As he was driving away from the burning house, Don realized that there was something else he needed to do. This part was a lot more difficult than starting a fire, but no less important: for once in his life, Don needed to cut himself some serious slack.
If it was true that Don’s relationships with women had occasionally been fraught, it also had to be acknowledged that his relationship with his mother—his earliest relationship—must have been the thing that set him off on the wrong foot. Even Norcross would probably agree to that much. She had raised him on her own and he thought she did her best, but what had his mother ever done to prepare him for the likes of Jeanette Sorley, Angel Fitzroy, or Janice Coates? Don’s mother had made him grilled cheese sandwiches and baked him individual strawberry pies shaped like UFOs. She had brought him ginger ale and looked after him when he had the flu. When Don was ten, she had constructed for him a black knight costume out of cardboard and strips of felt that was the envy of the entire fourth grade—the entire school!
That was all lovely, but maybe his mother had been too kind. Hadn’t his own go-along, get-along nature gotten him in trouble more than once? For instance, when Sorley came on to him. He had known it was wrong, and yet, he had let her take advantage of him. He was weak. All men were, when it came to women. And some—many, even—were . . . were . . .
Too generous!
Yes!
Generosity was a ticking bomb handed down to him by his mother and it had exploded in her face. There was a justice to that (an incredibly cruel justice, granted), and although Don could accept it, he vowed that he would never like it. Death was a harsh punishment for generosity. The real criminals were the Janice Coates types. Death wouldn’t be too harsh for Janice Coates. Instead of dosing her with the pills, he wished he’d had the chance to choke her out. Or cut her throat and watch her bleed out.
“I love you, Mom,” he said to the cab of his pickup truck. It was as if he were testing the words to see if they’d ricochet. Don repeated the statement a couple of more times. He added, “I forgive you, Mom.”
Don Peters found that he didn’t want to be alone with his voice. It was like—like it didn’t sound right.
(“Are you sure that’s true, Donnie?” his mother used to ask when he was little and she thought he might be lying. “Is it the God’s-honest that you only took one cookie from the jar, sweetheart?”
(“Yes,” he’d say, “It’s the God’s-honest,” but it wasn’t, and he supposed she had known it wasn’t, but she let it slide and look what it had gotten her. How did the Bible put it? Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.)
3
Because the lot at the Squeaky Wheel was packed, Don ended up parking at a curb down the street.
On his way inside, he passed a few men standing on the sidewalk with their beer glasses, admiring the large blaze in the hills. “And there’s another one—think that’s someplace in town,” one of the men noted.
Probably Mom’s house, Don thought. Maybe it’ll take the whole neighborhood, and who knows how many sleeping women. A few of them good, which was a shame, but the great majority either sluts or frigid. Always too hot or too cold, that was women for you.
He acquired a shot and a beer at the bar, and found a seat at the end of a long table with Deputy Terry Coombs and a black guy whose face he recognized from previous evenings at the Squeak but whose name he couldn’t recall. Don gave a moment’s consideration to the question of whether Terry might have heard about the doings at the prison, the false accusation and frame-up and so on. But if Coombs had heard, he was in no condition or mood to do anything about it—the deputy looked half asleep with a three-quarters-empty pitcher on the table in front of him.
“You boys mind if I join you?” Don had to yell to be heard over the commotion in the bar.
The other two shook their heads.
Big enough to handle a hundred, the barroom, at three in the morning, was handling at least that many. Although there were a few women, most of the crowd was male. Under the current circumstances, it seemed that not many women were looking to imbibe depressants. Incongruously, there were also a few teenagers lurking around, dazed expressions on their flushed faces. Don felt sorry for them, but the mama’s boys of the world were going to have to grow up fast now.
“Hell of a day,” Don said. He felt better now that he was with men.
The black guy murmured an agreement. He was tall, lots of shoulder, forty or so. Sitting ramrod straight.
“I’m just trying to decide whether or not to kill myself,” Terry said.
Don chuckled. Coombs had a hell of a deadpan. “Did you see the Secret Service putting their boots in the asses of those rioters outside the White House? Must have been like Christmas for those guys. And Jesus, look at that.”
Terry and the black guy turned their gazes to one of the televisions on the wall.
It was security footage from an underground garage. A woman, age and race rendered indeterminate by the placement of the camera and the grain of the footage, though clearly dressed in the uniform of a parking garage attendant, was atop a man in a business suit. She appeared to be stabbing him in the face with something. Black liquid pooled on the pavement, and bright white strands hung from her face. The TV news never would have shown something like that before today, but it seemed that Aurora had put Standards and Practices—that was what they called it, right?—out of business.
“Must’ve woke her up for his keys or something, huh?” Don mused. “This stuff, it’s, like, the ultimate P-M-S, am I right?”
The two men made no response.
The television feed cut to the anchor’s desk. It was empty; George Alderson, the old dude that Don had watched earlier, had disappeared. A younger guy, wearing a sweatshirt and headphones, poked his head into the frame and made a sharp get-out-of-here! gesture. The feed flipped to an advertisement for a sitcom.
“That was unprofessional,” said Don.
Terry drank directly from his pitcher of beer. Foam ran down his chin.
4
Sleeper storage.
This wasn’t Lila’s only consideration this early Friday morning, but it was right up there. The ideal spot would be a basement, or a tunnel with a concealed entrance. A tapped-out mineshaft could serve well—their area certainly had a healthy supply of those—but there was no time to find one, no time to set it up. So, what did that leave? It left people’s homes. But if groups of vigilantes—of crazies, whoever—did start to go around killing the sleeping women, homes were the first place they’d check. Where’s your wife? Where’s your daughter? It’s for your own safety, for everyone’s safety. You wouldn’t leave dynamite lying around your house, would you?