“I’m perfecto.” Terry waved his hand at a moth that was bothering his ear. “Are you happy we’re arming up, Frank? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Frank gave Terry a long look. It was totally unthreatening, totally blank. He stared at Terry the way that kids looked at television screens—as if they were gone from their bodies.
“No,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t say I’m too happy. It’s the job, that’s all. The one in front of us.”
“Do you always tell yourself that before you kick somebody’s ass?” Terry asked, genuinely interested, and was surprised when Frank recoiled, as if from a slap.
Kronsky was in the waiting room when they came out. He’d found the plastic explosive, also a bundle of dynamite someone had found in a gravel pit near the Griner property and turned in for disposal. Johnny Lee looked disapproving. “This dyno had no business back there, folksies. It gets old and cranky. The C4, now—” He shook it, making Frank wince. “You could run it over with a truck and nothing would happen.”
“So you want to leave the dynamite?” Terry asked.
“Jesus, no.” Kronsky looked offended. “I love me some dyno. Always have. Dyno’s what you call old-school. Need to wrap it in a blanket, is all. Or maybe Sleeping Beauty there’s got a nice thick sweater in the closet. Oh, and I’ll need to get some items from the hardware store. I trust the sheriff’s department has an open account?”
Before Terry and Frank left, they packed a duffel bag with the handguns and ammo that hadn’t been looted, and carried out all the vests and helmets they could rustle up. There wasn’t much, but their posse—really no sense calling it anything else—would bring plenty of armament from home.
Linny hadn’t left a sweater in the closet, so Johnny Lee had wrapped the dynamite in a couple of towels from the bathroom. He held it to his chest as if carrying an infant.
“Getting late in the day for any kind of assault,” Frank observed. “If that’s what it comes to.”
Terry said, “I know. We’ll get the boys out there tonight, make sure everyone knows what’s what and who’s in charge.” He looked pointedly at Frank as he said this. “Requisition a couple schoolbuses from the town motor pool and park them at the intersection of Route 31 and West Lavin, where the roadblock was, so the fellas don’t have to sleep raw. Keep six or eight of em on watch, in a . . . you know . . .” He made a circle in the air.
Frank helped him out. “A perimeter.”
“Yeah, that. If we have to go in, we’ll do it tomorrow morning, from the east. We’ll need a couple of bulldozers to bust through. Send Pearl and Treater to pick out a couple from the public works yard. Keys are in the office trailer there.”
“Good,” Frank said, because it was. He wouldn’t have thought of bulldozers.
“First thing tomorrow morning, we bulldoze the fences and come at the main building across the parking lot. That way the sun will be in their eyes. Step one, push em deep, away from the doors and windows. Step two, Johnny Lee blows the front doors and we’re inside. Press em to throw down their weapons. At that point, I think they will. Send a few around the far side to make sure they can’t bolt for it.”
“Makes sense,” Frank said.
“But first . . .”
“First?”
“We talk to Norcross. Tonight. Face to face, if he’s man enough. Offer him a chance to give the woman up before something happens that can’t be taken back.”
Frank’s eyes expressed what he felt.
“I know what you’re thinking, Frank, but if he’s a reasonable man, he’ll see it’s the right thing. He’s responsible for more lives than just hers, after all.”
“And if he still says no?”
Terry shrugged. “Then we go in and take her.”
“No matter what?”
“That’s right, no matter what.” They went out, and Terry locked the glass double doors of the station behind him.
11
Rand Quigley got his toolbox and spent two hours chiseling and hammering out the small wire-reinforced window that was embedded in the concrete wall of the visitors’ room.
Tig Murphy sat nearby, drinking Coke and smoking a cigarette. The no-smoking reg had been lifted. “If you were an inmate,” he said, “that’d get about five years added to your sentence.”
“Good thing I’m not an inmate, then, isn’t it?”
Tig tapped ash on the floor and decided not to say what he was thinking: if being locked in meant you were an inmate, that’s what they were now. “Man, they really built this place, didn’t they?”
“Uh-huh. Like it was a prison, or something,” Rand said.
“Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck.”
When the glass finally fell out, Tig clapped.
“Thank ya, ladies and gentlemen,” Rand said, doing Elvis. “Thank ya very much.”
With the window removed, Rand could stand on top of the table they had pulled below as a shooting platform, and stick his weapon through. This was his spot, with clean angles on the parking lot and the front gate.
“They think we are pussies,” Rand said. “But we are not.”
“Got that right, Rand-o.”
Clint poked his head in. “Tig. With me.”
The two of them walked up the stairs to the raised level of B Wing. This was the prison’s highest point, the only second floor in the structure. There were windows in the cells that faced out on West Lavin. These were stronger even than the window in the visitors’ room—thick, reinforced, and sandwiched between layers of concrete. It was hard to imagine Rand knocking one out of the wall with just hand tools.
“We can’t defend this end,” Tig said.
“No,” Clint said, “but it makes a helluva lookout post, and we don’t need to defend it, right? There’s no way through here.”
That seemed inarguable to Clint, and to Scott Hughes, too, who was relaxing a few cells down the line and listening in. “I’m sure you guys are going to get yourselves killed one way or another, and I won’t be crying any tears when it happens,” he called, “but Shrink Boy’s right. It’d take a bazooka to blow a hole in this wall.”
12
On the day two opposing groups of Dooling men armed up, preparing to make war, less than a hundred women were still awake in the Tri-Counties. One was Eve Black; one was Angel Fitzroy; one was Jeanette Sorley.