He hands her the poetry book as if to say, Isn’t this interesting. She takes it without understanding, puts it down on the table. Behind them Ponytail and Duster are involved in a furious conversation, heads close together. Their eyes are on Felix and Story, whispering excitedly. And by now we know who they are. One is a prophet. The other has given himself the name of a Stephen King villain.
“What are we doing?” Story asks nervously. Every minute they’re in the store feels dangerous. Behind her the Prophet takes a step forward.
“Shhh,” says Felix.
The Prophet reaches out to touch Story’s shoulder. But then a woman is there, hurrying around the front of the table.
“Oh my God,” she says to Story. “You look just like her.”
The Prophet freezes, hand in midair. Story looks at Felix. What do I do?
The woman grimaces a smile.
“The judge’s daughter.”
She holds up her phone. Story sees a CNN headline—TRICK OF THE TAPE? and below it the side-by-side images of her college ID and some woman seated behind her mother in a Senate chamber.
“You’re her, right?” says the young woman, a blonde, maybe twenty-six. She smiles.
Felix grabs Story by the elbow, propels her toward the door.
“Hold on, hold on, lemme get a picture,” says the woman, trying to turn her phone around and switch to camera.
Felix race walks toward the door, pushing Story now. From the corner of his eye he can feel Mobley watching them. It was a mistake coming in here. He can see that now. Behind them the woman has her camera on and is hurrying to cut them off.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she says, taking three fast steps toward the door and turning to face them.
Story freezes as the camera comes up—a second away from becoming the next internet meme—but then the boy in the Duster puts a shoulder into the blonde and she stumbles toward the restaurant. And the boy with the ponytail puts a hand on Felix’s back, shoving him and Story out the door.
“Don’t turn around,” he says.
And then they’re out on the street, turning left, passing the window. Glancing inside, the Prophet sees Simon staring out at the street. He raps the glass, gestures—hurry up. Simon frowns, confused, looks behind him, sees that his friends are gone. His mind puts the equation together.
“Shit,” he says, and hurries to the door, meeting up with Randall Flagg, who has spent the last thirty seconds telling the blonde to watch where the fuck she’s going next time. On the street, Randall grabs Simon, steers him in the opposite direction of the Prophet.
“Wait,” says Simon. “Where are we—”
But Randall shoves him toward the intersection. Out of the corner of his eye, Simon can see Mobley sitting inside the restaurant. He is talking to his guest, but his eyes are tracking Simon and Flagg as they reach the corner. Mobley has the hint of a smile on his face.
I see you, he says with his eyes. All of you.
And something about the smile makes Simon shudder, as Randall pushes him out of the sun and into the shade.
The Wizard
When they write about E. L. Mobley, they often describe him by the things he owns. The private 737, the six-story, fifty-room mansion off Madison Avenue, the five other palatial estates from Florida to Tokyo to Rome. He is a man with his own Caribbean island and possibly a gold mine in West Africa. Journalists list the presidents he befriended, the Russian oligarchs and Chinese party leaders who call him on his cell phone. He made his first billion from the land—specifically from blasting water at high pressure into the shale, forcing oil and natural gas to the surface. The effect of this on the environment was multifaceted, which is why in Oklahoma they called him the Earthquake King and in Louisiana he was the Slurry Man, known for creating a bilious soup of chemicals that leech up into people’s groundwater. Since then he has diversified, laundering his money through a cloud storage empire, a packaged food behemoth, and a financial services consortium, until that original billion blasted from the shale is just one one-hundredth of his wealth.
Being rich has made him wealthy, in other words.
He likes women, the younger the better. This part is common knowledge in certain circles and yet remains mostly unreported. He is a lifelong bachelor, after all, a billionaire. Of course he plays the field. What’s the point of money if not to buy youth? It’s accepted, like an eccentricity, mostly because people assume young means nineteen or eighteen. Perhaps while abroad he flirts with women as young as seventeen.
The truth is, he doesn’t like women at all.
He likes girls.
Mobley is a sixty-three-year-old man who prefers the company of children, some as young as fourteen. He has slept with thousands. In New York City they are plentiful and cheap. He used to joke you could pick up a six-pack at the corner store. All you need is some licorice and a smile. A collector of old fairy-tale engravings, he calls the girls his animal brides. Mobley has a ranch outside Marfa, Texas, where he flies nineteen and twenty-year-olds on private jets. There, in a special chamber, designed according to the golden mean, he violates them, their cries ringing out inside the perfectly honed acoustic bowl. E. L. Mobley believes himself to be the most important and original man that has ever lived. He alone can see the secrets of the universe. He alone can map the invisible labyrinth of the human mind. He is a sorcerer.
A wizard.