Firestarter(58)

It could have been that they knew just enough to make them nervous, he supposed. Maybe they had even been given specific orders: The woman may be extremely dangerous. If she does something-anything-to jeopardize the operation, get rid of her. Quick.

Or maybe they just didn't like leaving witnesses. Something more than their share of the taxpayer's dollar was at stake, after all.

But the blood. He should be thinking about the blood, which hadn't even been dry when he discovered it, only tacky. They hadn't been gone long when he arrived.

More insistently his mind said: Charlie!

He kissed his wife again and said, "Vicky, I'll be back."

But he had never seen Vicky again, either.

He had gone upstairs to the telephone and looked up the Dugans" number in Vicky's Phone-Mate. He dialed the number the Joan Dugan answered. "Hi, Joan," he said, and now the shock was aiding him: his voice was perfectly calm, an everyday voice. "Could I speak to Charlie for a second?" "Charlie?" Mrs. Dugan sounded doubtful. "Well, she went with those two friends of yours. Those teachers. Is... wasn't that all right?"

Something inside of him went skyrocketing up and then came plunging down. His heart, maybe. But it would do no good to panic this nice woman whom he had only met socially four or five times. It wouldn't help him, and it wouldn't help Charlie.

"Damn," he said. "I was hoping to catch her still there. When did they go?"

Mrs. Dugan's voice faded a little. "Terri, when did Charlie go?"

A child's voice piped something. He couldn't tell what. There was sweat between his knuckles.

"She says about fifteen minutes ago." She was apologetic. "I was doing the laundry and I don't have a watch. One of them came down and spoke to me. It was all right, wasn't it, Mr. McGee? He looked all right..."

A lunatic impulse came to him, to just laugh lightly and say Doing the laundry, were you? So was my wife. I found her crammed in under the ironing board. You got off lucky today, Joan.

He said, "That's fine. Were they coming right here, I wonder?"

The question was relayed to Terri, who said she didn't know. Wonderful, Andy thought. My daughter's life is in the hands of another six-year-old girl.

He grasped at a straw.

"I have to go down to the market on the corner," he said to Mrs. Dugan. "Will you ask Terri if they had the car or the van? In case I see them."

This time he heard Terri. "It was the van. They went away in a gray van, like the one David Pasioco's father has."

"Thanks," he said. Mrs. Dugan said not to mention it. The impulse came again, this time just to scream My wife is dead! down the line at her. My wife is dead and why were you doing your laundry while my daughter was getting into a gray van with a couple of strange men?

Instead of screaming that or anything, he hung up and went outside. The heat whacked him over the head and he staggered a little. Had it been this hot when he came? It seemed much hotter now. The mailman had come. There was a Woolco advertising circular sticking out of the mailbox that hadn't been there before. The mailman had come while he was downstairs cradling his dead wife in his arms. His poor dead Vicky: they had pulled out her nails, and it was funny-much funnier than the way the keys had of accumulating, really-how the fact of death kept coming at you from different sides and different angles. You tried to jig and jog, you tried to protect yourself on one side, and the truth of it bored right in on another side. Death is a football player, he thought, one big mother. Death is Franco Harris or Sam Cunningham or Mean Joe Green. And it keeps throwing you down on your ass right there at the line of scrimmage.

Get your feet moving, he thought. Fifteen minutes" lead time-that's not so much. It's not a cold trail yet. Not unless Terri Dugan doesn't know fifteen minutes from half an hour or two hours. Never mind that, anyway. Get going.

He got going. He went back to the station wagon, which was parked half on and half off" the sidewalk.

He opened the driver's-side door and then spared a glance back at his neat suburban house on which the mortgage was half paid. The bank let you take a "payment vacation" two months a year if you needed it. Andy had never needed it. He looked at the house dozing in the sun, and again his shocked eyes were caught by the red flare of the Woolco circular sticking out of the mailbox, and whap! death hit him again, making his eyes blur and his teeth clamp down.

He got in the car and drove away toward Terri Dugan's street, not going on any real, logical belief that he could pick up their trail but only on blind hope. He had not seen his house on Conifer Place in Lakeland since then.

His driving was better now. Now that he knew the worst, his driving was a lot better. He turned on the radio and there was Bob Seger singing "Still the Same."

He drove across Lakeland, moving as fast as he dared. For one terrible moment he came up blank on the name of the street, and then it came to him. The Dugans lived on Blassmore Place. He and Vicky had joked about that: Blassmore Place, with houses designed by Bill Blass. He started to smile a little at the memory, and whap! the fact of her death hit him again, rocking him.

He was there in ten minutes. Blassmore Place was a short dead end. No way out for a gray van at the far end, just a cyclone fence that marked the edge of the John Glenn Junior High School.

Andy parked the wagon at the intersection of Blassmore Place and Ridge Street. There was a green-over-white house on the corner. A lawn sprinkler twirled. Out front were two kids, a girl and a boy of about ten. They were taking turns on a skateboard. The girl was wearing shorts, and she had a good set of scabs on each knee.