Devoted(68)
The stranger who followed the deputy into the room possessed a presence that none of the deputies nor even the sheriff could claim, a calm demeanor and an easy way of moving that suggested that little surprised him and nothing rattled him.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I apologize for my dog. He’s a good boy, and he means well, but sometimes his enthusiasm gets the best of him.”
Before Megan could reply, the man spoke to the retriever. “Hey, Scooby.” The dog looked at him. “Is everything okay?”
Megan thought she must have imagined it, but knew that she didn’t: The dog nodded.
“Everything’s all right,” the newcomer said to the deputy. Without being asked, he extracted a wallet from his hip pocket and produced a driver’s license. “My name’s Brenaden Septimus Hawkins. Friends either call me Ben or Hawk. My mom and dad are great people, but they’ve got a tin ear about names. My brother’s Willie Willard Hawkins. My sister’s Eulalia Ermintrude Hawkins. Fortunately, she’s smart, pretty, and damn tough, so everyone knows better than to call her anything but Trudie.”
73
Perhaps the booming wind has fallen into an unlikely rhythm, but the red-blue strobing of the ambulance beacons seems to beat like a fatalistic drum. The nearer trees flare in carnival colors, though the deep darkness of the farther forest swallows the light, refusing to reveal its secrets. All of it is exciting, the wind and the dark and the pulsing light, the frightened men calling out instructions and warnings to one another, so that Shacket feels exhilarated rather than defeated.
In spite of his shackled ankles and his wrists cuffed tightly behind his back, two EMTs from the second ambulance and two deputies are required to restrain him enough to inject chlorpromazine, and then a few cubic centimeters more when the first dose has less effect than they expect.
Even when they think he is at last unconscious, he is not. He’s helpless for the moment, unable to struggle anymore, but he can hear everything they’re saying. He knows where they intend to take him, how they expect to manage him in custody. The powerful drug has left him physically incapacitated, but he is still rapidly becoming, and his mind is not affected, though his captors are certain that he is subdued beyond all awareness. He keeps his eyes closed, so that they will not suspect his true condition. He listens, and he schemes.
74
The county jail didn’t have a cell suitable for a suspect in an extreme psychotic state, nor did the staff have sufficient medical expertise to protect such an individual from himself and others. Therefore, Shacket was transported to the county hospital, on the southeastern edge of the town of Pinehaven.
Sheriff Eckman waited with Deputy Rita Carrickton under the portico roof of the emergency entrance. Because she was meticulous in all things and unfailingly loyal, he trusted her more than anyone else to use her iPhone and his to obtain an adequate video record of the calm authority with which he would oversee the arrival of Lee Shacket. They would secure this serious threat to public safety in one of the four hospital rooms that doubled as regular patient-care spaces and, in a crisis, as units of a psychiatric ward.
He and Rita were lovers, in violation of departmental rules against intimate relations between uniformed personnel. They risked raising suspicions each time he chose her for a task that any deputy could do, especially since he’d appointed her undersheriff. They were pledged to each other, however, not just romantically—in fact, not primarily for romantic reasons—but because they understood each other’s single-minded aspiration. Those possessed by truly ruthless ambition were rare, and rarer still were those who understood that a tightly bonded couple were more powerful than a hundred loners. They would rise in status together, protecting each other at all costs, until they could marry and then openly destroy their competition, whom they’d previously worked secretly, each on behalf of the other, to eliminate via character assassination and other means.
Speaking above the wind, Rita said, “She’s not an innocent victim. I’d bet on it.”
“Who isn’t?” he asked.
“The Bookman bitch. She drew him to her.”
“Who? You mean this Shacket?”
“She drew him to her somehow. Just look at her.”
“Who knows how he thinks? He’s a psychopath,” the sheriff said.
“Tell me you wouldn’t like a piece of her.”
“I’ve got you. More than enough for me.”
Rita spat and the wind carried the spittle onto Eckman’s pant leg. “Heard that from other guys. Then one like her comes along.”
“She’s not my type.”
“She’s got it all, and she sells it hard.”
“Sells what?”
“You make me suspicious when you play dumb. That face, that body, she’s all, Look at me, I’m the perfect piece of ass.”
“She doesn’t wear makeup, she dresses in jeans, and she seems all about that screwed-up kid, not much about herself.”
“Don’t you ever touch her.”
“I have no interest in her.”
“I’ve been through shit like this before with sluts like her.”
“You’ve never been through it with me. We’re in this together. All that matters is getting ours, and we can best do that together.”