Jeanette had wandered into the delousing area to resume her conversation with the bud man, but Angel was paying close attention. Clint could almost hear her mood lift, like a generator first thumping to life and then whirring into gear. “They ain’t gonna kill me. Not without a fight.”
For the first time Evie looked piqued. Clint thought that whatever she’d done to awaken Mickey Coates might have drained her battery. “Angel, they’ll wash over you like a wave over a child’s sand castle.”
“Maybe, but I’ll take a few with me.” Angel did a couple of rusty kung fu moves that made Clint feel an emotion he had never before associated with Angel Fitzroy: pity.
“Did you bring us here?” Michaela asked. Her eyes were bright, fascinated. “Did you draw us here? Garth and me?”
“No,” Evie said. “You don’t understand how powerless I am—little more than one of the drug-man’s rabbits hung on a line, waiting to be skinned or set free.” She turned her gaze fully on Clint. “Do you have a plan? I think you do.”
“Nothing so grand,” Clint said, “but I might be able to buy some time. We’ve got a fortified position here, but we could use a few more men—”
“What we could use,” Tig interrupted, “is a platoon of marines.”
Clint shook his head. “Unless Terry Coombs and that guy Geary can get outside help, I think we can hold the prison with a dozen men, maybe as few as ten. Right now we number just four. Five, if we can get Scott Hughes onboard, but I don’t hold out much hope of that.”
Clint went on, speaking mostly to Mickey and the doc she’d brought with her. He didn’t like the idea of sending Flickinger on a life-or-death mission—nothing about how he looked or smelled disagreed with Evie’s pronouncement that he was a big-time doper—but Flickinger and Janice Coates’s daughter were all he had to work with. “The real problem is weaponry, and the big question is who lays hands on it first. I know from my wife that they’ve got quite the armory at the sheriff’s station. Since 9/11 and all the domestic terrorism threats afterward, most towns Dooling’s size do. For handguns they’ve got Glock 17s and, I think Lila said, Sig… something or others.”
“Sig Sauer,” Billy Wettermore said. “Good weapon.”
“They’ve got M4 semi-autos with those big clips,” Clint went on, “and a couple of Remington Model 700s. Also, I believe Lila said they have a forty-millimeter grenade launcher.”
“Guns.” Evie spoke to no one in particular. “The perfect solution to any problem. The more you have, the more perfectly they solve the problem.”
“Are you shitting me?” Michaela cried. “A grenade launcher?”
“Yes, but not for explosives. They use it with teargas.”
“Don’t forget the bulletproof vests.” Rand sounded glum. “Except at super-close range, those things will stop a Mossberg slug. And the Mossies are the heaviest armament we’ve got.”
“This sounds like a punting situation,” Tig remarked.
Billy Wettermore said, “I sure don’t want to kill anybody if I don’t have to. Those are our friends, for God’s sake.”
“Well, good luck,” Evie said. She went to her bunk and powered up Assistant Warden Hicks’s phone. “I’m going to play a few games of Boom Town, then take a nap.” She smiled at Michaela. “I won’t be taking any further questions from the press. You’re a wonderful kisser, Mickey Coates, but you’ve worn me out.”
“Just watch that she don’t decide to sic her rats on you,” Angel said to the group at large. “They do whatever she wants. It’s how she got Hicksie’s cell phone.”
“Rats,” Garth said. “This keeps getting better.”
“I need you folks to come with me,” Clint said. “We need to talk, but it has to be quick. They’ll have this place locked down soon enough.”
Billy Wettermore pointed to Jeanette, now seated cross-legged in the shower alcove of the delousing station and talking earnestly with someone only she could see. “What about Sorley?”
“She’ll be fine,” Clint said. “Come on. Go to sleep, Jeanette. Let yourself rest.”
Without looking at him, Jeanette said a single word. “No.”
To Clint, the warden’s office had an archaeological appearance, as if it had been abandoned for years instead of less than a week. Janice Coates lay on the couch, wrapped in her cerements of white. Michaela went to her and knelt down. She stroked the cocoon with one hand. It gave off crackling sounds. Garth started to approach her, but Clint took his arm. “Give her a minute, Dr. Flickinger.”
It was actually more like three before Michaela got to her feet. “What can we do?” she asked.
“Can you be persistent and persuasive?” Clint asked.
She fixed him with eyes that were no longer bloodshot. “I came to NewsAmerica as an unpaid intern at twenty-three. By twenty-six, I was a full-time correspondent and they were talking about giving me my own evening show.” She saw Billy giving a look to Tig and Rand, and smiled at them. “You know what they say around here, don’t you? It ain’t bragging if it’s the truth.” She returned her attention to Clint. “Those are my references. Are they good enough?”
“I hope so,” Clint said. “Listen.”
He talked for the next five minutes. There were questions, but not many. They were in a bad corner, and all of them knew it.
CHAPTER 6
Alexander Peter Bayer, the first baby to be born on the other side of the Tree, son of a former Dooling inmate named Linda Bayer, breathed air for the first time a week after Lila and Tiffany returned from the wreck below Lion Head. It was another few days before Lila made his acquaintance at a small gathering in Elaine Nutting Geary’s repaired home. He was not a traditionally attractive infant; the stacking of his many jowls produced an association not with the Gerber Baby but with a bookie that Lila had once arrested who had been known as “Larry Large.” However, baby Alexander had an irresistibly comic way of rolling his eyes around, as if he were anxiously attempting to gain his bearings amid the flowering of female faces that loomed above him.
A plate of slightly crispy (though still pretty tasty) scones was passed around. Between bouts of the strange vertigo that afflicted her, Nadine Coombs had baked them in an outdoor oven. The oven itself had recently been hauled from the ruins of the Lowe’s in Maylock, using sledges and Tiffany’s horses. It flabbergasted Lila sometimes, the rate of progress they were making, the speed and efficiency with which problems were solved and advancements made.
At some point Lila ended up with the baby. “Are you the last man on earth, or the first?” she asked him.
Alexander Peter Bayer yawned.
“Sorry, Lila. He doesn’t talk to cops.” Tiffany had sidled up beside her in the corner of the living room.
“That so?”
“We teach em young around here,” Tiffany said.
Since their adventure they’d become odd friends. Lila liked how Tiffany rode around town on her horses, wearing her white cowboy hat, insisting that children come over and stroke the animals’ necks, and see how soft and warm they were.
One day, with nothing better to do, Lila and Tiffany searched the Dooling YMCA, not knowing exactly what they were looking for, only knowing it was one of the few places that hadn’t been investigated. They found plenty of stuff, some of it interesting, but nothing they really needed. There was toilet paper, but supplies of that in the Shopwell were still plentiful. There were also cartons of liquid soap, but over the years it had hardened into pink bricks. The pool had dried up; nothing remained but a faint, astringent odor of chlorine.