Firestarter(120)

"I... gee, damn if I know. I can check it for you if it's important..." Puck's dubious tone seemed to imply that Cap employed about five thousand spooks to check just such things.

"No, that's okay," Cap said. He held the telephone firmly against his ear again. "Just thinking out loud, I guess. Maybe I'm getting old."

"Not you, Cap. There's too much vampire in you."

"Yeah, maybe. Thanks, goodbuddy."

"No trouble at all. Glad you're getting away for a bit. Nobody deserves it more than you, after the last year you've put in." He meant Georgia, of course; he didn't know about the McGees. Which meant, Cap thought wearily, that he didn't know the half of it.

He started to say good-bye and then added, "By the way, Puck, where will that plane be stopping to refuel? Any idea?"

"Durban, Illinois," Puck said promptly. "Outside Chicago."

Cap thanked him, said good-bye, hung up. His fingers went to the note in his pocket again and touched it. His eye fell on Hockstetter's memo. It sounded as if the girl had been pretty upset, too. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt if he went down and spoke to her, stroked her a little.

He leaned forward and thumbed the intercom.

"Yes, Cap?"

"I'll be going downstairs for a while," he said. "I should be back in thirty minutes or so."

"Very good."

He got up and left the study. As he did so, his hand stole to his breast pocket and felt the note there again.

8

Charlie lay on her bed fifteen minutes after Cap left, her mind in a total whirl of dismay, fear, and confused speculation. She literally didn't know what to think.

He had come at quarter of five, half an hour ago, and had introduced himself as Captain Hollister ("but please just call me Cap; everyone does"). He had a kindly, shrewd face that reminded her a little of the illustrations in The Wind in the Willows. It was a face she had seen somewhere recently, but she hadn't been able to place it until Cap jogged her memory. It had been he who had taken her back to her rooms after the first test, when the man in the white suit had bolted, leaving the door open. She had been so much in a fog of shock, guilt, and-yes-exhilarated triumph that it was really no wonder she hadn't been able to place his face. Probably she could have been escorted back to her apartment by Gene Simmons of Kiss without noticing it.

He talked in a smooth, convincing way that she immediately mistrusted.

He told her Hockstetter was concerned because she had declared the testing at an end until she saw her father. Charlie agreed that was so and would say no more, maintaining a stubborn silence... mostly out of fear. If you discussed your reasons for things with a smooth talker like this Cap, he would strip those reasons away one by one until it seemed that black was white and white black. The bare demand was better. Safer.

But he had surprised her.

"If that's the way you feel, okay," he had said. The expression of surprise on her face must have been slightly comical, because he chuckled. "It will take a bit of arranging, but-"At the words "a bit of arranging," her face closed up again. "No more fires," she said. "No more tests. Even if it takes you ten years to 'arrange" it."

"Oh, I don't think it will take that long," he had said, not offended. "It's just that I have people to answer to, Charlie. And a place like this runs on paperwork. But you don't have to light so much as a candle while I'm setting it up."

"Good," she said stonily, not believing him, not believing he was going to set anything up. "Because I won't." "I think I ought to be able to arrange it... by Wednesday. Yes, by Wednesday, for sure."

He had fallen suddenly silent. His head cocked slightly, as if he were listening to something just a bit too high-pitched for her to hear. Charlie looked at him, puzzled, was about to ask if he was all right, and then closed her mouth with a snap. There was" something... something almost familiar about the way he was sitting.

"Do you really think I could see him on Wednesday?" she asked timidly.

"Yes, I think so," Cap said. He shifted in his chair and sighed heavily. His eye caught hers and he smiled a puzzled little smile... also familiar. Apropos of nothing at all, he said: "Your dad plays a mean game of golf, I hear."

Charlie blinked. So far as she knew, her father had never touched a golf club in his life. She got ready to say so... and then it came together in her mind and a dizzying burst of bewildered excitement ran through her.

(Mr. Merle! He's like Mr. Merle!)

Mr. Merle had been one of Daddy's executives when they were in New York. Just a little man with light-blond hair and pink-rimmed glasses and a sweet, shy smile. He had come to get more confidence, like the rest of them. He worked in an insurance company or a bank or something. And Daddy had been very worried about Mr. Merle for a while. It was a "rick-o-shay." It came from using the push. It had something to do with a story Mr. Merle had read once. The push Daddy used to give Mr. Merle more confidence made him remember that story in a bad way, a way that was making him sick. Daddy said the "rick-o-shay" came from that story and it was bouncing around in Mr. Merle's head like a tennis ball, only instead of finally stopping the way a bouncing tennis ball would, the memory of that story would get stronger and stronger until it made Mr. Merle very sick. Only Charlie had got the idea that Daddy was afraid it might do more than make Mr. Merle sick; he was afraid it might kill him. So he had kept Mr. Merle after the others left one night and pushed him into believing he had never read that story at all. And after that, Mr. Merle was all right. Daddy told her once that he hoped Mr. Merle would never go to see a movie called The Deer Hunter, but he didn't explain why.