cooler, where he drew himself a fresh cup of water. Lancte watched him go with interest.
“So you just fainted, right?” Lancte said.
“No,” Johnny said, not turning around. “I was going to shoot him with a bazooka. Then, at the critical moment, all my bionic circuits blew.”
Lancte sighed.
Bass said, “You’re free to go any time.”
“Thank you.”
“But I’ll tell you just the same way Mr. Lancte here would tell you. In the future, I’d stay away from Stillson rallies, if I were you. If you want to keep a whole skin, that is. Things have a way of happening to people Greg Stillson doesn’t like . . .”
“Is that so?” Johnny asked. He drank his water.
“Those are matters outside your bailiwick, Chief Bass,” Lancte said. His eyes were like hazy steel and he was looking at Bass very hard.
“All right,” Bass said mildly.
“I don’t see any harm in telling you that there have been other rally incidents,” Lancte said. “In Ridgeway a young pregnant woman was beaten so badly she miscarried. This was just after the Stillson rally there that CBS filmed. She said she couldn’t ID her assailant, but we feel it may have been one of Stillson’s bikies. A month ago a kid, he was fourteen, got himself a fractured skull. He had a little plastic squirtgun. He couldn’t ID his assailant, either. But the squirtgun makes us believe it may have been a security overreaction.”
How nicely put, Johnny thought.
“You couldn’t find anyone who saw it happen?”
“Nobody who would talk.” Lancte smiled humorlessly and tapped the ash off his cigarette. “He’s the people’s choice.”
Johnny thought of the young guy holding his son up so that the boy could see Greg Stillson Who the hell cares? They’re just for show, anyway:
“So he’s got his own pet FBI agent.”
Lancte shrugged and smiled disarmingly. “Well, what can I say? Except, FYI, it’s no tit assignment, Johnny. Sometimes I get scared. The guy generates one hell of a lot of magnetism. If he pointed me out from the podium and told the crowd at one of those rallies who I was, I think they’d run me up the nearest lamppost.”
Johnny thought of the crowd that afternoon, and of the pretty girl hysterically waving her chunk of watermelon. “I think you might be right,” he said.
“So if there’s something you know that might help me . . .” Lancte leaned forward. The disarming smile had become slightly predatory. “Maybe you even had a psychic flash about him. Maybe that’s what messed you up.”
“Maybe I did,” Johnny said, unsmiling.
“Well?”
For one wild moment Johnny considered telling them everything. Then he rejected it. “I saw him on TV. I had nothing in particular to do today, so I thought I’d come over here and check him out in person. I bet I wasn’t the only out-of-towner who did that.
“You sure wasn’t,” Bass said vehemently.
“And that’s all?” Lancte asked.
“That’s all,” Johnny said, and then hesitated. “Except ... I think he’s going to win his election.”
“We’re sure he is,” Lancte said. “Unless we can get something on him. In the meantime, I’m in complete agreement with Chief Bass. Stay away from Stillson rallies.”
“Don’t worry.” Johnny crumpled up his paper cup and threw it away. “It’s been nice talking to you two gentlemen, but I’ve got a long drive back to Durham.”
“Going back to Maine soon, Johnny?” Lancte asked casually.
“Don’t know.” He looked from Lancte, slim and impeccable, tapping out a fresh cigarette on the blank face of his digital watch, to Bass, a big, tired man with a basset hound’s face. “Do either of you think he’ll run for a higher office? If he gets this seat in the House of Representatives?”
“Jesus wept,” Bass uttered, and rolled his eyes.
“These guys come and go,” Lancte said. His eyes, so brown they were nearly black, had never stopped studying Johnny. “They’re like one of those rare radioactive elements that are so unstable that they don’t last long. Guys like Stillson have no permanent political base, just a temporary coalition that holds together for a little while and then falls apart. Did you see that crowd today? College kids and mill hands yelling for the same guy? That’s not politics, that’s something on the order of hula hoops or coonskin caps or Beatle wigs. He’ll get his term in the House and he’ll free-lunch until 1978 and that’ll be it. Count on it.”
But Johnny wondered.
2
The next day, the left side of Johnny’s forehead had become very colorful. Dark purple—almost black—above the eyebrow shaded