“Something like that,” Fletch said. “It’s been interesting so far.”
Then Jack’s smile was genuine. “You saw that turning us in immediately would serve no purpose?”
“You let me see you had an objective,” Fletch said. “You made me wonder what it was.”
Jack laughed. “You took the bait.”
“Yeah. I took the bait. You meant me to. So I did.”
“Yes,” Jack said. “I was hoping you would.”
“Clearly you did. You didn’t come cross-country to my house for my help. You would have been better off without it. You could have been here yesterday.”
“That’s for sure. With easy access to Moreno’s money.”
“You came to my house to involve me.”
“So far, it’s worked out pretty well.” Jack stuck his finger against Fletch’s solar plexus. “Siegfried.”
“Enough of that shit.”
Jack took a wad of bills out of his shorts pocket. “Two thousand dollars. Commandant Wolfe gave it to me. He wants me to rebuild the sound system.”
“What sound system?”
“There will be speeches this evening. Will you drive me into Huntsville to get the equipment I need?”
“Carrie will have to come with us. Or go home.”
“It would be better if she came with us.”
“Why?”
“Your theory. Cops look more closely at two men than they would two men and a woman.”
“I guess so.”
“I’ll go check it out,’ ‘Jack said.” See what we need. I’ll be right back. After I get something to drink. After I get a whole lot to drink.”
“Sure,” Fletch said. “We’ll do lunch.”
“FLETCH, THERE ARE women and children down there. Little children! Babies! In that big, filthy trailer.”
Fletch had wandered down to where Carrie had parked the truck.
Somehow she had gotten a big plastic tub onto the back of the truck, upside right. While the bull calf slobbered up the water, she poured more from a bucket through the rails of the pen.
“The children are filthy, Fletch. Dirty diapers everywhere. The trailer stinks. I think they’re hungry. The women seem half out of it. What are we going to do?”
“We’re going into Huntsville,” Fletch said. “With Jack.
Unless you’d rather take the truck and go home. I rather you would.”
“I can’t leave these children here. There’s a girl down there stuffing uncooked hamburger into a toothless baby’s mouth!”
“Well, you know,” Fletch said. “In this context. Women and children …”
“We’ve got to get them some baby food. Milk. Diapers. Soap. If we get them some soap, is there any way they can wash their clothes?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m going with you,” Carrie said. “And I’m coming back.”
“THAT’S ODD.” CARRIE, in the middle front seat of the station wagon, craned to look over Fletch’s shoulder. Fletch driving, they were just entering the long wooded driveway out of the encampment. “A forest-green four-door Saturn with Tennessee license plates.”
“What’s odd about that?” Fletch, too, turned to look but could see nothing but the woods. “You finally found a car with Southern plates?”
“Francie drives a forest-green Saturn.”
“Francie who?”
“Joe Rogers’s wife.”
Jack sat to Carrie’s right.
“Sheriff Joe Rogers?” Fletch asked.
“Yeah,” Carrie said.
Fletch said, “Must be a coincidence.”
“Must be,” Carrie said.
12
Hello, Andy. How’s your head bone?” “Feels like less a bone, thank you, Mister Fletcher, more like a head. I swear, I got a good case of sound poisoning last night.”
“I suppose it’s possible. First, please tell me about the ‘seismic disturbance’ in California. I still haven’t heard any news.”
“Cable is one thing, Mister Fletcher; I’ve heard your excuses for not watching GCN, but don’t you even have a radio down on that farm? A wireless? Are you too far from town to pick up the tom-toms?”
“Yes, Andy, we have radios. I just haven’t had the chance all morning to work the pedals to pump one up. They’re antique radios anyway. They only pick up Rudy Vallee and news of World War Two.”
Fletch sat in the station wagon in the sun-drenched parking lot of a shopping mall in Huntsville, Alabama.
The trip there from the encampment had been quiet. Carrie had sat in the front seat between Fletch and Jack.
Fletch had begun, once they had left the dust of the encampment behind them, by asking Jack, “Did you go to school, do all sorts of good things? Sports?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“Bloomington. Chicago. Boston.”
“Boston? Why Boston?”
“Why not Boston?”
Over the ignored condition of the babies, children, women Carrie had discovered at the encampment, their hunger, their filth, what she believed she identified as evidences of physical abuse, her fury emanated as palpably from her as would a strong odor. She had difficulty even looking at Jack. Clearly, she had no interest in anything he had to say.
Sensing this, Jack had no interest in talking.
Fletch hummed “What a swell party this is …”
As soon as Fletch stopped the car in the shopping mall’s parking lot, Jack was out the door headed for an electronics store. Separately, Carrie headed for a supermarket.
Fletch took the cellular phone from under the car seat and pressed in Andy Cyst’s office phone number at Global Cable News in Virginia.
“The California earthquakes,” Andy mused, as if asked to discuss something that had happened in sixteenth-century France. “Considerable.”
“Considerable what? Damage?”
“Yes. No estimates yet. Covered a wide area along the southern coast. Power lines, water lines disturbed, some fires, a small bridge fell in, no major buildings collapsed, although many will have to be inspected before being occupied again, two deaths reported so far. Two aftershocks reported. Geologists are saying there is no more to worry about than there was before. That’s reassuring, isn’t it? The governor of California has issued a statement reminding people that most of California is not affected by earthquakes at all. I suspect that bit was written for him by the Chamber of Commerce goaded by amusement park operators.”
“That’s called a positive spin.”
“Anyway, the California earthquake story has knocked out much interest in your prison escapees story. Ordinarily, that story would be getting a big play. But, as it is, there’s almost no coverage of it.”
“Why would it have been getting a big play in particular?”
“Because of who one of them is. By the way, I was wrong. There were three escapees.”
“Three?”
“Yes. Kris Kriegel, the most interesting, who would be drawing the most attention, if it weren’t for the California earthquakes, fifty-three years old, a native of South Africa, son of once-wealthy landowners with banking interests. He has his doctor of philosophy degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Warsaw, Poland. In South Africa, he was an apartheid activist, and a leader of the neo-Nazi movement there. He is suspected as one of the originators of the plan to instigate warfare among the tribes. He was present, in a neo-Nazi uniform, at the so-called ‘trod-through’ in Soweto, when, as you remember, seventy-two blacks, men, women, and children, were massacred by a white gang for which the old South African government denied all responsibility, and, damn their eyes, knowledge.”