Firestarter Read online

  "Did I say I wanted to talk to the owner, sis?"

  She was starting to be frightened now, and that was okay with OJ. "N-no."

  "That's right. Because I want to talk to you, not to some guy that's been out in the kitchen scrambling eggs and making Alpoburgers all morning." He took the picture of Andy and Charlie out of his pocket and handed it to her, not letting go of her wrist. "You recognize them, sis? Serve them their breakfast this morning, maybe?"

  "Let go. You're hurting me." All the color had gone out of her face except for the whore's rouge she had tricked herself up with. Probably she had been a cheerleader in high school. The kind of girl who laughed at Orville Jamieson when he asked them out because he had been president of the Chess Club instead of quarterback on the football team. Bunch of cheap Lowville whores. God, he hated New York. Even New York City was too fucking close.

  "You tell me if you waited on them or if you didn't. Then I'll let go. Sis."

  She looked briefly at the picture. "No! I didn't. Now let--"

  "You didn't look long enough, sis. You better look again."

  She looked again. "No! No!" she said loudly. "I've never seen them! Let me go, can't you?"

  The elderly jd in the cut-rate Mammoth Mart leather jacket sauntered over, zippers jingling, thumbs hooked in his pants pockets.

  "You're bothering the lady," he said.

  Bruce Cook gazed at him with open, wide-eyed contempt. "Be careful we don't decide to bother you next, pizza-face," he said.

  "Oh," the old kid in the leather jacket said, and his voice was suddenly very small. He moved away quickly, apparently remembering that he had pressing business on the street.

  Two old ladies in a booth were nervously watching the little scene at the counter. A big man in reasonably clean cook's whites--Mike, the owner, presumably--was standing in the kitchen doorway, also watching. He held a butcher knife in one hand, but he held it with no great authority.

  "What do you guys want?" he asked.

  "They're feds," the waitress said nervously. "They--"

  "Didn't serve them? You're sure?" OJ asked. "Sis?"

  "I'm sure," she said. She was nearly crying now.

  "You better be. A mistake can get you five years in jail, sis."

  "I'm sure," she whispered. A tear spilled over the bottom curve of one eye and slipped down her cheek. "Please let go. Don't hurt me anymore."

  OJ squeezed tighter for a brief moment, liking the feel of the small bones moving under his hand, liking the knowledge that he could squeeze harder yet and snap them ... and then he let go. The diner was silent except for the voice of Stevie Wonder coming from the Seeberg, assuring the frightened patrons of the Hastings Diner that they could feel it all over. Then the two old ladies got up and left in a hurry.

  OJ picked up his coffee cup, leaned over the counter, poured the coffee on the floor, and then dropped the cup, which shattered. Thick china shrapnel sprayed in a dozen different directions. The waitress was crying openly now.

  "Shitty brew," OJ said.

  The owner made a halfhearted gesture with the knife, and OJ's face seemed to light up.

  "Come on, man," he said, half-laughing. "Come on. Let's see you try."

  Mike put the knife down beside the toaster and suddenly cried out in shame and outrage: "I fought in Vietnam! My brother fought in Vietnam! I'm gonna write my congressman about this! You wait and see if I don't!"

  OJ looked at him. After a while Mike lowered his eyes, scared.

  The two of them went out.

  The waitress scooched and began to pick up broken pieces of coffee cup, sobbing.

  Outside, Bruce said, "How many motels?"

  "Three motels, six sets of tourist cabins," OJ said, looking down toward the blinker. It fascinated him. In the Lowville of his youth there had been a diner with a plaque over the double Silex hotplate and that plaque had read IF YOU DON'T LIKE OUR TOWN, LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE. How many times had he longed to pull that plaque off the wall and stuff it down someone's throat?

  "There are people checking them out," he said as they walked back toward their light-blue Chevrolet, part of a government motor pool paid for and maintained by tax dollars. "We'll know soon now."

  4

  John Mayo was with an agent named Ray Knowles. They were on their way out along Route 40 to the Slumberland Motel. They were driving a late-model tan Ford, and as they rode up the last hill separating them from an actual view of the motel, a tire blew.

  "Shit-fire," John said as the car began to pogo up and down and drag to the right. "That's fucking government issue for you. Fucking retreads." He pulled over onto the soft shoulder and put on the Ford's four-way flashers. "You go on," he said. "I'll change the goddam tire."

  "I'll help," Ray said. "It won't take us five minutes."

  "No, go on. It's right over this hill, should be."

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah. I'll pick you up. Unless the spare's flat, too. It wouldn't surprise me."

  A rattling farm truck passed them. It was the one OJ and Bruce Cook had seen leaving town as they stood outside the Hastings Diner.

  Ray grinned. "It better not be. You'd have to put in a requisition in quadruplicate for a new one."

  John didn't grin back. "Don't I know it," he said glumly.

  They went around to the trunk and Ray unlocked it. The spare was in good shape.

  "Okay," John said. "Go on."

  "It really wouldn't take but five minutes to change that sucker."

  "Sure, and those two aren't at that motel. But let's play it as if it were real. After all, they have to be somewhere."

  "Yeah, okay."

  John took the jack and spare out of the trunk. Ray Knowles watched him for a moment and then started walking along the shoulder toward the Slumberland MoteL

  5

  Just beyond the motel, Andy and Charlie McGee were standing on the soft shoulder of Highway 40. Andy's worries that someone might notice he didn't have a car had proved groundless; the woman in the office was interested in nothing but the small Hitachi TV on the counter. A miniature Phil Donahue had been captured inside, and the woman was watching him avidly. She swept the key Andy offered into a mail slot without even looking away from the picture.

  "Hope y'enjoyed y'stay," she said. She was working on a box of chocolate coconut doughnuts and had got to the halfway mark.

  "Sure did," Andy said, and left.

  Charlie was waiting for him outside. The woman had given him a carbon copy of his bill, which he stuffed into the side pocket of his cord jacket as he went down the steps. Change from the Albany pay phones jingled mutedly.

  "Okay, Daddy?" Charlie asked as they moved away toward the road.

  "Lookin good," he said, and put an arm around her shoulders. To their right and back over the hill, Ray Knowles and John Mayo had just had their flat tire.

  "Where are we going, Daddy?" Charlie asked.

  "I don't know," he said.

  "I don't like it. I feel nervous."

  "I think we're well ahead of them," he said. "Don't worry. They're probably still looking for the cab driver who took us to Albany."

  But he was whistling past the graveyard; he knew it and probably Charlie did, too. Just standing here beside the road made him feel exposed, like a cartoon jailbird in a striped suit. Quit it, he told himself. Next thing you'll be thinking they're everywhere--one behind every tree and a bunch of them right over the next hill. Hadn't somebody said that perfect paranoia and perfect awareness were the same thing?

  "Charlie--" he began.

  "Let's go to Granther's," she said.

  He looked at her, startled. His dream rushed back at him, the dream of fishing in the rain, the rain that had turned into the sound of Charlie's shower. "What made you think of that?" he asked. Granther had died long before Charlie was born. He had lived his whole life in Tashmore, Vermont, a town just west of the New Hampshire border. When Granther died, the place on the lake went to Andy's mother, and when she di
ed, it came to Andy. The town would have taken it for back taxes long since, except that Granther had left a small sum in trust to cover them.

  Andy and Vicky had gone up there once a year during the summer vacation until Charlie was born. It was twenty miles off the nearest two-lane road, in wooded, unpopulated country. In the summer there were all sorts of people on Tashmore Pond, which was really a lake with the small town of Bradford, New Hampshire, on the far side. But by this time of year all the summer camps would be empty. Andy doubted if the road in was even plowed in the winter.

  "I don't know," Charlie said. "It just ... came into my mind. This minute." On the other side of the hill, John Mayo was opening the trunk of the Ford and making his inspection of the spare tire.

  "I dreamed about Granther this morning," Andy said slowly. "First time I'd thought about him in a year or more, I guess. So I suppose you could say he just came into my head, too. "

  "Was it a good dream, Daddy?"

  "Yes," he said, and smiled a little. "Yes, it was."

  "Well, what do you think?"

  "I think it's a great idea," Andy said. "We can go there and stay for a while and think about what we should do. How we should handle this. I was thinking if we could get to a newspaper and tell our story so that a lot of people knew about it, they'd have to lay off."

  An old farm truck was rattling toward them, and Andy stuck out his thumb. On the other side of the hill, Ray Knowles was walking up the soft shoulder of the road.

  The farm truck pulled over, and a guy wearing biballs and a New York Mets baseball cap looked out.

  "Well there's a purty little miss," he said, smiling. "What's your name, missy?"

  "Roberta," Charlie said promptly. Roberta was her middle name.

  "Well, Bobbi, where you headed this morning?" the driver asked.

  "We're on our way to Vermont," Andy said. "St. Johnsbury. My wife was visiting her sister and she ran into a little problem."

  "Did she now," the farmer said, and said no more, but gazed at Andy shrewdly from the corners of his eyes.

  "Labor," Andy said, and manufactured a wide smile. "This one's got a new brother. One-forty-one this morning."

  "His name is Andy," Charlie said. "Isn't that a nice name?"

  "I think it's a corker," the farmer said. "You hop on in here and I'll get you ten miles closer to St. Johnsbury, anyhow."

  They got in and the farm truck rattled and rumbled back onto the road, headed into the bright morning sunlight. At the same time, Ray Knowles was breasting the hill. He saw an empty highway leading down to the Slumberland Motel. Beyond the Motel, he saw the farm truck that had passed their car a few minutes ago just disappearing from view.

  He saw no need to hurry.

  6

  The farmer's name was Manders--Irv Manders. He had just taken a load of pumpkins into town, where he had a deal with the fellow who ran the A&P. He told them that he used to deal with the First National, but the fellow over there just had no understanding about pumpkins. A jumped-up meat cutter and no more, was the opinion of Irv Manders. The A&P manager, on the other hand, was a corker. He told them that his wife ran a touristy sort of shop in the summertime, and he kept a roadside produce stand, and between the two of them they got along a right smart.

  "You won't like me minding your beeswax," Irv Manders told Andy, "but you and your button here shouldn't be thumbin. Lord, no. Not with the sort of people you find ramming the roads these days. There's a Greyhound terminal in the drugstore back in Hastings Glen. That's what you want."

  "Well--" Andy said. He was nonplussed, but Charlie stepped neatly into the breach.

  "Daddy's out of work," she said brightly. "That's why my mommy had to go and stay with Auntie Em to have the baby. Auntie Em doesn't like Daddy. So we stayed at home. But now we're going to see Mommy. Right, Daddy?"

  "That's sort of private stuff, Bobbi," Andy said, sounding uncomfortable. He felt uncomfortable. There were a thousand holes in Charlie's story.

  "Don't you say another word," Irv said. "I know about trouble in families. It can get pretty bitter at times. And I know about being hard-up. It ain't no shame."

  Andy cleared his throat but said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. They rode in silence for a while.

  "Say, why don't you two come home and take lunch with me and the wife?" Irv asked suddenly.

  "Oh no, we couldn't do--"

  "We'd be happy to," Charlie said. "Wouldn't we, Daddy?"

  He knew that Charlie's intuitions were usually good ones, and he was too mentally and physically worn down to go against her now. She was a self-possessed and aggressive little girl, and more than once Andy had wondered to himself just who was running this show.

  "If you're sure there's enough--" he said.

  "Always enough," Irv Manders said, finally shifting the farm truck into third gear. They were rattling between autumn-bright trees: maples, elms, poplars. "Glad to have you."

  "Thank you very much," Charlie said.

  "My pleasure, button," Irv said. "Be my wife's, too, when she gets a look at you."

  Charlie smiled.

  Andy rubbed his temples. Beneath the fingers of his left hand was one of those patches of skin where the nerves seemed to have died. He didn't feel good about this, somehow. That feeling that they were closing in was still very much with him.

  7

  The woman who had checked Andy out of the Slumberland Motel not twenty minutes ago was getting nervous. She had forgotten all about Phil Donahue.

  "You're sure this was the man," Ray Knowles was saying for the third time. She didn't like this small, trim, somehow tight man. Maybe he worked for the government, but that was no comfort to Lena Cunningham. She didn't like his narrow face, she didn't like the lines around his cool blue eyes, and most of all she didn't like the way he kept shoving that picture under her nose.

  "Yes, that was him," she said again. "But there was no little girl with him. Honest, mister. My husband'll tell you the same. He works nights. It's got so we hardly ever see each other, except at supper. He'll tell--"

  The other man came back in, and with ever-mounting alarm, Lena saw that he had a walkie-talkie in one hand and a great big pistol in the other.

  "It was them," John Mayo said. He was almost hysterical with anger and disappointment. "Two people slept in that bed. Blond hairs on one pillow, black on the other. Goddam that flat tire! Goddam it all to hell! Damp towels hanging on the rod in the bathroom! Fucking shower's still dripping! We missed them by maybe five minutes, Ray!"

  He jammed the pistol back into its shoulder holster.

  "I'll get my husband," Lena said faintly.

  "Never mind," Ray said. He took John's arm and led him outside. John was still swearing about the flat. "Forget the tire, John. Did you talk to OJ back in town?"

  "I talked to him and he talked to Norville. Norville's on his way from Albany, and he's got Al Steinowitz with him. He landed not ten minutes ago."

  "Well, that's good. Listen, think a minute, Johnny. They must have been hitching."

  "Yeah, I guess so. Unless they boosted a car."

  "The guy's an English instructor. He wouldn't know how to boost a candy bar out of a concession stand in a home for the blind. They were hitching, all right. They hitched from Albany last night. They hitched this morning. I'd bet you this year's salary that they were standing there by the side of the road with their thumbs out while I was walking up that hill."

  "If it hadn't been for that flat--" John's eyes were miserable behind his wire-framed glasses. He saw a promotion flapping away on slow, lazy wings.

  "Fuck the flat!" Ray said. "What passed us? After we got the flat, what passed us?"

  John thought about it as he hooked the walkie-talkie back on his belt. "Farm truck," he said.

  "That's what I remember, too," Ray said. He glanced around and saw Lena Cunningham's large moon face peering out the motel office window at them. She saw him seeing her and the curtain fell back into place. />
  "Pretty rickety truck," Ray said. "If they don't turn off the main road, we ought to be able to catch up to them."

  "Let's go, then," John said. "We can keep in touch with Al and Norville by way of OJ on the walkie-talkie."

  They trotted back to the car and got in. A moment later the tan Ford roared out of the parking lot, spewing white crushed gravel out from beneath its rear tires. Lena Cunningham watched them go with relief. Running a motel was not what it once had been.

  She went back to wake up her husband.

  8

  As the Ford with Ray Knowles behind the wheel and John Mayo riding shotgun was roaring down Route 40 at better than seventy miles an hour (and as a caravan of ten or eleven similar nondescript late-model cars were heading toward Hastings Glen from the surrounding areas of search), Irv Manders hand-signaled left and turned off the highway onto an unmarked stretch of tar-and-patch that headed roughly northeast. The truck rattled and banged along. At his urging, Charlie had sung most of her nine-song repertoire, including such golden hits as "Happy Birthday to You," "This Old Man," "Jesus Loves Me," and "Camptown Races." Irv and Andy both sang along with that one.

  The road twisted and wound its way over a series of increasingly wooded ridges and then began to descend toward flatter country that had been cultivated and harvested. Once a partridge burst from a cover of goldenrod and old hay at the left side of the road and Irv shouted, "Get im, Bobbi!" and Charlie pointed her finger and chanted "Bam-ba-DAM!" and then giggled wildly.

  A few minutes later Irv turned off on a dirt road, and a mile farther along they came to a battered red, white, and blue mailbox with MANDERS stenciled on the side. Irv turned into a rutted driveway that was nearly half a mile long.

  "Must cost you an arm and a leg to keep it plowed in the winter," Andy said.

  "Do it m'self," Irv said.

  They came to a big white frame farmhouse, three stories tall and set off with mint-green trim. To Andy it looked like the sort of house that might have started off fairly ordinary and then grown eccentric as the years passed. Two sheds were attached to the rear, one of them zigging thisaway, the other zagging thataway. On the south side, a greenhouse wing had been added, and a big screened-in porch stood out from the north side like a stiff shirt.