Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

Corrie accelerated onto the paved road with a screech of rubber. The whole scene had begun to take on a sense of unreality. Here Pendergast had just been humiliated, ordered peremptorily off a case he’d come all the way from New York to investigate . . . and all he could do was talk about tea and the weather?

A minute ticked away, then two. At last, she couldn’t take the silence any longer. “Look,” she blurted indignantly, “I can’t believe you just let that sack-of-shit sheriff do that to you!”

“Do what?”

“What? Treat you that way! Kick you off the site!”

Pendergast smiled. “ Nisi paret imperat. ‘If he does not obey, he commands.’ ”

“You mean you’re not going to obey the order?”

“Miss Swanson, I do not habitually talk about my future intentions, even with a trusted assistant.”

She blushed despite her anger. “So we’re just going to blow him off? Continue our investigation? To hell with the runty bastard?”

“What I do with regard to, as you so colorfully put it, ‘the runty bastard’ can no longer be your concern. The important thing is, I cannot have you defying the sheriff on my account. Ah, here we are. Pull up to the garages behind the house, if you please.”

Corrie pulled behind the Kraus mansion, where a rickety row of old wooden garages stood. Pendergast went to one that sported a fresh padlock and chain, unlocked it, and flung open the doors. Inside Corrie could see the gleam of a car—a big car. Pendergast disappeared into the gloom and she soon heard the roar of an engine, followed by a low purring. Slowly, the car nosed out of the garage. Corrie could hardly believe her eyes as a gleaming, polished vision of elegance emerged into the gray dust of Medicine Creek. She had never seen a car like it before, except maybe in the movies. It came to an idling stop and Pendergast got out.

“Where’d this come from?”

“I always knew there was a chance I might lose your services, and so I had my own car brought out.”

“This is yours? What is it?”

“A ’59 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith.”

It was only then that the full meaning of his prior sentence sunk in. “What do you mean, lose my services?”

Pendergast handed her an envelope. “Inside is your pay up to the end of the week.”

“What’s this for? Aren’t I going to stay on as your assistant?”

“Not after the cease-and-desist. I can’t protect you from it, and I could not ask you to put yourself in legal jeopardy. Regrettably, as of this moment, you are discharged. I would suggest you go home and resume your normal life.”

“What normal life? My normal life sucks. There must be something I can do!” She felt a rising tide of fury and helplessness: now that she was finally interested in the case, fascinated even; now that she felt she had finally met a person she could respect and trust—now that she finally had a reason to wake up in the morning—he was firing her. Despite her best efforts, she felt a tear escape. She angrily wiped it away.

Pendergast bowed. “You could help me one last time by satisfying my curiosity on the source of Medicine Creek’s excellent water.”

She stared in disbelief. He really was impossible.

“It comes from wells that supposedly tap into some underground river,” she said, trying to make her voice as stony as possible.

“Underground river,” Pendergast repeated, his eyes blank, as if his gaze had turned inward with a sudden revelation. He smiled, bowed, took her hand, raised it to within an inch of his lips. And then he got into his car and glided off, leaving her standing in the parking lot beside her own junk heap, in a swirl of dust, consumed by a mixture of wrath, astonishment, and misery.

Forty-Two

T he cruiser whipped past the rows of corn on the airline road at a nice, easy 110 miles per hour. The AC might not work, thought Hazen, and the upholstery might look like shit, but the 5.0 Mustang police package still had what it took under the hood. The heavy chassis rocked from side to side, and in the rearview mirror Hazen could see two rows of corn whipsawing in his wake.

Hazen felt better than he had all week. Pendergast was out of the picture. He had a firm handle on the case, and it was getting firmer all the time. He glanced over at Chester Raskovich, sitting next to him. The security honcho looked a little gray around the gills, and beads of sweat had popped out on his temple. The speed of the cruiser didn’t seem to agree with him. Hazen had much rather it had been Tad sitting in the passenger seat than this campus grunt; the confrontation that was about to take place would have been good experience for him. For the thousandth time, Hazen found himself wishing that his own boy Brad had grown up more like his deputy: respectful, ambitious, less of a wise-ass. Hazen sighed. Wishful thinking wasn’t important right now. What was important was keeping Raskovich in the loop, and by extension, Dr. Fisk. If he played this right, he was certain Medicine Creek would get the experimental field.

The first outlying farmhouses of Deeper flashed past, and Hazen slowed quickly to the speed limit. It wouldn’t be too swift to flatten some Deeper kid just as the case was breaking and things were going his way.

“What’s the plan, Sheriff?” Raskovich managed to say. He had begun to breathe again.

“We’re going to pay a visit to Mr. Norris Lavender, Esquire.”

“Who’s that?”

“He owns half of the town plus a lot of these fields out here. Leases ’em out. His family owned the first ranch in these parts.”

“You think he’s involved?”

“Lavender’s got his finger in every pie around here. Like I asked Hank Larssen: who’s got the most to lose? Well, no mystery there.”

Raskovich nodded.

Now the commercial district of Deeper hove into view. There was a Hardee’s at one end of town and an A&W at the other; in between, a bunch of shabby or shuttered storefronts; a sporting goods store; a grocery; a gas station; a used car lot (all AMC shitboxes); a coin-op laundromat; and the Deeper Sleep Motel. Everything dated from the fifties. Could be a movie set, thought Hazen.

He turned into the parking lot behind the Grand Theater (long abandoned) and the Hair Apparent salon. In the rear sat a low, one-story building of orange brick, completely surrounded by a shimmering expanse of heaved asphalt. Hazen drove to the glass-doored entrance and parked his car across the fire lane, illegally, in your face. Hank’s cruiser was parked neatly nearby. Hazen shook his head. Hank just didn’t know how to do things in a way that commanded respect. He left the cruiser with its pinball flasher going like mad, so everyone would know he was there on official business.

Hazen pushed through the double doors and strode into the chilly air of the Lavender Building, Raskovich at his heels. He glanced around the reception area. A rather ugly secretary, with a voice of such efficiency that it bordered on unfriendliness, said, “You may go straight through, Sheriff. They’ve been waiting.”

He touched the brim of his hat and strode down the hall, right, and through some more glass doors. Another secretary, even dumpier than the first, waved them past.

They grow ’em ugly up here in Deeper, he thought. Probably marry their cousins.

Hazen paused at the threshold of the rear office and looked around with narrowed eye. It was pretty snazzy, with a slick cosmopolitan look: bits of metal and glass in various shades of gray and black, oversized desk, thick carpeting, potted figs. A couple of cheesy Darlin’ Dolls prints, however, betrayed Lavender’s white trash origins. Lavender himself sat, smiling, behind the giant desk, and when Hazen’s eye fell on him the man rose easily to his feet. He was wearing a jogging suit with racing stripes, and a diamond ring in a platinum setting winked on one pinky. He was slender and rather tall, and he invested all his movements with what he no doubt assumed looked like aristocratic languor. His head, however, was overly large for his body and shaped like a pyramid, a very wide mouth smiling under two gimlet eyes set close together, tapering to a narrow forehead as smooth and white as a slab of sliced suet. It was the head of a fat man on a thin body.