John Saul - Black Lightning

Not much came up, and she was left feeling just as bad as she had before, except now her mouth was filled with the sour taste of vomit. Wishing she could sink through the bricks and disappear into the ground, but knowing it wouldn’t happen, Sheila Harrar shuffled over to the drinking fountain at the corner and filled her mouth with water, swirled it around, then spit it out. This time, though, she spit carefully into the catch basin around the fountain’s mouthpiece rather than spew more of her expectoration onto the sidewalk.

What the hell good was she like this? If she was ever going to find out what had happened to Danny, she had to pull herself together.

She burrowed into her tote bag again, this time finding a few stray coins hidden among the odds and ends that had gathered in its corners. She gazed at the money, automatically calculating how much wine she could buy with it.

An image of Danny came into her mind, and she determinedly ignored her body’s craving for alcohol. Making her way down to First Avenue, she went into one of the cafés that catered to the neighborhood derelicts as long as they had the price of one of its cheap meals, and ordered a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Though her stomach threatened to rebel once again at the unaccustomed intrusion of food so early in the day, she consumed the entire pastry, washing it down with two cups of coffee. As she ate she had a long talk with Danny, even though he wasn’t really there to talk to her:

Maybe she never got the message, Danny’s voice suggested. Or maybe you didn’t wait by the phone as long as you think.

“I waited,” Sheila muttered, then made herself stop talking out loud, as the person two stools away glanced at her.

Maybe you only waited a couple of minutes, then went out and got drunk, Danny’s implacable voice went on.

Sheila didn’t try to argue with him — she knew he was right. In fact, she might not even have left the right number for Anne Jeffers to call her at.

Better call her again. She got off the stool and started toward the rest rooms at the back of the café, where she knew there was a pay phone. Leafing through the phone book in search of the number of the Herald, she suddenly had an idea.

What if Anne Jeffers had never even gotten her message at all? What if it had just gone into one of those machines, and no one had ever listened to it? Dropping the yellow pages, Sheila picked up the white pages and began thumbing through them. A minute later she found it. “Jeffers, Glen & Anne,” were listed, up at the fancy end of Capitol Hill.

Dropping a quarter into the slot, Sheila dialed the number. On the eighth ring, just as she was about to hang up, someone answered.

“Hello?”

“Is Anne Jeffers there? The one who works for the paper?”

“This is her residence, but she’s at work now. May I take a message?”

Sheila hesitated, but then made up her mind. At least this time she was talking to a real person, and if it was Anne Jeffers’s house, then she’d probably get the message. “I left a message at the paper, but she didn’t call me back,” Sheila said, pronouncing each word very carefully in the hope that whoever she was talking to wouldn’t know how drunk she’d been last night. “Are you her husband?”

Sheila didn’t notice the slight hesitation before the voice replied with a single terse word: “Yes.”

“It’s my son,” Sheila went on. “Danny Harrar. That man Richard Kraven killed him, but the police didn’t do anything. They said he was just a drunken Indian, but that isn’t true. Danny was a good boy. He worked, and he went to school, and he never drank at all.” Sheila felt her eyes sting with tears, but she wiped them away with her sleeve, determined not to let her emotions get the better of her. Not this time. “All I want is to find my boy. All I want is to find my son so I can bury him.”

Sheila heard a silence. Then the man spoke again. “And you want Anne to help you find him?”

Sheila’s breath caught in her throat. He hadn’t hung up! “Do you think she would?” she asked, her voice trembling with anxiety. It had been so long since anyone had even listened to her that she could barely believe this man’s wife might actually be willing to help her.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?” the man asked. “Just tell me what you think happened to your son, and how my wife can get in touch with you.”

Suddenly, Sheila Harrar’s hands were shaking and a sheen of sweat covered her skin. Where should she start? What should she say? “He was going fishing,” she began. “With that man, Richard Kraven. I told the police, but they didn’t believe me, because I’m an In—” She hesitated, then took a deep breath. “The police never believe Native Americans,” she went on. “They say we’re all drunks, but that isn’t true. Danny wasn’t a drunk, and neither was I, not back then. But they didn’t believe me anyway.”

“Just tell me what happened,” the man said. “Tell me everything you know and everything you think.”

Speaking slowly and carefully, Sheila Harrar began to relate what she suspected had happened on the day Danny disappeared.

And the man at the other end of the line listened.

Listened, and remembered.…

The sound of his own heartbeat throbbed so loudly in his ears that the Experimenter could barely believe it was audible to no one but himself. But who else would hear it?

He was by himself, sealed alone into his private world.

A mobile world made of metal and glass in which he was in total command, in utter control of his environment.

Free to do anything he wanted, free to roam wherever his mood took him, free of all the distractions of the larger world beyond, in which he had little control at all.

It was good to be alone.

But soon he would be alone no longer, for through the windshield he saw what he’d been looking for.

A boy — perhaps seventeen or eighteen — standing on the corner half a block ahead. A boy holding a fishing rod. Waiting for him.

At the same time he began to slow the motor home to a gentle stop, the Experimenter also tried to slow his heartbeat But it was impossible: the thrill of anticipation was too much.

But the boy wouldn’t notice — none of his subjects ever noticed.

The vehicle came to a smooth and silent stop, and the door opened.

The boy smiled at him, showing a double row of even teeth whose whiteness was accentuated by his bronze skin.

The Experimenter smiled back, waving the boy into the motor home.

“Where we going?” the boy asked.

“The mountains,” the Experimenter replied. “I know a great spot along the Snoqualmie River.” Automatically he glanced around, but the streets were empty.

No one had seen the motor home. No one had seen him.

If anyone had seen the boy standing on the corner by himself, it wouldn’t matter.

He drove the van carefully, seldom changing lanes, never exceeding the speed limit.

In the seat beside him, the boy talked, just as all the other subjects had talked. But he found the boy much more interesting than most of the rest of them, for the boy was a Native American, though of what tribe the man wasn’t sure.

“Did you know our people believe the first woman came from a fish?”

The Experimenter shook his head.

“It was a salmon,” the boy said. “And it must have been a big one, because when the man who caught it pulled it out of the river and tore it open, there was a woman inside.”

“Tore it open?” the Experimenter asked, his heartbeat once more quickening as a thrill of excitement went through him.

“Its belly,” the boy explained. “The man sliced the fish’s belly open to clean it, but instead of its guts coming out, the first woman came out. That’s why our people revere the salmon. Because it was from them that our own ancient mother came.”