The Big Dark Sky (57)
Joanna leaned closer to Jimmy. “Mi hermano. Querido hermano. Please talk to me now as you did when we were so young.”
He wrenched his fist from between her clasping hands, and at last he spoke in the guttural voice—almost a bestial growl—that she had heard in the dream. “You’ve changed, Jojo. You’re not the same.”
A chill—part exhilaration and part disquiet, wonder married to fear, occasioned by hearing him other than in a dream—shot up her spine and stippled the nape of her neck with gooseflesh. She understood his words to be a gentle complaint that she had for so long abandoned him.
“I would have come to see you if I’d known you were here, but until the dream last night, I had no memory of us. You must know I had no memory.”
Sudden tears welled in his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. “You’re not the same,” he repeated.
“I’m older, as are you, dear one.”
He shook his head, and fierce emotion twisted his misassembled face into a greater strangeness. “You’re not the same, just not the same.” His wide mouth cracked open, a crescent of crooked teeth, and he hissed an accusation: “Innocence, innocence, you’ve lost your innocence!”
Taken aback by his passion, she rose from the footstool. “I’ve grown up, Jimmy. That’s all. I’m still me, still Jojo.”
In her purse, her cell phone rang.
Leaning forward in his armchair, Jimmy cried with anguish more than anger, but not without a trace of the latter, “Answer it!”
Hands trembling, she fished the phone from her purse. No caller ID. She took the call and recognized the voice of the woman who had phoned her more than once in Santa Fe.
“You’ve lost your innocence,” the caller said. “You’re filled with moral confusion, strange convictions, fears, and calculation. How can you save me if you can’t save yourself?”
Perhaps because she was back in Montana, fresh from Rustling Willows Ranch, the recognition of the speaker’s identity no longer eluded her. In New Mexico, at a far remove from the land of her childhood, she could deny that this voice was that of her mother, but she could not deny it now.
The voice of her mother, but not her mother.
Her mother was dead.
The question echoed in her mind—How can you save me if you can’t save yourself?—and gave rise to an extraordinary suspicion.
The voice had been that of her mother, but somehow the caller had been Jimmy Two Eyes.
In the days after her mother’s death, in the hours following midnight, as she’d watched family videos alone in the house at Rustling Willows, the recording froze with Joanna’s face on the screen, and her mother had spoken words that the home movie had never contained on previous viewings. You will soon be going away, Jojo, going away to grow up elsewhere. I might reach out to you many years from now and ask you to come home.
That had not been a visitation by a spirit. That, too, must have been Jimmy.
She terminated the call and dropped the phone into her purse, shaken by a sense that the madness of recent weeks was a mere presentiment of greater insanity to come.
Looming over Jimmy, staring down at his tear-wet face, into his bottomless eyes, she demanded, “That was you, wasn’t it? Somehow that was you. My mother drowned. She’s been gone most of my life. She hasn’t come back. That was somehow you. Tell me the truth.”
Although his face glistened, his eyes no longer welled with tears, and his grief—if it had been grief—gave way to what seemed to be bitter resentment. His slumped and shapeless body stiffened into a disturbing configuration of misshapen bones and tortured muscles. He gripped the arms of the chair and sat up as straight as he could manage and raised his head as if in challenge.
His rough voice grew rougher, the words like hardwood and his voice a saw that cut them one from the other. “Truth? It’s truth you want? Then you’ll have it. The truth is, your mother’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered. Murdered. Murdered by your father.”
46
Once a black-hat hacker, now a white-hat hacker, Kenny Deetle was ready to go gray in a crisis. If the world harbored people who would, with pleasure, cut your head in two from skullcap to chin with a chain saw, stability was an illusion and lasting peace was a dream of fools. Yeah, evil was an irrational choice, because though evil could work in the short run, it never worked in the long run. And, yeah, evil people practiced to deceive, but not all deception was evil. Sometimes it was a survival technique.
The 1970 jet-black Pontiac GTO Judge, which Kenny kept in a spacious unit at an immense self-storage facility illiterately named “Storage R Us,” had been registered with the state by one Jamison Eugene Norwald, who didn’t exist, at an address in Spokane that was nothing but a mail drop. This had been possible because Kenny could backdoor the Department of Licensing computer and insert false data that even the most talented IT-security types couldn’t detect. Seemingly well-ordered and rational societies could go mad rapidly, as witness Germany in the 1930s, or they could be destroyed by corrupt kleptocrats like Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela, or they could be sucked into a vortex of irrationality by utopian ideologues—some religious, some atheistic—so it was always wise to have wheels that no one knew belonged to you, stashed where your enemies would not think to look for them, available for a quick getaway.