Unfortunately, the angry and incoherent man grossly misused this wonderful new service, this internal Twitter system. Rather than communicating something helpful to others, he broadcast an insane, vitriolic rant. And now with the words came sharp attitude, fierce emotion. Minette could not only hear the sender’s fury, but also feel it, his lust and bloodlust, carried on the words, woven through the obscenities, so that she felt unclean and assaulted. Those vile words came in repetitious, rhythmic rushes like some ferocious canticle, building in intensity, building and building until it had the power of a Gregorian chant, suddenly louder, more insistent, and Minette had no way to disconnect from it, his fury exploding into her head.
Shaken, she sat in the office chair to wait out the onslaught, but soon needed to grip the desk with both hands, as if it were a wave-tossed fragment of a sunken ship, her one desperate hope of staying above water on a storm-racked and rolling sea. The vulgar salvos of hate and threat grew in volume and velocity, became a constant cannonade of malevolent words twined with caustic emotions that were alien to her, emotions hot with cruel desire but that howled through her like an arctic wind. In the progress of the storm, she realized that no longer were all the sounds in the sender’s rant words, but now also shrieks and hisses and shrill cries like the keening of coyotes chasing down prey, and with this difference came a change in the nature of the emotions flooding into her whispering room, a new coarseness, a primitive bludgeoning-shredding power that was both terrifying and alluring. The sender’s transmission swelled into a fierce declaration of freedom from all obligations and all consequences, a celebration of the thrill of violent rape, killing, and the savage destruction of all that is the Other. As this river of alien emotion sluiced through the channels of her brain, Minette became mildly apprehensive as she felt something slowly eroding within her, as if this influx from the sender were a solvent.
Near the door to the hallway, Bob had dropped to his knees and then fallen onto his side. He lay with his hands clasped to his head, but otherwise in the fetal position, with his back bent and knees drawn toward his chest, as though preparing to be born again.
Minette lost all ability to judge the pace of the passage of time. Whether the invasion of her whispering room and, therefore, her mind lasted minutes or hours, she couldn’t say. But the sense that something essential was eroding from her continued, although the disquiet that initially troubled her soon passed, and in its place arose an agreeable anticipation.
Moments after her apprehension was rinsed from Minette, her Bobby came out of the fetal position, whereupon he did something unexpected and exciting.
1
LUTHER TILLMAN, FOUR TIMES ELECTED SHERIFF of a mostly rural county in Minnesota, was tall and solidly built, yet he moved with catlike quiet. When he opened the door of the motor home and stepped inside, Jane knew at once that he’d arrived, not because the vehicle softly protested when it took his weight, but because the man had presence.
She’d last seen him twelve days earlier, when he and his daughter Jolie had gone to ground in Texas with friends of hers, Leland and Nadine Sacket, entrepreneurs and now philanthropists, operators of the Sacket Home and School for orphaned children. At Jane’s request, Leland had flown Luther to Palm Springs in the Sackets’ Learjet this morning and had driven him to Indio in a rental car.
Because he had been tied to Jane by the authorities and the press, he had shaved his head since she’d last seen him, and his face was beginning to disappear behind a flourishing salt-and-pepper beard. He had spent most of his life in uniforms and suits, a pillar of the community; now he wore red sneakers, black jeans, a killer T-shirt featuring the face of the singer and actress Janelle Monáe, a loose black-denim jacket cut to mid-thigh, the better to carry a concealed weapon, and a bling necklace of silver chain links. He looked like Dennis Haysbert might have looked in the role of a fiftysomething gang leader in the hood, a godfather of street crime, if Haysbert had ever been given a chance to play such a character.
Jane slid out of the dinette booth, where she’d been checking out various items she had purchased from her forged-documents source in Reseda, and got to her feet. “You’re not as pretty as Janelle Monáe, but you look damn good to me.”
As they hugged each other, he said, “I doubt I can kick ass like Janelle, but I’m ready to do my best.”
They had been through a lot together in the two days between when they met in Iron Furnace, Kentucky, and parted in Texas. Jane not only trusted him with her own life but with that of her child.
He said, “I don’t know how you don’t look tired, all you’ve been through.”
“I’m tired enough,” she said, “and scared. Travis is safe for the moment, hidden away. But they know he’s somewhere in Borrego Valley, and if we don’t get to him soon, these sonsofbitches will.”
She led him to the dinette booth, and they sat facing each other across the table.
Luther had picked up the trail of the Arcadian conspiracy when a friend of his, a schoolteacher named Cora Gundersun, had committed suicide in a flamboyant fashion, taking forty-six other people with her, including a governor and congressman. He had not believed she was capable of such an atrocity. His reward for dogged and brilliant detective work had been the loss of his wife, Rebecca, and his older daughter, Twyla, who had been injected with control mechanisms and were now enslaved. His younger daughter, seventeen-year-old Jolie, remained in hiding with the Sackets in Texas.
“How did Jolie take it when you told her you were coming here?”
“Pretty much how a Marine wife like you takes bad news. Jolie doesn’t swoon and get the vapors. She thinks I can single-handedly break these bastards, so she’s all for us taking them down to get your boy. For such a smart girl, she has too much faith in me.”
“Only what’s been earned,” Jane said. “You’re not carrying any ID, are you?”
“No.”
“Now you are.”
She slid a driver’s license across the table. The photo was the one he had emailed to the house of the dancing gnomes in Reseda.
“It’s on file with the DMV in Sacramento,” she said. “So it’ll pass any police check. You’re now Wilson Ellington from Burbank. The street address is real, and it’s an apartment complex, but there’s no apartment twenty-five. They stop at twenty-four.”
“You know the best sources. Incredible quality,” Luther said, studying the hologram of the Great Seal of the State of California that appeared and disappeared as the license was viewed from different angles.
“Maybe I’ve always belonged on the dark side of the law.”
“In this topsy-turvy time, your side is the right side. I imagine you have a plan.”
“I’ll go over it with you. You ever fired an automatic assault shotgun?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve never even seen one.”
“You’ll like it.”
“What do we need it for?”
“Insurance. Just in case.”
2
THE RANT WAS A RIVER RACING, currents of words rippled through with wordless expressions of rage and need and hatred, a tireless primal scream as nuanced as Nature herself, a corrosive erosive flood tide surging through Minette, so loud now that no sound in the world around her could compete.…
Such a great volume poured into her and nothing poured out, for she had been struck dumb by the power of this tsunami of sound and primitive emotion. She sat behind the desk with her mouth agape but issuing only silence. To make room for the incoming dark deluge, structures within her dissolved.
The fear evoked by the assault faded. A tentative excitement rose in her and soon grew into a thrill born from a sense of wild possibilities, feral freedom.