Firestarter(78)

The girl fascinated Rainbird. The first year he had been with the Shop, he had taken a series of courses not to be found in any college curriculum wiretapping, car theft, unobtrusive search, a dozen others. The only one that had engaged Rainbird's attention fully was the course in safecracking, taught by an aging burglar named G. M. Rammaden. Rammaden had been sprung from an institution in Atlanta for the specific purpose of teaching this craft to new Shop agents. He was supposed to be the best in the business, and Rainbird would not have doubted that, although he believed that by now he was almost Rammaden's equal.

Rammaden, who had died three years ago (Rainbird had sent flowers to his funeral-what a comedy life could sometimes be!), had taught him about Skidmore locks, about square-door boxes, about secondary locking devices that can permanently freeze a safe's tumblers if the combination dial is knocked off with a hammer and chisel; he had taught them about barrel boxes, and niggerheads, and cutting keys; the many uses of graphite; how you could take a key impression with a Brillo pad and how to make bathtub nitroglycerine and how to peel a box from the back, one layer at a time.

Rainbird had responded to G. M. Rammaden with a cold and cynical enthusiasm.

Rammaden had said once that safes were like women: given the tools and the time, any box could be opened. There were, he said, tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks.

This girl was tough.

At first they had had to feed Charlie intravenously just to keep her from starving herself to death. After a while she began to understand that not eating was gaining her nothing but a lot of bruises on the insides of her elbows, and she began to eat, not with any enthusiasm but simply because using her mouth was less painful.

She read some of the books that were given her-leafed through them, at any rate-and would sometimes turn on the color TV in her room only to turn it off" again a few minutes later. She had watched a local movie presentation of Black Beauty all the way through in June, and she had sat through The Wonderful World of Disney once or twice. That was all. On her weekly reports the phrase "sporadic aphasia" had begun to crop up more and more often.

Rainbird had looked the term up in a medical dictionary and understood it at once-because of his own experiences as Indian and warrior, he understood it perhaps better than the doctors themselves. Sometimes the girl ran out of words. She would simply stand there, not a bit upset, her mouth working soundlessly. And sometimes she would use a totally out-of-context word, apparently without realizing it at all. "I don't like this dress, I'd rather have the hay one.'. Sometimes she would correct herself absently-I mean the green one"-but more often it would simply pass unnoticed.

According to the dictionary, aphasia was forgetfulness caused by some cerebral disorder. The doctors had immediately begun monkeying with her medication. Orasin was changed to Valium with no appreciable change for the better. Valium and Orasin were tried together, but an unforseen interaction between the two had caused her to cry steadily and monotonously until the dose wore off: A brand-new drug, a combination of tranquilizer and light hallucinogenic, was tried and seemed to help for a while. Then she had begun to stutter and broke out in a light rash. Currently she was back on Orasin, but she was being monitored closely in case the aphasia got worse.

Reams had been written about the girl's delicate psychological condition and about what the shrinks called her "basic fire conflict," a fancy way of saying that her father had told her not to and the Shop people were telling her to go ahead... all of it complicated by her guilt over the incident at the Manders farm.

Rainbird bought none of it. It wasn't the drugs, it wasn't being locked up and watched constantly, it wasn't being separated from her father.

She was just tough, that was all.

She had made up her mind somewhere along the line that she wasn't going to cooperate, no matter what. The end. Toot finnee. The psychiatrists could run around showing her inkblots until the moon was blue, the doctors could play with her medication and mutter in their beards about the difficulty of successfully drugging an eight-year-old girl. The papers could pile up and Cap could rave on.

And Charlie McGee would simply go on toughing it out.

Rainbird sensed it as surely as he sensed the coming of rain this afternoon. And he admired her for it. She had the whole bunch of them chasing their tails, and if it was left up to them they would still be chasing their tails when Thanksgiving and then Christmas rolled around. But they wouldn't chase their tails forever, and this more than anything worried John Rainbird.

Rammaden, the safecracker, had told an amusing story about two thieves who had broken into a supermarket one Friday night when they knew a snowstorm had kept the Wells Fargo truck from arriving and taking the heavy end-of-the-week receipts to the bank. The safe was a barrel box. They tried to drill out the combination dial with no success. They had tried to peel it but had been totally unable to bend back a corner and get a start. Finally they had blown it. That was a total success. They blew that barrel wide open, so wide open in fact that all the money inside had been totally destroyed. What was left had looked like the shredded money you sometimes see in those novelty pens...

"The point is," Rammaden had said in his dry and wheezing voice, "those two thieves didn't beat the safe. The whole game is beating the safe. You don't beat the safe unless you can take away what was in it in usable condition, you get my point? They overloaded it with soup. They killed the money. They were ass**les and the safe beat them."