“No time,” Little Low said.
A door at the end of the hall—opened with the prick’s pass card—led to a second hall. As they passed the open door of a staff room, not a single one of the dozen-plus men and women inside—cops, secretaries, lawyers—paid them any mind. They were all focused on NewsAmerica, where bizarre and horrific footage showed some Amish chick on a table rearing up and biting the nose off a man attending to her.
At the end of this second hall was an exit into the parking lot. Lowell and Maynard strolled out into bright sunshine and free air, big as life and happy as hound dogs in a barking contest. The dead cop’s GMC was parked nearby, and in the center console was a goodly supply of shitkicking music. The Brothers Griner agreed on Brooks and Dunn, followed by Alan Jackson, who was a good old boy for sure.
They boot-scooted their way to a nearby campground and parked the Jimmy-Mac behind a forest ranger outpost that had been closed in a round of cutbacks years before. The lock on the outpost door popped with one shove. A woman’s uniform hung in the closet. Luckily, she had been a large lady, and at Lowell’s command, Maynard squeezed into it. Dressed as such, it was easy to convince the driver of a Chevy Silverado in the campground parking lot to step away for a word.
“Is there something wrong with my camping permit?” Silverado Man asked Maynard. “This disease news has got me all turned around, I’ll tell you what. I mean, whoever heard of such a thing?” Then, with a glance at the tag on Maynard’s chest: “Say, how’d you get the name Susan?”
Little Low gave this question the answer it deserved by stepping out from behind a tree and using a junk of firewood to split Silverado Man’s skull. He was approximately Lowell’s height and weight. After Low dressed in Silverado Man’s clothes, the brothers wrapped the body in a tarp and put it in the back of their new vehicle. They transferred the dead cop’s music and drove to a hunting cabin that they had stocked for a rainy day long before. On the way, they burned through the rest of the CDs, agreeing that this James McMurtry fellow was probably a communist, but Hank III was the total package.
Once at the cabin, they alternated between the radio and the police scanner they kept there, hoping to glean intelligence concerning the police response to their escape.
Initially, Lowell found the complete inattention to said escape unnerving. By the second day, however, the snowballing events of the Aurora phenomenon—which explained the lady judge’s rough treatment of the Coughlin cop and the crap on her face—were so encompassing and cataclysmic that Lowell’s apprehension evaporated. Who had time for two country outlaws amid mass riots, plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns, and people incinerating chicks in their sleep?
2
On Monday, as Frank Geary was planning his assault on the women’s prison, Lowell was reclining on the moldy couch in the hunting cabin, gnawing on deer jerky and visualizing their own next moves. Though the authorities were currently in disarray, they would be reestablished in some form or another before long. Moreover, if things turned out the way they appeared to be headed, those authorities would likely be all-rooster, which meant that it would be the Wild West—hang em now, hang em high, ask questions later. The Griner brothers wouldn’t stay forgotten forever, and when they were remembered, the jackboots would be polished and primed to kick ass.
The news on the radio had initially caused Maynard to fall into gloom. “Is this the end of fuckin, Lowell?” he’d asked.
A little blue at the thought himself, Low had replied that they’d think of something . . . as if there might be some alternative. He was thinking of some old song about how birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.
His older brother’s mood had improved, however, at the discovery of a jigsaw puzzle in a cabinet. Now Maynard, in his camo underwear, on his knees by the coffee table, was drinking a Schlitz and working away on it. The puzzle showed Krazy Kat with his finger in a socket, getting electrocuted. Maynard enjoyed puzzles as long as they weren’t too hard. (This was another reason why Lowell had felt good about his brother’s possible prison future. They had a shit-ton of puzzles in prison.) The picture of Krazy Kat in the center was pretty much done, but the pale green wall surrounding the figure was giving May fits. He complained it all looked the same, which was cheating.
“We need to clean up,” Lowell announced.
“I told you,” Maynard said, “I put that old boy’s head inside a hollow log and dropped the rest of him down a hole.” (Low’s older brother broke down bodies the way other folks broke down turkeys. It was eccentric, but it seemed to bring May satisfaction.)
“That’s a start, May, but it’s not enough. We need to clean up even better while everything is still fucked up. A clean sweep, so to speak.”
Maynard finished his beer, pitched the can away. “How do we do that?”
“We burn down the Dooling Sheriff’s Department to start with. That’ll take care of the evidence,” Lowell explained. “That’s big numero uno.”
His brother’s slack-faced expression of puzzlement suggested elaboration was necessary.
“Our drugs, May. They got everthing in the bust. We burn those up, they got nothing solid.” Lowell could envision it—just wonderful. He had never known how much he wanted to obliterate a police station. “Then, just to make sure we’ve got our t’s crossed, we make a visit to the prison up there and deal with Kitty McDavid.” Low sawed a finger across his unshaven neck to show his brother exactly how that deal would go down.
“Aw, she’s probly asleep.”
Low had considered this. “What if the scientists figure out how to wake them all up?”
“Maybe her memory will be wiped out even if they do. You know, amnesia, like on Days of Our Lives.”
“And what if it’s not, May? When does anything work out as convenient as that? The McDavid cunt can put us away for the rest of our lives. That ain’t even the important thing. She snitched, that’s the important thing. She needs to go for that, wakin or sleepin.”
“You really think we can get to her?” asked Maynard.
In truth, Lowell didn’t know, but he thought they had a shot. Fortune favored the brave—he’d seen that in a movie, or maybe on a TV show. And what better chance would they have? Practically half the world was asleep, and the rest of it was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. “Come on. Clock’s ticking, May. No time like the present. Plus, it’ll be dark soon. Always a better time to move around.”
“Where do we go first?” Maynard asked.