Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"I didn't know you had a bike."

"I don't. It's Emmett's. After you left, he picked me up at the hospital and drove me back to the house. We took some of the good stuff out of the ruins. The garage fell on my mom's car. I guess it's my car now. Or was. This was out behind the garage. Not a scratch on it." He threw a leg over the machine and started it, the sound startling on the quiet street. Crows flew from the neighboring trees, complaining.

Suddenly she felt deep shame. "You've lost everything. Oh, Danny, I'm so sorry."

"Yeah, well, what can you do? Cry? I didn't lose my computer, though. And I still have the family pictures. They threw the dynamite into the kitchen, and the appliances and the sink took a lot of the blast. Get on now and hold tight."

She did and did, pressing the side of her face flat against his back. She thought she could hear his heart beat over the roar of the engine. He was real at least. No, don't stop at the hospital, just drive, just drive, we'll give up everything for love, have a life together, we'll worship each other, like pagans, like Americans… no, she thought, I'm not good enough for him.

As they rode up the drive to the hospital parking lot, they heard a roaring that nearly drowned out the sound of the motorcycle. A small helicopter was coming in for a landing atop the six-story building's roof. Dan switched off his engine and they watched it land.

"That'll be Mom," said Lucy, and felt a peculiar and perverse pride. I'm like her, now. Took a while. Will she be pleased? Lucy found she didn't much care.

"Should I come in?" Dan asked.

"No, I don't think…" She saw his face fall. "No, I need to…" She had lost the ability to talk to him. She wanted him to go away now. He saw this. He shrugged, nodded, turned away.

Zak was now stretched full-length on a vinyl-covered couch with his face on Karp's jacket. A number of people had come by to see Karp. The lawyer Poole, to express his condolences. Cheryl Oggert, to express the governor's. Besides that, Oggert wanted Karp to talk about the legal situation regarding Floyd and Weames, angling to see if something could be pulled out of this disaster. Karp was polite, monosyllabic; she soon left.

Hendricks came by later with a number of other state troopers. He had not, as it turned out, come just to offer comfort, but when he spotted Karp, he walked over, shook his hand, and did so. Karp thought Hendricks looked uncharacteristically rumpled, bleary. His eyes were red-rimmed. He sat down heavily in a chair next to Karp.

"You get them?" Karp asked, more out of sympathy than because he still cared.

"No. I'm sorry to say we didn't. We only got one roadblock out ahead of them and they blew right through that. They had a five-ton truck they stole from a coal company lot. Then we followed them up Burnt Peak, on that road, and they dropped the side of the hill there with dynamite right in front of my lead car. Road's full of big rocks. So that was that. Two of my boys're dead and two are here. Pruitt and Vogelsang are the ones didn't make it. I got to go call their families, I guess. Never happened before, never had to make that kind of call."

Hendricks seemed dazed. Karp, however, although normally a sympathetic sort, was not inclined to be so just then.

"Meanwhile, could you tell me how the fuck this was allowed to happen? A jailbreak in broad daylight?"

"What can I say? They kept it real close. Normally, you get a sense of what them boys are gonna do, and I got informants in the family. You recall I took you to see one of them."

"Russell."

"Him. But there wasn't a peep about this. They blindsided us, that's for damn sure."

"So what happens now?"

"Well, there's no way in hell the governor's gonna keep the feds out of it now. We don't have the resources to put a siege on a whole mountain. I'm not sure anybody does, if you want the truth. I mean Waco, that was a bunch of houses on the flat, in the desert. Ruby Ridge, that's the other big case, you had terrain, but there was only two men with guns, three if you count the kid they shot. Now put them two together. You got a, hell, figure a whole platoon up there, forty men, with all the dynamite they want and heavy automatic weapons. Plus you got the mine shafts. That hill's riddled with 'em, so it's perfect defensive territory. They know the shafts and the good guys don't. If this was a military operation, say in the Pacific or Vietnam, you'd chase them off the surface with artillery and air strikes, and then you'd go in with infantry, at least two hundred men, I'd reckon. If you got any serious resistance, you'd take major casualties: twenty, thirty dead and more wounded. Then you'd just blow the tunnels, seal 'em up inside. But we sure as hell ain't gonna do nothing like that. We ain't gonna take those kind of casualties, not with cops. And we ain't gonna use artillery, not with women and kids involved. You know, when you think on it a little, the gun nuts are right. You get you enough crazies and enough automatic weapons, and if you're in some rough country and you got enough food and water, well, then you got yourself your own country if you want it."

"That's what the Cades have now, their own country?"

"Pretty near. We'll block off the roads, of course, but there's no way on God's green earth we can stop up every rabbit trail off of that mountain. It'd take the whole West VA state police. So they'll keep being able to sell their dope and bring in reinforcements and food. Hell, it ain't much different from the way they live now. They could hold out for years up there if they want to. And I think Ben Cade wants to. He's been easing up to this kind of thing for years. We hear stories, you know. Girls, runaways, picked up and took away up there. For his wives." Here he paused and stared at his dusty shoes.

"So, the truth is, this is our problem, here. We let it grow like a boil for years and now it's time to pop it, come what may. I wanted to say, though, and all the boys think the same, and all the people I been talking to in town, we're all real, real sorry your boy got hurt. It wasn't none of your fight, and you came in and helped us out, and this happened. I guess after what happened to Lizzie Heeney I should've known the Cades were mean enough to gun down a little boy, but I reckon it's still a shock. I had half a dozen men come up to me and say, Captain, if'n you need another gun, just ask. And those that pray are praying for him. I know it don't mean much, but I wanted to say it. I'm sorry." Hendricks's steely blues locked on Karp's eyes. They looked teary. Karp did not think he could hold it together if Gary Cooper went all blubbery on him. He firmed his jaw and said, "Thank you." They shook hands. The captain left.

Karp's daughter and his wife arrived almost simultaneously, Marlene stepping out of the steel doors, Lucy coming down the corridor.

Karp gaped at his wife. "How did you get here so fast?"

"I leased a helicopter." Embraces, brief ones.

"How is he?"

"Still up in surgery the last I heard. They said they would contact us."

She checked her watch. "It's been five hours." She gave him a quick, appraising look. Everyone had a weakness, she knew, even hypercompetent people like her husband, and this happened to be all matters medical as they related to his family. His normally mighty powers of assertion seemed to flee when the kids were sick and the white coats were pontificating. That was why she had moved mountains and spent money like water to speed her way back here.

Marlene now took over. She made a scene, several in fact. People started moving a good deal faster than they were wont to at the Robbens County Medical Center. In short order the commotion arrived at the doctors' lounge, where Edward Small, MD, was taking a brief nap after operating on the kid. He had actually done a good deal of gunshot work in his time, although he usually left the cranial stuff alone. Stick a drain in there and either the patient would live or would die. Of course, it mattered which one-they were not heartless-but either way there would not be consequences for the docs. Robbens County Medical Center was essentially a medicaid/medicare mill, with a sideline servicing the stingy union health plan and telling injured miners they were fit to go back to work and not to bother suing the company. Anyone who could afford to pay got treated in a real hospital in Charleston or D.C.