‘Kiddo,’ Ben prompted. ‘You with us?’
‘Mom’s still not answering,’ Charley said. ‘You don’t think—’
‘No. I do not.’
‘You didn’t even hear what I was going to say.’
‘I just mean there’s no reason to worry about Mom.’ Ben pulled his tattered shirt back up over his bandaged shoulders. ‘She’s all the way down in Nebraska City. Hey. Look at me.’
Charley looked away instead, scraping the backs of his hands roughly across his overfilling eyes, clearly angry with himself for leaking.
‘I promise. Mom’s fine.’
‘How would you know?’
‘Because this has nothing to do with her.’
‘Then why isn’t she answering?’
‘Because she doesn’t have her phone,’ he said. ‘That’s all. You saw it on the counter before we left, right?’
‘No.’
Ben pointed to the prepaid in Charley’s hand. ‘Between us we’ve done a pretty good job of staking out her call list. The minute she sees this number, we won’t be able to shake her. Trust me.’
‘But who were those guys? Why are they after you?’ Charley glanced toward Wasserman in the corner as he plucked the twenty-dollar bill from Abe’s hand. ‘Who’s he?’
What had Ben thought? That he could hand the kid a phone and he’d be a five-year-old with no questions? But how on earth to explain?
Really.
How?
It was early afternoon by the time Lucius emerged from the Bergen Mercy Medical Center with a foot of gauze stuffed into the bloody hole in his shoulder, prescriptions for antibiotics and hydrocodone, wound-care instructions, a follow-up schedule, and repeated congratulations on his good fortune. Each doctor, nurse, and attending police official seemed to have their own anecdotal example of how much worse his injury might have been, had one thing been one way or another been another. Malcom Frost would have been surprised if any of them had observed a statistically significant number of chisel stabbings in their careers, but he couldn’t object to the general sentiment, being perhaps the best possible medicine for a soldier as prideful as Lucius Weatherbee: the indignity of repeated comparison to the common idiot.
Frost assumed charge of ground logistics himself, arranging a car service to transport them to the Omaha PD towing lot. There – with a little help from the same pollen-based hypnotic Frost had used to guide the detective through their interview back at the Middleton child’s house – the manager on duty released to them a heavily battered Lincoln Town Car with one working door, a well-cracked windshield, and industrial trash bags for passenger windows.
Fortunately, the vehicle’s satellite system remained intact.
Frost called one of the car’s various special features into service before leaving the lot, pressing a hidden button installed in the back of the steering wheel. Digital servo motors whined faintly, opening a concealed console. Frost dropped the buzzing cube from his pocket into its custom docking station; the system paired itself to the device without malfunction, illuminating the car’s factory display screen with a GPS map of the region.
‘Your bug’s still alive,’ Lucius observed sourly, referring to the cube’s unusual inhabitant. The big man looked miserable, slumped there in the passenger seat in his Bergen Mercy t-shirt and shoulder sling. ‘I guess that’s something.’
‘Alive and hungry,’ Frost said. ‘Though it’s not a bug, as I know you’re aware, which tempts one to interpret your tone as mockery. I’m willing to chalk that up to frustration on your part – possibly compounded by the commercial opioid you’ve chosen to ingest in favor of the cleaner, more effective, and generally superior tincture I personally offered to administer.’
‘Worm, I mean.’
‘Indeed.’ Olgoi-khorkhoi, to be precise. Commonly referred to by folklorists – along with those modern cryptozoologists who maintained hope of one day substantiating its existence once and for all – as the Mongolian Death Worm. ‘It woke up sometime during the night. Little squirmer’s been at it for hours now.’
‘Neat.’
‘There, Lucius, do you see? That’s an excellent example of the tone I was talking about.’
‘I just don’t see how a maggot in a paperweight helps us, that’s all.’
Frost kept one eye on the map display as he pulled cautiously into eastbound traffic. It was beneath decorum to be proceeding in the wobbling wreck the Lincoln had become. On the other hand, driving himself anywhere, in anything, had been beneath Frost’s personal station for years. Now was no time to stand on appearances.
‘First, a maggot is a larva,’ he said. ‘Larvae transform into entirely new physical beings. The Death Worm merely becomes a much bigger Death Worm.’
‘Like a twenty-pound kielbasa, I know. You told us already.’
‘Then you know it has to eat.’ The hatchling currently in Frost’s possession was no more than half an inch long, perhaps the girth of a pipe cleaner. Not so unlike a maggot after all, he supposed. It had been dormant inside the cube since the summer of 2007, hibernating peacefully in approximately two ounces of its native Gobi Desert sand. ‘To eat, it must find food. That’s how it helps us.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘We both know that’s untrue, Lucius. You just don’t believe a word of it. There’s a difference.’
‘Is there?’
Frost reached over to pat his surviving operative on the knee. ‘I can only encourage you to have faith.’
According to legend, the elusive Death Worm had earned its name by its ability to kill from a distance – either by electrocuting its victim through the ground, or by spitting a concentrated venom so overwhelmingly toxic that even grazing the outer flesh of a fully mature specimen could bring a large man to his swift, excruciating demise.
The legends were all true enough, of course, though trivial to Frost’s purpose at the moment. Instead, Frost relied on another well-known Death Worm characteristic – namely, its ability to locate its preferred food source: cynomorium songaricum, the Goyo plant.
It was the Goyo plant’s unique enzymatic profile which enabled a growing Death Worm to synthesize its powerful venom. The precursor toxins found in Goyo buds offered non-fatal uses as well, factoring prominently in Frost’s own blotting serum. Meanwhile, a hungry juvenile Death Worm possessed the remarkable sensory capacity to locate even the faintest trace of Goyo resin within a hundred-mile radius – even when the only available plant matter had already been ingested by another organism (such as, for example, a nebbishy twenty-something MBA student).
‘We still have juice left,’ Lucius pointed out. ‘Maybe it’s trying to find us.’
‘The vials are thoroughly hermetic,’ Frost said. ‘As are the darts.’
‘So’s the cube.’
‘Not precisely.’
In fact, the cube was perforated by an average 127 micropores per square centimeter, allowing sufficient air exchange to keep the organism inside alive – not that Lucius seemed particularly interested to know such facts. Nor was he likely to care about the cube’s unique alloy, which maintained long-term resistance to the wormlet’s corrosive secretions. Or the interior sensor panels that converted the animal’s natural bioelectric charge into binary signals. When paired with the predictive mapping software installed on the Lincoln’s on-board computer system, these signals extrapolated the worm’s movements into a kind of rough, inverted breadcrumb trail an experienced tracker could follow.
Of course, in human history to date, there existed only one experienced Khorkhoi Cubist: the inventor of the device, Malcom Frost himself. Maybe, after witnessing a successful tracking operation first-hand, Lucius might become a promising apprentice one day?
‘Hard pass,’ Lucius muttered.
‘Think about it,’ Frost said. ‘In the meantime, patience will show us the path.’
Lucius raised his Vicodin bottle and shook it like a baby rattle. ‘Few more of these and I’ll be pa
tient as a mofo.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Frost sighed. ‘But do keep your wits about you. There’s no telling what other woodworking tools a man like Middleton may be carrying by the time we catch up with him again.’
‘Hilarious. I am gonna murder that dude so hard.’
‘Lucius.’
‘For real.’
‘We mustn’t kill our bait. You know that.’
‘Bet that mud monster of yours can smell him just as good dead as alive.’
For mercy’s sake. ‘Let’s just wait and see how it all plays out then, would that be fair?’ Frost glanced at the map and put on his blinker; left-hand turn at the next traffic light. Northeast appeared to be their general bearing, according to the extrapolated vectors continually refreshing themselves across the display screen. ‘In the meantime, we still need the water carrier.’
‘Speaking of things I don’t get.’
‘Fortunately, I remain in command of the larger picture.’
‘And if the cops get to Middleton while we’re busy chasing Wasserman around?’
‘Then they’ll have done the heavy lifting for us.’ Frost ignored the looks the Lincoln drew from his fellow motorists, which ranged from mild amusement to outright scorn. ‘Although it’s my prediction that we still have the inside track.’
Lucius snorted. ‘If I was Wasserman, I’d be more than a hundred miles away by now, I can tell you that much.’
‘But you aren’t, and he isn’t.’ Frost tapped the map display with a finger. ‘The little squirmer doesn’t lie.’
Lucius rested his head and closed his eyes. ‘I’m gonna laugh my ass off when we end up at a botanical garden.’
‘Perhaps you’ll feel better after a nap.’
The trash bags duct-taped over the passenger windows flapped and billowed loudly next to Lucius’s head. ‘Damn sure hope so.’
I do, too, Frost thought. A little controlled insubordination may have been good for an injured man’s soul, but everything had its limits, including Frost’s patience. He’d already lost one good man today. It would be an undeniable shame to see the other one swallow an antibiotic capsule with a Death Worm hatchling hidden inside.
They were exceedingly difficult to come by, the worms.
After the docs rolled the unconscious kid back to where they kept all the machines, Saunders County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Curnow interviewed the injured party’s three remaining friends, then asked them one at a time to visit the hospital cafeteria, where he took individual statements from each. He also took down a number where he could follow up with Middleton, their curiously missing compatriot, and the vaguely exotic-looking gal with the distinguished profile. Glass.
Afterward, Tom checked in with Carla at dispatch. Then he gave his high school sweetheart a lift home in the cruiser.
They were twelve-odd miles from town when the call came over the radio: a regional Be On the Lookout alert for a 1980s-model GMC passenger van with unusually specific distinguishing features.
‘You gotta be kidding me,’ he said, immediately reaching for the handset.
Tiff turned in the shotgun seat, where she rode alongside the actual shotgun. She had yet to touch a clipper to her mums today, as she’d been planning all week to do. ‘Did they just describe—’
‘Those paintball idiots, yeah.’ Tom shook his head. ‘Fell out of a tree. Sure. And Middleton. Just got out of bed, he tells me. Just got out of bed and, what, ran into a weed whacker?’
‘His appearance was curious,’ Tiff agreed.
‘Those little shits lied to my face.’
‘You already knew they were lying, Tom. That’s why you rolled all the way to Douglas County just to talk with them.’
‘Family thing my fat hick ass.’
Tiff scowled at him. ‘Your hick ass is proportionate.’
Then her cell phone rang. Almost simultaneously, Carla from dispatch came over the radio. ‘Car Two, are you receiving? Tom?’
He keyed the squawker. ‘Car Two copy. Go ahead.’
‘What’s your location?’
‘Southwest on 6, crossing the river in ten. Dispatch, that black and gray GMC—’
‘Forget about the GMC. Is Tiff with you? Please tell me she’s with you. Or still in Omaha.’
Tom didn’t like this. The department’s new ‘clear language’ radio policy aside, he couldn’t remember a time in the past ten years he’d ever heard Carla use anybody’s first name over the air. ‘We’re together.’
‘Oh, thank god.’
‘En route to the firehouse.’
‘Good luck finding it.’
‘Say again?’ Tom glanced at his wife, who suddenly looked as stricken as Carla sounded. Tiff pointed to her phone and mouthed the name Roy. Referring to Roy Webber, with whom she split her on-call weekends.
‘Get there hot, Tom. State Patrol on scene. Silver Street barricaded at Twenty-fifth and Twenty-third. Adam Street barricaded at Twenty-fourth. And, um, be advised, Car Two?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I wasn’t kidding. It isn’t there anymore.’
‘Say again?’
‘The fire and rescue office. It’s a pile of bricks now. Break.’
Tom looked at the squawker in his hand. If he hadn’t known Carla Malvern since grade school, he’d have wondered if this was supposed to be some kind of a gag. Tiff was still on her phone, her eyes widening by the moment. ‘Roy, that just doesn’t make sense.’
Then Carla came crackling back: ‘Car Two, disregard last info. 10-34 ongoing at middle school football field. Multiple injuries reported, medical en route. Caller reports unidentified subject still on site, large build, probable male, possibly under the influence. God, Tom, that’s the Pee Wee football game …’
Charley stared at the carpet for a long time without speaking. Anabeth stepped over and put a hand on his shoulder. Still no response.
‘I know this all sounds like a joke,’ Ben said. ‘But I promise it isn’t.’
More silence. Then: ‘Like you promised Jack White was in town?’
‘I’m really sorry, kid, I know that was low. But I …’
‘Like you promised to come last Thanksgiving?’
‘Charley, I—’
‘Like you promised Mom you were gonna quit drinking?’
Ben felt a quick, sharp flash of indignation, followed immediately by shame-tingles all over. He sensed Anabeth watching him. Wasserman, too.
‘No,’ he said, almost wishing that Wasserman’s creature had finished him off back at the house. ‘Not like that, either.’
Charley stood abruptly, tossed Gordon’s prepaid phone on to the bed next to Ben, and stalked toward the door.
‘Hey.’ Ben rose with him, quickly buttoning his shirt. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to the van.’
‘Charley. Stop.’
Charley didn’t even pause. He unfastened the security chain and grabbed the doorknob.
‘I said stop. I know you’re pissed off, and I wouldn’t believe me, either. But—’
‘You said those guys were doing paintball at your place, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, but …’
Charley turned to face him, pulling the door open with him. ‘They were wearing helmet cams. I saw ’em in the back of the van still.’
For a moment, Ben could only stand and stare at his growing son. The cameras! Somehow this, too, had failed to cross his mind.
The cameras. If even one of the guys had been running video at the campsite this morning, they’d have caught Wasserman’s creature on film. Ben began to smile.
‘You,’ he said, ‘are a straight-up genius.’
‘Guess I got Mom’s brain, then.’
‘Uh oh,’ said Abe.
Ben had been so focused on this new idea about the forgotten GoPros in the back of the van – along with maybe grabbing Gun Guy’s gun while he was out there, just in case – that he hadn’t even noticed her moving close enough to stand beside him. Her hair an
d clothes still smelled like campfire smoke. He glanced at her.
Abe was staring past Charley, out the open door. Charley turned to follow her gaze, opening up Ben’s view as he did.
From where the three of them stood inside the room, they could see beyond the River Bend parking lot, across the highway, all the way to the Super 8 on the other side.
Which was now crawling with cops.
Red and blue lights flashed as figures in uniform trooped around the competing motel grounds. A small handful of them stood around the Vandura. One appeared to be working on the driver’s-side door with a slim jim.
‘Holy shit,’ Charley said.
Yep, Ben thought.
That about covered it.
SEVENTEEN
Councilman Glenn ‘Big Glenn’ Rademacher genuinely loved his neighbors, and he considered just about everyone a neighbor. Big-boned, big-hearted, big on your basic community ideals, he was the type of good-natured loudmouth you can find with his hand on a lever – or perhaps caught in the gears – somewhere in the workings of almost any Middle American small town.
Sure, he had his opinions. Along with a tendency toward minding other people’s business that had become, over the years, as well-developed as it was well-known. He probably spent more time telling half-true stories at the tavern than Shirley, his wife of forty-odd years, might have liked.
But he almost always laughed at himself before he laughed at others. Opinions aside, he dealt his cards from the top of the deck. He’d never been on the wrong end of Deputy Tom Curnow’s handcuffs, tavern or no tavern. And if you were looking for someone to pull you out of a ditch, Big Glenn Rademacher was your man.
In the end, whatever else you wanted to think or say about Glenn, one thing struck Tom as incontrovertible: the guy hadn’t deserved to be dead at sixty-two, fatally impaled on a football goalpost like a hog in a windbreaker on a blood-painted spit.
But that – inexplicably – was where they found him, midday Saturday, on the other side of Carla’s radio dispatch.
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