Firestarter(49)

But the girl. Could the girl be fixed?

There were ways. There were methods of containment.

The McGee files were still on the library cart. He got up, went to them, and began thumbing through them restlessly. He wondered where John Rainbird was at this moment.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

1

At the moment Cap Hollister had his passing thought about him, John Rainbird was sitting in his room at the Mayflower Hotel watching a television game called The Crosswits. He was naked. He sat in the chair with his bare feet neatly together and watched the program. He was waiting for it to get dark. After it got dark, he would begin waiting for it to get late. When it was late, he would begin waiting for it to get early. When it got early and the pulse of the hotel was at its slowest, he would stop waiting and go upstairs to Room 1217 and kill Dr. Wanless. Then he would come down here and think about whatever Wanless would have told him before he died, and sometime after the sun came up, he would sleep briefly.

John Rainbird was a man at peace. He was at peace with almost everything-Cap, the Shop, the United States. He was at peace with God, Satan, and the universe. If he was not yet at complete peace with himself, that was only because his pilgrimage was not yet over. He had many coups, many honorable scars. It did not matter that people turned away from him in fear and loathing. It did not matter that he had lost one eye in Vietnam.

What they paid him did not matter. He took it and most of it went to buy shoes. He had a great love of shoes. He owned a home in Flagstaff, and although he rarely went there himself, he had all his shoes sent there. When he did get a chance to go to his house, he admired the shoes-Gucci, Bally, Bass, Adidas, Van Donen. Shoes. His house was a strange forest; shoe trees grew in every room and he would, go from room to room admiring the shoefruit that grew on them. But when he was alone, he went barefoot. His father, a full-blooded Cherokee, had been buried barefoot. Someone had stolen his burial moccasins.

Other than shoes, John Rainbird was interested in only two things. One of them was death. His own death, of course; he had been preparing for this inevitability for twenty years or more. Dealing death had always been his business and was the only trade he had ever excelled at. He became more and more interested in it as he grew older, as an artist will become more interested in the qualities and levels of light, as writers will feel for character and nuance like blindmen reading braille. What interested him most was the actual leaving... the actual exhalation of the soul... the exit from the body and what human beings knew as life and the passing into something else. What must it be like to feel yourself slipping away? Did you think it was a dream from which you would wake? Was the Christian devil there with his fork, ready to jam it through your shrieking soul and carry it down to hell like a piece of meat on a shish kebab? Was there joy? Did you know you were going? What is it that the eyes of the dying see?

Rainbird hoped he would have the opportunity to find out for himself. In his business, death was often quick and unexpected, something that happened in the flick of an eye. He hoped that when his own death came, he would have time to prepare and feel everything. More and more lately he had watched the faces of the people he killed, trying to see the secret in the eyes.

Death interested him.

What also interested him was the little girl they were all so concerned with. This Charlene McGee. As far as Cap knew, John Rainbird had only the vaguest knowledge of the McGees and none at all of Lot Six. Actually, Rainbird knew almost as much as Cap himself-something that surely would have marked him for extreme sanction if Cap had known. They suspected that the girl had some great or potentially great power-maybe a whole batch of them. He would like to meet this girl and see what her powers were. He also knew that Andy McGee was what Cap called "a potential mental dominant," but that did not concern John Rainbird. He had not yet met a man who could dominate him.

The Crosswits ended. The news came on. None of it was good. John Rainbird sat, not eating, not drinking, not smoking, clean and empty and husked out, and waited for the killing time to come around.

2

Earlier that day Cap had thought uneasily of how silent Rainbird was. Dr. Wanless never heard him. He awoke from a sound sleep. He awoke because a finger was tickling him just below the nose. He awoke and saw what appeared to be a monster from a nightmare hulking over his bed. One eye glinted softly in the light from the bathroom, the light he always left on when he was in a strange place. Where the other eye should have been there was only an empty crater.

Wanless opened his mouth to scream, and John Rainbird pinched his nostrils shut with the fingers of one hand and covered his mouth with the other. Wanless began to thrash.

"Shhh," Rainbird said. He spoke with the pleased indulgence of a mother to her baby at fresh diaper time.

Wanless struggled harder.

"If you want to live, be still and be quiet," Rainbird said.

Wanless looked up at him, heaved once, and then lay still.

"Will you be quiet?" Rainbird asked.

Wanless nodded. His face was growing very red.

Rainbird removed his hands and Wanless began to gasp hoarsely. A small rivulet of blood trickled from one nostril.

"Who... are you... Cap... send you?"

"Rainbird," he said gravely. "Cap sent me, yes."

Wanless's eyes were huge in the dark. His tongue snaked out and licked his lips. Lying in his bed with the sheets kicked down around his knuckly ankles, he looked like the world's oldest child.