Page 127 of Whistle

Harry slipped into the building, closed the door behind him, then turned to see what was making all the racket.

“Oh my God,” Harry said.

Forty-Four

For all her talk about Harry still owing her for doing him this solid, Susie was excited to be involved in whatever he was up to. She started looking at her watch at six thirty, knowing Mr. Edwin Nabler would be arriving soon.

The Bobcats were having a practice, so the rink echoed with thewhooshingof skates on ice, a sound Susie had always found particularly soothing, as well as slap shots and sticks tapping the ice and a coach’s whistle and the general vocal pandemonium a bunch of teenage boys created. She walked the perimeter of the arena once, then popped into the snack bar that was doing a reasonable business with moms and dads waiting for their kids to finish up. Harry had been wise to bring coffee and donuts from outside when he’d come earlier. The snack bar stuff was shit, especially those hot dogs that had been spinning on that rotisserie since Bobby Orr played for the Bruins.

She had no idea why Harry was interested in Nabler, but that didn’t stop her from coming up with possible reasons. Given the current fucked-up state of the world, maybe he was one of those sleeper agents. Someone from an unfriendly foreign power who’d infiltrated American society, posing as a native, waiting for his orders to carry out a mission years in the planning stages. While that one gave Susie a bit of a thrill, she realized it was more likelysomeone like that would be the target of an FBI, CIA, or Homeland Security sting. No slight against Harry, but come on. He was the local chief of police.

The most likely scenario? Edwin Nabler had a thing for kids. What a perfect cover for someone who was a pedophile, running a business that catered, although not exclusively, to young boys. Yeah, Susie was putting her money on that one. And while she kept Nabler busy, Harry was probably searching his place for proof. Incriminating magazines and videocassettes.

Ick.

It was nearly seven.

Susie had come up with several pitches. And they wererealpitches, because if it turned out Nabler was not up to anything nefarious, and if he really did want to make a contribution, well, why not give it a shot? He could buy a huge banner advertising his business that could be hung from the rafters over the ice. Every hockey game, people would see it. If he wanted to buy an ad for the boards, she could arrange that, too.

Seven o’clock.

She didn’t want to be hanging around the entrance. Didn’t want to look too needy, too desperate.

When it got to be five minutes past seven, Susie didn’t give it much thought. Anybody could be five minutes late. And even when it was 7:10 p.m., she wasn’t particularly worried. Anyone coming out this way had to cross the tracks. All it took was one lone freight train to make someone late for an appointment.

At 7:15, Susie got out from behind her desk and strolled to the entrance, stepped outside, and checked the parking lot.

No Mr. Choo.

She gazed down the road in the direction from which he wouldbe coming. From here, she’d be able to see and hear a train passing through town, but there was no sign of one. No sign of Nabler’s van, either.

The guy was a no-show.

Shit,Susie thought.

She ran back into the community center to make a call to Harry’s cell phone.

Forty-Five

It took Harry a minute to comprehend what he was looking at, and even then, he couldn’t quite get his head around it. He’d never seen anything like this in his life. He had no basis for comparison.

The space he was in was larger than it would have seemed from the alley. The ceiling was a good fifteen feet over his head, and the space between him and the wall that was presumably the back side of the public area of the shop was filled with more... whatever this was. It was like trying to peer through a jungle.

That was the word that came to mind:jungle. Not long ago, he’d been to the local Blockbuster to rent for Dylan that Robin Williams movieJumanji, and there was that point where the house was overrun with so many vines and tree trunks and branches that you almost couldn’t tell you wereina house, and that was what it was like in this room. But instead of vines and branches, ribbons of toy train track, attached to narrow strips of planking and supported by a network of wires that hung down from the ceiling, were everywhere. Helixes and loops and straight sections, too many to even attempt to count.

And on all of them: trains. Dozens of them.

They weren’t resting on the track, as if on display. They wererunning. Every last one, and at maximum speed. Whipping past one way and the other. Steam engines and diesels and freight trains and passenger trains. A train consisting of nothing but green boxcarschugged past only a foot or so above the floor. A red and silver Santa Fe diesel flew by at chest level on another track, sped past pulling at least ten passenger cars, the interiors illuminated, little silhouettes of riders in the windows. And then, catching Harry by surprise as it came from a different direction, on a stretch of track that ran right past his left ear, a trio of Albany & Bennington diesel engines pulling a line of tanker cars that seemed to go off into infinity.

And the noise. God, the noise. It was close to deafening. An incessant din.

ChuffchuffCLICKETYCLACKclicketyCLACKwooWOOchuffCLICKETYchuffCLICKETYchuffWOOchuggachuggaclackclicketyCHUFFCHUFFclicketyCLACKwooWOOchuffCLICKETYchuffCLICKETYchuffWOOchuggachuggaclackclicketyCHUFFCHUFFclicketyCLACKwooWOOchuffCLICKETYchuffCLICKETYchuffWOOchuggachuggaclackclicketyCHUFF...

It felt to Harry like being inside a power plant, as if all these trains were turbines, cranking out enough electricity to light a city. Why had Nabler built such an elaborate apparatus? What on earth could be the point of all this? And why would he leave it running even when he wasn’t on the premises?

As Harry ducked and weaved his way through the tracks, he found there was even more to see. At the center of all this, and along the walls, were scale-model re-creations of towns and hills and tunnels and bridges that the trains were passing through continuously. As he got closer, he could make out the details more clearly.

At first glance, what Nabler had made looked like a typical model village. Stores and houses and trees and anything else one might expect to find on a typical American street. But Nabler had incorporated what an artist might have referred to as “found objects” into what would have otherwise been fairly realistic scenes. That chimney atop the pickle factory was clearly a lipstick tube. Those electrical wires strung from pole to pole were brown shoelaces. That manhole cover on the street was a button from a shirt. The building labeledoptometristhad a real pair of reading glasses sitting atop it. The store with alocksmithsign had a set of actual car keys dangling from it.

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