Curt M had probably figured the woman would never notice. To a son of a bitch like this, Aurora must have arrived looking like the opportunity of a lifetime, Easter morning in rapist heaven. There were probably a lot of others like him and, boy, were they in for a nasty surprise.
But how long before the word got out? If you tore the webs and tried to dip your wick, they fought back; they killed. Which seemed perfectly fair to Terry. But it was awfully easy, from there, to imagine some half-assed messiah like that batshit Kinsman What’s-His-Name who was always on the news pissing and moaning about his taxes, coming along with a brand new plan. He’d announce that it was in everyone’s best interest to go around shooting the cocooned women in their web-wrapped heads. They’re ticking bombs, he’d say. There were men out there who’d love that idea. Terry thought of all those guys who’d been having wet dreams for years about being able to use the ridiculous arsenals they’d amassed for “home defense,” but would never have had the guts to pull the trigger on a person who was awake, let alone armed and pointing a gun back at them. Terry didn’t believe there were millions of those guys, but he’d been a cop long enough to suspect there were thousands of them.
What did that leave? Terry’s wife was asleep. Could he keep her safe? What was he going to do, put her on a shelf in a cabinet, store her like a jar of preserves?
And he knew his daughter had never awakened that morning. It didn’t matter that the phone lines were scrambled. Diane was a college kid. She slept in whenever she could. Plus, she’d sent them her spring semester schedule, and Terry was pretty sure she didn’t have morning classes on Thursdays.
Was it possible that Roger—stupid, stupid, stupid Roger—had made an astute choice when he took those webs off Jessica? Roger got it over with before having to see anyone he loved shot in her sleep.
I should kill myself, Terry thought.
He let the idea float around. When it didn’t sink, he grew alarmed and told himself not to rush into anything. He ought to get a drink, or a couple, really let himself work through it all. He thought better when he’d had a few, always had.
On the floor, Curt McLeod—the third-best player on the Dooling High School varsity tennis team, behind Kent Daley and Eric Blass—was making hitching noises. Cheyne-Stokes respiration had begun.
8
Terry’s request that Lila drop him off at the Squeaky Wheel hardly jarred her. It made as much sense as anything at this point.
“What did you see in there, Terry?”
He was in the passenger seat, holding the cocooned baby between wide-open, flattened palms, like a hot casserole. “Some kid tried to—ah—get with a lady in there. You know what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“That woke her up. She was asleep again when I entered the premises. He was—pretty much dead. Dead all the way now.”
“Oh,” said Lila.
They rolled through the dark town. The fire in the hills was red, the smoke cloud that rose from it a shade deeper than the night. A woman in a neon pink jogging suit was doing jumping jacks on a lawn. Crowds of people—predominantly women—were visible through the big windows of the Starbucks on Main Street, which was either open exceptionally late or (perhaps more likely) had been forced open by the crowd. It was 2:44 AM.
The parking lot at the rear of the Squeak was more packed than Lila had ever seen it. There were trucks, sedans, motorcycles, compacts, vans. A new row of vehicles had begun on the grass embankment at the end of the lot.
Lila cozied the cruiser up to the back door, which was ajar and sending out light, voices, and a jukebox blare. The current song was a clattering garage band tune she’d heard a million times but wouldn’t have known the name of even if she had been operating on a full night’s rest. The singer’s voice was iron dragged over asphalt:
“You’re gonna wake up wonderin, find yourself all alone!” he wailed.
A barmaid had fallen asleep sitting on a milk crate beside the door. Her cowboy boots were sprawled out in a V. Terry got out of the car, put Platinum on the seat, then leaned back in. Neon from a beer sign washed over the right side of his face and gave him the acid green visage of a movie corpse. He gestured at the cocooned bundle.
“Maybe you should hide that baby somewhere, Lila.”
“What?”
“Think about it. They’ll start wiping the girls and women out soon. Because they’re dangerous. They wake up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak.” He straightened. “I have to get a drink. Good luck.” Her deputy shut the door carefully, as if afraid he might rouse the infant.
Lila watched Terry walk in through the back door of the bar. He didn’t spare a glance for the woman asleep on the milk crate, the heels of her boots planted in the gravel, toes pointed up.
9
Officers Lampley and Murphy had cleared off the crap on the long table in the janitor’s supply room so that Ree’s body could lie in peace. Taking her to the county morgue in the middle of the night was out of the question, and St. Theresa’s was still a madhouse. Tomorrow, if things settled down, one of the officers could transport her remains to Crowder’s Funeral Home on Kruger Street.
Claudia Stephenson sat at the foot of the table in a folding chair, holding an ice pack to her throat. Jeanette came in and sat in another folding chair, at the head of the table.
“I just wanted someone who’d talk to me,” Claudia said. Her voice was husky, hardly more than a whisper. “Ree was always a good listener.”
“I know,” said Jeanette, thinking that was true even though Ree was dead.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Van said. She was in the open door, her muscular body looking slack with weariness and sorrow.
“You should have used your Taser,” Jeanette said, but she couldn’t muster any real accusation. She was also weary.
“There was no time,” Van said.
“She was going to kill me, Jeanie.” Claudia said this in a tone of apology. “If you want to blame anyone, blame me. I was the one who tried to get the webs off her.” She repeated, “I only wanted someone to chat with.”
At rest, Ree’s uncovered face was both slack and stunned, lids low, mouth open; it was the in-between expression—between laughs, between smiles—you wore in the photograph that you threw out or deleted from your phone. Someone had scrubbed the blood from her forehead, but the bullet hole was stark and obscene. The tattered webbing hung loose around her hair, lank and wilted instead of fluttering and silken, as dead as Ree herself. The stuff had stopped growing when Ree stopped living.
When Jeanette tried to picture the living Ree, all she could find that was solid was a few moments from that morning. I say you can’t not be bothered by a square of light.