Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(49)
At the window, she takes in prescriptions as people drop them off or when the fax whirs out an order. She scans the Rx into the computer and then types the info and sends it to the pharmacists for review. So she normally enters her initials and an alphanumeric password, which is kind of a problem, since she’ll be tagged to anything she does, but luckily, one of the pharmacists hadn’t logged out, so it was doubtful anyone would look twice at the record. She opened up the work queue and searched Volpexx and it listed everyone who’d picked up their prescription in the past ten days. All their information is included in their profile: name, address, phone number. She could have print-screened anything she found, but that was too risky because the printer sits by the pharmacists. She keeps a little notebook in her pocket. Everybody does. For passwords and common overrides needed for various insurances. So nobody thought anything of her scribbling away. “And here I am. Here it is,” she says and holds out the sheet of paper to Max, at first teasing it away when he reaches for it, then handing it over when he stares hard at her and says, “This isn’t a joke, Malerie.”
He tells her she can go and she lingers a moment in defiance before turning so quickly her tail whips around her leg. She tromps up the stairs and everyone watches her go except for Max, who scans the names for a long thirty seconds and then raises his eyes to study the group. “Let’s do this.”
They wear camo jackets and pants tucked into black combat boots. They pull white pillowcases over their heads with eyeholes and crooked mouths scissored into them. They shove their hands into black leather gloves. “Keep them on, no matter if you get hot,” Max says. “No fingerprints.” And then they pile into three cars and caravan to the first name on the list, a Mr. James Duncan, at 312 Terrabonne Road.
Trick-or-treating took place earlier in the day, before nightfall, so no children crowd the sidewalks, the side roads mostly empty. Pumpkins glow on porches, the candle flames within them sputtering in the breeze and making their triangle eyes and toothy grins tremble with shadows.
“You’re with us, right?” Max says to Patrick, and Patrick says, “I’m with you.”
They park blocks away from their target. Their boots drum out an angry song on the sidewalk. The night is cold and their breath blooms gray. On Terrabonne, with baseball bats, they smash out the windows of the car parked in the driveway. On Macintosh and on Ridgeway, they spray-paint a pentagram on a garage door, the hood of a car. On Thirteenth Street, they toss an M-80 with a spitting fuse into a mailbox and run like hell and turn around in time to see the white-orange carnation of flame—the thunder of the explosion knocking them back a step and making them holler with pleasure.
In the Malibu Village trailer court, they navigate the maze of single-wides, the chicken coops, the rusted-out cars up on blocks with mullein flowers spiking through their engine blocks, and find the trailer, a gray vinyl dead whale of a thing. There is a bare-branched tree in the front yard decorated with fishing lures and empty cans of Budweiser and they soak it with lighter fluid and spark a Zippo and it lights like a blue torch.
At the B&B auto detailer, they scale the chain-link fence and move across the asphalt lot lit by high-intensity arc lights. They stare into the security cameras, not worried, hidden by their hoods, when they spray-paint LYCAN across the office windows in dribbling black capital letters.
All this time Patrick tries to think of the plane—the lycan exploding from the bathroom, the blood sluicing down the aisle, the bodies stacked and splayed all around him—and he admits to feeling good. Hurting back those who hurt him is a good thing. His heart beats madly, as if it were a poisonous toad trying to leap out of his chest.
When they roar through a high-end development—most of the windows dark at this hour, but a few living rooms still swimming with the blue light of televisions—he is the one who hurls a brick through a window and rains the living room with glittering shards of glass.
They run. And when they do, he might hear a voice calling angrily behind him—“I’m going to kill you, you sons o’ bitches!”—as if this were his fault, as if he wanted this to happen, his life’s goal to see his parents split up, his father shipped off to war, a plane full of passengers slaughtered, and when he finally takes the opportunity to lash out and abandon all the vinegary pain stewing inside him, somebody has the gall to threaten him? Part of him wants to rush back with a baseball bat—and the other part of him wants to yell over his shoulder, sorry, he thought things would turn out differently.
Chapter 18
IN THE FOOTHILLS of the Cascades, near the base of the North Sister, the forest opens into a red rocky clearing where the air smells sulfuric and steam rises in columns as if from secret chimneys. These are the Blood Bath Hot Springs, pockets of grainy water stained red from the iron in the ground. Around the springs lie tangles of clothes, heaps of beach towels. The rocks are warm to the touch and free of snow. And people, old men and women mostly, are bobbing in the red water up to their chins.
Many believe the water has a medicinal effect. That is why Alice is here with her husband, Craig, who is suffering from a head cold. He is naked now, his coat and collared short-sleeve shirt and pale blue jeans and white tennis shoes stacked on the rocks next to him. His hair is flecked with gray. He wears owlishly round-framed bifocals. And though he is thin, his cheeks are a bit jowly, making his mouth appear downturned, sour. He has a fondness for whistling Christmas carols year-round. You might peg him as the most normal man in the world, but Alice knows better. His breath smells of the tonic water he drinks all day. He has one testicle and a small, thin, uncircumcised penis. She once watched him kill a puppy—that she had brought home from the shelter and that messed on the rug—by stomping on it. He meets people on the Internet and forces her to have sex with them while he watches. He says it’s good for her.