Ree said Did you?
“No. No! I huddled in the corner of the room. How long, I couldn’t tell. Police said it was twelve or fourteen hours. I saw the shadows change, but I didn’t know how long. Damian sat there, and he talked. And he talked. Was I happy now. Had this been the plan from the beginning. Oh, and how had I rigged the ground in the park so he’d hurt his knee in the first place. What a great trick, Jeanie-baby. Eventually, he stopped talking. But I can see him—real clear, I can see him, right this minute still. I used to dream about telling Damian I was sorry, about begging his forgiveness. In those dreams he’d just sit in that chair, looking at me and turning blue. Too-late dreams, Dr. Norcross says. Too late for sorry. Score one for the doc, right, Ree? Dead men don’t accept apologies. Not once in the history of the world.”
Ree said Got that right.
“But, oh, honey, oh, Ree. What I wouldn’t give to change everything now just this one time, because you were too good to end up like this. You didn’t ever kill anyone. It should have been me. Not you. Me.”
To this Ree said nothing.
CHAPTER 19
1
Clint found Hicks’s cell phone number in the address book in his desk and called it from the landline. The acting warden was disconcertingly relaxed. Maybe he’d popped a Valium or two.
“A lot of the women seem to have reached a state of, I guess you’d call it acceptance, Doc.”
“Acceptance isn’t the same as giving up,” said Clint.
“Put it how you want to put it, but the lights have gone out on more than half of them since you left.” Hicks said this with satisfaction, noting that the officer-to-inmate ratio was once again manageable. They would still be in good shape once they lost the female officers.
This was how people in power thought of human life, wasn’t it? In terms of sum benefits and ratios and manageability. Clint had never wanted to be in power. As a ward of the foster system he had, mostly by grace, survived the dominion of countless domestic tyrants; he had chosen his field in clear reaction to that experience, in order to help the helpless, people like the boy he’d been, like Marcus and Jason and Shannon—and like his own mother, that pale, worried ghost of his faintest memory.
Jared squeezed his father’s shoulder. He had been listening.
“Be advised, the paperwork is going to be unprecedented,” Hicks continued. “The state does look down on shooting prison inmates.” Ree Dempster was cooling in the janitor’s closet and Hicks was already thinking of the paperwork. Clint decided he had to get off the phone before he used the slang term that referred to men who had sexual congress with the woman who’d given them birth.
Clint said he’d be in soon, and that was it. Jared offered to make fried baloney sandwiches. “You must be hungry.”
“Thank you,” said Clint. “Sounds like just the right thing.”
The meat sizzled and popped in the pan and his nose found the smell. It was so good tears came to his eyes. Or maybe the tears were in his eyes already.
“I need to get me one of those.” That was what Shannon had said to him that last time, looking at the picture of little Jared. And apparently she had.
Sheila, Lila had said the girl’s name was, Sheila Norcross.
It was flattering, really, maybe the most flattering thing that had ever happened to him, Shannon giving her girl his last name. It was a problem now, but still. It meant that she’d loved him. Well, he had loved Shannon, too. In a way. There were things between them that other people could never understand.
He remembered that New Year’s Eve. With that damp in her eyes, Shan had asked him if it was all right. The music had been blaring. Everything had smelled like beer and cigarettes. He had bent down to her ear to make sure he heard her . . .
A bite or two was all that Clint could manage. As fine as the smell was, his stomach was a hard rubber ball. He apologized to his son. “It’s not the food.”
“Yeah,” said Jared. “My appetite’s not great, either.” He was picking at the sandwich he’d made himself.
The glass door slid open with a whoosh, and Lila entered, holding a white bundle.
2
Once he’d killed his mother, Don Peters struggled to proceed.
The first step was apparent: clean up. That was going to be hard to do, however, because Don had opted to murder his mother by pressing the barrel of a Remington shotgun against her web-encrusted forehead and then pulling the trigger. This had done the job with aplomb (or maybe he meant some other word), but it had created a hell of a mess, and Don was better at making messes than cleaning them up. This was a point his mother had made often.
And what a mess it was! Blood, brains, and bits of web sprayed up the wall in the shape of a huge, ragged megaphone.
Instead of doing something about the mess, Don sat in his La-Z-Boy and wondered why he had made it in the first place. Was it his mother’s fault that Jeanette Sorley had waved her perky little tail in his face and then tattled when he would only let her jerk him off? Was it? Or that Janice Coates had hounded him out of his job? Or that Norcross, the head-shrinking priss, had sucker-punched him? No, his mother had nothing to do with any of that, and yet Don had driven home, seen that she was asleep, fetched his shotgun from the pickup, returned inside, and blown her dreaming brains out. Always supposing she was dreaming—who knew?
Yes, he had been rattled. Yes, he had been mistreated. Still, loath as Don was to concede it, as bad as it was to be rattled and mistreated, you shouldn’t up and kill your mother. That was overreacting.
Don drank a beer and cried. He didn’t want to kill himself or go to jail.
Seated on his mother’s couch, calmer with the beer in his stomach, it occurred to Don Peters that cleaning up might not present such a problem after all. The authorities were extremely busy. Things you could not normally get away with—like arson—you could probably skate on, thanks to Aurora. Forensic analysis of crime scenes was suddenly looking like a rather secondary field. Besides, it was chicks that did all that microscope-and-computer shit. On TV, at least.
He stacked a bundle of newspaper on the stovetop and flipped on the burner. While the paper got started, he squeezed a bottle of barbecue lighter fluid, scribbling the liquid over the drapes and the furniture, all the stuff that would go up fast.