The elder Hammersmith shouted at the vandal, though Bernie couldn’t hear what he was saying. The shikker, if in fact he was a drunk, at first ignored father and son, moving to the next lounger and pitching it into the pool.
Holden caught up with the guy and seized him by one shoulder, which was when things took a turn Bernie couldn’t have foreseen.
The vandal stood about five feet eight, weighed like 150. He was little Paddington Bear to Holden’s full-size grizzly. Even if the guy wanted a fight and was something of a scrapper, he would likely wind up with two broken arms and kishkes scrambled like eggs.
Except when the guy turned on Holden Hammersmith, he didn’t do anything that a drunken brawler would do. Didn’t throw a wild punch. Didn’t kick or pull a knife. With startling swiftness, as bold as a tiger and as lithe as a monkey, he scrambled up the bigger man as if scampering up a tree. From this distance, Bernie couldn’t be sure, but it looked as though, as Holden staggered backward in surprise, the vandal seized his ears or his hair and bit his face.
Whatever was happening over there, it seemed too weird to be only a common occurrence in another sunny day in beautiful Borrego Valley. Somehow it had to do with this cabal Jane had squared off against, these shmucks who thought people were just tools that they could use and break and discard.
From under the driver’s seat, Bernie withdrew a Springfield TRP-Pro chambered for .45 ACP. He threw open the door and got out of the motor home and hurried out from under the palm trees, across the blacktop loop that served the campground, onto the pool decking, and around the long rectangle of water toward the men struggling on the farther side.
18
THE HOUSE ROCKED WITH THE BLAST, which subsumed the crack of the Heckler & Koch, and the naked attacker fell backward with a third eye weeping in her forehead.
Jane thought, Bomb.
Window glass cascaded into the room. Wallboard bowed inward and fissured and expelled clouds of plaster dust, followed by shattered wall studs and exterior sheathing and blue stucco and elements of the front porch. Ultimately, in another half second, there followed the bumper, grille, and hydraulic rams of an immense front-loaded garbage truck.
The huge vehicle exploded into the house, shoving a dry tide of ruins ahead of it, engine howling, blazing headlights burning away shadows, the billowing dust motes glittering like minute droplets in a fog of pesticide. The ceiling sagged. The rotting carpet split, the wood flooring gave way, and the truck lurched to a halt as its front wheels dropped between floor joists and through the ceiling of the basement, stranding it in the living room.
The wiper blades began to sweep across the windshield, whisking off the dust. Up there in the driver’s seat loomed a macabre figure out of A Clockwork Orange, a man who shrieked with a kind of fierce and wrathful delight—part madhouse laugh, part scream, all threat. His lewd, goatish face was distorted by lust and by hatred of the lusted-after Other, for in a savage and deranged mind, sex and murder were two sides of the same thrill, neither as satisfying as when they were combined in one violent act.
The sagging ceiling began to collapse. As wallboard buckled and split overhead, Jane turned and sprinted into the kitchen, toward the back door. The floor shuddered and rolled underfoot, staggering her, as though the garbage truck might plunge through the joists and into the basement, pulling with it the entire back half of the small house.
19
LUTHER TILLMAN LOADED the boy’s luggage, Cornell’s bag, and the two German shepherds into the back of the Suburban. As he closed the tailgate, he heard the first loud noise from the distant residence, maybe like a door being broken down. After a minute or so came the first and second gunshots.
He stood for a moment, staring at the house, wanting to go to Jane’s side.
In the world as it had been when he’d grown up, a man went to a woman’s aid, always and without excuse. Rebecca, his wife, lost now to a controlling nanoimplant, had called him chivalrous, and he had always liked to hear her say it.
But it wasn’t chivalry, not that formal and flowery and self-aware code of knightly behavior from times medieval. It was simpler than that. There was wrong; there was right. You knew in your blood and bones which was which. If you knew what was right but you didn’t try to do what was right regardless of the risk, then you weren’t just a bad man, you weren’t even any kind of man at all.
The world in which he’d grown up had faded around him as he lived; it was now as ancient in its way as that of the pharaohs buried in the Egyptian pyramids. This darker reality had replaced it. He didn’t want this world. He wanted the one before it, the one of his youth, a mere twenty or twenty-five years ago, but if he could not turn back time, he could at least live by the values of that lost place.
While the right thing was usually the hardest thing to do, sometimes it seemed the easiest, like now, when the right thing was to avoid abandoning the urgent task at hand, get Travis and Cornell into the Suburban, and only then drive over to the house and pick up Jane. He’d been an officer of the law, four times elected county sheriff, and although he’d been through some hair-raising moments on the job, Jane had undoubtedly fought her way out of more tight spots than he had. If he’d ever known anyone, woman or man, who didn’t need to have a knight ride to the rescue, it was Jane Hawk.
Travis and Cornell were waiting in the vestibule, and when he called to them, they stepped outside.
The boy ran to the black Suburban and climbed in through the port side. Travis sat on the floor, not on the backseat, below window level, and Luther closed the door.
Cornell shambled after Travis, not bothering to make certain that his library for the end of the world was locked behind him. He had said he didn’t expect ever to return: I don’t want to live half dead anymore, please and thank you. All alive or all dead—either way is better. Now he got in the back starboard door.
Careful not to touch Cornell, Luther slipped doctored zip-ties around his wrists and his ankles, so he might pass for a prisoner.
As Luther opened the driver’s door, he heard a truck engine on the highway, rapidly accelerating and drawing nearer. He looked out there and saw the behemoth swing off the blacktop, roar across the pea-gravel landscape, shred through specimen cacti, plow through the front porch, and slam into the house.
20
HOURS OF LIGHT REMAIN, but the thunderheads allow nothing more than an enduring dusk except when lightning alchemizes the falling rain into torrents of molten silver. The wet highway flickers as if fitfully lit from underneath, and Egon Gottfrey passes vehicles with steamed windows further blurred by streaming rain, the ill-defined figures within like condemned spirits who have elected to forgo a downbound train in favor of taking the road to damnation.
Outbound from Beaumont in the Rhino GX, he is approaching Houston, in which he has no interest anymore. Beaumont, Houston, Killeen—every one is a false lead, nothing more than the Unknown Playwright’s version of a wild-goose chase. Although Ancel and Clare Hawk borrowed the Longrins’ Mercury Mountaineer, they never drove it as far as Killeen, and they never boarded a bus to anywhere.