Devoted(75)
That love was the antidote to envy and coveting.
That truth was essential for the flourishing of love.
That love was essential to maintain innocence.
That peace of mind and perfect happiness could be achieved only through the truth of innocence and the simplicity of truth.
Neither was embarrassed by his numerous personal revelations or by any of the many thousands of things that he discovered about the other.
What might have been awkward revelations were instantly purged of mortification in the sharing.
For one thing, both Kipp and Woody were innocent and had been inoculated against the loss of innocence, the former because of his canine nature, the latter because of his developmental disability.
Furthermore, both understood that all creatures with high cognitive ability, to one degree or another, were often fools and should embrace their foolishness rather than deny it.
That understanding ensured humility.
Humility was the foundation for all lasting achievements.
By this telepathy, two lives, in their intricate simplicities of facts and emotions, flowed as freely as information from a computer onto a flash drive, but with more profound effect than a mere transfer of data.
The bond between humanity and dogs had flourished for maybe a hundred thousand years.
In this hour, at least between these two, that bond had grown stronger and deeper than mere millennia could have made it.
What might come of this, Kipp did not know. Nor did Woody.
They would find out.
The what was always revealed.
The why of things, however, was more often shrouded in eternal mystery.
82
Two o’clock in the morning. On the outskirts of Sacramento. An abandoned shopping mall. Reconstruction would eventually transform the site into upscale apartments with numerous amenities.
A chain-link fence encircled the large property, emblazoned with red-lettered signs warning of hazards and against trespassing. Although nothing remained in the mall worth stealing, a guard was usually stationed in a car inside the only gate in the fence, less to deter thieves than to dissuade adventurous urban explorers—those self-described concrete spelunkers—who engaged in explorations of everything from abandoned hotels to the maze of service tunnels underlying major cities. Such exploring was illegal, but if some catacomber or amateur city archeologist were injured in one of their adventures, there was every reason to be concerned that a jury of the ignorant and a judge with issues would award millions to the trespasser.
On this night, the graveyard-shift guard had been instructed not to show up for duty. The abandoned mall offered an ideal venue for a meeting between two parties who both insisted on a rendezvous where an accidental witness was not only unlikely but virtually impossible.
Haskell Ludlow got out of his Lexus SUV and, in the beams of his headlights, making a spectacle of himself, used a key to unlock the gate, as if he were the first to arrive.
A few hours earlier, he’d been sharing a penthouse suite in Vegas with twenty-two-year-old twins, Zoey and Chloe, who surprised him by knowing more perverse practices than he did, although he had been immersing himself in perversity almost as long as they had been alive. He had been tight with Dorian Purcell for twenty-five years, his quiet partner, but he’d stepped away from the business two years earlier to devote himself to pleasure. Now Dorian was occupied with the cover-up of the truth of Springville and needed Ludlow for this one task, and Haskell was back to do his part for the team.
The sagging chain-link sang eerily in the wind: Hell’s harp strings strummed by a demon hand. Plastic bags of numerous origins, in a variety of conditions, caught in the gaps between the links, flapped and fluttered, producing a sound like swarming wings, as if a colony of bats were passing low overhead.
The gate rolled aside, wheels stuttering on the cracked and pitted blacktop. After driving onto the grounds, Ludlow closed the gate behind him, but he didn’t lock it. Two men, arriving together, would supposedly soon follow him.
He drove around the east flank of the immense building, entered an open-air four-story parking garage, and slotted the Lexus in a handicapped-only space. His was the sole vehicle in sight.
A brick-paved promenade separated the parking structure from an entrance to the mall. Ludlow’s flashlight revealed a few score of cracked and tattered plastic cups shivering along the pavement like schooling fish condemned to swim these bricks until demolition day.
The pneumatic glass doors had been removed and salvaged and replaced by a formidable plywood barricade and a single metal door. Using a second key, he unlocked the door and went inside, and did not lock up behind himself, pretending that events would unspool precisely as arranged.
The escalators had not yet been removed, though they were no longer operative. He climbed the grooved treads to the main floor. At most of the shops, the signage had been taken down, but here and there a retailer’s name and logo appeared above empty show windows.
Birds had gotten in somehow and had not found their way out. Sparrows and crows. Lying here and there in seemingly organized configurations of feathers and fragile bones. As if voodoo cultists had made patterns out of their remains as a prelude to a ceremony. Pinions and bones quivered with the illusion of movement in the traveling flashlight beam.
Midway along the main promenade of the structure was a large round pool in which lily pads had floated and colorful koi had once swum. The pond was waterless and fishless now, half filled with a random origami of paper debris.