Tee stared at Dyce. His features had become clearer as Tee’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. Dyce put his hand lightly over Tee’s nose.
“If you’re listening, just hold your breath for a count of six… Good, all right, you can breathe normally now. Now listen very carefully. I would normally give you another shot now to keep you quiet, but considering your heart and everything, I think I’d better not, so you’ll just have to cooperate. All right? What you must do is lie very, very still. Even if you feel some sensation coming back to your arms and legs, you must not move a muscle. If you do, first of all you’ll fall and hurt yourself-it’s a very long way down-but also you’ll destroy the illusion and then we’ll just have to start over. Do you understand? Hold your breath if you understand… Good. Keep your breathing as light as you possibly can. I don’t want to see your chest heaving up and down; that makes everything silly. And your eyes have to stay closed the whole time. All right? Now that you’re conscious you’ll be tempted to want to see, but you must avoid that, all right? Hold your breath if you understand… Very good.”
Lightning flashed and thunder followed it so quickly from so nearby that the house seemed to shake. Tee saw the ladder tucked into the space where the roof met the walls. If I could move at all, he thought desperately, if I could nudge the ladder with my foot so it would fall, do something, anything. But he felt so weak and tired, horribly tired.
“It will take me a minute or two to get ready,” Dyce said, propelling himself across the rafter with his hands. “You can keep your eyes open until I tell you.”
Straining his eyes to the side, Tee could see Dyce on his midair island begin to undress.
Becker turned off his headlights before he was halfway up to the crest of the county road. He drove in darkness, his eyes fixed not on the road invisible in front of him, but on the silhouette of the farmhouse that stood against the dark sky.
Coasting with his foot off the gas, he counted seconds from the moment the car started downhill. It had taken a count of twelve when he did it in the daylight. At eleven he geared down into second, using his handbrake to slow the car so that the flash of red brake lights would not betray him. His right front tire slipped over the edge of the roadside ditch, and Becker compensated accordingly with the wheel, pulling the car onto the access road. He was moving beneath the shelter of the corn now and was hidden from the view of the house, but still he drove with his lights out. If he turned them on, they would splash off the corn and into the air like a warning beacon for Dyce. If Dyce was there.
Becker waited for a flash of lightning, fixed the path in his mind, and drove straight ahead until the image faded from his retina. Then he stopped and waited for the next flash. When he was within a few yards of the entrance to the farmyard, he stopped. Timing his move with a clash of thunder, Becker opened the car door and stepped into the corn.
Gold’s voice had been running through his mind like a tape since he got into the car and started toward the farm.
“It’s a function of will,” Gold had said. “We all have fantasies. It’s whether we act on them that matters. Most of us don’t. You don’t, Becker.”
“Don’t I?” thought Becker.
“What you do, what you have done-the experience with Bahoud in New York, the incident in Washington, the other times-they cause the fantasies. It is not the fantasies that cause the incidents.”
“Incidents. You mean the killings.”
“All right, the killings,” Gold said.
Becker bent between the corn rows and rubbed dirt on his forehead and under his eyes. The turtleneck rolled up to just under his mouth. Lightning flashed and thunder roared so close it seemed to be over the cornfield itself Becker could smell the electricity in the air. Strangely, there was still no rain.
The wind was beating against the corn stalks so fiercely they sounded like acres of crackling cellophane. The earth itself was so noisy there was no need for caution, but Becker moved silently, anyway, from long habit.
Cutting diagonally through the field, Becker came to the edge of the cultivated ground where the corn stopped and the farmyard began. Kneeling, he studied the house and the barn.
His heart seemed to have ascended in his chest and was beating rapidly just beneath his collarbone. Becker recognized the excitement for what it was-an eagerness for action and a tingling of anticipation. There was no fear involved in it. Caution, prudence, but no fear.
“They were all justified,” Gold said. “You were in danger every time. You did what you had to do to save yourself”
“Justified?”
“Justified. Absolutely.”
“But were they necessary?”
Becker approached the barn from the rear where there was nothing but blank wall to watch him. He did not expect to find anything in it, but this was not the time to go on assumptions alone. That was Hatcher’s way, not Becker’s.
“Why are you so sure he’s at the farm?” Hatcher had asked.
Becker said, “I’m not sure of anything,” but he was. He could not say that he was sure because he had come to understand Dyce on a level that Hatcher could not begin to comprehend. The man’s life had fallen apart on him and he had fled to the place where it had all begun, the cruel, twisted injury that had made him what he was. He could not tell Hatcher that he understood the man’s thoughts and needs and darkly contorted emotions just as he had understood Bahoud’s and all of those since then.
He could not tell Hatcher, but he had told Gold.
“Don’t be so damned hard on yourself, man,” Gold repeated now in his mind. “You don’t want to do it; it happens because of circumstances. These are not pussycats the Bureau sends you after. These are multiple murderers, hardened killers who would have killed you in an instant.”
“How do you know I don’t want to do it?”
“How do I know? Because you don’t do it any other time, that’s how I know. What you experience isn’t joy; it’s a final release of adrenaline. You are in great danger, under terrible stress-you are feeling the sense of release, not pleasure. You were brought into this by accident. It turns out you’ve got great skills, but having empathy or understanding for these people does not mean you are these people, understand? You have the empathy to be a great shrink. I understand my patients, most of them. That doesn’t mean I am them, doesn’t mean I share their problems-but I understand them.”
The farmhouse had two stone chimneys, one at either end of the house on the exterior. The stone walls had been breached as if a tank had driven through them, but those sections that still stood were enough to hold up the roof beam and the unburned portions of the roof.
There was no blind side from which to approach. Becker counted on the darkness and moved swiftly across the yard. When the lightning struck, he dove for the ground and lay there motionless, hoping that if Dyce had seen his movement he would attribute it to a trick of the night.
He lay still until his heart stopped racing. It was a job he had to do, he told himself. Nothing more. A job. There was a maniac to find, possibly a friend to save if he wasn’t already too late for that.
Becker tried to turn off the tape in his head, but Gold’s voice insisted on being heard.
“I can’t give you absolution, I’m not a priest. I can forgive you, I can understand you.”
“I don’t want that.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to stop it.”
“You have stopped. Just keep stopping.”
“And if I go after Dyce?… I do have to go after him now.”
“Good. Find the bastard.”
“And then?”
“He’s killed at least eight men. He may have killed your friend… Find the bastard.”
“And then?”
The first rain hit him as he lay and it felt like the initial gush from a faucet. The clouds opened as if rent asunder by the last lightning bolt. By the time Becker got to his feet, he was already soaked to the skin.