Desperation (15 page)

Chapter 5

1

David Carver saw it while
the woman in the blue shirt and faded jeans was finally giving up, huddling back against the bars of the drunk-tank and holding her forearms protectively against her breasts as the cop pulled the desk away so he could get at her.

Don't touch it,
the white-haired man had said when the woman threw the shotgun down and it came clattering across the hardwood floor to bang off the bars of David's cell.
Don'
t touch it, it's empty, just leave it alone!

He had done what the man said, but he had seen something else on the floor when he looked down at the shotgun: one of the shells that had fallen off the desk. It was lying on its side against the far lefthand vertical bar of his cell. Fat green shotgun shell, maybe one of a dozen that had gone rolling every whichway when the crazy cop had started battering the woman, Mary, with the desk and the chair in order to make her drop the gun.

The old guy was right, it would make no sense to go grabbing for the shotgun. Even if he could also get the shell, it would make no sense to do that. The cop was big—tall as a pro basketball player, broad as a pro football player—and the cop was also fast. He'd be on David, who had never held a real gun in his life, before David could even figure out what hole the shell went in. But if he should get a chance to pick up the shell . . . maybe . . . well, who knew?

“Can you walk?” the cop was asking the woman named Mary. His tone was grotesquely solicitous. “Is anything broken?”

“What difference does it make?” Her voice was trembling, but David thought it was rage making that tremble, not fear. “Kill me if you're going to, get it over with.”

David glanced at the old guy who was in the cell with him, wanting to see if the old guy had also noticed the shell. So far as David could tell, he hadn't, although he had finally gotten off the bunk and come to the cell bars.

Instead of yelling at the woman who had tried her very best to blow his head off, or maybe hurting her for it, the cop gave her a brief one-armed hug. A pal's hug. In a way, David found this seemingly sincere little gesture of affection more unsettling than all the violence which had gone before it. “I'm not going to
kill
you, Mare!”

The cop looked around, as if to ask the remaining three Carvers and the white-haired guy if they could believe this crazy lady. His bright gray eyes met David's blue ones, and the boy took an unplanned step back from the bars. He felt suddenly weak with horror. And
vulnerable.
How he could feel more vulnerable than he already was he didn't know, but he did.

The cop's eyes were empty—so empty that it was almost as if he were unconscious with them open. This made David think of his friend Brian, and his one memorable visit to Brian's hospital room last November. But it wasn't the same, because at the same time the cop's eyes were empty, they
weren't.
There was something there, yes,
something,
and David didn't know what it was, or how it could be both something and nothing. He only knew he had never seen anything like it.

The cop looked back at the woman called Mary with an expression of exaggerated astonishment. “Gosh, no!” he said. “Not when things are just getting interesting.” He reached into his right front pocket, brought out a ring of keys, and selected one that hardly looked like a key at all—it was square, with a black strip embedded in the center of the metal. To David it looked a little like a hotel key-card. He poked this into the lock of the big cell and opened it. “Hop in, Mare,” he said. “Snug as a bug in a rug, that's what you'll be.”

She ignored him, looking instead at David's parents. They were standing together at the bars of the little cell directly across from the one David was sharing with white-haired Mr. Silent. “This man—this
maniac
—killed my husband. Put . . .” She swallowed, grimacing, and the big cop looked at her benignly, seeming almost to smile encouragement:
Get this out, Mary, sick it up, you'll feel better when you do.
“Put his arm around him like he did me just now, and shot him four times.”

“He killed our little girl,” Ellen Carver told her, and something in her tone struck David with a moment of utter dreamlike unreality. It was as if the two of them were playing Can You Top This. Next the woman named Mary would say, Well, he killed our
dog
and then his
mother
would say—

“We don't
know
that,” David's father said. He looked horrible, face swollen and bloody, like a heavyweight boxer who has taken twelve full rounds of punishment. “Not for
sure.
” He looked at the cop, a terrible expression of hope on his swollen face, but the cop ignored him. It was Mary he was interested in.

“That's enough chit-chat,” he said. He sounded like the world's kindliest grandpa. “Hop into your room, Mary-mine. Into your gilded cage, my little blue-eyed parakeet.”

“Or what? You'll kill me?”

“I already told you I won't,” he said in that same Kind Old Gramps voice, “but you don't want to forget the world-renowned fate worse than death.” His voice hadn't changed, but she was now looking up at him raptly, like a staked goat at an approaching boa constrictor. “I can hurt you, Mary,” he said. “I can hurt you so badly you'll wish I
had
killed you. Now, you believe that, don't you?”

She looked at him a moment longer, then tore her eyes away—and that was just what it felt like to David from his place twenty feet away, her
pulling
free, the way you'd pull a piece of tape off the flap of a letter or a package—and walked into the cell. Her face shivered as she went, then broke apart as the cop slammed the cell's barred door behind her. She threw herself onto one of the four bunks at the rear, put her face into her arms, and began to sob. The cop stood watching her for a moment, head lowered. David had time to look down at the shotgun shell again and think about grabbing it. Then the big cop jerked and kind of shook himself, like someone waking from a doze, and turned away from the cell with the sobbing woman in it. He walked across to where David was standing.

The white-haired man retreated rapidly from the bars as the cop came, until the backs of his knees struck the edge of the bunk and he folded down to a sitting position. Then he put his hands over his eyes again. Before, that had seemed like a gesture of despair to David, but now it seemed to echo the horror he himself had felt when the cop's stare had fallen upon him—not despair but the instinctive hiding gesture of someone who will not look at a thing unless absolutely
forced
to look.

“How's it going, Tom?” the cop asked the man on the bunk. “How they hanging, oldtimer?”

Mr. White Hair shrank away from the sound of the voice without taking his hands away from his eyes. The cop looked at him a moment longer, then turned his gray gaze on David again. David found he couldn't look away—now it was
his
eyes that had been taped. And there was something else, wasn't there. A sense of being
called.

“Having fun, David?” the big blond cop asked. His eyes seemed to be expanding, turning into bright gray ponds filled with light. “Are you filling this interlude, measure for measure?”

“I—” It came out a dusty croak. He licked his lips and tried again. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Don't you? I wonder about that. Because I see . . .” He raised one hand to the corner of his mouth, touched it, then dropped it again. The expression on his face seemed to be one of genuine puzzlement. “I don't know
what
I see. It's a question, yes sir, it is. Who
are
you, boy?”

David glanced quickly at his mother and father and could not look for long at what he saw on their faces. They thought the cop was going to kill him, as he had killed Pie and Mary's husband.

He turned his eyes back at the cop. “I'm David Carver,” he said. “I live at 248 Poplar Street, in Wentworth, Ohio.”

“Yes, I'm sure that's true, but little Dave, who made thee? Canst thou say who made thee?
Tak!
”

He's not reading my mind,
David thought,
but I think maybe he could. If he wanted to.

An adult would likely have admonished himself for such a thought, told himself not to be silly, not to succumb to fear-driven paranoia.
That's just what he wants you to believe, that he's a mind-reader,
the adult would think. But David wasn't a man, he was a boy of eleven. Not just
any
boy of eleven, either; not since last November. There had been some big changes since then. He could only hope they would help him deal with what he was seeing and experiencing now.

The cop, meanwhile, was looking at him with narrowed, considering eyes.

“I guess my mother and father made me,” David said. “Isn't that the way it works?”

“A boy who understands the birds and bees! Wonderful! And what about my other question, Trooper—are you having any fun?”

“You killed my sister, so don't ask stupid questions.”

“Son, don't provoke him!” his father called in a high, scared voice. It didn't really sound like his father at all.

“Oh, I'm not
stupid,
” the cop said, bending that horrid gray gaze even more closely on David. The irises actually seemed to be in motion, turning and turning like pin-wheels. Looking at them made David feel nauseated, close to vomiting, but he couldn't look away. “I may be a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. I know a lot, Trooper. I do. I know a
lot.
”

“Leave him
alone!
” David's mother screamed. David couldn't see her; the cop's bulk blocked her out entirely. “Haven't you done enough to our family? If you touch him, I'll kill you!”

The cop paid no notice. He raised his index fingers to his lower lids and pulled them down, making the eyeballs themselves bulge out grotesquely. “I've got eagle eyes, David, and those are eyes that see the truth from afar. You just want to believe that. Eagle eyes, yes sir.” The cop continued to stare through the bars, and now it was almost as if eleven-year-old David Carver had hypnotized
him.

“You're quite a one, aren't you?” the cop breathed. “You're quite a one indeed. Yes, I think so.”

Think whatever you want, just don't think about me thinking about the shotgun shell.

The cop's eyes widened slightly, and for a hideous moment David thought that was
exactly
what the cop was thinking about, that he had tuned into David's mind as if it were a radio signal. Then a coyote howled outside, a long, lonely sound, and the cop glanced in that direction. The thread between them—maybe telepathy, maybe just a combination of fear and fascination—snapped.

The cop bent to pick up the shotgun. David held his breath, fully expecting him to see the shell lying on the floor off to his right, but the cop did not glance in that direction. He stood up, flipping a lever on the side of the shotgun as he did so. It broke open, the barrels lying over his arm like an obedient animal. “Don't go away, David,” he said in a confidential, just-us-guys voice. “We've got a lot to talk about. That's a conversation I'm looking forward to, believe me, but just now I'm a little busy.”

He walked back toward the center of the room, head down, picking up shells as he went. The first two he loaded into the gun; the rest he stuffed absently into his pockets. David dared wait no longer. He bent, snaked his hand between the two bars on the left side of the cell, and grabbed the fat green tube. He slipped it into the pocket of his jeans. The woman named Mary didn't see; she was still lying on the bunk with her face buried in her arms, sobbing. His parents didn't see; they were standing at the bars of their cell, arms around each other's waist, watching the man in the khaki uniform with horrified fascination. David turned around and saw that old Mr. White Hair—Tom—still had his hands to his face, so maybe
that
was okay, too. Except old Tom's watery eyes were open behind his fingers, David could see them, so maybe it
wasn't
okay. Either way, it was too late now to take it back. Still facing the man the cop had called Tom, David raised the side of one hand to his mouth in a brief shushing gesture. Old Tom gave no sign that he saw; his eyes, in their own prison, only continued to stare out from between the bars of his fingers.

The cop who had killed Pie picked up the last shell on the floor, took a brief look under the desk, then straightened and snapped the shotgun closed with a single flick of his wrist. David had watched him closely through the picking-up process, trying to get a sense of whether or not the cop was counting the shells. He hadn't thought so . . . until now. Now the cop was just standing there, back-to, head down. Then he turned and strode back to David's cell, and the boy felt his stomach turn to lead.

For a moment the cop just stood there looking at him, seeming to
pry
at him, and David thought:
He's trying to pick my brains the way a burglar tries to pick a lock.

“Are you thinking about God?” the cop asked. “Don't bother. Out here, God's country stops at Indian Springs and even Lord Satan don't step his cloven feet much north of Tonopah. There's no God in Desperation, baby boy. Out here there's only
can de lach.
”

That seemed to be it. The cop walked out of the room with the shotgun now riding under his arm. There were perhaps five seconds of silence in the holding area, broken only by the muffled sobs of the woman named Mary. David looked at his parents, and they looked back at him. Standing that way, with their arms around each other, he could see how they must have looked as small children, long before they met each other at Ohio Wesleyan, and this frightened him out of all measure. He would rather have come upon them naked and fucking. He wanted to break the silence, couldn't think how.