Devoted(94)
101
At ten o’clock Thursday morning, after three hours of deep though nightmare-riddled sleep, Megan came downstairs to a kitchen redolent of baking cheese and tomato sauce and basil, where Ben Hawkins was at work, on both guard and culinary duty.
She stood in the doorway, watching as he finished layering a second pan of lasagna, getting ready to put it in the oven after the first pan came out. He was unaware of her, softly singing an old Boyz II Men song, “4 Seasons of Loneliness,” though he somehow made it sound upbeat.
She said, “You even cook.”
Glancing at her, he said, “That’s what I call it. Cooking. Not everyone who tastes it thinks the term is appropriate.”
“You really believe we’ll have something to celebrate.”
“Lots of people have shot at me, nobody ever hit me, so there’s precedent to expect a need to celebrate.” He spooned sauce over the top layer of noodles. “Anyway, I looked through your pantry, it’s a massive pantry, all those packages of pasta, plus all the treasures you packed away in that humongous freezer—enough choice sirloin hamburger patties and fine steaks for half a dozen Independence Day parties—and I was inspired. Well, first I said to myself, ‘Ben’—I call myself Ben—I said, ‘Ben, this woman must be seriously worried that cattle are going extinct,’ and then I was inspired to start making use of all that stuff, because I’ve got it on good authority that cattle will be around for at least another millennium.”
“I have this need to be prepared for anything,” Megan said. “We have a generator, runs on propane, so we can power the entire house for a month if the electric company goes down.”
He nodded. “In case it’s taken out by terrorists.”
She said, “Or in a cattle stampede.”
He was covering the top layer of noodles with mozzarella. He knew what he was doing. “I assumed Woody likes lasagna.”
“As long as it and each vegetable is in a separate dish.”
“Maybe that’s all behind him.”
“Amazing if true. But whatever happens, he’s the best, a great kid. My turn for guard duty. Get some sleep while you can.”
“Six deputies left and six new ones came about two hours ago.”
She looked toward the back door, at the police SUV parked athwart the porch steps.
He said, “I’ve just begun to cook. There’s still a lot for you to do.”
“Good. It’ll keep my mind off . . . everything.”
“The first pan comes out of the oven in five minutes.”
He washed his hands, dried them on a paper towel.
As she stood at the oven, peering in at the baking lasagna, he said, “I like your paintings. They’re very good.”
She shrugged. “They’re all I know how to do.”
“I doubt that. I’d like to talk with you about them, when this business is over.”
“I hope it’ll be over soon.”
“It will.”
He went to the door. As he was about to step into the hallway, Megan said, “Which was your favorite? Of the paintings.”
He turned and smiled. “Everything. I like everything I’ve seen.”
102
In his three-bedroom suite in the hotel in Sacramento, after only five hours of sleep, at 11:10 a.m. Haskell Ludlow woke from a dream about the murders in the abandoned shopping mall. He got out of bed and went to the nearest of three bathrooms. After he relieved himself, he intended to go to a different bedroom, where the sheets were fresh and no nightmare lingered to enfold him again.
Bad dreams were such a dependable part of his sleep for so many years that he had begun to wonder if a supernatural entity, perhaps the evil twin of the Sandman, had taken a disliking to him and was targeting him with horrific visions. At first this was a frivolous thought; maybe it still was, but as the years passed, he came to take it more than half seriously. By changing bedrooms in the middle of the night, Haskell Ludlow was taking evasive action. In his house in Menlo Park, where he lived alone when not traveling, there were nine bedrooms through which he cycled.
Now, as he was crossing the living room of the hotel suite, the disposable phone, which he’d left on a coffee table, began to ring. Only John Verbotski and Bradley Knacker, of Atropos & Company, had this number, and Ludlow would destroy the phone once the business with Megan Bookman, in Pinehaven, had been concluded.
Being Alexander Gordius, he sat on the sofa and picked up the burner on the third ring and said, “Yeah?”
John Verbotski said, “We’ve been trying to get you for hours.”
“I was wiped out, sleeping.”
“We’ve gotten some sleep, too, but we’re taking turns at it.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got no one to take turns with me. What’s happening?”
“We’re in position, four of us, but we can’t visit the lady because the sheriff’s got six deputies at her house as protection.”
Bewildered, Ludlow said, “Six deputies? How did he know she’d need protection?”
“Not protection from us. We’re monitoring police radio traffic here. They’re protecting her from some guy named Nathan Palmer, he went after her.”