Strangers (29 page)

“The moon,” he said softly.

Hearing himself speak those words aloud, Jack shuddered violently. Inexplicable fear welled in him. He was gripped by an irrational urge to run and hide from the moon, as if its luminescence were corrosive and would, like an acid, dissolve him as he stood bathed in it.

The compulsion to flee passed in a minute. He could not understand why the moon had so suddenly terrified him. It was only the ancient and familiar moon of love songs and romantic poetry. Strange.

He headed toward the car again. The looming lunar face still made him uneasy, and several times he glanced up at it, perplexed.

However, by the time he got in the car, drove into New Haven, and picked up Interstate 95, that curious incident had faded from his mind. He was once more preoccupied with thoughts of Jenny, his comatose wife, whose condition haunted him more than usual at Christmastime.

Later, in his apartment, as he stood by a big window, staring out at the great city, a bottle of Beck’s in one hand, he was sure that from 261st Street to Park Row, from Bensonhurst to Little Neck, there could be no one in the Metropolis whose Christmas Eve was lonelier than his.

7
Christmas Day

Elko County, Nevada

Sandy Sarver woke soon after dawn came to the high plains. The early sun glimmered vaguely at the bedroom windows of the house trailer. The world was so still that it seemed time must have stopped.

She could turn over and go back to sleep if she so desired, for she had eight more days of vacation ahead of her. Ernie and Faye Block had closed the Tranquility Motel and had gone to visit their grandchildren in Milwaukee. The adjacent Tranquility Grille, which Sandy operated with her husband, Ned, was also closed over the holidays.

But Sandy knew she could not get back to sleep, for she was wide awake—and horny. She stretched like a cat beneath the blankets. She wanted to wake Ned, smother him with kisses, and pull him atop her.

Ned was merely a shadowy form in the dark bedroom, breathing deeply, sound asleep. Although she wanted him badly, she did not wake him. There would be plenty of time for lovemaking later in the day.

She slipped quietly out of bed, into the bathroom, and showered. She made the end of it a
cold
shower.

For years she had been uninterested in sex, frigid. Not long ago, the sight of her own nude body had embarrassed her and filled her with shame. Although she did not know the reason for the new feelings that had risen in her lately, she definitely had changed. It had started the summer before last, when sex had suddenly seemed…well, appealing. That sounded silly now.
Of course
sex was appealing. But prior to that summer, lovemaking had always been a chore to be endured. Her late erotic blossoming was a delightful surprise and an inexplicable mystery.

Nude, she returned to the shadowy bedroom. She took a sweater and a pair of jeans from the closet, and dressed.

In the small kitchen, she started to pour orange juice but stopped when stricken by the urge to go for a drive. She left a note for Ned, put on a sheepskin-lined jacket, and went outside to the Ford pickup.

Sex and driving were the two new passions in her life, and the latter was almost as important to her as the former. That was another funny thing: until the summer before last, she hated going anywhere in the pickup except to work and back, and she seldom drove. She’d not only disliked highway travel but had dreaded it the way some people were afraid of airplanes. But now, other than sex, there was nothing she liked
better than to get behind the wheel of the truck and take off, journeying on a whim, without a destination, speeding.

She had always understood why sex repelled her—that had been no mystery. She could blame her father, Horton Purney, for her frigidity. Though she had never known her mother, who had died giving birth, Sandy had known her father far too well. They had lived in a ramshackle house on the outskirts of Barstow, on the edge of the lonely California desert, just the two of them, and Sandy’s earliest memories were of sexual abuse. Horton Purney had been a moody, brooding, mean, and dangerous man. Until Sandy escaped from home at fourteen, her father had used her as if she had been an erotic toy.

Only recently had she realized that her strong dislike for highway travel was also related to something else that her father had done to her. Horton Purney had run a motorcycle repair shop out of a sagging, sun-scorched, unpainted barn on the same property as his house, but he had never made much money from it. Therefore, twice a year, he put Sandy in the car and made the two-and-a-half-hour drive across the desert to Las Vegas, where he knew an enterprising pimp, Samson Cherrik. Cherrik had a list of perverts with a special interest in children, and he was always happy to see Sandy. After a few weeks in Vegas, Sandy’s father packed, put Sandy in the car, and drove back to Barstow, his pockets bulging with cash. For Sandy, the long drive to Vegas was a nightmare journey, for she knew what awaited her at their destination. The trip back to Barstow was worse, for it was not an escape from Vegas but a return to the grim life in that ramshackle house and the dark, urgent, insatiable lust of Horton Purney. In either direction, the road had led to hell, and she had learned to loathe the rumble of the car’s engine, the hum of tires on the pavement, and the unspooling highway ahead.

Therefore, the pleasure she now took from driving and sex seemed miraculous. She could not understand where she’d found the strength and will to overcome her horrible past. Since the summer before last, she simply…
changed,
was still changing. And, oh, it was glorious to feel the chains of self-loathing and the bonds of fear breaking apart, to feel self-respect for the first time in her life, to feel
free
.

Now, she got into the Ford pickup and started the engine. Their house trailer was set on an unlandscaped half-acre lot at the southern edge of the tiny—almost nonexistent—town of Beowawe, along Route 21, a two-lane blacktop. As Sandy drove away from the trailer, there seemed to be nothing but empty plains, rolling hills, scattered buttes, rocky outcroppings, grass, brush, and waterless arroyos for a thousand miles in every direction. The intensely blue morning sky was immense, and as she got the Ford up to speed, Sandy felt as if she might take flight.

If she headed north on 21, she would pass through Beowawe and soon come to Interstate 80, which led east toward Elko or west toward Battle Mountain. Instead, she went south, into a beautifully barren landscape. With skill and ease, she guided the four-wheel-drive pickup over the badly weathered county road at seventy miles an hour.

In fifteen minutes, Route 21 petered out into a gravel roadbed that led south through another eighty-three miles of uninhabited and desolate territory. She did not follow it, choosing instead to turn east on a one-lane dirt track flanked by wild grass and scrub.

Some snow lay on the ground this Christmas morning, though not much. In the distance, the mountains were white, but down here, the annual precipitation was less than fifteen inches a year, little of it in the form of snow. Here was an inch-deep skin of snow, there a small hillock against which a shallow drift had formed, and here a sparkling bush on which wind-driven snow had hardened into a lacy garment of ice, but by far the largest portion of the land was bare and dry and brown.

Sandy drove fast on the dirt, too, and behind her a cloud of dust plumed up. In time she left the track, headed overland—north, then west, coming at last to a familiar place, though she had not set out with this destination in mind. For reasons she did not understand, her subconscious often guided her to this spot during her solitary drives, seldom in a direct line but by wandering routes, so her arrival was usually a surprise to her. She stopped, set the brake. With the engine idling, she stared for a while through the dusty windshield.

She came here because it made her feel better, though she did not know why. The slopes, the spines and teeth of rock, the grass and brush, formed a pleasing picture, though the scene was no prettier and no different from thousands of other places nearby. Yet here she felt a sublime peacefulness that could not be attained anywhere else.

She switched off the engine and got out of the pickup, and for a while she strolled back and forth, hands jammed into the pockets of her sheepskin-lined jacket, oblivious of the stingingly cold air. Her drive through the wildlands had brought her back toward civilization, and Interstate 80 lay only a couple of hundred yards to the north. The occasional roar of a passing truck echoed like a distant dragon’s growl, but the holiday traffic was light. Beyond the highway, on the uplands to the northwest, lay the Tranquility Motel and Grille, but Sandy glanced just once in that direction. She was more interested in the immediate terrain, which exerted a mysterious and powerful attraction for her, and which seemed to radiate peace the way a rock, in evening, radiated the heat of the sun that it had absorbed during the day.

She wasn’t trying to analyze her affinity for this patch of ground.
Evidently, there was some subtle harmony in the contours of the land, an interplay of line, form, and shadow that defied definition. Any attempt to decode its attraction would be as foolish as trying to analyze the beauty of a sunset or the appeal of a favorite flower.

That Christmas morning, Sandy did not yet know that Ernie Block had been drawn, as if possessed, to the same patch of ground on December 10, when he had been on his way home from the freight office in Elko. She did not know that it aroused in Ernie an electrifying sense of pending epiphany and more than a little fear—emotions quite unlike those that it stirred in her. Weeks would pass before she learned that her special retreat had a strong attraction for others besides herself—both friends and strangers.

Chicago, Illinois

For Father Stefan Wycazik—that stocky Polish dynamo, rector of St. Bernadette’s, rescuer of troubled priests—it was the busiest Christmas morning he had ever known. And as the day wore on, it swiftly became the most meaningful Christmas of his life.

He celebrated the second Mass at St. Bernadette’s, spent an hour greeting parishioners who stopped by the rectory with fruit baskets and boxes of homemade cookies and other gifts, then drove to University Hospital to pay a visit to Winton Tolk, the policeman who had been shot in an Uptown sandwich shop yesterday afternoon. Following emergency surgery, Tolk had been in the intensive care unit yesterday afternoon and all through the night. Christmas morning he had been moved to a semiprivate room adjacent to the ICU, for although he was no longer in critical condition, he still needed to be monitored constantly.

When Father Wycazik arrived, Raynella Tolk, Winton’s wife, was at her husband’s bedside. She was quite attractive, with chocolate-brown skin and stylish close-cropped hair. “Mrs. Tolk? I’m Stefan Wycazik.”

“But—”

He smiled. “Relax. I’m not here to give anyone the last rites.”

“Good,” Winton said, “’cause I’m sure not planning on dying.”

The wounded policeman was not only fully conscious but alert and apparently suffering no pain. His bed was raised to a sitting position. Although his broad chest was heavily bandaged, and although a cardiac telemetry device hung around his neck, and in spite of the IV line that was dripping glucose and antibiotics into the median basilic vein in his left arm, he looked remarkably well considering his recent misadventure.

Father Wycazik stood at the foot of the bed, his tension betrayed only
by the way he kept turning his black fedora around and around in his strong hands. When he realized what he was doing, he quickly put the hat on a chair.

He said, “Mr. Tolk, if you feel up to it, I’ve come to ask you a few questions about what happened yesterday.”

Both Tolk and his wife looked puzzled by Stefan’s curiosity.

The priest gave a partial explanation for his interest—though only partial. “The fellow who cruised the Uptown district with you for the past week, Brendan Cronin, was in my employ,” he said, maintaining Brendan’s cover as a lay worker for the Church.

“Oh, I’d like to meet
him,
” Raynella said, her face brightening.

“He saved my life,” Tolk said. “He did a
crazy
-brave thing, which he shouldn’t have done in a million years, but I’m sure glad he did it.”

Raynella said, “Mr. Cronin walked into that sandwich shop not knowing if all the gunmen were dead, not knowing if he might be shot.”

“It’s strictly against police procedure to walk into a situation like that,” Winton said. “I’d have handled it by the book myself if I’d been one of those outside. I can’t exactly applaud what Brendan did, Father, but I owe him my life for doing it.”

“Amazing,” Father Wycazik said, as if this were the first time he had heard of Brendan’s bravery. In fact, yesterday he had spoken at length with Winton Tolk’s precinct captain, an old friend, and had heard Brendan praised for courage and damned for foolishness. “I’ve always known Brendan’s a dependable fellow. Did he also provide first aid?”

“He might have,” Winton said. “Don’t really know. I remember regaining consciousness…and there he was…sort of looming over me…calling my name…but I was still in a haze, you see.”

“It’s a miracle Win survived,” Raynella said in a tremulous voice.

“Now, now, honey,” Winton said softly. “I
did
make it, and that’s all that counts.” When he was sure his wife would be all right, he looked at Stefan and said, “Everyone’s amazed that I could lose so much blood and pull through. From what I hear, I must’ve lost buckets.”

“Did Brendan apply a tourniquet?”

Tolk frowned. “Don’t know. Like I said, I was in a haze, a daze.”

Father Wycazik hesitated, wondering how to find out what he needed to know without revealing the extraordinary possibility that motivated this visit. “I know you’re not very clear about what happened but…did you notice anything peculiar about…Brendan’s hands?”

“Peculiar? What do you mean?”

“He touched you, didn’t he?”