Authors: James W. Hall
Dobbins had made him pay dearly for his few moments of freedom.
He recognized Thorn and stiffened. Thorn peeled away the duct tape.
“Quieres ser libre o es demasiado peligroso?”
It seemed only fair to ask him if he wanted to be free or if that posed too great a risk.
The man considered the question, eyeing the ominous weapons. After another moment he nodded his head.
“Si, señor
.
Quiero ser libre.”
Thorn asked him his name and the man replied that it was Jésus.
“Te pido solo una cosa, Jésus. Si quiere.”
Thorn was asking for one thing, but only if the man was willing.
The man asked what that one thing was.
“Por favor llevemos al invernadero.”
Sugar said, “I got everything but that last one.”
“I’ve asked him if he’d be willing to show us the way to the greenhouse.”
“You’re sick? You can’t smell anymore?”
“Sick, yeah,” X said. “Call it that. Swelling in the brain. It’s been coming for a while.”
“Then what’re we supposed to do about that goddamn video?”
Burkhart said, “The man tells you he’s dying, you’re worried about a video?”
“Dying? He didn’t say anything about dying.”
The cab of Dobbins’s truck was steamed up by the three men tightly packed. The wipers slinging away the rain as they sped back toward Belmont Heights.
“You want to know the truth,” X said, “it’s a relief.”
“What? Dying?”
“Not smelling anymore. And yeah, sure, dying too, getting on with the next thing.”
Dobbins had nothing to say to that. Dying wasn’t high on his bucket list. They were headed back to colored town because Webb decided he needed to have a sit-down with Ladarius and Eddie and whoever else wanted to attend. One by one, he was going to turn Burkhart loose on them, let the old soldier use his military tricks to get the truth.
One of them would know where the Moss kid and Thorn had run off to.
As Webb had suspected, Ladarius and Eddie and their people were working with the hippies all along. As soon as this rain passed and things dried out for a day or two, he was going to stock up on kerosene and Belmont Heights was going to feel Webb Dobbins’s wrath. Time for a community bonfire, get started on that beautification project Laurie had been campaigning for for so long.
But first they’d do a little enhanced interrogation. Begin with Ladarius, that insolent son of a bitch.
“That one,” Webb said, pointing at the shack where Ladarius lived.
Burkhart swung the truck off the road and bounced into the front yard with the headlights shining bright against the door. As they were getting out, a curtain twitched in the front room.
“Need anything special, Burkhart? Tools of the trade that could speed this up? I could run to the farm, pick up whatever sharp objects you’d like.”
“I don’t think that’ll be required,” Burkhart said. “Common household utensils should be sufficient. You did say the man had a couple of daughters.”
“Three little girls,” Dobbins said.
Burkhart smiled.
“Even better.”
THIRTY-FIVE
JÉSUS STOPPED IN A CLOAKROOM
near the exit and pulled on a blue jumpsuit, the same uniform the sentries were wearing, and in a row of lockers he found a pair of work boots that fit him. When he was dressed, he led them outside the barn and guided them along a meandering path that circled around one after another giant pond of pig manure then past three other barns where Thorn heard the indignant squeals and grunts and mutterings of pigs, a mixture of protest, outrage, and yearning.
The deluge had died away to a drizzling mist, more fog than rain. The temperature was dropping fast and Thorn had to shift the shotgun from hand to hand to prevent them from going icy numb.
Sugarman was silent, bringing up their rear flank, glancing to each side into the dark hollows of the night.
They hiked across a large gravel parking area, then another just like it, and came to a county highway, crossed it, then slogged through a ditch on the other side, and clumped ahead through a muddy field and went another mile down a private paved road.
Thorn moved alongside Jésus.
“Cuánto más lejos?”
Not much farther, Jésus replied. One more mile.
When they finally rounded an old wood barn that smelled of damp hay, Thorn realized they’d hiked far enough from the farm that they’d left behind the stink of the manure lagoons and the pig barns.
Jésus halted and pointed to the lights of a two-story farmhouse skirted by porches. Rockers and hanging swings and potted plants decorated the verandas. Several outbuildings were clustered so close to the house that they fell inside the halo of illumination from its many windows. A silo, a granary, a smokehouse, a tobacco barn, and what looked like the original settlers’ log cabin, as if the Dobbinses had preserved these structures as family shrines in memory of their hardy ancestors.
About fifty feet to the left of the house was the glassed-in conservatory.
On the other side of the house, parked in the driveway, was a white Jaguar.
“Quien es este coche?”
Thorn asked him.
The car, he replied, belonged to the sister, Laurie.
“Wait here,” Thorn said.
“What’re you doing? You said no one gets hurt.”
“And I meant it. We’re playing by Flynn’s rules.”
Thorn entered the house, shut the door quietly behind him. A stairway with ornate bannisters stood directly in front of him. He took a quick look into the parlor, whose furniture and decorations were at least a half century out of date. A stage set that looked unlived in. No magazines strewn about, no signs of human occupation or any contemporary touch, as if the room had been decorated just so, then left to collect dust. A museum display of roughly the same vintage as Millie’s living room, but this was a stifling formal room where no entertaining had ever taken place.
Back in the foyer, he heard music playing upstairs. Smoky New Orleans jazz, heavy on the sax. He followed the music up one flight, then another, past a collection of metal-framed photos that showed the gradual evolution of the Dobbins clan and the farm they operated, from the small circle of log buildings Thorn had just seen outside to the massive aluminum structures that now housed thousands of pigs.
And many photos of a frail woman with a despondent air holding a young boy on her lap, and more photos of the same woman grown even frailer, this time cradling a baby in her arms, the boy growing into a burly lad, standing apart looking bewildered and bereft, and in her later incarnation the mother became so delicate she seemed to be hardly there at all, standing stiffly beside that adolescent boy and the smug young daughter in their crisp matching Easter outfits and later their high school graduation robes.
Mingled in were photographs of a bulky, robust man with a flamboyant moustache whose resemblance to Webb Dobbins was unmistakable. In every image the man seemed to loom over the other family members, an impression produced more from his severe and contemptuous countenance than his height.
At the top of the stairs Thorn heard voices, the low murmurs, croonings, and giggles of what sounded like erotic play. Both voices he recognized as he moved to the door. Pixie’s bright and chirpy inflection and the low throaty growl of Laurie.
He turned the doorknob and nudged open the door with the barrel of the shotgun. They’d kicked the bedsheets to the floor and were intertwined in a naked knot of damp flesh. Pixie was pressing a pillow to her face as if to muffle her cries of pleasure.
Laurie looked up, her face glistening with the jelly of Pixie’s release.
“Well, look who came to the party.” Laurie scrubbed her palm across her mouth and licked a finger clean.
She climbed off Pixie and got out of the bed and stood facing Thorn, as if daring him to gawk at her nakedness, while she lit up a roach, took a drag, then handed it to Pixie.
“Three things,” Thorn said.
“Oh, good, a man who likes to dominate. My favorite kind.”
“Can you run this farm without Webb’s help? Without drug money?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Can you? A smaller version maybe, like the farm you grew up on. Can you do that? Do you know how to manage that?”
“If I wanted to I could. Sure.”
“Well, you do, you want to,” he said. “You want to because you don’t want Pine Haven to die. You want to because this is your home, these are your roots. Even though you act like you despise everything around you, you haven’t left, so there’s still some kind of bond to this place. But most of all you want to because you don’t want to go to jail with your brother. Agreed?”
“You’re a presumptuous asshole.”
“Because when this is done, I’ll be coming back from time to time to make sure you’ve fulfilled your side of the bargain. If you let the farm go down, then I’ll do everything I can to make sure you serve the same sentence as your brother.”
Laurie’s mocking smile was tightening into a frown.
“Okay, the second thing is this. When I leave the room I want you to call Webb, tell him I’m here. He needs to get home quick so he can watch everything he’s worked so hard for go up in flames.”
“Are you insane?” Laurie said, taking back the joint from Pixie.
“You’re going to call him as soon as I leave the room.”
“You bet your ass I am.”
“And third, you’re going to tell me where the bodies are buried. When you tell me exactly where they are, we’ll hang those murders on Webb and Burkhart and you get a pass. You get to stay and run this farm, have your fun. But if you lie or stonewall me, you’re going down with your brother. Make up your mind and do it quick. Where are they buried?”
“What’re you, an attorney?”
“No,” Thorn said. “I’m the guy offering you a second chance.”
“Que vas a hacer?”
Jésus wanted to know what they were going to do.
Thorn told him they were about to destroy the greenhouse and everything inside it. He held up his shotgun.
With a faint smile the man nodded his assent, as if he’d been hoping for that answer.
“Vamos a necesitar protección contra el humo si ese edificio le incendia
,
no?”
Thorn suspected they’d need protection against the fumes from the fire.
“Un incendio? Si, si, absolutamente. Entonces sigueme.”
“He wants us to follow him,” he told Sugar.
“Lourdes teach you all that Spanish?”
“Oh, yeah. That and a lot more. A memorable month at sea.”
“Why?” Sugar asked as Jésus led them to a cabin beside the greenhouse.
“Why what?”
“Why attack that building?”
“It’s the cornerstone,” Thorn said. “It’s the lake where the billion gallons of coal slurry is stored.”
At the door of a small cabin beside the greenhouse, Jésus told them to wait a moment. He went inside and returned with two gas masks that looked like army surplus Second World War gear, full-face with goggle eyes and a filter canister mounted to the side.
Jésus fit one on his face, demonstrated how to tighten the straps, then took it off and held it out to Sugarman.
Sugarman took the mask and edged closer to Thorn.
“This part of your master plan, is it?”
“How about if we write up the master plan once we’re done?”
“That’s a history, not a plan.”
Sugarman pressed the gas mask to his face, wiggled it around, looking for a comfortable fit.
“Get it airtight,” Thorn said. “You don’t want to be inhaling these fumes, believe me. You don’t want that.”
When Sugar’s mask was in place, Jésus told Thorn he would leave now. He would stand far off in a field and watch the greenhouse burn with great pleasure. And if anyone came close to the fire, breathed those fumes, then whoever was stupid enough to do that thing would be stoned. Dead on their feet, hammered.
“Ahogado,”
he said.
“Flipado.”
“Gracias, Jésus. Bueno suerte.”
When Jésus had disappeared into the night, Thorn fit his gas mask on and asked Sugarman if he was ready.
“Ready as I’m going to be.”
Thorn raised the Atchisson shotgun to his shoulder.
“Okay,” he called through the mask. “Let’s take these babies for a spin.”
The fire took a while to catch on. Each of them unloaded five rounds, exploding great sections of the glass walls and rattling the earth beneath their feet, but they didn’t ignite the flammable portions. After ten rounds they were starting to get the hang of it, spreading apart, aiming into the lower areas of the structure where the heavy timber beams and posts and braces intersected.
The greenhouse shook and shifted and when finally the first tentative flames took hold and the fire began to swell, glass panes in the roof popped and shattered and fell in bright spiral chips like waterlogged fireworks, no exhilarating rockets bursting high in the air, but a dismally subdued inferno whose intense heat and thickening smoke drove Thorn and Sugar back a few yards, where they fired more rounds and more after that.
He could barely see through the smoke as the trumpet plants ignited, their stalks melting; the blooms blackened and withered and released a bluish gas that coiled into the black smoke from the burning wood. He saw a tube of fire burrow under the wooden floor, then reemerge a few feet later, uncoiling atop the old planks like a bright orange snake slithering forward, then dividing into three more orange snakes, each of which began to explore a different aisle between the potted flowers.
Cruz had chosen her artillery well. The shotgun had almost no recoil and its destructive capabilities were beyond any weapon Thorn had ever encountered. Each round was a mini–hand grenade, detonating with a deep concussive force that shattered several of the upper-story windows in the farmhouse and knocked an old rope-pulled dinner bell off its stand.
They were down to a handful of rounds, maybe three or four each, when Burkhart and X-88 and Dobbins arrived. The pickup truck slewing into the driveway, barely under control, ramming the rear fender of the Jaguar and coming to a stop. The men piled out and Thorn caught glimpses of a shotgun, an automatic rifle, and the glint of a handgun in X-88’s hand.