Then she smiled and signed some more. Potter laughed when he heard the translation. "You owe me a new skirt and blouse. And I expect to be repaid. You better not forget. I'm Deaf with an attitude. Poor you."
Potter wandered back to the van, thanked Tobe Geller and Henry LeBow, who were taking commercial flights back to their respective homes. A squad car whisked them away. He shook Dean Stillwell's hand once more and felt a ridiculous urge to give him a present of some sort, a ribbon or a medal or a federal agent decoder ring. The sheriff brushed aside his mop of hair and had the presence of mind to order his men – federal and state alike – to walk carefully, reminding them that they were, after all, at a crime scene and evidence still needed to be gathered.
Potter stood beneath one of the halogen lights, looking out at the stark slaughterhouse.
"Night, sir," a voice drawled from behind him. He turned to Stevie Gates. The negotiator shook his hand. "Couldn't have done it without you, Stevie."
The boy did better dodging bullets than fielding compliments. He looked down at the ground. "Yeah, well, you know."
"A word of advice."
"What's that, sir?"
"Don't volunteer so damn much."
"Yessir." The trooper grinned. "I'll keep that in mind." Then Potter found Charlie Budd and asked him for a lift to the airport. "You're not going to hang around for a while?" asked the young captain.
"No, I should go."
They climbed into Budd's unmarked car and sped away. Potter caught a last glimpse of the slaughterhouse; in the stark spotlights the dull red-and-white structure gave the appearance of bloody, exposed bone. He shuddered and turned away.
Halfway to the airport Budd said, "I appreciate the chance you gave me."
"You were good enough to confess something to me, Charlie -"
"After I almost fixed your clock."
"- so I better confess something to you."
The captain rubbed his tawny hair and left it looking like he'd been to the Dean Stillwell hair salon. He meant, Go ahead, I can take it.
"I kept you with me as an assistant 'cause I needed to show everybody that this was a federal operation and state took second place. I was putting you on a leash. You're a smart man and I guess you figured that out."
"Yup. Didn't seem you really needed a high-priced gofer like me. Ordering Fritos and beer and helicopters. It was one of the things made me put that tape recorder in my pocket. But the way you talked to me, treated me, was one of the things that made me take it out."
"Well, you've got a right to be good and mad. But I just wanted to say you did a lot better than I expected. You were really part of the team. Handling that session by yourself – you were a natural. I'd have you negotiate with me any time."
"Oh, brother, not for any money. Tell you what, Arthur – I'll run 'em to ground and you get 'em out of their holes."
Potter laughed. "Fair enough, Charlie."
They drove in silence through the miles and miles of wheat. The windswept grain was alive in the moonlight, like the silken coat of an animal eager to run. "I've got a feeling," Budd said slowly, "you're thinking you made a mistake tonight."
Potter said nothing, watching the bug eyes of the threshers.
"You're thinking that if you'd come up with what that Detective Foster did you could've got 'em out sooner. Maybe even saved that girl's life, and Joey Wilson's."
"It did cross my mind," Potter said after a minute. Oh, how we hate to be pegged and explained. What's so compelling about the idea that our selves are mysteries to everyone but us? I let you in on the secrets, Marion. But only you. It's an aspect of love, I think, and reasonable enough there. But how queasy it makes us feel when strangers have the eye to see us so unfurled.
"But you kept 'em alive through three or four deadlines," Budd continued.
"That girl though, Susan…"
"But he shot her before you even started negotiating. There was nothing you could've said to save her. Besides, Handy had plenty of chances to ask for what Sharon offered him, and he never did. Not once."
This was true. But if Arthur Potter knew anything about his profession it was that the negotiator was the closest thing to God in a barricade and that every death fell on his shoulders and his only. What he'd learned – and what had saved his heart over the years – was that some of those deaths simply weigh less than others.
They drove another three miles and Potter realized he'd grown hypnotized, staring at the moon-white wheat. Budd was talking to him once again. The subject was domestic, the man's wife and his daughters.
Potter looked away from the streaming grain and listened to what the captain was telling him.
In the tiny jet Arthur Potter slipped two sticks of Wrigley's into his mouth and waved goodbye to Charlie Budd, who was waving back, though the interior of the plane was very dim and Potter doubted that the captain saw him.
Then he sank down into the spongy beige seat of the Grumman Gulf-stream. He thought of the flask of Irish whisky in his briefcase but found himself decidedly not in the mood.
How 'bout that, Marian? No nightcap for me and I'm off-duty. What do you say about that?
He saw a phone on a console nearby and thought he should call his cousin Linden and tell her not to Wait up for him. Maybe he'd wait until they were airborne. He'd ask to speak to Sean; the boy would be thrilled to know that Uncle Arthur was talking to him from twenty thousand feet in the air. He gazed absently out the window at the constellations of colored lights marking runways and taxiways. Potter took from his pocket the still-damp note Melanie had written him. Read it. Then he crumpled the paper, stuffed it into the pocket of the seat in front of him.
The jets whined powerfully and with a sudden burst of thrust he found the plane not racing down the runway at all but streaking straight into the sky, almost from a dead stop, like a spaceship headed to Mars.
They rose up and up, aiming for the moon, which was an eerie sickle in the hazy sky. The plane pointed itself at the black disk surrounded by the white crescent. Uncharacteristically poetic, Potter thought of this image: the icy thumb and index finger of a witch, reaching for a pinch of nightshade.
The negotiator closed his eyes and sat back in the soft seat.
Just as he did, the Grumman banked fiercely. So sharp was the maneuver that Arthur Potter knew suddenly he was about to die. He considered this fact very calmly. A wing or an engine had fallen off. A bolt holding together the whole airplane had finally fatigued. His eyes sprang open and – yes, yes! – he believed he saw his wife's face clearly in the white glow surrounding the moon as it scythed past. He understood that what had joined the two of them, himself and Marian, for all these years joined them still, just as powerfully, and she was pulling him after her in death.
He closed his eyes again. And felt utterly at peace.
But no, he was not destined to die just yet.
For as the plane completed its acute turn and headed back toward the airport, dropping the landing gear and flaps, sliding down down down to the flat Kansas landscape once more, Potter clutched the telephone to his ear, listening to SAC Peter Henderson tell him in a shaking, grim voice how the real Detective Sharon Foster had been found dead and half-naked not far from her house a half-hour ago and how it was now suspected that the woman who'd impersonated her at the barricade had been Lou Handy's girlfriend.
The four troopers who'd been escorting Handy and Wilcox were dead, as was Wilcox himself – all killed in a violent shootout five miles from the slaughterhouse.
And as for Handy and the woman – they were gone without a trace.
IV A MAIDEN'S GRAVE
1:01 A.M.
As they drove through the fields beneath the faint moon the couple in the Nissan reflected on the evening at their daughter's home in Enid, which had been exactly as unpleasant as they'd expected.