“Hello!” Forrest answered in a shout. There was some sort of drill motor grinding away in the background.
“Is this Jack?” she asked, almost ashamed of the relief she’d felt upon hearing his voice.
“Yeah, who’s speaking?”
“It’s the woman from the truck stop.”
“Veronica?”
“Yeah. How did you— Oh, you must’ve seen my plate.”
“Hey, Linus,” Forrest said to someone in the background. “Shut that fucking thing off a minute, I can’t hear this girl. It sounds like the meteor may have gone public. Okay, Veronica, go ahead. Have they gone public already?”
She gave Michael a gotcha look, and he sat up a little straighter in bed. “No, Jack. No, they haven’t gone public. At least not that I know of.”
“Is something wrong, then?”
“Well, sort of,” she replied. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk with Michael, my boyfriend. He doesn’t believe your story.”
Forrest laughed out loud. “Did you really expect him to? Put me on speaker.”
“You already are.”
“Okay, great. Mike, you there, man?”
“Yeah,” Michael said.
“Listen, I’m sorry. The story was bullshit. I was just trying to get in her pants. You know how guys are.”
“Yeah, I know how they are,” Michael muttered.
Veronica turned off the speaker and put the phone to her ear. “You son of a bitch! You tell him what you told me, goddamnit! Don’t make me look like an idiot!”
“Am I still on speaker?”
“No!”
“Veronica, listen to me.” She sat in bed and leaned over so Michael could listen in. “Put yourself in his situation. The story’s going to break soon enough. When it does, call me back.”
“What was that drilling sound when you first answered?” she asked, hoping to garner some more telling information.
“Oh, that… well, we’re busy with lots of arts and crafts right now.” They could hear laughter in the background. “Listen, Veronica, I gotta go. Call me if you hear something.”
“But wait!” she said. “What if it never goes public? What then?”
“Then I was obviously lying to you.”
“No! I’m sorry but you’ve all but convinced me, so you’re going to have to live up to the offer.”
Michael gave her a look.
She could hear the sound of Forrest’s Zippo lighter clicking open and then closed as he lit a cigarette.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell you what. If it never goes public, I’ll call you back at this number two days before the event, how’s that?”
“Do you promise?”
“What the hell would a promise mean, Veronica? You don’t even know me. Now try and get some sleep.”
Forrest broke the connection.
“See?” she said, throwing the phone down between them in the counterpane. “See what I was talking about? Does he sound remotely nuts to you?”
Michael sat looking at her, realizing with mixed emotions that she had already made some kind of a connection with this mysterious Jack, who very definitely had a certain unmistakable je ne sais quoi about him even over the phone. “I’ll admit that he seems to believe what he’s saying. Beyond that… all we can do is wait and see.”
“What do you think they were drilling?” she wondered, settling beneath the blankets. “You have to admit it’s pretty late at night to be up working, and it’s an hour later in Nebraska.”
He chuckled as he reached across her to turn off the lamp. “For all we know, Ronny, the guy was drilling his way out of a prison cell in Guatemala.”
Six
After an exhausting round trip to northern Montana to visit his estranged wife, Monica, Forrest arrived back at the silo a day later, tense and strung out on amphetamines. He pulled up to a modest two-story house that had once been used to house Air Force personnel during the Cold War. The house had been built over the top of the silo entrance to better disguise it from Soviet satellites.
Ulrich stood on the porch of the house watching as a giant black German shepherd jumped out of the Humvee and ran across the yard to pee on a fifty gallon drum of diesel oil that was yet to be taken below.
“We running a kennel service now?”
Forrest gave no indication he’d heard Ulrich’s dig as he went about unloading the back of the Hummer, stacking fifty-foot bundles of NM-B type wire and five-gallon buckets of latex paint neatly off to the side. Ulrich came down the stairs and over to the truck.
“You expecting burglars or something? That’s another mouth to feed.”
Forrest stopped and looked at him in the light of the cab. “Are you intentionally being an asshole or do you really not recognize him?”
Ulrich turned for another look at the German shepherd. “You’ve been all the way to Montana and back? Jesus, you must’ve driven nonstop both ways.”
“Yeah, well, Benzedrine’s a wonderful thing,” Forrest muttered, grabbing up two buckets of paint as if they weighed little more than a pair of barracks bags and heading for the house.
Because of his prosthetic foot, Ulrich grabbed a single bucket and followed him. They set the buckets down in the hall and went into the kitchen, where Forrest took a couple of beers from the fridge, knocking the caps off against the edge of the counter and handing one to Ulrich.
Forrest gestured at the dog with the bottle. “He eats a fifty-pound bag of dog food a month.” He took a pull from the beer. “So we’ll need at least twenty-four bags. And be sure to get Purina. Don’t buy any of that generic shit. And get a bunch of those Milk Bones too. Fifty boxes or so.”
“That’s like six hundred pounds of dog shit somebody’s gonna have to scoop up, and it sure as hell won’t be me,” Ulrich said.
“Nobody’s asking you to,” Forrest replied testily.
Ulrich glanced over his shoulder as the dog trotted through the house sniffing everything in sight. “How did you talk Monica into giving him up?”
“I didn’t talk her into anything. She asked me if I wanted to save my son’s dog and I said yes. Now, are you gonna pick up the food or do I have to go get it myself?”
Linus Danzig stepped into the doorway and stood looking at the wolflike dog trotting around the kitchen. He was a big country boy in his late twenties, wearing nothing but a pair of purple underwear.
“Fuck are you made up for?” Forrest asked irritably.
Danzig shook his head and disappeared back down the hall, realizing Forrest was in one of his moods.
Ulrich drank deeply from the beer and had a seat. “Wanna tell me about it?” He put his feet up on the table.
“Nothin’ to tell,” Forrest said, ripping the cellophane from a brand new pack of Camels. “She don’t wanna live underground and she ain’t gonna, but then I already knew that.” He smacked a cigarette from the pack, lit it with the Zippo from his pocket and stood leaning against the sink staring at the floor.
“I can help you kidnap her,” Ulrich said quietly.
Forrest looked at him, his eyes welling with tears. “I’d never do that to her. She’d kill herself belowground the first chance she got. Hell, if it wasn’t for her horses, she’d have done it by now.”
Ulrich sighed and rocked back, the wooden chair creaking beneath the strain. “There’s a lot that’s unsaid, Jack, but you know I think the world of that woman.”
Forrest nodded, drawing pensively from the cigarette. “She’s just so… full of anger, Wayne. She never shows it but it’s there, right below the surface… Christ, that woman’s angry.”
“And she has every right. You guys lost your son. And who knows? Maybe if I hadn’t talked you into that last mission—”