“You know I did,” Clint said. “I’m sure I’ve mentioned her name.”
“In passing,” Lila said. “But it was a little more than a passing acquaintance, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was. We were both caught in the foster system. For awhile we kept each other afloat. Otherwise one or both of us would have drowned. It was Shannon who got me to stop fighting. She said if I didn’t, I was apt to kill someone.” He took Lila’s hands across the table. “But that was years ago.”
Lila pulled her hands away. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Fifteen years ago!” Clint cried. It was ridiculous.
“Sheila Norcross is fifteen.”
“A year younger than me . . .” Jared said. If she’d been older—eighteen or nineteen—her birth would have pre-dated his parents’ marriage. But younger . . .
“And her father’s name,” Lila said, breathing hard, “is Clinton Norcross. It says so right on her school enrollment.”
“How did you get her enrollment?” Clint asked. “I didn’t know those documents were available to the general public.”
For the first time his wife looked uncomfortable rather than angry . . . and thus somehow less like a stranger.
“You make it sound sleazy.” Lila’s cheeks had flushed. “Okay, maybe it was sleazy. But I had to know the father’s name. Your name, as it turns out. So then I went to see her play. That’s where I was last night, in the Coughlin High gym, at an AAU game, watching your daughter play hoops. And it’s not just your face and your name she has.”
10
The horn blasted and the Tri-Counties AAU team jogged over to the sideline. Lila broke away from searching the stands for a sign of Shannon.
She saw Sheila Norcross nod at one of her teammates, a taller girl. They did an elaborate handshake: bumped fists, locked thumbs, and clapped hands over their heads.
It was the Cool Shake.
That was it, that was when Lila’s heart broke. Her husband was a man in a beguiling mask. All her doubts and dissatisfactions suddenly made sense.
The Cool Shake. She had seen Clint and Jared do it a hundred times. A thousand times. Bump, lock, clap-clap. There was a precious slideshow in her head of Jared, growing taller with each click of the wheel, filling out, hair darkening, doing the Cool Shake with his father. Clint had taught it to all the boys on Jared’s Little League team.
He’d taught her, too.
CHAPTER 20
1
Around midnight central time, a fracas broke out between a small group of Crips and a much larger contingent of Bloods at a Chicago bar called Stoney’s Big Dipper. It spread from there, becoming a city-wide gang war that Internet news sites described variously as apocalyptic, unprecedented, and “fucking humungous.” No one would ever know which member of which gang actually lit the match that ignited what became known as the Second Great Chicago Fire, but it started in West Englewood and spread from there. By dawn, large parts of the city were in flames. Police and fire department response was nearly nonexistent. Most of the cops and hose-jockeys were at home, either trying to keep their wives and daughters awake, or watching over their cocooned bodies while they slept, hoping against hope.
2
“Tell me what you saw,” Frank said. He and Don Peters were standing in back of the Squeaky Wheel, where things had finally begun to wind down—probably because Pudge Marone’s supply of alcohol was running low. “Exactly what you saw.”
“I was in the Booth, right? That’s the prison’s nerve-center. We got fifty different cameras. I was looking into what they call the soft cell, which is where they put the new one. She’s down as Eve Black, although I don’t know if that’s her real name or just—”
“Never mind that now. What did you see?”
“Well, she was in a red top, like all the new intakes are, and she was falling asleep. I was interested to see the webs come out of her skin, because I knew about it but hadn’t seen it. Only they didn’t.” Don grasped the sleeve of Frank’s shirt. “You hear what I’m saying? No webs. Not a single thread, and by then she was asleep. Only she woke up—her eyes snapped wide open—and she stared right into the camera. Like she was staring at me. I think she was staring at me. I know that sounds crazy, but—”
“Maybe she wasn’t really asleep. Maybe she was faking.”
“All relaxed and sprawled out like she was? No way. Trust me.”
“How come she’s there? Why not in the lockup downtown?”
“Because she’s as crazy as a shithouse mouse, that’s why. Killed a couple of meth cookers with her bare fucking hands!”
“Why aren’t you at the prison tonight?”
“Because a couple of ratfucks framed me!” Don burst out. “Fucking framed me and then fucking canned me! Warden Coates and her buddy the headshrinker, the sheriff’s husband! Being married to her is how he probably got the job at the prison in the first place! Had to be a fucking political deal, because he doesn’t know his ass from a doorknob!”
Don plunged into the story of his innocent crucifixion, but Frank didn’t care what Coates and Norcross claimed this Peters had done. At that moment Frank’s mind was a frog on hot rocks, leaping from one idea to the next. Leaping high.
An immune woman? Right here in Dooling? It seemed impossible, but he now had a report of her waking from two people. If there was a Patient Zero, she had to be somewhere, right, so why not here? And who was to say there weren’t other immunes scattered around the country and the world? The important thing was that if it was true, this Eve Black might offer a cure. A doctor (maybe even his new buddy Garth Flickinger, if Flickinger could get straight and sober) might be able to find something about her blood that was different, and that might lead to . . . well . . .
A vaccine!
A cure!
“—planted evidence! Like I’d want anything to do with some husband murderer who—”
“Shut up a minute.”
For a wonder, Don did so. He stared up into the taller man’s face with booze-shiny eyes.
“How many guards at the prison right now?”
“Officers is what we call em, and I dunno for sure. Not many, with everything so screwed up. Depends on who’s coming and who’s going, too.” He squinted while he did the math—not a pretty sight. “Maybe seven. Eight if you count Hicks, nine if you add in Mr. Shrinky Dink, but those two ain’t worth a fart in a high wind.”
“What about the warden?”
Don’s eyes shifted away from Frank’s. “I’m pretty sure she went to sleep.”
“Okay, and how many of the ones on duty now are female?”