Neil McMahon - Revolution No.9

He started driving again, expecting at every bend to find the road blocked and armed men moving in-praying that the stuffed pajama dummy would lure Freeboot close enough for a clear shot.

But no ambush came. When Monks got to the camp, a little more than an hour later, there was still no sign of a living soul.

He was shaking with dread.

He stopped the Bronco fifty yards short of the scorched clearing where the fire had been. He opened the door and stepped out onto the soft wet earth, holding the Beretta pressed against his thigh. He waited, watching, listening. The collapsed buildings were as desolate as ancient ruins. The night breeze still carried the faint smell of charred wood.

Just come walking on out and call my name out loud.

Monks walked slowly forward to the edge of the burn.

“Freeboot?” he said. The wind caught his voice, carrying it like an echo.

Call my name out loud.

“Freeboot!” he yelled, and this time something tiny changed in the periphery of his vision. He swiveled toward it, raising the pistol.

A light had come on-small, dim, on top of a pile of soot-crusted rock that had been part of a foundation.

Glenn’s cabin, Monks remembered. That was where Glenn’s cabin had stood.

He trotted toward it, stumbling through the soggy foot-deep ash that still covered the earth.

As he got close, he saw that it was a small scalloped bulb, sitting in an open guitar case, like a candle illuminating a shrine.

But Glenn’s guitar was not inside. Monks slid to his knees, staring at what was:

A human ear, with dark blood congealing along its severed edge.

The lobe was pierced by the skull-shaped earring that Glenn had worn.

Monks looked up to the sky, his face streaking with the first tears that he had wept since watching young soldiers die under his helpless hands thirty years ago.

Monks’s home telephone rang five times. He let the answering machine take the call.

“Carroll?” Sara’s voice said, with brittle sweetness. “Will you pick up the phone, please? I know you’re there.”

He raised his glass blearily and swallowed more vodka. It was sometime after dark; he didn’t know or care when. He was sprawled on the couch in his living room, surrounded by squalor-clothes on the floor, unwashed dishes, half-eaten food. Like a man evading creditors, he hadn’t answered the phone for the past two days. The only reason that he left the phone on at all was because the severed ear was being DNA tested and he still harbored a whisper of hope that it wasn’t Glenn’s.

“We have to talk,” Sara said imploringly. “You can’t just keep your head buried in the sand. I understand why you had to lie to me, and I’m over it now.”

His cats prowled the mess happily, one or another of them occasionally settling on his chest to comfort him. A dying fire in the woodstove kept the chill away. The television was playing an old episode of Have Gun, Will Travel. Richard Boone had just finished thumping a couple of mouthy young punks in a frontier bar. That was a world that made sense.

“You prick,” Sara fumed. “You selfish asshole. Pick up the goddamn phone.”

There was silence for ten seconds or so, then an abrupt deadness that had a sound of its own.

Monks swilled more vodka. She was absolutely right, he was a prick and a selfish asshole. But she was determined to nurture him, and he had already explained to her, as gently as he could, that if he encountered any nurturing just now he was going to kill somebody.

He was walking the perilous line of that somebody being himself.

The phone rang again a few minutes later. This time the voice was a man’s. Monks listened without interest, expecting it to be another reporter.

“Dr. Monks? This is Andrew Pietowski, with the FBI.”

Monks stiffened.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call ASAP,” Pietowski said. “There’s something important I’d like to discuss with you. Let me give you a couple of numbers where I can be reached.”

Monks heaved himself to his feet and walked unsteadily to the phone, getting it in time to interrupt Pietowski reading out the numbers.

“This is Monks,” he said.

“Doctor, glad you’re home. I don’t know if you remember me.”

“Yes,” Monks said. Pietowski was a Washington, D.C.-based domestic terrorism specialist who had followed the Calamity Jane murders from the beginning-a hefty man in his fifties with a big balding head, big nose, and big ears, a look that was reminiscent of former president Lyndon Johnson. He had flown to California immediately on learning that Freeboot might be involved. Pietowski listened more than he spoke, seeming to prefer staying in the background, but he had the kind of imposing presence that Monks had noticed.

“I’d like to drop by your place, but I thought I’d better call first,” Pietowski said. “I gather you, uh, had a run-in with some newspeople.”

“It was nothing personal. I never actually shot at anybody. I just wanted privacy.”

“I think they got that message.”

Monks braced himself and said, “Is this about Glenn?”

“No. Those results won’t be back for a few more days.”

He sagged with the miserable relief of bad news postponed.

Pietowski broke the silence. “Okay if I come on in?”

“Sure. How soon are we talking?”

“I’m at the foot of your driveway.”

Monks blinked. “I’m not exactly at my best right now.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

It was almost one A.M., he saw with vague surprise. He eyed the wreckage around him with a notion of a hasty cleanup, but decided there was no point in pretending. He poured another drink instead, and waited at the door for Pietowski.

Freeboot had gotten away clean, again. The sad and sordid truth was that the Bronco had, after all, been bugged. The FBI had found three devices, probably planted by Freeboot’s men while Monks had followed Marguerite on the beach, just as he had feared. Freeboot had known from the start that the FBI was coming in. The kidnaping and the agonizing drive to the camp had been a sham to torment Monks, and the FBI’s huge wasted effort, a way of insulting them. Freeboot probably had gone to the camp hours before Monks got there, and left the ear in the guitar case, with a voice-activated light.

Call my name out loud.

And then Freeboot had stayed in the forest long enough to stalk one of the recon agents, disarming him and beating him unconscious with his own rifle-a contemptuous message that he could easily have killed the man. He had worn a ski mask, bolstering the thought that he’d altered his appearance and didn’t want his new face seen. But his bare footprints were easy to identify. Dogs had followed them for two miles. After which, the prints had simply vanished.

Baskett and other agents had given Monks a thorough raking over the coals. They had finally conceded officially that he wasn’t to blame, but it was clear that they blamed him anyway. A lot of attention had focused on Glenn-how deeply he might have been involved in hacking computer information that was instrumental in the selection of the murder victims and facilitating the killings. The fact that Glenn, by all indications, was dead, did not figure in. He was still a criminal in their eyes, and the heavy weight of guilt by association had landed on Monks.

With Freeboot now linked to the Calamity Jane killings, the media furor had been explosive. After the FBI had tossed Monks away like a drained husk, satisfied that he had nothing more to give them, packs of journalists fell upon him. When he finally got to his home, bone weary and heartsick, a crowd of them was waiting.