فصل 02 - بخش 05

2

Halfway back to Flint City, Ralph finally realized what had been bugging him about the bra strap.

He pulled into the two-acre lot of a Byron’s Liquor Warehouse, and hit speed-dial. His call went to Yune’s voicemail. Ralph broke the connection without leaving a message. Yune had already gone above and beyond; let him have his weekend. And now that he had time to give it a little thought, Ralph decided this was a confluence he didn’t want to share with anyone, except maybe his wife.

The bra strap hadn’t been the only bright yellow thing he had seen during those moments of hyper-vigilance before Terry was shot; it was just his brain’s stand-in for something that had been part of the larger gallery of grotesques, and overshadowed by Ollie Peterson, who had drawn the old revolver from his newspaper bag only seconds later. No wonder it had gotten lost.

The man with the horrible burns on his face and the tattoos on his hands had been wearing a yellow bandanna on his head, probably to cover more scars. But had it been a bandanna? Couldn’t it have been something else? The missing shirt, for instance? The one Terry had been wearing in the train station?

I’m reaching, he thought, and maybe he was … except his subconscious (those thoughts behind his thoughts) had been yelling at him about it all along.

He closed his eyes and tried to summon up exactly what he’d seen in those last few seconds of Terry’s life. The blond anchor’s unlovely sneer as she looked at the blood on her fingers. The hypodermic sign reading MAITLAND TAKE YOUR MEDICINE. The boy with the bad lip. The woman leaning forward to give Marcy the finger. And the burned man who’d looked as if God had taken a giant eraser to most of his features, leaving only lumps, raw pink skin, and holes where a nose had been before the fire had put tattoos on his face far fiercer than those on his hands. And what Ralph saw in this moment of recall was not a bandanna on that man’s head but something far bigger, something that hung all the way down to his shoulders like a headdress.

Yes, that something could have been a shirt … but even if it was, did that mean it was the shirt? The one Terry had been wearing in the security footage? Was there a way to find out?

He thought there was, but he needed to enlist Jeannie, who was far more computer-savvy than he was. Also, the time might have come to stop thinking of Howard Gold and Alec Pelley as enemies. Maybe we’re all on the same side here, Pelley had said last night as he stood on the Maitland stoop, and maybe that was true. Or could be.

Ralph put his car in gear and headed home, pushing the speed limit all the way.