The Face

Vladimir Laputa.
        His cell phone rang. When he answered it, he recognized the voice that he had heard a short time ago, in the street, issuing from the apparition.
        Dunny Whistler said, “I’m Ethan’s guardian, not yours, not Aelfric’s. But if I save him-if I can -there’ll be no point to it if either you or the boy dies.”
        [478] Usually able to draw upon a rich account of words, Hazard found himself bankrupt in this case. He had never talked to a ghost before. He didn’t want to start.
        “He’ll blame himself for the loss of either of you,” Whistler continued. “And then the shadow on his heart will become a darkness deep within it. Don’t go in that house.”
        Hazard found a voice not too much thinner and shakier than the one he usually could rely upon: “Are you dead or alive?”
        “I’m dead and alive. Don’t go in that house. The Kevlar vest won’t matter. You’ll be head shot. Two bullets in the brain. And I have no authority to resurrect you.”
        Dunny hung up.

        Corky in the kitchen, stylishly outfitted to storm the castle of Hollywood’s reigning king, glanced at the wall clock and saw that he had less than an hour until his rendezvous with Jack Trotter in Bel Air.
        Murder and mayhem sharpened the appetite. On his feet, roaming back and forth from refrigerator to pantry, he made a makeshift meal of cheese, dried fruit, half a doughnut, a spoonful of butterscotch pudding, a taste of this, a bite of that.
        Such a chaotic dinner was well suited to a man who had brought so much disorder into the world in one day, and who still had much work to do before lying down to sleep.
        The Glock, with sound suppressor attached, lay on the kitchen table. It would just fit in the deepest pocket of his storm suit.
        In other pockets, he had spare magazines, far more ammunition than he ought to need, considering that he didn’t expect to have to kill anyone else today except Ethan Truman.

        [479] If Hazard had been nothing more than a man who wanted to live, he would have driven away without crossing the street to ring that doorbell.
        He was, however, also a good cop and Ethan’s friend. He believed that police work was not just a job, that it was a calling, and that friendship required commitment exactly when commitment was hardest to give.
        He opened the door. He got out of the car.

CHAPTER 73
        
        UPON RECEIVING THE CALL, DUNNY AT ONCE responds to it not by automobile this time but by highways of fog and water, and by the idea of San Francisco.
        In a Los Angeles park, he pulls about him a cloak of earthbound cloud, and hundreds of miles to the north, he arrives through the soft folds of another fog, having traded the footpath in the park for the planking of a wharf.
        Because he is dead but has not yet moved on from this world to the next, he inhabits his own corpse, a strange condition. After he died in a coma, his spirit had resided briefly in a place that had felt like a doctor’s waiting room with neither tattered magazines nor hope. Then he was readmitted to the world, to his familiar mortal shell. He is no mere ghost, nor is he a traditional guardian angel. He is one of the walking dead, but his flesh is now capable of whatever amazing feat his spirit demands of it.
        In this more northern and colder city, no rain falls. Water laps at the pilings of the wharf, an unpleasant chuckling that suggests mockery, conspiracy, and inhuman hunger.
        Perhaps the thing about being dead that most surprises him is the persistence of fear. He would have thought that with death came freedom from anxiety.
        [481] He trembles at the sounds of the water beneath the wharf, at the ponk of his footsteps on the dock planking wet with condensation, at the briny semen scent of the fertile sea, at the frosty rectangles, fluorescent in the mist, that are the large windows of the bay-view restaurant where Typhon waits. For most of his life, he had perceived no meaning in anything; now dead, he sees meaning in every detail of the physical world, and too much of it has a dark significance.
        One finger of the wharf leads past the restaurant windows, and at a prime table sits Typhon, in the city on business but currently alone, beautifully dressed as always, regal in demeanor without appearing pretentious. Through the pane of glass, their eyes meet.
        For a moment,