R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

Her rationale was that she could only help.

To which I replied, “Really.”

“I’m helping you, aren’t I?”

“Nip down to the doughnut shop and get me a coffee, will ya?”

She laughed as if I had been joking.

All in all, we got along pretty well. After I had bludgeoned her finer scruples to death with a barrage of clever crudities, she even began to laugh. I only genuinely pissed her off once, when I bailed between radio stations in the middle of this incredibly sappy tune.

“So let me guess,” she said, her eyes fluttering in irritation. “You hate Kelly Clarkson too.”

“Not at all,” I replied. “She makes me want to light some candles, draw a steaming bath, and shave my vagina.”

That earned me several minutes of fuming silence. But I’m pretty sure I caught a head-shaking smile reflected in the passenger window.

Now, a career counsellor would tell you that a job like mine is “soft- skill intensive,” which is just a fancy way of saying you need to be a “people person” of some description to do it well. As you might have surmised, I am not a people person. I tend to hate people, as a rule. What I am good at is disarming people, getting them to say things they might not otherwise say. I have a gift for manipulation, or so Dr. Ken Shelton told me on June 11, 1999.

I mention this because the more people I asked about the Framers, the more troubled I found myself. You see, by this point I was pretty much sucking on the idea of the Framers like oxygen. Like I said, I had never worked a cult member’s disappearance before, and I fell on the novelty of it all like a homeless guy on a half-smoked cigarette.

This probably made me a little more sympathetic to their cause than I should have been. Surround a guy with enough smiles and he’ll prize the first angry asshole he meets-sure as shit. So I found myself poking the unsuspecting citizens of Ruddick with the fact of the Framers, mentioning them the way I might note a strange-looking mole on their skin-you know, with that You-should-get-that-checked-out tone-just to see what kind of reaction I would get.

And I discovered that for a goodly number of the good inhabitants of Ruddick, the Framers were a matter of rote, reflex-as simple as simple could be. Guilty, probably. Symptom of some social malaise, certainly. Otherwise, they were a bunch of dangerous fools.

Of course, this made me think they were harmless.

Only Xenophon Baars kept me guessing… The day was pretty much a strikeout as far as Dead Jennifer was concerned. Sure, there was old Dane Ferrence, who insisted that God was simply trying to tell the Framers to turn to Jesus. And there was sixteen-year-old Sky Armstrong, who had taken swimming lessons with Jennifer at the local YMCA the previous summer. “She was weird,” she said in that tone people reserve for declarations of peer-group solidarity. Then immediately contradicted herself by saying, “She was really normal, though.”

But otherwise, nobody knew nothing.

Rather than return to our rooms, Molly and I drove directly to Odd- Jobs-to spare me the embarrassment of dodging traffic on foot as much as anything. For a time we just stared at our menus in that witless way, soaking in the damp hum of summer exhaustion. The tailings of what counted as rush-hour traffic in Ruddick roared up and down the road beyond our window. Nolen walked in almost the instant after we had placed our order: the turkey surprise for Molly and a BLT for me.

He looked like a man run ragged, too skinny for his police shirt, too fat for his uniform pants. But true to type, he smiled and laughed at nothing when I hailed him. I introduced him to Molly, whom he thought he recognized. He sidled in beside her without a wisp of embarrassment: he was used to being welcome, I could tell.

“What’s that I smell on your breath?” he said, fixing me with a smiling frown. He must have caught me exhaling or something. Either that or he was just fucking with me, which would mean he was more clever than I had credited.

I shrugged and said, “Mint?”

He had this way of laughing, hands held close yet flared out like a magician, and a stiff-necked backward lean. Adolescent self-consciousness hardened into adult habit.

“So you talked to the Morrows?” I asked.

“Yeah… But first I have to ask you something.”

“Shoot.”

“What’s this I hear about you, um, taking a, ah, collection?”

I could feel Molly’s eyes boring into my profile. Funny the way their stares cut so much deeper before you’ve slept with them.

“Just part of the cover, Caleb.”

His frown made him look like a mascot for some kind of mattress or furniture company.

“Look,” I added quickly, “you know how people get…” I had already accumulated around nine hundred bucks, thanks to Dead Jennifer. When it came to missing persons, pretty chicks were almost as lucrative as blond children. A couple more and I would have a good chunk of my Bally’s Visa paid off, and I could go back to playing craps for real Cover my odds instead of rolling naked. “There’s a big difference between what they say when they think everything is off the cuff as opposed to, you know, all official.” I made a Who-likes-that-crap?face for emphasis.

“Well…”

I grinned and waved dismissively. “Don’t worry, Caleb. We’re keeping close track of who gave us what. It’ll be all returned.” I turned to prod some expression of affirmation from Molls. “Even the nickels and dimes.”

Nolen laughed at that. I think an excuse to laugh it off was all he really wanted.

I steered the conversation back to what mattered and away from the dope on my breath and the dough stuffed in my pocket by asking him how things went with Jill and Eddie Morrow. I couldn’t resist a you-people grin at Molly when he pulled out his notebook. I could have hung silver dollars from his forehead, his frown lines were so deep. Pressing the thing flat like a Gideon on the table, he gave me the rundown on his interview, responding to each of my successive questions with what seemed more and more anxiety. He was one of those guys who became more nervous the more he heard the sound of his own voice. Molly watched with the look of patient boredom women often get while waiting for men to confirm their mutual intelligence.

“So neither of them said anything about Eddie going out after dropping Jill off?” This was a rhetorical question: Nolen had already told me that he interviewed the two together, and I had gathered enough from my short conversation with Jill to know this was something both would be keen to paper over with silence. This is the glue that holds most relationships together: things unspoken and wilfully overlooked.

“No… I mean, yeah, that’s right. You mentioned something about that, didn’t you?”

Do you see why I feel like I’ve been stranded in a life skills class for the developmentally challenged? Don’t laugh. The whole world rides the short bus, you included.

“Letme look into it,” I said. Okay, just because I score large with the ladies doesn’t mean I understand them. They always seem to come at me sideways. Here I think we’re taking a pleasant stroll in the park heading toward soft pillows and cool sheets and suddenly, click-

I’m standing on a land mine.

Nolen beat an awkward retreat partway through our dinner. Neither of us said much-just munched in that silent too-much-fun-in-the-sun way. It seemed a joke, driving the car across the street to the motel. It happened too fast for me to pick up on any telltale signs. In all honesty, I was doing cartwheels of joy inside, the way she simply followed me to my door after we got out of the Vee-Dub.

Naked time, I thought as I ushered her in. I could almost feel the soft skin of her ass.