“Dutch Boy Rhumba Red!” Linny screamed with laughter and dropped her cigarette in her lap. She picked it up, almost puffed on the lit end, and dropped it on the floor trying to get it turned around. That brought on more general laughter.
“What did you take?” Clint asked. “You and Linny? Was it the coke?”
“No, we’re saving the blow for later,” Lila said.
“Don’t worry, Sheriff, I’ll defend you,” Barry said. “I’ll plead exigent circumstances. No jury in America will convict.”
That caused another explosion of hilarity.
“We took in over a hundred Blue Scooties in the Griner brothers bust,” Linny said. “Lila opened one of the capsules, and we snorted the powder.”
Clint thought of Don Peters, first getting Jeanette Sorley to perform a sex act on him in the common room, then drugging Janice’s java. He thought of the idiotic coffee-mix that Coates had signed off on. He thought of the strange woman in A Wing. He thought of Ree choking Claudia and trying to open her throat with her teeth. He thought of terrified inmates crying in their cells, and of Vanessa Lampley saying, I don’t want to, Dr. Norcross.
“I see it worked,” Clint said. To hold himself in took a concentrated effort. “You seem very awake.”
Lila took Clint’s hands. “I know how it looks, honey—how we look—but we had no choice. The pharmacies are a bust, and anything of a speedy nature that the supermarkets sell is long gone. Jared told me. I spoke with him. He’s all right, you know, you don’t have to worry, you—”
“Uh-huh. Can I talk to you alone for a minute?”
“Of course.”
3
They walked outside into the cool night. Now he could smell ashes and burning plastic—all that remained of the Rite Aid, he supposed. Behind them, the conversation started up again. And the laughter.
“Now, what’s going on with Jared?”
She put up a hand, like a crossing guard. Like he was an aggressive driver. “He’s babysitting a little girl named Molly. She’s old Mrs. Ransom’s granddaughter. Mrs. Ransom is cocooned, so he took charge. He’s all right for now. You don’t need to worry about him.”
No, he thought, don’t tell me not to worry about our son. Until he turns eighteen, our job is to worry about him. Are you so drugged that you’ve forgotten that?
“Or at least, not any more than you have to,” she added after a moment.
She’s tired and she’s got a lot on her plate, Clint reminded himself. She just killed a woman, for God’s sake. You have no reason to be angry with her. But he was angry, just the same. Logic had very little power over emotions. As a shrink he knew that, not that knowing it was any help at this moment.
“Any idea how long you’ve been awake?”
She closed one eye, calculating. It gave her a piratical aspect he didn’t care for. “Since maybe . . . one o’clock or so yesterday afternoon, I guess. That makes it . . .” She shook her head. “Can’t do the math. Boy, my heart’s pounding. But I’m wide awake, there’s that. And look at the stars! Aren’t they pretty?”
Clint could do the math. It came to roughly thirty-two hours.
“Linny went on the Internet to see how long a person can go without sleep,” Lila said brightly. “The record is two hundred sixty-four hours, isn’t that interesting? Eleven days! It was set by a high school kid who was doing a science project. I’ll tell you, that record is going down. There are some very determined women out there.
“Cognition declines pretty quickly, though, and then emotional restraint. In addition, there’s this phenomenon called microsleep, which I myself experienced out at Truman Mayweather’s trailer, whoo, that was scary, I felt the first strands of that stuff coming right out of my hair. On the bright side, humans are diurnal mammals, and that means as soon as the sun comes up, all the women who’ve managed to stay awake through the night will get a boost. It’s apt to be gone by mid-afternoon tomorrow, but—”
“It’s too bad you had to pull that graveyard shift last night,” Clint said. The words were out before he even knew they were on the way.
“Yeah.” The laughter went out of her at once. “It is too bad I had to do that.”
“No,” said Clint.
“Pardon?”
“A pet food truck did overturn on Mountain Rest Road, that much is true, but it happened a year ago. So what were you doing last night? Where the hell were you?”
Her face was very white, but in the darkness, her pupils had grown to more or less their normal size. “Are you sure that’s something you want to get into right now? With everything else that’s going on?”
He might have said no, but then another burst of that infuriating laughter came from inside, and he gripped her arms. “Tell me.”
Lila looked at his hands on her biceps, then at him. He let go and stepped back from her.
“At a basketball game,” said Lila. “I went to see a girl play. Number thirty-four. Her name is Sheila Norcross. Her mother is Shannon Parks. So tell me, Clint, who’s been lying to who?”
He opened his mouth—to say what, he didn’t know—but before he could say anything at all, Terry Coombs burst out through the door, eyes wild. “Oh, Jesus, Lila! Jesus fuckin God!”
She turned away from Clint. “What?”
“We forgot! How could we forget? Oh, Jesus!”
“Forgot what?”
“Platinum!”
“Platinum?”
She only stared at him, and what Clint saw on her face caused his rage to collapse. Her perplexed expression said she sort of knew what he was talking about, but couldn’t put it in any context or frame of reference. She was too tired.
“Platinum! Roger and Jessica’s baby daughter!” Terry shouted. “She’s only eight months old, and she’s still at their house! We forgot the fucking baby!”
“Oh dear God,” Lila said. She spun and ran down the steps with Terry on her heels. Neither of them looked at Clint, or looked around when he called after them. He took the steps two at a time and caught Lila by the shoulder before she could get into her car. She was in no shape to drive, neither of them were, but he could see that wouldn’t stop them.
“Lila, listen. The baby is almost certainly okay. Once they’re in those cocoons, they seem to enter a kind of steady state, like life support.”
She shrugged his hand away. “We’ll talk later. I’ll meet you at the house.”
Terry was behind the wheel. Terry who had been drinking.
“Hope you’re right about that baby, Doc,” he said, and slammed the door.
4
Near Fredericksburg, the spare tire the warden’s daughter had been driving on for several weeks blew at the least opportune time, the way her mother—maniacally dedicated, as mothers and wardens are wont to be, to the calculation of worst case scenarios—would have warned her that it inevitably would. Michaela eased her car to a stop at a McDonald’s parking lot. She went inside to pee.