“Where is he, exactly?” she asked in a low voice.
I risked a look to make sure he hadn’t moved. Nope, he was still on the bench, and now I could look directly into the crater where there had once been thoughts. His ear was still on, but it was crooked and I found myself remembering a Mr. Potato Head I’d had when I was four or five. My stomach clenched again.
“Get it together, Champ.”
“Don’t call me that anymore,” I managed to say. “I hate it.”
“Duly noted. Where is he?”
“Sitting on the bench.”
“The one on this side of the door, or—”
“This side, yeah.”
I was looking at him again, we were close now so I couldn’t help it, and I saw an interesting thing. A man came out of the store with a newspaper under his arm and a hot dog in one hand. The hot dog was in one of those foil bags that’s supposed to keep them hot (believe that and you’ll believe the moon is made of green cheese). He started to sit down on the other bench, already pulling his hot dog out of the bag. Then he stopped, looked either at me and Liz or the other bench, and walked on down the block to eat his pup somewhere else. He didn’t see Therriault—he would have run if he had, most likely screaming his head off—but I think he felt him. No, I don’t just think it, I know it. I wish I’d paid more attention at the time, but I was upset, as I’m sure you understand. If you don’t, you’re an idiot.
Therriault turned his head. It was a relief because the move hid the worst of the exit wound. It wasn’t a relief because his face was normal on one side and all bloated out of shape on the other, like that guy Two-Face in the Batman comics. Worst of all, now he was looking at me.
I see them and they know I do. It’s always been that way.
“Ask him where the bomb is,” Liz said. She was speaking from the corner of her mouth, like a spy in a comedy.
A woman with a baby in a Papoose carrier came up the sidewalk. She gave me a distrustful glance, maybe because I looked funny or maybe because I smelled of puke. Maybe both. I was past the point of caring. All I wanted was to do what Liz Dutton had brought me here to do, then get the fuck out. I waited until the woman with the baby went inside.
“Where’s the bomb, Mr. Therriault? The last bomb?”
At first he didn’t reply and I was thinking okay, his brains are blown out, he’s here but he can’t talk, end of story. Then he spoke up. The words didn’t exactly match the movements of his mouth and it came to me that he was talking from somewhere else. Like on a time-delay from hell. That scared the shit out of me. If I’d known that was when something awful came into him and took him over, it would have been even worse. But do I know that? Like for sure? No, but I almost know it.
“I don’t want to tell you.”
That stunned me to silence. I had never gotten such a reply from a dead person before. True, my experience was limited, but up until then I would have said they had to tell you the truth first time, every time.
“What did he say?” Liz asked. Still talking from the corner of her mouth.
I ignored her and spoke to Therriault again. Since there was no one around, I spoke louder, enunciating every word the way you would for a person who was deaf or only had a shaky grasp on English. “Where… is… the last… bomb?”
I also would have said that the dead can’t feel pain, that they are beyond it, and Therriault certainly did not seem to be suffering from the cataclysmic self-inflicted wound in his head, but now his half-bloated face twisted as if I were burning him or stabbing him in the belly instead of just asking him a question.
“Don’t want to tell you!”
“What did he—” Liz began again, but then the lady with the baby came back out. She had a lottery ticket. The baby in the Papoose had a Kit-Kat finger which he was smearing all over his face. Then he looked at the bench where Therriault was sitting and started crying. The mom must have thought her kid was looking at me, because she gave me another glance, mega distrustful this time, and hurried on her way.
“Champ… Jamie, I mean…”
“Shut up,” I said. Then, because my mother would have hated me talking to any grownup like that, “Please.”
I looked back to Therriault. His grimace of pain made his ruined face look more ruined than ever, and all at once I decided I didn’t care. He had maimed enough people to fill a hospital ward, he had killed people, and if the note he’d pinned to his shirt wasn’t a lie, he had died trying to kill even more. I decided I hoped he was suffering.
“Where… is it… you… motherfucker?”
He clasped his hands around his middle, bent over like he had cramps, groaned. Then he gave it up. “King Kullen. The King Kullen Supermarket in Eastport.”
“Why?”
“Seemed right to finish where I started,” he said, and drew a circle in the air with one finger. “Complete the circle.”
“No, why do it at all? Why set all those bombs?”
He smiled, and the way it kind of squelched the bloated side of his face? I still see that, and I’ll never be able to unsee it.
“Because,” he said.
“Because what?”
“Because I felt like it,” he said.
25
When I told Liz everything Therriault had said, she was excited and nothing else. I could understand that, she wasn’t the one looking at a man who’d pretty much blown off one whole side of his head. She told me she had to go into the store and get some stuff.
“And leave me here with him?”
“No, go back down the street. Wait by the car. I’ll only be a minute.”
Therriault was sitting there looking at me with the eye that was more or less regular and the one that was all stretched out. I could feel his gaze. It made me think of the time I went to camp and got fleas and had to have this special stinky shampoo like five times before they were all gone.
Shampoo wouldn’t fix the way Therriault made me feel, only getting away from him would do that, so I did what Liz said. I walked as far as the laundromat and looked in at the woman who was still folding clothes. She saw me and gave me a wave. That brought back the little girl with the hole in her throat, and how she had waved to me, and for one horrible moment I thought the laundromat lady was also dead. Only a dead person wouldn’t be folding clothes, they only stood around. Or sat around, like Therriault. So I gave her a return wave. I even tried to smile.
Then I turned back to the store. I told myself it was to see if Liz was coming out yet, but that wasn’t why. I was looking to see if Therriault was still looking at me. He was. He raised one hand, palm up, three fingers tucked into his palm, one finger pointing. He curled it once, then twice. Very slowly. Come here, boy.
I walked back, my legs seeming to move of their own accord. I didn’t want to, but couldn’t seem to help myself.
“She doesn’t care about you,” Kenneth Therriault said. “Not a fig. Not one single fig. She’s using you, boy.”
“Fuck you, we’re saving lives.” There was no one passing by, but even if somebody had been, he or she wouldn’t have heard me. He had stolen all of my voice but a whisper.
“What she’s saving is her job.”
“You don’t know that, you’re just some random psycho.” Still only a whisper, and I felt on the verge of peeing myself.
He didn’t say anything, only grinned. That was his answer. Liz came out. She had one of those cheap plastic bags they gave you in stores like that back then. She looked at the bench, where the ruined man she couldn’t see was sitting, and then at me. “What are you doing here, Cha… Jamie? I told you to go to the car.” And before I could answer, quick and harsh, like I was a perp in a TV cop show interrogation room: “Did he tell you something else?”