Cooper couldn't figure out what they were supposed to be.
When the girl was free, Cooper stepped up to the counter.
She smiled at him, a real friendly smile, showing her gums.
"Can I help you?" she asked.
"I need help," Cooper said. He knew she was just asking about his order, but he hoped she could help him anyway.
Yes, sir?"
He stood there for a moment, not certain what it was he wanted to say to her.
"I have a car," he said at last.
She blinked but she didn't stop smiling.
"Can I take your order, sir?"
"I want you to come in my car," Cooper said.
"Pardon me?"
"Come in my car."
The girl looked at him curiously, tilting her head to one side like a bird. "Sir, I'm working. Did you want to place' an order?"
Cooper did not know how to explain what he needed.
He knew he was doing it wrong, but he couldn't think of a better way.
"I want to show you something," he said. "In the car."
The girl turned around, looking for someone.
"Dwayne? Could you come out here. This gentleman needs some help."
Cooper shook his head. Now she had it all wrong. He didn't need anything from anyone named Dwayne. He needed help from her. He needed her.
"Just come on," he said. He reached over the counter and took hold of her arm and when she started to protest he grabbed her other arm and lifted her over the counter.
"Dwayne! Help!"
Dwayne came running from the kitchen, took one look at the size of the man who had hold of Sybil, and stopped in his tracks. He let them go out the door before he called for the police.
But the police were already there. A cop stood next to Mayvis's Oldsmobile, peering inside. He straightened up when he saw Cooper advancing towards him, half carrying and half dragging a girl.
"Is this your car, sir?" the cop asked, trying to figure out just what was going on between the man and the girl.
He was always reluctant to involve himself in domestic disputes, but this one seemed awfully one-sided.
The man kept coming straight at him, not slowing down at all, holding the girl with just one arm now.
"You can't drive around with your rear end like that," the cop said, knowing even as he said it that he was too late to help himself.
Cooper grabbed the cop's neck and pushed his head into the side of the car. He did it twice more until the cop went limp and then he kicked him once for good measure as he fell.
The girl was kneeling over the fallen policeman, making wailing noises and Cooper got into the car and was about to leave when he remembered why he was there in the first place. He grabbed the girl and yanked her into the car and drove off.
Pegeen made the call hoping Deputy Crist would be away from her desk, too busy to talk, out of communication, anything but there so that Pegeen would not have to speak to her directly. If she wasn't around, Pegeen could fax the information and be done with it. She remembered the baleful stare which Karen had given her at their last encounter and had no illusions that the other woman would have forgotten who she was. She was the nitwit who had sat around in the motel bedroom while the Deputy Director's man took an unscheduled, spontaneous, and poorly explained shower in the other room.
No one believed in the innocence of the occasion and Pegeen didn't blame them, but the men who knew of it were assuming the guilt was Becker's.
Karen Crist, however, blamed Pegeen, and she did so because she saw the guilt in Pegeen's face. You couldn't hide that from another woman, although men, God knows, were as clueless as stumps about such things.
It's not that I actually did anything, Pegeen thought defensively, it's not that anything actually happened I didn't even towel him off. He came out of the bathroom fully dressed and we left. But of course the facts were beside the point in Karen Crist's mind-it was what Pegeen felt about John Becker that mattered, and Pegeen knew that. And agreed. She was just as guilty in her own mind as she was in Crist's. The difference was that in her own mind being guilty didn't make her bad.
To her dismay, the Bureau in New York put her call straight through.
"Director Crist, this is Special Agent Pegeen Haddad from the Nashville office."
Yes.
She remembers me all right, Pegeen thought. Thank God it's not a television phone. "There's been a development in the Darnell Cooper case, and we have instructions to keep you posted personally..
"Yes."
Like talking point-blank to a glacier. All that came back was a blast of cold air.
"We have a report of a stolen car. The suspect was working at a fast-food restaurant under the name of Darnell Cooper. He was also wanted for questioning about a purse snatching that took place on the highway three days earlier. He's also suspected of being involved in a robbery and assault with a motor vehicle at a service station."
"Yes?"
"He is also believed to have been involved in an assault on a police officer and the abduction of a young woman just outside of Chattanooga."
"Not exactly covering his tracks. Where is he now?"
"Local and state police are in pursuit, but he has eluded them so far."
Pegeen could not remember ever saying I eluded" aloud before. Get any stiffer and you'll be catatonic, kid.
"Kidnapping is a federal offense," Pegeen said, having trouble believing that she was hearing herself correctly.
"It falls under our jurisdiction."
She probably didn't know that, Pegeen, you halfwit.
Good of you to enlighten her, she'll appreciate it.:'I see," Karen said.
'So we're entering the case directly," Pegeen continued. She could feel the waves of hostility pouring through the phone and straight into her ear.
"Good. Was there anything else?"
"Well…" How about if I drive a spike through my head, will that make you happy? Pegeen thought. "No."
Pegeen felt that she should say something more, but she didn't know what it should be. It didn't seem that an agent in her position should be the one to terminate a conversation with an assistant deputy director, however.
Surely that prerogative belonged to the senior agent.
Karen did not oblige her, however, and the silence between them grew and expanded uncomfortably and the longer it stretched the more it seemed to fill with the unspoken. Becker. Pegeen had sat silently with a mute telephone to her ear before, but only with boys, only with romantic interests when the silence had been filled with unspeakable longing, never with another woman. An FBI agent, her superior, a tough-assed careerist federal officer.
It gave her the creeps.
Pegeen cleared her throat discreetly.
"One thing," Karen said.
"Yes?"
"Watch your ass."
The phone line went dead and Pegeen replaced the receiver as if it were something unclean. Watch my ass?
Meaning, be careful in your pursuit of Cooper? Or meaning, stay away from my man or I'll feed your giblets to the cats? Was this the way an assistant deputy director normally spoke to other agents? Watch my ass?
I won't have to, Pegeen thought. She'll be watching it for me.
It was only later, as she replayed the conversation in her mind for the hundredth time while driving towards Chattanooga, that her own thought about driving a spike through her head reminded her of Becker's comment about how to kill a werewolf. Why had he referred to himself like that?
Did he really think of himself that way?
Why did he perceive himself as a bad man when Pegeen could see so clearly that he wasn't? The man needed help and understanding, and it was obvious he wasn't going to get it from Crist, the frost queen. Some men were salvageable and some were not. She had pretty well come to the conclusion that Eddie, the man she was seeingsort of-fell into the category of irretrievable junk goods.