The Big Dark Sky (16)
Asher raises his head from the pedestal of his palm and shakes it slowly, mournfully. “It pains me, saddens me, to say that by your ignorance and hostility, by your refusal to give up hope, you have earned special treatment. Not the quick and merciful knife.”
Because her wrists are bound together, she has to prop both elbows on the table to mock him by resting her chin on a hand. “So tell me, you nutless freak, how does a pained and saddened eunuch kill someone if he doesn’t use a knife? Will you set me on fire?” She fakes a look of surprise. “Oh, gee, I’m asking the questions instead of answering them. Still, I’d like to know.”
Asher Optime has not understood this snarky bitch since she first woke from a chloroform sleep. She isn’t behaving like the two men and two women whom he’d brought here before her. Those four had been properly terrified of him, respectful and eager to please. The longest he’d taken to bleed the hope from any of them had been four days, and one of them had fallen into black despair in less than six hours. This smart-mouthed slut isn’t stupid, so she must be a little crazy—or she’s faking this irrational confidence to put him off his game and keep herself alive in hope of escaping or somehow taking him out. He’d like to punch her in the face a few times, smash that smug smile into bloody pulp.
No. No, no, that would be wrong. That would be an act of anger and would reduce him to the miserable human condition that he has transcended under the instruction of Xanthus Toller and through the act of self-castration. He is above anger and resentment and all of that, high above it, flying on his mission of world restoration. He kills not for his own gratification, but for Mother Earth.
“Will you set me on fire?” she asks again. “Do you have some enormous vat of acid into which you’ll slowly lower me? Is there maybe a pit of alligators, and you’ll throw me among them after you wrap me in bacon?”
She’s mocking him as if he styles himself after a comic-book villain, some nemesis of Spider-Man. Such impudence is infuriating. Rather, it might be infuriating if he wasn’t incapable of violent and vindictive emotions. Having transcended such human weaknesses, Asher merely smiles and nods and says, “You hide your fear behind sarcasm and ridicule. But you’ll be begging for your worthless life soon enough. Excuse me while I step outside to commune with Mother about how you should suffer for the sin of your existence.”
She feigns astonishment. “Your syphilitic mother is here?”
“Mother Earth,” he clarifies. “She’s here. She’s everywhere.”
The necklace of heavy chain, which earlier anchored Ophelia to a wall stud, now padlocks her to the headrail of the chair. Thus shackled, with wrists zip tied, she isn’t fully immobilized. But if she were to get up from the table, she would be able only to hobble clumsily around the room, the chair on her back, too slow and noisy to escape.
Asher carries his straight-backed chair outside, places it on the saloon veranda, and sits facing the ghost town’s only avenue.
In a sky as pale blue as a robin’s egg, the sun is at its apex, so neither the buildings nor the weeds in the unpaved street cast shadows. The warm summer air is so perfectly still that Zipporah might be a diorama under a glass dome. The scene looks flat and unreal.
From a pocket of his lightweight denim jacket, Asher extracts a silver cigarette case and a lighter. The case contains hand-rolled joints spiced with PCP, an animal tranquilizer that, in combination with weed, can often facilitate visions and profound communion with Nature. He already knows to what well-deserved torment Ophelia Poole must be subjected. He doesn’t need Mother’s counsel on the matter. But if the woman is given five or six hours to wonder about what horrors he is contemplating, her unfounded confidence might falter and her hope begin to fade by the time that he takes her down the street to the necropolis and forces her to spend time as the only living person among the decomposing dead.
11
Earlier that Thursday morning in August, Wyatt Rider, a licensed private investigator, had met with Liam O’Hara in the billionaire’s signature building, in his personal apartment high above Seattle. The study was a large corner room with floor-to-ceiling windows and spectacular views of both Puget Sound to the west and, to the north, lesser skyscrapers than O’Hara’s own, shouldering one another along the streets of the metropolis.
The vistas beyond the windows might have rendered the study furnishings unmemorable if they had been any less dramatic than the massive steel desk, which had a quartzite top the white of fractured ice with veins as blue as arctic seawater. The enormous David Hockney paintings, from his California swimming-pool-art period, provided warmth in contrast to the steel and quartzite, a warmth that was a quality of O’Hara himself.
The forty-six-year-old billionaire had come from a family of modest means, the son of a lumber-mill worker and a diner waitress. Brilliant and driven, he had made his fortune fast in the high-tech revolution, but he never forgot where his roots were.
Wyatt Rider, too, remained always aware of his origins, but his father and mother hadn’t been as humble and hardworking as O’Hara’s parents. Although smart enough to know the risks, they had sought the easy money that could be snatched up by deceiving the naive and vulnerable.
Wyatt had done jobs for Liam six times, not the least of which had involved serious threats against the two O’Hara children, Laura and Tavis, and he was accustomed to being greeted with a broad smile and vigorous handshake. The lumberman’s son was reliably energetic and in high spirits, as if his gratitude for such good luck would not allow him to indulge in a moment of anxiety or depression.