She says, “Laurie Longrin wants to apologize.”
The man who took her to the Washington Aspasia is a hugely successful entrepreneur, Gregory, with whom she conducts an intense on-again-off-again affair, which is one way that she ascends the Arcadian ladder. She had heard whispers of the brothels, rumors so vague they weren’t credible. Sex with Greg is vigorous, interesting, and … edgy. With sly amusement, he sometimes calls himself Jekyll and Hyde, but it turns out there is some truth in this. She had seen only Jekyll, and he wanted her to accompany Hyde to Aspasia, not to participate but only to watch. Among other things, Gregory is an exhibitionist. And he felt that it would be interesting if, when Janis is in the future bedded with Jekyll, she would have in her mind the threat of Hyde. That night at Aspasia, for more than four hours, Gregory indulged in a demonic catalogue of depravities; he subjected the Aspasia girl—who had but a single name, Flavia—to degradations of which Janis never previously conceived. He didn’t stab Flavia to death at the moment of his last climax of the night, but later he suggested to Janis that the girl would have received the knife with a smile if he had wished to go that far and pay the charge required to dispose of her remains and install another girl in her quarters.
The revolution must be won, and Janis is determined to be one of those at the apex of this techno utopia, for otherwise there is no refuge for her in this world, no safety, no surcease from fear.
The freckle-faced bitch stands beside her, not immediately responsive to Janis’s introduction.
With the hand that is behind the girl, Janis twists Laurie’s belt, pinching her waist as a reminder that the little whore’s position is precarious.
She repeats, “Laurie Longrin wants to apologize. She called you out here because she misunderstood the situation.”
The deceitful slut clears her throat, smiles, and waves at the crowd, which Janis thinks is a clever touch, a convincing gesture.
“This nice lady,” says Laurie Longrin, raising her voice to compete with the chopper but letting no quiver of fear taint her words, “this nice lady would like you to leave, and if you leave, she’ll kill me.”
The stupid bitch has no common sense, no survival instinct. With her last three words, she tries to pull away, but she can’t wrench free of her captor’s grip.
Janis draws the pistol, jams the muzzle against the girl’s temple.
The crowd reacts and some of them start forward.
“Her death’s on you!” Janis shouts. “One more step, and I’ll blow her brains out. I chambered a round before I came out here, I’ve got some pull on the trigger, it’s a hair away from discharge, her brains’ll be all over your stupid faces.”
What now, what now? No refuge, no safety, no surcease from fear. Rejection, submission, enslavement, endless degradation. No pleasure left except to kill the hateful little shit.
24
CHRIS AND SALLY AND THE SIX from Austin ease back from their confrontational stance, separating themselves from the mob as well as from Janis Dern. Too many guns, too much emotion. No way this can end in a truce. Every action that Chris and his crew take from now on must be calculated to reduce the number of casualties on their side.
This is not his familiar partner, not the Janis with whom he’s worked for more than two years. There has been a dangerous fault line in her, some San Andreas of the mind, waiting for the right kind of stress to quake her. You think that you know a colleague’s mind and heart, know her far better than your sister, but maybe no one ever really knows the truth of anyone.
The helicopter’s searchlight evidently can be powered higher with the twist of a switch, because abruptly the beam doubles in brightness as it narrows in diameter, leaving a portion of the veranda in soft shadow even as it focuses on Janis and Laurie with such blazing intensity that it seems capable of setting them aflame, and the moths adance within it flicker like sparks rising from some infernal fire under the earth.
The girl shields her eyes with one hand, and Janis shouts at the chopper pilot, who of course can’t hear her.
The young Austin agent beside Chris says, “The crazy bastard wants to save her, but he’ll get her killed instead.”
It’s one of those occasions when Death plays games with the living, just to impress upon them that no one is immune from the touch of his fleshless fingers, not even freckled little girls.
Infuriated, driven by emotion rather than reason, with a one-hand grip, Janis takes an unlikely distance shot at the chopper.
The double crack of two guns echo together through the night, which is when Chris Roberts realizes the copilot at the open door must also be a well-trained sniper, perhaps former military.
No one is immune, not even freckled little girls—or those who would kill them.
Before Janis can bring the muzzle of the pistol back to the hostage’s head, she receives a bullet of her own, a round of such high caliber and velocity that her skull comes apart like a hollow pumpkin in which Halloween pranksters have put a few cherry bombs, swatches of her hair in flight like strange wet birds borne out of some grim dream. Janis collapses as she’s flung backward, and the screaming girl bolts down the steps into the yard, flailing her hands in her hair as if to chase off a swarm of bees, screaming to her knees, and thereafter sobbing.
25
AT 4:10 A.M., in the bedroom of his suite in the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Egon Gottfrey is awakened by the ringtone of his smartphone. The script requires him to be at once alert, and he sits up in bed, wide awake after less than four hours of sleep.
From his immediate Arcadian superior, he receives a report of the events at Longrin Stables: Janis Dern dead following a psychotic episode; a tense standoff that could have led to additional deaths but did not; a negotiated exit by all the agents involved, whereby they do not acknowledge wrongdoing of any kind; an agreement by the mob of vigilantes not to question the validity of the agents’ FBI credentials as long as they depart at once and permanently; an understanding that there will be no prosecution of the sniper or vengeance of any kind against him; and adequate steps being taken by private-sector Arcadians to prevent Internet distribution of any vigilante account of these events or photographs of the agents involved.
Considering the Unknown Playwright’s usual style and narrative tendencies, this is surely not the way he intended this scene to be performed. Consequently, based on past experience, Gottfrey assumes that characters who were supposed to be administrators of pain will find themselves recipients of it, so that they might learn to intuit the intentions of the author more accurately.
Evidently, the Playwright has given up entirely on the learning ability of the Janis Dern character.
However, Gottfrey finds it difficult to believe that he himself will be blamed and made to suffer for this deviation from the script when he wasn’t even present for the action. He has been harried from Worstead to Killeen to Houston and has neither failed to follow the leads given him nor complained about the demands that the story has put upon him. Go with the flow. Nothing is real, anyway.
Subsequent to the report of the debacle at Longrin Stables, the caller reveals that agents have been following up on the many buses that departed the Houston terminal during the period when Ancel and Clare Hawk might have been stowaways, and that one of them has struck pay dirt. There is video of the fugitives disembarking from a bus that departed Houston at 3:30 P.M. the previous day and arrived in Beaumont less than two hours later, at 5:02. An Uber driver in Beaumont has additional information that will assist in the search.
“From your current location,” the caller says, “the drive to Beaumont will take approximately one hour and twenty-seven minutes if you depart prior to morning traffic.”