The Heaven Makers Read Online Free PDF Page B

too impersonal, he knew. It’d have to be done in person.
    And I’d be irrevocably associated with the tragedy, he thought. I don’t want that.
    Thurlow realized then that he was daydreaming, trying to hold onto something of what he and Ruth had known together. He sighed. Let someone else break the news to her. She was someone else’s responsibility now.
    An officer on Thurlow’s right said: “Think he’s drunk?”
    “Is he ever sober?” Mossman asked.
    The first officer asked: “You see the body?”
    “No,” Mossman said, “but Jack described it when he called me.”
    “Just gi’me one good shot at the sonofabitch,” the first officer muttered.
    And now it starts, Thurlow thought.
    He turned as a car pulled to a screeching stop across the street. Out of it jumped a short fat man, his pants pulled over pajamas. The man carried a camera with strobe light.
    Thurlow whirled away from the light as the man crouched and aimed the camera. The strobe light flared in the canyon of the street… and again.
    Expecting the glare, Thurlow had looked up at the sky to avoid the reflected light and its pain on his injured eyes. As the strobe flashed, he saw the strange object once more. It was hanging in the air about ten feet out from Murphey’s window. Even after the flare of light, the thing remained visible as a dim shape, almost cloudlike.
    Thurlow stared, entranced. This couldn’t be an illusion or aftereffect of the eye injury. The shape was quite definite, real. It appeared to be a cylinder about twenty feet long and four or five feet in diameter. A semicircular shelf like a Ubangi lip projected from the end nearest the building. Two figures crouched on the lip. They appeared to be aiming a small stand-mounted tube at Murphey’s window. The figures were indistinct in the fog-like outline, but they appeared human—two arms, two legs—although small: perhaps only three feet tall.
    Thurlow felt an odd sense of detached excitement at the vision. He knew he was seeing something real whose strangeness defied explanation. As he stared, one of the figures turned, looked full at him. Thurlow saw the glow of eyes through the cloud-blurring. The figure nudged its companion. Now, both of them peered down at Thurlow—two pairs of glowing eyes.
    Is it some form of mirage? he wondered.
    Thurlow tried to swallow in a dry throat. A mirage could be seen by anyone. Mossman, standing beside him, was staring up at Murphey’s window. The deputy couldn’t help but see that odd cylinder hovering there—or the vision of it—but he gave no sign.
    The photographer came panting up to them. Thurlow knew the man: Tom Lee from the Sentinel.
    “Is Murphey still in there?” Lee asked.
    “That’s right,” Mossman said.
    “Hi, Dr. Thurlow,” Lee said. “What you staring at? Is that the window where Murphey’s holed up?”
    Thurlow grabbed Lee’s shoulder. The two creatures on the cylinder had returned to their tube and were aiming it down toward the crowd of officers. Thurlow pointed toward them, aware of a strong musky smell of cologne from the photographer.
    “Tom, what the devil is that up there?” Thurlow asked. “Get a picture of it.”
    Lee turned with his camera, looked up. “What? Picture of what?”
    “That thing outside Murphey’s window.”
    “What thing?”
    “Don’t you see something hovering just out from that window?”
    “A bunch of gnats, maybe. Lots of ’em this year. They always collect like that where there’s light.”
    “What light?” Thurlow asked.
    “Huh? Well…”
    Thurlow yanked off his polarized glasses. The cloud-like cylinder disappeared. In its place was a vague, foggy shape with tiny movements in it. He could see the corner of the building through it. He replaced the glasses. Again, there was a cylinder with two figures on a lip projecting from it. The figures were now pointing their tube toward the building’s entrance.
    “There he comes!” It was a shout from their left.
    Lee almost