“Wise,” Father Wycazik said bleakly, feeling even colder than the winter day in which he stood.
“Wise, wise, wise,” Roger Hasterwick said impatiently, making it clear he preferred not to be interrupted. "So finally, with a halfhour daylight left, they decide they'll send in the SWAT guys to dig him out, maybe save the sister and brotherinlaw. So they lob tear gas in there, see, and the SWAT guys rush the place, but when they get in they hit trouble. Sharkle must've been workin' on the house for weeks, settin' traps. The cops start fallin' over these thin wires he's strung everywhere, and one gets brained by a deadfall, which don't kill him but sure does some damage. Then, Christ, Sharkle opens fire on 'em because he's wearin' a gas mask same as they are and just waitin' like a cat. The dude was prepared. So he blows one cop away, utterly, and wounds one, then he heads down into the cellar and pulls the door shut, and nobody can get in after him 'cause it's not any regular cellar door but a steel door he's put in special. Not only that, but the outside cellar door, around back, is steel, too, and what he's done is he's put heavy sheetmetal shutters over the insides of the cellar windows, so it's your typical stalemate, see."
By Stefan's calculations, two people were dead, three wounded.
Hasterwick said, "So the cops they pulled in their horns real fast and figured to wait him out through the night. This mornin', Sharkle the Shark slides open one of them sheetmetal shutters on a basement window, see, and he shouts a bunch of stuff, really crazy stuff, and they figure somethin' more is gonna go down, but then he closes the shutter again, and since then nothin'. I sure hope he does somethin' soon, ,cause it's cold and I'm beginnin' to get bored."
“What did he shout?” Stefan asked.
“Huh?”
“This morning, what crazy stuff did he yell from the basement?”
"Oh, well, see, what he says . Roger Hasterwick stopped when he realized that a piece of news, passing in from the edge of the crowd, had electrified everyone. People hurried away from the barricade, some walking fast and some running south on Scott Avenue. Appalled by the prospect of missing new bloodshed, Hasterwick grabbed frantically at a blotchyfaced man in a deerstalker cap, the flaps of which were down but flopping loose. “What is it? What's happenin'?”
Trying to pull away from Hasterwick, the man in the deerstalker cap said, "Guy down here has a van with his own policeband radio. He's tuned in on the cops, the SWAT team, they're getting ready to wipe that fuckin' Sharkle off the map!" He wrenched loose of Hasterwick and rushed away, and Hasterwick hurried after him.
Father Wycazik stared after the departing throng for a moment. Then he glanced around at the ten or twelve onlookers who had remained, at the officers manning the barricade, past the barricade. More death, murder. He could sense it coming. He should do something to stop it. But he could not think. He was numb with dread. Until now, he had seenand been able to seeonly a positive side to the unfolding mystery. The miraculous cures and other phenomena had engendered only joy and an expectation of divine revelations to come. But now he was seeing the dark side of the mystery, and he was badly shaken by it.
Finally, hoping he would not be mistaken for just another ghoul in the bloodthirsty crowd, Stefan hurried after Roger Hasterwick and the others. They had gathered almost a block south of O'Bannon Lane, around a recreational van, a metallicblue Chevrolet with a Californiabeach mural on the side. The owner, a huge and hugely bearded man sitting behind the wheel, had opened both doors and turned up the volume on the policeband radio, so everyone could hear the cops in action.
In a minute or two, the essentials of their attack plan were clear. The SWAT team was already moving into place, back into the first floor of Sharkle's house. They would use a small, precisely shaped charge of plastic explosives to blow the steel cellar door off its pins, not enough to send shrapnel cutting through the basement. Simultaneously, another group of officers would blow off the exterior cellar door with a similar carefully gauged charge. Even as the smoke was clearing, the two groups would storm into the basement and catch Cal Sharkle in a pincer attack. That strategy was terribly dangerous for the officers and the hostages, though the authorities had decided that they would be in far greater danger if action was delayed any further.
Listening to the radiorelayed voices crackle in the cold January air, Father Wycazik suddenly knew he must stop the attack. If it was carried out, the slaughter would be worse than anyone imagined. He had to be allowed to go past the barricade, to the house, and talk to Cal Sharkle. Now. Right away. Now. He turned from the Chevy van and raced back toward the entrance to O'Bannon Lane, a block away. He was not sure what he would say to Sharkle to get through his paranoia. Perhaps, "You are not alone, Calvin." He'd think of something.
His abrupt departure from the van apparently gave the crowd the idea that he had heard or seen something happening up at the barricade. He was less than halfway back to the entrance to O'Bannon Lane when younger and fleeter onlookers began to pass him, shouting excitedly, plunging off the sidewalk and out into the street, bringing a complete halt to the already crawling traffic on Scott Avenue. Brakes barked. Horns blew. There was the thud of one bumper hitting another. Stefan was jostled by runners and struck so hard that he fell to his hands and knees on the pavement. No one stopped to help him. Stefan got up and ran on. The air seemed to have thickened with animal madness and bloodlust. Stefan was horrified at the behavior of his fellow men, and his heart was pounding, and he thought, This is what it might be like in Hell, running forever in the midst of a frantic and gibbering mob.
By the time Stefan reached the police blockade, more than half the frenzied crowd had returned ahead of him. They were jammed against the sawhorses and police cars, craning to see into the forbidden block of O'Bannon Lane. He pushed in among them, desperate to get to the head of the mob, so he could speak to the police. He was pushed, shoved, but he shoved back, telling them he was a priest, but no one was listening, and he felt his fedora knocked off his head, but he persisted, and then at last he was through to the front of the surging multitudes.
The policemen angrily ordered the mob to move back, threatened arrest, drew batons, lowered the visors on their riot helmets. Father Wycazik was prepared to lie, to tell the police anything that might get them to postpone the imminent attack on the house, tell them that he was not just a priest but Sharkle's own priest, that he knew what was wrong, knew how to get Sharkle to surrender. Of course, he didn't really
know how to obtain Sharkle's surrender, but if he could buy time and talk to Sharkle, he might think of something. He caught the attention of an officer who ordered him to step back. He identified himself as a priest. The cop wasn't listening, so Stefan tore open his topcoat and pulled off his white scarf to reveal his Roman collar. “I'm a priest!” But the crowd surged forward, pushing Stefan against a sawhorse, and the barrier fell over, and the cop shoved back angrily, in no mood to listen.
An instant later, two small explosions shook the air, one a splitsecond after the other, low and flat but hard. The hundred voices of the crowd gasped as one, and everybody froze, for they knew what they had heard: the SWAT team blowing the steel doors off the cellar. A third explosion followed the first two, an immense and devastating blast that shook the pavement, that hurt the ears, that vibrated in bones and teeth, that shot slabs and splinters of Sharkle's house into the wintry sky, that seemed to shatter the day itself and cast it down in a billion broken pieces. Again with a single voice, the crowd cried out. Instead of pressing toward the blockade this time, they scrambled back in fear, suddenly realizing that death could be not just an interesting spectator sport but a participatory activity.
“ He had a bomb!” one of the barricade cops said. "My God, my God, Sharkle had a bomb in there!" He turned to the emergency medical van in which two paramedics were waiting, and he shouted, “Go! Go!”
The red beacons flashed atop the paramedics wagon. It pulled out of the barricade, speeding toward the middle of the block.
Shaking with horror, Father Wycazik tried to follow on foot. But one of the cops grabbed him and said, “Hey, get the hell back there.”
:'I'm a priest. Someone may need comforting, last rites."
'Father, I wouldn't care if you were the pope himself. We don't know for sure that Sharkle's dead."
Numbly, Father Wycazik obeyed, though the tremendous power of the explosion left no doubt in his mind that Cal Sharkle was dead. Sharkle and his sister. And his brotherinlaw. And most members of the SWAT team. How many altogether? Maybe five? Six? Ten?
Moving aimlessly back through the crowd, absentmindedly tucking his scarf in place and buttoning his coat, partially in a state of shock, murmuring a Pater Noster, he saw Roger Hasterwick, the unemployed bartender with the queerly gleaming eyes. He put a hand on Hasterwick's shoulder, and said, “What did he shout to the police this morning?”
Hasterwick blinked. “Huh? What?”
"Before we got separated, you told me Calvin Sharkle slid open the metal shutter on one of the cellar windows and shouted a lot of weird stuff this morning, and you thought something was going to happen, but then nothing did. What exactly did he say?"
Hasterwick's face brightened with the memory. "Oh, yeah, yeah. It was real weird, see, straightout crazy stuff." He scrunched up his face, striving to recall the madman's exact words. When he had them, he grinned, rolled his mouth as if savoring the revelation, then repeated Sharkle's ravings for Stefan's enjoyment.
Stefan not only failed to enjoy the performance, but second by dreadful second, he became increasingly convinced that Calvin Sharkle had not been insane. Confused, yes, baffled and afraid because of the tremendous stress generated by his brainwashing and by the collapse of his memory blocks, badly confused but not insane. Roger Hasterwick and everyone else thought Sharkle's shouted accusations and declarations and imprecations, flung at the world through the shielded window of a jerrybuilt fortress, were obviously the lunatic fantasies of a demented mind. But Father Wycazik had an advantage over everyone else: He saw Sharkle's statements in the context of events at the Tranquility Motel, in the context of miracle cures and telekinetic phenomena, and he wondered if there might be some truth in the claims and accusations that the poor frightened man had shouted through the basement window. And wondering, he felt the fine hairs rise on the back of his neck. He shivered.
Seeing that reaction, Hasterwick said, "Hey, ain't no point takin' it serious, for Christ's sake. You don't think what he said was true? Hell, the guy was a nut. He blowed himself up, didn't he?"
Father Wycazik ran north along Scott Avenue to the parish car.
Even before he had arrived in Evanston and discovered the unfolding tragedy at Calvin Sharkle's house, Stefan Wy cazik had halfexpected to be on a flight to Nevada before the day was through. The events at the Mendozas' apartment and at the Halbourgs' place had set a fire of wonder and curiosity burning in him, and the blaze would not be quenched unless he plunged into the activities of the troubled group in Elko County.
Now, because of what he had just learned from Hasterwick, the urge to go to Nevada had become a burning need. If only half of what Sharkle had shouted through the basement window was true, Stefan had to go to Nevada, not only to witness a miracle but to do what he could to protect those who had gathered at the Tranquility. All his life, he had been a rescuer of troubled priests, a shepherd bringing lost souls back into the fold. This time, however, he might be called upon to save minds and lives as well. The threat of which Calvin Sharkle had spoken was one that might put body and brain in as much jeopardy as the spirit.
He slipped the car in gear again. He drove out of Evanston.
He decided not to return to the rectory to pack. There was no time. He would head straight to O'Hare International Airport and take the first available seat on the first available flight west.
Dear God, he thought, what have You sent us? Is it the greatest gift for which we could have asked? Or a plague to make all Biblical plagues pale by comparison?
Father Stefan Wycazik put the pedal to the metal and drove south and then west toward O'Hare like . . . well, like a bat out of Hell.
Ginger and Faye spent the larger part of the morning with Elroy and Nancy Jamison under the pretense that Ginger, supposedly the daughter of an old friend of Faye's, was moving west for unspecified health reasons and was interested in learning about Elko County. The Jamisons were localhistory buffs, eager to talk about the county, especially about the beauty of the Lemoille Valley.
Actually, indirectly and directly, Ginger and Faye were seeking indications that Elroy and Nancy were suffering from the effects of collapsing memory blocks. They found none. The Jamisons were happy, untroubled. Their brainwashing had been as successful as Faye's; their false memories were firmly rooted. Bringing them into the Tranquility family would put them in jeopardy while serving no great purpose.
In the motel van, as they pulled away from the Jamison house (with Elroy and Nancy waving from the front porch), Ginger said, "Good people. Really nice people."
“Yes,” Faye said. "Reliable. Wish they were standing beside us in this thing. On the other hand, I'm happy they're well out of it."
Both women were quiet then, and Ginger figured Faye's thoughts were the same as her own: They were wondering if the government car was still parked along the county road, near the entrance to the Jamisons' place, and if the men in it would still be content merely to follow them. Ernie and Dom had armed themselves for their expedition into the mountains around Thunder Hill Depository. However, considering the unprovocative nature of Faye's and Ginger's errands, no one had thought that they might be in special danger, too. Ginger, like many attractive women living alone in a city, knew how to use a handgun, and Faye, a good Marine wife, was something of an expert, but their knowledge and expertise was of no use when they were not armed.
Having driven only a quartermile along the Jamisons' halfmile driveway, Faye stopped the van in one of the deepest pools of shadows cast by the overhanging pines. “I'm probably being melodramatic,” she said. She slipped open a few buttons on her coat and reached under her sweater. “And these won't be much good if they point guns at our heads.”
Grimacing, she withdrew two steak knives and put them on the seat between her and Ginger.
Surprised, Ginger said, “Where'd you get these?”
"This is why I insisted on drying the breakfast dishes while Nancy washed them. Putting away the silverware, I swiped these. Didn't want to ask straightout for a weapon; that would've meant bringing Nancy and Elroy into it, which it was clear we weren't going to have to do. I can return them later, when this is over." She picked up one of the knives. "The end's nicely pointed. The blade's sharp and serrated. Like I said, not much help if they've got a gun at your head. But if they were to run us off the road and try to force us into their car, you keep the knife a secret until you get your opening, then stab the bastard."