A Stillness in Bethlehem(110)

“It’s Betty Heath,” Kelley Grey said suddenly in his ear. “I wonder what’s going on. I wonder what she’s so upset about.”

“He grabbed her shoulder,” someone in the crowd said.

Timmy Hall was bellowing and scratching like an animal. “LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR,” he roared, and it was an awful sound, a sound that seemed to contain an echo of itself. That was when Gregor noticed the mood of the people around him, the same mood he’d picked up the one or two times he’d stumbled onto cockfights, the will to see blood. He saw Franklin Morrison at the edge of the crowd and started toward him.

“Good,” Franklin said when Gregor turned up. “I’ve got Lee out there but I could use some help. Go get Stuart Ketchum for me.”

“Stuart Ketchum? You mean you want me to drive out to the farm?”

“Over there.” Franklin pointed. Gregor saw Stuart Ketchum, looking as tensely alert as if he’d still been on sentry duty in the Mekong Delta, standing next to a small, furious woman with a look on her face as wild as the ones in drawings from the French Revolution. Madame Guillotine.

“Dear Jesus Christ,” Gregor said. “What’s going on around here?”

“Gossip,” Franklin Morrison said grimly. “Gossip all over town for weeks now that Timmy Hall is Tommy Hare and guilty of God knows what, and now they’re scared and they’re not thinking, they’re just looking for a blood sacrifice. I’m going to get Peter Callisher. Between the five of us—you and me and Lee and Stuart and Peter—we ought to be able to get Timmy out of here.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“All they need is torches,” Franklin said.

A big old man came up between them and grabbed Franklin by the shoulders, hard. “Lock the bastard up!” he screamed into Franklin’s face, and Gregor could smell the beer. “Lock the bastard up. What are you anyway, Morrison, some kind of jellyfish queer? What are you anyway—”

“That’s enough,” Peter Callisher said, coming up behind the big man and grabbing him even harder than he was grabbing Franklin Morrison. Peter had an advantage, because Peter wasn’t drunk. Peter got the man off-balance and pitched him back into the crowd.

“You all right?” he asked Franklin.

Franklin was shaking. “I’m fine,” he said. “I was just going to find you. Mr. Demarkian here is going around the circle to get Stuart.”

“Good idea.”

“What happened out here?” Gregor asked them. “How did this get started?”

Peter Callisher exploded. “It was that damned fool woman, Betty Heath. Timmy came up behind her just wanting to know if she wanted help carrying this bag she had—I don’t know what happened to the bag, she doesn’t have it now—and when she didn’t hear him ask, he tapped her on the shoulder and all hell broke loose. God, people have been crazy all day. You’d better get Stu, Mr. Demarkian. We’re going to have to get them both out of here and it isn’t going to be easy.”

“Both?” Franklin Morrison asked.

“Amanda’s over on that side against the wall ready to tear to shreds anybody who tries to lay a finger on him. And she’s small. You know how that will end.”

“Go get Stuart,” Franklin Morrison said.

Gregor went to get Stuart. It helped that Stuart hadn’t moved since Gregor had first seen him, even though many of the people in the crowd had. In fact, there was suddenly a lot of movement all around him, and not only of the physical kind. “Riots,” his old instructor at Quantico had told him, all those many years ago, “are a matter of emotion.” He knew what the old man had meant. The emotions here were shifting. They were not shifting in the right direction. The crowd had been in an ugly humor when Gregor first came out of the Inn. It was now turning vicious.

He came up to Stuart Ketchum and tapped him on the shoulder, very gently, not wanting to set one more person off. Stuart was in far too rigid a state of control to be set off.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said.

“I’ve come as an emissary from Franklin Morrison,” Gregor told him. “Mr. Morrison wants your help.”

“I’ll bet he does.”

“You mean you won’t give it?”

Stuart Ketchum brushed this off, as if it were a stupid suggestion, which Gregor admitted it probably was. Then Stuart began to ease out toward the center of the circle, very carefully, trying not to be too obvious. Gregor thought he knew what Stuart was going to do. He was going to enter the circle’s almost empty center, and he didn’t want to do it in such a way as to start a surge. It would be far too easy to start a surge. Gregor caught sight of Franklin Morrison and Peter Callisher and Lee Greenwood. They had maneuvered their way around the edges of the circle until they were standing nearly opposite the Green Mountain Inn, in that place where they had the least room to move and the least chance of escape. The problem was, if they were going to get Timmy out, that was the only way they were going to do it. To pull him in any other direction would require bringing him past too many irrational people, with no place to stash him once he was through. Where Franklin and the rest were now standing there was a building, and a building meant rooms with doors that could be locked and windows that could be shortcutted through.