The words hung in the air like a bad odor, churning Jake’s stomach. At the same time, they left him feeling oddly fulfilled. “You murdered him?”
Thorne responded silently, with one of his humorless smiles.
“Does Harry know? I mean, did he tell you to kill him?”
“Of course not,” Thorne scoffed quickly, unequivocally; like it was the most ridiculous question in the world. “Mr. Sinclair doesn’t operate that way. He thinks I put the Polack on a plane to anyplace two thousand miles away, with instructions never to be seen again. He assumed I did what he told me, and I never bothered to correct him.”
Jake didn’t buy it. “Come on, Thorne! Do you expect me to believe-”
Thorne cut him off with a raised hand. “You still don’t get it, do you? My job is to make problems go away. Ninety percent of the time, Mr. Sinclair has no idea what I do. In fact, he pays me a lot of money not to keep him informed.”
“But if he knew-”
“He’d be upset-oh, yeah,” Thorne said. “But like I said, Carolyn-she was a cutie. And myself, I’ve always been partial to permanent solutions.”
Travis had been in this tunnel once before, and like last time, he wasn’t alone. Those same faceless voices floated all around him in the dark, saying things he couldn’t quite make out.
The snake was still down his throat, but it seemed to have settled down. It wasn’t biting him anymore. Jesus, though, his mouth was dry. He tried to swallow, but the snake wouldn’t let him. It wasn’t hissing at him anymore, either-at least, not unless he wanted it to. The snake had given him back control of his breathing. That was nice of him.
Something was dragging him toward a light, and as he got closer, he gradually realized that he wasn’t in a tunnel at all. He was asleep. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t get himself all the way awake. The voices kept getting louder and louder. If he wasn’t mistaken, someone was saying his name.
What nightmares he’d had! Chases and chemicals and screaming and fighting. Whatever he’d had to eat before bed last night, he hoped he’d never make that mistake again.
What was last night, anyway? The light grew brighter still.
But he wasn’t floating anymore. In fact, he felt anchored down, as if glued to the floor. He tried to move, but his chest hurt like hell. Like he’d been beaten with something. Was that what this was all about? Maybe he was still in the dirt recovering from his fight with Terry Lampier, and the rest had all been a wild dream.
The light rushed toward him now, with frightening speed. The voices grew louder and clearer, and sure enough, someone was saying his name.
Travis opened his eyes, yet he still didn’t know where he was. He tried to talk, but something in his mouth wouldn’t let him. His old friend the snake.
A face appeared above him, a lady he didn’t know, with a smile that trimmed the edges off his fear. “Hi there, Travis,” she said. “Welcome back. You had us worried for a while.”
Hours had passed, she was sure, but there was no way for her to know what time it was. Clocks weren’t the only human niceties denied to residents of the isolation wing. So was any view of the outdoors. The only reality residents were allowed was the one provided by their jailers. How easy it was, she’d thought at one point during the night, to manipulate people’s thoughts and fears. Her light had stayed on all night, but she supposed it would have been just as easy to keep it off. Days and days without a restful sleep, followed by days and days of darkness, were pretty much guaranteed to alter a body’s sense of reality. And to what end? Any end they chose, she assumed.
She hadn’t moved in a very long time. She just sat there on her concrete cot, fingering the rope that Wiggins had left behind and trying to make peace with God. Was there a God? Despite everything that had happened to her over the years, she couldn’t help but feel that there was another place, better than this one, and a presence-a force — that wanted her and Jake and her little boy to be together. If not here, then there.
What was she to do? What options did she have? She could kill herself or kill her son. That part was clear, but what then? What guarantees were there that Wiggins wouldn’t kill her little boy, anyway? Maybe this was all bluff to begin with…
No, she told herself quickly. He was dead serious. He’ll kill my baby.
For a long while, she debated the option of reporting all of this to the matron, but ultimately, she rejected it as unworkable. They’d never believe her, and in the questioning that followed, she’d miss her deadline to die.
Roll call. She didn’t even know when that was. It had to be in the morning, she figured, but what time? Judging by the rhythms of the place, the critical hour was approaching. Late, late that night, the noise had died down to just a few rude conversations as inmates dropped off to sleep. Now the noise was picking up again; nothing like it was before, but it wouldn’t be long.
The slipknot was the first thing she tied. Nothing fancy-nothing like the looped nooses that Travis liked to tie in every piece of rope he ever got his hands on. Just a simple slipknot, tied the same way she’d learned years ago, in Brownies.
Memories of her childhood-the most horrible ones-tried to sneak their way into her consciousness, but she ran them off. For the last time, she realized with some measure of relief. Perhaps that was the silver lining within this darkest of clouds. She’d never have to face the nightmares again.
It was time to think about Jake. And about Travis. About the good times.
Snagging the light fixture with the running end of the rope turned out to be quite the challenge. She fashioned a lasso of sorts in the middle of the clothesline and tried to rope the fixture, much like a cowboy would rope a horse. With the fixture well out of reach overhead, there could be no screwups, no second chances; no way to loosen a fouled knot.
It helped if she stood on the cot. After four or five flubs, she finally got it and in so doing, felt inexplicably elated. The next challenge would be to lean out far enough to actually extend her neck into the dangling loop of rope.
A bell rang somewhere, startling the hell out of her. “Roll call!” someone yelled. “All right, ladies, rise and shine!”
Carolyn’s heart raced now as she heard footsteps approaching down the hall.
“Front and center, Mrs. Donovan!”
Standing on tiptoes and straining like a kid trying to see over the fence at a ballpark, she just barely hooked the noose with the point of her chin and opened her jaw wide to drag her head in further. She filled her brain with images of Jake and Travis. The images she wanted to take with her. She whispered that she loved them.
“It’s a new day…”
That’s when she lost her balance. The noose came tight-impossibly tight-as she swung away from the cot in a wide arc, her toes straining instinctively to touch the floor, which remained just an inch out of reach. For an instant, she wondered if the thin clothesline might actually pop her head right off her body, and she clawed at the spot where the rope dug into her flesh.
Then her vision flashed red, and there was nothing more.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Orion News Database was available to everyone who could afford the subscription fee, which was easily high enough to keep the riffraff from jamming the server. Such concerns were not a problem, of course, for the FBI, and once inside the database, Irene could locate every article written on any subject within the last fifty years, as compiled from over a thousand daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals.
Somewhere, buried among all those words, she figured there had to be an item or two about the Grant Plant’s past. Never much of a computer whiz, she was walking blind here, having always depended on staffers to take care of this kind of research. She learned right off the bat that success and failure lay in the selection of well-defined search parameters. Underestimating the scope and power of the database, she tried Newark+Arkansas in her first attempt and was greeted with an invitation to scroll through 627,838 items.