“All right. Then that just leaves . . .”
“Stop baby-walking me and get to it.”
“Luke Prescott.”
They both fall silent, and Jordy’s not sure if he should feel prideful that Milo’s nasally breaths sound louder than his.
The nearest mountain peak looks like a jagged shelf of granite turned on its side and wedged inside a giant mound of green; orange sunlight reflects off its western flank. Orange the color of flame.
Milo’s right about one thing: This is too much pressure, too soon. Too much messiness before the first bomb’s been assembled. Hell, the explosives haven’t even been delivered yet. They’ll need to be stored, protected, the reserves distributed to their foot soldiers at points throughout the country.
Jordy assumed the hardest part would be finding the bombers most committed to the cause, but that’s been easy. Maybe because they’ve set their goals in the right place. They’re after three things that have become a kind of mantra: range, variation, coordination. A gay bar here, an abortion clinic there, a mosque there. All on the same day. A big death toll in each place would be nice, but in the end, it’s just a perk. It’s the calculation and coordination that will truly strike terror into the hearts of the deviants and the godless, that will convince them that every expression of their twisted selfhood runs the risk of split-second immolation. A web of righteousness, stretched wide, will do more to advance their cause than any single crater in the earth.
“We’re not killing two sheriff’s deputies in a row,” Jordy finally says.
“I didn’t say we should.”
“Luke Prescott doesn’t know anything.”
“Why is she so damn quiet, then?” Milo asks. “Why is she acting like she’s going to get rescued?”
“You’re doping her up,” Jordy says.
“I’m jerking her off depressants, then putting her on stimulants to get her gums to start flapping, and it’s not working.”
“Maybe you broke her,” Jordy says.
“Bull. She’s hiding something.”
“Well, we’ve turned over her trailer four times and gone through her computer and there’s nothing.”
Because she went through my damn computer, Jordy thinks, and I’d rather get beat myself than tell Milo that.
“There are ways to silence somebody without killing them,” Milo says quietly. “Honestly, breaking people’s more my specialty.”
For a while, the two men just stare at each other.
Jordy’s seen enough missions go south to know that there’s usually, not all the time, but usually, a moment of warning coupled with a moment of decision, and someone makes the wrong choice.
“I fucked up,” Jordy whispers. “I wasn’t careful enough with my computer. She must have seen something. She’d been such a basket case before, I didn’t expect her to get her mind back and start . . .”
Something cold passes through Milo’s expression, then he closes his eyes and nods.
“That’s the past. Let’s talk about the future.” His tone’s not as forgiving as his expression.
“Do what you think’s best,” Jordy says.
“With Prescott?” Milo asks.
Jordy nods.
When Milo nods back, Jordy removes his gun from its holster and strides back toward the clearing. His foot soldiers stand in a loose circle around Henricks’s corpse. The ones that stick out to him are that kid, Tommy Grover, who always looks like he just smelled something foul, and Manuel Lloya, the ex–car thief from Anaheim; they’re Milo’s guys, not his, and their presence now is a reminder that loyalties could shift in dangerous ways if Jordy doesn’t let Milo put this back on course the way he wants.
All seven men part when they see him coming, but he walks past them, to the spot where Lacey’s still on her side in the fetal position, staring into the dope-smeared contents of her mind.
Before she can look up into his eyes, he fires one shot into her forehead.
He turns away before he can be distracted by old feelings.
He’ll replace her someday. The world is full of victims waiting to be healed, and Lacey wasn’t even the prettiest one.
III
33
Charley’s given Luke a lot longer than the minute of quiet he asked for.
She kept her mouth shut during the ride back to the house. She let him wander outside into the backyard by himself once they got home. Now, it’s an hour later, and he’s still sitting outside, glowering at the view. In the meantime, she’s held her tongue, stayed out of his eye line, done all the things she figures you’re supposed to do when someone you love suddenly announces they don’t want to hear your voice. It leaves you with no choice but to be assailed by all manner of dark fears about where their little funk might end, but maybe that’s just how adult relationships are supposed to be. She doesn’t know. She’s never had one before.
She had years of experience watching Marty and Luanne go about their relationship with casual ease—spending time together on the weekends, giving the other football fields’ worth of space whenever they wanted it. But then there’s the specter of Abigail Banning, who through a series of jailhouse interviews has tried to cast her gruesome life’s work as a testament to the idea that if you don’t help your man indulge his darkest instincts, you’ll be alone forever. She knows how repulsive and wrong Abigail is, of course. But she’s afraid her early exposure to the idea in practice might have produced in her a neurotic fear that today makes her far more indulgent of Luke’s mood swings and outbursts than she should be.