actual commission of the crime. But as he left the knoll and headed
toward the houses to the southwest, where he had parked his car on a
quiet street, he felt no elation, no thrill. He was losing the ability
to take delight in even the contemplation of a crime.
He was changing. And he did not know why.
As he drew near the first houses to the southwest of the knoll, he
became aware that the night had grown brighter. He looked up. The moon
swelled fat on the horizon, so huge it seemed to be crashing to earth,
an illusion of enormousness created by the odd perspective of the early
stages of the satellite's ascension. He stopped abruptly and stood with
his head tilted back, staring up at the luminous lunar surface. A chill
seized him, an inner iciness unrelated to the winter cold.
"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 Becks 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, ther
e 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 winddriven 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 wildiands 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.
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."
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?"
"Sure. I guess he felt for a pulse ... then checked around to see
where the bleeding was coming from."
"Well, did you feel anything ... anything unusual when he touched you
... anything odd?" Stefan asked carefully, frustrated by the need to be
vague.
"I don't seem to be following your line of thought, Father."
Stefan Wycazik shook his head. "Never mind. The important thing is
that you're well." He glanced at his watch and, feigning surprise, said,
"Good heavens, I'm late for an appointment." Before they could respond,
he snatched his hat from the chair, wished them godspeed, and hurried
out, no doubt leaving them astonished by his behavior.
When people saw Father Wycazik walking toward them, they were usually
reminded of drill sergeants or football coaches. His solid body and the
self-confident, aggressive way he used it were not what one expected of
a priest. And when he was in a hurry, he was not so much like a drill
sergeant or a football coach as he was like a tank.
From Tolk's room, Father Wycazik blitzed down the hall, shoved through a
pair of heavy swinging doors, then through another pair, into the
intensive care unit, where the wounded policeman had been until just an
hour ago. He asked to speak to the physician on duty, Dr. Royce
Albright. With the hope that God would forgive a few little white lies
told in a good cause, Stefan identified himself as the Tolk family's
priest and implied that Mrs. Tolk had sent him to get the full story of
her husband's condition, about which she was not yet entirely clear.
Dr. Albright looked like Jerry Lewis and had a deep rumbling voice like
Henry Kissinger, which was disconcerting, but he was willing to answer
whatever questions Father Wycazik wished to pose. He was not Winton
Tolk's personal physician, but he was interested in the case. "You can
assure Mrs. Tolk that there's almost no danger of a setback. He's
coming along marvelously. Shot twice in the chest, pointblank, with a
.38. Until yesterday, no one here would've believed that anyone could
take two shots in the chest from a large-caliber handgun and be out of
intensive care in twentyfour hours! Mr. Tolk is incredibly lucky."
"The bullets missed the heart, then . . . and all vital organs?"
"Not only that," Albright said, "but neither round did major damage to
any veins or arteries. A .38-caliber slug has lots of punch, Father.
Ordinarily, it chews up the victim. In Tolk's case, one major artery
and vein were nicked, but neither was severed. Very fortunate, indeed."