“We’ve also got high-placed friends on the private side,” Chris insists. “Anything gets posted from this tonight, it’ll be taken down within the hour, even quicker. They can make it so you google Longrin Stables and it’s like the place never existed.”
The young agent shakes his head, scanning the crowd for the first indication that the worst is about to happen. “I don’t like being photographed, not here, not like this, don’t like it at all.”
19
THE OBNOXIOUS LITTLE SLUT doesn't want to get to her feet. She isn’t cool with the way the tables have turned. She acts as though she’s still disoriented, too loose-limbed to stand and walk, but it’s just an act, pretense, deceit. She lives to deceive. She’s the bitch queen of deception. Everything she ever says is a lie, and Janis doesn’t buy a word of it.
“Get your ass in gear, get on your feet,” Janis orders, looming over her. “Get up or I’ll Taser your hateful face. I’ll make you bite on it, and I’ll Taser your lying tongue. You want to take a jolt through that dirty little tongue of yours?”
The threat works. The girl struggles to her feet and stands swaying. There’s such contempt graven on her face. But when hasn’t there been? That’s among the primary identifying qualities of her type: conceit, vanity, arrogance, and the never-ending contempt of one who sees herself above all others.
The shuffling girl weaves along the central aisle, across oval pools of light and bridges of shadow, toward the trapdoor and the ladder, bumping against the walls of boxes, pretending still to be suffering residual effects of the Taserings. By clambering to her feet after claiming that she could not, the little slut has proved her weakness is mere pretense, and yet she can’t stop pretending, because guile and trickery are no less components of her blood than is plasma.
“Move, move, damn you,” Janis orders, prodding the treacherous little whore.
Backing down the ladder, clutching the side rails, the girl hesitates to place each foot, as though her spatial awareness remains disrupted by the shocks she has taken.
When the cunning little sleaze is halfway down, Janis follows, but she doesn’t turn her back on her captive. She knows too well the danger of letting the bitch get behind her. Instead, she faces forward, perches on the trapdoor frame, and then sits from one step of the ladder to the next.
Below Janis, three steps from the bottom, the girl looks up, hair hanging across her face, one eye revealed and bright with calculation.
Before the hateful little weasel can try whatever trick she has conceived, Janis kicks out, booting her in the chest, knocking her backward onto the closet floor.
Off the ladder, Janis grabs a fistful of the brat’s T-shirt and yanks on it. “Come on, come on, you little shit, you’ll never win an Oscar with a performance like this.”
She harries the girl to her feet, out of the closet door, into the master bedroom, and shoves her toward the door to the upstairs hallway.
A girl such as this has a bottomless capacity for treachery, which she proves again when, shuffling past her mother’s dresser, she grabs for the scissors that she left there earlier.
Janis anticipates this rebellion. As her captive reaches for the weapon, she boots her in the backside.
The foolish girl staggers forward and, trammeled by the zip-ties, trips herself and falls to her knees.
Janis sweeps the silver brush-and-comb set off the dresser, onto the floor, and then the silver tray with the three small Lalique perfume bottles. She picks up one of the porcelain geishas with its colorful kimono and throws it at the girl. Then the second. The third. She snatches up the scissors.
“Get up, you little sleaze. Get up, get up! I’m not going to be injected because of you. I won’t be made a slave. Get up or I’ll Taser you until you swallow your tongue and choke to death on it.”
20
HAVING LOCKED the employees in stable 2 with only Alejandro Lobo to look after them, the other three Austin agents step out of the darkness into the searchlight, bringing the number at the front line of the confrontation to eight, making a show of force that might dissuade the armed posse from pushing this too far.
Chris Roberts hopes that one of the three has had the wit to call for additional backup. Even if more Arcadians are en route, however, the odds are they won’t get here in time to stop these rednecks from doing something stupid.
Sally Jones, thus far the only spokesperson for the government in this matter, understands the need to appear equal to the threat of the crowd. She shouts at the restive mob for quiet. “Eight more of us inside the house, four in the stables,” she lies. “We came here in serious numbers because this damn well is an urgent matter of national security, whether you want to believe us or not. The future of our country is at stake. I know you’re all patriots here. I know you want to do the right thing. Think before you do something you’ll regret. Many of you probably have children at home. Think about them. You don’t want to do anything that leaves those kids without a family. They need you.”
“Is that a threat?” shouts a man in the mob. “You mean to shoot us down like we’re animals?”
Sally raises both hands in a gesture of placation. “No, no, no. I’m saying we’re engaged in legitimate law enforcement here. Anyone who interferes with us will have to be charged according to their offenses and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. There’s no way around that. To the full extent of the law. Your babies back home will be without you for a long time. Doing prison, you’ll stain yourself and them, your family name, their reputation. All for what? All because you’ve been misinformed.”
A man who previously identified himself as Linwood Haney, and who seems to be the leader of this rabble, speaks up. “Bring Chase and Alexis out here, them and their three girls, so we can ask ’em is all this righteous police work like you say.”
“We can’t do that,” Sally says. “You don’t understand. Chase and Alexis have agreed to cooperate with us in return for immunity. They’re in the middle of giving depositions, under oath. It would compromise the integrity of the deposition process to interrupt the continuity of the recording, and that would jeopardize Chase and Alexis’s immunity, which is the last thing they would want, believe me, the last thing.”
Chris winces at this response to Haney. Sally talks down to the crowd, as though she thinks their kind are as ignorant and clueless as the stereotypical hayseeds with which some in the media believe “flyover country” is entirely populated.
Sure enough, a woman shouts an objection. “You sayin’ their lawyer is in there with them at this ungodly hour? Hell’s bells, woman, their lawyer is Rolly Capshaw. Old Rolly goes to bed eight-thirty every night, sure as the flag has stars and stripes. He won’t stay up till three in the mornin’ like this even if he knows for a fact it’s the night Jesus is comin’ back.”
Among the crowd, there is considerable agreement with this assessment, and Linwood Haney says, “There won’t be a damn thing righteous about any deposition taken without they’re allowed a lawyer.”
21
THE CLATTER OF THE HELICOPTER is more muffled in the upstairs hallway than it had been in the attic. But as the deceitful little whore pretends that her fettered ankles require slow progress on the front stairs and as Janis prods her to move faster toward the foyer below, the rhythmic pounding of the blades grows louder again.