Elsewhere, page 23
“I didn’t think you. If I thought you, the first thing I’d have said is, I’ll pay for dinner, after all.”
“So who shot him?”
“Two hulks in his goon squad were stationed across the street from where it happened. They’re raising hell with my people, as if they never told us to back off. They want arrests made yesterday. Anyway, it was dark, but they had night-vision gear, so they saw a little. They say it was this traitor Harkenbach and some woman. The perps got away, which makes no sense to me, with Falkirk’s crew of numbnuts right there and armed to the teeth.”
“Who do they want you to arrest?”
“Well, Harkenbach and the woman—”
“What woman?”
“They don’t know. The kind of law these guys enforce, any woman might work for them, plus they want the guy who owns the house.”
“Who owns the house?”
“Well, that’s the thing I find most interesting. It’s a guy named Jeffrey Coltrane, lives there with his daughter, Amity. Would those be the friends of yours you mentioned, the ones who live on Shadow Canyon Lane and got ‘caught up in this through no fault of their own’?”
“I’ve heard of them,” Duke conceded.
“Is Coltrane a killer?”
“Is Mary Poppins?”
“I wouldn’t vouch for anyone these days,” Phil said. “Listen, these guys with Falkirk are like The Sopranos, but they have for-real legal authority and a desire to abuse the hell out of it. If the shit hits the fan, I can’t pull the plug for you.”
“Thanks for the heads-up. See you for dinner tomorrow night.”
“I love the lobster bisque.”
Duke terminated the call and crossed the street against the light, holding up one hand to stop the traffic, with which he had more success than King Canute did when he commanded the sea to be still.
73
In this timeline, no breeze issued off the ocean, no ball of red yarn appeared, but Michelle’s sense of an impending shock did not diminish.
She glanced left and right, thinking, and then told Ed, “Jane and Larry Barnaby. They had a daughter, Keri, the same year Amity was born. We went through that sleepless first year together, babysat for each other. I’ve stayed friends with them since Jeffy and Amity died. He would have, too, after I . . . after the other Michelle walked out on him.”
“Where do these Barnaby people live? If they’re still in this town at all.”
“Quickest way is out to Pacific Coast Highway and turn south. It’s maybe a ten-minute walk.”
As she and Ed started west along the alley, a man turned the corner ahead and approached them at a brisk pace. Tall and barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, he might have been a guy who earned his living breaking knees or necks or heads, whatever was wanted of him. Even though he wore a suit and tie, though he carried himself with his spine as straight as a knight’s lance, an air of menace clung to him.
Michelle moved to the right side of the alley, as did Ed, giving the stranger a wide berth. The man glanced at them, seemed disinterested, but then did a double take and changed course, crossing directly to Michelle.
“Mrs. Coltrane?”
She strove to suppress her surprise. “What? No. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
As she tried to sidle past this stranger, he blocked her.
Ed eased one hand under his coat, to the pistol in his belt holster.
Without looking away from Michelle, his bottle-green eyes decanting pure suspicion, the big man said to Ed, “Cool it, pal. Don’t make me break your hand. You don’t need a gun, anyway.”
“Really,” Michelle said, “you’re making a mistake. I don’t know any Coltrane.”
He snatched off her baseball cap, and she gasped, and he said, “You’re older, of course, but you look the same as those photos in your daughter’s wallet that she’s so proud of. She showed them to me not two hours ago. You don’t even need to put your hair down. You’re Michelle, all right.”
Oddly enough, a sudden breeze, scented with cinnamon, stirred litter along the alley. Later than in the world they recently left, the ball of red yarn came rolling past them, unraveling as it went.
This time the scarlet filament didn’t call to mind a thread of blood or a lit fuse. Instead, she dared to think of it as a marker that, like Hansel and Gretel’s white pebbles in the fairy tale, was meant to lead her through the dark forest of her life and home to family.
Unsettled but also exhilarated by the way this encounter was unfolding, she said, “You know where Jeffy and Amity are?”
“They’re at my house.” He seemed to have transformed from ogre into friendly giant. “I’ll take you to them.”
Astonished, she looked at Ed, who beamed back at her and, as if this had been his plan all along, said, “The Ed factor. Things tend to happen around me.”
“You’re Harkenbach?” the stranger asked.
Ed rubbed his bald head with one hand. “In my sadly depilated condition, I may not look like him—”
“I don’t know what he looks like,” the stranger said. “I’ve never seen a picture. I only met Jeffy and Amity this morning, and they didn’t much describe you. So you’re Jeffy’s friend.”
“Actually, that’s quite another Ed, the Ed of this world. I’m the Ed of this Michelle’s world, a braver specimen of myself, I’m happy to say. I know I sound as though I’m talking gibberish—”
“I get you,” the big man said. He smiled at Michelle. “You’re not the mother who walked out on the girl. Maybe like they’ve been hunting another you, you’ve been hunting another them. You must have a damn good story to tell. Best save it till we get to my place, so you don’t have to repeat it for your husband and daughter. My name’s Charlie Pellafino, by the way. Friends call me Duke, and I’m pretty damn sure we’re going to be friends.”
As Duke escorted them eastward along the alley, Michelle said, “You met them only this morning?”
“Yes, ma’am. Your husband is a stand-up guy, and your girl is a charmer. She called me Uncle Duke.”
“But how could you know all that you know . . . how could you have come to believe it if you met them only a few hours ago?”
“Seeing is believing,” Duke said. “I accidentally got myself sent to hell with your daughter. We just about got carved up by this scary-as-shit bug-form robot in a version of the hotel that won’t ever again turn a profit.”
Ed Harkenbach said, “Earth one point seventy-seven. I’ve been to some worse, but not many.”
The ball of yarn had entirely unraveled. As Michelle hurried along with Ed and Duke, her bright excitement was tarnished somewhat by the fear that this might not be a direct route out of the dark forest of her life, as she’d thought. The moon-white pebbles dropped by Hansel didn’t help him and Gretel find their way safely through the woods, nor did the bread crumbs with which he later marked a trail. Ahead might lie a wicked witch with a warm oven and a taste for cannibalism. Or something worse.
74
Almost as much as he hated English teachers, John Falkirk also hated nurses, whether they were dressed in white uniforms or green scrubs or were naked in a porno film. Just because they knew the difference between simethicone and simvastatin, could recognize the early symptoms of numerous diseases, could change the bedsheets with the patient in the bed, and could give injections without causing an embolism, they thought that they were superior to their patients, as though they didn’t also empty bedpans. Bustling here and there with annoying self-importance, not one of the nurses at Mercy Hospital could have pulled off the execution of a Supreme Court justice with a secretly induced heart attack or would have had the nerve to put a bullet in the head of an influential political activist who made the mistake of believing his party actually adhered to the principles that it espoused. In an overpopulated world, nothing was noble about nursing back to health and saving the lives of those people who were not essential to the function of the state, which were maybe 90 percent of them.
The only medical personnel whom Falkirk hated more than nurses were physicians. The one who treated him was Dr. Nolan Burnside, a thirtysomething whiz kid who looked like a TV doctor and had the so-cool breezy manner and the knock-’em-dead smile of an actor who knew he was destined to be the number-one box-office star in a year or two. He supposedly injected a local anesthetic to block the nerves carrying the message of disaster from the wound to the brain, but the torment did not relent. In fact, as Burnside disinfected the torn flesh, stopped the bleeding, and sewed twenty-six stitches by hand, the pain increased, so Falkirk broke into a sweat that seemed as thick as hot gravy, cursing both the God he didn’t believe in and the Devil he knew to be real. Burnside, evidently a graduate of the Quackery School of Medicine at the University of Humbug, had the impudence, the brass, to subtly imply that the local anesthetic was effective and that the pain must be psychosomatic. This insolence earned him a death warrant, which would be served as soon as Falkirk obtained the key to everything and amassed the power that would make him untouchable. Oblivious of the truth that his days were numbered, Burnside joked with the nurses, who were all charmed by the bastard. He probably banged the prettiest of them, standing up in a supply closet, while his patients died in agony of sepsis.
The bullet passed entirely through Falkirk, tunneling the flesh, missing major arteries and veins and bones. Had it been an inch to the left, the results would have been devastating. A half inch the other way, the round would have done nothing worse than score the surface of his thigh, requiring no other attention than a bandage. The wound didn’t need a drain. Burnside applied the bandage and scheduled him for discharge the following day, but Falkirk refused to stay overnight. He wanted a prescription for a painkiller that would leave him clearheaded, a cane, and immediate release.
“As an NSA agent,” Dr. Burnside said, “you may have authority from coast to coast and border to border, but in here, Mr. Falkirk, I am in charge.”
Throughout the procedure in the ER cubicle, Vince Canker—who thought he had some psychic ability and that his mother, who’d died a week earlier, had recently been trying to reach him from the Other Side—stood in one corner. He was dressed in black for the Shadow Canyon operation, as was Falkirk, and he wore a sidearm in plain sight. With his flat, hard face and eyes the color of burnt butter, he was of such disturbing appearance that both Burnside and the various nurses had pretended that he wasn’t present, as if on eye contact his drilling stare could take a core sample of their souls.
Now Falkirk asked Canker to bring in Louis Wong from the corridor, where he was standing guard outside the cubicle. Louis’s father was Chinese, his mother Irish. He had the dreamy face of a Buddha shrine and the clear, green eyes of a Killarney choirboy. He was dressed in black as well, and with a sidearm; but neither the doctor nor the nurses would think that his stare could skewer their souls. Rather, he had the air of a sly man who would do you with a knife.
Louis brought with him a fresh pair of black pants that another agent had delivered to replace the torn and blood-soaked pair that Falkirk had been wearing. In the ICU cubicle, he closed the door and blocked it, while Vince Canker moved to the foot of the bed to stare more pointedly at Burnside.
The physician’s handsome face didn’t pale. His posture remained loose limbed and confident. Although the curve of his matinee-idol smile didn’t appear to change, it didn’t really qualify as a smile anymore.
“A bottle of painkillers, a double prescription,” Falkirk said. “And a cane. Now.”
Burnside was a proud man. “Even if I wanted to oblige, there are hospital protocols—”
“Fuck the protocols, Nolan.” Falkirk sat up on the edge of the bed. “I noticed you wear a wedding ring. What’s your wife’s name?”
Burnside hesitated to answer, and then said, “I don’t see what that has to do—”
“You don’t need to see what it has to do,” Falkirk interrupted. “I assure you, Nolan, if you don’t answer me, you’ll wish you had.”
Another hesitation. Then: “Cynthia.”
“Do you and Cynthia have children?”
“Two. We have two children.”
“What are their names and ages?”
“Jonathan is four. Rebecca is six.”
Falkirk nodded. “Sweet. A nice little family. Hostages to fortune. Very brave of you to have a family. A man alone has much less to lose.”
Burnside met Falkirk’s stare for a long moment. Then he glanced at Vince Canker and quickly away. “You’re not NSA agents.”
“Our ID is genuine, though our true employers operate from far deeper in the state than the National Security Agency. Do you want to test me, Nolan, and discover just how deep?”
Although the physician said, “This is outrageous,” his voice was marked more by fear than outrage, more by resignation than by fear.
“Think of me as a troll, Nolan. A troll who lives far down in the deepest of deep caverns. Trolls take whatever they want from your world, whatever treasures, whatever pretties, and no one ever follows them down into their caverns to retrieve what they’ve taken, because no one believes trolls exist.”
As if time must be flowing at a different rate in the cubicle than beyond it, Nolan Burnside seemed to have aged noticeably in but a few minutes.
“I’ll get the pills and the cane.”
“Call a nurse and order her to bring them,” Falkirk said. “I need you here to help me get into this clean pair of pants. You’ll put on my socks and shoes for me, too. And kneel down to tie the laces.”
75
Jeffy enjoyed mundane work like mowing the yard, cleaning the house, doing laundry, preparing meals, and polishing Bakelite radios to restore their luster. When engaged in tasks of that nature, he seemed to have two minds. One remained focused intently on the chore before him, and the other floated free to contemplate or to search for inspiration. His contemplation involved the purpose of his life, the meaning of the world, what he had done wrong, and what he might yet do right. The inspiration he sought always involved thinking of things to make Amity’s life more fun and interesting, to keep her spirits high and help her fulfill the potential she possessed in abundance. When Amity was very young, Jeffy’s free-floating mind wrote funny poems and stories about magical animals to entertain her. By the time she was five, he gave much thought to how best to homeschool her, which continued to occupy his mind year after year. He had daydreamed of teaching her to surf, and she had learned how to thrash the waves. Now they had the joy of the sea to share. Recently she’d been learning to sail. For him, work was pleasant because it was also a chance to dream, and when work was done, the day was theirs for living out those dreams.
Now, in Duke Pellafino’s kitchen, as Jeffy measured coffee into the filter of the brewer, he wondered if he would ever again be able to lose himself in the common tasks of everyday life and allow part of his mind to float free as before, or whether what he now knew of the multiverse would always weigh his mind down with worries about what might be happening in those infinite elsewheres. He could try his best to protect Amity and ensure her happiness in this world that she shared with him. But what of all those other Amitys in so many timelines? Scores of Amitys? Hundreds? Thousands? Inevitably, in some places, she was orphaned, and he was not there to look over her. In still other worlds, she might be ill or lost or tormented in any of the myriad ways that indifferent nature allowed her children to suffer in a fallen world. He loved this child more than he loved life itself, but it seemed to him that his love must be bestowed on all the Amitys who were without him elsewhere, if it were to be a true and worthy love.
That was madness. He couldn’t possibly be father to a thousand now fatherless Amitys, or to a hundred, or even to fifty Amitys in different worlds. If they survived their current predicament, he would somehow have to be father to this version of her, as if she were the only one, and put from his mind what travails and horrors other Amitys might be enduring, though at the moment, he was unable to see how this could be done.
These thoughts troubled Jeffy as the coffee began brewing in a fragrant rush and as he took a package of bacon from the freezer, which was when Duke Pellafino entered the kitchen from the hallway, accompanied by a man at once strange and familiar.
“Spooky Ed,” said Amity.
At the same moment, Jeffy recognized the scientist. The shock of this development was sufficient to distract him from wondering how the old man had come to be with Duke. In spite of their year of camaraderie on the front porch, a flush of anger warmed his face, and he confronted Harkenbach. “What the hell’s wrong with you, Ed? How could you call yourself my friend and yet leave that gismo with me, knowing Falkirk might land on me with both feet, knowing I might have to use the damn thing?”
Harkenbach held up one hand as though to sue for peace. “You’ve got me all wrong. I was never your friend, Jeffrey. I never left it with you.”
“What’s the point of denying it? We both know exactly what you did. There’s no point in denying it, Ed.” Jeffy took a deep breath. “What happened to your hair?”
“I thought baldness and no bow tie constituted an effective disguise. Apparently I was wrong. I seldom am. It’s humbling. But I’m not wrong about the key. That was another Ed, another me who’s less responsible than I am. I was never your friend. I’m her friend in a different world and now in this one.”
“Her? Her who?”
