Devoted(108)
John Verbotski rang the doorbell. On the porch behind him were Knacker, Speer, and Rodchenko, the last two with briefcases of a style that FBI agents might carry, in which were all the necessary drugs and instruments of interrogation.
Verbotski startled when lightning flashed as if the sun had gone nova and burned off the overcast in an instant. A fierce crack of thunder reverberated in his teeth and bones.
As a hard rain abruptly rattled on the porch roof with the icy racket of hail, the door opened, and a man loomed on the threshold with a boy at his side.
The guy must have been the unknown individual who had arrived in a Range Rover. He was tall and fit, and he had about him an air that Verbotski didn’t like. Competence? Steadfastness? Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
His intuition told him to shoot this fucker now. But Verbotski had earned a university degree—or received one—in psychology. His favorite German masters of that field had written that intuition was merely a myth, that the concept had its origins in the Volkskunde of superstitious peasants who believed in such nonsense as natural law.
An enlightened man must be guided by cold reason based on clear-eyed observations and hard facts. When he gave credence to intuition, he was doomed as all such myth-besotted fools were doomed. He held his fire.
The boy at the man’s side must have been the mental misfit, the son of Megan Bookman. He was small for his age. His blue eyes seemed to swim in their sockets, as if he couldn’t quite focus on anything, and his smile was like that on a strange doll or marionette, eerie because it seemed perpetual and unrelated to any emotion.
“May I help you gentlemen?” the man said.
Verbotski had his fake Bureau ID ready, and he presented it with a smile that he was sure looked more genuine than that of the basket-case boy. “Special Agent Lewis Erskine.” Indicating his companions, who displayed more phony ID, Verbotski said, “Special Agents Jim Rhodes, Tom Colby, and Chris Daniels. We’re here to see Mrs. Bookman regarding the unfortunate encounter she had with Lee Shacket, who’s now on the Bureau’s most-wanted list.”
All that didn’t sound quite right to Verbotski as he said it, and he wished he’d taken more time to practice his lines. But the boy maintained his idiot smile, and the man appeared relieved. “I’m Ben Hawkins, a friend of Mrs. Bookman’s. Considering that Shacket’s killed people in at least two states, we’ve been wondering why the hell someone at the federal level wasn’t on this. Come in, come in, Agent Erskine, gentlemen. We’re all in the living room.”
Leaving them to shut the door behind themselves, Hawkins turned his back, not in the least suspicious, and started across the foyer. When he realized that the eternally smiling boy was still in the doorway, staring through Verbotski and crew, Hawkins halted and said, “Come along now, Woody. Let’s get a cookie, son.” When the boy still didn’t move out of the way, Hawkins returned and took him by the hand. “Sorry,” he said to Verbotski. “Woody is a very good boy, he usually listens, but he’s . . . you know, special.” With that, he gently led the kid toward the living room archway.
Being Lewis Erskine, Verbotski went into the house, and his crew followed, and Speer closed the door.
The torrents of rain came down so hard that they filled even this well-built residence with a soft drumming-rushing sound that was strangely comforting. Perhaps in the amniotic sac, an unborn child heard a susurration alike to this, the sound of his mother’s life-sustaining blood circulating ceaselessly through the body that encompassed and sustained him.
Whenever a thought like that occurred to Verbotski, he wondered about himself, whether something might be a little wrong with him. Had he continued his education with a master’s degree in psychiatry, he would have been required to undergo psychoanalysis to learn how to conduct such sessions, which might have been interesting. But in short order he’d gone from being a highly paid mercenary in foreign hot spots to being an extravagantly paid domestic murder-for-hire specialist, and a career path in psychiatry appeared insufficiently rewarding.
Now, as he followed Ben Hawkins and the boy into the living room, he heard the man say, “Megan, everyone, our prayers have been answered. These gentlemen are from the FBI, and they’re here about Lee Shacket.”
The people in the living room were having coffee, the sideboard was laden with tarts and cookies and finger sandwiches, Hawkins went to the fireplace where he had left his cup and saucer on the mantel, Megan Bookman put her cup aside on a table next to the sofa and rose to her feet to greet her visitors, and John Verbotski was impressed that she could be so fresh and lovely and psychologically together after all that she’d recently been through.
She had about her a regal quality, an air of indomitability. They might need a lot of thiopental and other drugs to break her, but she would be fun to interrogate. And when the interrogation was finished, she’d be fun to use, just to see how much humiliation she could endure without cracking.
A Latina woman was sitting in one armchair, a black man in the other, holding coffee cups, and neither of them rose, which made Verbotski’s work easier. He put away his phony Bureau ID and said, “Mrs. Bookman, I’m Special Agent Lewis Erskine.” As he began to speak, his three associates moved farther into the room, getting in position to act, each within striking distance of one of the adults. They could deal with the kid after everyone else had been Tasered, chloroformed, and restrained. Rodchenko and Speer put down their briefcases. “And these,” Verbotski continued, “are Special Agents—”