Clint was confident that he could put Terry off at least for awhile. What concerned him was the big guy standing beside Terry, who had given the acting sheriff the flask and was advising him between exchanges. It was like watching a ventriloquist and his talking dummy. Clint noticed the way the big guy was scanning around instead of staring at the intercom speaker, as people instinctively tended to do. It was like he was casing the place.
Clint depressed his intercom button and spoke into the mic. “Honestly, I’m not trying to complicate things, Terry. I feel terrible about this. Not to beat a dead horse, but I swear, I’ve got the warden’s book right here in front of me. It’s in capital letters at the top of the Lockdown Ordinances!” He tapped the electronics board in front of him, on which there rested no book of any kind. “This isn’t what I was trained for, Terry, and the book is all I have.”
“Clint.” He could hear Terry’s disgusted exhalation. “What the heck, man. Am I going to have to bust down the gate? This is ridiculous. Lila would be—really disappointed. Really disappointed. She wouldn’t believe this.”
“I understand you’re frustrated, and I know I can’t even begin to appreciate the stress you’ve been under the last couple of days, but you do realize there’s a camera on you, right? I just watched you take a drink from a flask and we both know that it wasn’t Kool-Aid. With all due respect, I knew Lila—” The mention of his wife in the past tense, realized only as soon as it was out of his mouth, caused Clint’s heart to catch. To get himself a moment, he cleared his throat. “I know Lila a little better than you, and that’s what I think would disappoint her, that her go-to deputy is drinking on the job. Put yourself in my position. Would you let someone into the prison who doesn’t have jurisdiction, or the right paperwork, and who’s been drinking?”
They watched Terry throw up his hands and walk away from the intercom, pacing in a circle. The other man put an arm around his shoulder, and spoke to him.
Tig shook his head and chuckled. “You should never have gone into prison medicine, Doc. You could have been rich selling shit on HSN. You just did major voodoo on that guy. He’s going to need therapy now.”
Clint swiveled to the three officers standing by. “Anybody know the other one? The big dude?”
Billy Wettermore did. “That’s Frank Geary, the local animal control officer. My niece helps out with the strays. She told me he’s okay, but kind of intense.”
“Intense how?”
“He really doesn’t like people who don’t take care of their animals, or abuse them. There was a rumor that he put a beatdown on a redneck who tortured a dog or cat or something, but I wouldn’t bet all my money on that one. High school grapevine has never been too reliable.”
It was on the tip of Clint’s tongue to ask Billy Wettermore to give his niece a ring before he remembered how unlikely it was that she’d still be awake. Their own female population was down to a grand total of three: Angel Fitzroy, Jeanette Sorley, and Eve Black. The woman he’d photographed was an inmate named Wanda Denker who had a body type similar to Evie’s. Denker had been conked out since Friday night. In preparation, they’d dressed her in scrubs with Evie’s ID number and Evie’s ID pinned to her red top. Clint was grateful—and a little stunned—that the crew of four remaining officers had bought into what he was doing.
He’d told them that since word of Evie’s sleeping and waking was public knowledge, it was inevitable that someone—probably the cops—would come for her. He hadn’t attempted to pitch Tig Murphy and Rand Quigley and Billy Wettermore and Scott Hughes on the idea that Evie was some sort of fantastic being whose safety, and by extension the safety of every woman in existence, depended on Clint. He had a great deal of confidence in his ability to talk a person around to a new way of seeing things—he’d been doing exactly that for nearly two decades—but this was an idea that not even he dared attempt to sell. The tack Clint had taken with Dooling Correctional’s remaining officers was simpler: they couldn’t hand Evie over to locals. Moreover, they couldn’t play it straight with them, because as soon as they acknowledged that Evie was different, they’d only become more relentless. Whatever the deal with Evie was—whatever immunity she possessed—it needed to be sorted out by serious scientists from the federal government who knew what the hell they were doing. It didn’t matter that the town authorities probably had a comparable plan in mind: to have a doctor examine her, to question her about her background, and perform every test you could perform on a person who seemed to have a unique biology. Which sounded okay.
But, as Terry might have said. But.
She was too precious to risk, that was the but. If they handed Evie over to the wrong people and things went sideways, if someone lost their temper and killed her—perhaps out of simple frustration, perhaps because they needed a scapegoat—what good would she be then to anyone’s mothers and wives and daughters?
And forget Evie as an interview subject, Clint told his (very) thin blue line. She couldn’t or wouldn’t tell anyone anything. She seemed not to have the remotest idea of what was so special about her biology. Plus, immune or not, Eve Black was a psychopath who’d planted a pair of meth cookers.
“Someone could still, like, study her body and her DNA and such, couldn’t they?” Rand Quigley had hopefully proposed. “Even if her brains were blown out?” He added hastily: “I’m just sayin.”
“I’m sure they could, Rand,” said Clint, “but don’t you think that’s not optimal? It’s probably better if we keep her brains in. They might be useful.”
Rand had conceded as much.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of this scenario, Clint had been making regular calls to the CDC. Since the guys in Atlanta didn’t answer—repeated calls yielded nothing but a recorded announcement or the same busy signal as on the Thursday the crisis started—he was discussing matters with a branch of the CDC that happened to be located on the second floor of an empty house on Tremaine Street. Its number was Lila’s cell phone, and Jared and Mary Pak were the only scientists on the staff.
“This is Norcross again at Dooling Correctional in West Virginia,” began the play that Clint performed over and over, with minor variations, for the ears of his remaining officers.
“Your son is asleep, Mr. Norcross,” was how Mary replied at the start of their latest go-round. “May I please kill him?”
“That’s a negative,” Clint said. “Black is still sleeping and waking. She’s still extremely dangerous. We still need you to come and get her.”