Blaine smiled. “I’ll never forget it. You were hungry that time, too.”
“And you bought me a rose.”
“It seems to me I did.”
“You’re a sweet guy, Shep.”
“If I recall correctly, you’re a newspaper gal. How come—”
“I’m still working on a story.”
“Fishhook,” said Blaine. “Fishhook is your story.”
“Part of it,” she said, returning to her steak.
They ate for a while with very little talk.
“There is one other thing,” Blaine finally said. “Just what gives with Finn? Godfrey said he was dangerous.”
“What do you know of Finn?”
“Not much of anything. He was out of Fishhook before I tied up with it. But the story went around. He came back screaming. Something happened to him.”
“Something did,” said Harriet. “And he’s been preaching it up and down the land.”
“Preaching?”
“Hell and brimstone preaching. Bible-pounding preaching, except there is no Bible. The evil of the stars. Man must stay on Earth. It’s the only safe place for him. There is evil out there. And it has been the parries who have opened up the gates to this spawn of evil. . . .”
“And the people swallow that?”
“They swallow it,” said Harriet. “They wallow in it clear up to their middles. They absolutely love it. They can’t have the stars, you see. So there’s satisfaction to them that the stars are evil.”
“And the parries, I suspect, are evil, too. They are ghouls and werewolves. . . .”
“And goblins,” said Harriet. “And witches. And harpies. You name it and they’re it.”
“The man’s a mountebank.”
Harriet shook her head. “Not a mountebank. He’s as serious as Godfrey. He believes the evil. Because, you see, he saw the evil.”
“And Godfrey saw the good.”
“That’s it. It’s as simple as all that. Finn is just as convinced Man has no business among the stars as Godfrey is convinced he’ll find salvation there.”
“And both of them are fighting Fishhook.”
“Godfrey wants to end the monopoly but retain the structure. Finn goes farther. Fishhook’s incidental to him. PK is his target. He wants to wipe it out.”
“And Finn’s been fighting Stone.”
“Harassing him,” said Harriet. “There’s no way to fight him, really. Godfrey shows little for anyone to hit at. But Finn found out about him and sees him as the one key figure who can prop the parries on their feet. If he can, he’ll knock him out.”
“You don’t seem too worried.”
“Godfrey’s not worried. Finn’s just another problem, another obstacle.”
They left the restaurant and walked down the strip of pavement that fronted on the units.
The river valley lay in black and purple shadow with the river a murky bronze in the dying light of day. The tops of the bluffs across the valley still were flecked with sunlight, and far up in the sky a hawk still wheeled, wings a silver flash as he tilted in the blue.
They reached the door of the unit, and Blaine pushed it open and stood aside for Harriet, then followed. He had just crossed the threshold when she bumped into him as she took a backward step.
He heard the sharp gasp in her throat, and her body, pressed against his, went hard and tense.
Looking over her shoulder, he saw Godfrey Stone, face downward, stretched upon the floor.
TWENTY-ONE
Even as he bent above him, Blaine knew that Stone was dead. There was a smallness to him, a sort of essential withering of the human form, as if life had been a basic dimension that had helped to fill him out. Now he was something less than six feet of limp body clothed in crumpled cloth, and the stillness of him was somehow very dreadful.
Behind him, he heard Harriet pulling shut the door and shooting home the bolts. And in the clatter of the bolts he thought he heard a sob.
He bent down for a closer look and in the dimness could make out the darker shine of hair where the blood had oozed out of the skull.
The window shutters creaked and groaned, sliding home with a clatter as Harriet shoved the lever that controlled them.
“Maybe, now,” he said, “we can have a little light.”
“Just a minute, Shep.”
The lighting toggle clicked and light sprang from the ceiling, and in the glare of it Blaine could see how a heavy blow had crushed in the skull.
There was no need to hunt for pulse, no need to listen for a heartbeat. No man could live with a skull so out of shape.
Blaine rocked back and teetered, crouched upon his toes, marveling at the ferocity and, perhaps, the desperation, which must have driven the arm that had delivered such a blow.
He looked at Harriet and nodded quietly, wondering at her calmness, then remembering, even as he wondered, that in her reporting days violent death could have been no stranger to her.
“It was Finn,” she said, her voice quiet and low, so quiet that one could sense the checkrein she’d put upon herself. “Not Finn, himself, of course. Someone that he hired. Or someone that volunteered. One of his wide-eyed followers. There are a lot of people who’d do anything for him.”
She came across the room and squatted across the corpse from Blaine. Her mouth was set in a straight, grim line. Her face was pinched and stern. And there was a streak down her face where a single tear had run.
“What do we do now?” he asked. “The police, I would imagine.”
She made a restraining motion with her arm.
“Not the police,” she said. “We can’t afford to get tangled up in this. That would be exactly what Finn and his crew would want. What do you bet that someone has phoned the police already?”
“You mean the killer?”
“Certainly. Why not? Just a voice saying that a man has been killed in unit number ten out at The Plainsman. Then hang up real quick.”
“To put us on the spot?”
“To put whoever was with Godfrey on the spot. They maybe even know exactly who we are. That doctor—”
“I don’t know,” said Blaine. “He may have.”
“Listen, Shep, I’m positive from all that’s happened that Finn is in Belmont.”
“Belmont?”
“That town we found you in.”
“So that’s the name of it.”
“There’s something happening,” she said. “Something happening right here. Something important going on. There was Riley and the truck and—”
“But what are we to do?”
“We can’t let them find Godfrey here.”
“We could pull the car out back and take him out the back door.”
“There’s probably someone watching. Then they’d have us cold.”
She beat her hands together in exasperation.
“If Finn has a free hand now,” she said, “he probably can pull off whatever he is planning. We can’t let him put us out of action. We have got to stop him.”
“We?”
“You and I. You step into Godfrey’s shoes. Now it’s up to you.”
“But I—”
Her eyes blazed suddenly. “You were his friend. You heard his story. You told him you were with him.”
“Sure I did,” said Blaine. “But I am starting cold. I don’t know the score.”
“Stop Finn,” she said. “Find out what he’s doing and stop him in his tracks. Fight a delaying action. . . .”
“You and your military thinking. Your delaying actions and your lines of retreat laid out.” (A very female general with enormous jackboots and a flock of medals pendant from very spearlike breasts.)
Cut that out!
A newspaper gal. And you are objective.
“Shep,” she said, “shut up. How can I be objective? I believed in Godfrey. I believed in what he was doing.”
“I suppose that I do, too. But it is all so new, so quick. . . .”
“Maybe we should just cut and run.”
“No! Wait a minute. If we cut and run, we’d be out of it as surely as if they caught us here.”
“But, Shep, there is no way.”
“There just might be,” he told her. “Is there a town around here by the name of Hamilton?”