Stephen King - The Stand

Exasperated, Paul said: “Who do you think? The same person that gave me all the red list names.”

“Oh. Okay.” He said goodbye and hung up. Small-talk was impossible with the bad connection, and Lloyd had too much to think about to want to make it, anyway.

Red list.

Names that Flagg had given to Paul and to no one else, apparently—although Paul had assumed Lloyd knew all about it. Red list, what did that mean? Red meant stop.

Red meant danger.

Lloyd lifted the telephone again.

“Operator.”

“Lloyd again, Shirl.”

“Well, Lloyd, did you—”

“Shirley, I can’t gab. I’m onto something that’s maybe big.”

“Okay, Lloyd.” Shirley’s voice lost its flirtiness and she was suddenly all business.

“Who’s catching at Security?”

“Barry Dorgan.”

“Get him for me. And I never called you.”

“Yes, Lloyd.” She sounded afraid now. Lloyd was afraid, too, but he was also excited.

A moment later Dorgan was on. He was a good man, for which Lloyd was profoundly grateful. Too many men of the Poke Freeman type had gravitated toward the police department.

“I want you to pick someone up for me,” Lloyd said. “Get him alive. I have to have him alive even if it means you lose men. His name is Tom Cullen and you can probably catch him at home. Bring him to the Grand.” He gave Barry Tom’s address and then made him repeat it back.

“How important is this, Lloyd?”

“Very important. You do this right, and someone bigger than me is going to be very happy with you.”

“Okay.” Barry hung up and Lloyd did too, confident that Barry understood the converse: Fuck it up and somebody is going to be very angry with you .

Barry called back an hour later to say he was fairly sure Tom Cullen had split.

“But he’s feeble,” Barry went on, “and he can’t drive. Not even a motor-scooter. If he’s going east, he can’t be any further than Dry Lake. We can catch him, Lloyd, I know we can. Give me a green light.” Barry was fairly drooling. He was one of four or five people in Vegas who knew about the spies, and he had read Lloyd’s thoughts.

“Let me think this over,” Lloyd said, and hung up before Barry could protest. He had gotten better at thinking things over than he would have believed possible in the pre-flu days, but he knew this was too big for him. And that red list business troubled him. Why hadn’t he been told about that?

For the first time since meeting Flagg in Phoenix, Lloyd had the disquieting feeling that his position might be vulnerable. Secrets had been kept. They could probably still get Cullen; both Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson could fly the army choppers that were hangared out at the Springs, and if they had to they could close every road going out of Nevada to the east. Also, the guy wasn’t Jack the Ripper or Dr. Octopus; he was a feeb on the run. But Christ! If he had known about this Andros what’s-his-face when Julie Lawry had come to see him, they might have been able to take him right in his little North Vegas apartment.

Somewhere inside him a door had opened, letting in a cool breeze of fear. Flagg had screwed up. And Flagg was capable of distrusting Lloyd Henreid. And that was baaaad shit.

Still, he would have to be told about this. He wasn’t going to take the decision to start another manhunt upon himself. Not after what had happened with the Judge. He got up to go to the house phones, and met Whitney Horgan coming from them.

“It’s the man, Lloyd,” he said. “He wants you.”

“All right,” he said, surprised by how calm his voice was—the fear inside him was now very great. And above all else, it was important for him to remember that he would have long since starved in his Phoenix holding cell if it hadn’t been for Flagg. There was no sense kidding himself; he belonged to the dark man lock, stock, and barrel.

But I can’t do my job if he shuts off the information , he thought, going to the elevator bank. He pushed the penthouse button, and the elevator car rose swiftly. Again there was that nagging, unhappy feeling: Flagg hadn’t known. The third spy had been here all along, and Flagg hadn’t known .

“Come in, Lloyd.” Flagg’s lazy smiling face above a prosy blue-checked bathrobe.

Lloyd came in. The air conditioning was on high, and it was like stepping into an open-air suite in Greenland. And still, as Lloyd stepped past the dark man, he could feel the radiating body heat he gave off. It was like being in a room which contained a small but very powerful furnace.

Sitting in the corner, in a white sling chair, was the woman who had come in with Flagg that morning. Her hair was carefully pinned up, and she wore a shift dress. Her face was blank and moony, and looking at her gave Lloyd a deep chill. As teenagers, he and some friends had once stolen some dynamite from a construction project, had fused it and thrown it into Lake Harrison, where it exploded. The dead fish that had floated to the surface afterward had had that same look of awful blank impartiality in their moon-rimmed eyes.

“I’d like you to meet Nadine Cross,” Flagg said softly from behind him, making Lloyd jump. “My wife.”

Startled, Lloyd looked at Flagg and met only that mocking grin, those dancing eyes.

“My dear, Lloyd Henreid, my righthand man. Lloyd and I met in Phoenix, where Lloyd was being detained and was consequently about to dine on a fellow detainee. In fact, Lloyd might already have partaken of the appetizer. Correct, Lloyd?”

Lloyd blushed dully and said nothing, although the woman was either gonzo or stoned right over the moon.

“Put out your hand, dear,” the dark man said.

Like a robot, Nadine put her hand out. Her eyes continued to stare indifferently at a point somewhere above Lloyd’s shoulder.

Jesus, this is creepy , Lloyd thought. A light sweat had sprung out all over his body in spite of the frigid air conditioning.

“Pleestameetcha,” he said, and shook the soft warm meat of her hand. Afterward, he had to restrain a powerful urge to wipe his hand on the leg of his pants. Nadine’s hand continued to hang laxly in the air.

“You can put your hand down now, my love,” Flagg said.

Nadine put her hand back in her lap, where it began to twist and squirm. Lloyd realized with something like horror that she was masturbating.

“My wife is indisposed,” Flagg said, and tittered. “She is also in a family way, as the saying is. Congratulate me, Lloyd. I am going to be a papa.” That titter again; the sound of scampering, light-footed rats behind an old wall.

“Congratulations,” Lloyd said through lips that felt blue and numb.

“We can talk our little hearts out around Nadine, can’t we, dear? She’s as silent as the grave. To make a small pun, mum’s the word.”

“What about Indian Springs?”

Lloyd blinked and tried to shift his mental gears, feeling naked and on the defensive. “It’s going good,” he managed at last.

“ ‘Going good’?” The dark man leaned toward him and for one moment Lloyd was sure he was going to open his mouth and bite his head off like a Tootsie Pop. He recoiled. “That’s hardly what I’d call a close analysis, Lloyd.”

“There are some other things—”

“When I want to talk about other things, I’ll ask about other things.” Flagg’s voice was rising, getting uncomfortably close to a scream. Lloyd had never seen such a radical shift in temperament, and it scared him badly. “Right now I want a status report on Indian Springs and you better have it for me, Lloyd, for your sake you better have it!”

“All right,” Lloyd muttered. “Okay.” He fumbled his notebook out of his hip pocket, and for the next half hour they talked about Indian Springs, the National Guard jets, and the Shrike missiles. Flagg began to relax again—although it was hard to tell, and it was a very bad idea to take anything at all for granted when you were dealing with the Walkin Dude.