“They need my signature to transfer them over. And then make sure no one uses their designs, or anything derived from them.”
“Just say no. They can’t get away with it.”
“Sure they can. Don’t you understand how things work now? Either I sign, or I’m likely to have an accident. And then the patents go to my sole heir: Daddy.”
Slider was balancing a knife on his hand while he watched Donny and listened.
“Dad is getting a nice payday from Lecker out of the deal. Enough to stop working. Maybe enough to leave the country.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Donny. “That’s not how your dad works.”
“Sure it is,” she said, inserting wires into a bag of Titan Jelly. “He probably thinks it’s for the good of the country.”
“If what you’re telling me is true, then why are you helping them?”
“Because we need to draw them out,” said Slider.
“Huh?” said Donny.
“And because the people running this place have sold out the cause,” said Heather. “You talk about justice the same way they do. Like it’s something we can get from talking. But the creatures who have been murdered can’t do any talking. We need to get this planet back to equilibrium.”
“Using the same mode of ecocide your granddad used to get us into this mess?”
“This stuff works a lot different when you use it on a building instead of a forest,” said Heather.
“You wouldn’t do that,” said Donny. But as he looked at them, he knew they would.
“Maybe we’re just going to do what it takes to persuade Lecker to sign over Heather’s trust funds, instead of her signing over the patents. And then we’re going to finish what we started, before the lawyers and do-gooders and so-called peacekeepers got in the way.”
“How much time do we have before they get here, baby?” said Heather.
“A few hours,” answered Slider. “Terrell said he’d be here before sunup.”
“Where are you going?” said Donny.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” said Slider. He held up Donny’s Swissfōn. “What I do know is this thing will work wherever I take it.”
“Oh, man, don’t take that,” said Donny. “Come on.”
“You’re not going to be needing it where you’re going,” said Slider.
“Where’s that?” said Donny.
“Out there,” said Slider, pointing at the open window. “Where they were going to send her.”
“Where the wild things are,” said Heather.
“At least you’re giving me a chance,” said Donny.
They both laughed.
“You both should come with me. Back to Dallas.”
They both laughed harder.
“Slider, I am on the verge of getting the outcome you wanted in the case for your parents. For your parents and all the other victims. We will be able to make them pay.”
“With what?” said Slider. “With money?”
“Yeah,” said Donny. “Enough to shut down the company. Kill it, for all intents. And make them accountable. Names, dates, how and why. The truth will come out. We will publish their records, shame the perpetrators, and honor the victims. And hopefully prevent something like that from ever happening again.”
“Money won’t bring my parents back,” said Slider.
“Neither will killing people,” said Donny. “What if I told you I found where their bodies are?”
“You don’t know shit,” said Heather.
“Slider knows. Because he’s dumped bodies there himself.”
“What are you talking about now, Donny?” he answered.
“Out there by City Park. In that culvert.”
A weird look came over Slider’s face. The first time Donny had seen him look scared.
“What’s he talking about, Slider?”
“I’m talking about where they buried the President. Or what was left of him. In the same place as his victims.”
Slider looked at him with those crazy blue eyes, the tattoos dancing on his shirtless frame. Then he lifted up the cage Donny was in and tossed it over as hard as he could. It felt like wrecking a very small car.
“Don’t make all that noise!” said Heather.
“You’re lucky I don’t stick you,” said Slider, poking the knife through the bars. “It’s time, anyway.”
He came over, opened the door, and dragged Donny out by the tie around his neck, keeping the knife in his other hand.
“Sit here,” said Slider, pushing him up against the wall. From there he could see the guns lined up against the opposite wall, underneath the posters of Maxine Price and the red armadillo.
“I know you did it, Daryl,” said Donny.
“You don’t know shit, Donny.”
“Who helped you?”
“Fuck off.”
“I don’t blame you for doing it.”
“You have no idea, dude. You and your fucking mind tricks don’t work on me anymore.”
“All I ever tried to do was help you.”
“You tried. And you failed.”
“Where’s the body?”
“Why don’t you ask Heather’s daddy,” he said. “They’re probably keeping him there on display, in the middle of their mall church.”
“Come on,” said Donny.
“What’s this about, baby?” said Heather. “Is it true?”
Slider looked at her. Then he looked at Donny.
“You really want to know?” he said to Heather.
She nodded.
“I was on the squad that intercepted that fucker. And I helped deliver the sentence.”
“You really killed the President?” said Heather.
Slider nodded. “Me and four others. I’m the only one left. The rest all got out of the country. I had unfinished business. I needed to get you. But then the people who sent us to do the job decided we knew too much. And that’s the real reason I had to disappear. But that’s not his body. Because there is no body. We broke it down in acid. Dissolved it down to the bones. Now, stop asking about it. Leave it alone. And get the fuck out of here.”
“I can go?”
“You have to go. Out there, like I said. I’m sorry, Donny. That’s just how it is.”
Donny looked at them. Then he stood up, grimaced at the pain from being locked in the box, and looked out at the landscape through the window.
Black water, the silhouettes of lush trees, and the sound of predatory wild.
“Okay, Daryl,” said Donny. “But can you at least spare me some shoes?”
45
Donny walked, barefoot, dragging oversized sneakers through thigh-high water, waiting for when the pull on his leg was not the muck swallowing his feet, but a gator on his leg.
He had not been that high in many years, and the cocktail of intoxicants he had been enjoying from sundown to midnight mixed with the jolt of adrenaline he felt as he stepped out into it had a weird effect, simultaneously altering his senses and sharpening them. He felt the bite on his toe and the sting on his neck and the muggy sweat soaking through the T-shirt Slider had let him take. He heard the frogs laughing at him and wild dogs taking in his scent and the snakes moving his way, or maybe moving away. The moon was out, a new moon, but with a clear sky and just enough light that Donny swore he could see the glisten on the scales of the fish in the water, scattering at the sight and sound of his lumbering legs.
He saw other lights. Lights in motion, man-made. Trucks, he thought, before realizing they were boats, moving on the river, not too far away.
He saw the rooftops of submerged houses, like he and Marianne had seen earlier in the day. The water would be deeper. But maybe he could find shelter until the sun came up.
He was chest-deep when he saw the eyes on the waterline, reflecting his shape back at him in the moonlight.
He panicked.
He swam, a spaz-stroke wanting to be freestyle, splashing enough to wake up every creature anywher
e near that water. But it worked. He had never swum that fast in his life, but soon he was pulling himself up on the shingles of what must have been a very nice home before the world started to drown.
He scrambled up to the top, to the chimney. He grabbed onto the chimney like the mast of a sinking ship, panting, spewing swamp scum from his mouth and nose.
And then the gators came up to follow him. Three of them that Donny could see. Maybe more that he couldn’t.
First they circled around. There was a couple of feet between the roof edge and the waterline. Too far for an alligator to climb up.
Or so he would’ve liked to think. Because then the first one did just that, with its snout and those stubby little legs.
The teeth that hang outside the mouth, and the claws at the end of the toes that look like meat hooks.
Donny screamed, a banshee scream, a scream to scare off dragons and summon forgotten angels of protection.
It didn’t work. It looked like the gator was smiling. Those fucking jaws.
Donny looked down the chimney.
46
When Donny was a kid, before his parents split up, his family belonged to a country club. Dad liked to play golf, and Mom liked to play tennis. Donny liked to hang out at the pool, lie in the sun, and read books.
When he took a break and got in the water, one of the things Donny liked to do was see how long he could hold his breath at the bottom of the deep end. He got so good at it that he would freak out the lifeguards, to say nothing of the moms.
The lung capacity he developed from this weird, dorky pastime proved handy when he got to high school and college, long after he learned the only way he could get back in the club was as a caddy, which he did a few summers. His capacity for sucking down long bong hits became legend in certain circles. People were not as impressed with that particular talent when Donny got to law school.
A girl who actually kind of liked him once taped one of his answers to the professor in a second-year civil procedure class, and it became almost as famous, especially for the digressions about imaginary rules Donny invented as if that would make up for his inability to remember the real ones through the fog.
Maybe it was the mushrooms that had brought that girl’s face into Donny’s head as he came out of the fireplace into the underwater living room full of what his fuzzed-out eyes were sure were glow-in-the-dark catfish, waiting for the gator teeth to pull him back. He kept swimming, trying to remember her name, trying to remember what he had said, trying to find a way out of that house and into the open water.
It was the fish that showed him, as they tried to get away from him the same way he was trying to evade the gators.
Nature was helpful that way, if you paid attention.
So he followed them, as far as he could, until he knew he could no longer pretend to have gills.
And when he came up, he never knew he could be so happy to see concrete.
47
Donny followed the old elevated freeway up out of the water. He looked back for his predators, but saw only the moonlight on dark water.
His felt a weird tingle on his skin, like every hair on his body was dancing to try to keep whatever toxins were in that nasty water from finding their way through. He tried to ignore it. He tried to tell himself he hadn’t swallowed too much.
He scanned up ahead, seeing where the freeway came to an abrupt end in a mess of twisted rods and concrete crumble.
He looked off to the left, and saw solid ground. Another roadway coming up out of the water, this one up onto the soil and turf, which was mostly covering the old pavement.
And down the middle of that muddy trackway, he saw an animal in motion. A raccoon. It was carrying something. And then it disappeared, down into a hole.
No sign of the gators. Donny hung himself from the edge of the ruined overpass and dropped down onto the other road. His ankle lit up when he landed, and he lost his footing, curled in pain. Then he got up and walked over to where the animal had been.
There were more than one set of tracks in the mud. Mostly raccoon, recognizable from the opposable thumbs and the long little claws.
Donny had seen a lot of raccoon tracks in his life, especially as one who liked to fish in urban creeks. But he had never seen tracks that big.
And the smell. The smell of smoke. Like barbeque.
Donny looked around. The path was an old right-of-way that ran through this stretch of higher ground, parallel to the road. A natural gas pipeline sign was still there, with the number to call before digging. Apparently no one had told the raccoons, judging from the track that converged around an old valve box someone had left open.
Donny squatted down and peered into the hole. What he saw was a bigger space than he expected. A little cubed steel cave buried in the ground, big enough for a small work crew. Sticking out of one wall was something like a pilot light. A flare. That was lit. And around the flame were three raccoons. In the weird light, they seemed the size of seventh graders.
Even weirder, Donny could have sworn they were cooking food on sticks.
But as he rubbed his eyes to make sure it wasn’t the mushrooms, one of them noticed Donny, snarled, and screamed at him.
Those eyes stayed with him as he ran, trying to find the lights of the boats. The eyes, and the heads, which he could swear looked bigger than any raccoons he had ever seen.
48
Donny’s head was clear by the time the sun began to work its way up over the ragged skyline. It was Sunday, and his case wasn’t as dead as he had thought. But if he wasn’t on his way back to Dallas by the time the sun started to go back down, it would be.
Donny looked around to gather his bearings. It wasn’t hard to figure out where he was. On the river, way uptown, looking at the opposite bank and wondering if he could swim it. He also wasn’t far from Joyce’s. And Joyce had information he needed, and other things to answer for.
He cut in from the river along one of the side streets that fronted the park. Some of the houses were still occupied, and Donny saw an old woman out tending her wild garden.
He found the backside of the fence that surrounded Joyce’s place, the high fence that had kept the animals inside the zoo. The gate was locked, with a triple chain, which was odd in a community where all doors were usually open. He looked for Joyce or Sig back in there where the house was. But the only sign of people he saw was a truck, an old pickup. That was an even weirder thing to see, in the city that had banned cars. The french-fry smell told him it was one of those biodiesel conversions. It had an oversized camper top in the bed and a cargo trailer at the hitch.
The fence was steel, about ten feet high, only vertical bars. Not easily climbable, not without gecko feet or a simian athleticism Donny did not have. There was an old sign warning of high voltage, but he wasn’t buying it, and a tentative touch with his left pinky did not shock. He tried to climb it and fell on his ass twice, tearing his shirt the second time, before he got the idea to use one of the stubby trees that had grown up along the outside of the fence. That got him up there and over, at the cost of a couple more tears.
He walked to the house, up on the porch.
“Joyce?”
There was no one there. Not that he could see. But he smelled fresh-baked bread, and coffee.
He looked at the other path and decided to walk back down there toward the old zoo buildings. Maybe they were doing their morning chores.
Donny remembered the joke the pedicab operator made, about the big cats that come out at night. He didn’t believe it. At least not until he walked back in there and noticed for the first time how loud all the birds suddenly were. Alerting one another, and all the other creatures who knew how to interpret their signs, to Donny’s presence.
Donny looked around, and listened.
“Joyce!” He wanted to yell, but only had the nerve to whisper. There probably weren’t any zoo animals on the prowl. But Sig was around for sure, and he was probably more dangerous, and had even
better reasons to have it in for Donny than Slider. He decided to keep quiet.
He saw a shadow off in the near distance to his right. Something low to the ground, but big.
He decided to walk back to the house.
The kitchen door was open.
“Hello?” he said, just loud enough. There was no answer. No sound of anyone about.
He tore off a piece of bread and scarfed it down as he stepped into the study.
It was a small room, furnished with plush old furniture and thick drapes over all the windows. There were bookshelves, but not enough for all the books, many of which were piled on the floor. There was an old rifle leaned up against the wall. And even though all the exterior light had been blocked out, the room was glowing.
When he stepped into the room, he found the source: a small video monitor on the desk. The screen showed a dimly lit room. The bars in the background revealed it was one of the old cages, refurbished to look like something more humane than a place to imprison animals. There were someone’s things there. A couple of books. A notebook and pencils. Some postcards on the wall. A fighter jet. A map. A menagerie of animals.
On the right side of the frame was a door.
It opened.
Joyce walked in. She had a tray of food in one hand, and a Taser in the other. The gun was still holstered at her side.
From the shadows at the side of the room emerged a figure. Donny saw now there was a bed there, on which the figure had been lying.
It was a man. Donny expected to see Sig, but this was someone else. Middle-aged, wearing old coveralls. When he sat up, his bare feet glowed in the ambience of the surveillance feed.
It was President Mack.
49
Joyce set the food on the little table.
She had more food in a bag over her shoulder. Not people food.
The President looked at the food. Donny could smell the bread. The President could, too.
The President stood. He didn’t have his prosthetic arm anymore. He looked at the bag of food, picked it up with the one hand he had, and then poured the contents into a big metal bowl on the floor. He took some of the hot water from the tray Joyce had brought, and mixed it in.
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