“President Reginald K. Dinkleballs,” Angel blurted from the neighboring cell. “Either him, or Lord Herkimer Jerkimer. Maybe—”
Then she screamed. Clint turned in time to see a large brown rat scamper through the bars and into Angel’s cell. She drew her feet up on the bunk and screamed again. “Git it out! Git it out! I hate rats!”
“Are you going to be quiet, Angel?” Evie asked.
“Yes! Yes! I promise! Yes!”
Evie twirled her finger, like an umpire signaling a home run. The rat reversed out of Angel’s cell and squatted in the corridor, watching her with beady eyes.
Clint turned back to Evie. He’d had a series of questions in mind when he came down here, questions designed to make her face her delusions, but now they were blown away like a house of cards in a strong wind.
I am the one with the delusions, he thought. Holding onto them so I don’t go completely insane.
“No one sent me,” Evie said. “I came on my own.”
“Can we make a deal?” he asked.
“We already have one,” Evie said. “If I live through this, if you save me, the women are free to decide their own course. But I warn you: the big guy, Geary, is very determined to have me. He thinks he can control the other men and capture me alive, but he’s probably wrong about that. And if I die, it’s over.”
“What are you?” he asked.
“Your only hope. I suggest you stop worrying about me and focus all your energies on the men outside these walls. They’re the ones that need to concern you. If you love your wife and son, Clint, you need to work quickly to gain the upper hand. Geary isn’t in complete control yet, but he will be soon. He’s clever, he’s motivated, and he doesn’t trust anyone but himself.”
“I put him off.” Clint’s lips felt numb. “He has his suspicions, yes, but he can’t be sure.”
“He will be, once he talks to Hicks, and he’s on his way there now.”
Clint rocked back on his chair as if she had reached through the bars and slapped him. Hicks! He’d forgotten all about Hicks. Would he keep his mouth shut, if Frank Geary questioned him about Eve Black? Balls he would.
Evie sat forward, her eyes locked on Clint’s. “I’ve warned you about your wife and son, I’ve reminded you that there are weapons you may be able to access, and those things are more than I should have done, but I didn’t expect to like you so much. I suppose I might even be attracted to you, because you’re so damn foolhardy. You’re like a dog barking at the ocean tide, Dr. Norcross. Not to get off the subject, but this is another aspect of the basic problem, the man-woman equation that never balances. Never mind, subject for another time. You have a decision to make: either prepare your defenses, or clear out and let them have me.”
“I’m not going to let them have you,” Clint said.
“Big talk. Very macho.”
Her dismissive tone galled him.
“Does your all-seeing eye know I had to disable the payphones, Evie? That I kept every last woman here from saying goodbye to anyone, even to their children, because we couldn’t risk letting word of you get out any further? That my own son is probably in danger, too? He’s a teenage boy, and he’s taking chances that I’m telling him to take.”
“I know what you’ve done, Clint. But I didn’t make you do anything.”
Clint was suddenly furious with her. “If you believe that, you’re lying to yourself.”
From the shelf, she took Hicks’s phone. “We’re done here, Doctor. I want to play a few games of Boom Town.” She dropped him the wink of a flirty teenager. “I’m getting better all the time.”
6
“Here we are,” Garth Flickinger said, and brought his battered Mercedes to a stop in front of the late Truman Mayweather’s far more battered trailer.
Michaela regarded it blankly. For the last few days she’d felt like a woman in a dream, and the rusty trailer—up on blocks, surrounded by weeds and discarded auto parts, the police tape now lying on the ground and fluttering lackadaisically—seemed like just another of the peculiar turns dreams take.
But I’m still here, she told herself. My skin is still my skin. Right? She rubbed a hand up one cheek and across her forehead. Right. Still clean of cobwebs. Still here.
“Come on, Mickey,” Garth said, getting out. “If I find what I’m looking for, you’ll be good to go for at least another day or two.”
She tried to open her door, couldn’t find the handle, and simply sat there until Garth came around and opened it for her, with an extravagant bow. Like a boy taking his date to the prom instead of to some shitass trailer in the woods where there was a recent double murder.
“Upsa-daisy and out you come,” Garth said, seizing her arm and pulling. He was bright and lively. Why not? He wasn’t the one who’d been awake for over a hundred hours.
Since that night in the Squeaky Wheel, she and Garth had become fast friends. Or drug buddies, at least. He’d had a large bag of crystal meth—his emergency stash, he said—and that had balanced off the drinks nicely. She’d been happy enough to go home with him when the Wheel finally ran out of booze and closed its doors. Under other circumstances she might even have slept with him—as little as men did for her, sometimes the novelty was appealing, and God knew, the way things were going, she appreciated the company. Not under these circumstances, though. If she slept with him, she would really go to sleep after, she always did, and if she did that, whoopsie, there goes your ballgame. Not that she had any idea if he would even be interested; Garth Flickinger did not present as the most sexual of beings, except in regards to dope, about which he was quite passionate.
The emergency stash turned out to be sizable, and they had kept the party going at Garth’s house for the better part of the next forty-eight hours. When he finally fell asleep for a few hours on Sunday afternoon, she had explored the contents of the doctor’s rolltop desk. It contained, predictably, a stack of medical journals and several scorched drug pipes. Less expected was a creased photo of a baby wrapped in a pink blanket. Cathy was penciled lightly on the reverse side—and in the desk’s bottom cabinet, a big box of reptile vitamin supplements. Next, she played with his jukebox. It held nothing but jam bands, unfortunately; she didn’t need to listen to “Casey Jones”; she was well en route to becoming Casey Jones. Michaela flicked through what seemed like five hundred channels on his el gigantico TV, pausing only to watch those infomercials where the hucksters had the loudest, most offensive, listen-to-me-or-die voices. She seemed to remember ordering a Shark vacuum cleaner and having it sent to her old address in DC. She doubted if it would arrive; although it had been a man who took her call, Michaela was sure that it was women who actually filled the orders. Wasn’t it usually the women who got those kinds of jobs? The crap jobs?