NOS4A2(150)

Laconia, New Hampshire


HUTTER SAW IT BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DID, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS HAPPENING right in front of all of them. Lou Carmody began to go down. His right knee buckled, and he put a hand against the big oval table in the conference room.

“Mr. Carmody,” she said.

He sank into one of the rolling office chairs, fell into it with a soft crash. His color had changed, his big grizzled face taking on a milky pallor, a sweat shining greasily on his forehead. He put one wrist to his brow as if feeling for a fever.

“Mr. Carmody,” Hutter said again, calling down the table and across the room to him.

There were men all around him; Hutter didn’t understand how they could stand there and not see that the guy was having a heart attack.

“I’m gone, Lou,” Vic McQueen said, her voice coming through the Bluetooth headset in Hutter’s ear. “I love you.”

“Back atcha,” Carmody said. He wore a headpiece identical to Tabitha Hutter’s own; almost everyone in the room was wearing one, the whole team listening in on the conversation.

They were in a conference room at the state police headquarters outside Laconia. It could’ve been the conference room at a Hilton or a Courtyard Marriott: a big, bland space with a long, oval central table and windows looking out on an expanse of parking lot.

McQueen hung up. Hutter tore out her earpiece.

Cundy, her lead tech, was on his laptop, looking at Google Maps. It was zoomed in on Sugarcreek, Pennsylvania, to show Bloch Lane. Cundy rolled his eyes up to look at Hutter. “We’ll have cars there in three minutes. Maybe less. I just spoke with the locals, and they’re on the way with sirens blasting.”

Hutter opened her mouth, meant to say, Tell them to turn their f*cking sirens off. You didn’t warn a federal fugitive that the cops were closing in. That was fundamental.

But then Lou Carmody leaned all the way forward, so his face was resting on the table, his nose squashed to the wood. He grunted softly and clutched at the tabletop as if he were at sea and clinging to a great chunk of driftwood.

And so what Hutter said instead was, “Ambulance. Now.”

“You want . . . an ambulance to go to Bloch Lane?” Cundy asked.

“No. I want an ambulance to come here,” she said, moving swiftly away from him and around the table. She raised her voice, “Gentlemen, give Mr. Carmody some air, please. Step back. Step back, please.”

Lou Carmody’s office chair had been slowly rolling backward, and at that exact moment it slid out from beneath him and Carmody went straight down, as if dropped through a trapdoor.

Daltry was the closest to him, standing just behind the chair with a mug that said WORLD’S BEST GRANDDAD. He leaped aside and slopped black coffee down his pink shirt.

“The f*ck hit him?” Daltry asked.

Hutter went down on one knee next to Carmody, who was half under the table. She put her hands on one big sloping shoulder and pushed. It was like trying to flip a mattress. He slumped onto his back, his right hand grabbing his Iron Man T-shirt, twisting it into a knot between his man tits. His cheeks were loose, and his lips were gray. He let out a long, ragged gasp. His gaze darted here and there, as if he were trying to get his bearings.

“Stay with us, Lou,” she said. “Help will be here soon.”

She snapped her fingers, and his gaze found her at last. He blinked and smiled uncertainly. “I like your earrings. Supergirl. I would’ve never figured you for Supergirl.”

“No? Who would you have figured me for?” she asked, just trying to keep him talking. Her fingers closed on his wrist. There was nothing for a long moment, and then his pulse whapped, a single big kick, and then another stillness, and then a flurry of rapid beats.

“Velma,” he said. “You know? From Scooby-Doo.”

“Why? Because we’re both dumpy?” Hutter asked.

“No,” he said. “Because you’re both smart. I’m scared. Will you hold my hand?”

She took his hand in hers. He gently moved his thumb back and forth over her knuckles.

“I know you don’t believe anything Vic told you about Manx,” he said to her in a sudden, fierce whisper. “I know you think she’s out of her mind. You can’t let facts get in the way of the truth.”

“Jinkies,” she said. “What’s the difference?”

He surprised her by laughing—a rapid, helpless, panting sound.

She had to ride to the hospital with him in the ambulance. He wouldn’t let go of her hand.





Here, Iowa


BY THE TIME VIC CAME OUT OF THE OTHER END OF THE BRIDGE, SHE had slowed to almost nothing and the bike was in neutral. She remembered acutely her last visit to the Here Public Library, how she had rushed headlong into a curb and been flung for a knee-scraping slide across a concrete path. She didn’t think she could take a crash in the state she was in now. The bike didn’t care for neutral, though, and as it thumped down onto the asphalt road that ran behind the library, the engine died with a thin, dispirited wheeze.

When Vic had last been Here, the strip of park behind the library had been raked and clean and shady, a place to throw down a blanket and read a book. Now it was half an acre of mud, gouged with tread marks from loaders and dump trucks. The century-old oaks and birch had been plucked from the ground and bulldozed into a twelve-foot-high mound of dead wood, off to one side.