“I can take care of this. You just be the best Albert Rudolph Neary you can be.”
The sofa bed was on a platform that Enrique de Soto had raised from thirteen inches to fifteen. He had taken the folding bed and its mechanism out of the platform, so that it was now hollow. In its original condition, thick sofa cushions had to be removed to access the pull-out bed and unfold it. Now that it had been remade, the seat cushions were glued to a slab of inch-thick particleboard, the edge of which was concealed with welting.
When she pushed on the welted edge of the particleboard, she released a pressure latch that freed the entire slab to which the pillows were glued. It glided forward on hidden roller tracks, exposing the hiding place beneath.
Jane stepped over the cushions and sat in the cavity. She stretched out flat on her back, head against one sidewall of the sofa, feet against the other.
In the bedroom, in similar fashion, Luther would be secreting himself within the larger platform of the queen-size bed, the box springs having been removed by Enrique and replaced by particleboard that supported the mattress.
With one hand, Jane slid the pillowed platform shut, and the pressure latch clicked. She would be able to release the latch from this position when the time came to climb out. In the confining darkness, she listened to the low rumble of the engine as, in fits and starts, the vehicle moved forward toward the roadblock.
If the motor home had been transporting illegal drugs and if this had been a border crossing with experienced DEA agents, they would have found the secret stashes in about three minutes, even without the assistance of dogs. But the men manning the roadblock were FBI or Homeland Security, or maybe NSA, not drug-enforcement types, and they were probably not familiar with human-trafficking techniques, either. With Bernie Riggowitz behind the wheel, the least likely getaway driver in the annals of crime, any search of the Tiffin Allegro was likely to be perfunctory.
14
HAVING TAKEN REFUGE in the driver’s seat of her Buick, doors locked and engine running, Mrs. Atlee stares out at Carter Jergen and the others as though she is in a deep-sea submersible, watching the strange marine creatures in an oceanic crevasse as they go about their watery business unaware that they are about to be torn apart and swallowed by some approaching leviathan.
Perhaps because they are baffled and frightened by the behavior of the naked, bloody Minette, the two deputies acquiesce to Radley Dubose’s assumption of authority. As directed, Deputy Utley goes to the northeast corner of the house, from which he can see two sides of the residence, and Deputy Parkwood goes to the southwest corner to maintain surveillance of the other two sides. They will sound an alarm if the woman attempts to flee the house by door or window.
A de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter passes overhead, ceaselessly netting transmissions from those carrier waves that are assigned to disposable cellphones, hoping Jane Hawk will make a call, allowing them to get a fix on her. In this debilitating heat, the airplane’s turboprop engines sound like the lazy droning of a giant bumblebee.
Dubose intends to go into the house through the front door. He expects Jergen to go with him.
“We should wait for backup,” Jergen counsels as he proceeds across the yard with the big man.
“There is no backup, my friend. Backup is busy manning those roadblocks and tracking zombies.”
“Zombies? What’re you talking about zombies?”
“Zombies like Minette Butterworth.”
As Dubose reaches the porch steps, Jergen halts short of them. The sun is a torch. The air is as dry as that in a blast furnace. Each inhalation sears his throat. “She’s not a zombie. She’s fallen through the forbidden door. Psychological retrogression, like you said. Reptile consciousness.”
Turning to Jergen, Dubose speaks with a degree of impatience meant to shame Jergen for being thickheaded. “If she has any memory of her life to date, it’s minimal. If there’s a natural law that tells us right from wrong, she’s no longer aware of it. She has no Tao, no conscience, no inhibitions, maybe not even any fear. She lives entirely for pleasure, and one of her greatest pleasures is the thrill of violence. She is fearless of consequences because she no longer has the intellectual capacity to imagine what they might be or even that there are such things as consequences. To her, the world is a rats’ warren, and she’s a serpent with no other purpose than to hunt. Like a snake, she’ll kill to eat and defend herself, but unlike a snake, she’ll also kill in an orgasmic frenzy, just for the excitement of it, for the rush of emotion, because it makes her clitoris throb like nothing else can. In that viperous brain of hers, in that black hole of collapsed psychology, there’s no longer a taboo of any kind, certainly not one against cannibalism. From her perspective, meat is meat, and you’re no more sacred than a rat. Now do you want to debate whether the term zombie applies, as if we’re having tea in Cambridge?”
Jergen’s mouth has filled with saliva, as if he is about to vomit. He swallows hard and swallows again. “You saw what Ramsey Corrigan did to his parents, his brother, that Homeland agent who was a martial-arts specialist—what he did in seconds.”
“He’s seventeen, bigger than an NFL linebacker. Minette is thirty-four, seventeen years older, less than half his weight, just a damn girl, a gash, and she doesn’t have the advantage of surprise like Ramsey Corrigan did. Are you gonna help me get this done, or are you gonna wimp out on me?”
While Dubose turns away and climbs the porch steps, Carter Jergen doesn’t bother to catalogue the advantages of wimping out, which are countless, but tries unsuccessfully to think of a single convincing benefit to manning up and accompanying his partner.
Dubose reaches the porch.
Dismayed but not entirely surprised, Jergen ascends the steps in his partner’s wake. He is loath to admit to the truth of his own psychology, which is not reptilian but which is certainly screwed up. As much as Radley Dubose frustrates, appalls, and disgusts him, Jergen wants the big man’s approval. Maybe that is because Jergen’s mother loves only her political and charitable causes, and because his father is remote, incapable of affection, and disapproving of everything short of perfection. Self-analysis was a key fascination of the perpetual juveniles with whom he matriculated at Harvard; but Jergen, who found that practice puerile then, finds it no less so now. He doesn’t know why anyone does anything, least of all himself.
Dubose is an inbred backwoods rustic from a squalid family, poorly educated at Princeton, crude, often mannerless. But he is also an indomitable force free of self-doubt, ruthless, brutal, in love with power and its many privileges, a confirmed elitist in spite of his origins, a rapist and murderer without any capacity for guilt or even regret, because he knows that the only “natural law” is the law of the blade and the gun, that conscience and virtue are fictions, merely inventions of those who wish to rule others by self-righteous moral intimidation; so there is much about him to admire. Perhaps Dubose is not an ideal surrogate big brother, but Jergen follows him across the porch and, warily, into the house.
15
NONE OF THE OFFICERS AT THE ROADBLOCK wore a uniform, but a Homeland Security photo ID hung on a lanyard around the neck of the one seeking Bernie’s attention.
The Tiffin Allegro was equipped with a driver’s door, optional on that model. Bernie put down the window and looked as solemn as his aging, Muppet face would allow. “Wow. Homeland Security must mean big trouble.”
The agent had to peer up at him in the high driver’s seat. The man had a gurnisht face, an unfortunate nothing from brow to chin that you would remember for maybe thirty seconds after he turned away.
He said, “We’re just seeking a fugitive, sir. No crisis. May I see your license?”