Along Came a Spider

about anything. I read some more about Styron’s bout with depression, until I could sleep. I had some dreams of my own.

CHAPTER 21

    C
AREFUL, be oh so careful now, Gary boy
. Gary Soneji watched the fat woman out of the extreme corner of his left eye. He watched the blubbery blob the way a lizard watches an insect — just before mealtime. She had no idea that he was studying her.
    She was a policewoman, so to speak, as well as a toll collector, at exit 12 on the turnpike. She slowly counted out his change. She was enormous, black as the night, completely out of it. Asleep at the switch. Soneji thought she looked like Aretha Franklin would have, if Aretha couldn’t sing a note and she had to make it in the real, workaday world.
    She didn’t have a clue as to who was riding by in the monotonous stream of holiday traffic. Even though she and all her cohorts were supposed to be desperately searching for him. So much for “massive police dragnets” and your basic “nationwide manhunt.” What a fucking letdown and disappointment. How could they possibly expect to catch him with people like this in the hunt. At least they could
try
to keep it interesting for him.
    Sometimes, especially at times like this, Gary Soneji wanted to proclaim the inescapable truth of the universe.
    Proclaim
. Listen, you slovenly bimbo bitch cop! Don’t you know who I am? Some paltry nothing disguise have you buffaloed? I’m the one you’ve been seeing in every news story for the past three days. You and half the world, Aretha, baby.
    Proclaim
. I planned and executed the Crime of the Century so perfectly. I’m already bigger than John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Juan Corona. Everything went right until the rich little blue boy got sick on me.
    Proclaim
. Look real close. Take a good look at me. Be a goddamn hero for once in your life. Be something besides a fat black zero on the Freeway of Love. Look at me, will you!
Look at me
!
    She handed back his change. “Merry Christmas. sir.”
    Gary Soneji shrugged. “Merry Christmas back at you,” he said.
    As he pulled away from the blinking lights of the tollbooth, he imagined the policewoman with one of those smiling, have-a-nice-day heads on her. He mind-pictured a whole country full of those smiley balloon faces. It was happening, too.
    It was getting worse than
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, actually. Drove him cra-azy if he thought about it, which he tried not to do. Country of smiling Balloonheads. He loved Stephen King, identified with His Weirdness, and wished The King would write about all the smiley fools in America. He could see the dust jacket for King’s masterpiece —
Balloonheads
.
    Forty minutes later, Soneji pulled the trusty Saab off Route 413, in Crisfield, Maryland. He accelerated down the rutted dirt road to the old farmhouse. He had to smile, had to laugh at this point. He had them so completely fooled and bamboozled. Completely turned inside out.
    So far, they didn’t know which way was up, down, or sideways. He already had the Lindbergh thing topped, didn’t he? Now it was time to pull the mat out from under all the Balloonheads again.

CHAPTER 22

    IT WAS DEFINITELY SHOWTIME! A Federal Express courier had arrived at the FBI offices just before ten-thirty on the morning of the twenty-sixth of December. He’d delivered the new message from the Son of Lindbergh.
    We were called back to the crisis room on the second floor. The whole FBI staff seemed to be in there. This was it, and everybody knew it.
    Moments later, Special Agent Bill Thompson, from Miami, rushed in. He brandished one of those familiar-looking delivery-service envelopes. Thompson carefully opened the orange-and-blue envelope in front of the entire group.
    “He’s going to let us see the message. Only he’s not going to read it to us,” Jeb Klepner from the Secret Service cracked under his breath. Sampson and I were standing there with Klepner and Jezzie Flanagan.
    “Oh, he doesn’t want all the heat on this one,” Jezzie predicted. “He’ll share with us this time.”
    Thompson was ready, up at the front.
    “I have a message from Gary Soneji. It goes as follows.
    “There’s the number
one
,” Thompson read the message.
    “Then, spelled out in letters,
ten million
. On the next line, the number
two
. Then the words
Disney World, Orlando — The Magic Kingdom
. Next line. The number
three
. Then,
Park at Pluto 24. Go across Seven Seas Lagoon on the ferry, not the monorail.