“What do you mean, ‘someone’?”
“A girl. But there was something weird about her.”
There was a beat of silence.
“I’ll call you back in half an hour,” the woman said.
The phone went dead. Crane sat there with it in his hands, shaking.
As he sat waiting, he stared at the radio still lying on the floor. Tried not to see it as a symbol for all the other things he should have taken more care of while he had the chance. But once the mind thinks it’s found a sign or portent, it will not let go even if it discovers too late and only to punish you. When he reached KC&H that morning, he’d tried phoning Rachel’s work number. She had called in sick. Halfway through the morning, Livvie phoned, complaining she’d tried to get hold of Rachel on her cell to arrange lunch later in the week and gotten no reply. Todd told her he’d received an e-mail ten minutes earlier saying she’d lost her phone at some club the night before, was getting a replacement sent, sorry—he meant to tell her right away.
He was doing all the right things. He was behaving well. He was going rapidly out of his mind.
Rose called back twenty minutes later.
“I can see you,” she said without preamble. “Around seven. I’ll confirm a venue closer to the time.”
“I need to—” Todd stopped. He knew he couldn’t demand to know where they were going to meet. He couldn’t ask for a specific place either. Not yet.
“Need what, Todd?”
“To see you, that’s all.”
“And it’s going to happen. I just hope I find it worthwhile.” Then she was gone.
Todd pulled on his coat and hurried out of the office. Bianca tried to wave him down as he passed her office, but she could wait. Everything could wait.
He emerged into Post Alley with his phone already in his hand but didn’t call his daughter’s house until he was halfway down the street, shoulders hunched against the rest of the world.
As he pleaded with the person who answered, getting her to accept the fact that he hadn’t yet been able to confirm the venue she’d specified, he didn’t notice a stocky, red-haired man coming out of the deli on the corner: a man who heard every detail of Todd’s phone conversation and quickly relayed it on.
In a hotel ten minutes’ walk away, a man sat on the end of a bed. He had been there most of the afternoon. It was not a nice bed. It was not a nice room. It was, all in all, not a great hotel. Shepherd didn’t care. He’d stayed in good hotels often enough. Unless you are in urgent need of spa treatment and don’t mind spending thirty bucks on breakfast, the difference isn’t very noticeable when the lights go out. You’re still just a man in a room in a building in a city, surrounded by strangers, hoping that tonight you will sleep.
His phone rang. He checked the number and did not answer it. It was Alison O’Donnell’s cell phone. Again. She’d left a number of messages during the day. Her husband, too. They were in an excitable state, having hooked up with some policeman in Seattle, one who’d had the sense to realize that the reason Shepherd had specified Alison should call him on her cell was that the alleged FBI agent who’d left his card with her would accept calls only from that particular number. Give a cigar to Detective Whatever-His-Name-Was: Evidently the SPD Missing Persons Bureau recruited from a higher IQ bracket than the sheriff’s department in Cannon Beach. Shepherd had no interest in talking to Mrs. O’Donnell now. Things were closing in. Not just the situation he’d brought about, but everything. He could feel it getting closer by the hour.
Behind him on the bed lay his suitcase. It had lasted four years so far. Before that there’d been one exactly the same, and another before that. How many had he gone through in his time? He had no idea.
The suitcase was full of money. This was what had made him accept the bargain and stick to it, a bargain that had seen him lending material assistance to someone who’d been declared far beyond the pale. The first thing the girl remembered on the beach was the money’s whereabouts. It had been arranged that way—with the 9-by-9 symbol as a trigger—and Shepherd had gone straight back to Portland to pick it up from the old Chinese woman to whom it had been entrusted. He’d broken the terms of the initial bargain because he couldn’t wait any longer. He needed the money now. It was to be his stake, his first birthday present, his head start next time. It was utterly forbidden to do this, but he wasn’t one of them, and he would not be even when he took advantage of the older deal, the one struck when he was twenty.
Work for us, that deal went, do our dirty work, and we’ll arrange that you, too, will be reminded, when you come back. Shepherd had not merely been present at deaths, after all; he’d been instrumental, as all who took the title were, in rebirths. He had arrived in people’s lives, sometime after their eighteenth birthday, and supplied the trigger they’d registered with the trust. A phrase, a piece of music, a picture or symbol, on a couple of occasions a specific flavor: memory joggers, carefully selected so as not to be something the person would run into by accident, before he or she was ready. Before someone like Shepherd was on hand to guide the subjects through the process of realizing that their current feet were not the first with which they had walked the earth.
Shepherd knew that if a count were made in his life, however, the deaths far, far outweighed the rebirths. He had become a specialist. People who found out something, however small. People who guessed next to nothing at all. And once in a while even one of their own. Someone who had become a threat to the system or had returned damaged in transit—either of whom was not then supposed to be helped to come back again.
Murders and motel rooms—in the end they all flattened into one. Now Shepherd could feel his legacy gathering around. With Anderson’s machine he might even be able to see them, if it had really worked. The people Shepherd had sent away grew thicker around him. Like invisible cats, but larger and far colder, rubbing insidiously against the back of his legs and neck. Waiting. How far away were they? Not far enough.
Shepherd needed this situation to be over with. Then he had to admit his condition to Rose and start putting things in place. He needed certainty, more than ever. Now that the time was approaching, he’d found himself prey to occasional doubt, to the idea that maybe there was no deal, that all those like him had been tricked. Perhaps this notion had come to him in a dream or a waking thought in one of the long night watches when he looked back over the things he’d done. Or perhaps one of the shadows that surrounded him had whispered it in his ear, not as a warning but as a taunt. Either way it occurred to him one night that he’d never met someone like him who had come back. Never heard of one from the others either, and he’d known more than a few like him who had died, after years of long ser vice. The man who’d recruited Shepherd, for example, who found a gangling youth in a small town in Wisconsin and made him a promise compelling enough to make that boy leave everything behind, even a sweetheart whom he loved. That man had died twenty-five years ago. Since then there’d been no sign of him, even though it had been agreed that he could get in touch with Shepherd once he’d been reminded.
But he must be out there somewhere.
The deal must be real. It had to be. These doubts were nothing more than a variation on those that every human felt when faced with the end of the road.
Shepherd could smell the bathroom from where he sat. His stomach was in near-constant revolt now, and yet still he tried to eat. It was a habit the body found hard to break. Like a wounded dog, viciously rejected, kicked for years, but still returning with cowed back to its hateful master or mistress, in the hope of love this time. He could remember his mother, in her last days, when he was thirteen. In the months of her slow death, she’d made little notes in a book, jotted down memories of her early life, as if gathering fallen leaves to her chest, to stop them from being scattered and lost by the coming winds. In the final few weeks, she stopped doing it. She merely sat in her chair out on the porch, reeking of cancer, and done nothing but wait, with increasing impatience, for the end. Ready to go home alone, to leave, waiting for her wounded dog of a body to finally lie down and die, so she could be free of its relentless needs and loves and demands.