Thad, who could not have agreed more, said: 'Give me his number, please.' Somehow, calling upon reserves he'd had no idea he possessed, he managed not to scream it.
'Sure. Just a sec. Uh . . .' An excruciating pause ensued. Seconds only, of course, but it seemed to Thad that the pyramids could have been built during that pause. Built and then tom down again. And all the while, Miriam's life could be draining out on her living-room rug five hundred miles away. I may have killed her, he thought, simply by deciding to call Pangborn and getting this congenital idiot instead of calling the New York Police Department in the first place. Or 911. That's what I probably should have done; dialed 911 and thrown it into their laps..Except that option did not seem real, even now. It was the trance, he supposed, and the words he had written while in that trance. He did not think he had foreseen the attack on Miriam . . . but he had, in some dim way, witnessed Stark's preparations for the attack. The ghostly cries of those thousands of birds seemed to make this whole crazy thing his responsibility. But if Miriam died simply because he had been too panicked to dial 911, how would he ever be able to face Rick again?
Fuck that; how would he ever be able to look at himself again in a mirror?
Ridgewick the Down-Home Yankee Idiot was back. He gave Thad the sheriff's number, speaking each digit slowly enough for a retarded person to have taken the number down . . .but Thad made him repeat it anyway, in spite of the burning, digging urge to hurry. He was still shaken by how effortlessly he had screwed up the sheriff's office number, and what could be done once could be done again.
'Okay,' he said. 'Thanks.'
'Uh, Mr Beaumont? Sure would appreciate it if you'd kinda soft-pedal any stuff about how I - Thad hung up on him without the slightest twinge of remorse and dialed the number Ridgewick had given him. Pangborn would not answer the phone, of course; that was simply too much to hope for on The Night of the Cobwebs. And whoever did answer would tell him (after the obligatory few minutes of verbal ring-around-the-rosy, that was) that the sheriff had gone out for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. In Laconia, New Hampshire, probably, although Phoenix was not entirely out of the question.
He uttered a wild bark of laughter, and Liz looked at him, startled. 'Thad? Are you all right?'
He started to answer, then just flapped a hand at her to show he was, as the phone was picked up. It wasn't Pangborn; he'd had that much right, anyway. It was a little boy who sounded about ten.
'Hello, Pangborn residence,' he piped, 'Todd Pangborn speaking.'
'Hi,' Thad said. He was dimly aware that he was holding the phone receiver much too tightly and tried to loosen his fingers. They creaked but didn't really budge. 'My name is Thad - '
Pangborn, he almost finished, oh Jesus, that would be good, you're on top of this, all right, Thad, you missed your calling, you should have been an air traffic controller. ' - Beaumont,' he finished after the brief mid-course correction. 'Is the sheriff there?'
No, he had to go to Lodi, California, for beer and cigarettes. Instead, the boy's voice moved away from the telephone mouthpiece and bugled, 'DAAAD!
PHONE!' This was followed by a heavy clunk that made Thad's ear ache. A moment later, O praise God and all His holy Saints, the voice of Alan Pangborn said, 'Hello?'
At the sound of that voice, some of Thad's mental buck fever melted away.
'It's Thad Beaumont, Sheriff Pangborn. There's a lady in New York that may need help very badly right now. It has to do with the matter we were discussing Saturday night.'
'Shoot,' Alan said crisply, just that, and the relief, oh boy. Thad felt like a picture coming back into focus.
'The woman is Miriam Cowley, my agent's ex-wife.' Thad reflected that only a minute ago he undoubtedly would have identified Miriam as 'my ex-wife's agent.'
'She called here. She was crying, extremely distraught. I didn't even know who she was at first. Then I heard a man's voice in the background. He said for her to tell me who she was and what was going on. She said there was a man in her apartment, threatening to hurt her. To . . .' Thad swallowed. '. . . to cut her. I'd recognized her voice by then, but the man shouted at her, told her if she didn't identify herself he'd cut her f**king head off. Those were his words. 'Do what I say or.I'll cut your f**king head off.' Then she said she was Miriam and begged me . . .' He swallowed again. There was a click in his throat, as clear as the letter E sent on a Morse key. 'She begged me not to let the bad man do that. Cut her again.'
Across from him, Liz was growing steadily whiter. Don't let her faint, Thad wished or prayed. Please don't let her faint now.
'She was screaming. Then the line went dead. I think he cut it or pulled it out of the wall.'
Except that was bullshit. He didn't think anything. He knew. The line had been cut, all right. With a straight-razor. 'I tried to get her again, but - '