The Dark Half(66)

'Time will tell, I suppose,' he said vaguely. 'For now, I'd advise you two to stick to the line you took with me last night - this is a guy who thinks he's George Stark, and he's crazy enough to have started at the logical place - logical for a crazyman, anyway - the place where Stark was officially buried.'

'If you don't at least allow the idea some mental house-room, you're going to be in shit up to your armpits,' Thad said. 'This guy - Alan, you can't reason with him, you can't plead with him. You could beg him for mercy - if he gave you the time - but it wouldn't do any good. If you ever get close to him with your guard down, he will make sharkmeat pie out of you.'

'I'll check with your doctor,' Alan said, 'and with the doctor who operated on you as a kid. I don't know what good it will do, or what light it might shed on this business, but I'll do it. Otherwise, I guess I'll just have to take my chances.'

Thad smiled with no humor whatsoever. 'From my standpoint, there's a problem with that. My wife and kids and I will be taking our chances right along with you.'

3

Fifteen minutes later a trim blue-and-white panel truck pulled into Thad's driveway behind Alan's car. It looked like a telephone van, and that was what it turned out to be, although the words maine state police were written on the side in discreet lower-case letters. Two technicians came to the door, introduced themselves, apologized for having taken so long (an apology that was wasted on Thad and Liz, since they hadn't known these guys were coming at all), and asked Thad if he had any problem signing the form one of them carried on a clipboard. He scanned it quickly and saw it empowered them to place recording and traceback equipment on.his phone. It did not give them blanket permission to use the transcripts obtained in any court proceeding.

Thad scratched his signature in the proper place, both Alan Pangborn and one of the technicians (Thad bemusedly noticed that he had a telephone-tester slung on one side of his belt, a .45 on the other) witnessed it.

'This traceback stuff really works?' Thad asked several minutes later, after Alan had left for the Orono State Police Barracks. It seemed important to say something; following the return of their document, the technicians had fallen silent.

'Yeah,' one of them answered. He had picked the living-room telephone out of its cradle and was rapidly levering off the handset's plastic inner sleeve. 'We can trace a call back to its point of origination anywhere in the world. It's not like the old telephone traces you see in the movies, where you have to keep the caller on the line until the trace is done. As long as no one hangs up the phone on this end' - he waggled the phone, which now looked a little like an android demolished by ray-gun fire in a science fiction epic - 'we can trace back to the point of origination. Which more often than not turns out to be a pay telephone in a shopping mall.'

'You got that right,' his partner said. He was doing something to the telephone jack, which he had removed from its baseboard plug. 'You got a phone upstairs?'

'Two of them,' Thad said. He was beginning to feel as if someone had pushed him rudely down Alice's rabbit hole. 'One in my study and one in the bedroom.'

'They on a separate line?'

'No - we just have the one. Where will you put the tape-recorder?'

'Probably down cellar,' the first said absently. He was sticking wires from the telephone into a Lucite block which bristled with spring connectors, and there was a wouldja-mind-lettin-us-do-our-job undertone to his voice. Thad put his arm around Liz's waist and guided her away, wondering if there was anyone who could or would understand that not all the tape-recorders and high-tech state-of-the-art Lucite blocks in the world would stop George Stark. Stark was out there, maybe resting up, maybe already on his way.

And if no one would believe him, just what in the hell was he going to do about it? How in the hell was he supposed to protect his family? Was there a way? He thought deeply, and when thought accomplished nothing, he simply listened to himself. Sometimes - not always, but sometimes - the answer came that way when it would come no other. Not this time, though. And he was amused to find himself suddenly, desperately horny. He thought about coaxing Liz upstairs - and then remembered the state police technicians would shortly be up there, wanting to do more arcane things to his outmoded one-line telephones. Can't even get laid, he thought. So what do we do?

But the answer was simple enough. They waited, that's what they did. Nor did they have to wait long for the next horrible tidbit: Stark had gotten Rick Cowley, after all - booby-trapped his door somehow after ambushing the technicians who had been doing the same thing to Rick's telephone that the men in the living room were doing to the Beaumonts'. When Rick turned his latchkey, the door simply blew up.

It was Alan who brought them the news. He had gotten less than three miles down the road toward Orono when word of the explosion came over the radio. He had turned back immediately.

'You told us Rick was safe,' Liz said. Her voice and her eyes were dull. Even her hair seemed to have lost its luster. 'You practically guaranteed it.'

'I was wrong. I'm sorry.'.Alan felt as deeply shocked as Liz Beaumont looked and sounded, but he was trying hard not to

let it show. He glanced at Thad, who was looking back at him with a kind of bright-eyed stillness. A humorless little smile lurked just around the edges of Thad's mouth. He knows just what I am thinking. This was probably not true, but it felt true to Alan. Well . . . maybe not EVERYTHING, but some of it. Quite a bit of it, maybe. It could be that I'm doing a shitty job of covering up, but I don't think that's it. I think it's him. I think he sees too much.