22
THE WINDSTORM WAS STILL IN PROGRESS, BUT IT was not raging as fiercely as it had been when Elliot and Tina had watched it through the restaurant window. A brisk wind pushed across the city from the east. Laden with dust and with the powdery white sand that had been swept in from the desert, the air abraded their faces and had an unpleasant taste.
They put their heads down and scurried past the front of the diner, around the side, through the purple light under the single mercury-vapor lamp, and into the deep shadows behind the building.
In the Mercedes, in the darkness, with the doors locked, she said, “No wonder we haven’t been able to figure it out!”
“Why on earth are you so—”
“We’ve been looking at this all wrong—” “—so bubbly when—”
“—approaching it ass-backwards. No wonder we haven’t been able to find a solution.” “What are you talking about? Did you see what I saw in there? Did you hear the jukebox? I don’t see how that could have cheered you up. It made my blood run cold. It was weird.”
“Listen,” she said excitedly, “we thought someone was sending me messages about Danny being alive just to rub my face in the fact that he was actually dead—or to let me know, in a roundabout fashion, that the way he died wasn’t anything like what I’d been told. But those messages haven’t been coming from a sadist. And they haven’t been coming from someone who wants to expose the true story of the Sierra accident. They aren’t being sent by a total stranger or by Michael. They are exactly what they appear to be!”
Confused, he said, “And to your way of thinking, what do they appear to be?” “They’re cries for help.”
“What?”
“They’re coming from Danny!”
Elliot stared at her with consternation and with pity, his dark eyes reflecting a distant light. “What’re you saying— that Danny reached out to you from the grave to cause that excitement in the restaurant? Tina, you really don’t think his ghost was haunting a jukebox?”
“No, no, no. I’m saying Danny isn’t dead.” “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.”
“My Danny is alive! I’m sure of it.”
“We’ve already been through this argument, and we rejected it,” he reminded her.
“We were wrong. Jaborski, Lincoln, and all the other boys might have died in the Sierras, but Danny didn’t. I know it. I sense it. It’s like . . . a revelation . . . almost like a vision. Maybe there was an accident, but it wasn’t like anything we were told. It was something very different, something exceedingly strange.”
“That’s already obvious. But—”
“The government had to hide it, and so this organization that Kennebeck works for was given responsibility for the cover-up.”
“I’m with you that far,” Elliot said. “That’s logical. But how do you figure Danny’s alive? That doesn’t necessarily follow.”
“I’m only telling you what I know, what I feel,” she said. “A tremendous sense of peace, of reassurance, came over me in the diner, just before you finally managed to shut off the jukebox. It wasn’t just an inner feeling of peace. It came from outside of me. Like a wave. Oh, hell, I can’t really explain it. I only know what I felt. Danny was trying to reassure me, trying to tell me that he was still alive. I know it. Danny survived the accident, but they couldn’t let him come home because he’d tell everyone the government was responsible for the deaths of the others, and that would blow their secret military installation wide open.”
“You’re reaching, grasping for straws.” “I’m not, I’m not,” she insisted.
“So where is Danny?”
“They’re keeping him somewhere. I don’t know why they didn’t kill him. I don’t know how long they think they can keep him bottled up like this. But that’s what they’re doing. That’s what’s going on. Those might not be the precise circumstances, but they’re pretty damn close to the truth.”
“Tina—”
She wouldn’t let him interrupt. “This secret police force, these people behind Kennebeck .
. . they think someone involved with Project Pandora has turned on them and told me what really happened to Danny. They’re wrong, of course. It wasn’t one of them. It’s Danny. Somehow . . . I don’t know how . . . but he’s reaching out to me.” She struggled to explain the understanding that had come to her in the diner. “Somehow . . . some way . . . he’s reaching out . . . with his mind, I guess. Danny was the one who wrote those words on the chalkboard. With his mind. “
“The only proof of this is what you say you feel . . . this vision you’ve had.” “Not a vision—”
“Whatever. Anyway, that’s no proof at all.”
“It’s proof enough for me,” she said. “And it would be proof enough for you, if you’d had the same experience back there in the diner, if you’d felt what I felt. It was Danny who reached out for me when I was at work . . . found me in the office . . . tried to use the hotel computer to send his message to me. And now the jukebox. He must be … psychic. That’s it! That’s what he is. He’s psychic. He has some power, and he’s reaching out, trying to tell me he’s alive, asking me to find him and save him. And the people who’re holding him don’t know he’s doing it! They’re blaming the leak on one of their own, on someone from Project Pandora.”
“Tina, this is a very imaginative theory, but—”
“It might be imaginative, but it’s not a theory. It’s true. It’s fact. I feel it deep in my bones. Can you shoot boles through it? Can you prove I’m wrong?”
“First of all,” Elliot said, “before he went into the mountains with Jaborski, in all the years you knew him and lived in the same house with him, did Danny ever show any signs of being psychic?”
She frowned. “No.”
“Then how come he suddenly has all these amazing powers?”
“Wait. Yeah, I do remember some little things he did that were sort of odd.” “Like what?”
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93