Devoted(70)
76
Blood calls to him. His own blood sings through his arteries, whispers home to the heart through his veins, and both its voices are cries for freedom. The blood of others speaks to him only as a scent, which he smells strongest when they’re here with him, though he also smells them in the corridor beyond the closed door.
He is fully awake now, with only a small light above the head of his bed, the room draped with gathered shadows, which do not in the least obscure anything from him. In his becoming vision, all details are revealed in shades of red, for he sees not just by the light of the visible spectrum but also by the light that others cannot see, the infrared radiation that is produced by the molecular vibration occurring in all solid matter—the floors, the wall, the ceiling, the furniture, his own body—and by the molecular rotation of the gases in the air.
His damaged ear has been treated and bandaged while they thought he was entirely unconscious.
For his comfort, the bite block has been removed from between his teeth. Any time they feel the need to reinsert it, they will dose him with a tranquilizer first.
The zip ties have been removed. A wide strap across his chest binds him to the bed, his arms at his sides. Another wide strap runs across his thighs.
He is hooked up to an IV to keep him hydrated and to allow for the quick administration of drugs through the port in the drip line. He’s catheterized and is urinating into a bottle.
He isn’t concerned about his situation.
The wide straps across his chest and thighs are not leather, but rubber, allowing just enough elasticity to afford him minimum comfort and avoid obstructing circulation. An average man could not struggle successfully against the four-inch-wide restraining bands, but he is not an average man.
He is thinking this through, working out the how of escape.
A deputy is stationed in a chair outside the room door. Shacket has heard people talking to this guard. He can smell the deputy: the hair cream he uses, the dried sweat in his armpits, his sour breath born of acid reflux from a fondness for food heavy in garlic.
They do not know what they have done, to whom they have done it, and Shacket will not forgive them. He will rise again, and he will teach them humility. The world is at the end of an age, and Lee Shacket is the embodiment of the new age being born. He is progress, remade by science, which is the only force on Earth with both the right and the obligation to change everything always and forever.
77
Carson Conroy in his Ford Explorer, in a far corner of the hospital parking lot. Waiting for Sheriff Hayden Eckman to be gone. Fortified by a thermos of black coffee from the Four Square Diner. One caffeine tablet consumed, a tin of others in one jacket pocket.
Having made a life of working with the dead, of documenting the extreme cruelty that murderers had visited on their victims, Carson had ceased to believe in justice. Justice was nothing but a concept, not a fact, manipulated and ceaselessly redefined by everyone from the manufacturers of pop culture in Hollywood to politicians to self-appointed deep thinkers who were as susceptible to intellectual fashion trends as the average teenager was driven to want whatever sneakers and jeans were the cool gear of the moment.
What he sought in his new life in Pinehaven, in the wake of his wife’s long-unsolved murder, was not justice but truth. Truth could not be redefined. Truth was what it was. The simple task of finding the truth was complicated only by the haystacks of lies you had to sort through to find the shiny needle.
He had no illusions that he would ever learn the identity of Lissa’s drive-by killer, or that any forensic autopsy would provide him with the full truth of any human act of violence. The truth he sought in this new life was both the truth of nature and of himself. He spent much of his leisure time hiking ever deeper into the Sierra Nevada, observing—studying—the natural world with increasing care and intimacy. A marvelous order existed in nature, a damn harsh but rational order, and no deception was involved other than, in some cases, the camouflage of fur or feathers, or chameleon scales. In the wilds, no lies were told by tongue or pen. He hoped that the better he understood the way of nature, the better he’d understand the way a man needed to live to have respect for himself and others that included no self-delusions or equally egregious errors.
He couldn’t say why he believed that the truth of the Spader-Klineman murders and the truth of Lee Shacket, alias Nathan Palmer, were inextricably linked to whatever ultimate truth he expected to find in nature. That was just what he felt, and he felt it strongly.
Earlier, in the alleyway between the morgue and the sheriff’s station, when he’d heard an ambulance arriving in Pinehaven just as another was leaving, he’d intuited that the sirens had something to do with Shacket. He’d gone next door to speak with Carl Fredette, the watch commander on the current shift, and had learned about the events at the Bookman house.
Now, through binoculars, he watched as Hayden Eckman and Rita Carrickton came out of the emergency entrance and stood talking for a minute or two under the portico. Their patrol cars were in the no-parking zone, and they departed one after the other, without sirens or lightbars.
Carson finished his current cup of coffee, screwed the cup onto the thermos bottle, and set out across the parking lot toward the hospital. According to Carl Fredette, Shacket had been captured and would be restrained at the hospital until the sheriff could speak with the district attorney in the morning.