“She didn’t love me anyway!” one fool announced to the entire store, waving a bottle of gin. He smelled like a polecat.
The shelves were largely empty, but Terry found two pints of gin, and paid with money that would soon be worthless, he supposed, if this terrible fuck-up went on. He filled the flask with one pint, carried the other in a paper bag, and walked with Frank to a nearby alley. It opened into a courtyard piled with garbage bags and rain-softened cardboard boxes. Johnny Lee Kronsky’s scuffed apartment door was here, at ground level, between two windows with plastic sheeting for glass.
Kronsky, a mythic figure in this part of West Virginia, answered and spied the bottle in the bag. “Those who come bearing gifts may enter,” he said and took the bottle.
There was only one chair in the living room. Kronsky claimed it for himself. He drank half the pint in two ginormous swallows, his Adam’s apple rolling like a bobber at the end of a hooked line, paying no attention to Terry or Frank. A muted television sat on a stand, showing footage of several cocooned women floating on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. They looked like weird life rafts.
What if a shark decided to bite one? Terry wondered. He guessed that if that happened, the shark might be in for a surprise.
What did any of it mean? What was the point?
Terry decided the point might be gin. He got out Frank’s flask and had a tug.
“Those women are from the big plane that crashed,” Johnny Lee said. “Interesting that they float like that, isn’t it? The stuff must be mighty light. Like kapok, or something.”
“Look at them all,” Terry marveled.
“Yes, yes, quite a sight.” Johnny Lee smacked his lips. He was a licensed private investigator, but not the kind that checked up on cheating spouses or solved mysteries. Until 2014, he had worked for Ulysses Energy Solutions, the coal company, cycling through their various operations, posing as a miner and listening for rumors of union organizing, working to undercut leaders who seemed particularly effective. A company dog, in other words.
Then had come trouble. A right smart of trouble, one could say. There was a cave-in. Kronsky had been the man handling the explosives. The three miners who had been buried under the rock had been talking loudly about holding a vote. Almost as damning, one had been wearing a tee-shirt with the face of Woody Guthrie on it. Lawyers hired by Ulysses had prevented the levying of charges—a tragic accident, they successfully argued before the grand jury—but Kronsky had been forced into retirement.
That was why Johnny Lee had come home to Dooling, where he had been born. Now, in his ideally located apartment—right around the corner from the liquor store—he was in the process of drinking himself to death. Each month, a check from UES arrived via Federal Express. A woman Terry knew at the bank told him that the notation on the stub was always the same: FEES. Whatever his FEES amounted to wasn’t a fortune, as the crummy apartment proved, but Kronsky managed on it. The whole story was familiar to Terry because hardly a month passed that the police weren’t called out to the man’s apartment by a neighbor who had heard breaking glass—a rock or a brick thrown through one of Kronsky’s windows, undoubtedly by union spooks. Johnny Lee never called himself. He had let it be known that he was not overly concerned—J. L. Kronsky didn’t give Shit One about the union.
One afternoon not long before the Aurora outbreak, when Terry had been partnered with Lila in Unit One, the conversation had turned to Kronsky. She said, “Eventually some disaffected miner—probably a relative of one of the guys Kronsky got killed—is going to blow his head off, and the miserable son of a bitch will probably be glad to go.”
“There’s a situation at the prison,” Terry said.
“There’s a situation everywhere, Mister Man.” Kronsky had a beaten face, pouched and haggard, and dark eyes.
“Forget everywhere,” Frank said. “We’re here.”
“I don’t give a tin shit where you are,” Johnny Lee said, and polished off the pint.
“We might need to blow something up,” Terry said.
Barry Holden and his station-robbing friends had taken a lot of firepower, but had missed the Griner brothers’ bump of C4. “You know how to work with plastic, don’t you?”
“Could be I do,” Kronsky said. “What’s in it for me, Mister Man?”
Terry calculated. “I tell you what. Pudge Marone from the Squeak is with us, and I think he’ll let you run an endless tab for the rest of your life.” Which Terry guessed wouldn’t be long.
“Hm,” Johnny Lee said.
“And of course, it’s also a chance to do your town a great service.”
“Dooling can go fuck itself,” Johnny Lee Kronsky said, “but still—why not? Just why the fuck not?”
That gave them twenty.
Dooling Correctional did not have guard towers. It had a flat tarpaper roof, piped with vents, ducts, and exhaust stems. There wasn’t much in the way of cover beyond a half-foot of brick edging. After assessing this roof, Willy Burke told Clint he liked the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perspective of the entire perimeter, but he liked his balls even more. “Nothing up here that could stop a bullet, see. How about that shed there?” The old man pointed down below.
Although labeled EQUIPMENT SHED on the prison blueprints, it was your basic catch-all, containing the riding lawnmower that inmates (trustworthy ones) used to groom the softball field, plus gardening tools, sports equipment, and stacks of moldering newspapers and magazines bound with twine. Most importantly, it was built of cement blocks.
They had a closer look. Clint dragged a chair out behind the shed and Willy had a seat there beneath the overhang of the shed’s roof.
From this position, a man would be sheltered from the view of anyone at the fence, but would still be visible at either end of a firing line that stretched between the shed and the prison. If they’re just on one side, I should be all right,” said Willy. “I’ll see em from the corner of my eye and take cover.”
“Both sides at the same time?” Clint asked.
“If they do that, I’ll be for it.”
“You need help. Backup.”
“When you say that, Doc, it makes me wish I’d done more churchin in the days of my youth.”
The old fellow regarded him amiably. Upon arriving at the prison, the only explanation that he had required of Clint was a further assurance that the stand they were making was what Lila would have wanted. Clint had readily given it to Willy, although at this stage he was no longer sure what Lila would have wanted. It seemed like Lila had been gone for years.
Clint tried to reflect the same amiability—a bit of lighthearted savoir faire in the face of the enemy—but what remained of his sense of humor seemed to have fallen out of the back of Barry Holden’s RV along with Gerda Holden and Garth Flickinger. “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Willy?”
Willy held up his left hand. The meat of his palm was gouged with scar tissue. “As it happens, a few bits of me are still there.”
“How did it feel?” Clint asked. “When you were there? You must have lost friends.”
“Oh, yes,” Willy said. “I lost friends. As to how I felt, mostly just scared. Confused. All the time. Is that how you feel right now?”
“It is,” Clint admitted. “I never trained for this.”
They stood there in the milky afternoon light. Clint wondered if Willy sensed what Clint was really feeling—some fear and confusion, that was true, but also excitement. A certain euphoria infused the preparations, the prospect of pouring the frustration and dismay and loss and impossibility of everything into action. Clint could observe it happening to himself, a rush of aggressive adrenalin that was as old as apes.