“Cutting the cocoons is dangerous,” Terry said. “People have died.”
“Which makes it damn lucky that you’ve got a certified animal control specialist on your team. I’ve dealt with some mean dogs in my time, Terry, and once I got called out to deal with a very pissed-off bear that managed to wrap himself up in barbed wire. To deal with Ms. Black, I’ll use my biggest catch-pole, the Tomahawk ten-foot. Stainless steel. Spring lock. Drop the noose around her neck before snipping the shit over her face. Yank it as tight as I have to when she starts to buck and snap. She might lose consciousness, but it won’t kill her. The stuff’ll grow back, and when it does, she’ll go sleepy-bye again. All we need is a look. That’s all. A quick look.”
“If it’s her, and all the chatter turns out to be bullshit, everybody’s gonna be disappointed,” Terry said. “Including me.”
“Me, too.” Frank was thinking of Nana. “But we have to know. You see that, don’t you?”
Terry did: “Yeah.”
“The question is, how do we get Norcross to give us access? We could raise a posse, and we might have to, but that’s a last resort, don’t you think?”
“Yes.” Terry found the idea of a posse unpleasant bordering on stomach-churning. In the current situation, a posse might well turn into a mob.
“We could use his wife.”
“Huh?” Terry stared at Frank. “Lila? Say what?”
“Offer a swap,” he said. “You give us Eve Black, we give you your wife.”
“Why would he go for that?” Terry asked. “He knows we’d never hurt her.” When Frank didn’t reply to this, Terry grabbed Frank by the shoulder. “We would never hurt her, Frank. Never. You get that, right?”
Frank shook loose. “Of course I do.” He showed Terry a smile. “I’m talking about running a bluff. But it’s one he might believe. They’re burning cocoons in Charleston. Just panicky social-media-driven bullshit, I know. But lots of people believe it. And Norcross might believe we believe it. Also . . . he has a son, right?”
“Yeah. Jared. Nice kid.”
“He might believe it. He might be persuaded to call his dad and tell him to give the Black woman up.”
“Because what, we threaten to burn his mother like a mosquito on a bug light?” Terry couldn’t believe the words he was hearing himself say. No wonder he was drinking on the job. Look at the kind of discussion he was being forced to have.
Frank chewed his gum.
“I don’t like it,” Terry said. “Threatening to burn up the sheriff. I don’t like it a bit.”
“I don’t like it, either,” Frank said, and this was the truth. “But desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures.”
“No,” Terry said, for the moment not feeling drunk at all. “Even if one of the teams find her, it’s a flat no. And hell, for all we know, she’s still awake. Put on her boogie shoes and blew town.”
“Left her husband and son? Left her job, with things messed up like they are? You believe that?”
“Probably not,” Terry said. “One of the teams will find her eventually, but using her that way is still a no. Cops don’t make threats, and cops don’t take hostages.”
Frank shrugged. “Message received. It was just an idea.” He turned around to face out through the windshield, started the engine and backed Unit Four onto the highway. “I suppose somebody checked Norcross’s house for her?”
“Reed Barrows and Vern Rangle, yesterday. She and Jared are both gone. Place is empty.”
“The boy, too,” Frank said thoughtfully. “Babysitting her somewhere, maybe? Could have been the shrink’s idea. He ain’t dumb, I’ll give him that.”
Terry didn’t reply. Part of him thought having another nip was a bad idea, but part of him thought one more couldn’t hurt. He fished the flask out of his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and offered it to Frank first, which was only polite, since it was his.
Frank smiled and shook his head. “Not while I’m driving, amigo.”
Five minutes later, as they were passing the Olympia Diner (the sign out front no longer attempted to entice passersby with the promise of egg pie; now it read PRAY FOR OUR WOMEN), something the headshrinker had said over the intercom came to Frank. Since Hicks walked off on Friday morning, I’m the only administrative officer this prison’s got.
His big hands clamped down on the wheel, and the cruiser swerved. Terry, who had been dozing, snapped awake. “What?”
“Nothing,” Frank said.
Thinking about Hicks. Wondering what Hicks knew. Wondering what Hicks had seen. But for now, he would keep these questions to himself.
“Everything’s fine, Sheriff. Everything’s fine.”
6
What pissed Evie off about the video game were the blue stars. Multi-colored triangles, stars, and fiery orbs rained down the screen. You needed a string of four fiery orbs in order to explode one sparkling blue star. Other shapes flashed and disappeared if you linked up chains of them, but the sparkling blue stars were apparently made of some almost adamantine material that only the incendiary force of the fiery orbs could shatter. The name of the game was, for no rationale that Evie could grasp, Boom Town.
She was on Level 15, teetering on extinction. A pink star appeared, then a yellow triangle, and then—finally, thank fuck!—a fiery orb, which Evie tried to slide left to a stack of three fiery orbs that she’d already amassed alongside a blue star that was clogging up that area of her screen. But then came a green death-triangle, and that was all she wrote.
“SORRY! YOU DIED!” proclaimed a flashing message.
Evie groaned and flipped Hicks’s phone onto the far end of her cot. She wanted as much distance as possible between herself and the wicked thing. Eventually, of course, it was going to suck her back in. Evie had seen dinosaurs; she had looked down upon the great forests of America from the eyes of a passenger pigeon. She had surfed into Cleopatra’s sarcophagus atop a flume of desert sand and caressed the glorious queen’s dead face with beetle legs. A playwright, a clever Englishman, had written an amusing, if not entirely accurate, speech about Eve once. She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the fore-finger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep . . .
As an enchanted being, she should be able to do better than Level 15 of Boom Town.
“You know, Jeanette, they say the natural world is cruel and stupid, but that little machine . . . that little machine is a very good argument in and of itself that technology is a lot worse. Technology is, I would say, the actual Boom Town.”
7