"He's been over at KDCU, doing commercials," Elvena says. "Dropped him off myself. I don't know why he doesn't just do them in his studio here, something about the sound effects, I think he might have said. I'm surprised he didn't tell you that."
The bitch of it is, Henry did. Cousin Buddy's Rib Crib. The old ball and chain. Beautiful downtown La Riviere. All that. He even told Jack that Elvena Morton was going to drive him. A few things have happened to Jack since that conversation — he's reencountered his old childhood friend, he's fallen in love with Judy Marshall's Twinner, and just by the way he's been filled in on your basic Secret of All Existence — but none of that keeps him from turning his left hand into a fist and then slamming himself directly between the eyes with it. Given how fast things are now moving, making this needless detour strikes him as an almost unforgivable lapse.
Mrs. Morton is regarding him with wide-eyed alarm.
"Are you going to be picking him up, Mrs. Morton?"
"No, he's going for a drink with someone from ESPN. Henry said the fellow would bring him back afterward." She lowers her voice to the timbre of confidentiality at which secrets are somehow best communicated. "Henry didn't come right out and say so, but I think there may be big things ahead for George Rathbun. Ver-ry big things."
Badger Barrage going national? Jack wouldn't be entirely surprised, but he has no time to be delighted for Henry now. He hands Mrs. Morton the cassette tape, mostly so he won't feel this was an entirely wasted trip. "Leave this for him where . . ."
He stops. Mrs. Morton is looking at him with knowing amusement. Where he'll be sure to see it is what Jack almost said. Another mental miscue. Big-city detective, indeed.
"I'll leave it by the soundboard in his studio," she says. "He'll find it there. Jack, maybe it's none of my business, but you don't look all right. You're very pale, and I'd swear you've lost ten pounds since last week. Also . . ." She looks a bit embarrassed. "Your shoes are on the wrong feet."
So they are. He makes the necessary change, standing first on one foot and then the other. "It's been a tough forty-eight hours, but I'm hanging in there, Mrs. M."
"It's the Fisherman business, isn't it?"
He nods. "And I have to go. The fat, as they say, is in the fire." He turns, reconsiders, turns back. "Leave him a message on the kitchen tape recorder, would you? Tell him to call me on my cell. Just as soon as he gets in." Then, one thought leading to another, he points to the unmarked cassette tape in her hand. "Don't play that, all right?"
Mrs. Morton looks shocked. "I'd never do such a thing! It would be like opening someone else's mail!"
Jack nods and gives her a scrap of a smile. "Good."
"Is it . . . him on the tape? Is it the Fisherman?"
"Yes," Jack says. "It's him." And there are worse things waiting, he thinks but doesn't say. Worse things by far.
He hurries back to his truck, not quite running.
Twenty minutes later Jack parks in front of the babyshit brown two-story at 1 Nailhouse Row. Nailhouse Row and the dirty snarl of streets around it strike him as unnaturally silent under the sun of this hot summer afternoon. A mongrel dog (it is, in fact, the old fellow we saw in the doorway of the Nelson Hotel just last night) goes limping across the intersection of Ames and County Road Oo, but that's about the extent of the traffic. Jack has an unpleasant vision of the Walrus and the Carpenter toddling along the east bank of the Mississippi with the hypnotized residents of Nailhouse Row following along behind them. Toddling along toward the fire. And the cooking pot.
He takes two or three deep breaths, trying to steady himself. Not far out of town — close to the road leading to Ed's Eats, in fact — that nasty buzzing in his head peaked, turning into something like a dark scream. For a few moments there it was so strong Jack wondered if he was perhaps going to drive right off the road, and he slowed the Ram to forty. Then, blessedly, it began to move around toward the back of his head and fade. He didn't see the NO TRESPASSING sign that marks the overgrown road leading to Black House, didn't even look for it, but he knew it was there. The question is whether or not he'll be able to approach it when the time comes without simply exploding.
"Come on," he tells himself. "No time for this shit."
He gets out of the truck and starts up the cracked cement walk. There's a fading hopscotch diagram there, and Jack swerves to avoid it without even thinking, knowing it's one of the few remaining artifacts which testify that a little person named Amy St. Pierre once briefly trod the boards of existence. The porch steps are dry and splintery. He's vilely thirsty and thinks, Man, I'd kill for a glass of water, or a nice cold —
The door flies open, cracking against the side of the house like a pistol shot in the sunny silence, and Beezer comes running out.