'The reason he gets noticed isn't his height but his breadth. He's not fat, but he's extremely wide. Neck size maybe eighteen-and-a-half, maybe nineteen. He's my age, Alan, but he's not fading the way I'm starting to or running to fat. He's strong. Like Schwarzenegger looks now that Schwarzenegger has started to build down a little. He works out with weights. He can pump a bicep hard enough to pop a sleeve-seam on his shirt, but he's not muscle-bound.
'He was born in New Hampshire, but following the divorce of his parents, he moved with his mother to Oxford, Mississippi, where she was raised. He's lived most of his life there. When he.was younger, he had an accent so thick he sounded like he came from Dogpatch. A lot of people made fun of that accent in college - not to his face, though, you don't make fun of a guy like this to his face - and he worked hard on getting rid of it. Now I think the only time you'd be apt to hear cracker in his voice would be when he gets mad, and I think people who make him mad are often not available for testimony later on. He's got a short fuse. He's violent. He's dangerous. He is, in fact, a practicing psychotic.'
'What -' Pangborn began, but Thad overrode him.
'He's quite deeply tanned, and since blonde men usually don't tan all that well, it might be a good point of identification. Big feet, big hands, big neck, wide shoulders. His face looks like somebody talented but in a hurry chopped it out of a hard rock.
'Final thing: he may be driving a black Toronado. I don't know what year. One of the old ones that had a lot of blasting powder under the hood, anyway. Black. It could have Mississippi plates, but he's probably switched them.' He paused, then added: 'Oh, and there's a sticker on the back bumper. It says HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH.'
He opened his eyes.
Liz was staring at him. Her face was paler than ever.
There was a long pause on the other end of the tine.
'Alan? Are you - ?'
just a sec. I'm writing.' There was another, shorter, pause. 'Okay,' he said at last. 'I got it. You can tell me all of this but not who the guy is or your connection with him or how you know him?'
'I don't know, but I'll try. Tomorrow. Knowing his name isn't going to help anyone tonight anyway, because he's using another one.'
'George Stark.'
'Well, he could be crazy enough to be calling himself Alexis Machine, but I doubt it. Stark is what I think, yeah.' He tried to wink at Liz. He did not really believe the mood could be lightened by a wink or anything else, but he tried, anyway. He only succeeded in blinking both eyes, like a sleepy owl.
'There's no way I can persuade you to go on with this tonight, is there?'
'No. There's not. I'm sorry, but there's not.'
'All right. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.' And he was gone, just like that, no thank you, no goodbye. Thinking it over, Thad supposed he didn't really rate a thank you. He hung up the phone and went to his wife, who sat looking at him as if she had been turned into a statue. He took her hands - they were very cold - and said, 'This is going to be all right,
Liz. I swear it is.'
'Are you going to tell him about the trances when you talk to him tomorrow? The sound of the birds? How you heard it when you were a kid, and what it meant then? The things you wrote?'
'I'm going to tell him everything,' Thad said. 'What he chooses to pass on to the other authorities
. . . He shrugged. 'That's up to him.'
'So much,' she said in a strengthless little voice. Her eyes were still fixed on him - seemed powerless to leave him. 'You know so much about him. Thad . . . how?'
He could only kneel there before her, holding her cold hands. How could he know so much?
People asked him that all the time. They used different words to express it - how did you make that up? how did you put that into words? how did you remember that? how did you see that? - but it always came back to the same thing: how did you know that?
He didn't know how he knew.
He just did..'So much,' she repeated, and she spoke in the tone of a sleeper who is in the grip of a distressful
dream. Then they were both silent. He kept expecting the twins to sense their parents' upset, to wake up and begin crying, but there was only the steady tick of the clock. He shifted to a more comfortable position on the floor by her chair and went on holding her hands, hoping he could warm them up. They were still cold fifteen minutes later when the phone rang. 5
Alan Pangborn was flat and declarative. Rick Cowley was safe in his apartment, and was under police protection. He would soon be on his way to his ex-wife, who would now be his ex-wife forever; the reconciliation of which both had spoken from time to time, and with considerable longing, was never going to happen. Miriam was dead. Rick would make the formal identification at the Borough of Manhattan morgue on First Avenue. Thad should not expect a call from Rick tonight or attempt to make one himself; Thad's connection with Miriam Cowley's murder had been withheld from Rick 'pending developments.' Phyllis Myers had been located and was also under police protection. Michael Donaldson was proving a tougher nut, but they expected to have him located and covered by midnight.