In that case, he can pull it out.
The buildings on the outskirts of French Landing glide past the pickup's windows. Jack has reached almost the exact point at which Henry pulled the plug on Dirtysperm. Obviously he can open the ashtray. Nothing could be simpler. You just get your fingers under there and tug. Easiest thing in the world. He extends a hand. Before his fingers touch the panel, he snatches the hand back. Drops of perspiration glide down his forehead and lodge in his eyebrows.
"It isn't a big deal," he says aloud. "You got some kind of problem here, Jacky-boy?"
Again, he extends his hand to the ashtray. Abruptly aware that he is paying more attention to the bottom of his dashboard than to the road, he glances up and cuts his speed by half. He refuses to hit his brakes. It's just an ashtray, for God's sake. His fingers meet the panel, then curl under its lip. Jack glances at the road once more. Then, with the decisivesness of a nurse ripping a strip of tape off a patient's hairy abdomen, he yanks out the sliding tray. The lighter attachment, which he had unknowingly dislodged in his driveway that morning, bounces three inches into the air, greatly resembling, to Jack's appalled eye, a flying black-and-silver egg.
He veers off the road, bumps over the weedy shoulder, and heads toward a looming telephone pole. The lighter drops back into the tray with a loud, metallic thwack no egg in the world could have produced. The telephone pole swims closer and nearly fills the windshield. Jack stamps on the brake and jerks to a halt, arousing a flurry of ticks and rattles from the ashtray. If he had not cut his speed before opening the ashtray, he would have driven straight into the pole, which stands about four feet from the hood of the pickup. Jack wipes the sweat off his face and picks up the lighter. "Shit on a shingle." He clicks the attachment into its receptacle and collapses backward against the seat. "No wonder they say smoking can kill you," he says. The joke is too feeble to amuse him, and for a couple of seconds he does nothing but slump against the seat and regard the sparse traffic on Lyall Road. When his heart rate drops back to something like normal, he reminds himself that he did, after all, open the ashtray.
Blond, rumpled Tom Lund has evidently been prepped for his arrival, for when Jack walks past three bicycles lined up next to the door and enters the station, the young officer takes off from behind his desk and rushes forward to whisper that Dale and Fred Marshall are waiting for him in Dale's office, and he will show him right in. They'll be glad to see him, that's for sure. "I am, too, Lieutenant Sawyer," Lund adds. "Boy, I gotta say it. What you got, I think, we need."
"Call me Jack. I'm not a lieutenant anymore. I'm not even a cop anymore." Jack had met Tom Lund during the Kinderling investigation, and he had liked the young man's eagerness and dedication. In love with his job, his uniform, and his badge, respectful of his chief and awed by Jack, Lund had uncomplainingly logged hundreds of hours on the telephone, in records offices, and in his car, checking and rechecking the often contradictory details spun off by the collision between a Wisconsin farm-insurance salesman and two Sunset Strip working girls. All the while, Tom Lund had retained the energetic sparkle of a high school quarterback running onto the field for his first game.
He does not look that way anymore, Jack observes. Dark smudges hang beneath his eyes, and the bones in his face are more prominent. More than sleeplessness and exhaustion lie behind Lund's affect: his eyes bear the helplessly startled expression of those who have suffered a great moral shock. The Fisherman has stolen a good part of Tom Lund's youth.
"But I'll see what I can do," Jack says, offering the promise of a commitment greater than he intends.
"We can sure use anything you can give us," Lund says. It is too much, too servile, and as Lund turns away and leads him to the office, Jack thinks, I didn't come here to be your savior.
The thought instantly makes him feel guilty.
Lund knocks, opens the door to announce Jack, shows him in, and vanishes like a ghost, utterly unnoticed by the two men who rise from their chairs and fasten their eyes upon their visitor's face, one with visible gratitude, the other with an enormous degree of the same emotion mixed with naked need, which makes Jack even more uncomfortable.