Firestarter(124)

He had brought the golf bag up meaning to take out each of the irons and his two putters and look them over, touch them, see if that wouldn't ease his mind. And then one of the irons had seemed to... well, it was funny (ridiculous, in fact), but one of the irons had seemed to move. As if it wasn't a golf club at all but a snake, a poison snake that had crawled in there-

Cap dropped the bag against the wall and scuttled away. Half a glass of brandy had stopped the minute shakes in his hands. By the time he finished the glass, he might be able to tell himself they had never trembled at all.

He started the glass on its way to his mouth and then halted. There it was again! Movement... or just a trick of his eyes?

Trick of his eyes, most definitely. There were no snakes in his damned golf bag. Just clubs he hadn't been using enough lately. Too busy. And he was a pretty good golfer, too. No Nicklaus or Tom Watson, hell no, but he could keep it on the course. Not always slicing, like Puck. Cap didn't like to slice the ball, because then you were in the rough, the tall grass, and sometimes there were-

Get hold of yourself. Just get hold of yourself. Is you still the Captain or is you ain't?

The trembling was back in his fingers again. What had done this? What in God's name had done this? Sometimes it seemed that there was an explanation, a perfectly reasonable one-something, perhaps, that someone had said and he just... couldn't remember. But at other times

(like now Jesus Christ like now) it felt as if he were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It felt as if his brain was being pulled apart like warm tafy by these alien thoughts he couldn't get rid of.

(is you the Captain or is you ain't?)

Cap suddenly threw his brandy glass into the fireplace, where it shattered like a bomb. A strangled sound-a sob-escaped his tight throat like something rotten that had to be sicked up whatever the miserable cost. Then he made himself cross the room (and he went at a drunken, stiltlike lurch), grab the strap of his golf bag (again something seemed to move and shift in there... to shiffffft... and hissssss) and slip it over his shoulder. He hauled it back into the shadow-draped cavern of the cellar, going on nothing but guts, drops of sweat perched huge and clear on his forehead. His face was frozen in a grimace of fear and determination.

Nothing there but golf clubs, nothing there but golf clubs, his mind chanted over and over again, and at every step of the way he expected something long and brown, something with beady black eyes and small sharp fangs dripping poison, to slither out of the bag and jab twin hypos of death into his neck.

Back in his own living room he felt much better. Except for a nagging headache, he felt much better.

He could think coherently again...

Almost.

He got drunk.

And in the morning he felt better again.

For a while.

15

Rainbird spent that windy Monday night gathering information. Disturbing information. First he went in and talked to Neary, the man who had been watching the monitors when Cap paid his visit to Charlie the night before.

"I want to see the videotapes," Rainbird said.

Neary didn't argue. He set Rainbird up in a small room down the hall with the Sunday tapes and a Sony deck complete with close-up and freeze-frame features. Neary was glad to be rid of him and only hoped that Rainbird wouldn't be coming back and wanting something else. The girl was bad enough. Rainbird, in his own reptilian way, was somehow worse.

The tapes were three-hour Scotch jobs, marked from 0000 to 0300 and so on. Rainbird found the one with Cap on it and watched it four times, not moving except to rewind the tape at the point where Cap. said; "Well, I'll be going now. But I'll be seeing you, Charlie. And don't worry."

But there was plenty in that tape that worried John Rainbird. He. didn't like the way Cap looked. He seemed to have got older; at times while he was talking to Charlie he seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, like a man on the edge of senility. His eyes had a vague, bemused look that was uncannily similar to the look Rainbird associated with the onset of combat fatigue, which a comrade-in-arms had once aptly dubbed The Brain Squitters and Trots.

I think I ought to be able to arrange it... by Wednesday. Yes, by Wednesday, for sure.

Now why in the name of God had he said that?

Setting up an expectation like that in the kid's mind was the surest way Rainbird could think of to blow further testing right out of the water. The obvious conclusion was that Cap was playing his own little game-intriguing in the best Shop tradition.

But Rainbird didn't believe it. Cap didn't look like a man engaged in an intrigue. He looked like a man who was profoundly f**ked up. That remark about Charlie's father playing golf, for instance. That had come right out of left field. It bore on nothing they had said before and nothing they said afterward. Rainbird toyed briefly with the idea that it was some sort of code phrase, but that was patently ridiculous. Cap knew that everything that went on in Charlie's rooms was monitored and recorded, subject to almost constant review. He was capable of disguising a trip phrase better than that. A remark about golf. It just hung there, irrelevant and puzzling.

And then there was the last thing. Rainbird played it over and over. Cap pauses. Oh, almost forgot. And then he hands her something that she looks at curiously and then puts away in the pocket of her robe.

With Rainbird's finger on the buttons of the Sony VCR, Cap said Oh, almost forgot half a dozen times. He passed the thing to her half a dozen times. At first Rainbird thought it was a stick of gum, and then he used the freeze-frame and zoom gadgets. That convinced him that it was, very likely, a note.