"No. I don't think I can see you now, Alan."
"Yes. You can. And you're going to. I'll bThen Henry Payton's voice cut in. Why don't you do i't right away, before he gets nervous and decides to visit relatives in Dry HumP, South Dakota?
"You'll be what?" she was asking. "You'll be what?"
"I just remembered something," Alan said slowly.
"Oh, did you? Was it a letter you wrote at the beginning of September, Alan? A letter to San Francisco?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, Polly. I can't come now because there's been a break in... in the other thing. But later-" She spoke to him through a series of gasping sobs that should have made her hard to understand but didn't. "Don't you get it, Alan? There is no later, not anymore. You-"
"Polly, please-"
"No! just leave me alone! Leave me alone, you snooping, prying son of a bitch!"
Bink!
And suddenly Alan was listening to that open telephone line hum again. He looked around the intersection of Main and School like a man who doesn't know where he is and has no clear understanding of how he got there. His eyes had the faraway, puzzled expression often seen in the eyes of fighters in the last few seconds before their knees come unhinged and they go sprawling to the canvas for a long winter's nap.
How had this happened? And how had it happened so quickly?
He hadn't the slightest idea. The whole town seemed to have gone slightly nuts in the last week or so... and now Polly was infected, too.
Bink!
"Urn... Sheriff?" It was Sheila, and Alan knew from her hushed, tentative tone that she'd had her ears on during at least part of his conversation with Polly. "Alan, are you there? Come back?"
He felt a sudden urge, amazingly strong, to rip the mike out of its socket and throw it into the bushes beyond the sidewalk. Then drive away. Anywhere. just stop thinking about everything and drive down the sun.
Instead he gathered all of his forces and made himself think of Hugh Priest. That's what he had to do, because -t now looked as if maybe Hugh had brought about the deaths of two women. Hugh was his business right now, not Polly... and he discovered a great sense of relief hiding in that.
He pushed the TRANSMIT button. "Here, Sheila. Ten-four."
"Alan, I think I lost the connection with Polly. I... um... didn't mean to listen, but-"
"That's okay, Sheila; we were done."
(There was something horrible about that, but he refused to think of it now.) "Who's there with you right now? Ten-four?"
"John's catching," Sheila said, obviously relieved at the turn in the conversation. "Clut's out on patrol. Near Castle View, according to his last ten-twenty."
"Okay." Polly's face, suffused with alien anger, tried to swim to the surface of his mind. He forced it back and concentrated on Hugh Priest again. But for one terrible second he could see no faces at all; only an awful blankness.
"Alan? You there? Ten-four?"
"Yes. You bet. Call Clut and tell him to get on over to Hugh Priest's house near the end of Castle Hill Road. He'll know where.
I imagine Hugh's at work, but if he does happen to be taking the day off, I'll want Clut to pick him up and bring him in for questioning. Ten-four?"
"Ten-four, Alan."
"Tell him to proceed with extreme caution. Tell him Hugh is wanted for questioning in the deaths of Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck.
He should be able to fill in the rest of the blanks for himself.
Ten-four."
"Oh!" Sheila sounded both alarmed and excited. "Ten-four, Sheriff."
"I'm on my way to the town motor pool. I expect to find Hugh there. Ten-forty over and out."
As he racked the mike (it felt as if he had been holding it for at least four years) he thought: If you'd told Polly what you just put on the air to Sheila, this situation you've got on your hands might be a little less nasty.
Or it might not-how could he tell such a thing when he didn't know what the situation was? Polly had accused him of prying... of snooping. That covered a lot of territory, none of it mapped.
Besides, there was something else. Telling the dispatcher to put out a pick-up-and-hold was part of what the job was all about. So was making sure your field officers knew that the man they were after might be dangerous. Giving out the same information to your girlfriend on an open radio/telephone patch was a different matter entirely. He had done the right thing and he knew it.
This did not quiet the ache in his heart, however, and he made another effort to focus his mind on the business ahead-finding Hugh Priest, bringing him in, getting him a goddam lawyer if he wanted one, and then asking him why he had stuck a corkscrew into Nettle's dog, Raider.
For a moment it worked, but as he started the station wagon's engine and pulled away from the curb, it was still Polly's face-not Hugh's-he saw in his mind.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN