The Dark Half(127)

As he got out of the prowler-car, a man in green fatigues came out of the men's convenience and walked toward the cab of the beer truck. He was short, dark-haired, narrow-shouldered. No George Stark here.

'Officer,' he said, and gave Alan a little salute. Alan nodded at him and walked down to where three elderly ladies were sitting at one of the picnic tables, drinking coffee from a Thermos and talking..'Hello, Officer,' one of them said. 'Can we do something for you?' Or did we maybe do something wrong? the momentarily anxious eyes asked.

'I just wondered if the Ford and the Volvo up there belonged to you ladies,' Alan said.

'The Ford is mine,' a second said. 'We all came in that. I don't know anything about a Volvo. Is it that sticker thing? Did that sticker thing run out again? My son is supposed to take care of that sticker thing, but he's so forgetful! Forty-three years old, and I still have to tell him ev - '

'The sticker's fine, ma'am,' Alan said, smiling his best The Policeman Is Your Friend smile.

'None of you happened to see the Volvo drive in, did you?'

They shook their heads.

'Have you seen anyone else during the last few minutes who might belong to it?'

'No,' the third lady said. She looked at him with bright little gerbil's eyes. 'Are you on the scent, Officer?'

'Pardon, ma'am?'

'Tracking a criminal, I mean.'

'Oh,' Alan said. He felt a moment of unreality. Exactly what was he doing here? Exactly what had he been thinking to get here? 'No, ma'am. I just like Volvos.' Boy, that sounded intelligent. That sounded just . . . f**king . . . crackerjack.

'Oh,' the first lady said. 'Well, we haven't seen anyone. Would you like a cup of coffee, Officer?

I believe there's just about one good one left.'

'No, thank you,' Alan said. 'You ladies have a nice day.'

'You too, Officer,' they chorused in an almost perfect three-part harmony. It made Alan feel more unreal than ever.

He walked back up to the Volvo. Tried the driver's side door. It opened. The inside of the car had a hot attic feel. It had been sitting here awhile. He looked in the back and saw a packet, a little bigger than a Sweet 'n Low packet, on the floor. He leaned between the seats and picked it up. HANDI-WIPE, the packet said, and he felt someone drop a bowling-ball in his stomach. It doesn't mean anything, the voice of Protocol and Reason spoke up at once. At least, not necessarily. I know what you're thinking: you're thinking babies. But, Alan, they give those things out at the roadside stands when you buy fried chicken, for heaven's sake. All the same . . .

Alan stuck the Handi-Wipe in one of the pockets of his uniform blouse and got out of the car. He was about to close the door and then leaned in again. He tried to look under the dashboard and couldn't quite do it on his feet. He had to get down on his knees. Someone dropped another bowling-ball. He made a muffled sound - the sound of a man who has been hit quite hard.

The ignition wires were hanging down, their copper cores bare and slightly kinked. The kink, Alan knew, came from being braided together. The Volvo had been hot-wired, and very efficiently from the look of it. The driver had grasped the wires above the bare cores and pulled them apart again to cut the engine when they had parked here.

So it was true . . . some of it, at least. The big question was how much. He was beginning to feel like a man edging closer and closer to a potentially lethal drop. He went back to his prowler-car, got in, started it up, and took the microphone off its prong. What's true? Protocol and Reason whispered. God, that was a maddening voice. That someone is at the Beaumonts' lake house? Yes - that might be true. That someone named George Stark backed that black Toronado out of Fuzzy Martin's bam? Come on, Alan..Two thoughts occurred to him almost simultaneously. The first was that, if he contacted Henry Payton at the State Police Barracks in Oxford, as Harrison had told him to do, he might never know how this came out. Lake Lane, where the Beaumonts' summer house was located, was a dead end. The state police would tell him not to approach the house on his own - not a single officer, not when they suspected the man who was holding Liz and the twins of at least a dozen murders. They would want him to block off the road and no more while they sent out a fleet of cruisers, maybe a chopper, and, for all Alan knew, a few destroyers and fighter-planes. The second thought was about Stark.

They weren't thinking about Stark; they didn't even know about Stark. But what if Stark was real?

If that was the case, Alan was coming to believe that sending a bunch of state troopers who didn't know any better up Lake Lane would be like marching men into a meat-grinder. He put the microphone back on its prong. He was going in, and he was going in alone. It might be wrong, probably was, but it was what he was going to do. He could live with the thought of his own stupidity; God knew he had done it before. What he couldn't live with was even the possibility that he might have caused the deaths of a woman and two infants by making a radio-call for back-up before he knew the real nature of the situation.

Alan pulled out of the rest area and headed for Lake Lane..

Chapter Twenty-four

The Coming of the Sparrows

1

Thad avoided the turnpike on the way down (Stark had instructed Liz to use it, cutting half an hour off their time), and so he had to go through either Lewiston-Auburn or Oxford. L.A., as the natives called it, was a much bigger metropolitan area . . . but the state police barracks was in Oxford. He chose Lewiston-Auburn.