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Chapter 26

 

FRIDAY, JUNE 10TH

Darlene waved Dan to a stop as he was on his way out of the studio the next afternoon.

"What's up?"

Darlene grinned and handed him a stack of front pages. "I like the ones of Puck with the actress," she said. "Look."

The pictures flattered Janna, and Janna's presence did a lot to make Puck more palatable. Puck trying on clothes, Puck standing in a bakery, Puck grinning in a barber's chair—all of those became slightly more newsworthy, and considerably more front pageworthy, with beautiful, smiling Janna at his side.

"How did you get her involved in this?" Darlene asked.

Dan didn't bother to mention that the two of them were dating. He just smiled and said, "Actually, she called me."

"Ooh-la-la."

"They're good pictures," he said.

"You can keep them. We have quite a stack. Charlotte News and Observer did the biggest story." She smiled an evil smile. "But they spelled your name wrong."

He started to take the front pages, but she said, "Don't go yet. That's not all." She lugged a mail sack out from under her desk. "You have fans," she said. "I'd be careful opening the ones addressed to 'Asshole, WKTU.'"

Dan raised an eyebrow. "Those would be for Bernie." He paused. "There really are letters to Asshole?"

"If you don't believe me, see for yourself."

Dan reached in and fished out a handful of letters. Some had return addresses, some didn't. The ones that didn't, he realized quickly, tended to be addressed to "The Human Hellspawn" or "Devil Dan" or, as Darlene had said, just "Asshole." He dropped the handful of letters back in the bag and frowned. "I can't believe the post office delivered those."

"It isn't their job to censor your mail for you. For all the post office knows, you had your name legally changed to Asshole. I mean, people have done stupider things." She gave him a saccharine smile and went back to her desk.

"Thanks, Darlene. Your support means so much."

She laughed and winked at him.

The weather had turned horrendous. The temperature on the bank sign read 104.3, and with the high humidity, it felt like twice that. A mad sun beat down out of a white-hot, merciless sky in which not even the smallest of clouds survived, and it melted tar on the road and set up shimmering mirages that reflected from the pavement, from the trunks of cars ahead of him in traffic, from sidewalks. The air conditioner in the Mustang wasn't working, and driving with the windows open felt like sitting in front of a blast furnace.

When he got home, he found Meg in her car, which she'd parked under a cluster of dogwoods. She had the seat tilted back, eyes closed, air conditioner running. He rapped on the window.

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. She had a pretty smile. It lighted up her ordinary face, and made her almost radiant. She swung the car door open and slid out. "Hi, you."

"Hi, yourself. You take off early?"

"I figured that since I had good news, I should. Besides, today was a slow day. I only had two clients scheduled and one of them canceled out on me at the last minute. She decided she didn't want that divorce after all, I guess."

Dan picked her up and swung her around, hugging her close to his chest as he did. Their skin stuck, their damp clothes clung to themselves and each other, and their foreheads and upper lips beaded with sweat. Meg laughed. Dan liked her laugh. It had just a hint of looniness, and there was nothing artful or artificial about it. Her laugh was rather like the rest of Meg, in fact.

He put her down. "So what's your good news?"

"Two things. The ACLU has decided to go ahead with the antidiscrimination suit for the Hellraised. My friend at the office called me today; she told me not to expect quick results, of course."

"Of course. That's terrific. And the second thing?"

"The consortium has reviewed the Devil's Point plan and has agreed that it's a worthwhile project, and they've met with representatives from Satco, and have already negotiated a deal whereby they purchase the land with Satco's money and for their work they'll not only get a handsome immediate return but stock and shares in Devil's Point itself." Meg made a little face at that. "I have to say that I didn't care much for the attitude of the fallen angels and devils who did the negotiating. And they came with so many of their own lawyers . . ." Her gaze took on a faraway look for an instant, and she shivered. "There but for the grace of God . . ." she said.

"Not so," he said. "Those weren't people who ended up in Hell accidentally, and they aren't people who would have to stay there. They have a choice—they are where they choose to be. People consciously choose evil in their lives—their crummy childhoods and evil parents don't make them evil. They, and you and I, become what we wish to be."

Meg looked up at him. "That's an odd attitude for someone who's trying to help the Hellraised out of Hell."

"I think you can show people that life can be different than it is, and that it can be better, but you can't make their decisions for them."

Meg stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. "You're probably right."

"I'm certainly right." He looked down at Meg and frowned. He was forgetting something. "Oh. Shit. My mail. I've got to get my mail."

"I came to get my male, " Meg said, giving his shirt a little tug, "and since Puck and his friend are still tied up with the consortium, I'd like to see if I could tempt you upstairs for just a . . . quickie."

Francie tugged at Dan's mind, but he forced himself to not think about her. He said, "By all means. Tempt away. But would you mind tempting me someplace that isn't so frigging humid?"

They ran up the stairs together, hand in hand.

***

When the explosion blew in Dan's bedroom window an hour later, luck alone saved them from serious injury. Meg, in the windowless bathroom washing up, missed everything but the noise and the pressure that blew the bathroom door open. Dan, with a bad case of postcoital munchies, had been standing in the kitchen going through the freezer and trying to find any sort of ice cream that the damned devil hadn't scarfed. The boxes of Drumsticks and Frosty-Pops and cartons of chocolate and vanilla ice cream (Dan refused to buy anything with a stupid name like Cookie Dough Crunch on general principle) were still in the freezer, but all of them were empty. He'd just finished wishing the devil back into Hell when the earth shook, glass shattered, and a roar like a freight train erased the mundane sounds of life as it had been.

In the bathroom, Meg screamed. He ran to help, but stopped as soon as he opened his bedroom door. The floor glittered with knives of glass. The waterbed sparkled, and thin sprays of water shot straight into the air from the places where tiny glass spears stuck through the sheet and into the vinyl.

He looked around for something to put on his feet, raced back to the entryway closet, and pulled out a pair of sneakers. Then he ran across the bedroom floor and skidded to a halt in the master bathroom doorway. Meg crouched in the still-full tub, her arms over her head. "Meg! Are you okay?"

"What was that?"

"I don't know yet, but it threw glass all across the room and punched holes in the bed. If we'd still been in it, it would have punched holes in us, too."

Meg stared up at him. "What happened?"

Dan shrugged. "Don't know. Stay there. I'll get you some clothes and shoes from my closet. Your stuff is covered in glass."

He got her a T-shirt and some sweatpants and another pair of his sneakers. When she'd dressed, she looked like a little kid playing dress-up in her father's clothes. Dan put on underwear, jeans and a T-shirt, too. Then the two of them crept to the window, keeping low in case whatever had caused the destruction wasn't done yet. I "Oh, shit," he whispered. "My car!"

Parts of the Mustang still burned. Flames shot out of the windows from the charred interior. One door lay on the grass quadrant between two apartment buildings, and the other hung canted on broken hinges. A snow flurry of paper turned the ground white for a hundred yards in all directions. People were running everywhere.

"Where did all the paper come from?" he wondered, and as soon as he did, he knew. "Someone tried to kill me," he said. He stared at Meg. "Someone tried to kill me! Someone mailed me a bomb. He wanted to . . ."

Dan felt light-headed. Queasy. He couldn't seem to catch his breath, and his lips began to tingle. The room spun, and at that moment Meg said, "Oh, no you don't." She grabbed his arm and dragged him out to the couch and made him sit with his head between his legs until he could breathe again.

By that time, Dan could hear the sirens in the distance. He stood, still feeling weak and sick, and told Meg, "Let's go. We need to tell someone what happened. And we need to see if anyone else is hurt."

He ran out his door and down the stairs. The stink of acrid, synthetic-scented smoke filled his lungs and burned his eyes. He coughed and kept going; he saw a knot of people clustered near his car and felt a sudden sick dread. Someone had been hurt. Someone had been killed by the blast, shattered, splattered across cars and concrete, torn, hurled down . . .

He pushed his way through the people, found a man kneeling in the center of the circle, and he realized his worst fears were true. A woman lay, bloody, shredded, unbreathing, while the man did CPR. Filling the lungs with air, pressing on the chest.

Dead because of me, Dan thought. Dead because I brought this danger here.

The ambulance pulled into the parking lot and its lights, flashing red and white, cast shadows in daylight. The paramedics swung out of their front doors, ran to the back, and a second later forced their way through the crowd, pushing a stretcher with a box of supplies on top. A young woman with pale hair, broad shoulders, a narrow waist, mid-twenties, confident swagger; an equally young man, blank-eyed as a war veteran coming up out of the trenches. They knelt by the man doing CPR. Dan couldn't hear what they said, but the man nodded and moved back. The ambulance's EMT team checked the victim's pulse and looked for breathing. The female rescuer took a tube and a metal cylinder and pried the woman's jaws open and slid the tube down her throat. The other rescuer had cut through her shirt and was attaching sticky circles to her chest and hooking them up to some sort of heart monitor. Police arrived and started clearing the bystanders, and the man who'd done the initial rescuing stood and backed away with the crowd. His blood-smeared face and hands made him look like another victim. Dan started to work his way toward the other man, when the man glanced over at Dan and smiled a weary, sad smile. Dan looked into his eyes and froze at what he saw.

Pale yellow-gold eyes. Square pupils.

Puck.

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