Кроха - Dedication

Sam could drive only short distances because of his left leg. In Molena Point, he hadn’t driven the van at all. Best to let people think he was more crippled than he was, to garner sympathy, make folks feel sorry for him. Now, moving across the country, he did drive, though it made his leg hurt. His increasing crankiness continued to irritate Tekla.

They didn’t stop in Atlanta; she wanted to move on through, head north into Georgia’s less populated backcountry. Freeway drivers were fast and brutal, so even she got nervous. They gassed up outside Canton, moved away on a narrower road into low hills, thick pine woods, and tacky mom-and-pop farms. “Home places,” the gas attendant called them when they asked for directions, home places, with an accent that made Arnold smirk. The rain had stopped, the weather hot and humid, further souring Sam’s mood.

With a local map they checked out a couple of shabby motels back in the hills at the edge of small manmade lakes. The only motels available in that backcountry, where people went to fish. Following the crooked roads they passed truck gardens and commercial chicken farms, long rows of rusted metal buildings that stunk of burned feathers and burned, dead chickens.

They holed up in a sleazy motel north of Jasper, the hick town where juror Meredith Wilson had moved to take care of her aging father. The weather had turned even more muggy, sticky and overcast with dark clouds hanging low. Sam said it was tornado weather. He was always imagining something, some disaster that never happened. Coming across country he’d grown more and more bad tempered, critical of her and of this whole plan, whining that they were going to get caught.

Well, they hadn’t even been stopped. Couple of glances from GHP black-and-whites on the highway, but with Arnold ducked down out of sight, and with her long blond hair, they sailed right on through.

Getting caught hadn’t been Sam’s complaint earlier, right after the trial. Those first two “accidents,” he’d been pretty high, seeing Herbert vindicated. “One more payback,” he’d say. Then when she’d pulled off the first Molena Point assaults without a hitch, and then Arnold did one while she watched from the shadows, then Sam had been really excited. He’d even got a kick out of the fake attacks. “They probably deserved it, anyway,” he’d said. And all along, he hadn’t had to do one damn bit of the legwork.

But now suddenly, running from the cops, he’d decided, this late in the game, that he didn’t like the program.

It was half his idea in the first place. More than half. It had been his rage as well as her own, at the twisted law, at the self-righteous courts. It was Sam’s anger, at that lawyer and the jurors, that’s what started them planning. He said, when Herbert was committed to die, “Those twelve lackeys just signed their death sentences. No one,” Sam said, “has the right to take Herbert’s life. Every one of them will pay, and pay hard.”

It was later that he started to get shaky. Though not until they were through Texas did he really get cold feet, when that trucker slowed and ran alongside them for half a mile, looking. But by that time they’d changed license plates, and she and Arnold sat in the back, both with long blond wigs; she thought that was funny. Arnold didn’t. But it was then that Sam, glancing up at the trucker, began to really whine.

Well, to hell with him. Now they were in Georgia she wasn’t stopping, not this late in the game. Now they had a motel just where she wanted it, a place to hole up near to Meredith Wilson, and now it was her turn to pay.

A thin, nervous creature, the Wilson woman, fidgeting in the jury box looking upset every time the coroner up there on the witness stand mentioned some gory aspect of his supposedly unbiased examination—the bastard putting Herbert in the worst light. Deliberately making the weaker jurors, like Wilson, squirm with unease.

She wished she’d taken care of those other three jurors that were still in San Francisco, they’d been just as bad. Once she was done here, maybe they’d go back, see to them, too. By that time, those three would stop jumping at every shadow on the street, would have let their guard down. Meanwhile, the Wilson woman would be a pleasure to terrify before she died.

She didn’t need to stage an accident, not back in these Georgia hills. This country was full of pot farmers and no-goods, it was nothing for someone to shoot a prowler. She read the papers, she’d looked at the statistics. People got shot all the time, raped, beat up. Half those guys were never caught, were friends with enough of the deputies to accidentally escape or to wiggle around the law.

Meredith Wilson lived only half a mile up the gravel road from the shoddy motel, and that was handy. Hot, hilly country running along both sides of the valley where the narrow lake lay. Mostly summer shacks down by the water, just the one old motel. It rented fishing poles and rowboats, and when Sam kept at her, whining not to do the Wilson woman but to move on and get away, when he’d kept at her, she rented poles for him and Arnold. Bought bait from the motel keeper and sent them out to the end of the dock to fish so maybe she could have a little peace.

Sam didn’t like that the sky was so heavy and dark. She told him, there was a little wind, if he’d be patient it would blow the clouds away. Leaving them occupied, she went back to the small, muggy room, pulled the blinds, lay down on the sagging bed, thinking about the moves she still had to make. The shifting of money to a nearby state, calls from the throwaway cell phone, another motel registration, North Carolina maybe, using one of the fake driver’s licenses and fake names. She needed to pay attention to the details. Well, she was good at that.

She was dozing off when the room darkened suddenly. The wind rose howling, the blind flapped, and the window glass warped into flashes and shadows. She hurried to look out but didn’t understand what she was seeing. The air was full of flying sticks, flying boards. Two windows broke nearly in her face. The wind hit her like a freight train, the force sent her reeling away, covering her eyes. Tree limbs, furniture, pieces of wood and glass hit her as she was flung against the far wall. Behind her another window exploded and the roof was gone: she watched the whole roof lift and drop in the lake. It settled on the water, hung up on the edge of the dock. Where the roof had been, dark, roiling sky boiled down. Where she’d glimpsed Arnold racing in, pushing Sam in the wheelchair, now there was only the great slab of roof covering the dock and torn lumber and crashing wind. When she turned, the wall behind her was gone. The motel office and the line of rooms were gone, torn apart into rubble. She ran, falling and stumbling, dodging flying debris.

33

The Damens’ patio was crowded with friends gathered belatedly to welcome the wanderers home from Alaska: the Greenlaws, and Ryan’s dad and Lindsey. The walled garden echoed softly with talk and laughter. Joe, Kit, and Pan wandered among the guests begging politely. It took only a soft paw and a gentle meow to receive an offering of Brie or pâté, as their human friends, drinks in hand, waited for the main course.

But soon Joe and Pan, growing impatient, leaped to the wall beside the barbecue, closer to the broiling salmon. Below them Kit prowled restlessly, her mind on Dulcie and Wilma at home alone missing the party in their patient deference to the unborn kittens. Even Joe Grey, though he sat greedily licking his whiskers, had not liked leaving his lady.

The backyard of Clyde’s original bachelor cottage had once been a depressing expanse of dry grass and weeds that Clyde had euphemistically called the back lawn. Ryan’s description had been less endearing. Under her imaginative design, and with a good crew, she had transformed the half-dead patch into a charming and private retreat. The tall white stucco walls offered privacy from prying neighbors, and cut the sea wind. The brick paving was dappled with leafy shadows from the young maple tree she had planted, and was edged by raised planters now bright with the last of the winter cyclamens. Beneath the trellis that shaded the barbecue, hickory coals glowed where Ryan and her dad stood broiling the big salmon that Mike had split down the center and laid on foil.