“The Lamb is only mistaken about the date,” Louis muttered.
“The Lamb is a mistake,” Theresa said, joggling Elijah in her arms to quiet him.
“You—” Louis began heatedly, only to be silenced by Jess’s upraised hand.
“No more,” Jess said. “The new rule in the truck is, we just don’t talk. Quiet, everybody.”
For some time after that no more was said.
The road sloped downward. Lynn realized they were descending out of the mountains. The shadows across the pavement had lengthened, and the sky was no longer as bright as it had been. In one place a small furry animal stood on its hind legs at the side of the road to sniff the air for the coming of night. The day was slowly drawing to a close.
The last day of their lives?
Lynn shuddered at the thought. A surreptitious glance at Jess’s wrist revealed the time in digital numbers: 7:32 P.M.
A little less than thirteen and a half hours left.
Lynn felt herself begin to sweat.
A small green roadside sign flashed by. The truck was already flying past before Lynn registered what it said: KAMAS, 12 MILES.
Eight minutes later they were in the heart of town. It wasn’t much: a church, a used-car lot, a gas station, a Stop-and-Go market. A lot of green yards and neat, ranch-style homes. Everything, even the houses, looked deserted. Of course. It was Sunday night. In rural Utah. Everybody in this quiet town would be in church, Lynn realized.
Glancing at the small white clapboard church with its classic steeple and crowded parking lot, Lynn hesitated.
Even under these, the direst of circumstances, she discovered that she was squeamish about darting into a church full of people and breaking up the service by screaming her news.
“What we need is a phone,” Jess said.
A phone. Of course. Lynn looked around and pulled into the Stop-and-Go. A pay phone on the brick wall outside promised salvation.
“Anybody have a quarter?” Jess asked.
“You don’t need a quarter to dial nine-one-one.” Lynn slid out of the truck. Everybody else, even Louis, spilled out behind her.
“Lynn, honey, it’s about time you got this through your head: You’re not in Chicago anymore.” Jess came around the front of the truck toward her. “Out here in the wide open spaces you can’t just pick up any old pay phone and dial nine-one-one and get help. You have to have a quarter, and you have to actually punch in a number to get the police.”
Not prepared to just take his word for it, Lynn marched to the phone, picked up the receiver, and tried it. Jess was right. Without a quarter the phone wouldn’t work.
“Told ya,” Jess said. He was already heading inside the store. Lynn followed him.
It was only when she saw the plump, gray-haired woman behind the cash register eyeing Jess with growing alarm that she realized how disreputable he looked. Clad in jeans that by this time had been ripped almost to tatters, toes poking through holey, filthy socks, Jess was bare-chested, long-haired, and dirty, with that awful-looking wound in his shoulder.
If she’d been the clerk and he had walked up to her, she would have been scared of him herself.
“Ma’am, can I trouble you to use your phone?” he asked with his best ingratiating smile.
“Pay phone on the wall outside,” she replied, her manner abrupt as she returned his smile with a forbidding frown.
“There’s been an accident,” Lynn intervened, joining Jess at the counter so the woman would be reassured by her presence. “And we need to call the police. Please, may we use the phone?”
“What kind of accident?” the woman asked suspiciously. She looked Lynn over without softening. Her expression hardened into concrete as her gaze slid beyond Lynn to the rest of the party.
A quick glance back revealed Rory with her discolored forehead, Theresa in her tattered nightgown clutching a wailing baby, and cadaverous Louis.
Taken all together, Lynn realized, they were as grungy-looking a group as she personally had ever seen.
“A murder,” Jess said, reaching for the phone behind the counter as he fixed the clerk with an inimical stare. The clerk took a step backward, her face tightening, then reached downward and fumbled beneath the counter.
She came up with a nasty-looking pistol, which she pointed straight at Jess.
“Now you just hold it right there,” she said, one hand reaching beneath the counter again. Neither the gun nor her eyes ever wavered as she picked up the phone herself.
A quarter of an hour later the Stop-and-Go was aswarm with police.
Jess and Louis, hands cuffed behind them, sat in the back of one patrol car, while Lynn, Rory, and Theresa with Elijah were confined in the back of another. Lynn and Rory had their hands cuffed in front. Only Theresa was allowed to remain without handcuffs so that she could hold Elijah, who was howling in earnest now and whom the troopers clearly did not care to deal with.
The officers had been perfect gentlemen when they patted the women down. They were a little rougher on Louis and especially Jess. At one point Lynn thought a burly cop was going to clout Jess over the head with his nightstick. She had to admit, though, that Jess brought it on himself: He struggled when they cuffed him and cursed with furious vehemence between bouts of trying to explain to first one cop and then another about the coming end of the world. It didn’t help when Louis chimed in to second his claims.
If she didn’t know better, Lynn thought, she, too, would have marked them down as a pair of possibly dangerous mental cases.
Unfortunately, in this instance the dire warnings they spewed were all too true.
They wouldn’t listen to Lynn either. Or Rory. Or Theresa.
The troopers weren’t buying any part of so wild a tale. With their prisoners secured they took a few minutes to relax. Lynn stared at them through the window as they sipped cups of coffee and exchanged pleasantries with the clerk. As they were getting ready to get back in their cars, she hustled into the store and came back with a bottle of milk for Elijah.
One trooper opened the back door of the patrol car and handed the bottle to Theresa. The whole squad piled into their cars. Then, ignoring every single thing their irate captives said, they hauled them all off to jail.
40
IT WAS ELEVEN P.M. Lynn, Jess, Rory, Theresa with Elijah, and Louis were locked together in the single large holding cell in State Police Outpost Number 27. Jess had given up cursing and was now pacing. He paused from time to time to grip the bars at the front of the cell and glare at the indifferent officer on duty, who by now had heard their story at least a hundred times and ignored Jess’s demands to exercise his right to make a phone call at least a hundred more.
Lynn sat on one of the two mattressless bunks, her back against the concrete-block wall. Rory lay with her head in her mother’s lap, almost asleep. On the other bunk Theresa was curled up with a thankfully sleeping Elijah. Louis sat in a corner, his head in his hands.
In ten hours a dozen bombs would explode, killing millions and plunging the country into devastation.
They had managed the impossible, she and Jess, Lynn thought tiredly, escaping from a band of murderers and a flooded mine and making it across more than fifty miles of wilderness to sound the warning before it was too late.
And nobody believed them.
Under less dire circumstances it would have been downright comical.
The phone blared on the officer’s desk. He let it ring four times—he was sitting right beside it but must have held off answering to give the impression of being busy—before finally picking it up.
As he spoke into the receiver, then listened, his expression changed. He glanced at Jess, who was once again gripping the bars at the forefront of the cell with renewed interest.
“What? What is it?” Jess demanded.
Without answering, the officer replaced the receiver, stood up, and hurried to open the door that separated the holding area from the rest of the police station.
/> A brisk tap sounded on the door just as he reached it. The officer opened the door, and another man in police uniform—a higher-ranking officer from the way the first deferred to him—entered.
The door closed behind him.
“Listen, this is life or death—” Jess began desperately.
“We found the bodies,” the man said, interrupting. He looked Jess up and down. His gaze then slid over the other occupants of the cell as if weighing them. Feeling it on herself, Lynn had to fight the urge to flip him the bird.
Talk about your Keystone Kops. They almost deserved to be blown up.
“Then you realize that this is serious, and what I’m telling you is God’s honest truth,” Jess said. He gripped the bars with renewed urgency, his bare feet (he’d lost the remnants of his socks in the strip search that they had all endured) planted just slightly apart. Every muscle in his body seemed taut.
“Before you say anything else I want to caution you.” The man held up his hand to stop Jess’s words. He was about fifty, Lynn estimated, still reasonably lean but with a slight paunch that hung over his belt. His face was lined, and his salt-and-pepper hair was cut military-short. From the way he looked at Jess, he didn’t think much of long-haired, bare-chested men in torn jeans and bare feet.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You—”
“What?” Jess exploded, cutting him off. “I didn’t kill those people! Haven’t you idiots been listening to a single fucking thing I’ve said?”
Face hardening, the officer continued inexorably, while Jess pounded the flat of his hand against the bars in frustration. The other occupants of the cell, with the exception of Theresa and Elijah, both of whom were asleep, Watched this exchange with only tepid interest. If Rory and Louis felt the way she did, Lynn thought, they were too exhausted at the moment to care about anything but sleep. Fighting city hall was too much work.
If the world was destined to blow up in the morning, then so be it.
“Look, I told you the bodies were there, I told you the condition they were in, and I was right on the money, wasn’t I? Everything else I’ve told you is just as true. You don’t have to believe me. Just let me make one phone call. Just one, okay? Can you just at least do that?”
Both policemen looked at him with identical frowns. The younger officer stood a pace behind the older, mirroring him down to the hands clasped behind his back.
In other circumstances Lynn might have found that funny too.
“I’m not letting you out of that cell until we get your identity confirmed, and the phone won’t reach.”
“Then could you make the call for me? I’ll stand right here and tell you the number and everything to say. Please. Dammit, man, if you keep us in here much longer we’re all going to die. Do you have a family? They’re going to die. Do you hear what I’m saying? Half the freaking country is going to be blown to hell at nine in the morning!”
The older officer’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”
“No!” Jess rested his forehead against the bars in obvious despair. He looked up. “No, it’s not a threat. I told you I’m a former ATF agent. The man I want to call was my superior officer. What harm can it do to talk to him? If he tells you I’m a fucking nut, then I guess I am.”
“Jess,” Lynn said, her eyes flicking from Jess to the older man, whose face had tightened more with each profanity, “I think you’d do better if you didn’t swear at them.”
“I’ll say fucking pretty please if he’ll let me use the fucking phone,” Jess growled, flicking Lynn a fulminating glance over his shoulder.
He was too angry to contain himself, Lynn recognized. She didn’t much blame him. She had told them her name and that she was an anchorwoman for WMAQ in Chicago until she was blue in the face. They patently disbelieved her even while telling her they’d check it out.
In the morning.
There was no penetrating denseness like that.
“Is the call you want to place long-distance?” The officer was reaching for the phone, but he still looked undecided.
“Yes. Yes, it is. But I’ll pay for the call. You can put it on my credit card—hell, I don’t have it with me, and I don’t know the number. You can charge it to my home phone.”
“There’s no one there to verify the charges,” the officer said, his hand withdrawing just as it had been about to touch the receiver. “We already tried calling to see if we could get somebody down here to confirm your identity.”
Jess groaned. “Owen is still out with the damned tourists! I know—call collect. Ben will accept a collect call from me. Just try. Please.”
“What’s the number?” The officer picked up the receiver.
Gripping the bars so tightly his knuckles showed white, Jess told him.
The officer punched in the numbers, listened a moment, then spoke into the mouthpiece, presumably to the operator.
“I want to make this call collect.” He listened again, then glanced at Jess. “What name do you want to give?”
“My name, Jess Feldman.”
This information was repeated into the mouthpiece.
A minute passed, then another. The phone at the other end of the line was obviously not being picked up.
Despite having learned better by this time, Lynn felt herself getting tense all over again.
The officer’s face changed expression. Lynn realized that someone had answered.
“No, this is Commander Avery Wheeler of the Utah State Police. A man who claims he is Jess Feldman is in jail with us here and asked me to place this call for him. Who am I speaking to, please?”
He listened a moment. “Ben Terrell.” He glanced sideways at Jess. “And what is your job, please?”
A pause. Then Wheeler continued in a very different tone, “ATF Deputy Director. I see. Well, sir, I’m sorry I had to question you like that, but this fellow here’s involved in a mass murder and—”
“Ben,” Jess yelled. “Ben, tell him to let you talk to me. It’s urgent! Ben!”
Wheeler glared at Jess, then appeared to listen. With a sour expression he placed the receiver on the desk and picked up a set of keys.
“I’m going to let you out of there, and I’m going to let you talk to the man. But we’re going to be watching you real close,” he warned.
Jess was so eager to get to the phone that he didn’t even answer as Wheeler walked to the cell and unlocked the door.
Freed, Jess snatched up the phone and began to relate the whole convoluted story into the mouthpiece. Even with occasional interruptions and backtracking, presumably to answer questions, Jess was finished in under ten minutes.
“Louis, get over here,” Jess ordered, beckoning. Louis looked alarmed, but he got to his feet and shuffled over to the phone. He moved like a very old man. Lynn realized that, like all of them, he had endured a hard couple of days.
“Tell him about the bombs,” Jess instructed. “How many there are, and where they are. And how they’re going to be detonated.”
He handed Louis the receiver.
Lynn listened as Louis related the story one more time. Six nuclear bombs in six vital cities. Six lesser but still deadly bombs at six chemical and biological weapon-storage facilities around the country, one in Utah, another in Kentucky.…
Lynn glanced at the clock as Louis rattled off the list of places that would be blown off the map when the Lamb typed instructions into a computer at the appropriate time.
It was now 11:32 P.M.
A little less than nine and a half hours to go. Lynn’s pulse rate increased at the thought. Deliberately, she calmed herself down, chanting under her breath until her pulse was steady again.
Om …
There was no point in getting excited. Whatever happened from this point on was out of her hands.
Louis gave the phone back to Jess, who reiterated his belief in everything Louis had said.
“He wants
to talk to you again.” Jess held the receiver out to Wheeler, a smug expression on his face.
Jess was entitled to look like that, Lynn thought. The police had treated him like a cross between a lunatic and a criminal since they had first laid eyes on him.
Here he was trying to save the world, and no one was interested.
“You mean you think that whole cockamamy story is true?” Wheeler exclaimed into the receiver as Jess, grinning widely, gave Lynn a thumbs-up.
Lynn smiled at him. Sitting beside Lynn now, Rory glanced from Jess to her mother and back again with a frown. Lynn smiled at her too.
“Well, now,” Wheeler said, hanging up the phone. “That changes things a little, I guess. Deputy Director Terrell said you were one of the best agents he ever had working for him. He said he’d vouch for you all the way. That being the case I’m going to move you to more comfortable surroundings. I’m not letting you go, mind you, until I get more information and some verification, but I’m willing to transfer you to the county jail for the night. They have mattresses on their bunks, and they can get you a meal. We’ll get this all sorted out in the morning.”
“What?” Jess exploded, turning to stare at Wheeler.
“If we don’t get this taken care of tonight, there won’t be a morning,” Lynn said tiredly. She’d said it a thousand times before, and it never seemed to penetrate. She had no real expectation of it penetrating now.
Wheeler smiled at her, then at Jess. He seemed much friendlier now that he had spoken to Ben Terrell, if just as obdurate.
“Well, see, there’s a bunch of bodies up there on that mountain. I can’t just let you go. Even if you didn’t kill them you could be classified as material witnesses.”
“Okay.” Jess took a deep breath and looked around at Lynn. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Ben’s taking care of it. I guarantee you he’s on the horn right now, rounding up everybody short of the U.S. Marines and getting them up to Castle Rock, South Dakota, to stage a raid on that compound. They’ll yank Reverend Bob out of there before he knows what’s hit him.”
Heartbreaker Page 27