Freeboot was afraid that he, not Motherlode, had passed on the diabetes to Mandrake-afraid that medical examination would reveal this, and bring his megalomaniacal theory of his own superiority crashing down.
And he was willing to stand by and let his son die to keep that from happening.
Once again, despising himself for it, Monks kept his true feelings to himself.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he said.
“We’re just talking, that’s all. We got to get to know each other a lot better. Trust, right?”
Monks nodded.
Freeboot turned and started away. The interview was over. But then he paused and looked back.
“You want to take a hot bath, let me know. We got a luxury setup.” He grinned. “Maybe even provide you some company, a pretty girl to wash your back-and, hey, who knows what else?”
“I’ll think about that, too,” Monks said.
He walked on to the washhouse and cleaned up distractedly, trying to make sense of this gambit. Freeboot could hardly be serious about his offer to join, and Monks’s initial hope-that he might be able to pay extortion money for Glenn and be set free-was long gone. After all that he had seen, that would be far too great of a risk for Freeboot. More likely, this show of friendliness was a way of keeping Monks cooperative, for as long as Mandrake stayed alive.
After that…
When Monks walked back outside, he saw that there were now three crows on the ground, croaking and flapping their wings at each other in contention for some bit of carrion. Sidewinder, the guard, was sighting his rifle at them and jerking the barrel up in a pantomime of each gunshot’s recoil.
Monks felt the first light sprays of rain against his face.
In mid-morning, Monks heard the lodge’s outside door slam violently, then bootsteps in the main room, heavy enough to rattle the lamp’s glass chimney. He tensed, fearing that it was one of the guards, coming to drag him off to another lesson that Freeboot had arranged.
But a man’s voice called out excitedly: “Marguerite! Where are you?”
Monks heard her muffled reply from the kitchen.
“Come when you’re called, girl,” the man commanded.
Monks got up quietly and went to the bedroom’s doorway. The unmistakable shape of Hammerhead stood in the room’s center. He was holding something behind his back. His grin looked manic.
Marguerite walked slowly out of the kitchen, her own face tense and uncertain.
“I’m full maquis now,” Hammerhead announced. “I want you in the Garden, wearing this and nothing else.”
He thrust something toward her, holding it in his big hands and letting it slither through his fingers like a snake. Monks glimpsed a gold chain.
Marguerite’s mouth opened, but not with the pleasure of a woman receiving a gift-more as if it was a snake. Her hands, instead of reaching to receive it, twisted each other nervously.
“Where’d you get that?” she breathed.
Hammerhead frowned. Clearly, this was not the reaction that he had expected.
“Never mind where I got it. You have to do what I tell you. Put it on!”
With obvious reluctance, she reached forward to accept it, and slipped it around her neck. At the end of the gold chain hung a dark green pendant, but Monks was too far away to see it clearly.
“Now come on,” Hammerhead said. He grasped her wrist, pulling her toward the door.
“Wait,” she said, struggling with his grip. “I have to feed Mandrake.”
This was not true, but Hammerhead didn’t know that, and he seemed to realize that it was something he didn’t dare interfere with. He hesitated, then pulled her close and planted a wide-mouthed kiss on her, an embrace she neither resisted nor accepted.
“Hurry up,” he said into her ear, in a voice thick with passion. “I’ve been waiting for this forever.”
He let her go and strode out of the building. Marguerite lifted the pendant off over her head and gazed at it, still looking troubled, but fascinated, too.
“If you’re going to be leaving, Mandrake could use some soup,” Monks said.
She looked up at him swiftly, then spun away, clasping the pendant tight in her fist and hurrying back into the kitchen.
He returned to his chair, bemused by the exchange but too burdened by his other worries to try to make sense of it. Mandrake was still withdrawn and listless, not responding to Monks’s attempts to draw him out. At first, Monks had thought it was from the shock of seeing the violent attack last night.
But Mandrake’s forehead had gotten noticeably warmer during the night, and he was developing a weak but ugly cough. Mucus was forming in his nose, streaking his upper lip. Monks feared that he was coming down with a virus, or even pneumonia.
That could easily precipitate a coma. Then the end would not be far off, and there wasn’t a thing in the world that Monks could do about it.
His watch read 10:14 A.M. That left just seven hours of daylight to find a way out of here.
15
By mid-afternoon, the rain was coming down in sheets, driven by lashing gusts of wind that blew the trees around like candle flames. The gloom was already indistinguishable from twilight. The camp seemed almost deserted. Sidewinder continued to skulk around, taking refuge under the eaves of a shed, apparently forbidden to go inside; and a couple of the other men had stopped into the lodge to make sandwiches. But Monks had been alone with Mandrake for the past hour. With the rain, there wasn’t much incentive to wander around.
He walked to the kitchen to check out something that he had noticed on one of his trips back from the washhouse-a gap in the old rock-and-mortar foundation, where the kitchen water and drain pipes ran in. Probably the plumbing had been added some time after the lodge was built, requiring a space for a man to slither in under the floor. The water pipe was wrapped with insulation, suggesting that it was prone to freezing. Monks had done a fair amount of plumbing on his own house, and once in a while the weather got cold enough that he needed to thaw a pipe. It was a lot easier when there was access to it from both ends.
He opened the cabinet under the kitchen sink. A section of the heavy plank floor had been cut out for the pipes, then replaced with two pieces of half-inch plywood, about eighteen by twenty-four inches, joining in the middle with hemispherical cuts around the pipes.
The plywood was not nailed down.
He quickly removed the items under the sink-cleaning supplies and a bucket to catch drips from the leaky drain-and lifted the plywood sections. He could just see a gray patch of twilight through the foundation’s gap, fifteen feet away. It opened out the back, on the opposite side of the lodge from Sidewinder’s watch point.
It would be a tough squirm for a good-sized man. But a good-sized desperate man could make it.
He replaced the stuff under the sink, mentally going through all the factors he could bring to mind. Then he walked to the lodge’s door and stepped out into the rain.
Sidewinder walked to meet him, unhappily drawn forth from his cover.
“Where you going, man?” he said.
“To visit my son,” Monks said, continuing his walk toward Glenn’s cabin. He had been watching it from the lodge’s windows, and had seen Glenn a couple of times, hurrying to the washhouse or on some errand. But he had not seen Shrinkwrap. He was hoping that she was gone.
“I’m already fucking soaked,” Sidewinder complained. “I was outside all night and I haven’t slept. Freeboot’s making me stay on duty, ’cause-”