To allay the jitters, he tried to divert himself with conversation. “Where’d you serve?” he asked Nebraska.
Nebraska wasn’t overly chatty, but he had a laid-back attitude, and seemed happy to talk, which made him the most relaxing of the Loonies to be around.
The big man took another pull on his cigarette, and said, “Operation Enduring Freedom, ’03. Went for the Taliban, stayed for the opium.” He blew smoke, smiling slightly. “Came back, tried for contract work. They wouldn’t take me. Tried to drive a bus…”
“Lemme guess,” said McKenna. “They wouldn’t take you?”
Nebraska slid him a look, still smiling. You got it, his expression said.
For a moment they sat in companionable silence. Nebraska might have been laid-back, but he had a keen intelligence. There was a weariness about him too, as if he had been pushing at life too hard for too long.
Weighing up the question in his mind, wondering whether he should ask it, McKenna decided to take the plunge. “So… the officer. Did he live?”
“Excuse me?” Nebraska replied.
“The CO—the asshole you shot. Did he live?”
“Funny.” A small nod. “He did.”
“Where is he now?” McKenna asked.
Nebraska’s expression turned into something halfway between sadness and amusement. He studied McKenna’s face and cocked his head slightly, like a hopeful comedian waiting for a tiny audience to get his punchline. McKenna frowned, not understanding, and then he got it and his face went slack.
“You’re shitting me.”
Nebraska sighed and lifted up his hair to reveal a puckered pale scar on the dark skin beneath his hairline.
He shrugged. “I missed.”
McKenna blinked at him. “Why… why did you do that?”
“Miss?”
“Shoot yourself.”
“The doctors keep asking me that.” Nebraska took another drag on his cigarette. “I walked to the hospital with a bullet in my head. It’s why I’m… y’know…” He waffled his hand in the air. “Fuzzy sometimes.”
McKenna felt a chill trickle down his spine. He cleared his throat. “Should I be worried?”
“Probably,” Nebraska replied grimly. He stood up, tossing the butt of his cigarette to one side, then tapped at his scar with a smile and pointed to Heaven. “God wouldn’t take me neither.”
McKenna expected him to walk away, but Nebraska stood for a moment, contemplating his new friend, as if debating whether to reveal more devastating truths. Finally, he seemed to decide, but what he said surprised McKenna—surprised him and moved him.
“I got your back, Chief.”
The constant noise in the lot had been getting to Nettles, and now the sound of a biker noisily revving his engine only a few feet away managed to fray his last few nerves.
Scowling, he said, “You mind keeping it down?”
The biker shot him an incredulous look. “You gonna make me, fairy boy?”
Nettles jumped to his feet and started toward him. “Am I gonna make you Fairy Boy? How would that work? Do I, like, give you powers? A wand? I’m confused.”
The biker strode to meet him, full of rage and swagger and a history that doubtless included a hundred such encounters, all of them ending the same way. Nettles relished that moment, the instant when the guy’s confidence suffused him the way all the best emotions did—love, fury… humiliation.
Nettles shot out a hand with such fluidity that anyone looking on would have seen the motion as almost casual. The biker wouldn’t have agreed—not when he staggered, gasping, and crumpled to the ground.
Standing in front of a vending machine, McKenna saw the exchange and shook his head. Great. Just fucking great. What did these guys not understand about the need to keep a low profile? He banged the machine with his fist. Bizarrely, and without warning, a paper cup dropped down and started filling with coffee. McKenna stared at the cup a moment—he hadn’t put any money in yet—and decided to take this as a good omen.
Nettles could take care of himself, right?
He sure as hell hoped so.
Nebraska walked by, headed for the motel room, and with a last glance toward Nettles, McKenna followed. Nebraska knocked at the door, a prearranged signal of two short, three long knocks, and Coyle yanked it open almost immediately.
“Good timing,” Coyle said, glancing from Nebraska to McKenna before he stepped back to let them in.
McKenna understood his urgency the moment they entered. On the bed, the woman had turned over and seemed to be stirring. Baxley and Lynch were gathered by the bed of their sleeping Snow White with the air of expectant fathers. She stirred again, moaned a bit, and Nebraska moved in as well. He held up his hands as if she were already awake, like she might try to bolt and he wanted to calm her before she hurt herself.
“Easy,” Nebraska told the others. “She’s gonna open her eyes, buncha motherfuckers hovering, she might be coming in hot.”
“Got it,” Coyle said, nodding anxiously, eyes even crazier than usual. “Chill.”
McKenna frowned as he noticed a dinner tray on a stand that had been set up next to the bed. A tiny cup of coffee, a troll doll, a postcard, a drawing of a shopping cart, a foil unicorn. Like offerings to the God of Idiots.
“What is this shit, exactly?” McKenna asked.
Baxley looked sheepish. “We wanted to make her feel comfortable. When she wakes up. The postcard’s from me, the unicorn’s from Nettles—”
McKenna raised a hand to cut him off, nodding as if Baxley’s explanation actually made sense. In a way, he guessed, it did. The Loonies were like some Dr. Moreau combination of children and feral cats, wild but aware of the weird allure of domesticity.
Casey moaned softly as she clawed her way back to the surface of the deep black pool into which she’d fallen. The dead time between the tranquilizer taking effect and her return to consciousness seemed like both an instant and an eternity. She tried to open her eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time, and this time managed it, light suddenly flooding in between her lids.
“Mornin’, sunshine,” said a voice.
That’s not my name, she thought groggily. But when she tried to communicate the fact, it came out as: “I wish people’d stop calling me that.”
All at once, it occurred to her to wonder who had spoken. The last time she had heard a human voice it had come from a man who was about to kill her. The adrenaline that flooded through her at the memory enabled her to open her eyes wide, to half sit up. She saw faces. Men’s faces. They didn’t look like doctors. In fact, each of them looked crazy in one way or another.
Her gaze shifted instinctively to her left, looking for an escape route. She didn’t spot one immediately, but what she did spot was almost as good. Bounding out of bed, she grabbed the Remington shotgun, which was propped against a chair beside the bed, on which sat a tray piled with various bits of junk—a troll doll, a foil unicorn, other stuff. Whirling round, she leveled the gun shakily at the group of men. Her eyes were wide and her breath came in ragged sips as she studied them, maybe trying to decide who to shoot first if anyone made a move.
The men didn’t look scared. In fact, they looked impressed by her moves—and in her present befuddled state that confused her a little. One of the men—sandy hair, handsome, maybe the least crazy looking of the bunch—stepped forward, his hands raised to show he was unarmed.
“Relax,” he said soothingly. “We’re the good guys.”
She sneered at him. Backing away, she fumbled in her pants pocket while still trying to keep the shotgun pointed in their vicinity, then started to look panicked. Frantically she patted her other pockets.