Carolee let out a sharp breath. “Not Adam, no—”
He was shaking his head again, whether in wonder or disgust or some combination of the two, Sten couldn’t say. “If he’d fired his weapon, that would have put us onto his location, so he didn’t.” A pause. “He was too smart for that.”
But the dog had contacted him, that was for sure, because the dog came back with his backpack, or a backpack. Which contained Hershey’s Kisses, a whole sixteen-ounce bag of them, a bottle of gin, ammunition for a .22 rifle (strange, because the recovered casings from the initial firefight were from the Norinco), and half a dozen packages of freeze-dried entrées—the imported ones, from Switzerland, that weren’t exactly cheap. They’d sent the backpack to the lab for DNA testing, but really, there wasn’t much point since it was ninety-nine percent certain it was Adam’s. The SWAT team officer had seen him, positive ID, engaged him, and how he’d ever managed to get away from the K-9 unit was just a mystery.
Sten heard himself say, “What if I went out there?”
“You can’t do that. Too risky.”
“What if I, I don’t know, went up the train tracks with a bullhorn or something, and called him to give himself up? Or the train. What if I took the train up there and just kept calling all the way up and back again—it’s better than nothing. I’ll tell you, sitting here is killing me. And Carolee too.”
Carolee had an arm round his shoulder, bracing herself, and he felt her grip tighten now. “I could go too,” she said. “He’d listen to me, I mean, more than—”
“Me? You mean more than me?” He could feel the anger coming up in him, anger at her, anger at Rob, but most of all at Adam, Adam with his thrusts and parries and the way he hid behind his debility, pulled it down like a screen to excuse anything, and so what if he was the principal’s son? Was it really all that much of a burden? They’d tried to send him to another school, any school he wanted, but he wouldn’t go, wouldn’t behave or act normal or even try, wouldn’t do anything anybody wanted except to please himself. “Because I’m shit for a father, right, is that what you mean? Because he hates me?”
“You’d have to wear body armor,” Rob said, giving him a long cool look. “I wouldn’t let you go out there without it.”
Carolee pushed the hair away from her face and leaned in over the table, looking from him to Rob, her eyes fierce. “I’m going too.”
“I can’t allow that,” Rob said.
“Can’t allow it?”
“Too dangerous.”
But she wouldn’t have it. She stood there glaring at the sheriff, the cords of her throat drawn tight. “I can’t believe you,” she said, her voice rising till it broke. “You think my son would ever dream of hurting me? His own mother?”
32.
ON THE MORNING THE sheriff finally called to give his permission, Sten was still in bed. A long stripe of bleached-out sunlight painted the wall over the night table, where the clock radio showed half past ten. Carolee was nowhere to be seen, gone, he remembered, down to Calpurnia to work at the game reserve, Just to get out of the house because I swear I’m going to start screaming any minute now. He’d taken a sleeping pill in the middle of the night after something had awakened him—a random noise, a scurrying in the dark—and he’d lain there for what seemed like hours till he got up, made his way to the bathroom and swallowed an Ambien, dry, and then staggered back to bed. When his cellphone weaned him into consciousness, he didn’t at first know where he was, his head fogged with the residue of his dreams, dreams that bucked and shifted and left his muscles kinked with anxiety till he felt as if he’d been crawling through a series of decreasingly narrow tubes all night long.
He was going to ignore the phone—he was trying to ignore it, two weeks more having dragged by since Rob had stopped by the house to quiz him on the subject of Adam’s military background, the police presence in the hills inflated till there was a virtual army out there and still no news, no hope, no reason to do anything but lie flat out on your back like one of the living dead—but those two sharp bleats, followed by a pause and another pair of bleats and then another, were too much for him. He pushed the talk button and heard the sheriff’s voice coming at him, a morning voice, caffeinated and urgent.
“Sten?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“No, I just—you know how it is.” And now all his fears came to squat on his chest like a flock of carrion birds with their long naked claws. “What’s the news? Tell me quick.”