The road itself was nowhere near as clogged as it looked from the house. What seemed to be a sea of cars was broken in the middle by a thin ribbon of unobstructed road. Gregor was not comfortable navigating this ribbon, because he was sure he was going to sideswipe one of the parked cars, and that would mean a moral dilemma. He couldn’t very well get out and leave a note on the windshield with his name and address on it, but it wouldn’t feel right to just let it go.
This must be stress, Gregor thought, and then, just like that, he was past the cars. There was nothing around him but grass and trees and the occasional driveway that went nowhere, since there were no houses in sight. He sped up and decided that that wasn’t too bad. He did not feel completely out of control of the car just because he was doing thirty-five miles an hour. He kept his eyes on the right side of the road, where Andy’s was supposed to be. Part of him thought that he shouldn’t be able to miss it. There were so few buildings out here, Andy’s would surely stand out. Part of him thought that the garage would be hidden the way the houses were. You’d only be able to find it if you knew exactly where it was and exactly what to look for in the way of a driveway into the trees.
As it turned out, Andy’s was impossible to miss. It sat right on the road, in a big clearing, entirely surrounded by weather-beaten cars and trucks that looked as if they would never move again. Gregor had no idea if the vehicles were abandoned or in for repairs. He made his way carefully between them. The last thing he needed was to have escaped an accident at the house only to get into one here. There was an open space on the garage’s side. There was another open space near a chain-link fence at the back, straight ahead. Gregor took that one.
He got out of the car and looked around, and the first thing he saw was Luis sitting in a plastic chair at the garage’s open front door. Luis saw him a split second later, and stood up.
“Mr. Demarkian,” he said in a flat Queens accent that had nothing at all Hispanic about it. “Why didn’t you call me? Mr. Card said you didn’t know how to drive.”
In other circumstances, Gregor might have spent some time wondering at the fact that, after all this time, the man was actually able to talk. Under these circumstances, he just walked over to where Luis was standing and wished he’d brought an umbrella.
“I can’t,” he said. “At least, I haven’t driven in years. I didn’t kill anybody. There’s a little problem out at the house.”
He gave Luis a rundown on what was going on with Jimmy Card, Liz Toliver, and all the rest of the people in Stony Hill, and Luis nodded his way through the explanation, unfazed.
“Right,” he said. “We should have expected it. You should have seen what it was like when Mr. Card got divorced from Miss Handley. You want I should go out and pick the bunch of them up?”
“I think they want Mr. Card’s driver to do that,” Gregor said, “and they have to wait for the ambulance anyway. Is there a phone where I could—?”
“It’s a nuisance, not being able to use the cell phones.”
There was a pay phone just inside the garage’s office, hanging open on a wall, with not so much as a little perforated head barrier to make for privacy. Gregor got out the little card Liz Toliver had given him and all the change he could find and started dialing numbers. He dialed the doctor’s offices first, and was relieved to find that there was somebody actually on hand. He had no idea what he would have done if he’d gotten the answering service. He explained who he was and what the problem was and got a promise of an ambulance, as soon as possible, at the Toliver house.
“At least in this case, we don’t have to worry about the insurance,” the young woman on the other end of the line said, and then hung up, apparently not at all curious about reporters, cut phone lines, or rock and roll stars.
Gregor dialed the number of the hotel where Jimmy Card’s driver was staying. The phone in the room rang and rang without being picked up. He hung up himself, called the hotel back, and made a point of the fact that this was an emergency. If they didn’t believe it, they could turn on any television station. He had no idea if that were true, but he thought—given the insanity at the house—that there was a good chance it would be. In the end, he got Jimmy’s driver, fresh out of the shower, and told him what was going on.
“Right,” the man said. “Here we go again. Let me tell you, Mr. Demarkian, I’ve seen enough of it. I never want to be famous.”
Gregor declined to talk to him about it—although it would be an interesting speculation, whether the things you got from fame like this were worth what else you got with it—and hung up. Outside the garage’s big plate-glass front window, the rain was coming down hard. The sky was full of thunder and lightning. Luis had come inside, as had the three men who had been sitting in plastic chairs near Luis when Gregor first showed up. It was raining the way it did in hurricanes and floods.