She hadn’t been able to use chloroform with the girl because she’d needed to interrogate her in a timely manner. She had hours to devote to Yegg if she needed them.
Chloroform was highly volatile. To be sure that he remained unconscious, she put a double thickness of paper towels over his face, trapping the fumes. He wasn’t having a breathing problem.
At the security-system keypad, Jane set the alarm in the HOME mode. She returned to the front door, engaged the Schlage deadbolt, and peered out the window. The limousine was long gone. In the pale penumbra of a streetlamp, a slinking coyote turned its luminous yellow eyes toward the house, as if it sensed her watching.
Muscular, five feet ten, weighing about 180 pounds, Simon posed a greater logistics problem than had Petra Quist. There were always ways to accomplish such tricky tasks, however, and in this case, the problem himself had thoughtfully provided her with the solution. From the garage, she had earlier brought up the mechanic’s sled. She rolled it to his side and locked the wheels.
A hundred and eighty pounds of inert Yegg was a lot of dead weight. Getting him onto the board required treating him as if he were several loosely connected sacks of potatoes, and after four or five minutes of struggle, she got the job done.
The board was too short to hold all of him. His legs were off the sled from mid-thigh down, but the drag factor wouldn’t slow her too much.
To prevent his arms from sliding off the board, she undid the belt on his Gucci chinos, shoved his hands under the waistband, and cinched the belt tight. He lay there as if fondling himself.
To fashion a pull for the sled, she had employed one of the extension cords that she’d found stored in a garage cabinet. After flipping up the built-in chocks on the wheels, she pulled Simon Yegg to the main elevator, leaving the baseball cap on the foyer floor.
Descending to the basement, she lifted the paper towels and checked the color in his face and made sure he was still breathing well. Then she replaced the towels and lightly spritzed them with more chloroform.
In the theater, the carpet somewhat resisted the squeaking wheels, and when Jane pulled the sled into the lobby, Petra sat up straight, eyes wide. The girl worked her jaws, perhaps trying to shift the wad of saliva-soaked gauze in her mouth. She made urgent noises that, through the duct tape, were not words.
Jane propped open the door between the lobby and the theater. She maneuvered the sled into the main room.
There were three rows of chairs, five per row, but they were neither traditional theater seats nor in harmony with the French theme. These adjustable loungers, upholstered in leather, appeared more conducive to sleep than to cinema.
The rows of chairs were flanked by wide aisles. Because the floor sloped down to a stage and a big screen—currently out of sight behind a burgundy-velvet curtain trimmed with enormous tassels—gravity more than overcame the impediment of the carpet.
Between the front row and the stage, an eight-foot-wide flat area extended the width of the theater. She parked the sled there, where earlier she had left three more extension cords, the workbench stool from the garage, a Bernzomatic butane lighter with a long flexible neck that she had found in a kitchen drawer, and half a dozen sixteen-ounce bottles of water.
She passed the first of the extension cords under the sled and used it as a rope to secure Simon Yegg’s upper arms to the board. In similar fashion, she strapped down his waist and then his legs. The rubber on the cords didn’t allow knots to be drawn as tight as she preferred them; therefore, with the butane lighter, she fused them into knots that couldn’t be undone, using some of the water in one of the bottles each time the melting rubber began to flame.
She plucked the paper towels off the wife killer’s face and tossed them aside. A faint moist residue of chloroform lent a sheen to his upper lip, which evaporated even as she watched, and a few tiny drops of dew sparkled in his nose hairs. Simon would regain consciousness in ten to fifteen minutes.
43
After Tanuja Shukla receives her nanomachine control mechanism, Carter Jergen gathers up the empty ampules and other debris, and he returns everything to the cooler, leaving no significant evidence behind.
He goes to the women’s restroom and returns with the candle glass that was left there. He sets it on the table with the other two and turns off the overhead fluorescents, preferring to pass the waiting period in this softer and more atmospheric light.
Dubose stands by the kitchen sink, smoking a joint, taking deep breaths and holding them and expelling them less with a sigh than with a gruff bearish exhalation, all the while watching the girl.
Jergen supposes he knows what that means. This waiting period isn’t likely to be as tedious as it has been during other recent conversions.
He settles at the table with his iPad and goes online to explore hotel possibilities for a Caribbean vacation that he’s hoping to take in September.
But for Dubose’s smoking and what little noises Jergen makes, the church kitchen is quiet. The twins now understand that any question will receive a blow rather than an answer, as will any comment or argument. They are powerless, and they are acutely aware of it. All the Shukla moxie has evaporated. They don’t know what the injections have done to them, and fear of the unknown is paralyzing. If they aren’t in despair, if they haven’t utterly abandoned hope, they are despondent, with no current capacity for hope. Part of the reason they do not speak is no doubt because they fear that their voices will sound weak and lost, that hearing themselves will only further discourage them.
Sooner than Jergen expects, Dubose pinches out the remainder of the joint, drops it in a jacket pocket, and crosses the room to the girl. He unties the leash from the stretcher bar and tells her to get up. When she hesitates, he jerks hard on the leash, as if he’s an impatient child and she’s a pull toy that’s wedged immobile.
She rises from the chair, and her brother says anxiously, “What’s happening, what’re you doing?”
Jergen leans forward, grabs the kid’s left ear, twists it hard enough to crush a little cartilage and make his point. Sanjay tries to pull his head away, but Jergen won’t allow that.
As Dubose leads the girl toward the hallway door, she looks back and says her brother’s name, not as if calling for his help, but as if saying good-bye. Then she and Dubose are gone.
When Jergen lets go of the ear, Sanjay tries to thrust to his feet, as if there might be some slightest chance that the leash will snap or the collar come undone, or the dinette chair disintegrate as he thrashes valiantly in it. He transitions directly from despondency to that energized form of despair called desperation. Although he surges from stoic immobility into a screaming rage, his fury will not gain him anything, for he is furious less with Dubose than with himself, with his helplessness, which will endure for the rest of his life.
Jergen puts aside his iPad to watch Sanjay, who for the moment is more entertaining than any Caribbean vacation.
In but a minute, Sanjay exhausts himself and sags in the chair, slick with sweat. He is like a horse that, having been thrown into a panic by a snake, has stamped and reared so often, to no avail, that it has no strength remaining for anything other than the tremors coursing through it from throttle to thigh, its blind terror otherwise expressed only in its eyes, which seem to swell in their sockets, encircled by an extraordinary field of white, the irises like twin craters in twin moons.