sleep. He felt foggy, thick-tongued. If by the time the field office got men out here, the drugs had taken over, they'd probably find Teddy drooling into his bathrobe, defecating where he sat. And the Ashecliffe version of the truth would be validated.
He heard the ferry blow its horn and came up on a rise in time to see it finish its turn in the harbor and begin to steam backward toward the dock. He picked up his pace, and ten minutes later he could see the back of Cawley's Tudor through the woods.
He turned off the road into the woods, and he heard men unloading the ferry, the thump of boxes tossed to the dock, the clang of metal dollies, footfalls on wooden planks. He reached the final stand of trees and saw several orderlies down on the dock, and the two ferry pilots leaning back against the stern, and he saw guards, lots of guards,'rifle butts resting on hips, bodies turned toward the woods, eyes scanning the trees and the grounds that led up to Ashecliffe.
When the orderlies had finished unloading the cargo, they pulled their dollies with them back up the dock, but the guards remained, and Teddy knew that their only job this morning was to make damn sure he didn't reach that boat.
He crept back through the woods and came out by Cawley's house. He could hear men upstairs in the house, saw one out on the roof where it pitched, his back to Teddy. He found the car in the carport on the western side of the house. A '47 Buick Roadmaster. Maroon with white leather interior. Waxed and shiny the day after a hurricane. A beloved vehicle.
Teddy opened the driver's door and he could smell the leather, as if it were a day old. He opened the glove compartment and found several packs of matches, and he took them all.
He pulled his tie from his pocket, found a small stone on the ground, and knotted the narrow end of the tie around it. He lifted the license plate and unscrewed the gas tank cap, and then he threaded the tie and the stone down the pipe and into the tank until all that hung out of the pipe was the fat, floral front of the tie, as if it hung from a man's neck.
Teddy remembered Dolores giving him this tie, draping it across his eyes, sitting in his lap.
"I'm sorry, honey," he whispered. "I love it because you gave it to me. But truth is, it is one ugly fucking tie."
And he smiled up at the sky in apology to her and used one match to light the entire book and then used the book to light the tie. And then he ran like hell.
He was halfway through the woods when the car exploded. He heard men yell and he looked back, and through the trees he could see the flames vaulting upward in balls, and then there was a set of smaller explosions, like firecrackers, as the windows blew out. He reached the edge of the woods and he balled up his suit coat and placed it under a few rocks. He saw the guards and the ferrymen running up the path toward Cawley's house, and he knew if he was going to do this, he had to do it right now, no time to second-guess the idea, and that was good because if he gave any thought at all to what he was about to do, he'd never do it.
He came out of the woods and ran along the shore, and just before he reached the dock and would've left himself exposed to anyone running back to the ferry, he cut hard to his left and ran into the water.
Jesus, it was ice. Teddy had hoped the heat of the day might have warmed it up a bit, but the cold tore up through his body like electric current and punched the air out of his chest. But Teddy kept plowing forward, trying not to think about what was in that water with him - eels and jellyfish and crabs and sharks too, maybe. Seemed ridiculous but Teddy knew that sharks attacked humans, on average, in three feet of water, and that's about where he was now, the water at his waist and
getting higher, and Teddy heard shouts coming from up by Cawley's house, and he ignored the sledgehammer strokes of his heart and dove under the