“Let’s talk about Evie,” Clint said. “What exactly do you plan to do with her? What can you do?”
Terry appeared stumped, but Frank was ready, speaking with assurance. “We’re going to take her to the sheriff’s station. While Terry’s questioning her, I’m going to get a team of doctors from the state hospital down here double-quick. Between the cops and the docs, we’re going to find out what she is, what she did to the women, and whether or not she can fix it.”
“She says she did nothing,” Clint said, staring off into the distance. “She says she’s just an emissary.”
Frank turned to Terry. “You know what? I think this man is totally full of shit.”
Terry gave him a reproachful (if slightly red-eyed) look; Frank once again raised his hands and stepped back.
“You don’t have a single medical doctor in there,” Terry said, “and you don’t have any PAs you can call, because I seem to remember that they’re both women and they’ll be in cocoons by now. So, bottom line, you’re not examining her, you’re just holding her—”
“Holding onto her,” Frank growled.
“—and listening to what she tells you—”
“Swallowing it, you mean!” Frank shouted.
“Be quiet, Frank.” Terry spoke mildly, but when he turned back to Clint and Willy his cheeks were flushed. “But he’s right. You’re swallowing it. Drinking the Kool-Aid, so to speak.”
“You don’t understand,” Clint said. He sounded weary. “She’s not a woman at all, at least not in the sense we understand. I don’t think she’s entirely human. She has certain abilities. She can call rats, that much I’m sure of. They do what she wants. It’s how she got Hicks’s cell phone. All those moths people have been seeing around town have something to do with her, too, and she knows things. Things she can’t know.”
“You saying she’s a witch?” Terry asked. He pulled out the flask and had a sip. Probably not the best way to negotiate, but he needed something, and right now. “Come on, Clint. Next you’ll be telling me she can walk on water.”
Frank thought of the fire spinning in the air in his living room, and then exploding into moths; and of the phone call, Evie Black saying that she had seen him protect Nana. He tightened his arms across his chest, squeezing down his anger. What did it matter what Eve Black was? What mattered was what had happened, was happening, and how to fix it.
“Open your eyes, son,” Willy said. “Look at what’s happened to the world over the last week. All the women asleep in cocoons, and you’re sticking at the idea the Black woman may be something supernatural? You boys need to do better. Need to quit on sticking your fingers where they don’t belong and let this thing play out like the doc says she wants.”
Because Terry could think of no adequate reply, he took another drink. He saw the way Clint was looking at him and had a third, just to spite the bastard. Who was he to judge, hiding behind prison walls while Terry tried to hold the rest of the world together?
“What she’s asked for is a few more days,” Clint said, “and that’s what I want you to give her.” He nailed Terry’s eyes with his own. “She’s expecting bloodshed, she’s made that much clear. Because she believes that’s the only way men know how to solve their problems. Let’s not give her what she expects. Stand down. Give it seventy-two hours. Then we can revisit the situation.”
“Really? And what do you think will change?” The liquor hadn’t taken over Terry’s mind yet, so far it was only visiting, and he thought, almost prayed: Give me an answer I can believe in.
But Clint only shook his head. “I don’t know. She says it’s not entirely in her hands. But seventy-two hours without shooting would be the right first step, of that I’m sure. Oh, and she says that the women have to take a vote.”
Terry nearly laughed. “How the fuck are sleeping women going to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Clint said.
He’s playing for time, Frank thought. Spouting any old made-up thing that comes into his shrinky-dink brain. Surely you’re still sober enough to see that, aren’t you, Terry?
“I need to think it over,” Terry said.
“All right, but you need to think clearly, so do yourself a favor and pour the rest of that liquor out on the ground.” His eyes shifted to Frank, and they were the cold ones of the orphan boy who had fought for milkshakes. “Frank here thinks he’s the solution, but I think he’s the problem. I think she knew there’d be a guy like him. I think she knows there always is.”
Frank leaped forward, reached through the fence, seized Norcross by the throat, and choked him until his eyeballs first bulged, then dropped out to dangle on his cheeks . . . but only in his mind. He waited.
Terry considered, then spat in the dirt. “Fuck you, Clint. You’re no real doctor.”
And when he raised the flask and took another long, defiant swallow, Frank raised an inward cheer. By tomorrow, Acting Sheriff Coombs would be in the bag. Then he, Frank, would take over. There would be no seventy-two hours, and he didn’t care if Eve Black was a witch, a fairy princess, or the Red Queen of Wonderland. Everything he needed to know about Eve Black had been in that one short phone call.
Stop this, he had told her—almost begged her—when she called him on her stolen cell. Let the women go.
You’ll have to kill me first, the woman had replied.
Which was what Frank intended to do. If it brought the women back? Happy ending. If not? Revenge for taking away the only person in his life who mattered. Either way? Problem solved.
7
Just as Van Lampley reached her stalled ATV—with no idea what to do next—a kid tore past on one of those bikes with the apehanger handlebars. He was making enough speed to blow his hair back from his forehead, and he wore an expression of stark, bug-eyed terror. It could have been caused by any one of a dozen things, the way the world was now, but Van had no doubt what had lit a fire under the boy. It wasn’t an intuition; it was a rock-solid certainty.
“Kid!” she shouted. “Kid, where are they?”
Kent Daley paid her no mind, only pedaled faster. He was thinking about the old homeless woman they had been goofing with. They never should have done it. This was God, paying them back. Paying him back. He pedaled faster still.
8
Although Maynard Griner had left the halls of academe while still in the eighth grade (and those halls had been delighted to see him go), he was good with machinery; when his younger brother passed him the bazooka and one of the shells, May handled them as if he had been doing so all his life. He examined the shell’s high-explosive tip, the wire that ran down the side of the thing, and the fins at the base. He grunted, nodded, and aligned the shell’s fins with the grooves inside the tube. It slid in easy-peasy. He pointed to a lever above the trigger and below the black plastic inventory tag. “Pull that back. Should lock her in.”
Low did, and heard a click. “Is that it, May?”