Devoted(51)

He took the book to the door. He dropped it beside the key.

He turned to look at his new companion.

“You don’t like the motel? You want one with more amenities? Listen, Scooby-Doo, I’ve only gotten like an hour of sleep.”

On the Wire, the boy was screaming in abject terror.

Ben had brought a shaving kit in from the Range Rover. It was in the bathroom. He would have to pack that himself.

He had also brought in a suitcase, but he had not yet opened it. The suitcase stood near the mirrored closet door.

Panting with frustration, Kipp went to the bag and knocked it over. He looked at his companion.

Ben had hung his jeans in the closet. As he took them out and pulled them on, he said, “All right, you’re trying to tell me what? That you need to pee?”

He had been a Navy SEAL. He couldn’t be stupid. Maybe he just woke up slowly.

Kipp took the handle of the overturned suitcase in his mouth and, backing up, dragged the Samsonite across the room to the door.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on the socks he’d left balled up in his sneakers, Ben said, “You’re a very strange dog.”



The motel key was lying on the table where the book had been.

Kipp got it, brought it to the door, and dropped it on the suitcase.

“Weird things happen in a war zone. There are times you ought to die, you don’t, and it’s impossible to explain why you don’t.”

After putting on his shoes without further comment, Ben came to the door and stood looking at the suitcase, the book, the keys.

“Like, you turn a corner, there’s a bad guy with an automatic carbine ten feet away. He pulls the trigger, the rifle jams, and you shoot him dead instead of he you.”

Kipp wagged his tail.

“About the third time something like that happens, you start to think the world is a stranger place than you always thought.”

Kipp nodded.

“Or maybe I’m losing my mind.”

Kipp shook his head: no.

“Well, I guess there’s no going back to bed. Maybe you don’t need to pee, but I do. Then we’re out of here.”





55



Megan pulled the door open, let it arc under its own momentum, shielding behind it as it moved, and no one burst into the bedroom. She had both hands on the pistol as the door swung past her to reveal the hallway.



As she cleared the threshold, the spill of light issuing from her suite proved barely sufficient for her to see that the hall was deserted.

Woody’s quarters lay to her left, toward the front of the house. To her right were two guest rooms, a bath, and a hall closet. The intruder could be in any of them, door ajar, watching through the gap. Opposite Woody’s suite was a sewing room that she used for storage, and maybe the door stood ajar, maybe not. She didn’t dare turn her back on the guest wing, and she needed to keep an eye on that sewing room, so she put her back to the wall, just to the left of the door that she’d come through.

Before she began to move, she listened, trying to hear through the lamentations of the wind that, in their volume and quality of distress, might have been a threnody for the death of the world itself. But the rainless storm was a mask of sound behind which footsteps or any other telltale noises could not be heard.

Her heart knocking to the frantic tempo of the wind, she eased sideways, turning her head left and right, the one eye of the pistol tracking where her two eyes looked.

She came to Woody’s room without incident. As she stepped inside, she urgently whispered his name.

Before she could close the door behind her, she saw her son on the bed, lying on his left side, his back to her, a man kneeling in soft lamplight at bedside, face-to-face with her boy.

“Here comes Mommy,” the intruder said. “You know how hot your mommy is? Way too hot to waste her life with a dummy like you.”





56



The wind was a mad spirit, howling along the alleyway as though through the halls of Bedlam, flailing against the brick walls of the buildings.

The guy named Zellman, surely experienced in the handling of the dead, whether as an assistant medical examiner or otherwise, drove the morgue wagon with two cadavers aboard. Frawley the fixer followed in the Shelby Super Snake that had belonged to the late Painton Spader, which had been transferred to the custody of the state attorney general along with the bodies and other evidence. Both vehicles turned right into the town square and out of sight, taking their light with them.

In the wind-shaken gloom, Carson Conroy said, “This is so not right.”

Sheriff Eckman shrugged. “It is what it is.” He went to the side entrance out of which he’d come earlier and disappeared into his elected domain.

Carson heard that expression more often these days—It is what it is—and it nettled him every time someone spoke it. He wanted to say to Eckman, You are what you are, and now I know what that is. He held his tongue, because in the next election the voters might wise up and cast their ballots for a new sheriff. In the meantime, Carson didn’t want to be forced out of his job.

In spite of the late hour, he left the wind to its raging and returned to his office. At his computer, he accessed the National Crime Information Center website and went to the list of people for whom arrest warrants were outstanding. He sought the name Nathan Palmer—and began to make a list of curious facts.