“We’ll be there before seven o’clock,” Gottfrey says.
“The Medexpress carrier containing the control mechanisms should maintain an appropriate temperature for at least another thirty-six hours.”
The carrier is on the nightstand. Gottfrey reports the number on the digital readout. “Forty-two degrees.”
“Good. Now, the clothes you were wearing yesterday have been cleaned and pressed. They’ll be sent up to you by a bellman when you call the front desk.”
“Another conflicting detail,” Gottfrey says.
“Excuse me?”
“The hotel’s own directory of services doesn’t offer four-hour laundry and dry cleaning, certainly not late-night.”
“Yes, but of course we made special arrangements.”
“A minor rewrite.”
“A what?”
“They say it’s good to be the king,” Gottfrey replies, “but the real power is with the author of the play, who can change details, rewrite anything he wants and make it turn out different.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” the caller says. “We’re rewriting the play, and the play is this country, the world, the future.”
“Well,” Gottfrey says, throwing back the bedclothes, “the script calls for me to take a shower.”
The caller laughs. “Make it a short one and hit the road. We need to get the in-laws, brain-shag ’em, and find the damn kid. We break Jane’s heart, we’ll also break the bitch’s will.”
26
THE SAME NIGHT, THE SAME TEXAS plain infinite in appearance, the same sky overhead infinite in fact, the same radically hot, bespoke Range Rover by Overfinch North America …
Yet all is different. Chris Roberts marvels at how everything can change so profoundly in one hour. When he was cruising back and forth on this same highway, looking for the runaway Longrin girl, he’d been thinking about shacking up with Janis for a torrid week, picturing her naked, figuring that even at just thirty-five he might need a bottle of Viagra to keep up with her. Now her body and the jigsaw puzzle that is her head are wrapped in a waterproof tarp provided by Longrin Stables, the ends folded and secured with almost an entire roll of strapping tape, resting in the cargo area behind the backseat. Picturing her naked is neither as easy nor as appealing as it was an hour earlier.
This is a sobering journey even for Chris, who is neither a pessimist nor a deep thinker. Pessimism is a waste of time, because you can’t forestall disaster by sitting around and brooding about it. Anyway, you can’t be a pessimist and also a fun guy; Chris thinks of himself as a major fun guy.
As for deep thinkers … Well, the deep thinkers he’s known mostly become alcoholics, and if they don’t become alcoholics, they kill themselves. The few that have neither killed themselves nor become alcoholics are either in mental institutions or ought to be.
Nevertheless, cruising now through the last hours of the night, on a four-hour drive to the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Chris has what he believes to be a deep thought. It scares him a little: not just the fact that it’s deep, but the thought itself.
Because he’s the kind of guy who can get people to talk about themselves, he’s aware that a significant percentage of the Techno Arcadians he knows have come from dysfunctional families. Janis has said little about her folks, except that she not only renounced her parents and sisters and hadn’t seen them in fourteen years, but also wished they would all die of a painful, disfiguring disease. Now, in light of what happened at the Longrin place, Chris wonders if the fact that so many Arcadians come from dysfunctional families might result in the entire Techno Arcadian project becoming dysfunctional in the long run.
Fortunately, he doesn’t come from a dysfunctional family, and perhaps this gives him a competitive advantage within the ranks of the revolution. His mother and father love each other and never argue. They ran a prosperous business together, and five years ago—at the age of just fifty-eight—they retired to an ocean-view home in Laguna Beach. They shower him with affection, always have, and he has only excellent memories of his childhood, especially when he reached puberty, whereupon many of the girls in his mom and dad’s high-end super-discreet west-side-L.A. escort service thought he was a cute kid, a little blond Tom Cruise, and wanted to please his mother by doing him for free.
Nostalgic reveries aren’t enough to take his mind off Janis back there in the cargo area. Each time he hits a bump in the road or takes a sharp turn, the tarp slides around a little, and he imagines—hopes he only imagines—that he hears her making sounds within the shroud.
He has a long drive ahead of him before he can deliver Janis to the owner of a construction company, a fellow Techno Arcadian who builds entire communities in the outlying suburbs of Fort Worth and who will find a nice resting place for her under the concrete-slab foundation of one structure or another. They can’t very well blame her death on Jane Hawk, considering how many people know otherwise, and in the interest of putting the entire Longrin Stables operation behind them as though it never happened, it is best that Janis just disappear. Her name will be purged from the FBI, Homeland, and NSA personnel records; her pensions have not had time to vest, so they can just evaporate; and because her family, whether slowly dying of a disfiguring disease or healthy, have for fourteen years not known her whereabouts, no relative is going to come looking for her.
That someone as young and hot as Janis should end this way is sad, really sad, epic sad, and Chris Roberts doesn’t like to be sad. Sad is not who he is. He’s a fun guy, and he’s driving a radically hot vehicle, and he needs some bitchin’ music to chase away the sadness.
Puff Daddy is the right stuff most of the time, but that music doesn’t feel right for driving dead Janis to an unmarked grave. He thinks about it for a couple miles, and then he pops some TLC into the system. “Baby-Baby-Baby” starts to improve his mood, and “Red Light Special” and then—wham!—“Diggin’ on You” hoses away sadness. This was the true wood, back in the day. He was into it even before puberty, cool with the music, sexually precocious, ready for the future yesterday. Tionne Watkins. Lisa Lopes. Rozonda Thomas. Hot, hot, hot. And now their big hit “No Scrubs,” totally top of the charts. The music gets him up and keeps him up as he races through the predawn Texas dark toward a future that is Arcadian, that is inevitable, that belongs to him!
27
NO MATTER HOW MUCH shampoo she used or how long she stood under the hot water, Laurie Longrin didn’t feel clean. Although the water was so stinging hot that she turned a boiled-pink color head to foot, she couldn’t melt away the chill in her chest, couldn’t stop shivering.
Her mother waited with a bath towel when Laurie at last stepped out of the shower stall. Laurie preferred to dry herself. She’d been drying herself for ages and ages. However, she understood that her mother didn’t merely want to do it, but also needed to do it, as if reassuring herself that her oldest daughter was alive and unharmed, so Laurie allowed it.
Mother kept telling her—promising her—nothing like this would happen again. They were taking steps to defend themselves against the repetition of such a horror. Every adult on their property would henceforth be armed at all times. From now until Jane Hawk was able to produce evidence to expose these power-mad bastards and clear her name, Laurie and her sisters would be homeschooled, where no one could try to get at them.