aliens, he’s careful because he doesn’t want to disappear or get shot like Jack and Bobby, but he talks about the black cars all the time, and the experiments. Things that would turn your hair white. Did you know that Son of Sam was a walk-in? No? Well, he was. Then the devil that was inside him walked back out, leaving only a shell. Raise your head, son, that blood’s all down your neck, and if it dries before I can get it, I’ll have to scrub.”
3
The Beeman boys, a pair of great hulking teenagers from the trailer park south of town, showed up at quarter past noon, well into what was usually Tim’s lunch hour. By then most of the stuff for Fromie’s Small Engine Sales and Service was on the cracked concrete of the station tarmac. If it had been up to Tim, he would have fired the Beemans on the spot, but they were related to Mr. Jackson in some complicated southern way, so that wasn’t an option. Besides, he needed them.
Del Beeman got the big truck with the stake sides backed up to the door of the Carolina Produce boxcar by twelve-thirty, and they began loading in crates of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and summer squash. Hector and his secondman, interested not in fresh veggies but only in getting the hell out of South Carolina, pitched in. Norb Hollister stood in the shade of the depot overhang, doing some heavy looking-on but nothing else. Tim found the man’s continued presence a trifle peculiar—he’d shown no interest in the arrivals and departures of the trains before—but was too busy to consider it.
An old Ford station wagon pulled into the station’s small parking lot at ten to one, just as Tim was forklifting the last crates of produce into the back of the truck that would deliver them to the DuPray Grocery . . . assuming that Phil Beeman got it there all right. It was less than a mile, but this morning Phil’s speech was slow and his eyes were as red as those of a small animal trying to stay ahead of a brushfire. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce he’d been indulging in a bit of wacky tobacky. He and his brother both.
Doc Roper got out of his station wagon. Tim tipped him a wave and pointed to the warehouse where Mr. Jackson kept his office/apartment. Roper waved back and headed in that direction. He was old-school, almost a caricature; the kind of doctor who still survives in a thousand poor-ass rural areas where the nearest hospital is forty or fifty miles away, Obamacare is looked upon as a libtard blasphemy, and a trip to Walmart is considered an occasion. He was overweight and over sixty, a hardshell Baptist who carried a Bible as well as a stethoscope in a black bag which had been handed down, father to son, for three generations.
“What’s with that kid?” the train’s secondman asked, using a bandanna to mop his forehead.
“I don’t know,” Tim said, “but I intend to find out. Go on, you guys, rev it up and go. Unless you want to leave me one of those Lexuses, Hector. Happy to roll it off myself if you do.”
“Chupa mi polla,” Hector said. Then he shook Tim’s hand and headed back to his engine, hoping to make up time between DuPray and Brunswick.
4
Stackhouse intended to make the trip on the Challenger with the two extraction teams, but Mrs. Sigsby overruled him. She could do that because she was the boss. Nevertheless, Stackhouse’s expression of dismay at this idea bordered on insulting.
“Wipe that look off your face,” she said. “Whose head do you think will roll if this goes pear-shaped?”
“Both of our heads, and it won’t stop with us.”
“Yes, but whose will come off first and roll the farthest?”
“Julia, this is a field operation, and you’ve never been in the field before.”
“I’ll have both Ruby and Opal teams with me, four good men and three tough women. We’ll also have Tony Fizzale, who’s ex-Marines, Dr. Evans, and Winona Briggs. She’s ex-Army, and has some triage skills. Denny Williams will be in charge once the operation begins, but I intend to be there, and I intend to write my report from a ground-level perspective.” She paused. “If there needs to be a report, that is, and I’m starting to believe there will be no way to avoid it.” She glanced at her watch. Twelve-thirty. “No more discussion. We need to