Forty-nine minutes…
"Okay," he told his lieutenant. "Guess that'll do. You ride herd on 'em, Phil. Make sure they sit tight. They can wander around a little behind the lines and take notes on whatever they want -"
Was that okay? he wondered. What would Potter say?
"- but suit 'em up in flak jackets and make sure they keep their heads down."
Quiet Phil Molto nodded.
The first car arrived a minute later, containing two men. They climbed out, flashed press credentials, and as they looked around hungrily the older of them said, "I'm Joe Silbert, KFAL. This is Ted Biggins."
Budd got a kick out of their dress – dark suits that didn't fit very well and black running shoes. He pictured them racing down the hall of a TV station, shouting, "Exclusive, exclusive!" while papers spun in their wakes.
Silbert looked at the press table and laughed. Budd introduced himself and Molto and said, "Best we could do."
"It's fine, Officer. Only I hope you don't mind if we use our own stone tablet to write on?"
Biggins hefted a large portable computer onto the table.
"Long as we see what you write before you send it." For so Potter had instructed him.
"File it," Silbert said. "We say 'file it,' not 'send it.' " Budd couldn't tell if he was making a joke.
Biggins poked at the typewriter. "What exactly is this?"
The men laughed. Budd told them the ground rules. Where they could go and where they couldn't. "We've got a couple troopers you can talk to if you want. Phil here'll send 'em over."
"They hostage rescue?"
"No. They're from Troop K, up the road."
"Can we talk to some hostage rescue boys?"
When Budd grinned Silbert smiled too, like a co-conspirator, and the reporter realized he wasn't going to catch the captain in any slipups about whether or not HRT was on the scene.
"We're going to want to talk to Potter sometime soon," Silbert groused. "He planning on avoiding us?"
"I'll let him know you're here," Budd said cheerfully, the Switzerland of law enforcers. "Meanwhile Phil here'll bring you up to date. He's got profiles of the escapees and pictures of them. And he'll get you suited up in body armor. Oh, and I was thinking you might want to get the human-interest angle from some troopers. What it's like to be on a barricade. That sort of thing."
The reporters' faces were solemn masks but Budd wondered again if they were laughing at him. Silbert said, "Fact is, we're mostly interested in the hostages. That's where the story is. Anybody here we can talk to about them?"
"I'm just here to set up the press table. Agent Potter'll be by to give you the information he thinks you oughta have." Is that the right way to put it? Budd wondered. "Now I got some things need looking after so I'll leave you be."
"But I won't," said Molto, cracking a rare smile.
"I'm sure you won't, Officer." Their computer whirred to life.
What Melanie had smelled in the air of the killing room, what had forced her from her music room: mud, fish, water, diesel fuel, methane, decaying leaves, wet tree bark.
The river.
The fishy breeze had been strong enough to start the lamp swaying. That told her that somewhere near the back of the slaughterhouse was an open doorway. It occurred to her that maybe De l'Epée had already sent his men around the slaughterhouse looking for places where the girls might get out. Maybe some were even cutting their way in right now to rescue them.
She thought back to their arrival at the slaughterhouse this morning. She remembered seeing groves of trees on either side of the building, a muddy slope down to the river, which glistened gray and cold in the overcast afternoon light, black wood pilings, dotted with tar and creosote, a dock leaning precariously over the water, dangling rotten tires for ship bumpers.
The tires… That's what had given her the idea. When she was a girl, every summer in the early evening she and Danny would race down to Seversen Corner on the farm, run over the tractor ruts and through a fog of wheat down to the pond. It was nearly an acre, surrounded by willows and grass and stiff reeds filled with cores like Styrofoam. She ran like the Kansas wind so that she'd be the first one to the hill overlooking the pond, where she'd leap into space, grab the tire swing hanging over the water and sail out above the mirrorlike surface.
Then let go and tumble into the sky and clouds reflected below her.
She and her brother had spent long hours at the pond – even now, that glassy water was often her first thought when she stepped outside into a warm summer evening. Danny had taught her to swim twice. The first time when she was six and he'd taken her hands and eased her into the water of the still but deep pond. The second time was far harder – after she'd lost her hearing and grown afraid of so many things. She was twelve then. But the lanky, blond boy, five years older, refused to let her dodge the swimming hole any longer and, using the sign language he alone in the Charrol family had learned, talked her into letting go her grip on the bald Goodyear. And he calmly trod water, supported her and kept her from panicking while she finally remembered the strokes she'd learned years before.
Swimming. The first thing she'd done that gave her back a splinter of self-confidence after her plunge into deafness.
Thank you, Danny, she thought. For then, and for now. Because it was this memory that she believed was going to save some, if not all, of her students.
The river was wide here. The surface was choppy and the current fast but she remembered a tangle of branches and garbage washed up against a fallen tree that hung into the choppy water maybe a hundred feet downstream. Melanie pictured the girls moving silently through the back corridors of the slaughterhouse, over the dockside, into the water, then drifting with the current to the tree, scrambling out through the branches. Running to safety…
"Never underestimate a body of water," Danny had told her. "Even the calm ones can be dangerous."
Well, there was nothing calm about the Arkansas. Could they manage it? Donna Harstrawn can swim. Kielle and Shannon – superheroes that they are – can swim like otters. (Melanie pictures Kielle's compact body cannonballing off the diving board, while Shannon's willowy frame leisurely completes her laps.) The twins love to play in the water. But they can't swim. Beverly knows how but with her asthma she can't. Melanie doesn't know about pretty Emily; the girl refuses to put her face underwater and always stands demurely in the shallow end of the pool when they go swimming.
She'll have to find something for the ones who can't swim, a paddle-board, a float. But what?
And how do I get them to the back of the slaughterhouse?
She thought of Danny. But Danny wasn't here to help. Panic edged in.
De l'Epée?
She sent her thoughts out to him but all he did was whisper his reassurance that there'll be police to find the girls that escape into the river. (They'll be there, won't they? Yes, she has to believe they will.)
Crap, Melanie thinks. I'm on my own here.
Then, suddenly, the smell changes.
Her eyes open and she finds herself staring into the face of Brutus, a few feet away from her. She no longer smells the river but rather meat and stale breath and sweat. He's so close that she sees, with horror, that the marks on his neck – what she thought were freckles – must be the blood from the woman with the purse, the woman he killed this afternoon. Melanie recoiled in disgust.
"Sit tight, missie," Handy said.
Melanie wondered again, Why can I understand him? Sit tight. A phrase almost impossible to lip-read, and yet she knows without a doubt that this is what he said. Brutus took her hands. She tried to resist him but she couldn't. "You were sitting there with your eyes closed… hands were twitching like a shot 'coon's paws. Talking to yourself? That what you doing?"
There was movement in the corner. Kielle had sat up and was staring at him. The little girl had an eerily adult look in her face. Her jaw was set. "I'm Jubilee!" Kielle signed. Her favorite X-Man character. "I'm going to kill him!" Melanie dared not sign but her eyes implored the girl to sit down.