“Zhan . . . Zhan . . . ah, fuck.” She lolled back in her chair. “Goin bye-bye, Doc. Goin shleep.”
Clint looked in the wastebasket, and there, among some tissues and a few crumpled Mars bar wrappers, he found a brown prescription bottle. The label said JANICE COATES and XANAX and 10 MG. It was empty.
He held it up so Janice could see it, and they spoke the same word at the same time, Coates slurring her half of the duet: “Peters.”
Making an effort—surely a supreme effort—Janice Coates sat up and fixed Clint’s gaze with her own. Though her eyes were glassy, when she spoke, she was hardly slurring at all. “Get him, Doc. Before he leaves the building. Slam that molesting son of a bitch into a C Wing cell and throw away the key.”
“You need to vomit,” Clint said. “Raw eggs. I’ll get some from the kitch—”
“Too late. I’m going down. Tell Mickey . . .” Her eyes closed. She forced them open again. “Tell Mickey I love her.”
“You’ll tell her that yourself.”
Coates smiled. Her eyelids were rolling down again. “You’re in charge now, Doc. At least until Hicks comesh back. You . . .” She uttered a huge sigh. “Keep them shafe until they all go to sheep . . . and then . . . ah, keep them shafe, keep us shafe until . . .”
Warden Coates crossed her arms on her desk blotter and pillowed her head on them. Clint watched in fascination and horror as the first strands of white began to spin out of her hair, her ears, and the skin of her flushed cheeks.
So fast, he thought. So goddam fast.
He hurried from the office, meaning to tell Coates’s secretary to get on the horn and make sure Peters was kept on-site, but Blanche McIntyre was gone. Lying on her blotter was a single piece of prison stationery with a note written on it in black Sharpie. Clint read the big block letters twice before he could believe what his eyes told him he was seeing.
I HAVE GONE TO MY BOOK CLUB.
Book club?
Book club?
Really?
Blanche went to her fucking book club?
Clint ran down Broadway toward the entrance lobby, dodging a few wandering inmates in their baggy Brown Tops, aware that some were regarding him with surprise. He got to the locked main doors and hammered on the intercom button until Millie Olson, still on the board at the lobby security station, answered. “Jesus, Doc, don’t wear it out. What’s wrong?”
Through the double glass panes, he could see Don Peters’s battered Chevrolet beyond the inner gate, inside the dead zone, but now passing through the outer gate. He could even see Don’s stubby fingers, holding out his ID card for the reader.
Clint pushed the intercom button again and said, “Never mind, Millie. Never mind.”
CHAPTER 13
1
On her way back to town, an impudent little nonsense jingle began to run through Lila Norcross’s mind, one she and her friends had chanted when they were downstreet and their parents couldn’t hear. She began to chant it now, in the dying daylight.
“In Derby Town, in Derby Town, the streets are made of glass; in Derby Town, in Derby Town, the girls will kick your bumpty-bump, bumpty-bump, bumpty-bumpa-tee-bump-bump-bump . . .”
What came next? Oh yes.
“In Derby Town, in Derby Town, my brother had a fit; in Derby Town, in Derby Town, my sister’s full of bumpty-bump, bumpty-b—”
Almost too late, she realized she was off the road and running into the underbrush, bound for a steep slope down which her cruiser would roll at least three times before reaching the bottom. She stood both feet on the brake and stopped with the front end of the car hanging over that gravelly drop. She threw the gearshift into park, and as she did, she felt tendrils of something brush gently against her cheeks. She tore at them, had time to see one melting away even as it lay across her palm, then shouldered open her door and tried to get out. Her harness was still on, and it yanked her back.
She opened the clasp, got out, and stood taking deep breaths of the air, which was finally cooling. She slapped herself across the face once, then twice.
“Close one,” she said. Far below, one of the little creeks—cricks, in the local patois—that fed the Ball River went flowing and chuckling east. “That was a close one, Lila Jean.”
Too close. She would fall asleep eventually, she knew that, and the white crap would spin itself out of her skin and enclose her when she did, but she would not let that happen until she had kissed and hugged her son at least one more time. That was a dead-red promise.
She got back behind the wheel and grabbed her mic. “Unit Four, this is Unit One. Come back?”
Nothing at first, and she was about to repeat when Terry Coombs replied. “One, this is Four.” He sounded wrong, somehow. As if he had a cold.
“Four, have you checked the drugstores?”
“Yeah. Two looted, one on fire. FD is on the scene, so it won’t spread. I guess that’s one good thing. The pharmacist at the CVS was shot dead, and we think there’s at least one body inside the Rite Aid. That’s the one that’s burning. FD doesn’t know how many vics for sure.”
“Oh, no.”
“Sorry, Sheriff. It’s true.”
No, not as if he had a cold—as if he’d been crying.
“Terry? What is it? Something else is wrong.”
“Went home,” he said. “Found Rita covered in that cocoon crap. She nodded off at the table, just like she always does before I come home from my shift. Grab fifteen or twenty minutes for herself. I warned her not to, and she said she wouldn’t, and then I zipped home to see how she was doing and—”
Now he did begin to cry.
“So I put her in bed and I came back out to check the drugstores, like you said. What else could I do? I tried calling my daughter and there’s no answer in her room. Rita tried calling, too, early, a bunch of times.” Diana Coombs was a freshman in college at USC. Her father made a gaspy, watery sound. “Most of the West Coast women are asleep, never woke up. I hoped maybe she was up all night, studying or something, partying even, but . . . I know she’s not, Lila.”
“Maybe you’re wrong.”
Terry ignored this. “But hey, they’re breathing, right? All the women and girls are still breathing. So maybe . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Is Roger with you?”
“No. I spoke with him, though. He found Jessica covered with it. Head to toe. Must have gone to sleep naked, because she looks like a mummy in one of those old horror movies. Baby, too. Right there in the crib, wrapped up, same as the ones they’ve been showing on television. Roger lost it. He was bawling and howling his damn head off. I tried to get him to come with me, but he wouldn’t.”
This made Lila unreasonably angry, probably because she was so goddam wrung out herself. If she wasn’t allowed to give up, then no one else was, either. “It’ll be night soon, and we’re going to need every cop we’ve got.”
“I told him that—”
“I’ll go get Roger. Meet me at the station, Terry. Tell everyone you can reach to join us. Seven o’clock.”