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THIS TIME THERE’S so he has heard once before In the summer of 1997, Jack went up way north to Vacaville with an LAPD skydiving club called the PF Flyers It was a dare, one of those stupid things you got yourself into as a result of too et yourself out of again Not with any grace Which was to say, not without looking like a chickenshit He expected to be frightened; instead, he was exalted Yet he had never done it again, and now he knohy: he had cohtened part of him must have known it It was the sound before you pulled the ripcord ¡ª that lonely white rushing of the wind past your ears Nothing else to hear but the soft, rapid beat of your heart and ¡ª maybe ¡ª the click in your ears as you sed saliva that was in free fall, just like the rest of you

Pull the ripcord, Jack, he thinks Ti to be awfully damn hard

Now there’s a new sound, low at first but quickly swelling to a tooth-rattling bray Fire alarm, he thinks, and then: No, it’s a symphony of fire alarms At the sarip He hears a faint, squawking cry as his fellow sky diver is swept away, and then there’s a smell ¡ª

Honeysuckle ¡ª

No, it’s her hair ¡ª

¡ª and Jack gasps against a weight on his chest and his diaphrag that the wind has been knocked out of him There are hands on him, one on his shoulder, the other at the s his cheek The sound of alar footfalls that clack and echo

"jack jack jack are you all right"

"Ask a queen for a date, get knocked into the middle of next week," he mutters Why is it so dark? Has he been blinded? Is he ready for that intellectually rewarding and financially remunerative job as an ump at Miller Park?

"Jack!" A palm smacks his cheek Hard

No, not blind His eyes are just shut He pops the over hi, he closes his left hand in the hair at the nape of her neck, brings her face down to his, and kisses her She exhales into his asp that inflates his lungs with her electricity ¡ª and then kisses him back He has never been kissed with such intensity in his entire life His hand goes to the breast beneath her nightdress, and he feels the frenzied gallop of her heart ¡ª If she were to run faster, she’d catch her feet and fall, Jack thinks ¡ª beneath its firm rise At the same moment her hand slips inside his shirt, which has somehow come unbuttoned, and tweaks his nipple It’s as hard and hot as the slap As she does it, her tongue darts into his one, like a bee into a flower He tightens his grip on the nape of her neck and God knoould have happened next, but at that e crash of glass and soh and almost sexless with panic, but Jack believes it’s Ethan Evans, the sullen young person frooldarnit!" Of course it’s Ethan; only a graduate of Mount Hebron Lutheran Sunday school would use goldarnit, even in extremis

Jack pulls away from Judy She pulls away frohtdress is all the way up to her waist, exposing plain white nylon underwear Jack’s shirt is open, and so are his pants His shoes are still on, but on the wrong feet, frolass-topped coffee table is overturned and the journals that were on it are scattered Sos

More screams from the corridor, plus a few cackles andas well ¡ª Head Nurse Rack, perhaps The alarms bray on and on

All at once a door bursts open and Wendell Green gallops into the room Behind him is a closet with clothes scattered everywhere, the spare itele his Panasonictubular objects Jack is willing to bet they’re double-A Duracells

Jack’s clothes have been unbuttoned (or perhaps blown open), but Wendell has fared s over a pair of white boxer shorts, severely pee-stained in front He is dragging his brown gabardine slacks by one foot They slide across the carpet like a shed snakeskin And although his socks are on, the left one appears to have been turned inside out

"What did you do?" Wendell blares "Oh you Hollywood son of a bitch, WHAT DID YOU DO TO M ¡ª "

He stops His mouth drops open His eyes widen Jack notes that the reporter’s hair appears to be standing out like the quills on a porcupine

Wendell,on the glass- and paper-littered floor, with their clothes disarranged They aren’t quite in flagrante delicious, but if Wendell ever sao people on the verge, dese are de and filled with iing like a washing machine that has been overloaded with clothes and suds; he desperately needs so to hold on to He needs news Even better, he needs scandal And here, lying in front of him on the floor, are both

"RAPE!" Wendell bellows at the top of his lungs A rin twists up the corners of his mouth "SAWYER BEAT ME UP AND NOW HE’S RAPING A MENTAL PATIENT!" It doesn’t look much like rape to Wendell, in all truth, but who ever yelled CONSENSUAL SEX! at the top of his lungs and attracted any attention?

"Shut that idiot up," Judy says She yanks down the heown and prepares to stand

"Watch out," Jack says "Broken glass everywhere"

"I’ to Wendell with that perfect fearlessness Fred kneell: "Shut up! I don’t knoho you are, but quit that bellowing! Nobody’s being ¡ª "

Wendell backs away fro with him Why doesn’t someone come? he thinks Why doesn’t so? In his frenzy and near hysteria, Wendell has either not registered the alar on inside his head, just a little o with his absurd "er, a beautiful wo in the dust and eating a half-cooked bird like a cave up with his hands held out in front of hiry lawyer Caveet-eer onyou ¡ª OW! OW!"

Wendell has stepped on a piece of broken glass, Jack sees ¡ª probably from one of the prints that for the floor He takes one more off-balance lurch backward, this ti into the leather recliner where Dr Spiegle his patients on their troubled childhoods

La Riviere’s pre Nean-derthal ide, horrified eyes, then throws the minicorder at him Jack sees that it’s covered with scratches He bats it away

"RAPE!" Wendell squeals "HE’S RAPING ONE OF THE LOONIES! HE’S ¡ª "

Jack pops hi the punch just a little at the lastit with alle as if to some tasty beat that only the searian couldn’t have done better," Jack ht to treat hiical workup in the not too distant future His head has put in a hard couple of days

The door to the hall bursts open Jack steps in front of the recliner to hide Wendell, stuffing his shirt into his pants (at some point he’s zipped his fly, thank God) A candy striper pokes her fluffy head into Dr Spieglehteen, her panicin here?" she asks "Who’s hurt?"

Jack has no idea what to say, but Judy es like a pro "It was a patient," she says "Mr Lackley, I think He ca to be raped, and then ran out again"

"You have to leave at once," the candy striper tells them "Don’t listen to that idiot Ethan And don’t use the elevator We think it was an earthquake"

"Right away," Jack says crisply, and although he doesn’t h for the candy striper; she heads out Judy crosses quickly to the door It closes but won’t latch The frame has been subtly twisted out of true

There was a clock on the wall Jack looks toward it, but it’s fallen face-down to the floor He goes to Judy and takes her by the ar," she says, "but what an exit you ?" Her eyes plead with hiht away," he tells her Enough to know that I love you ¡ª that I’ll always love you, in this world or any other

"Tyleris he alive?" She reverses his grip so she is holding hi in Faraway, Jack reet hileman’s desk, which has danced its way into the roo interesting in one of those drawers and hurries across the carpet, crunching on broken glass and kicking aside one of the prints

In the top drawer to the left of the desk’s kneehole is a tape recorder, considerably bigger than Wendell Green’s trusty Panasonic, and a torn piece of brorapping paper Jack snatches up the paper first Scrawled across the front in draggling letters he’s seen at both Ed’s Eats and on his own front porch is this:

Deliver to JUDY MARSHALL

also known as SOPHIE

There are what appear to be stamps in the upper corner of the torn sheet Jack doesn’t need to exaar packets, and that they were affixed by a dangerous old dodderer naer matters much, and Speedy knew it Neither does his location, because Jack has an idea Chummy Burnside can flip to a new one pretty much at will

But he can’t take the real doorith him The doorway to the furnace-lands, to Mr Munshun, to Ty If Beezer and his pals found that ¡ª

Jack drops the wrapping paper back into the drawer, hits the EJECT button on the tape recorder, and pops out the cassette tape inside He sticks it in his pocket and heads for the door

"Jack"

He looks back at her Beyond theh, staff runs to and fro Their eyes ard, Jack can ale constellations

"Is it wonderful over there? As wonderful as in my dreams?"

"It’s wonderful," he tells her "And you are, too Hang in there, okay?"

Halfway down the hallway, Jack coas his Sunday school teacher, has laid hold of a disoriented old wo her back and forth The old woman’s frizzy hair flies around her head

"Shut up!" young Mr Evans is shouting at her "Shut up, you crazy old cow! You’re not going anywhere except back to your dadbla about his sneer makes it obvious that even noith the world turned upside down, young Mr Evans is enjoying both his power to coh to ry What infuriates him is the look of terrified incomprehension on the old woman’s face It o, in a place called the Sunlight Ho or so ame phase of the festivities now, and so Mr Evans’s te victim, strikes the wall, then slides down it, his eyes wide and dazed

"Either you didn’t listen in Sunday school or Kinderling’s wife taught you the wrong lessons," Jack says

"YouhitMr Evans whispers He finishes his slow dive splay-legged on the hallway floor halfway between the Records Annex and Ay

"Abuse another patient ¡ª this one, the one I was just talking to, any of them ¡ª and I’ll do a lotMr Evans Then he’s down the stairs, taking the a handful of johnny-clad patients who stare at him with expressions of puzzled, half-fearful wonder They look at hiht, some wonder as brilliant as it isafter Judy Marshall has walked composedly back to her room without professional help of any kind), the alarms cut off An alenized it as her boy’s ¡ª begins to blare from the overhead speakers At this unexpected roar, patients who had pretty ain The old woered Jack Sawyer is crouched below the ad so about the Russians and Civil Defense

"THE EMERGENCY IS OVER!" Spiegleman assures his cast and crew "THERE IS NO FIRE! PLEASE REPORT TO THE COMMON ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR! THIS IS DR SPIEGLEMAN, AND I REPEAT THAT THE EMERGENCY IS OVER!"

Here co his way slowly toward the stairwell, rubbing his chin gently with one hand He sees young Mr Evans and offers hih Wendell ets his buttocks against the wall and ain his feet

"THE EMERGENCY IS OVER! I REPEAT, THE EMERGENCY IS OVER! NURSES, ORDERLIES, AND DOCTORS, PLEASE ESCORT ALL PATIENTS TO THE COMMON ROOMS ON EACH FLOOR!"

Young Mr Evans eyes the purple bruise rising on Wendell’s chin

Wendell eyes the purple bruise rising on the te Mr Evans asks