"There's one more thing," Marshall says. "I probably made a mistake. Wendell Green came over about an hour ago."
"Anything involving Wendell Green is automatically a mistake. So what happened?"
"It was like he knew all about Tyler and just needed me to confirm it. I thought he must have heard from Dale, or the state troopers. But Dale hasn't made us public yet, has he?"
"Wendell has a network of little weasels that feed him information. If he knows anything, that's how he heard about it. What did you tell him?"
"More or less everything," Marshall says. "Including the tape. Oh, God, I'm such a dope. But I thought it'd be all right — I thought it would all get out anyhow."
"Fred, did you tell him anything about me?"
"Only that Judy trusts you and that we're both grateful for your help. And I think I said that you would probably be going in to see her this afternoon."
"Did you mention Ty's baseball cap?"
"Do you think I'm nuts? As far as I'm concerned, that stuff is between you and Judy. If I don't get it, I'm not going to talk about it to Wendell Green. At least I got him to promise to stay away from Judy. He has a great reputation, but I got the feeling he isn't everything he's cracked up to be."
"You said a mouthful," Jack says. "I'll be in touch."
When Fred Marshall hangs up, Jack punches in Henry's number.
"I may be a little late, Henry. I'm on my way to French County Lutheran. Judy Marshall got a tape from the Fisherman, and if they'll let me have it, I'll bring it over. There's something strange going on here — on Judy's tape, I guess he has some kind of foreign accent."
Henry tells Jack there is no rush. He has not listened to the first tape yet, and now will wait until Jack comes over with the second one. He might hear something useful if he plays them in sequence. At least, he could tell Jack if they were made by the same man. "And don't worry about me, Jack. In a little while, Mrs. Morton is coming by to take me over to KDCU. George Rathbun butters my bread today, baby — six or seven radio ads. 'Even a blind man knows you want to treat your honey, your sweetheart, your lovey-dovey, your wife, your best friend through thick and thin, to a mm-mmm fine dinner tonight, and there's no better place to show your appreciation to the old ball and chain than to take her to Cousin Buddy's Rib Crib on South Wabash Street in beautiful downtown La Riviere!' "
" 'The old ball and chain'?"
"You pay for George Rathbun, you get George Rathbun, warts and all."
Laughing, Jack tells Henry he will see him later that day, and pushes the Ram up to seventy. What is Dale going to do, give him a speeding ticket?
He parks in front of the hospital instead of driving around to the parking lot, and trots across the concrete with his mind filled with the Territories and Judy Marshall. Things are hurtling forward, picking up pace, and Jack has the sense that everything converges on Judy — no, on Judy and him. The Fisherman has chosen them more purposefully than he did his first three victims: Amy St. Pierre, Johnny Irkenham, and Irma Freneau were simply the right age — any three children would have done — but Tyler was Judy Marshall's son, and that set him apart. Judy has glimpsed the Territories, Jack has traveled through them, and the Fisherman lives there the way a cancer cell lives in a healthy organism. The Fisherman sent Judy a tape, Jack a grisly present. At Tansy Freneau's, he had seen Judy as his key and the door it opened, and where did that door lead but into Judy's Faraway?
Faraway. God, that's pretty. Beautiful, in fact.
Aaah . . . the word evokes Judy Marshall's face, and when he sees that face, a door in his mind, a door that is his and his alone, flies open, and for a moment Jack Sawyer stops moving altogether, and in shock, dread, and joyous expectation, freezes on the concrete six feet from the hospital's entrance.
Through the door in his mind pours a stream of disconnected images: a stalled Ferris wheel, Santa Monica cops milling behind a strip of yellow crime-scene tape, light reflected off a black man's bald head. Yes, a bald man's black head, that which he really and truly, in fact most desperately, had not wished to see, so take a good look, kiddo, here it is again. There had been a guitar, but the guitar was elsewhere; the guitar belonged to the magnificent demanding comforting comfortless Speedy Parker, God bless him God damn his eyes God love him Speedy, who touched its strings and sang
Travelin' Jack, ole Travelin' Jack,
Got a far long way to go,
Longer way to come back.
Worlds spin around him, worlds within worlds and other worlds alongside them, separated by a thin membrane composed of a thousand thousand doors, if only you know how to find them. A thousand thousand red feathers, tiny ones, feathers from a robin redbreast, hundreds of robin redbreasts, flew through one of those doors, Speedy's. Robin, as in robin's-egg blue, thank you, Speedy, and a song that said Wake up, wake up, you sleepyhead.