The Hollow Ones(30)

But another impulse commanded the entity’s attention. An awareness, a sudden cognizance. It felt it the way animals perceive changes in barometric pressure presaging a change in the weather.

The foe.

He was near.

Obediah was incapable of fear, of anything other than hunger, than the hunt for pleasure. But here was a source of potential pain. Here was the end of the Hollow One’s raucous joyride of gluttonous annihilation.

There were four Hollow Ones. There had always been four Hollow Ones. But Obediah was the only entity still free.

It pushed down heavily on the gas pedal, driving the Jeep west toward the city of New York.

Toward Hugo Blackwood.





Odessa returned to Earl Solomon’s hospital room, finding him sitting in a padded chair looking out the grimy window. The sky was baby-blanket blue, and she wondered what it looked like to an aging man who’d had a significant health scare…if he was even seeing the sky at all.

“Is it time?” he said before turning. He had been expecting a nurse. “Oh. Agent Hardwicke.”

“Hello again,” she said, stopping by the foot of his empty bed. The corner television was on mute. “How are you today?”

“I’ve been better.” He turned back to the window. “I can barely see past all the city soot on the glass. I had to shadow a window washer once. In Manhattan. Late ’60s, but the buildings were still tall then. I tried going out on a platform. They didn’t clip in back then with them…what is it, the clips?”

“Carabiners?”

He turned back to her. “No such thing. Not when you got so little sand left in the hourglass.” He scratched at his neck over the top collar of his hospital gown with fingernails like dulled arrowheads. “What’s on your mind?”

“Maybe you saw on television, there was another rampage murder. This one out on Long Island.”

“A local politician,” Solomon said.

Odessa nodded. “Another person who just snapped, no history of violence or aggression. Killed three innocent bystanders before being shot.”

Solomon pursed his dry lips. “You see similarities to your case.”

“Don’t you?”

He smiled, closing one eye—not in a wink, but to get a better look at her. “They always happen in threes, these things. All bad things, actually.”

“Always?” asked Odessa. “How many times have you seen something like this?”

“You went out there, didn’t you,” said Solomon.

She couldn’t tell if he approved or was simply amused. “I did,” she said. “When I was here before, you asked about cauldrons at the crime scene. Why?”

“I was curious.”

“It’s a very specific, and strange, detail.”

“I know. And you looked at me like I was headed for the loony bin. And then you went out to this spree killer’s house in Long Island…”

“Not in his garage,” she told him. “An old shed out in back. An iron pot, just like you described. That’s kind of extraordinary.”

He smiled. “You flatter me because now you’re hungry for information.”

“But how did you know?”

Two nurses knocked at the open door behind Odessa, walking right into the room. “Okay, Mr. Solomon.”

Odessa’s heart dropped. She stepped to the side to allow them through. “You have a visitor?” one said.

“My accountant,” he said. “She handles my vast fortune.”

The older nurse smiled at Odessa. “How wonderful.”

Odessa stood by anxiously as they helped him out of the chair and back into the wheeled bed.

The younger nurse said, “Do you have any stock tips for us? If you could invest in one thing, what’s guaranteed to accrue over time?”

Once he settled into the pillows, he said, “Human stupidity.”

The nurses chuckled. Odessa was jumping out of her skin. She had so much to ask him.

“He’s going for another scan,” the older nurse told her. “It’s going to be a while.”

“Is everything all right?” Odessa asked.

The nurses were mum. Patient confidentiality. They looked to Solomon.

“I had a bad test,” he said. “And these ladies will use any excuse to get me naked. How was my house?”

“Your house was fine. Fine.” The room of tapes: How could she bring it up with the nurses here? “I took Dennis.”

“Who? Oh—the fish. Right. You steal anything else? Found anything of interest?”

The nurses unplugged him from the monitors, releasing the brakes on the bed wheels.

What if something happened to him? What if it was now or never?

“I checked crime scene photos from my incident,” Odessa said. “They photographed the entire house, as you know.”

The nurses pretended not to listen, but “crime scene photos” got their antennae up.

Solomon said, “Now, how’d you get those?”

“In one of the pictures, it looks like another pot—a cauldron—in the basement behind a water heater. In Peters’s house, the one his family lived in. Hidden down there. I couldn’t see what was inside. The photographer probably thought it was a trash can or something.”