Devoted(106)

“It’s all right,” Rita said. “There’s not much left of him.”

“Whatever you say, Sheriff.”

This confused Hayden further. His voice was slurred as he said to her, “No, you’re the undersheriff.”

“And thanks for the appointment,” she said. “I’ll be interim sheriff until the special election.”

Hayden didn’t think he’d had enough Scotch and certainly not enough wine to be drunk, but he sounded inebriated. “What special election?”

“Tio Barbizon will endorse me. I’ve made the club, Hayden. I’m on my way.”

He smelled blood. He realized the water was discolored by it.

A lot of blood.

For a moment he thought Shacket had gotten into the house and had bitten him half to death. Then he realized that his right arm was lying on the porcelain ledge of the tub and that his wrist bore a deep cut from a razor blade.

His eyelids were very heavy. Leaden. He couldn’t hold them open. He said, “But I’m owned. I sold myself. I’m a valuable asset.”

“It’s nice for you that you could think you were, for a little while.”



Her voice seemed to come from a distance, as if she had left the bath and spoke from the bedroom.

With effort, Hayden opened his eyes, but she remained sitting on the closed lid of the toilet.

Shadows were gathering in the room. He couldn’t quite make out the features of the watching woman.

“Joyce?” he asked.

“Damn, you hear that, Andy? You know what I hated most about this asshole?”

A man who was only a silhouette said, “What’s that?”

“We’d be doing the nasty, him grunting like a pig rooting for truffles, he’d call me by her name and not even realize it.”

“Whose name?”

“Joyce. Some next-door neighbor cop he wanted to do when he was a geek teenager.”

“What a freak,” the man said.

“A freak’s freak,” the woman said.

Hayden Eckman tried to protest that insult. He couldn’t find his voice. And then he couldn’t remember what had offended him. And then—





116





After a few hours of sleep, Ben Hawkins met with Megan Bookman to review preparations for their unwanted but inevitable visitors. In spite of her fear of what might happen, she was nonetheless eager for a chance to fight back. Ben expected her to insist that Woody be hidden away from any potential confrontation, but she understood the boy’s presence was essential to convince the killers that, however traumatized she might have been by Shacket, she didn’t at the moment recognize the danger she faced. If they didn’t see the boy at once, they would suspect they’d been made, the guns would come out, and there would be blood.

Minutes later, Ben was in the kitchen when Carson Conroy, having returned from his third trip to the abandoned trailer park, brought in the last two bags and put them beside a pile of others.

“Not enough time to risk another run,” Ben said.

Carson shook his head. “No need to. That’s the lot of them.”

“If you’ll tend to all this”—Ben indicated the bags—“I’ll tuck the Fleetwood away like we planned.”

“You really think they’ll come today? It’s just yesterday they tracked Woody to his computer. Or I guess they think it was Megan.”

“They’ll want to move as fast as they can. They’re coming, all right. They won’t wait for night, because they’ll expect us to be more suspicious of them if they show up in the dark. With this heavy overcast, there’s only a few hours of good light left. They’ll be here soon. In maybe an hour.”

Carson glanced at a window, beyond which the day was steadily dimming under a sombrous, swollen sky. “And they’ll come boldly, pretending to be what they aren’t?”



“They’ll see it as their best chance to get in the door and establish control. Their kind think the rest of us are suckers.”

“Often we are.”

“Yeah, but not this time.”

Although the wind was rough, it had lost its rage. It blustered now instead of shrieking, and it seemed to choke on the anger that it could no longer adequately express.

The key to the motor home lay in the cup holder next to the driver’s seat. Ben drove out to the highway and turned north.

In less than a mile, he came to a mountain-view rest area with picnic tables. In respect of the wind and the threat of rain, no one currently made use of the facility. He parked the motor home and locked it and walked briskly back to the Bookman property.

As he approached the residence, he surveyed the windows. Blinds and draperies were drawn over all of them, except for the panes in the front door and the two sidelights, one of which featured glass and the other the semi-opaque plastic tarp that he and Megan had nailed in place the previous night.

In the house once more, he found everyone in the living room, waiting as had been arranged. Carson and Rosa were in armchairs. Megan sat on one of the sofas, Woody at her left side, a pistol under the decorative pillow to the right of her.

Ben stood at the fireplace, his back to the ceramic logs that were licked by gas flames. His pistol was tucked behind the mantel clock.