Lisey believed him. "You're going to do something for me, Professor," she said. "If Dooley gets in touch with you again, maybe just to tell you he's hot on the trail and things are lookin good, you're going to tell him the deal's off. Totally off."
"I will." The man's eagerness was almost abject. "Believe me, I - " He was interrupted by a woman's voice - his wife's, Lisey had no doubt - asking something. There came a rustling sound as he covered the bottom part of the telephone with his hand.
Lisey didn't mind. She was adding up her situation here and not liking the total. Dooley had told her she could turn off the heat by giving Woodbody Scott's papers and unpublished manuscripts. The Professor would then call the madman, tell him everything was cool, and that would be that. Only the former King of the Incunks claimed he no longer had any way of getting in touch with Dooley, and Lisey believed him. Was it an oversight on Dooley's part? A glitch in his planning? She didn't think so. She thought that Dooley really might have some vague intention of showing up at Woodbody's office (or suburban castle) with Scott's papers...but before he did, he planned to first terrorize her and then hurt her in places she'd never let the boys touch at the junior high school dances. And why would he do that, after going to such great lengths to assure both the Professor and Lisey herself that there was a fail-safe system in place to keep bad things from happening if she cooperated?
Maybe because he needs to give himself permission.
That rang true. And later on - after she was dead, maybe, or so grotesquely maimed she wished she were dead - Jim Dooley's conscience would be able to assure itself that Lisey herself had been to blame. I gave her every chance, her friend "Zack"
would think. It was nobody's fault but her own. She had to be Yoko to the bitter end.
Okay. Okay, then. If he showed up, she'd just give him the keys to the barn and the study and tell him to take whatever he wanted. I'll tell him to knock himself out, have a ball.
But at this thought Lisey's lips thinned into the humorless moon-smile perhaps only her sisters and her late husband, who called it Lisey's Tornado Look, would have recognized. "The smuck I will," she muttered, and looked around for the silver spade. It wasn't there. She'd left it in the car. If she wanted it, she'd better go out and get it before it got completely dar -
"Mrs. Landon?" It was the Professor, sounding more anxious than ever. She'd forgotten all about him. "Are you still there?"
"Yeah," she said. "This is what it gets you, you know."
"I beg pardon?"
"You know what I'm talking about. All the stuff you wanted so bad, the stuff you thought you had to have? This is what it gets you. How you feel right now. Plus the questions you'll have to answer when I hang up, of course."
"Mrs. Landon, I don't - "
"If the police call you, I want you to tell them everything you've told me. Which means you better answer your wife's questions first, don't you think?"
"Mrs. Landon, please!" Woodbody sounded panicky now.
"You bought into this. You and your friend Dooley."
"Stop calling him my friend!"
Lisey's Tornado Look grew stronger, the lips thinning until they showed the tops of her teeth. At the same time, her eyes narrowed until they were no more than blue sparks. It was a feral look, and it was all Debusher.
"But he is!" she cried. "You're the one who drank with him, and told him your tale of woe, and laughed when he called me Yoko Landon. You were the one who set him on me, whether you said it in so many words or not, and now it turns out he's just as crazy as a shithouse rat and you can't pull him off. So yes, Professor, I'm going to call the County Sheriff, and yessirree, I'll be giving them your name, I'll be giving them anything that'll help them find your friend, because he's not done, you know it and so do I, because he doesn't want to be done, he's having a good smucking time, and this is what it gets you. You bought it, you own it! Okay? Okay?"
No answer. But she could hear the wet sound of breathing and knew the former King of the Incunks was trying not to cry. She hung up, snagged another ciggy off the floor, lit it. She went back to the telephone, then shook her head. She'd call the Sheriff's Office in a minute. First she wanted to get the silver spade out of the Beemer, and she wanted to do it right away, before all the light was gone and her part of the world swapped day for night.
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