"Good find, Annie," Grace said. "You have any pockets in that dress?"
Annie shone her light down on the eight-thousand-dollar ruin and sighed. "I have a bra."
"Same thing. Tuck a couple of these in." She handed her two of the old Coke bottles, and Annie struggled to find a place for them.
"Could probably sell these things for some serious money on eBay."
"The bottles or the boobs?" Sharon asked, and the second the words were out of her mouth, she snapped it shut in horror. Oh, God. Had she really said that? A thousand people were going to die, poor Deputy Lee was already dead, and a minute later, she was making jokes? What kind of a person was she?
Annie had slapped a hand to her mouth to cover the laugh, but it kept squirting through her fingers in little breathy snorts. Not funny, not funny, none of this is funny, she kept telling herself, but once she'd started to laugh, she couldn't seem to stop. It didn't help that Grace was laughing, too. Grace hardly ever laughed. It was scary. "Omigod," Annie gasped. "We're hysterical."
And that made Sharon start laughing, too, because she'd seen hysterical, and this wasn't it. Hysterical was when your mother raced stark-naked through the house, wailing at the top of her lungs, wringing her hands, settling briefly in this chair and that, until finally the chair she chose was the one behind the desk with the big, ugly gun in the center drawer.That was hysterical. And then there was the ten-year-old daughter crouched on the floor, legs scrambling as she tried to push herself into the wall she was leaning against, her mouth open in a silent scream, her eyes fixed on her mother's blood and brains sliding down the plate-glass window behind the desk.That was hysterical, too. But not this.
She took a deep breath that erased everything. Displacement behavior, she remembered, was the body's defense against stress. People laugh at funerals. Cats stop fighting and spontaneously groom themselves. Cats licked, people laughed.
Annie and Grace were letting out the last long, shaky exhales, letting it all go, and then Grace was passing out bottles again, and it was as if the laughter had never happened.
They started upstairs to leave the house by the front door-not outthrough the basement and into the backyard. The perimeter was out there, in the woods but closer than they'd thought. Deputy Lee had proven that. There was less chance that they would be seen with the protection of the buildings between them and the trees.
Grace was in the lead, shining the flashlight down on the risers, making the climb easier.
It's the flashlight, Sharon thought as she followed. Whoever has the flashlight is automatically the leader, as if light was some kind of royal scepter, even more powerful than a gun. Maybe in the Bible, she thought wryly.
In the feverish religion that her mother had practiced, plowshares were mightier than swords, and things like light and goodness and mercy always won out over the lesser weapons, like atomic bombs.God's sword will not be beaten, Sharon. Man's weapons are puny in theface of the Word of God. . ..But in the end, her mother hadn't stuck a Bible in her mouth and blown her brains out, now had she?
"Wait a minute," she whispered, thinking of something as Grace prepared to open the door at the top. "We don't have a lighter, or matches."
"There are matches in the glass display case at the gas station," Grace said.
Christ, Sharon thought. She sees everything. The tiniest detail. And never forgets it. Like a really excellent cop. She saw all the things that you should have seen, drew all the conclusions that you should have drawn, and that's how she knew that this town was wrong before we ever walked into it. You're not just a good cop scared off the street by a bullet in the neck-you were never that good to begin with. And Grace isn't the leader because she's carrying the flashlight- she's the leader because she just is. Something big and dark seemed to open a little in Sharon's head, and her next breath felt like the first one she had taken in a very long time. It almost made her smile.
Grace opened the door to the upstairs and turned off the flashlight, and they were all lost in a black void. They felt their way to the front door and slipped outside. The moon was below the tree line now, and the darkness seemed to have texture, it was so impenetrable. Grace could barely identify shapes more than ten feet distant. This must be what it's like to be blind and deaf, she thought-no sound, no light, no motion, not even a breath of air stirring in the hot, still night.
The hulking outlines of the cafe and gas station were barely visible, but the outside air had that sweet, wet, predawn smell that seems to gather in the last hours before sunrise on a hot summer night. We have to hurry, Grace thought.
They carefully crept across the broken asphalt between the house and the gas station-this was the one place they would be fully exposed to any line of sight from the woods. Once inside the gas station, Grace felt around the display case until she found the matches, tucked them into her jeans pocket, and they all moved into the adjacent garage bay. There were no windows in here; even the narrow back door was solid, and it was safe for Grace to turn on the flashlight.
Ten minutes gone, six hours left.
Grace found a red gas can with a gooseneck nozzle next to the hydraulic lift, checked it and found it nearly full, then swept the walls with the beam of light. "Can't see it."
"Give me the light," Sharon said. "They're usually somewhere near the counter." She found the master switches that turned the pumps on and off under a shelf near the register that held about a decade's worth of dusty Veterans Day poppies. She pushed the two levers to the off position and hoped they worked.
When she came back to the garage bay, she shined the light on Annie and Grace, who were filling the Coke bottles with gas by touch. The smell was cloying in the closed space. Grace looked up at her. "Pumps off?"
"Yes."
"There's a box of disposable rags on the bench behind you. I couldn't find them in the dark."
"Got 'em," Sharon said after a few seconds with the light.
Annie gave up crouching after a few minutes and sat down on the filthy garage floor, fat legs crossed, expertly twisting and stuffing rags into the bottles. "Haven't done this since I tried blow up Cameron DuPuy's BMW convertible sophomore year in Atlanta. Remember, Grace?"
"No. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't there."
Annie chuckled softly and kept stuffing, and Sharon wished for a moment that she had been there, committing a felony with these two women. Maybe life would have been different then.
When the bottles were ready, they moved out to the pumps. Sharon removed the nozzles and locked them open, watched the trickle of gasoline that remained in the hoses seep out onto the concrete, then stop. The shut-off switches had worked.
Annie started laying a trail of rags from where the nozzles lay on the concrete back to the big garage bay door. Grace followed, soaking the rags with gas from the can. Back inside, they cracked the big garage door, then Grace continued the flammable trail, sloshing gas over cases of motor oil and cans of solvent stored inside the garage. She felt the cold, slimy wetness on her hands as she continued the trail out the back door, through the junked cars behind the station. They piled more rags there, and then all three of them stood, looking down at the pathetic pile of dirty, pale blue.
"No way we are ever going to hit that little bitty pile," Annie said worriedly, glancing over her shoulder at the woods behind them.
"Softball," Sharon murmured. "All-state pitcher, three years in a row."
"Honey." Annie gave her a soft punch in the shoulder. "Way to go."
It was too dark to see her face-they didn't dare use the flashlight out here-but Sharon thought she might have been smiling.
While Grace soaked the pile of rags with gasoline, hoping it wouldn't evaporate too fast, Annie and Sharon collected the Coke-bottle Molotov cocktails from the gas station and carried them back to the edge of the woods. The reek of gasoline was in their mouths, their noses, bathing their sinus cavities, and by the time they were finished, it seemed that there was no fresh air left in the world. But they were ready.