“I can’t explain what she is, Jared,” he said.
Although he was trying to sound calm, Clint was livid—with himself, with Geary, with Evie. That bullet could have hit Jared. Could have blinded him. Left him comatose. Killed him. Clint had not beaten up his old friend Jason in the Burtells’ yard so that his own son could die before him; he had not shared beds with kids who pissed themselves in their sleep for that; he had not left behind Marcus and Shannon and all the others for that; and he had not worked his way through college or medical school for it.
Shannon had told him, all those years before, that if he just hung on and kept from killing anyone, he would make it out. But to make it out of the current situation, they might have to kill people. He might have to kill people. The idea did not upset Clint as much as he would have expected. The situation changed, and the prizes changed, but maybe, at bottom, it was the same deaclass="underline" if you wanted the milkshake, you’d better be ready to fight.
“What?” asked Jared.
Clint cocked his head.
“You look,” his son said, “Sort of tense.”
“Just tired.” He touched Jared’s shoulder and excused himself. He needed to make sure everyone was placed.
There was no need to say I told you so.
Terry caught Frank’s eye as they stepped away from the group around the bodies. “You were right,” Terry said. He produced the flask. Frank thought about stopping him, didn’t. The acting sheriff took a healthy swallow. “You were right all the way down the line. We’ll have to take her.”
“You sure?” Frank said it as if he himself wasn’t.
“Are you kidding? Look at this goddam mess! Vern dead, girl there did it, she’s shot to pieces and dead, too. Lawyer’s skull caved in. Think he might have lived for awhile, but he’s sure dead now. Other guy, driver’s license says he’s an MD named Flickinger—”
“Him too? Really?” If so, it was too bad. Flickinger had been a mess, but he’d had enough soul left in him to try to help Nana.
“And that’s not the worst part. Norcross and the Black woman and the rest of them have got serious armaments now, most everything high-powered that we could have used to make them stand down.”
“Do we know who was with them?” Frank asked. “Who was behind the wheel of that RV when they hauled ass out of here?”
Terry tipped the flask again, but there was nothing left inside. He swore and kicked a chunk of broken macadam.
Frank waited.
“Codger named Willy Burke.” Terry Coombs breathed out between his teeth. “Cleaned up his act in the last fifteen or twenty years, does a lot of community stuff, but he’s still a poacher. Used to be a moonshiner, too, back when he was young. Maybe he still is. Vet. Can handle himself. Lila always gave him the right-of-way, felt like it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to try and get him for something. And I guess she liked him.” He inhaled. “I felt the same.”
“All right.” Frank had decided to keep Black’s phone call to himself. It had infuriated him so much, in fact, that he would have been hardpressed to recount the details of the conversation. One part had stayed with him, though, and tugged at his sleeve: how the woman had praised him for protecting his daughter at the hospital. How could she have known about that? Eve Black had been in the jail that morning. It kept coming back to him and he kept pushing it away. As with the moths that had burst from the lit fragment of Nana’s cocoon, Frank could not fathom an explanation. He could only see that Eve Black had meant to tweak him—and she had succeeded. But he didn’t believe she understood what tweaking him meant.
In any case, Terry was back on track—he didn’t need any extra motivation. “You want me to start putting together a group? I’m willing, if that’s your pleasure.”
Although pleasure had nothing to do with it, Terry seconded the motion.
The prison defenders hurriedly removed the tires from the various cars and trucks in the parking lot. There were about forty vehicles altogether, counting the prison vans. Billy Wettermore and Rand Quigley rolled the tires out and arranged them in pyramids of three in the dead space between the inner and outer fences, then doused them in gasoline. The petrol stench quickly overwhelmed the ambient odor of damp, charred wood from the still-smoldering fire in the woods. They left the tires on Scott Hughes’s truck but parked it crossways right behind the interior gate, as an extra barrier.
“Scott loves that truck,” Rand said to Tig.
“You want to put yours there instead?” Tig asked.
“Hell no,” said Rand. “Are you crazy?”
The only vehicle they left untouched was Barry Holden’s RV, situated in the handicap space by the cement path to the Intake doors.
Minus Vern Rangle, Roger Elway, and the department’s female officers, all of whom had been confirmed as asleep during Frank’s cataloging operation, seven deputies remained from Sheriff Lila Norcross’s duty roster: Terry Coombs, Pete Ordway, Elmore Pearl, Dan “Treater” Treat, Rupe Wittstock, Will Wittstock, and Reed Barrows. It was a solid group, in Terry’s opinion. They were all force veterans of at least a year, and Pearl and Treater had both served in Afghanistan.
The three retired deputies—Jack Albertson, Mick Napolitano, and Nate McGee—made ten.
Don Peters, Eric Blass, and Frank Geary made lucky thirteen.
Frank quickly martialed a half-dozen other volunteers including Coach JT Wittstock, father of the deputies who shared his surname, and the defense-first coach of the Dooling High School varsity football team; Pudge Marone, bartender at the Squeaky Wheel, who brought along his Remington shotgun from beneath the bar; Drew T. Barry of Drew T. Barry Indemnity Company, by-the-book insurance agent and prize-winning deer hunter; Carson “Country Strong” Struthers, Pudge’s brother-in-law, who had fought to a 10-1 Golden Gloves record before his doctor told him he had to quit while he still had some brain left; and two town board members, Bert Miller and Steve Pickering, both of whom, like Drew T. Barry, knew their way around a deer stand. That was nineteen, and once they were informed that the woman inside the prison might have information related to the sleeping sickness, maybe even knowledge of a cure, every single one was eager to serve.
Terry was pleased, but wanted an even twenty. The sight of Vern Rangle’s bleached-out face and torn neck was something he would never be able to forget. He could feel it the way he could feel Geary, silent as a shadow, following everything he did, judging every choice he made.
But never mind. The only way out was through: through Norcross to Eve Black, and through the Black woman to the end of this nightmare. Terry didn’t know what would happen when they got to her, but he knew it would be the end. Once the end came, he could work at blurring the memory of Vern Rangle’s bloodless face. Not to mention the faces of his wife and daughter, which no longer exactly existed. Seriously drinking his brain into submission, in other words. He was aware that Frank had been encouraging him to use the booze, and so what? So fucking what?
Don Peters had been tasked with calling around to the male officers on Dooling Correctional’s roll, and it didn’t take him long to figure out that Norcross had four officers on duty, max. One of those, Wettermore, was a swish, and another, Murphy, had been a history teacher. Throw in the Black woman and the old coot, Burke, plus maybe a couple or three others they didn’t know about just to be generous, and that meant they were up against less than a dozen, few if any of whom could be expected to stand fast if things got hot, no matter how much armament they had acquired.
Terry and Frank stopped at the liquor store on Main Street. It was open, and busy.