Firestarter(35)

"And it wasn't bad?"

"No. Under the circumstances, it wasn't bad."

"Because when you get into a bad fix, you do what you have to do to get out of it."

"With some exceptions, yes."

"What are exceptions, Daddy?"

He ruffled her hair. "Never mind now, Charlie. Lighten up."

But she wouldn't. "And I didn't mean to set that man's shoes on fire. I didn't do it on purpose."

"No, of course you didn't."

Then she did lighten up; her smile, so much like Vicky's, came out radiantly. "How does your head feel this morning, Daddy?"

"Much better, thanks."

"Good." She looked at him closely. "Your eye looks funny."

"Which eye?"

She pointed at his left. "That one."

"Yeah?" He went into the bathroom and wiped a clear place on the steamed mirror.

He looked at his eye for a long time, his good humor fading. His right eye looked just as it always had, a gray green-the color of the ocean on an overcast spring day. His left eye was also gray green, but the white was badly bloodshot, and the pupil looked smaller than the right pupil. And the eyelid had a peculiar droop that he had never noticed before.

Vicky's voice suddenly rang into his mind. It was so clear that she might have been standing beside him. The headaches, they scare me, Andy. You're doing something to yourself as well as to other people when you use that push or whatever you want to call it.

The thought was followed by the image of a balloon being blown up... and up... and up... and finally exploding with a loud bang.

He began to go over the left side of his face carefully, touching it everywhere with the tips of his right fingers. He looked like a man in a TV commercial marveling over the closeness of his shave. He found three spots-one below his left eye, one on his left cheekbone, and one just below the left temple-where there was no feeling at all. Fright drifted through the hollow places in his body like quiet early-evening mist. The fright was not so much for himself as it was for Charlie, for what would happen to her if she got left on her own.

As if he had called her, he could see her beyond him in the mirror.

"Daddy?" She sounded a little scared. "You okay?"

"Fine," he said. His voice sounded good. There was no tremor in it; nor was it too confident, falsely booming. "Just thinking how much I need a shave." She put a hand over her mouth and giggled. "Scratchy like a Brillo pad. Yuck. Gross." He chased her into the bedroom and rubbed his scratchy cheek against her smooth one. Charlie giggled and kicked.

3

As Andy was tickling his daughter with his stubbly beard, Orville Jamieson, aka OJ, aka The Juice, and another Shop agent named Bruce Cook were getting out of a light-blue Chevy outside the Hastings Diner.

OJ paused for a moment, looking down Main Street with its slant parking, its appliance store, its grocery store, its two gas stations, its one drugstore, its wooden municipal building with a plaque out front commemorating some historical event no one gave a shit about. Main Street was also Route 40, and the McGees were not four miles from where OJ and Bruce Cook now stood.

"Look at this burg," OJ said, disgusted. "I grew up close to here. Town called Lowville. You ever hear of Lowville, New York?" Bruce Cook shook his head.

"It's near Utica, too. Where they make Utica Club beer. I was never so happy in my life as I was the day I got out of Lowville." OJ reached under his jacket and readjusted The Windsucker in its holster.

"There's Tom and Steve," Bruce said. Across the street, a light-brown Pacer had pulled into a parking slot just vacated by a farm truck. Two men in dark suits were getting out of the Pacer. They looked like bankers. Farther down the street, at the blinker light, two more Shop people were talking to the old cunt that crossed the school kids at lunch time. They were showing her the picture and she was shaking her head. There were ten Shop agents here in Hastings Glen, all of them coordinating with Norville Bates, who was back in Albany waiting for Cap's personal ramrod, A1 Steinowitz.

"Yeah, Lowville," OJ sighed. "I hope we get those two suckers by noon. And I hope my next assignment's Karachi. Or Iceland. Any place, as long as it's not upstate New York. This is too close to Lowville. Too close for comfort."

"You think we will have them by noon?" Bruce asked.

OJ shrugged. "We'll have them by the time the sun goes down. You can count on that." They went into the diner, sat at the counter, and ordered coffee. A young waitress with a fine figure brought it to them. "How long you been on, sis?" OJ asked her. "If you got a sis, I pity her," the waitress said. "If there's any fambly resemblance, that is."

"Don't be that way, sis," OJ said, and showed her his ID. She looked at it a long time. Behind her, an aging juvenile delinquent in a motorcycle jacket was pushing buttons on a Seeberg.

"I been on since seven," she said. "Same as any other morning. Prolly you want to talk to Mike. He's the owner." She started to turn away and OJ caught her wrist in a tight grip. He didn't like women who made fun of his looks. Most women were sluts anyway, his mother had been right about that even if she hadn't been right about much else. And his mother surely would have known what to think about a high-tit bitch like this one.