He also knew at once that the trouble on O'Bannon Lane was not merely
coincidental. Something was happening at the Sharkle house.
In spite of temperatures in the mid-twenties and wind gusting to thirty
miles an hour, a crowd of about a hundred had gathered outside the
police barricade-on the sidewalks and on the lawns of the corner houses.
Passing traffic on Scott Avenue was slowed by gawkers, and Stefan had to
drive almost two blocks at a frustratingly slow pace before he found a
parking space.
When he walked back to the crowd and became part of it, seeking
information from the well-bundled onlookers, Father Wycazik found that
they were for the most part a friendly and strangely excited group. But
creepy, too. Not blatantly weird. In fact, they were ordinary
people-except for their totally insensitive fascination with the tragedy
unfolding before them, as if it were as legitimate a source of thrills
as a football game.
It was definitely a tragedy, and one of a particularly horrible nature,
which Father Wycazik discovered a minute after he joined the crowd and
began to ask questions. A florid-faced, mustachioed man in a plaid
hunting jacket and toboggan hat said, "Jesus, man, don't you watch the
goddamned TV?" He was not the least restrained because he did not know
he was talking to a priest; Stefan's topcoat and scarf concealed all
evidence of his holy office. "Christ, fella, that's Sharkle down there.
Sharkle the Shark, man. That's what they're callin' him. Guy's a
dangerous loony. Been sealed up in his house there since yesterday,
man. He shot him two of his neighbors and one cop already, and he's got
him two goddamn hostages who, if you ask me, got about as much chance as
a fuckin' cat at a Doberman convention."
Tuesday morning, via Pacific Southwest Airlines, Parker Faine flew into
San Francisco from Orange County, then caught a connecting West Air
flight to Monterey. It was an hour's trip up the California coast on
PSA, a one-hour layover in San Francisco, and then only thirty-five
minutes to Monterey. The journey seemed shorter because one of the
other travelers, a pretty young woman, recognized his name, liked his
paintings, and was in the mood to be enthralled by his burly charms.
In Monterey, at the small airport rental agency, he hired a vomit-green
Ford Tempo. It was an offense to his refined sense of color.
The Tempo's tempo was satisfyingly allegro on flat roads but a bit
adagio on the hills. Nevertheless, he required less than half an hour
to find the address Dom had given him for Gerald Salcoe, the man who had
stayed at the Tranquility Motel with his wife and two daughters on the
night of July 6, and who had thus far been unreachable by both phone and
Western Union. It was a big Southern Colonial manor house, hideously
out of place on the California coast, set on a prime half-acre, in the
shade of massive pines, with enough elaborately tended shrubbery to
employ a gardener one full day a week, including beds of impatiens that
blazed with red and purple flowers even now, in January.
Parker swung the Tempo into the majestic circular driveway and parked in
front of broad, flower-bordered steps that led up to a deep pillared
veranda. In the shadows of the trees, there was sufficient gloom to
require lights indoors, but he saw none at the front windows. All of
the drapes were tightly shut, and the house had a vacant look.
He got out of the Tempo, hurried up the steps, and crossed the wide
veranda, voicing his objection to the chilly air as he went: "Brrrrrrr."
The area's usual morning fog had cleared from the airport, permitting
landings, but it was still clinging to this part of the peninsula,
bearding the pines, weaving tendrils between their trunks, muting the
impatiens' brilliant blooms. Winter in northern California was a more
bracing season than in Laguna Beach, and with the added damp chill of
fog, it was not at all to Parker's taste. He had come dressed for it,
however, in heavy corduroy slacks, a green-plaid flannel shirt, a green
pullover that mocked Izod-Lacoste by featuring a goofy-looking appliqudd
armadillo on the breast instead of an alligator, and a
three-quarter-length navy peacoat with sergeant's stripes on one sleeve:
quite an outfit, especially when accented by Day-Glo-orange running
shoes. As he rang the doorbell, Parker looked down at himself and
decided that maybe sometimes he dressed too eccentrically, even for an
artist.
He rang the doorbell six times, waiting half a minute between each ring,
but no one came.
Last night, when a man named Jack Twist had called him at eleven o'clock
from a pay phone in Elko, claiming to have a message from Dom, and had
asked him to go to a specific pay phone in Laguna for a callback in
twenty minutes, Parker had still been working on a new and exciting
painting that he had begun at three o'clock that afternoon.
Nevertheless, deeply involved as he was with the work, he had hastened
to the booth as directed. And he had agreed to the trip to Monterey
without hesitation. The fact was that he had plunged into work as a
means of taking his mind off Dom and the unfolding events in Elko
County, for that was where he really wanted to be, neck-deep in the
mystery. When Twist told him about Dom's and the priest's psychic
demonstration-floating salt and pepper shakers, levitating
chairs!-nothing short of World War III could have prevented Parker from
going to Monterey. And now he was not going to be defeated by an empty
house. Wherever the Salcoes were, he would find them, and the best place
to start was with the neighbors.
Because of the half-acre lots and walls of intervening shrubbery, he
could not easily walk next door. Back in the Tempo, as he put the car
in gear, he glanced at the house again, and at first he thought he saw
movement at one of the downstairs windows: a slightly parted drape
falling back into place. He sat for a moment, staring, then decided the
movement had been a trick of fog and shadows. He popped the handbrake
and drove around the second half of the circular driveway, out to the
street, delighted to be playing spy again.
Ernie and Dom parked the Jeep Cherokee at the end of the county road,
and the pickup with the tinted windshield halted two hundred yards
behind them. Perched on its high allterrain tires, with goggle-eyed
spotlights on its roof, it looked (Dom thought) like a big insect poised
alertly on the downsloping lane, ready to skitter toward a hidey-hole if
it saw someone with a giant economy-size can of Raid. The driver did
not get out, nor did the passenger, if there was one.
"Think there's going to be trouble here?" Dom asked, getting out of the
Cherokee and joining Ernie at the side of the road.
"If they'd meant trouble, they'd already have made it," Ernie said. His
breath steamed in the frigid air. "If they want to tag along and watch,
that's all right by me. To hell with them."
They got two hunting rifles-a Winchester Model 94 carbine loaded with
&
nbsp; .32 special cartridges, and a .30/06 Springfield-from the back of the
Jeep Cherokee, handling the weapons conspicuously in the hope that the
men in the pickup would be encouraged to remain peaceable by the
realization that their quarry could fight back.
The mountain still rose on the western side of the lane, and forest
still clothed those slopes. But the land that fell away to the east had
become a broad treeless field, the northern end of the series of meadows
that lay along the valley wall.
Although snow had not yet begun to fall, the wind was picking up. Dom
was thankful for the winter clothes he had purchased in Reno, but he
wished he had an insulated ski suit like Ernie was wearing. And a pair
of those rugged laceup boots instead of the flimsy zippered pair he now
wore. Later today, Ginger and Faye would stop at a sporting-goods store
in Elko with a list of gear needed for tonight's operation, including
suitable clothes for Dom and everyone else who did not already have
them. At the moment, however, the insistent wind found entrance at
Dom's coat collar and at the unelasticized cuffs of his sleeves.
Leaving the Cherokee, he and Ernie went over the side of the road, down
into the sloping meadow, continuing their inspection of the Thunder Hill
perimeter on foot. The high, electrified chainlink fence with the
barbed-wire overhang led out of the trees farther back; it ceased to
parallel the northward course of the county road, turning east and down
toward the valley floor. The snow in the meadow was ten inches deep,
but still below the tops of their boots. They slogged two hundred yards
to a point along the fence from which they could see, in the distance,
the enormous steel blast doors set in the side of the valley wall.
Dom saw no signs of human or canine guards. The snow on the other side
of the fence was not marked by footprints or pawprints, which meant no
one walked the perimeter on a regular schedule.
'A place like this, they're not going to be sloppy," Ernie said. "So if
there aren't any foot patrols, there must be one hell of a lot of
electronic security on the other side of this fence."
Dom had been glancing toward the top of the meadow, a little worried
that the men in the all-terrain truck might be up to something with the
Cherokee. This time, when he looked back, he saw a man in dark clothes,
starkly silhouetted against the snow. The guy wasn't around the
Cherokee and seemed to have no interest in it, but he had come down from
the edge of the county road, descending a few yards into the inclined
meadow. He was standing up there, unmoving, maybe a hundred and eighty
yards above Dom and Ernie, watching them.
Ernie noticed the observer, too. He tucked his Winchester under his
right arm and lifted the binoculars he had been carrying on a strap
around his neck. "He's Army. At least that looks like a regulation
Army greatcoat he's wearing. Just watching us."
"You'd think they'd be more discreet."
"Can't follow anyone discreetly, not in these wide-open spaces. Might
as well be forthright. Besides, he wants us to see what he's carrying,
so we'll know our rifles don't worry him."
"What do you mean?" Dom asked. "What's he carrying?"
"A Belgian FN submachine gun. Damn fine weapon. It can fire up to six
hundred rounds a minute."
If Father Wycazik had watched television news, he would have heard about
Calvin Sharkle last night, for the man had been a hot story for
twenty-four hours. However, he'd stopped watching TV news years ago,
for he'd decided that its relentless simplification of every story into
stark black and white issues was intellectually corrupt and that its
gleeful concentration on violence, sex, gloom, and despair was morally
repellent. He also might have read about the tragedy on O'Bannon Lane
on the front pages of this morning's Tribune and Sun-Times, but he had
left the rectory in such a ' hurry that he'd had no time for newspapers.
Now he pieced the story together from information provided by those in
the crowd behind the police barricades.
For months, Cal Sharkle had been acting . . . odd. Ordi narily
cheerful and pleasant, a bachelor who lived alone and was well-liked by
everyone on O'Bannon Lane, he'd become a brooder, dour and even grim. He
told neighbors he had "a bad feeling about things," and believed
something "important and terrible is going to happen." He read
survivalist books and magazines, and talked about Armageddon. And he
was plagued by vivid nightmares.
December first, he quit trucking, sold his rig, and told neighbors and
relatives the end was imminent. He wanted to sell his house, buy remote
property in the mountains, and build a retreat like those he had seen in
the survivalist magazines. "But there isn't time," he told his sister,
Nan Gilchrist. "So I'll just prepare this house for a siege." He didn't
know what was going to happen, did not understand the source of his own
invasion, economic collapse, or anything else that alarmed most
survivalists. "I don't know what . . . but something strange and
horrible is going to happen," he told his sister.
Mrs. Gilchrist made him see a doctor, who found him fit, suffering only
from job-related stress. But after Christmas, Calvin's previously
garrulous nature gave way to a closedmouth suspicion. During the first
week of January, he had his phone disconnected, cryptically explaining:
"Who knows how they'll get at us when they come? Maybe they can do it
over the phone." He was unable or unwilling to identify "they."
No one considered Cal really dangerous. He had been a peaceful,
kind-hearted man all his life. In spite of his new eccentric behavior,
there was no reason to think he would turn violent.
Then, yesterday morning at eight-thirty, Cal visited the Wilkersons, the
family across the street, with whom he had once been close but from whom
he had recently kept his distance. Edward Wilkerson told reporters that
Cal said, "Listen, I can't be selfish about this. I'm all prepared, and
here you are defenseless. So when they come for us, Ed, it'll be okay
if you and your family hide out at my place." When Wilkerson asked who
"they" were, Cal said, "Well, I don't know what they'll look like, or
what they'll call themselves. But they're going to do something bad to
us, maybe turn us into zombies." Cal Sharkle assured Wilkerson that he
had plenty of guns and ammunition in his house and had taken steps to
make a fortress of the place.
Alarmed by talk of weapons and shootouts, Wilkerson had humored Cal and,
as soon as the man left, had called his sister. Nan Gilchrist had
arrived at half-past-ten with her husband and had told a worried
Wilkerson that she would handle it, that she was sure she could persuade
Cal to enter the hospital for observation. But after she and Mr.
Gilchrist went into the house, Ed Wilkerson decided they might need some
backup, so he and another neighbor, Frank Krelky, went to the Sharkle
; house to provide what assistance they could.
Wilkerson expected Mr. or Mrs. Gilchrist to answer the bell, but Cal
himself came to the door. He was distraught, nearly hysterical-and
armed with a .20-gauge semiautomatic shotgun. He accused his neighbors
of being zombies already. "You've been changed, " he shouted at
Wilkerson and Krelky. "Oh God, I should've seen it. I should've known.
When did it happen, when'd you stop being human? My God, now you've
come to get us all in one swoop." Then, with a wail of terror, he opened
fire with the shotgun. The first blast took Krelky in the throat at
such close range that it decapitated him. Wilkerson ran, was hit in the
legs as he reached the end of Sharkle's front walk, fell, rolled, and
played dead, a ruse that saved his life.
Now Krekly was in the morgue, and Wilkerson was in the hospital in good
enough condition to talk to reporters.
And Father Wycazik was at the entrance to O'Bannon Lane, where a young
man in the crowd behind the police line was eager to fill in the last of
it for him. The man's name was Roger Hasterwick, a "temporarily
unemployed beverage concoctionist," which Stefan suspected was an
out-of-work bartender. He had a disturbing gleam in his eyes that might
have been a sign of intoxication, drug use, lack of sleep, psychopathy,
or all four, but his information was detailed and apparently accurate:
"So, see, the cops close the block, evacuate the people out their
houses, then they try to talk with this Sharkle the Shark. But he don't
have a phone, see, and when they use a bullhorn, he won't answer them.
The cops figure his sister and brotherin-law are in there alive,
hostages, so nobody wants to do nothin' rash."
"Wise," Father Wycazik said bleakly, feeling even colder than the winter
day in which he stood.