He mewls. Tears of blood run down his cheeks. “You’re not a good man. You’re a sadist. You enjoy hurting me, I know it.”
“You’re not the only one, are you?” Juniper says. “You’re not special enough to be the only one. You’re just the stupidest, the sloppiest. The one who got caught. Are there more? Tell me. Or I’ll work you over with the chain again.”
“There are more, there are more.” His voice gurgles, his lips sputter. “There will be many more to come. A whole fucking battalion.” His words give way to a coughing fit that makes him retch another pond of flies.
“Legion,” Juniper says. “You’re supposed to say legion. Didn’t you ever read the Bible?” He slaps the man’s belly, takes hold of the fat there, gives it a hard yank. “Are you sure they’re not stashed inside of you? This battalion? Because it looks like you’ve got a lot of storage space.” His belly button is as big as a mouth, and Juniper shoves a few fingers in it. “No? Not in there? Then where are they? Where’d you come from? Where are your buddies coming from?” He starts to lean all his weight onto the belly, up to his forearm in slippery fat.
His answer comes as a pained shriek. “From the Dark Net!”
Juniper leans back, gives the belly a gentle pat. “There we go. See how easy this can be. Now explain what you mean by the Dark Net.”
Sarin says, “That’s where Babs was doing business.”
“Is that why you killed Babs?” Juniper says. “Because of some shit going down on the Dark Net?”
“He already has the tunnels wired. The Oubliette is located beneath a Paradise data center. We wanted to work with him—we promised he would be rewarded for helping us—but he refused.” He smiles weakly. “Told us to go to hell.”
Juniper walks away and plunges his hands in a barrel, now half-empty and speckled with dead flies. He rubs his palms together, scrubs between the knuckles. He’s not sure any amount of soap would help him feel clean. His reflection ripples on the surface of the water. “Why do you need the tunnels wired? Why the data center?”
“To open the door.” His voice wheezes and cracks around the edges, so that it sounds like other voices folded into it. “To ready the way.”
Chapter 13
AT BENEDIKT’S, CHERYL WAITS as long as she can—finishing her coffee, listening to the polka band, paying the bill—but still her daughter doesn’t return from the woods out back. She hates to be such a worrier. Hannah once told her it was a chronic condition. “When we go to the beach, you warn me about sharks and sneaker waves. When we put up the Christmas tree, you double-check for bugs and fuss over the stand because you’re sure it will tip over. Doesn’t matter what the situation is, you imagine the worst-case scenario.” Hannah’s right. It’s the way Cheryl’s hard-wired. It’s the reason she’s been on a steady diet of Zoloft the past few years. Ever since Hannah’s eyes started to fail, both their ways of seeing changed, though they know a different kind of darkness.
Cheryl forces herself to walk, not run, after twenty minutes have passed, to the restaurant’s entrance. The hostess thanks her for coming and Cheryl says, “My pleasure!” with too much enthusiasm. The music and the laughter from the beer garden fade as she crosses the parking lot, passes the Dumpsters, and enters the tall stand of firs. The air instantly cools and thickens with blue shade.
She almost calls out for Hannah, then doesn’t. There’s no need to worry. That’s what Hannah would tell her. I’m fine, Mom. Quit hovering, Mom. Stop making such a fuss, Mom. Give me space, Mom. But it’s hard. Even now. Her daughter might not be blind, but she’s certainly disoriented. What if she tripped and hurt herself? What if she—
No, she’s fine. She’s playing a game in the woods. That’s all. And good for her, pushing boundaries. The guts her girl has. The grit. It should make Cheryl proud. It does make her proud. She’ll say as much when she finds her daughter—and then, when Hannah shrugs off the attention, Cheryl will ask if she’s found any of the hidden goat heads and whether she wants to go home.
But that’s not what happens. Cheryl rounds a blackberry thicket to find a man in a wolf mask bent over her daughter. It is an image out of a fairy tale: the shadowy woods, the gray-muzzled wolf kneeling over the girl, appearing to feed. And so it takes a moment for the reality to sink in, for her to cry out, “What are you doing?”—her voice not a scream, but almost there. “What’s happened?”
The man whirls around, still in a crouch, and for a moment it appears he might lunge. It’s the man. The one Hannah said she didn’t like in the restaurant. He stands, his body thickly set, and lifts the mask to reveal the face of a man with a beard so black it appears like iron shavings. “You are the sister,” he says.
“I’m her mother. Get away from her!”
But he doesn’t. Instead he seizes Hannah by the arm and drags her from the ground, her legs limp beneath her. “Both of you will come with me.” His teeth are long and yellow, visible when he speaks in flashes beneath his beard.
Lela has always accused her of being weak, a bore. But right now, with her daughter in danger, Cheryl feels like she could hurl a car, kick over a tree. She jams her hand in her purse until she finds what she’s looking for: the pepper spray Lela gave her. She flips the cap, thumbs the button, extends her arm—and lets loose a poisonous stream.
It splatters his face—his eyes and mouth—sheeting his skin and clouding the air all around. He lets go of Hannah and drops to the forest floor and shoves his fists into his eyes. His body convulses with pain.
Hannah lies on her side, the ferns mashed and spiked all around her in a green splash. Bits of moss and dirt stick to her clothes when Cheryl goes to her and hoists her into a seated position. “Come on, sweetie. Come on. Can you stand for me? Can you do that, love?”
Her daughter doesn’t say anything at first. Only nods. Cheryl can see her own frightened expression reflected in the visor of the Mirage.
The man continues to writhe when Cheryl helps her daughter stand and leads her out of the woods and into the parking lot. She knows she should go into the restaurant, ask for help, call the police, get words on paper. But something tells her to flee and she panics—and now here they are, a mile away, locked in traffic, edging forward a few feet at a time. Her nose runs and her eyes weep, maybe from the pepper spray, maybe from fear.
NPR plays on the radio, some news about millions of passwords hacked from a large corporation. She snaps it off and wipes her eyes. “What happened, Hannah?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”