F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 Read Free

and begin thinking.”
    “Let me tell you what
I
am thinking, John
Vanduyne,” she said—and using his first and last name meant she was
really annoyed. “I am thinking it is a good thing you are only renting
this house. Because your old friend Tommy Winston is going to be chased back to Georgia very
soon, along with everyone he brought with him.”
    “I am thinking you could be
right,” John said.
     
4
     
    The inbound traffic along Massachusetts
Avenue seemed heavier than usual, giving John
extra time to check out what the wonderful world of talk radio had to say about
Tom’s address to the nation last night. He hit scan and let his tuner
skip up the dial. Almost immediately he heard Tom’s voice.
    “… so we’ve been
attacking the problem with the full force of all the federal government’s
law enforcement agencies and all the local police departments for a quarter of
a century now, and where has it gotten us? We’ve spent three-quarters of
a trillion dollars, jailed hundreds of thousands of people, but have we solved
the problem? No. It’s worse. Are the streets any safer now after all these
hundreds of billions of dollars? No. They are not. So what’s the
solution? More of the same… ?” He moved on, stopping whenever he
heard an angry voice.
    Which was often.
    Everyone was shocked, but not
everyone was enraged. Howard Stern seemed to think it was a great idea, long
overdue; Imus didn’t seem to know what to think.
    But the call-in shows presented a
chorus of condemnation from everywhere on the political spectrum: right, left,
and center.
    “Tommy, Tommy,” he said
softly. “What have you done?” As he crawled downtown, John’s
mind tuned out the radio. His thoughts drifted back to his boyhood and all the
years he had spent with the kid from the neighboring farm. From grammar school
in Freemantle through Georgia State ,
Tommy and he had been inseparable.
    The things they did… God,
they were lucky to have survived.
    Both were reckless, assuming like
most kids that they were immortal and serious harm happened to other
kids—ones who weren’t quite as smart and agile as they—but
Tommy had always had more of the daredevil in him. Always Tommy who thought up
the most outrageous stunts.
    John remembered the time he
discovered he could drive his car down the wall of the sand pit outside town.
The pit’s walls looked steep and sheer, but one night when he was seeing
how close he could get to the edge with his old wreck of a Chevy—a junker
that was ready for the scrap heap—he got too close and the car began
sliding down the incline. To his relief, the walls were soft and slowed his
progress. He made it to the bottom in one piece and was able to drive out the
other side. He picked up Tom and damn near scared the crap out of him by
driving up to and over the edge.
    Which gave Tom a wonderful idea.
The next night they got Eddie Hennessy, one tough s.o.b., in the back seat and
went cruising through the woods, supposedly looking for parkers to spook. While
they were driving, Tom bemoaned the fact that Bonnie Littlefield had left him
for another, and how miserable he was, and how he didn’t see much point
in going on living. He timed his despair so that it reached its deepest point
as they approached the sand pit. With a shout of “Shit! I can’t go
on without her!” he wrenched the wheel to the right and went over the
edge of the pit.
    Well, Eddie Hennessy went into a
bug-eyed panic in the back of the car. He lunged forward, reached over the
front seat, and wrapped his arms around Tom’s face and neck, shouting
that he didn’t want to die and screaming, “Mama! Mama!” John
was laughing so hard he nearly wet himself, not realizing that Tom
couldn’t see a damn thing with Eddie’s arms wrapped around his
face. He lost control of the car; it slewed sideways and toppled over. Rolled
three times before it came to a stop at the bottom of the pit. No seat belts on
any of them, but somehow they