2 Sisters Detective Agency(34)
The ball of flames quickly consumed the engine and led to a second explosion. I felt the sonic boom of the blast in the ground beneath me, as the cars all around us bounced on their suspensions, the windshields of two or three of them dissolving into showers of glass.
I knew Baby was screaming, but I couldn’t hear it. For what felt like a long time there was only ringing in my ears as we crawled into the middle of the parking lot, out of the reach of the flames.
As I dragged myself to my feet, Baby hung off me by her fingernails with one leg wrapped around my waist and her armpit smooshed against my mouth. I had to peel her off and place her on her feet, where she stood trembling and watching the car burn.
“What happened?” she wailed as my hearing sucked back into functionality. “What happened? What happened, Rhonda? What did you do?”
“What did I do?” I brushed singed pieces of fabric off my shoulders. I could feel the warm California breeze through the holes in the back of my clothing. “I pissed off a Mexican drug cartel, that’s what.”
People were rushing out of the administration building. Where once they might have run toward us to assist, the sight of the burning car had everyone bolting in the other direction, disappearing back into the building almost as fast as they had emerged. Unexpected and dangerous events on school grounds, explosions included, meant active shooters to these people. Baby and I stood alone, watching the flames, as sirens began to wail from the buildings around us.
“All right, listen up,” I told Baby. “We’ve got to get our story straight.”
Chapter 42
Jacob Kanular put down his sandpaper and blew the sawdust off the surface of the jewelry box. He had begun teaching woodworking at the community college five years earlier, when Beaty started kindergarten—his days had felt empty without her crashing and bashing playfully around the house. A lot of the young men and women he taught were underprivileged high school dropouts or juvie regulars, but he’d run a tight ship from day one. He’d refused to let anyone go at the end of class if the workshop wasn’t up to scratch. For a couple of weeks, this had resulted in a lot of complaining. Slowly, however, it had made for disciplined and organized students who put tools on racks and brushed off machines, swept the floor until it was bare. He stood now in one of his immaculate classrooms, working at an otherwise spotless bench.
The box he was making for Beaty had a big knot right in the center of its lid. A lot of people who worked with wood would have called the placement unsightly. But Jacob liked knots. This one was a dark circle coiling in on itself, narrowing to an unseen eternity. His old teacher—a guy in Alaska whose body he had eventually fed into an industrial mulcher—had taught him that knots formed when the trunk of a tree thickened and enclosed the base of its branches, expanding over any lower branches that had dropped off, sometimes because they had been starved of sun. To Jacob, the scarred lumps inside the stretching, yawning, living tree were representations of the beauty in imperfect, lost, fallen, unrealized things. Many a branch that eventually formed a knot had begun to grow in a certain way and was interrupted, killed, banished to darkness. While others grew, these branches were sacrificed.
He knew Neina was there long before a less dangerous man would have. He’d heard her footsteps among the dozens of others moving about as classes broke for lunch outside his empty room. A lifetime of hunting men had given him that ability, and while the ability had lain dormant for many years, Derek Benstein’s death had gotten the old machine running again. He smelled her too as she entered the doorway. The scent of hospital soap, trying to combat days spent at a darkened bedside.
She tried to sweep the box off the counter as she came in, but he slammed a hand down on its lid before she could. When her gesture failed, she took aim at his face, smacking Jacob hard. He bore the blow silently and stiffly, though the predator inside him ruffled like a disturbed bird of prey.
“She showed brain activity,” Neina said. “And you weren’t there.”
Jacob smoothed the box with his hands. He took up the sandpaper and turned the object on its side, rubbing down the front of the lid.
“What was it?” he asked.
“A small electrical pulse in the amygdala,” Neina said. “The…the primal control center of the brain. Less than a second. But they got it. It was there.”
“If her amygdala’s working and not much else, she’ll wake up a vegetable,” Jacob said.
That got to her. Neina threw herself at him, raged against his chest. He grabbed hold of her until she stopped.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she screamed.
He couldn’t even begin to explain. Something had always been wrong, he supposed. There was a door in his mind, and behind it, nightmarish things lived. He’d discovered the door as a teenager, when his mother and brother were crushed between two semitrailers in a car accident. From then on, he’d begun opening the door and tossing hurtful and violent and disturbing things behind it, until he realized as an adult that those things hadn’t disappeared. They had grown and twisted together and spawned new things.
Whenever he opened the door and let the things out, he could commit deadly acts, like pushing a man he respected and loved into a wood mulcher or ignoring his child in her hospital bed.
“I know what you’re doing,” Neina said.