The Meridians(60)

"What?" he said, looking befuddled.

"You were a cop, right?" she answered. "Are they going to 'take us downtown' or 'book us' or anything like I see on all those cop shows?"

"No," he said with a smile. He was so handsome when he smiled. "But we'll probably have to make a statement, and I don't know if they'll have us do it here or invite us to the station to do it."

"Oh, so you guys invite people places? I thought it was just handcuffs and guns."

Scott smiled again. "Oh, police invite people all the time. Just it's kind of like getting an invitation from deity. You should probably say yes, because the alternative isn't likely to be nearly as good as the invitation."

Lynette noted that he said "deity" instead of "God" or even "Buddha" or "Allah" or any kind of proper name that indicated he believed in a higher power and filed the fact away for future reference. She sensed there was a story there, too, and she wanted to hear it.

"So it's going to be a while before we can escape the clutches of the pigs," she said, grinning wickedly.

"Hey! Watch how you talk about the brothers!" said Scott in mock anger. Then he smiled once more, and once more the grin lit up his face like a candle from within. "Yeah, it'll probably be an hour or two before we're done here. I'll talk to the 'pig' on the scene, though. He probably knows Gil, so I suspect that Gil will be over there in a second telling him what happened and asking him to take your statement first, so that you can get Kevin home."

"Preferential treatment?" she said.

"Just don't want you getting mad and hitting anyone else," he said over-seriously, rubbing his arm where she had slapped him a few moments ago.

And he was right. Within a few moments an Officer Olacsi came over and asked her if he could ask her a few questions. She said yes, then turned to Scott quickly and said, "Tonight. My place for coffee."

"I don't drink coffee," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "And I'm not sure I remember where you live."

"Cocoa, then," she answered. "And I know you remember where I live."

"Sure of yourself aren't you?" he replied.

"Of course," she said with her best imitation of a model flicking her hair on a L'Oreal commercial. "I'm stunning."

"You are that," answered Scott, and suddenly she knew that he wasn't joking, and it was her turn to be embarrassed.

She turned quickly to Officer Olacsi and began walking away with him, then turned back at the last second and said, "Don't flake on me, Scott Cowley."

He held up both hands. "Wouldn't dream of it."

And she smiled again, and he smiled at her. This time, his smile was even nicer, and she wondered if it was because he was happy that she was smiling at him, too. She didn't know, but she liked the thought, and smiled even more widely.

Then she thought of the night to come, and the story she was going to tell, and wondered if Scott would believe any of it, and now her smile was gone, swallowed up not by a scarred face and blue eyes, but by an old man in a gray suit.

Would she tell Scott about the gray man? she wondered.

Would she ever tell anyone about the gray man?

A sudden wind, unseasonably chill for this time of year, whipped through the parking lot. She shivered, but not from the cold of the wind. She shivered from the cold of the color gray, and the expressionless eyes of a madman who had tried to kill her and her son.

Somehow, she knew that today was linked intrinsically to the events of her past.

Somehow, she knew that she would be seeing the gray man again.

And soon.





***





28.

***

Scott listened to Lynette's tale with an odd combination of belief and incredulity. He knew that she had to be speaking the truth, because in her stories of the ghostly gray man and his homicidal urges he heard echoes of his own past that resonated together too closely to be anything but compelling harmonies to the same music. In fact, he sensed at one point that he was believing too easily, at least in her mind. And he couldn't blame her for being suspicious of the easy way that he believed her tales of phantom bullets appearing in utero; of bright red balls - she brought them out and showed them to him - that disappeared and reappeared forty feet away without anyone apparently moving them; of the words "Witten was white" uttered over and over in the otherwise deathly silence of a toddler's sleep; and, most of all, of a gray-suited old man who was trying to kill her son.

So to allay her obvious fear that he was putting her on - and because their stories were clearly intertwined, he told his own version of the things that had happened. He told her of the deaths of his son and wife, and of Mr. Gray's attempt on his own life. He told her of John Doe, who had died and then reappeared eight years later, and of Mr. Gray's own reappearances, both ghostly and corporeal, but in all cases a Mr. Gray who was much older, and who claimed to have been a "ghost" for sixty years and more. He told her of the fact that their meeting had not been coincidental; that John Doe had told him to show up on the very night and time - and at the very address - when she was moving in. She told him everything, he knew, even the parts that were most painful to her, and he could not help but do the same in return.