“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it,” Barbeau said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry that we can’t just work this out between us, like in the old days.” He turned one palm upward. “But, if that’s the way it has to be, okay. Bring your man around in the morning and we’ll do it your way.”
He and Marie climbed into the back seat
“Good-bye, Donald.”
The bodyguard shut them in, got into the front passenger seat and closed the door. I watched them drive off.
Hell of an anticlimax. It was absolutely too easy. Unless—
Could it be possible that I had really misread the situation? I had had amnesia. Supposing everything I’d seen on the way up had been bona fide BelPatri hallucinations? Could I really rely on my own judgment? What if Cora had simply gotten tired of putting up with me and left? Maybe—
I turned away. That way lies… I chuckled. More madness? Come on, feet, take me away. I looked around the area. The only pedestrian exit from the parking lot was a nearby platform—a station on the automated monorail system used to move people around the airport. I crossed over and climbed its steps.
I saw the button on the post, and there was an instruction plate beneath it. This was a special station. Cars would not stop here unless someone coming out of the VIP lot signalled for one. The idea apparently was that curious or wandering members of the general public would not be able to get off at this place. I pushed the button.
A few seconds later, a single car came along. There was one man in it. He was sitting with his back to me. I entered.
For a moment, I stared. There was something familiar about that seated figure. I moved around, nearer to him, and I looked him in the face.
A gray man, in some indeterminate region of middle age. He had grown bushy sideburns and acquired a network of broken veins across his wide nose since last I had seen him. He was a bit fleshier now, with the pouches under his bright blue eyes more pronounced.
“Willy Boy,” I said.
No, the face on the houseboat in Florida had not been his. It was as if my memory and imagination had somehow combined to warn me about something even then.
“Well, bless me! If it isn’t Mr. Don Bell-Patri!” he said, in that magical voice, clear and almost musical.
That voice had once been nationally famous. The words were always clearly enunciated; the accent varied, seeming at different times to come from all parts of the South. He’d shouted the Gospel at tent audiences and then auditorium audiences and finally at millions watching him on television. There were healings and hollerings, and then there had been the story of the teen-age girl in Mississippi—her abortion, her attempted suicide… Willy Boy’s stock had plummeted. In the end, there had been no legal charges, but for the past several years the faithful had been denied his version of the Lord. Willy Boy’s profile had flattened on the graph of public awareness. But there was still something special about him. It involved the healings. They had been real.
“Matthews,” I acknowledged, and I dropped into a seat facing him, fascinated by his presence, new memories surfacing from moment to moment.
I was fascinated, too, by the change that I saw in him—a change for the worse. He seemed to exhale evil now, along with a faint aroma of bourbon. And in a way, I was glad of this, because it meant that I had not been wrong, that I was not crazy, and that what was happening was not yet over.
The monorail car was not moving. Its door still stood wide open. But for the moment I thought nothing of this.
“How’s the energy business these days?” I asked him—because he was part of the group, I felt sure of that much, though what the group was was still hazy to me. I wondered what Matthews did-
And then I remembered what he did, even as he began to do it to me. I felt a sudden shortness of breath, and then a pain in my chest and one that radiated down my left arm.
There had been a night, long ago, when I had gone with Willy Boy to his apartment and spent an evening lowering the level in a jug of very smooth white lightning. Incongruously, for what he did in those days, there was still an opened Bible in plain sight, on a small table by the window. Curious, when he was out of the room, I had gone over. It was opened to Psalm 109, which was almost entirely underlined. Later, when we were both several sheets to the wind, I had asked him about his preaching days:
“How much of it was hype? Did you really believe any of the things you said?”
He lowered his glass and raised his eyes. He fixed me with that acetylene blueness which had come over so well on the tube.
“I believed,” he said simply. “So help me, when I started I was full of the fire of the Lord. I wanted their souls for Him. I believed. I hollered and gave ’em Scripture and waved the Good Book. I was as good as Billy Graham, Rex Humbard—any of ’em! Better, even! When I prayed for healing and saw ’em throw down their crutches and walk, or see again, or stop hurting, I knew that the grace of the Lord was on me, and I believed and there was no hype.” His eyes drifted away from me. “Then one day I got mad at a newsman,” he went on, slowly. “I kept telling him to move back, he was getting in my way. He wouldn’t do it ‘Damn you, then!’ I thought. ‘Drop dead, you miserable bastard!’” He paused again. “And he did,” he finally said, “just keeled over and lay there. The doctor said it was a heart attack. But he was young and healthy-looking, and I knew what I’d said in my heart. And then I thought about it. Thought about it a lot. Now the Lord wouldn’t go in for His servant pulling that sort of thing, would He? The healing, yeah—if it was helping to get a bunch of ’em saved. But killing ’em? I started thinking, maybe the power didn’t come from the Lord, maybe it was just something I could do by myself, either way. Maybe He didn’t care one way or the other whether I was preaching or not preaching. It wasn’t the Holy Spirit moving through me, healing. It was just something about me that could cure ’em or kill ’em. I started drinking around then, and fornicating and all the rest. That’s when it got to be hype and makeup and TV cameras and people planted in the audience with fake testimonies… I didn’t believe anymore. There’s just us and animals and plants and rocks. There ain’t no more. The best thing a man can do is get hold of all the good things in a hurry, ’cause time’s passing fast. There’s no God. Or if there is, He don’t like me anymore.”
He took a big swallow then, refilled his glass and changed the subject. It was a part of the longest conversation I’d ever had with Willy Boy on anything other than business.
… And his business was killing people. Heart attack, cerebral hemorrhage—it always looked like natural causes. He had the power. He was a reverse faith healer with no faith. I think he hated himself and he took it out on other people, for money, for Angra. And now he was squeezing my heart, and I would be dead in a matter of seconds.
I started to get up. I fell back. He was not finishing me as quickly as he might have. This was something new—overt sadism. He wanted to watch me struggle and die slowly.
I rolled out of my seat to the floor. A sense of the train’s computerized guidance system was in my brain like an alarm. Without knowing how I was doing it, I was trying to get the car to move, to take me to where I could get help. I reached the door, which had closed a few moments before, and I couldn’t get it open again. I pushed and pulled at it with my right hand, my left arm now feeling as if it were afire. Through the glass, I now became aware of a vague shape outside—a large man—a third bodyguard, perhaps. He just stood there watching while I struggled.
Matthews’ whiskered face loomed over me as he leaned forward in his seat, showing his long yellowed teeth, engulfing me in an atmosphere of alcohol fumes. I tried to reach out with all of my strength. Something—