“Carla, you look well,” he says to her now. That face. That smile. That voice. Bringing it all back.
Then he says a little louder, to the agent holding the tablet: “Yes, that’s her. That’s definitely her.” Then he says: “And who’s this little man?”
Santayana angles the tablet’s camera down toward Isaac, who cowers, clinging to his mother’s leg.
“Hey there, you must be Isaac, right?” says the man on the tablet screen, warmly smiling as Santayana centers the tablet’s camera on the boy’s face. “Isaac, I’m so pleased to see you. I’m your father and I can’t wait to meet you in person. These people are here to bring you home.”
31.
COOPER SITS in the trailer with Rigo.
Cooper says finally, “How did you know I’d say yes?”
“I didn’t, until you did.”
“And if I hadn’t?”
“We’d have found some other reason to intervene. The shootings are a convenient excuse, of course, but we could have cooked up something else. Some reason for the Institute to shut it all down. You fucked us up pretty good with that faked suicide, though. It’s hard to come charging in, guns blazing, just because some lonely old man offs himself.”
“So someone hired you to kill Colfax and Gable and Dean.”
“No, dummy, I hired you to do that.”
“But why those three?”
“Colfax was a test,” Rigo says. “Just to see if you’d actually do it. I figured if you weren’t willing to kill a psychopath like Colfax with sixty bodies on him, then we’d need to go to plan B. But you were. And you did. So we moved on to Gable. Then Dean.”
“For what? Bounties?”
“For closure.” He motions to the walls. “Is this trailer bulletproof?”
“I doubt it,” says Cooper. He doesn’t doubt it; he knows it isn’t. There’s only one building in the whole encampment that’s fortified in that way, and it’s not the one they’re sitting in right now.
“Then we might want to get to higher ground,” says Rigo. “Don’t worry about the money, by the way. It’s still waiting for you. The full two hundred. It’s still yours. A deal’s a deal.”
“So what are we waiting for now?” says Cooper.
“Are you familiar with the phrase ‘active shooter’?” says Rigo. He switches to an official-sounding tone. “During our recent visit to investigate the troubling incidents in Caesura, including several deaths and some unexplained acts of vandalism and animal cruelty, one of my men was overwhelmed by a particularly dangerous resident, a recent arrival, who then went on a killing spree. Thankfully, we were able to intervene and subdue him with our superior training and firepower, but, given the heavy casualties to the town’s populace, the decision was made by the Institute to shut down the program.” Rigo pauses, then says, “At least, that’s the story we’re going to tell everyone, once we’re back in the outside world. Don’t worry, Sheriff. Not to spoil the ending, but we’re going to make it out alive.”
“Who’s we?”
“You, me, my team, and the person we came for.”
“Fran Adams,” says Cooper.
“No, but you’re getting warmer.”
There’s a long, suspended moment of silence before the next thing happens, while Cooper contemplates just how fucked he is, how fucked Fran is, how fucked they all are, how fucked the town is.
And then the next thing happens.
Far away, but audible, and unmistakable.
Pop pop pop.
Gunshots.
And again.
Pop pop.
Cooper looks at Rigo. Rigo shrugs. He pulls his sunglasses out of his pocket. “Don’t worry, Sheriff. Dietrich knows who to avoid. The boy, for one.”
And the realization of what exactly is about to unfold surges into Cooper’s heart and overwhelms him, like water flooding the lungs of a drowning man.
“What about the boy’s mother?” Cooper finally brings himself to ask. “What happens to her?”
Rigo winces. “Honestly, I don’t think she’s going to make it.”
32.
ON THE FOURTH KNOCK, Ginger Van Buren answers. She finds Dick Dietrich standing in her doorway.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he says politely.
“You killed my babies,” she says. “Shot them dead in the street.” She’s dressed in a filmy caftan. Her face is deeply lined and pale and her eyes are red-rimmed from two days of crying.
“I’d argue that, by the time I found them, their fate was already determined. May I come in?” He stands in shadow, framed in the doorway, a silhouette against the sunlight. She squints at him. The sun today is so bright.
“Honestly, I’m not up to visitors.”
“Just for a moment,” he says. “There’s something coming and I thought it only fair to warn you. When it gets here, it’s best that you’re inside.”
Well, why not, Ginger thinks, and, to be honest, she’s not even really thinking anymore. She looks him over, this strange man, his head shorn, with all his tattoos, and thinks back over her life, or what scant parts of it she can recollect, and all of it seems like a dream since the other night. This whole strange coda, this house, this town, these people, it all seems like an errant epilogue to a much longer, more elaborate story that she can’t, for the life of her, recall. Even her pets are gone. All she can hear now is the absence of their howling. It’s deafening.
Well, why not, she thinks, and invites him in without another word, and when she turns, he’s already closed the door behind them both so the living room’s plunged back into its former gloom. He’s already pulling something from the back of his pants and wielding it and she sees now that it’s a gun.
“I’m sorry, but the thing I warned you was coming?” he says. “It’s already here.”
Well, why not, she thinks.
Dietrich knows the three shots are loud enough that people will notice.
Three shots.
Two more.
Well, why not.
The gun stuck back in the waistband of his pants, Dietrich walks back out into the sunlight on the porch, where he left the assault rifle propped up against the wall beside the front door, so as not to startle her. He hoists the rifle up by its strap and slings it over his shoulder. Then he spots that other woman, what’s her name, the new one, the pretty neighbor, the nervous one from the intake trailer with the nice expensive hair, the one they promised to move across town, coming out in her housecoat to her porch to see what the noise is all about.
Cooper’s mind searches for a plan. Comes up empty.
But Cooper’s fists have already formulated a plan.
The plan: Punch Rigo. Then punch Rigo again.
He knows he needs another, better plan.
If Cooper’s learned anything in the course of his life, it’s that the plans his fists come up with are never to be trusted. So he stalls. “What are you going to do about Dietrich?”
“Let him roam. For now,” Rigo says.
“Do you really think you can control a man like that?”
“Control? No. Kill? Yes. That we can do. You have to understand, Dietrich’s the man nobody wants—not the military, not the prison system—so it was easy to obtain his services for our special purposes.”