There was no point in arguing further. Monks did as he was told.
When he stepped into the bedroom, Motherlode was sitting on the edge of Mandrake’s bed, petting him and whispering to him-finally acting like a mother, if a stoned and disheveled one. She was wearing a rumpled flannel nightgown, her breasts loose and sagging beneath it.
“Is he going to get better?” she asked Monks.
“If we get him proper treatment, he will,” Monks said, making another bid for an ally.
“That’s why I wanted a doctor.”
That’s not enough, Monks was about to say, but it was another pointless argument. Whether Freeboot had ground her down to this state or she had found her own way to it, there was no help here. On the one hand, it was hard to feel sympathy for a mother who could fall into a self-induced stupor beside her sick child. On the other, Monks pitied anyone that desperate. She seemed bewildered, more than anything-incapable of dealing with this crisis.
She stood up, opened a dresser drawer, and took out a bottle of Percocets.
“Will you take care of him now?” she asked.
Monks looked at the fearful, uncomprehending little boy, in the hands of his addict mother and berserk father.
“I’ll do what I can,” he said.
She murmured thanks, and with a suddenly furtive air-clutching the pills, avoiding Monks’s gaze, and not looking back at Mandrake-she edged out of the room.
A moment later, the blanket in the doorway shifted aside, and Hammerhead came in. He dropped something on the floor that clanked when it hit.
Monks realized, with numb amazement, that it was a pair of handcuffs.
“Put them on,” Hammerhead said.
“You can’t be serious.”
“You seem to have a little attitude problem. We’re going to have to work on that.”
Monks stared at him, looking for some sign of sarcasm-the recognition that he was parroting Taxman’s words about himself, from just a few minutes earlier. But his face showed nothing except barely controlled anger. It hit Monks that this was really about Marguerite, whom he clearly was sweet on, walking off with the handsome Captain America. He was shifting the blame, projecting his rage onto a safe target. It was akin to Glenn’s claim that Monks had this coming because he “owes me bigtime,” and Freeboot’s blaming Monks for his own maltreatment, because he couldn’t be trusted.
This was a trait that Monks associated with children and with psychopaths, and a memory flashed through his mind of a court defense that he had once heard from a bank robber who had gunned down a young female teller: her death was her own fault, because she had pressed the alarm button.
“Do you have any idea of the consequences of kidnaping me?” Monks said. “In the eyes of the real world? You’re looking at prison.”
Hammerhead raised his shotgun a few inches and pressed the muzzle against Monks’s knee.
“There’s no need for that,” Monks said. “I know I’m outgunned.”
“Coil says you got a reputation for causing trouble. Don’t try it with me.”
“Okay,” Monks said. “I won’t try it with you.”
4
Freeboot ran like a wildman, pounding barefoot over the camp’s familiar paths, then out into the forest and onto the deer trails that he knew just as well. He was hot with rage.
Monks had made a fool of him. He had lost it, in front of everyone.
He just couldn’t get past the fear that drinking that piss would infect him with the weakness it carried.
After half a mile the trail took a sudden rise up a steep rocky crag. Freeboot drove himself to the top, leaping from foothold to foothold like a mountain goat, his hard, horny feet gripping the rocks surely and silently. Finally he slowed to a walk, circling the crag’s summit with hands on hips. He was breathing hard, but not winded. His legs ached with the strain, but he was ready for more.
He took the Copenhagen can from his shirt pocket and dipped his knifepoint into the powdered crank. He blasted three sharp hits into each nostril, a dose that would have left a normal man crawling around on the ground, screaming. As the drug filled him, he stood and opened his arms wide to the night sky, feeling like he could leap up into it and fly to the fucking moon. Most nights, he spent several hours out here in the woods, prowling his turf. In clear weather he could see almost to the Pacific, across the swaying treetops of the redwood forest that rose and fell down the mountain slopes like the waves of a deep green sea. The nearest paved road was fifteen miles away, the first tiny town was three miles farther, and tonight, even the few dim lights of the camp were lost in the blanketing mist.
Everything that he was going to do-that only he could do-was lying there at his feet, waiting.
All right. He was feeling better now. Monks had won that round. You had to respect the motherfucker.
But it was just starting.
Freeboot shook an unfiltered Camel cigarette from a pack and lit it. An occasional smoke would not hurt a man if he flushed his lungs rigorously with clean air every day.
He took a different path back down the crag and toward camp, moving with a stride that was almost a lope, but stealthy enough not to alarm the herd of deer that bedded down nearby.
He paused at one of the hidden seismic geophones that were buried around the camp’s perimeter. His favorite night game was to trip a sensor to alert a sentry, lure him into a snare, then disarm him and leave him tied to a tree for the others to find. The way he was feeling tonight, he would have hung the man upside down and thrashed him with a fir branch.
But there was business to take care of. Freeboot loped on to the bunker, a shaft cut into the rocky earth by coolie labor back in gold-rush days when this place had been a mining camp. The entrance was hidden by a shed with a false floor. He bolted shut the shed door from the inside, yanked up the wooden hatch, and dropped down the ladder into the hollowed-out antechamber. The bunker was secure and soundproof, outfitted for comfort, with chairs, cots, and a propane heater that vented through a hidden flue. There were battery-operated electric lights and laptop computers, with a gas-powered generator to recharge them. The catacombs of mining tunnels that branched out held stocks of food and water, along with weapons and other covert equipment.
Bunker-wise, Hitler had nothing on Freeboot.
Taxman and Shrinkwrap were already inside, waiting. Freeboot walked directly to an IBM ThinkPad and slotted in a CD that had been delivered earlier that evening. The screen changed as the CD’s contents came up.
“We’ve got some issues here, Freeboot,” Shrinkwrap said. She was trying to sound cool, but her mouth trembled a little. He could read her emotions as clearly as he could hear the forest creatures moving through the night. She was angry, she was afraid, and, like always, she was edgy because she knew that only he possessed the power.
But he needed her, so he spoke lightly.
“Had to happen, Shrink,” he said. “Motherlode was freaking about the kid. I could feel her getting ready to do something stupid. This will calm her down.”
“You should take him someplace, man. Like I said.”
That had been Shrinkwrap’s idea when Mandrake started acting weird-to take him several hundred miles away to another state, and abandon him in front of a hospital. He was too young for anyone to identify, and he’d be taken care of.
“You still could,” she said. “This is no place for a kid.” She wasn’t bad-looking, although thin as a bird, and she looked more feminine now, with a little pleading in her eyes.
Her anger was easy to deal with. This softness was not.
“Mandrake’s got to get his shit together,” Freeboot said uneasily. “Let it go, okay?” He pulled a bottle of the Monte Alban mescal from a shelf and drank from it, still watching the computer screen.