A Stillness in Bethlehem(90)
Maybe it was fear of vulnerability and exposure that had made Jan-Mark Verek install his alarm. Whatever it had been must have been a powerful emotion. The alarm had been awful enough heard from the safety of Stuart Ketchum’s barnyard. Right here at the source, it was devastating. The warning of a nuclear attack would sound like this, Gregor told himself, if you weren’t listening to it on television. Gregor promised himself to watch more television in the future, just in case there was a nuclear attack. After hearing this thing, he much preferred spending his last moments with the Emergency Broadcast System.
Behind the wheel, Bennis Hannaford braked, put the car into park and then sat back, looking at the wall of glass and wincing.
“How long does that thing go on?” she demanded. “I mean, what’s he calling, the National Guard?”
“That isn’t his alarm,” Franklin Morrison explained. “He’s got one of those goes off automatically if somebody tries to break in, and he’s got another one that rings a fire alarm in the volunteer fire department building in town. This is his panic-button alarm.”
“That means he has to stand there and pull the damn thing himself,” Stuart Ketchum said.
“Does he do this often?” Bennis climbed out from behind the wheel and stood in the driveway, still looking up at the house.
Stuart Ketchum sighed into the back of Gregor Demarkian’s head and said, “Once every two or three months. That’s all. Just once every two or three months.”
“Once there was even an emergency,” Franklin Morrison said. “Bear sat down outside the door and wouldn’t move. Poor man didn’t have any way to get out of his house.”
“Man built a sensible house, he’d have a back door to get out of,” Stuart Ketchum said.
Gregor Demarkian got his door open and climbed out onto the gravel driveway. As he did, the noise suddenly and abruptly stopped, mid-bellow, and Bennis Hannaford raised her eyes to heaven.
“Hallelujah,” she cried. “I have been saved. Why did it go off?”
“Because Jan-Mark turned it off, of course,” Franklin Morrison said. He’d gotten out of the car, too, with Stuart Ketchum just behind him. He looked resigned and as tired as Gregor Demarkian ever wanted to see any man. “If Stuart here and Peter Callisher hadn’t been coming up the drive just after Tisha Verek got killed, Jan-Mark would probably have set that thing off then, but there you were, the cavalry had already arrived—”
“—like we were the cavalry, for God’s sake—”
“—and Jan-Mark doesn’t like to waste electricity. The only thing Jan-Mark likes to waste is breath, which he wastes a lot of, especially if he’s drinking. Maybe we ought to go up and knock on the door. Although what we’d knock on it for is beyond me. He’s got to know we’re here. All he’s got is windows.”
He also had to have a reason to shut off the alarm, but Gregor didn’t want to bring that up. Franklin had just said it and forgotten he’d said it, but everybody else had forgotten it, too, and maybe it didn’t matter. They were all tired. Gregor moved to the front of the house and the only thing that might conceivably be a door and looked around for a bell. There wasn’t one. He tried for an intercom. There wasn’t one of those, either. Finally, he knocked.
Gregor had expected a wait, some frustration, a few more futile volleys against the door: That’s what door systems like this one were designed to induce. Instead, he got an instantaneous creak and rattle, and the door pulled back in front of his face in no time at all.
On the other side of the door was a man who looked more like Stuart Ketchum’s description of him than seemed fair. Jan-Mark Verek was indeed a bull, complete with overdeveloped shoulders and short, thickly muscled legs. Jan-Mark Verek looked like Franklin Morrison’s description of him, too—meaning like Brooklyn. Gregor thought the man was more than a little crazy, possibly a borderline sociopath. He had that kind of light in his eyes, that kind of intensity in his every small movement. Jan-Mark Verek was an arresting presence no matter what he was doing, and what he was doing right this moment was just standing there.
A moment later he had backed up and bent over, bowing comically, to let them all in. “It’s you,” he said, sounding pleased. “The Great Detective. And all I was expecting was Stuart in a pissed-off mood.”
“You got Stuart in a pissed-off mood,” Stuart Ketchum said. “Why don’t you just pick up the phone and call me?”
“You’re always out in the yard shooting at cans. You’d never hear me.”