The Face

women, the bodies of men torn by gunfire.
        Memories of innocent victims. His ghost family. Always with him. They were as real to him as the badge he carried, more real than the pension that he might never live to collect.
        “After Christmas isn’t soon enough,” Hazard said. “I had this dream.”
        Ethan looked at him, waited. Then: “What dream?”
        Rolling his Paul Bunyan shoulders, shifting on the seat to gain legroom, looking as uncomfortable as Babe the Blue Ox in a canary cage, Hazard stared at the concrete wall while he said matter-of-factly, “You were with me in Reynerd’s apartment. He shot you in the gut. Next, we’re in an ambulance. You’re not gonna make it.
        [377] They have these Christmas decorations in the ambulance. Tinsel, little bells. You ask me for a set of the bells. I take one set down, try to give them to you, but you’re gone, you’re dead.”
        Ethan turned his attention to the parking-garage wall once more. Among the decomposing corpses that his imagination identified in the stains and subtleties of texture, he expected to see his own face.
        “I wake up,” Hazard continued, still focused on the mottled concrete, “there’s someone in the room with me. Standing over the bed. A darker shape in the dark. Some guy. I’m up, I’m at him, but he’s not there. Now he’s across the room. I go after him. He moves. He’s quick. He doesn’t walk, he like glides . My piece is in my holster, hanging on a chair. I get it. He keeps moving, quick, too quick, gliding, like he’s playing with me. We circle the room. I get to a light switch, click on a lamp. He’s at my closet doors, his back to me. Mirrored closet doors. He walks into the mirror. Disappears into the mirror.”
        “This is still the dream,” Ethan suggested.
        “I told you, I wake up, there’s someone in the room with me,” Hazard reminded him. “I didn’t get a good look at him, his back to me, just a glimpse in the mirror, but I think it was Dunny Whistler. I open the closet door. He’s not in there. Where is he-in the damn mirror!”
        “Sometimes in a dream,” Ethan said, “you wake up, but the waking up is just part of the nightmare, and you’re really still dreaming.”
        “I search the apartment. Don’t find anybody. Back in the bedroom what I do find are these.”
        Ethan heard the sweet silvery ringing of small bells.
        He looked away from the concrete wall.
        Hazard held up an array of three concentrically strung bells like those that had hung in the ambulance.
        Their eyes met.
        Ethan knew that Hazard had instantly read not the nature of his secrets but certainly the fact that he had secrets.
        The astonishing things that had happened to Ethan in less than [378] thirty hours, and now also to Hazard, plus the inexplicable case of dead Dunny walking and possibly orchestrating the murder of Reynerd: All this had to be connected somehow to the contents of the six black boxes and the threat against Manheim.
        “What aren’t you telling me?” Hazard demanded.
        After a long pause, Ethan said, “I have a set of bells, too.”
        “You get yours in a dream like I did?”
        “I got mine just before I died in an ambulance late yesterday afternoon.”

CHAPTER 55
        
        FREE OF BOTH INSIPID MUSIC AND VOICES FROM Beyond, four flights of stairs led down to the lowest of the three subterranean levels of the hospital.
        Ethan and Hazard followed the familiar, brightly lighted white corridor past the garden room to a set of double doors. Beyond lay the ambulance garage.
        Among other vehicles belonging to the hospital, four van-type ambulances stood side by side. Empty parking stalls suggested that additional units in the fleet were at work in the rainy day.
        Ethan went to the nearest ambulance. He hesitated, then opened the rear door.
        Inside, red tinsel was strung at the ceiling along both the left and right sides of the compartment. Six clusters of tiny bells hung here, as well, one set at the beginning, another at the middle, and a third at the end of each garland of tinsel.
        At the second ambulance, Hazard said, “Here.”
        Ethan joined him at the open back door.
        Two lengths of red tinsel. Only five sets of bells. The missing set, in the middle of the right-hand garland of tinsel, was the one that had been given to him as he lay