The cop looked around, as if to ask the remaining three Carvers and the white-haired guy if they could believe this crazy lady. His bright gray eyes met David’s blue ones, and the boy took an unplanned step back from the bars. He felt suddenly weak with horror. And vulnerable. How he could feel more vulnerable than he already was he didn’t know, but he did.
The cop’s eyes were empty—so empty that it was almost as if he were unconscious with them open. This made David think of his friend Brian, and his one memo-rable visit to Brian’s hospital room last November. But it wasn’t the same, because at the same time the cop’s eyes were empty, they weren’t. There was something there, yes, something, and David didn’t know what it was, or how it could be both something and nothing. He only knew he had never seen anything like it.
The cop looked back at the woman called Mary with an expression of exaggerated astonishment. “Gosh, no!” he said. “Not when things are just getting interesting.” He reached into his right front pocket, brought out a ring of keys, and selected one that hardly looked like a key at all—it was square, with a black strip embedded in the center of the metal. To David it looked a little like a hotel key-card. He poked this into the lock of the big cell and opened it. “Hop in, Mare,” he said. “Snug as a bug in a rug, that’s what you’ll be.”
She ignored him, looking instead at David’s parents. They were standing together at the bars of the little cell directly across from the one David was sharing with white-haired Mr. Silent. “This man—this maniac—killed my husband. Put…” She swallowed, grimacing, and the big cop looked at her benignly, seeming almost to smile encouragement: Get this out, Mary, sick it up, you’ll feel better when you do. “Put his arm around him like he did me just now, and shot him four times.
“He killed our little girl,” Ellen Carver told her, and something in her tone struck David with a moment of utter dreamlike unreality. It was as if the two of them were playing Can You Top This. Next the woman named Mary would say, Well, he killed our dog and then his mother would say—“We don’t know that,” David’s father said. He looked horrible, face swollen and bloody, like a heavyweight boxer who has taken twelve full rounds of punishment. “Not for sure.” He looked at the cop, a terrible expression of hope on his swollen face, but the cop ignored him. It was Mary he was interested in.
“That’s enough chit-chat,” he said. He sounded like the world’s kindliest grandpa. “Hop into your room Mary-mine. Into your gilded cage, my little blue-eyed parakeet.”
“Or what. You’ll kill me.”
“I already told you I won’t,” he said in that same Kind Old Gramps voice, “but you don’t want to forget the world-renowned fate worse than death.” His voice hadn’t changed, but she was now looking up at him raptly, like a staked goat at an approaching boa constrictor. “I can hurt you, Mary,” he said. “I can hurt you so badly you’ll wish I had killed you. Now, you believe that, don’t you.”
She looked at him a moment longer, then tore her eyes away—and that was just what it felt like to David from his place twenty feet away, her pulling free, the way you’d pull a piece of tape off the flap of a letter or a package—and walked into the cell. Her face shivered as she went, then broke apart as the cop slammed the cell s barred door behind her. She threw herself onto one of the four bunks at the rear, put her face into her arms, and began to sob. The cop stood watching her for a moment head lowered. David had time to look down at the shotgun shell again and think about grabbing it. Then the big cop jerked and kind of shook himself, like someone waking from a doze, and turned away from the cell with the sob-bing woman in it. He walked across to where David was standing.
The white-haired man retreated rapidly from the bars as the cop came, until the backs of his knees struck the edge of the bunk and he folded down to a sitting position. Then he put his hands over his eyes again. Before, that had seemed like a gesture of despair to David, but now it seemed to echo the horror he himself had felt when the cop’s stare had fallen upon him—not despair but the instinctive hiding gesture of someone who will not look at a thing unless absolutely forced to look.
“How’s it going, Tom.” the cop asked the man on the bunk. “How they hanging, oldtimer.”
Mr. White Hair shrank away from the sound of the voice without taking his hands away from his eyes. The cop looked at him a moment longer, then turned his gray gaze on David again. David found he couldn’t look away—now it was his eyes that had been taped. And there was something else, wasn’t there. A sense of being called.
“Having fun, David.” the big blond cop asked. His eyes seemed to be expanding, turning into bright gray ponds filled with light. “Are you filling this interlude, measure for measure.”
“I—” It came out a dusty croak. He licked his lips and tried again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you. I wonder about that. Because I see He raised one hand to the corner of his mouth, touched it, then dropped it again. The expression on his face seemed to be one of genuine puzzlement. “I don’t know what I see. It’s a question, yes sir, it is. Who are you, boy.”
David glanced quickly at his mother and father and could not look for long at what he saw on their faces. They thought the cop was going to kill him, as he had killed Pie and Mary’s husband.
He turned his eyes back at the cop. “I’m David Carver,” he said. “I live at 248 Poplar Street, in Wentworth, Ohio.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s true, but little Dave, who made thee. Canst thou say who made thee. Tak!”
He’s not reading my mind, David thought, hut I think maybe he could. If he wanted to.
An adult would likely have admonished himself for such a thought, told himself not to be silly, not to succumb to fear-driven paranoia. That’s just what he wants you to believe, that he’s a mind-reader, the adult would think. But David wasn’t a man, he was a boy of eleven. Not just any boy of eleven, either; not since last Novem-ber. There had been some big changes since then. He could only hope they would help him deal with what he was seeing and experiencing now.
The cop, meanwhile, was looking at him with nar-rowed, considering eyes.
“I guess my mother and father made me,” David said. ‘Isn’t that the way it works.”
“A boy who understands the birds and bees! Won-derful! And what about my other question, Trooper—are you having any fun.”
“You killed my sister, so don’t ask stupid questions.
“Son, don’t provoke him!” his father called in a high scared voice. It didn’t really sound like his father at all “Oh, I’m not stupid,” the cop said, bending that horrid gray gaze even more closely on David. The irises actually seemed to be in motion, turning and turning like pin wheels.
Looking at them made David feel nauseated close to vomiting, but he couldn’t look away. “1 may be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. I know a lot Trooper. I do. I know a lot.”
“Leave him alone!” David’s mother screamed. David couldn’t see her; the cop’s bulk blocked her out entirely “Haven’t you done enough to our family. If you touch him, I’ll kill you!”
The cop paid no notice. He raised his index fingers to his lower lids and pulled them down, making the eyeballs themselves bulge out grotesquely. “I’ve got eagle eyes, David, and those are eyes that see the truth from afar. You just want to believe that. Eagle eyes, yes sir.” The cop continued to stare through the bars, and now it was almost as if eleven-year-old David Carver had hypnotized him.
“You’re quite a one, aren’t you.” the cop breathed. ‘You’re quite a one indeed. Yes, I think so.”