Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Barbara doesn’t waste time. “Where is she this morning, J?”

“Don’t know,” he says. “I dumped the tracker.”

“True?”

“True.”

“Well… okay.”

“Can I go back to sleep now?”

“No,” she says. Barbara has been up since 6:45, and misery loves company. “Time to get up and grab the world by the balls.”

“Mouth, sister,” he says, and boom, he’s gone.

Barbara stands by some kid’s really bad watercolor of the lake, staring at her phone and frowning. Jerome is probably right, Holly went off to meet some guy she met on that dating website. Not to fuck him, that’s not Holly, but to make a human connection? To reach out, as her therapist has no doubt been telling her she must do? That Barbara can believe. Portland has got to be at least five hundred miles from the site of that bombing she was so interested in, after all. Maybe more.

Put yourself in her shoes, Barbara tells herself. Wouldn’t you want your privacy? And wouldn’t you be mad if you ever found out that your friends—your so-called friends—were spying on you?

Holly wasn’t going to find out, but did that change the basic equation?

No.

Was she still worried (a little worried)?

Yes. But some worries had to be lived with.

She slips her phone back into her pocket and decides to go down to the music room and practice her guitar until 20th Century American History. She’s trying to learn the old Wilson Pickett soul shouter, “In the Midnight Hour.” The bar chords in the bridge are a bitch, but she’s getting there.

On her way out, she almost runs into Justin Freilander, a junior who’s a founding member of Houghton’s geek squad, and who has—according to rumor—a major crush on her. She smiles at him and Justin immediately turns that alarming shade of red of which only white boys are capable. Rumor confirmed. It suddenly occurs to Barbara that this might be fate.

She says, “Hey Justin. I wonder if you could help me with something?”

And takes her phone out of her pocket.

While Justin Freilander is examining Barbara’s phone (which is still, oh God, warm from being in her back pocket), Holly is landing at Pittsburgh International. Ten minutes later she’s in line at the Avis counter. Uber would be cheaper, but having her own ride is wiser. A year or so after Pete Huntley came onboard at Finders Keepers, the two of them took a driving course meant to teach surveillance and evasion—a refresher for him, new for her. She doesn’t expect to need the former today, but recourse to the latter isn’t out of the question. She is meeting a dangerous man.

She parks in the lot of an airport hotel to kill some time (early to my own funeral, she thinks again). She calls her mother. Charlotte doesn’t answer, which doesn’t mean she’s not there; direct-to-voicemail is one of her old punishing techniques for when she feels her daughter has stepped out of line. Holly next calls Pete, who asks again what she’s doing and when she’ll be back. Thinking of Dan Bell and his terribly gay grandson, she tells him she’s visiting friends in New England and will be in the office bright and early on Monday morning.

“You better be,” Pete says. “You have a depo on Tuesday. And the office Christmas party is on Wednesday. I plan to kiss you under the mistletoe.”

“Oough,” Holly says, but she’s smiling.

She arrives at the Monroeville Mall at quarter past eleven and makes herself sit in the car for another fifteen minutes, alternately punching her Fitbit (pulse running just over 100) and praying for strength and calm. Also to be convincing.

At eleven-thirty she enters the mall and takes a slow stroll past some of the shops—Jimmy Jazz, Clutch, Boobaloo strollers—looking in the windows not to scope out the merchandise but to catch a reflected glimpse of Chet Ondowsky, should he be watching her. And it will be Chet. His other self, the one she thinks of as George, is the most wanted man in America just now. Holly supposes he might have a third template, but she thinks it unlikely; he’s got a pig-self and a fox-self, why would he think he’d need more?

At ten minutes of twelve, she gets in line at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, then queues at Sbarro for a slice of pizza she doesn’t want. She unzips her jacket so the pink turtleneck shows, then finds an unoccupied table in the food court. Although it’s lunchtime, there are quite a few of those—more than she expected, and that makes her uneasy. The mall itself is low on foot traffic, especially for the Christmas shopping season. Seems to have fallen on hard times, everybody buys from Amazon these days.

Noon comes. A young man wearing cool sunglasses and a quilted jacket (a couple of ski-lift tags dangle jauntily from the zipper) slows, as if he means to chat her up, then moves on. Holly is relieved. She has little in the way of brush-off skills, never having had much reason to develop them.

At five past noon she starts to think Ondowsky isn’t coming. Then, at seven past, a man speaks from behind her, and in the warm, we’re-all-pals-here voice of a TV regular. “Hello, Holly.”

She jumps and almost spills her coffee. It’s the young man with the cool sunglasses. At first she thinks this is a third template after all, but when he takes them off she sees it’s Ondowsky, all right. His face is slightly more angular, the creases around his mouth are gone, and his eyes are closer together (not a good look for TV), but it’s him. And not young at all. She can’t see any lines and wrinkles on his face, but she senses them, and thinks there may be a lot. The masquerade is a good one, but up this close it’s like Botox or plastic surgery.

Because I know, she thinks. I know what he is.

“I thought it would be best if I looked just a bit different,” he says. “When I’m Chet, I tend to get recognized. TV journalists aren’t exactly Tom Cruise, but…” A modest shrug finishes the thought.

With his sunglasses off, she sees something else: his eyes have a shimmery quality, as if they’re underwater… or not there at all. And isn’t there something similar going on with his mouth? Holly thinks of how the picture looks when you’re at a 3-D movie and take off the glasses.

“You see it, don’t you?” The voice is still warm and friendly. It goes well with the small smile dimpling the corners of his mouth. “Most people don’t. It’s the transition. It will be gone in five minutes, ten at most. I had to come here directly from the station. You’ve caused me some problems, Holly.”

She realizes she can hear the small pause when he occasionally puts his tongue to the roof of his mouth to stop the lisp.

“That makes me think of an old country song by Travis Tritt.” She sounds calm enough but she can’t take her eyes from his, where the sclera shimmers into the iris and the iris shimmers into the pupil. For the time being, they’re countries with unstable borders. “It’s called ‘Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.’ ”

He smiles, the lips seeming to spread too far, and then, snap! The minute shivers in his eyes remain, but his mouth is solid again. He looks to her left, where an old gent in a parka and tweed cap is reading a magazine. “Is that your friend? Or is it the woman over there who’s been looking into the window of Forever 21 a suspiciously long time?”

“Maybe it’s both of them,” Holly says. Now that the confrontation is here, she feels okay. Or almost; those eyes are disturbing and disorienting. Looking into them too long will give her a headache, but he would take looking away as a sign of weakness. And it would be.

“You know me, but all I have is your given name. What’s the rest of it?”