But more than a handful of people had been standing out in the street when the Tom guy had said the word, and not all of them were locals. By the end of the day a few might pass on what had happened that morning to their friends and relatives. Phil knew what the Chief thought about that kind of thing too, and he really wished he'd got the guy inside someplace before he could say the B word. When Phil had called him on his cell phone, the Chief said he would be back by early afternoon at the latest. Phil was glad about that.
'Going to see if that guy wants some more of Izzy's soup,' he said, and Melissa nodded.
She watched as he went into the room, sat at the end of the table, and spoke gently to the man. She believed Kozelek should really be examined for after-effects of the sleeping pills he'd taken, but he was adamant that he didn't want to go to any hospital, and she had no power to make him. He'd survived three very cold days and nights in the woods, and walked a very long distance in hard terrain. Given that, he looked in good shape for a guy who'd been out there trying to die. There was a case for saying he should be talking to someone about that part of things, too, but again it wasn't something she could force. She privately thought that when his brain had thawed out properly, both that and talk of unknown species would gently fade away. Then they could just ship him back to LA or wherever it was, and life in Sheffer would go on as usual.
As she turned to go she noticed something in the bottom of the open backpack. She stopped and took a closer look. In amongst the shards of glass and sodden fragments of drug packet were a few things that looked like tiny bunches of dried flowers.
She took one of them out, and saw they weren't flowers after all; more like short, bedraggled stalks. It looked as though it must have fallen into the man's bag as he careered through the forest, knocked off passing bushes and trees.
Either that, or as if it had been bought from a man on a street corner somewhere, and had fallen out of its baggie.
Here was a man who said he'd seen things, and tried to break into bars by all accounts, and in his bag was a little bunch of natural-looking matter. How about that? Partly out of professional concern, but mainly from good, old-fashioned curiosity, Melissa slipped the tiny bunch in her bag and then went outside to drive back to the hospital where, she was fairly confident, not much of interest would be happening.
— «» — «» — «»—
At about lunch time, his head began to really ache. It had been hurting a little before. Had hurt for a significant proportion of His Time Away, in fact. But this was different. This was worse.
The headache was a slow, rolling affair and had an expensive, professional quality to it. This headache knew its trade. It had relevant experience. It covered his head like a cold counterpane, heavy and insistent, and had begun to maintain outposts in other parts of his body too. His guts, primarily. He had told the doctor he didn't want to go to the hospital at least partly to gauge her reaction. If she'd barked, 'Think again, moron, you're deeply, deeply fucked and we're going to drag you by the hair to a scary place with machines with green readouts and then you're going to die,' then he'd have gone quietly. She hadn't, which meant there was a chance he was okay. He felt okay, in general, apart from the headache, and the feeling in his guts, which he was inclined to see as a sub-division of the headache. He'd read somewhere that there was a mat of neural tissue spread around the stomach, actually the second largest collection of such tissue in the entire body (after the brain, of course). Hence gut reactions, gut feelings, blah blah blah. He could see this might make evolutionary sense: give the innards enough of a brain to enable it to send up signals saying, 'don't eat that rotten crap again, remember what happened last time', much as his own had done when he'd made it back to his bag, in the forest. He was hoping the way it felt now was merely a sign of it being in sympathy with his head. If it felt this way on its own account, it was possible he should have gone to the hospital after all.
He was also hoping that the painkillers the doctor had left would start to kick in any minute. His head was making his eyes go funny. He was still hanging onto the idea that at some point he was going to stand up, go walking out into town and find the ancient fucker who hadn't mentioned the bears, but just at this moment the plan didn't feel realistic. It seemed all too likely the old geezer could beat him up.
Just then, Tom suddenly smiled.
Of course bears weren't actually the issue. Not any more. One of the reasons he wanted to feel better very soon was that he had something interesting to tell people. Something very interesting indeed. A piece of information which had kept him alive, which had hauled his body out of the wilderness. He'd kept quiet about it so far, biding his time. But when the moment came…
Then, just as suddenly, his smile dropped. He had new information, yes. A life-saving datum. That didn't make it a life-changing one, however, big enough to blot out the dark light from what had come before. He was still compromised. Once you've done the thing, you've done it. Even if people don't know. The only difference was he now perhaps had something big enough to make it worth his while taking the risk it would never be found.
He watched blearily through the glass as the Sheffer sheriff's department (in the person of Phil, whom Tom increasingly thought he vaguely recognized from before His Time Away) went about its duties. Phil was young and slightly built for a cop: most city police seemed to spend their whole time in the gym, making sure their arms bulged nicely in those short-sleeve shirts. Basically, Phil was sometimes in the room, and then sometimes he went outside. That was about it. Presumably, apart from dealing with car wrecks and people skipping their tab in bars and the occasional recreational domestic in the long winter nights, this was about as frenetic as it got: until someone came back out of the woods with a strange story to tell.
The deputy would come to check on him again soon, and then maybe he'd get into it. In the meantime, he sipped a little more soup. It had cooled, and could do with a little salt, but otherwise was very good. It was making him feel better.
His vision slowly went white.
— «» — «» — «»—
The voice came from behind him.
'Sir?'
Tom shook his head, knowing that he wasn't going to be able to get away from this. But still, he shook his head. There was red on him. There was crunching underfoot. He finally turned, and he already knew what the news was going to be, but he did not know how it was going to fit in his head.
'Sir?'
Then everything was different. He jerked his head up woozily and saw he was still sitting in his chair in a police station, a very long way from LA. It was bright, and he was swaddled in blankets and there was a small heater sat on the floor about a yard away, shoving a thin stream of warm air at him. That was new, he thought. Don't remember that.
New too was the man standing on the other side of the table. Tom blinked at him. 'What time is it?'
'It's a little after three, sir,' the man said. He was much older than the one called Phil. He was taller, and broader. He was bigger in every way. He sat in one of the chairs opposite.
'Who are you?'
'My name is Connolly,' the man said. 'I work here.'
'Okay.' Tom's voice came out a little petulant, and he suddenly yawned massively. 'I'm actually kind of hot, now.'
'My deputy says the doctor said to keep you warm. So that's what we're going to do. That is, unless maybe you think it would be better for you to spend the night over in the hospital. Seems to me there's at least a couple reasons why that might be the case.'