The Face

speak.
        “When you come across after me, you wannabe ofay, better get ready for a million nightmares of eastlies. You know eastly, man?”
        “Yeah. An ugly person,” Hazard said, surprised that he had spoken, sensing at once that responding was a bad idea, that it was an invitation.
        “Worse than ugly, man. Extreme butt-ugly. This crib ain’t got nothin’ but eastlies. I be here when you come across, ofay. I be first in line.”
        Hazard wanted to press END, clip the phone to his belt, but grim fascination held it to his ear.
        He was standing ten feet from Vladimir Laputa’s front door. This wasn’t a wise place to engage in a phone chat with one of the restless dead.
        “Ofay, you know that four-five I shoulda capped you with last night?”
        In his mind’s eye, Hazard saw Calvin Roosevelt, alias Hector X, on the lawn outside Reynerd’s apartment house, both hands around a.45, squeezing off a shot, the muzzle spitting fire in the rain.
        “Check this out, queerboy. You get here, I have me somethin’ [487] bigger than my four-five I’ll shove up your ass, and then all the eastlies can jam you, too. Gonna see you soon.”
        Hazard pressed END, and at once the phone rang in his hand. No need to answer it, no way to answer it, knowing who it would be.
        He was wet. Cold… Scared.
        The phone continued to ring.
        He needed either to think hard about this or to think about it never again, and he couldn’t make up his mind which way to go while he stood here, on the mother-killer’s porch.
        He shoved the ringing phone into a jacket pocket, turned his back to the door, and descended the steps, into the rain once more.

CHAPTER 75
        
        THE GENTLY CIRCULATING WATER IN THE POOL stirred the light that rose through it, causing shimmering auroras and shadows to quiver ceaselessly across the limestone walls and barrel-vaulted ceiling.
        Fric brought a linen tablecloth to one of the poolside tables and arranged place settings of good china and silverware.
        He almost added candles, but figured that two guys wouldn’t have dinner by candlelight. Maybe by the glow of a firepit or Polynesian party torches, maybe beside a campfire in a forest full of prowling wolves, but not by candlelight.
        With a dimming switch, he adjusted the sconces on the limestone columns until they produced a soft golden glow.
        In good weather, Fric enjoyed eating by the outdoor pool, when he was the sole member of the family in residence and when Ghost Dad’s girlfriends weren’t lying around in bikini bottoms, thickly slathered in number-fifty sunblock, like plucked ducks in a marinade.
        The indoor pool didn’t measure up to the one outdoors: only eighty feet long and fifty-two feet wide, not quite large enough if you wanted to hold powerboat races. The room was warm in winter, however, and [489] a double shitload of palm trees in huge pots gave it a pleasant tropical feeling.
        Three walls of the pool room featured big windows framing the parklike grounds. The windows in the third wall were shared with the conservatory, offering a view into its jungly realms.
        A poolside dinner appealed to Fric because in the adjacent conservatory he had carefully prepared his deep and special secret place. Given the slightest reason to believe that Moloch was coming, he could bolt for cover and be out of sight as quick as a rabbit.
        Weirdly, he suspected that Mr. Truman, too, expected Moloch. The voltage-flow-testing story was crap. Something must be up.
        He hoped that Mr. Truman wouldn’t page him by intercom, as he had earlier paged him in the library. Not even under duress would Fric press the RESPOND button, because he was afraid that like *69, it might connect him with that place from which something had tried to squirm through the handset cord and into his ear.
        Finishing the table preparation sooner than expected, he checked his wristwatch. Mr. Truman would not arrive with the food for perhaps ten minutes.
        The rain-soaked, fog-swaddled grounds beyond the windows were revealed by many landscape lights, but the theme was enchantment and romance, which meant that shadows ruled. If Moloch had scaled the estate wall without being detected by the security system, he might be out there, shrouded in the murk, watching.
        Fric considered hurrying to the kitchen under the pretense