Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Savior of His Race? Pearson thought. Jesus please us. This guy sounds more like Jesse Helms during a filibuster.

He glanced at Duke and was encouraged to see that, while Duke was still listening, he was shifting in his seat and showing signs of coming out of his trance.

Pearson touched his face again and found it was still hot. He lowered the tips of his fingers to his carotid artery and felt his pulse—still racing. It wasn't the embarrassment at having to stand up and be looked over like a Miss America finalist now; the others had forgotten his existence, at least temporarily. No, it was something else. Not a good something else, either. '  . . .  we've stuck with it and stuck to it, we've done the footwork even when the music wasn't to our taste  . . .  ' Delray was droning.

It's what you felt before, Brand Pearson told himself. It's the fear that you've stumbled into a group of people sharing the same lethal hallucination.

'No, it's not,' he muttered. Duke turned toward him, eyebrows raised, and Pearson shook his head. Duke turned his attention back to the front of the room.

He was scared, all right, but not of having fallen in with some weird thrill-kill cult. Maybe the people in this room—some of them, at least—had killed, maybe that interlude in the Newburyport barn had happened, but the energy necessary for such desperate endeavors was not evident here tonight, in this roomful of yuppies being watched over by Dashiell Hammett. All he felt here was sleepy half-headedness, the sort of partial attention that enabled people to get through dull speeches like this without falling asleep or walking out.

'Robbie, get to the point!' some kindred spirit shouted from the back of the room, and there was nervous laughter.

Robbie Delray shot an irritated glance in the direction the voice had come from, then smiled and checked his watch again. 'Yeah, okay,' he said. 'I got rambling, I admit it. Lester, will you help me a sec?'

Lester got up. The two men went behind a stack of book cartons and came back carrying a large leather trunk by the straps. They set it down to the right of the easel.

'Thanks, Les,' Robbie said.

Lester nodded and sat back down.

'What's in the case?' Pearson murmured into Duke's ear.

Duke shook his head. He looked puzzled and suddenly a little uncomfortable  . . .  but maybe not as uncomfortable as Pearson felt.

'Okay, Mac's got a point,' Delray said. 'I guess I got carried away, but it feels like a historic occasion to me. On with the show.'

He paused for effect, and then whipped aside the blue cloth on the easel. His audience sat forward on their folding chairs, prepared to be amazed, then sat back with a small collective whoosh of disappointment. It was a black-and-white photograph of what looked to be an abandoned warehouse. It had been enlarged enough so that the eye could easily sort through the litter of papers, condoms, and empty wine-bottles in the loading bays, and read the tangle of spray-painted wit and wisdom on the wall. The biggest of these said riot grrrls rule.

A whispered babble of murmurs went through the room.

'Five weeks ago,' Delray said impressively, 'Lester, Kendra, and I trailed two batmen to this abandoned warehouse in the Clark Bay section of Revere.'

The dark-haired woman in the round rimless glasses sitting next to Lester Olson looked around self-importantly  . . .  and then Pearson was damned if she didn't glance down at her watch.

'They were met at this point'—Delray tapped one of the trash-littered loading bays—'by three more batmen and two batwomen. They went inside. Since then, six or seven of us have set up a rotating watch on this place. We have established—'

Pearson glanced around at Duke's hurt, incredulous face. He might as well have had why wasn't i picked? tattooed on his forehead.

'—that this is some sort of meeting ground for the bats in the Boston metro area—'