"Of course he is. He needs Wayfarer just as bad as you do.
He looked into Sharon's level brown eyes and saw the terrifying evenness of her common sense, the endless flat line of he moral horizon-good above and bad below and nothing in between.
She went to the kitchen and poured herself more coffee. When she came back she sat at the far end of the sofa, away from Joshua and the cat.
Joshua could sense the envelope of tension around her, palpable as the buzz in a prison.
"I don't know what the right thing to do is," she said.
"Welcome to the human race."
"Fuck you and your hatred, Josh."
"It makes a better light than your doubt does."
"I don't like the doubt, either. It makes for weakness an‹ indecision. It's paralyzing. But this is the first time since coming to the Bureau that I haven't felt right about something. Some thing big, I mean. If this goes wrong, Josh, it goes wrong big."
"Then I'll be looking for work in the private sector. Maybe Holt could use me. I might open my own little dry cleaning business."
"You might be dead."
Thoughts of his own mortality couldn't dent him. The joy of victory, even the thought of victory swept the fear from Josh's mind. He looked at Sharon now, at her face behind the rising steam from her coffee cup. She's beautiful, he thought, isn't she? In a different way than Rebecca, but beautiful just the same.
"I'll do it alone, Sharon."
"Do you want me there?"
"Of course I do."
"I'm afraid of doing the wrong thing. Of getting someone innocent killed. Aren't you?"
"No."
"You should be." "It scares me that I'm not. So I'll do it alone."
"No, you won't. I won't let you. I never considered that, even for a second."
CHAPTER 36
John had just ended his conversation with Joshua when he heard the cottage door open and close. He was upstairs in the cottage loft. His hands were jittery as he replaced the cellular unit under the sink cabinet, pressing it down into a box of cleaning products between two sponges of roughly the same size and laying the rubber gloves over them.
"Val?"
"No such luck, Bun-boy."
He heard footsteps across the hardwood floor. He quietly closed the cabinet and went downstairs.
Lane Fargo sat in the living room, an open Sports Illustrated draped over a crossed knee and a paper grocery bag beside his leg. He looked at John with his standard expression- mean spirited and noncommittal.
"Come to borrow some Pepto?" John asked. There was something in Lane Fargo so easy to detest.
"Not exactly."
"You still look a little peaked from Uganda. Bed rest, plenty of fluids."
"Feel great, actually. I've made some solid formulations lately."
"A firm stool can't be overpraised."
"Always talkin' shit, aren't you?"
Fargo tossed the magazine to the coffee table, uncrossed his legs and stood, never taking his eyes off of John. He made a fast sighing sound as he turned. John studied Fargo's dark, shadowy face. The vein throbbing in Fargo's neck and the one throbbing in his forehead kept the same cadence. His black widow's peak made him look simian. He had on his black t-shirt again, and the shoulder holster with the automatic jammed up along his rib cage.
"Look, Lane. You couldn't put me with Joshua What’s his name or Rebecca Harris, so why don't you just cave in and admit you were wrong? I'm clean. I won. Valerie kind of likes me, too. Go home and weep."
"That was the past," he said. "You beat me at it, like you beat me out at Olie's that day." At this, Fargo's dark visage crimped into a mock frown. "I'm more interested in the present, the right-now. Like in what happened to Snakey."
"Not him again."
"The plot's thickened, Bun-boy. I found this little tape recorder in his room, remember? Listened to the tape that was in it last night, after you and Mr. Holt went up to see the sights in Little Saigon. Snake was just using it for an activity log-what you did each day while we were gone. He was watching you. You know, Snakey wasn't a literary giant like you. But he was a good watcher and he loved to talk, though, so he just used the tape. Some awfully revealing notes on that tape, about you and Valerie. Quite a picnic on the island, wasn't it? Meaningful, touching and all that. How'd you keep the sand from sticking to your pecker tracks? Anyway, he's still up the second morning, watching you leave the main house just before sunrise. What a night. Then at 6:20-he says on the tape-you set out around the lake with your dogs, heading up into the hills. Says-this is right on the tape again-he couldn't figure out how anybody could have so much energy after being up all night drinking and necking, so he's going to follow, have a look. Do his job. That was the last thing he had to say to anybody, as far as I can tell. So, where'd you go that morning?"
"I thought you just told me."
"How far up the hills did you walk that morning?"
John went to the refrigerator. "Beer, Lane?"
"No thanks. So, how far up?"
John returned to the living room with a cold beer. He sat in a leather chair with his back to the picture window overlooking Liberty Lake. He popped the can and drank.
"Lane, beat it. I'm done."
"Come on, John, humor me. Play along. You play along, I won't tell Mr. Holt about touching his daughter."
"I told him anyway."
"Made a quick father figure out of him, didn't you? I loved the Patrick-act for the Missus, by the way. I can see Holt and Carolyn falling for it, but not Valerie. Mister and Missus, they're so fucked up after Patrick they'd believe anything. She's got a bullet in the brain, but I swear some of it chipped off and got into Mr. Holt, too. Anyway, you told him you touched his kid. Good for you. Humor me anyway. Just cooperate for a minute or two. Show me how futile it would be to go to Mr. Holt and tell him we should bounce your ass off Liberty Ridge. He listens to me, you know. I keep him alive."
John felt tired and surprised. He was not expecting to be playing this game on this field now. But he recognized that he needed to play. Anything on earth was worth forstalling now, until noon Sunday.
"I went a ways up the hill, Fargo."
"To the fence?"
"What fence."
"Perimeter, chain-link, electrically charged."
"No, then."
"Why?"
"Exercise. I couldn't have slept. I knew that, so I took a walk with the dogs. It's an old habit."
"When did you first see Snakey?"
"I didn't."
"You're not observant, are you?"
"Gee, Lane. I guess not."
"Then what happened to him, Bun-boy? He just fell in a hole up on the hillside and we haven't found him yet?"
John shrugged. "I guess. I don't care what happened to him."
"Well he didn't, and you should. I followed his trail and there was no Snakey, no hole. Wasn't very hard, either, because the brush is dense and he was paralleling the path you used. You do take paths on these morning walks, rather than blazing fresh trails as the sun comes up, right?"
"Right." The tree, he thought. The gun. The hole. The box of toys.
"The tracks up on the trail are from your Redwings in the closet up there. Plus, Snakey wore these ugly athletic shoes with the wavy pattern on the bottom. I remember because I told him to get some decent hiking boots if he was going to pay good money anyway. So, there was the Snake's shoe pattern, going the same direction as your path."
John looked at Fargo with all the weary patience he could feign. "Next time you drag out my Redwings, put a little mink oil on them, will you?"
"Two sets of tracks, heading up the same way. One was yours, the other Snakey's. Nobody's seen him since."
"Wow, this drama's so thick you could cut it with a knife. I surrender. Where'd he go, Lane?"
Fargo paced the living room once, his black combat boots thumping soft against the wood floor. "I don't know yet."