He told himself he shouldn’t be thinking that way, and maybe not, but it felt good. It was as if some guy who looked exactly like him, driving a coupe with the top down, had pulled up beside the old Clint at a stoplight, nodded once in recognition, then, at the flip of the green, his doppelganger had planted the accelerator, and the old Clint was watching him roar off. The new Clint had to hurry, because he was on a mission, and being on a mission was good.
While they were making their way to the rear of the prison, Willy told him about the moths and the fairy footprints he’d seen near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. Millions of moths, it seemed, coating the branches of trees, rolling above the canopy of the woods in swarms. “Was it from her?” Like everyone else, Willy had heard the rumors. “That woman you got?”
“Yes,” Clint said. “And that’s not even the half of it.”
Willy said he didn’t doubt it.
They dragged out a second chair and issued an auto to Billy Wettermore. It had been converted (legally or not Clint didn’t know, nor did he care) to full auto. That put a man on each end of the shed. It wasn’t perfect, just the best they could do.
Behind the front desk at the sheriff’s station, the body of Linny Mars lay cocooned on the floor with her laptop beside her and still broadcasting that Vine of the falling London Eye. It appeared to Terry that she had slid out of her chair when she finally drifted off to sleep. She was in a heap, partly blocking the hallway that led to the official areas of the facility.
Kronsky stepped over her and walked down the hallway, in search of the evidence locker. Terry didn’t like that. He called after him, “Hey, you notice the fucking person here? On the floor?”
“It’s okay, Terry,” Frank said. “We’ll take care of her.”
They carried Linny to a holding cell and lowered her gently to the mattress. She hadn’t been out for long. The webs were thin across her eyes and mouth. Her lips were twisted up in an expression of delirious happiness—who knew why, maybe just because her struggle to stay awake was over.
Terry had another drink. He lowered the flask and the wall of the cell rushed at him and he stuck out his hand to stop it. After a moment he was able to push up straight again.
“I’m worried about you,” Frank said. “You’re—overmedicating.”
“I’m perfecto.” Terry waved his hand at a moth that was bothering his ear. “Are you happy we’re arming up, Frank? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Frank gave Terry a long look. It was totally unthreatening, totally blank. He stared at Terry the way that kids looked at television screens—as if they were gone from their bodies.
“No,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t say I’m too happy. It’s the job, that’s all. The one in front of us.”
“Do you always tell yourself that before you kick somebody’s ass?” Terry asked, genuinely interested, and was surprised when Frank recoiled, as if from a slap.
Kronsky was in the waiting room when they came out. He’d found the plastic explosive, also a bundle of dynamite someone had found in a gravel pit near the Griner property and turned in for disposal. Johnny Lee looked disapproving. “This dyno had no business back there, folksies. It gets old and cranky. The C4, now—” He shook it, making Frank wince. “You could run it over with a truck and nothing would happen.”
“So you want to leave the dynamite?” Terry asked.
“Jesus, no.” Kronsky looked offended. “I love me some dyno. Always have. Dyno’s what you call old-school. Need to wrap it in a blanket, is all. Or maybe Sleeping Beauty there’s got a nice thick sweater in the closet. Oh, and I’ll need to get some items from the hardware store. I trust the sheriff’s department has an open account?”
Before Terry and Frank left, they packed a duffel bag with the handguns and ammo that hadn’t been looted, and carried out all the vests and helmets they could rustle up. There wasn’t much, but their posse—really no sense calling it anything else—would bring plenty of armament from home.
Linny hadn’t left a sweater in the closet, so Johnny Lee had wrapped the dynamite in a couple of towels from the bathroom. He held it to his chest as if carrying an infant.
“Getting late in the day for any kind of assault,” Frank observed. “If that’s what it comes to.”
Terry said, “I know. We’ll get the boys out there tonight, make sure everyone knows what’s what and who’s in charge.” He looked pointedly at Frank as he said this. “Requisition a couple schoolbuses from the town motor pool and park them at the intersection of Route 31 and West Lavin, where the roadblock was, so the fellas don’t have to sleep raw. Keep six or eight of em on watch, in a… you know…” He made a circle in the air.
Frank helped him out. “A perimeter.”
“Yeah, that. If we have to go in, we’ll do it tomorrow morning, from the east. We’ll need a couple of bulldozers to bust through. Send Pearl and Treater to pick out a couple from the public works yard. Keys are in the office trailer there.”
“Good,” Frank said, because it was. He wouldn’t have thought of bulldozers.
“First thing tomorrow morning, we bulldoze the fences and come at the main building across the parking lot. That way the sun will be in their eyes. Step one, push em deep, away from the doors and windows. Step two, Johnny Lee blows the front doors and we’re inside. Press em to throw down their weapons. At that point, I think they will. Send a few around the far side to make sure they can’t bolt for it.”
“Makes sense,” Frank said.
“But first…”
“First?”
“We talk to Norcross. Tonight. Face to face, if he’s man enough. Offer him a chance to give the woman up before something happens that can’t be taken back.”
Frank’s eyes expressed what he felt.
“I know what you’re thinking, Frank, but if he’s a reasonable man, he’ll see it’s the right thing. He’s responsible for more lives than just hers, after all.”
“And if he still says no?”
Terry shrugged. “Then we go in and take her.”
“No matter what?”
“That’s right, no matter what.” They went out, and Terry locked the glass double doors of the station behind him.
Rand Quigley got his toolbox and spent two hours chiseling and hammering out the small wire-reinforced window that was embedded in the concrete wall of the visitors’ room.
Tig Murphy sat nearby, drinking Coke and smoking a cigarette. The no-smoking reg had been lifted. “If you were an inmate,” he said, “that’d get about five years added to your sentence.”
“Good thing I’m not an inmate, then, isn’t it?”
Tig tapped ash on the floor and decided not to say what he was thinking: if being locked in meant you were an inmate, that’s what they were now. “Man, they really built this place, didn’t they?”
“Uh-huh. Like it was a prison, or something,” Rand said.
“Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck.”
When the glass finally fell out, Tig clapped.
“Thank ya, ladies and gentlemen,” Rand said, doing Elvis. “Thank ya very much.”
With the window removed, Rand could stand on top of the table they had pulled below as a shooting platform, and stick his weapon through. This was his spot, with clean angles on the parking lot and the front gate.
“They think we are pussies,” Rand said. “But we are not.”
“Got that right, Rand-o.”
Clint poked his head in. “Tig. With me.”
The two of them walked up the stairs to the raised level of B Wing. This was the prison’s highest point, the only second floor in the structure. There were windows in the cells that faced out on West Lavin. These were stronger even than the window in the visitors’ room—thick, reinforced, and sandwiched between layers of concrete. It was hard to imagine Rand knocking one out of the wall with just hand tools.