The white van with the broken windshield in the Hardiman file.

“Phil,” I said. “Phil. Jesus Christ.”

“What?”

“The clowns,” I said. “You just said it yourself. It was the week Cal was killed. And then, shit, I hummed the baseball through their windshield—”

“Damn straight you did.”

“And told my father.” I’d raised my hand to my mouth, half covering it because it was wide open in shock.

“Wait a second,” he said and I could see that the same knowledge prickling like fire ants against my spinal column had invaded Phil. His eyes lit up like flares.

“I marked the van,” I said. “I fucking marked it, Phil, without even knowing it. And EEPA found it.”

He stared at me and I could see that he knew it too.

“Patrick, you’re saying—”

“Alec Hardiman and Charles Rugglestone were the clowns.”

31

In the days and weeks after Cal Morrison was killed, if you were a kid in my neighborhood, you were afraid.

You were afraid of black guys, because Cal had supposedly been killed by one. You were afraid of mangy, grizzled men who stared too long at you on the subway. You were frightened by cars that paused at intersections for too long after the light had turned green or seemed to slow as they approached you. You were terrified by the homeless and the dank alleys and dark parks in which they slept.

You were afraid of almost everything.

But nothing frightened the kids in my neighborhood as much as clowns.

It seemed so silly, in retrospect. Killer clowns rampaged in pulp fiction and bad drive-in movies. They lived in the realm of vampires and prehistoric monsters stomping Tokyo. Fictions conjured up to scare the only targets gullible enough to be afraid of them—children.

As I reached adulthood, I was no longer afraid of my closet when I woke in the middle of the night. The creaks of the old house I grew up in held no terror either; they were simply creaks—the plaintive whine of aging wood and the relaxed sighs of settling foundations. I grew to fear almost nothing except the barrel of a pistol pointed in my direction or the sudden potential for violence in the eyes of bitter drunks and men realizing their entire lives had passed unnoticed by all but themselves.

But as a child, my fear was embodied by the clowns.

I’m not sure how the rumor started—maybe around a fire at summer camp, maybe after one of our group had seen one of those bad drive-in movies—but by the time I was six or so, every kid knew about the clowns, though no one could actually claim to have seen them.

But the rumors were rampant.

They drove a van and carried bags of candy and bright balloons, and bouquets of flowers exploded out from their oversized sleeves.

They had a machine in the back of that van that knocked kids out in under a second, and once you were unconscious, you never woke back up.