Odd Hours

TWENTY-SIX

CHIEF HOSS SHACKETT UNDERWENT A CHANGE worthy of one of those intelligent alien machines in that toy-based movie, Transformers, that can morph from an ordinary period Dodge into a giant robot with a hundred times the mass of the vehicle from which it unfolded.

I do not mean that the chief suddenly filled the cell and left me without elbow room. He metamorphosed from Mr. Hyde, if Mr. Hyde had been a sadistic warden in a Soviet gulag, into the benign Dr. Jekyll, if Dr. Jekyll had been a folksy sheriff from a small town where the biggest crime in twenty years had been when Lulamay copied Bobbijune’s rhubarb-jam recipe and passed it off as her own in the county-fair competition.

The eat-your-liver-with-fava-beans grin melted into the smile of any grandfather in any TV commercial featuring cute little kids frolicking with puppies.

The knotted muscles in his face relaxed. The tension went out of his body. As if he were a chameleon moving from gray stone to a rose, a touch of pink appeared in his skin.

Amazingly, the venomous green shade of his eyes changed, and they were now Irish eyes, happy and full of delight. Even his eyes were smiling, his lips and his eyes, his entire face, every line and plain and dimple of his countenance marshaling into a spectacle of sublime good will.

The previous Hoss Shackett could never have become the chief of police of Magic Beach, which was an elected position. Before me now was Hoss Shackett, the politician.

I was dismayed that he wasn’t up for election this year, because I wanted to go out right this minute and work in his campaign, put up some signs, canvass a few neighborhoods, help paint his portrait on the side of a four-story building.

Mr. Sinatra came to the table to stare more closely at the chief. He looked at me, shook his head in amazement, and returned to the corner.

Slumped in his chair, so relaxed that he seemed to be in danger of sliding onto the floor, Chief Hoss said, “Kid, what do you want?”

“Want, sir?”

“Out of life. What do you want out of life?”

“Well, sir, I’m not sure I can answer that question accurately since at the present time I don’t know who I am.”

“Let’s suppose you don’t have amnesia.”

“But I do, sir. I look in the mirror, and I don’t know my face.”

“It’s your face,” he assured me.

“I look in the mirror, and I see that actor, Matt Damon.”

“You don’t look anything like Matt Damon.”

“Then why do I see him in the mirror?”

“Let me hazard a guess.”

“I’d be grateful if you would, sir.”

“You saw those movies where he has amnesia.”

“Was Matt Damon in movies where he had amnesia?”

“Of course, you wouldn’t remember them.”

“Gone,” I agreed. “It’s all gone.”

“The Bourne Identity. That was one of them.”

I considered it. Then: “Nope. Nothing.”

“Kid, you’re genuinely funny.”

“Well, I’d like to think I might be. But there’s as good a chance that when I find out who I am, I’ll discover I’m humorless.”

“What I’m saying is, I’m willing to stipulate that you have amnesia.”

“I sure wish I didn’t, sir. But there you are.”

“For the purpose of facilitating our discussion, I accept your amnesia, and I will not try to trip you up. Is that fair?”

“It’s fair, sure, but it’s also the way it is.”

“All right. Let’s suppose you don’t have amnesia. I know you do have it, I know, but so you can answer questions with more than gone-it’s-all-gone, let’s just suppose.”

“You’re asking me to use my imagination.”

“There you go.”

“I think I might’ve been a guy with a good imagination.”

“Is that what you think, huh?”

“It’s just a hunch. But I’ll try.”

This new Chief Hoss Shackett radiated affability so brightly that being in his company too long might involve a risk of melanoma.

He said, “So…what do you want out of life, son?”

“Well, sir, I imagine a life in tire sales might be nice.”

“Tire sales?”

“Putting people back on good rubber, getting them rolling again, after life threw a blow-out at them. That would be satisfying.”

“I can see your point. But since we’re just imagining here, why don’t we imagine big?”

“Big. All right.”

“If you had a big dream in life, what would it be?”

“I guess maybe…having my own ice-cream store.”

“Is that as big as you can go, son?”

“My best girl at my side and an ice-cream shop we could work in together all our lives. Yes, sir. That would be terrific.”

I was serious. That would have been some life, me and Stormy and an ice-cream shop. I would have loved that life.

He regarded me pleasantly. Then: “Yes, I see, with a little one coming along, it would be nice to have a business you could rely on.”

“Little one?” I asked.

“The baby. Your girl is pregnant.”

Bewilderment is, for me, a natural expression. “Girlfriend? You know my girlfriend? Then you must know who I am. You mean…I’m going to be a father?”

“You were talking to her this afternoon. Utgard saw you. Before you jumped off the pier.”

I looked disappointed, shook my head. “That was crazy-jumping off the pier, talking tsunamis. But the girl, sir, I don’t know her.”

“Maybe you just don’t remember knowing her.”

“No, sir. When I came on the pier after being mugged, and I had amnesia, I saw her and thought, well, maybe I often went to the pier and she would know who I was.”

“But she didn’t know you.”

“Not a clue.”

“Her name’s Annamaria,” he said.

“That’s a pretty name.”

“Nobody knows her last name. Not even the people letting her live above their garage rent-free.”

“Rent-free? What lovely people they must be.”

“They’re do-gooder morons,” he said in the nicest way, with his warmest smile yet.

“The poor girl,” I sympathized. “She didn’t tell me that she had amnesia, too. What’re the odds of that, huh?”

“I wouldn’t take the bet. The thing of it is-the same day, here you are with no first name or last, and here she is with no last name.”

“Magic Beach isn’t a big city, sir. You’ll help us find out who we are. I’m confident of that.”

“I don’t believe either of you is from around here.”

“Oh, I hope you’re wrong. If I’m not from around here, how will I find out where I’m from? And if I can’t find out where I’m from, how will I find anyone who knows who I am?”

When the chief was in his charming-politician mode, his good humor was as unshakeable as the Rocky Mountains. He kept smiling, though he did close his eyes for a moment, as if counting to ten.

I glanced at Mr. Sinatra to see how I was doing.

He gave me two thumbs up.

Hoss Shackett opened his warm Irish eyes. Regarding me with delight, as if I were the leprechaun he had longed all his life to encounter, he said, “I want to go back to the big-dream question.”

“Still an ice-cream parlor for me,” I assured him.

“Would you like to hear my big dream, son?”

“You’ve accomplished so much, I’d guess your big dream already came true. But it’s good always to have new dreams.”

Chief Hoss Shackett the Nice remained with me, and there was no sign of Chief Hoss Shackett the Mean, though he resorted to the silence and the direct stare with which he had regarded me when he had first entered the room.

This stare had a different quality from the previous one, which had been crocodilian. Now the chief smiled warmly, and as Frankie Valli sings in that old song, his eyes adored me, as though he were looking at me through a pet-shop window, contemplating adopting me.

Finally he said, “I’m going to have to trust you, son. Trust isn’t an easy thing for me.”

I nodded sympathetically. “Being an officer of the law and having to deal every day with the scum of the earth…Well, sir, a little cynicism is understandable.”

“I’m going to trust you totally. See…my big dream is one hundred million dollars tax-free.”

“Whoa. That is big, sir. I didn’t know you meant big big. I feel a little silly now, saying an ice-cream parlor.”

“And my dream has come true. I have my money.”

“That’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you. Was it the lottery?”

“The full value of the deal,” he said, “was four hundred million dollars. My cut was one of the two largest, but several others here in Magic Beach have become very rich.”

“I can’t wait to see how you’re going to spread the good fortune around, sir. ‘Everyone a neighbor, every neighbor a friend.’”

“I’m adding four words to the motto-‘Every man for himself.’”

“That doesn’t sound like you, sir. That sounds like the other Chief Shackett.”

Sitting forward on his chair, folding his arms on the table, virtually sparkling with bonhomie, he said, “Happy as I am to be stinking rich, I’m not without problems, son.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Such a wounded look of disappointment came over his face that you would have wanted to hug him if you had been there.

“You are my biggest problem,” he said. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you are. That dream, the vision, whatever it was that you passed to me and Utgard.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. It’s a very disturbing little dream.”

“And so spot-on accurate. Clearly you know too much. I could kill you right now, bury you somewhere like Hecate’s Canyon, and nobody would find you for years.”

In his Chief Hoss Shackett the Nice persona, he had brought to the moment such a spirit of camaraderie and such fine intentions that the low concrete ceiling had seemed to expand into a high vault. Now it so suddenly crashed down again that I ducked my head a little.

Once again I could detect the smell of vomit under the pine disinfectant.

“If I have a vote, sir, I’m opposed to the kill-and-bury-in-Hecate’s-Canyon solution.”

“I don’t like it, either. Because maybe that fake-pregnant girlfriend of yours is expecting you to report in.”

“Fake-pregnant?”

“That’s what I suspect. Good cover. The two of you come into town like vagrants, the kind nobody looks at twice. You’re like some surf bum, she’s like a runaway. But you work for somebody.”

“Sounds like you have someone in mind.”

“Maybe Homeland Security. Some intelligence agency. They have a slew of them these days.”

“Sir, how old do I look to you?”

“Twenty. You might look younger than you are, might be twenty-three, twenty-four.”

“A little young to be an undercover spy, don’t you think?”

“Not at all. Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, the best of the best-some of them are twenty, twenty-one.”

“Not me. I have a gun phobia.”

“Yeah. Right.”

I had leaned on the table, as well. He reached out and patted my arm affectionately.

“Suppose you don’t check in with your partner, this Annamaria, at the appointed hour, and she gets on the horn to your controllers back in Washington or wherever.”

Amnesia no longer served me well. I would do better being a cool and deadly government agent. I said only, “Suppose.”

“In a spirit of trust, which I sincerely hope you genuinely do appreciate, I’ll tell you-the job that made me rich, my part of that is done tonight. In two weeks, I’ll be living in another country, under a new identity so tightly guarded I’ll never be found. But leaving the right way, the careful way, is going to take two weeks.”

“During which you’re vulnerable.”

“So I have only three options I can see. One-I have to find your Annamaria real quick, before she squawks, and kill you both.”

I consulted my watch, as if in fact I had a pending report time with my undercover co-agent. “You won’t be able to pull that off.”

“That’s what I figured. Option two-I kill you here, now. When you don’t report to Annamaria, she sends the alarm, your agency comes storming into town. I play dumb, tough it out. Never saw you, don’t know what happened to you.”

I said, “I’m sorry to hear…this must mean Reverend Moran is in this with you.”

“He’s not. He found you in his church, you said your life had taken a wrong turn. Then you started talking Armageddon, the end of the world, you made him nervous. You told him the retriever’s name was Raphael, but he knew who owned the dog, and its name is Murphy.”

I said, “Gee, a troubled young man worried about the end of the world, maybe on drugs, has a dog isn’t his…I’d think a preacher would try some counseling and prayer before turning me in.”

“He feels comfortable calling me about small stuff, and don’t pretend you don’t know why.”

“Are you a member of his parish?” I guessed.

“You know I am.”

I hesitated, then nodded. “We know.” I made the we sound like eight thousand bureaucrats in a block-square building near the CIA. “And don’t forget-the reverend knows you arrested me.”

He smiled and dismissed my concern with a wave of his hand. “That doesn’t matter if before morning the reverend kills his wife and commits suicide.”

“I gather you’re not a believing member of the parish.”

“Do I sound like a Christian to you?” he asked, and laughed softly, not as if he were remarking on his ruthless criminality but as if Christian were a synonym for brain-dead troglodyte.

I said, “Back to your second option. You remember that?”

“I kill you now, play dumb, say I never met you.”

“Won’t work,” I told him. “They know I’m here right now.”

“They who?”

“My handlers in…the agency.”

He looked dubious. “They can’t know.”

“Satellite tracking.”

“You aren’t carrying a transponder. We searched you at the church.”

“Surgically implanted.”

A little venom seeped into his twinkling Irish eyes. “Where?”

“Very tiny, efficient device. Could be my right buttocks. Could be my left buttocks. Could be in an armpit. Even if you found it, cut it out, and crushed it, they already know I’m here.”

He sat back in his chair and gradually repaired the politician demeanor that had begun to break down. He took an Almond Joy from his shirt pocket and began to unwrap it. “You like half?”

“No.”

“You don’t like Almond Joy?”

“You were going to kill me.”

“Not with poison candy.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” I said.

“You don’t take sweets from men who threaten to kill you.”

“That’s right.”

“Well…more for me.” After he had enjoyed a bite of the Almond Joy, he said, “So there’s only option three. This is where I figured we would wind up. Which is why I had to trust you and tell you my situation. I can make you very rich.”

“What happened to ‘Every man for himself’?”

“Son, I like you, I do, and I see my best option is co-opting you, but I wouldn’t in a million years give you a piece of my cut. I’m surprised I offered you half of the candy bar.”

“I appreciate your honesty.”

“If I’m to trust you, then you’ve got to have good reason to trust me. So from now on, only truth between us.”

Because he smiled at me so sincerely and because it would have been rude not to reciprocate, I returned his smile.

In the spirit of frankness that the chief encouraged, I felt it necessary to say, “In all honesty, I don’t believe that Utgard Rolf is the kind of generous fellow who would share his cut with me.”

“You’re right, of course. Utgard would kill his own mother for a thousand dollars. Or maybe it was five thousand.”

He ate more candy, and I digested the proposition that he had made to me.

After what seemed enough time for serious consideration, I said, “So, supposing I have a price-”

“Everyone has a price.”

“Who would meet mine?”

“The men backing this operation have some of the deepest pockets on the planet. They have a contingency fund. At this late hour, with so much on the line, if you join us and share what your agency knows or suspects, tell us the reason you were sent here, and if you feed them false information, you can be a very rich man, too, living in a wonderful climate under a name no one will ever discover.”

“How rich?”

“I don’t know the size of the contingency fund. And I would have to speak with a representative of our financiers, but I suspect they would consider you so valuable to this enterprise that they would find twenty-five million for you.”

“What about my partner? Annamaria?”

“Do you have a thing for her?”

“No. We just work together.”

“Then you tell us where she is, we kill her tonight. We put the body through a meat grinder, dump the sludge at sea, gone forever.”

“Let’s do it.”

“That was quick.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t see an alternative, because I’m not giving her a piece of my cut.”

“No reason you should.”

“In the right part of the world,” I said, “twenty-five million is like a hundred million here.”

“Live like a king,” the chief agreed, finishing his candy. “So, my new rich friend, what’s your name?”

“Harry Lime,” I said.

He held out his hand. I reached across the table and shook it.

I was not thrown back into the dream. Evidently, it happened only on first contact with one of these conspirators.

The chief said, “I’ve got to go talk to the money man, close the deal. I’ll be back in five minutes. One thing he’ll want to know.”

“Whatever. We’re partners.”

“How the hell did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“How did you pass the dream to Utgard and me? The dream, the vision, whatever you want to call it.”

“I don’t know exactly how. You triggered it, I think. Because you’re the people going to make it come true.”

Wide-eyed, a third Hoss Shackett sat before me now, neither the hard-case sadist nor the charming politician. This chief possessed a capacity for wonder that neither the baby-killer nor the baby-kisser shared.

This chief might have had the ability to commit a selfless act or an uncalculated kindness, because wonder admits to the existence of mystery, and the recognition of mystery in the world allows the possibility of Truth. The other two wouldn’t let this chief surface often. I was surprised that they had not already drowned him forever.

He said, “What are you, anyway? Some kind of psychic? I never believed in psychics, but what you put in my head, that was for damn sure real.”

Recognizing that we live in a distressed culture where anything like a conspiracy theory will be embraced by more people than will the simple and obvious truth, I tried to make it easier for Hoss Shackett to accept my otherness:

“The government has a drug that facilitates clairvoyance,” I lied.

“Sonofabitch.”

“It doesn’t work with everyone,” I said. “You have to carry a certain combination of genes. There aren’t many of us.”

“You see the future?”

“Not really, not directly. Things come in dreams. And they’re never complete. Just pieces of a puzzle. I have to do police work, just like you, to fill in what’s missing.”

“So you saw Magic Beach in your dream, and the nukes.”

Trying not to react to the word nukes, I said, “Yeah.” I suppose I had known all along.

“But in the dream, you didn’t see me or Utgard?”

“No.”

“What you put in my head, the sea all red and the sky-it seemed like the nukes were going off right here on the beach. That’s not how it’ll be.”

“The dreams are fragmentary, sometimes more symbolic than full of real details. Where will the bombs be detonated?”

He said, “Where it matters. In cities. In a few weeks. All on the same day. We’re just bringing them ashore and distributing. The major seaports and airports, they’re blanketed with radiation detectors.”

In addition to lingering spirits of the dead, I once in a while see other supernatural entities, about which I have written in the past. Ink-black, with no facial features, fluid in shape, sometimes catlike, sometimes wolflike, they can pass through a keyhole or through the crack under a door.

I believe they are spiritual vampires and possess knowledge of the future. They swarm to places where extreme violence or a natural catastrophe will soon occur, as though they feed on human suffering, to which they react with frenzied ecstasy.

Now I realized why none of these creatures had appeared in Magic Beach. The suffering would occur elsewhere. Already, legions of those ghoulish entities must be swarming through the target cities, relishing the prospect of the death and misery to come.

As Shackett rose from the table, I said, “Good thing for me that I had a price. Sounds like, a month from now, this’ll be a country nobody will want to live in.”

He said, “How do you feel about that?”

I could not tell which of the three Hoss Shacketts regarded me at the moment.

Playing to the savagery of the sadist, to the megalomania of the politician, to the bitterness in both of them, I invented something that he would believe. Remembering my advice to Hutch, I strove not to let my performance become fulsome, to keep it subdued and real.

“They lied to me about the effects of the drug. They said it facilitated clairvoyance for twelve to eighteen hours. But they knew. One dose is all you ever need. They knew it would change me forever. I rarely have a night of restful sleep anymore. Visions, nightmares, more vivid than reality. There’s a thousand kinds of hell on earth that could be coming. Sometimes I can’t wake from them. Hour after hour in those horrors. When at last I wake up, my bed is soaked with sweat, I’m swimming in it. Throat raw from screaming in my sleep.”

Through all of that, I had met his stare, daring him to see any lie in my eyes. Evil men are often easy to mislead, because they have spent so long deceiving that they no longer recognize the truth and mistake deception for it.

Now I gazed at the ceiling, as if seeing beyond it a nation that had betrayed me. Line by line, my voice grew quieter, less emotional, even as my words grew more accusatory.

“They lied to me. Now they say that after I’ve served them for five years, they’ll give me the antidote. I don’t believe there is one. They lie not just for advantage but for sport. Five years will become ten. They can all go to hell.”

I met his eyes again.

He was silent, not because he suspected deception but because he was impressed.

He was, after all, a man who would sell out his country to terrorists, who could conspire to murder millions of innocents in a nuclear holocaust and to condemn millions more to death in the chaos that would follow the day of detonations. A man who could believe in the rightness of such a scenario was one who could believe anything, even my little exercise in science-fiction paranoia.

At last he said, “You’re a good hater, kid. That’ll take you a long way in life.”

“What now?”

“I go talk to the man, get our deal confirmed. Like I said-five minutes, ten at most.”

“My leg is half numb. How about unshackling me from the table so I can walk around while I wait.”

“As soon as Utgard and I get back with the polygraph,” he said. “We’ll have to unshackle you for that.”

As if I had anticipated that they would want to confirm the sincerity of my conversion by any means available to them, I did not react to the word polygraph. Lie detector.

“You have a problem with that?” the chief asked.

“No. If our situations were reversed, I’d play it the same way you are.”

He left the room and closed the half-ton door behind him.

The silence of tranquility lies light upon a room, but this was the silence of apprehension, heavy enough to press me down on the chair in paralytic stillness.

So saturated was the air with the stink of pine disinfectant that I could taste the astringent chemical when I opened my mouth, and the underlying scent of other prisoners’ vomit was not conducive to a calm stomach.

The concrete walls were not mortared blocks, but solid, poured in place, reinforced with rebar, as was the ceiling.

One vent, high in a wall, brought air to the room and carried it away. No doubt any sound that passed through the vent would diminish as it followed a long insulated duct, and would be stifled entirely in whatever machine exchanged the air.

When I turned to look at Mr. Sinatra, he was sitting in the third chair, bent forward at the waist, elbows on his thighs, his face buried in his hands.

I said, “Sir, I’m in a real pickle here.”