“I know you,” Jeanette whispered. It felt as if there was a large warm weight on her chest. It was hard to breathe, but it didn’t hurt. “You were the one who brought Evie to the prison. The cop. I seen you through the window.”
“That smells like kerosene,” Lila said. She picked up the overturned canister, sniffed at it, then dropped it.
Outside that morning’s Meeting at the Shopwell, someone had mentioned that one of the golf carts was missing, and no one had signed the register for it; a girl named Maisie Wettermore had volunteered that she had seen Elaine Nutting just a few minutes earlier, driving one in the direction of Adams Lumberyard. Lila, who had come with Janice Coates, had exchanged a glance with the ex-warden. There were only two things in the direction of Adams Lumberyard these days: the desiccated ruins of a meth lab, and the Tree. It had worried both of them, the idea of Elaine Nutting going out there alone. Lila had remembered Elaine’s doubts about the animals there—the tiger, especially—and it occurred to her that she might try to kill it. This, Lila was certain, would be unwise. So, the two of them had taken out a golf cart of their own, and followed.
And now Lila had shot a woman she had never seen before, who lay bleeding on the ground, badly wounded.
“What the hell were you going to do?” she asked.
“Not me,” Jeanette said, and looked over at the weeping woman. “Her. She was the one. Her kerosene. Her gun. I stopped her.”
Jeanette knew she was dying. Coldness like well water rising up through her, taking away her toes, then the rest of her feet, then her knees, slipping up toward the heart of her. Bobby had been afraid of water when he was little.
And Bobby had been afraid someone was going to take his Coke and his Mickey Mouse hat. That was the moment captured in the photo on her little block of paint in the cell. No, honey, no, she had told him. Don’t you worry. Those are yours. Your mother’s not going to let anyone take them from you.
And if Bobby were here now, asking about this water? This water that his mother was sinking down into? Oh, she’d tell him, that’s nothing to worry about, either. It’s just a shock at first, but you get used to it.
But Jeanette was no Lying for Prizes champion. She wasn’t that caliber of contestant. She might have been able to get a fib past Bobby, but not Ree. If Ree had been there, she’d have had to admit, though the well water didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel right, either.
She could hear the host’s disembodied voice: That’s all for Jeanette Sorley, I’m afraid, but we’re sending her home with some lovely parting gifts. Tell her about them, Ken! The host sounded like Warner Wolf, Mr. Let’s-Go-to-the-Videotape himself. Hey, if you had to be sent home, you couldn’t ask for a better announcer.
Warden Coates, her hair now as white as chalk, interrupted Jeanette’s sky. It kind of suited her, the hair. She was too thin, though, big dents under her eyes, hollows at her cheeks.
“Sorley?” Coates went to a knee and took her hand. “Jeanette?”
“Oh, shit,” the cop said. “I think I just made a very bad mistake.” She dropped to her knees and put her palms against Jeanette’s wound, applying pressure, knowing it was pointless. “I only meant to wing her, but the distance . . . and I was so afraid for the Tree . . . I’m sorry.”
Jeanette felt blood leaking from both corners of her mouth. She began to gasp. “I have a son—his name is Bobby—I have a son—”
Jeanette’s last words were directed at Elaine, and the last thing she saw was that woman’s face, her wide, scared eyes. “—Please—I have a son—”
CHAPTER 15
Later, when the smoke and teargas clears, there will be dozens of stories about the battle for the Dooling Correctional Facility for Women, all of them different, most conflicting, true in some of the details and false in others. Once a serious conflict commences—a fight to the death—objective reality is quickly lost in the smoke and noise.
Also, many of those who could have added their own accounts were dead.
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As Van Lampley—hip-shot, bleeding, tired to her soul—drove her ATV slowly along a dirt road that she believed might be Allen Lane (hard to tell for sure; there were so many dirt roads curling around in these hills), she heard a distant explosion from the direction of the prison. She looked up from the screen of the tracker-equipped cell phone she had liberated from Fritz Meshaum. On that screen, the phone in her hand was represented by a red dot. The GPS gizmo on the bazooka was a green one. The two dots were now very close, and she felt she had taken the ATV as far as she could without alerting the Griners that she was after them.
Maybe that boom was them shooting off another bazooka shell, she thought. It was possible, but as a mining-country girl who had grown up to the rough music of dynamite, she didn’t believe it. The explosion from the prison had been sharper and harder. It had been dyno, all right. Apparently the Griner brothers weren’t the only sleazebuckets abroad with explosives.
She parked, dismounted the ATV, and staggered. The left leg of her pants was soaked with blood from hip to knee, and the adrenalin that had carried her this far was dwindling. Every part of her body ached, but her hip, where Meshaum had shot her, was agony. Something was shattered in there, she could feel the bones grinding with every step, and now she was lightheaded with blood loss as well as days upon nights of no sleep. Every part of her cried out to give up—to quit this madness and go to sleep.
And I will, she thought, grabbing her rifle and the antique pistol Meshaum had used to shoot her, but not yet. I may not be able to do anything about what’s happening at the prison, but I can put a hurt on those two bastards before they make it any worse. After that, I can rack out.
Branching off from the lane and angling up through the scrubby second-growth trees were two weedy ruts that might once have been a road. Twenty yards along, she found the truck the Griners had stolen. She looked inside, saw nothing she wanted, and continued on, her leg a rake that she dragged alongside the rest of her body. She no longer needed the tracker app because she knew where she was, although she hadn’t been here since her high school days, when it had been a less-than-prime makeout spot. A quarter mile up, maybe a bit more, the overgrown track ended on a knoll where there were a few tilted gravestones: the family plot of a family that had long since departed—probably the Allen family, if this really was Allen Lane. It had been the third or fourth choice for randy kids because the view from the knoll was of Dooling Correctional. Not exactly conducive to romance.
I can do this, she told herself. Another fifty yards.
She made the fifty yards, told herself she could make another fifty, and continued that way until she heard voices ahead. Then there was an explosive whoosh, followed by Little Lowell Griner and his brother Maynard whooping and slapping each other on the back.
“I wasn’t sure it’d have the range, brother, but looka that!” one of them cried. The response was a rebel yell.
Van cocked Meshaum’s pistol, and moved toward the sounds of redneck celebration.
2