"I'll take you there!"
Again Barney paused. He thought that one over. "I dunno," he said. "You probably had plans for today, this'd use up hours and hours of your time—"
"It's all right! It's a free day, I got a free day!"
Barney shook his head. "The finger in the mail, you know," he said, "it's a pretty surefire system."
"I'll take you there," she promised. "I'll take you right to him."
Barney sighed. He looked at the knife as though at an old friend, then turned to look at Mordon. "I don't know, Counselor," he said. "Traveling with her for hours, and then maybe she's planning something—"
"I'm not! I'm not!"
"— and then we still got her on our hands at the end of the day." Barney shook his head, troubled by the complications. "What's your opinion, Counselor?"
There was no way to tell to what extent Barney Beuler was bluffing, or to what extent Barney Beuler was insane. Mordon judged it safest to go along with the insane part of Barney, so he said, in his most sober legal-counselor manner, "There might be some advantage to it, Barney, to have her with us. If we use her van, with all the rest of us in the back . . ."
"Hmmm," Barney said. "Trojan horse, like."
"Exactly. Then we let her talk to him, let him see we have her under our control."
"If we have her under our control." Barney turned back to the girl, who was following the conversation very intently. "Do we have you under our control?"
"Yes! Yes!"
Mordon licked dry lips. He said, "If things don't work out, Barney, we can always fall back on the finger option later."
"That's true." Deciding, Barney smiled and pressed the knife between his hands, and the blade disappeared back into the handle. Pocketing the handle, he shook his head and said, "You're makin a softie outta me, Counselor."
50
When Geoff Wheedabyx saw the van, he was on his way home from this morning's emergency, a barn that had caught fire out on Swope Road. His was one of four fire companies that had responded and, as usual, all they'd managed to save was the foundation. You get one of these old barns, that old dry wood with all its nooks and crannies packed full of dry old straw and sawdust and crap — literally crap; the stuff they use for fuel in the Middle East — and when the fire starts, there's really nothing to do but break out the marshmallows. Well, and make sure the fire doesn't spread to the house or the fields or anything else. But once a flame takes hold in a barn, you can be sure that barn is gone.
The reason for this fire, as for most of the outside-of-town fires Geoff and his people responded to, could be summed up in one word that has yet to appear under "Cause" on any insurance report form: Farmer.
The problem is, your farmer will never call a mechanic, no matter what the job. Your farmer is his own carpenter, and he isn't a good carpenter. He's his own plumber, electrician, mason, roofer, auto mechanic, and midwife, and he's pretty bad at all of them. Geoff had seen wiring in some of these old farmhouses and barns that would give you nightmares; in the one that burned down this morning, for instance. If you ever see anything that's built to Code, you know a farmer didn't build it.
The farmers will tell you the reason they do everything themselves, instead of calling in somebody who knows what the hell he's doing, is because they're poor, which isn't exactly true. Oh, they're poor, all right, but that isn't the reason they do everything themselves. The reason is, they're proud; and we know what pride goeth before, don't we?
Geoff, in his ruminations, was just at the point of brooding on pride and its aftermath when he saw the van, definitely that selfsame gray van, owned by one Margaret Briscoe of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York, and last seen zipping away down Market Street out of town with Margaret Briscoe at the wheel and an invisible man named Freddie as the passenger.
And now the van was parked in front of Geoff's house. Geoff, in his pickup and still wearing his smoke-permeated firefighting gear, drove on by his house and reached first for his police radio, switching it over to the frequency it shared with Cliff's Service & Auto Repair out on County 14, Cliff being one of his two part-time deputies. "Cliff," he said into the mike. "Tell me you're there."
Geoff drove to the end of Dudley, made a U-turn, and parked behind his police cruiser. "Come on, Cliff," he said into the mike. "Be there."
"I was under a car, dammit. What's up?"
"Cliff, get your badge and your gun and go on down to my house. Out front, you'll see a van, gray. Do not let anybody into that van."
"Do I use lethal force?"
Clearly, Cliff had been watching too many action movies on his VCR. "Only if you absolutely have to," Geoff said.
"Roger."
Geoff switched off the police radio before he could hear Cliff say over and out, and picked up his walkie-talkie. "Hi, guys," he said into it. "Somebody turn off the damn radio and pick up."
The walkie-talkie connected him with his construction crew. Having finished the porch conversion here in town, they were at work now installing two rest rooms out at the Roeliff Summer Theater. The summer-theater operators having been given an anonymous grant for this purpose, their patrons would no longer have to use the Portosans out in the parking lot; at least not once Geoff and his guys got finished installing the wheelchair- and handicapped-access, water-saving, energy-conserving, unisex, washable-wall interior rest rooms.
"Is that you, Smokey?"
"If this is a dumb joke," Geoff said, "this must be Steve. Yeah, Steve, it's me. I want you guys to down tools—"
"Missy's gonna be mad."
"That's Missy's problem. I want you to down tools and come over to my house. All of you. There's somebody in there, I'm not sure who, not sure how many. Bring your walkie-talkie, and stay just down the block. Park in front of Whalens'. Don't come in or show yourselves unless I call you."
Steve, his joking ways forgotten, said, "Geoff? You got a real problem there?"
"Don't know yet. Goin in to find out."
"We'll be around."
"Cliff's watching a van out front. Don't let him shoot you."
"He might shoot at me."
Geoff got out of the pickup. He was in his tall firefighting boots, and black water-repellent coat, and now he put back on his fire-chief helmet, pocketed the walkie-talkie, and crossed Market Street to come at his house from the rear, as he'd done the last time he'd encountered Freddie and Peg.
Letting himself quietly into the house through the back door, he paused to remove his firefighting boots, but kept his helmet on, and eased forward slowly through the house. Not a sound. Nothing visible out of place.
His office door was closed and, when very quietly and cautiously he tested it: locked. He palmed his key, eased it into the keyhole, slowly turned it, and eased open the door.
Nothing. Office empty. Office chair not tilted back, so the invisible Freddie was not in it.
So what was going on? Where were they? Turning away from his now-open office doorway, standing in the middle of his front hall in his tube socks and firefighting gear, arms akimbo, Geoff looked this way and that and up the stairs, and nothing was to be seen, nothing was to be heard. "Peg?" he called. "Freddie?"
A smiling fat man with a pistol in his hand came out of the parlor. The pistol was pointed at Geoff's chest. The smiling fat man said, "You lookin for Freddie, too? What a coincidence, so are we. Let's look together."
51
This was not what Peg had had in mind, not at all.
When she had realized, back home in the apartment in Bay Ridge, that this guy Barney was either too mean or too crazy to stand up to, that he would do terrible things to find out what he wanted to know, that in fact he might even be serious about cutting off her finger and sending it to Freddie, she had done her best to think fast. Not easy, under the circumstances.