The Face

it.
        Fric longed to explain this crazy situation to Mr. Truman and to reveal all the weird events of the previous evening. Even as he worked up the courage to spill his guts, however, he thought of the six psychiatrists who would be eager to earn hundreds of thousands of bucks [344] by keeping him on a couch, talking about the stress of being the only child of the biggest movie star in the world, until he either exploded into bloody pieces or escaped to Goose Crotch.
        “Don’t get me wrong, Fric. I’m not saying you invented those calls. In fact, I’m sure you didn’t.”
        Clenched tightly around the cart handle, Fric’s hands had grown damp. He blotted them on his pants-and realized that he should not have done so. Every crummy, sleazy criminal in the world probably got sweaty palms in the presence of a cop.
        “I’m sure you didn’t,” Mr. Truman continued, “because last night someone rang me up on one of my private lines, and it didn’t show on the log, either.”
        Surprised by this news, Fric stopped blotting his hands and said, “You heard from the breather?”
        “Not the breather, no. Someone else.”
        “Who?”
        “Probably a wrong number.”
        Fric looked at the security chief’s hands. He couldn’t tell whether or not they were sweaty.
        “Evidently,” Mr. Truman continued, “something’s wrong with the telephone-log software.”
        “Unless he’s like a ghost or something,” Fric blurted.
        The expression that crossed Mr. Truman’s face was hard to read. He said, “Ghost? What makes you say that?”
        On the trembling edge of divulging all, Fric remembered that his mother had once been in a booby hatch. She had stayed there only ten days, and she hadn’t been chop-’em-up-with-an-ax crazy or anything as bad as that.
        Nevertheless, if Fric started babbling about recent freaky events, Mr. Truman would surely recall that Freddie Nielander had spent some time in a clinic for the temporarily wacko. He would think, Like mother, like son.
        For sure, he would immediately contact the biggest movie star in [345] the world on location in Florida. Then Ghost Dad would send in a powerful SWAT team of psychiatrists.
        “Fric,” Mr. Truman pressed, “what did you mean-ghost?”
        Shoveling manure over the seed of truth that he’d spoken, hoping to grow a half-convincing lie from it, Fric said, “Well, you know, my dad keeps a special phone for messages from ghosts. I just meant like maybe one of them called the wrong line.”
        Mr. Truman stared at him as though trying to decide whether he could be as stupid as he was pretending to be.
        Not as great an actor as his father, Fric knew he couldn’t long stand up to interrogation by an ex-cop. He was so nervous that in a minute he’d need to take a leak in one of the Rubbermaid jars.
        “Ummm, well, gotta go, things to do, things up in my room, you know,” he muttered, once more sounding like a cousin from the feeble-minded branch of the Hobbit clan.
        He swung the cart around Mr. Truman and pushed it east along the main hall. He didn’t look back.

CHAPTER 50
        
        THE DOME LIGHT ATOP OUR LADY OF ANGELS Hospital was a golden beacon. High above the dome, at the top of the radio mast, the red aircraft-warning lamp winked in the gray mist, as if the storm were a living beast and this were its malevolent Cyclopean eye.
        In the elevator, on the way from the garage to the fifth floor, Ethan listened to a lushly orchestrated version of a classic Elvis Costello number tricked up with violins and fulsome French horns. This cable-hung cubicle, ascending and descending twenty-four hours a day, was a little outpost of Hell in perpetual motion.
        The physicians’ lounge on the fifth floor, to which he’d been given directions by phone, was nothing more than a dreary windowless vending-machine room with a pair of Formica-topped tables in the center. The orange plastic items that surrounded the tables qualified as chairs no more than the room deserved the grand name on its door.
        Having arrived five minutes early, Ethan fed coins to one of the machines and selected black coffee. When he sipped the stuff, he knew what death must taste like, but he drank it anyway because he’d slept only four or five hours and needed the kick.
        Dr. Kevin O’Brien arrived precisely on time. About forty-five, [347]