The Black Dagger Brotherhood (24 page)

 

After Zsadist and I get home from Target, I help carry the bags into the mansion. We are just finishing the fetch-and-carry routine when Butch comes out of the door under the stairs. He's dressed in a black Izod sweater with a white shirt underneath and a pair of superbly cut black trousers. His shoes are Tod's. Black with no socks. He's got a duffel bag on his shoulder and a monster grin on his face.

 

I smile a good-bye to Z and he returns my expression, his ruined lip twitching up briefly and his eyes flashing yellow. I think for a moment how lucky Bella and Nalla are; then I follow Butch out of the foyer and into one of my favorite rooms in the house. The library is walled with books, the only breaks coming for the windows and the bank of doors and the fireplace. Oil paintings of landscapes are hung over the tomes here and there, giving an English-manor-house feel to the space.

 

Edna is your standard-issue links transport—except she's had a makeover right out of the
Robb Report
. She's got a Cadillac hood ornament and a grille modeled after the Escalade's. Painted black, her rims are twenty-fours, her bumpers are chromed, her seating leather, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to discover that she's turbo-charged. Hell, if you could nitro an electric engine, I'd be looking for the injector button on the console.

 

Kanye West blares out over the gardens and we take off across the rolling lawn, passing by flower beds that are battened down for the coming winter. As we go, I grab onto the lip of the top and start to laugh. Rolling bat-out-of-hell in a golf cart guarantees a trigger of your inner six-year-old, and I can't help but get a case of the tickle-giggles as we bounce along. The fact that we are being accompanied by Kanye singing about the good life is just about perfect.

 

Deer scamper out of the way at a dead run, their tails flipping up with white undersides flashing. Like Z, Butch doesn't have the headlights on, but given how loud Kanye is, I don't think there's any chance of catching one of those lovely animals frozen in our path.

Eventually, Butch slows Edna down right in front of the forest edge. Kanye quiets and the night's silence rushes forward as if it's a good host and we've just arrived at its party. Butch grabs the duffel and together we walk about twenty feet, heading in the direction of the mansion, which is in the far distance.

Butch puts the duffel on the ground, unzips it, and wades around inside. What comes out is a series of thin metal sections, which he begins to fit together.

 

When he's finished, he's built an odd kind of platform. The base is a foot off the ground, and it supports a metal rod that's about two feet high.

 

The model rocket is about two feet in length from pointed tip to flared bottom, and it has three sections. White, with a Red Sox logo painted on the side, its top is fluorescent, no doubt to track its path and increase the chances of recovering it in the dark.

 

I'm pretty sure at this point he's waggling his eyebrows at me, but I can't see under the brim of the
Miami Ink
hat. I smile anyway because . . . well, some things you can't help but do.

 

I press the butttttttttton, and a moment later there's a spark and a flash and a whizzing fizzle that's like a hundred Alka-Seltzers in a glass. The rocket shoots up to the autumn sky, an arcing trail of light and smoke streaming behind the glowing point at its tip. The angle is perfect, taking it precisely toward the center of the mansion. Its descent is just as smooth, and about three hundred feet from the ground the parachute unfurls. We watch the rocket as it slowly eases down, wagging from side to side like a lazy dog's tail. In the lights from the library I see that it lands in a rose bed.