The chopper crosses the highway ahead of him, on a trajectory that will take it directly to Longrin Stables. At an altitude of maybe three hundred feet, in the dark, any identification that might be on the aircraft can’t be seen.
When he returns his attention to the road, oncoming headlamps have materialized. They quickly grow larger, brighter, issuing from the direction of Worstead. In a moment, he can see it’s not just one vehicle but a caravan. They flash past him like a pack of NASCAR competitors in a tight formation toward the finish line: two, three, five, seven, nine, ten, eleven vehicles, mostly pickups and SUVs, a couple cars.
The timing of the helicopter and the cars isn’t coincidental. And there aren’t that many places they could be going in this empty country. At this hour, at their speed, the only place they can be headed is Longrin Stables.
No more oncoming headlamps appear.
Chris brakes, hangs a hard U-turn, and switches off the music. By the time he reaches the Longrin property, the eleven cars are parked along the private entrance lane, this side of the blocking Escalade, where Sally Jones and a few new agents from Austin engage in a confrontation with a crowd of local men and women. Chris parks athwart the lane to prevent an easy exit by this self-appointed posse. He gets out of the Range Rover and moves toward the crowd, his right hand on the pistol in his belt holster.
13
IN THE ATTIC, at the end of one of the rows of stored goods, Laurie Longrin knelt with her back pressed against the stacked boxes, out of sight of the main aisle.
She’d wanted to remain in the fire watch until Mr. Linwood Haney arrived with other firefighters and the threat posed by the Federal Bureau of Evil Idiots had come to an end. But when the six agents from Austin arrived first, she was kind of spooked. And when she realized that she didn’t have the scissors with which to defend herself, a sense of helplessness overcame her. All the windows in the fire watch made her feel naked and vulnerable, though as long as she stayed low, no one on the ground below could see her. Then she realized where she must have put down the scissors: on her mother’s dresser, just before moving to the walk-in closet. She decided to go back and get them and return to the fire watch.
Feeling her way in the dark, she’d been almost to the trapdoor when someone pulled it open from below. Closet light rose into the attic, and the ladder unfolded to accommodate whoever might be coming up.
Laurie had hurried back toward the spiral staircase but then realized the fire watch would be a trap. So she came to the end of this row of boxes and knelt there, a narrow aisle to either side of her, but hidden from anyone in the main passageway.
No sooner had she gotten out of sight than the lights had come on. She strained to hear footsteps, detected none. Then the voice of the Janis beast broke the silence—“Oh, shit, a phone!”—and the woman was so close that Laurie almost cried out, for an instant certain that Janis saw her and was speaking directly to her.
Then there were hurried footsteps, and it seemed as though the sulfur-eyed queen of Hell must be climbing the spiral stairs into the fire watch.
Laurie considered easing out of her refuge and hurrying to the trapdoor and down the ladder, to hide somewhere below, where they had already searched. Just as she was about to get off her knees, however, the very skeleton of the big attic—roof sheeting, rafters, collar beams, outriggers, studs—vibrated as hard rhythmic blasts of sound slammed through it. Gusts of wind hissed as they strained through the fine-wire screens over the ventilation cutouts in the eaves, blowing dust off the boxes, tearing the raggedy webs of long-dead spiders from their moorings and billowing them past her like eerie sea anemones. Pinching her nose shut against the tickling dust, breathing through her mouth to avoid sneezing, she stayed on her knees half a minute until she realized that the source of the uproar must be a helicopter, first passing over the house and now hovering near it, whereupon she sprang to her feet in excitement.
Mr. Glenn Alekirk, a local volunteer fireman and once a helo jockey in the navy, owned a four-seat Robinson R44 Raven, with which he surveyed field conditions on his large ranch, made day trips to Austin and San Antonio, and visited in-laws in Uvalde. If this was Mr. Alekirk, the firemen and firewomen were coming with a dramatic display of force, and Laurie was no longer at risk of becoming the puppet and pet of crazy Janis.
She almost stepped into the aisle to her left, but then she realized that her tormentor, having found the fire watch deserted and probably startled by the arrival of the helicopter, would head back to the trapdoor and the ladder. With all the racket, Laurie couldn’t be sure where the woman might be. Better to hunker down and wait a few minutes. She sat on the floor with her back to the boxes. The helo kept chugging nearby. She knew that everything would be all right soon. Very soon. Yet her stomach still fluttered. Her heart knocked hard like a fist on a door. The sound of the rotary wing chopping the night air, which had at first been scary and then had been reassuring, began to seem scary again.
14
FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA, the chopper noise like the sound made all those years ago when, time and again, Francine had knocked Janis down and knelt on her chest and boxed both her ears with the flat palms of the hands, fudda-fudda-fudda-fudda-fudda, until Janis couldn’t think straight and the headache came and then tinnitus that continued for hours after the assault concluded …
The spiral staircase is like some churning drill bit, so that Janis feels less like she’s descending than like she’s caught up in the bore and being pulled down, each step like a cutting nub on the shank of a bit, her feet skidding from step to step in spite of the rubber treads, the cold railing vibrating under her hand, the whole construction seeming to turn around her with carnival-ride frenzy.
Fudda-fudda-fudda …
At the bottom, feet on the attic floor, she stands for a moment, swaying, dizzy, the chopper noise drilling fear into her, although she had thought herself long past fear.
The unceasing clatter isn’t just the sound of this operation at Longrin Stables falling apart, but seems also to be the crack and clatter of her future collapsing. She has screwed up with the little bitch tomboy, let her get away, gave her a chance to call for help, and a mistake of this magnitude does not result in just a slap on the wrist or a boxing of the ears.
Arcadian discipline is swift and severe, which it must be to keep a secret like the nanoimplants from being leaked. If a failure is judged damaging enough to the revolution, then her future will be sealed with a needle, a catheter, and the infusion of three ampules of cloudy amber fluid. Thereafter she will do what she’s told to do, be what she is told to be, ever submissive. Perhaps she’ll be given to some disgusting Arcadian techno geek to be sexually used and humiliated and physically abused until she ages ten years in one, then strangled and bagged like garbage and thrown away.
Her dizziness doesn’t entirely pass, but she begins to move anyway. She’s got to find the devious little shit, find her and bind her. There is a way to use the brat to fix this situation. There must be a way.
The problem is locating the mocking midget bitch in time. Whatever chaos the helicopter brings with it, if a mob is here in the numbers that came out of Juan Saba’s house, the girl can’t be allowed to escape among them.
Halfway between the spiral stairs and the trapdoor, several inches within one of the side aisles, lies a spider. Once fat and juicy, it is now deformed in a wet blot of what once had been its internal substance. Recently tramped on.
Janis has never stepped foot in any of the side aisles. She has proceeded to and from the spiral stairs using the main aisle.
It can’t be Janis who stepped on the spider.