“Maybe this will thin out the crowd in front of the house,” Gregor said, to Luis as much as to anybody.
“Nah,” Luis said. “They put up with anything. Fire. Rain. Flood. Tornadoes. This is what they do. This is what they’re famous for. They always get the story.”
“Right,” Gregor said. He went back to the phone and searched through his change for another couple of quarters. He dialed the police department and waited. A woman’s voice answered and didn’t sound happy about it.
“This is the police department,” she said. “If you’re a reporter you can just hang up and talk to yourself, because I’m not going to talk to you.”
Gregor explained who he was. He knew that voice. It belonged to the woman he had met in the department the first time he’d met Kyle Borden.
“Oh,” she said. “All right. What do you want?”
“Kyle Borden,” Gregor said.
“He isn’t in yet. I did call him. And I called Ben Shed-man, too, he should be here. Nobody’s here except me.”
“Is Kyle Borden coming in?” Gregor asked.
“As soon as he can get here,” Sharon Morobito said.
The rain outside was coming down in sheets. The thunder sounded like mortar fire. The lightning streaked and rattled, lighting up the sky more often than leaving it dark. If those reporters didn’t get off the Toliver lawn, one of them was going to get electrocuted.
“When Kyle comes in, tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Gregor said. “If I were you, I wouldn’t let any of them into the station house if you can help it.”
“Well, I can’t help it, can I? It’s a public building. The doors opened to the public half an hour ago.”
“I’ll be in as soon as I can,” Gregor said. Then he hung up. Now there was a thought: dozens of reporters from every single one of the national magazines and important newspapers, crowding the waiting area at the Hollman Police Department.
Gregor got out his phone card and called Cavanaugh Street. He tried his own number, and then Bennis’s, and then Tibor’s. Nobody was home. He wanted to scream.
Instead, he swept the rest of his change into the palm of his hand, put it back in his pocket, and went over to where Luis was once again sitting in a plastic chair, only inside this time instead of out.
“I guess we’d better go out to the house and make sure they all get away the way they’re supposed to,” he said. “Then I’d appreciate it if you’d drive me into the police department. They’re having a little disturbance over there this morning, too.”
“Foreigners,” one of the other men in the plastic chairs said solemnly.
Luis got up. Out in the wind and the rain, a siren sounded. A moment later, an ambulance went hurtling by with its lights all flashing and its noise cranked up as far as it would go.
Gregor was relieved. No matter what else did or didn’t manage to get done, there would at least be this—unless, of course, the ambulance managed to crash before it got to the house.
3
At first, Gregor thought he would have to go all the way back to the Toliver house to make sure Jimmy and Liz and the boys got away as they needed to, and that the ambulance for Liz’s mother actually got hold of Liz’s mother. In the end, he hadn’t had to go to that kind of trouble. It was a good thing, because he was as tense as he could ever remember being. It was the lack of logic and of linear thought that got to him. He hated states of unalloyed chaos, where decisions seemed to be made on the basis of hysteria or on no basis at all. He couldn’t believe that any of the photographers trying to storm the Toliver home were thinking, logically or otherwise. At least some of them had to realize they were a disaster waiting to happen. He hated sitting in the gas station, listening to the men on the plastic chairs talk about local sports and national politics. He hated the rain, which was not letting up. At half past nine, when Jimmy Card’s driver pulled in to the garage’s parking lot to tell Gregor he was headed out to the house, the rain was coming down just as hard as it had been when Gregor had first called the police department. It was hard not to think about Noah and the forty days and forty nights. It was hard not to think about floods.
At quarter to ten, Jimmy Card’s driver came back by the gas station, blowing his horn in three hard, sharp bursts, to let Gregor know that everything had gone well at the house and there was no need for him to return there to check on the inhabitants. Gregor watched as a dozen cars crowded up so close to the limousine’s rear that there would have been a multicar pileup if Jimmy’s driver had done as much as stop short at a traffic light. Then he went back to Luis and asked to be taken into town to the police station.