31
Before going to bed, Hodges spends four hours in front of the TV, watching shows that go in his eyes just fine but disintegrate before reaching his brain. He tries to think about nothing, because that’s how you open the door so the right idea can come in. The right idea always arrives as a result of the right connection, and there is a connection waiting to be made; he feels it. Maybe more than one. He will not let Janey into his thoughts. Later, yes, but for now all she can do is jam his gears.
Olivia Trelawney’s computer is the crux of the matter. It was rigged with spook sounds, and the most likely suspect is her I-T guy. So why didn’t she have his card? He could delete her computer address book at long distance—and Hodges is betting he did—but did he break into her house to steal a f*cking business card after she was dead?
He gets a call from a newspaper reporter. Then from a Channel Six guy. After the third call from someone in the media, Hodges shuts his phone down. He doesn’t know who spilled his cell number, but he hopes the person was well paid for the info.
Something else keeps coming into his mind, something that has nothing to do with anything: She thinks they walk among us.
A refresher glance through his notes allows him to put his finger on who said that to him: Mr. Bowfinger, the greeting-card writer. He and Bowfinger were sitting in lawn chairs, and Hodges remembers being grateful for the shade. This was while he was doing his canvass, looking for anyone who might have seen a suspicious vehicle cruising the street.
She thinks they walk among us.
Bowfinger was talking about Mrs. Melbourne across the street. Mrs. Melbourne who belongs to an organization of UFO nuts called NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.
Hodges decides it’s just one of those echoes, like a snatch of pop music, that can start resounding in an overstressed brain. He gets undressed and goes to bed and Janey comes, Janey wrinkling her nose and saying yeah, and for the first time since childhood, he actually cries himself to sleep.
He wakes up in the small hours of Thursday morning, takes a leak, starts back to bed, and stops, eyes widening. What he’s been looking for—the connection—is suddenly there, big as life.
You didn’t bother keeping a business card if you didn’t need one.
Say the guy wasn’t an independent, running a little business out of his house, but someone who worked for a company. If that was the case, you could call the company number any time you needed him, because it would be something easy to remember, like 555-9999, or whatever the numbers were that spelled out COMPUTE.
If he worked for a company, he’d make his repair calls in a company car.
Hodges goes back to bed, sure that sleep will elude him this time, but it doesn’t.
He thinks, If he had enough explosive to blow up my car, he must have more.
Then he’s under again.
He dreams about Janey.