“Mr. Droog says me and him will have some milk plus and then play a really fun game called rape.”
“Honey, when did you talk to this Mr. Droog?”
“He’s in my room, he’s really funny.” As he speaks, the boy spins away from her.
“Travis, no! Come back here!”
He doesn’t heed her. Off into the hall and gone. His footsteps thundering away.
The average time for police response to a 911 call in her area is three minutes. In this instance, there is no difference between three minutes and eternity.
She yanks open a desk drawer, retrieves the pistol that she put there when she sat down to work.
Natsat, milk plus, droog…
This is no ordinary home invasion. Someone has done background on her. Intimately. All the way back to college.
In that instant, she realizes she’s been expecting blowback of some kind, a response to her persistent research into the national plague of suicides. Blowback, but not as bold and vicious as this.
All search-and-clear rules forgotten, as panicked as anyone who had never graduated the Academy in Quantico, she later will have no memory of getting from her office to her son’s bedroom. She recalls only being there, finding him standing in mild bewilderment, saying, “Where’d he go?”
The closet door is closed. Standing to one side, she pulls-throws it open with her left hand, gun in her right, crossed over her left arm, to take him down, kill him, if he lunges. But he isn’t in the closet.
“Stay behind me, close to me, quiet and close,” she whispers.
“You’re not gonna shoot him, are you?”
“Quiet and close!” she repeats, and there is steel in her voice that he has never heard aimed at him before.
The last thing she wants to do is clear the house with a child in tow. A thousand ways things could go wrong. But she can’t leave him there, doesn’t dare, because maybe he won’t be there when she gets back, won’t be anywhere that she will ever find him.
He stays close, quiet, being the good boy that he is. He’s scared, she’s frightened him, but that’s good, that means he’s got some small idea, at least, of what is at stake.
Her own fear is so great that with it comes nausea, but she chokes it back, masters it.
In the kitchen, on the table, lies a copy of A Clockwork Orange. A gift and a warning.
The back door stands open. It had been locked. Too many people are foolish about locks. She knows the value of them, keeps them engaged on windows and exterior doors at all hours, day and night.
“Did you let him in?” she whispers.
“No, never, no,” the boy assures her, and she believes him.
The telephone rings. It hangs on the wall near the sink. She stares at it, not wanting the distraction. She has been taking calls, and her voice mail is not engaged. The phone rings, rings, rings. No caller would wait through so many rings unless he knows that she is home.
At last she picks up the handset but says nothing.
“He is a wonderfully trusting child,” the caller says, “and so very tender.”
No reply she makes will matter. But anything this man says might inadvertently give her a lead.
“Sheerly for the fun of it, we could pack the little bugger off to some Third World snake pit, turn him over to a group like ISIS or Boko Haram, where they have no slightest qualms about keeping sex slaves.”
There are two qualities that make his voice memorable. First, he affects the faintest imitation of a British accent, has done so for so long that it is natural to him now. She has heard others who do this, often certain graduates of Ivy League universities who will inform you unasked of their alma mater, of the generations of their family who have attended it, and who wish you to know that they have been overeducated and are of an elite intellect. Second, it’s a mid-tenor voice that, when he puts too much emphasis on a word, now and then shades toward alto, as with trusting and fun.
When she says nothing, the caller presses her. “Do you hear me? I want to know you hear me, Jane.”
“Yes. I hear you.”
“Some of those badasses over there are terribly fond of little boys as much as they are of little girls. He might even be passed around until he’s ten or eleven before some barbarian tires of him and finally cuts off his pretty little head.”
The words terribly and barbarian sliding toward alto.
She grips the telephone receiver so tightly that her hand aches and the plastic is slippery with her sweat.
“Do you understand why this was necessary, Jane?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We knew you would. You are a bright girl. You’re more to my taste than your son, but I wouldn’t hesitate to pack you off with him and let those Boko boys who swing both ways have a twofer. Tend to your own business instead of ours, and all will be well.”
He hung up.
As she racked the handset, Travis clung to her. “I’m sorry, Mommy. But he was nice.”
She went to one knee and held him—but she did not let go of the pistol. “No, honey, he wasn’t nice.”
“He seemed nice, and he was funny.”
“Bad people can pretend to be nice, and it’s hard to tell when they’re pretending.”
She keeps him with her as she goes to the back door, closes it, locks it.
That day she buys the ancient Chevy from the used-car dealer.
That night she sets out with Travis for Gavin and Jess Washington’s place in California.
6
* * *
HE WHIMPERED, and she got up from the armchair to stand over him. His eyes moved rapidly under his closed and shadowed lids, and he grimaced, deep in sleep and dreaming.
She put a hand to his forehead to be sure that he didn’t have a fever, and of course he did not. She smoothed his hair off his brow, which seemed to smooth away the bad dream as well. He didn’t wake, but his face relaxed and he stopped whimpering.
The day Mr. Droog paid a visit, Jane had known that whoever wanted her to forget about a plague of suicide must have government associations. They were not necessarily a federal operation, but they had connections.
Her back door had been fitted with two Schlage deadbolts, the best locks available. No yaleman ever born could pop them open with the standard set of pick tools. To have disengaged both locks with little noise and quickly, Mr. Droog must have possessed a LockAid lock-release gun, an automatic pick sold only to law-enforcement agencies. For obvious reasons, LockAids were themselves kept under lock and key, and any officer who had a legitimate use for one would be required to sign it out from equipment inventory after presenting a court-issued search warrant limiting its use to a specific street address.
Maybe They weren’t law enforcement themselves, maybe they were not even government employees of any kind—most likely they were not—but they had serious sources in both of those official worlds.
She deduced this also for two other reasons.