Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “No. As long as you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay.” She smiled. He recalled that she was smiling a lot more nowadays, not the dry and sardonic smile she had formerly affected, but a real grin, from which light flared. “I’m actually real good.”

  Karp watched her walk out. Floating, yes. She had a bounce in her step that he had not noticed before. He hoped it was love, although personally he thought that Dan Heeney was not fit to tie the laces of her shoe. After he thought this, he had the good sense to laugh at himself.

  He stuffed a number of documents and scrawled-upon legal pads into a cardboard folder and walked over to the courthouse. There for the next several hours he consulted with Stan Hawes about their strategy for the Wayne Cade trial, which amounted to teaching the younger man how to prevail in a high-profile homicide prosecution without seeming to teach him anything. It was subtle and tiring work. Hawes was bright enough to understand he needed help, but he was also a competitive and politically ambitious young lawyer, and his mind was at least partially on the greasy pole rather than totally devoted to the case at hand. Karp had observed this in such lawyers before this. It pissed him off, and he could not afford to be pissed off just then.

  At three, they both went down to the courtroom to answer motions before Judge Bledsoe. Wayne Cade had a public defender, a man named Rob Sawyer. Sawyer had a new blue suit, a law degree nearly as old, and a light trace of acne on his cheeks. The motions were the usual pro formas: exclusion of evidence, deficiencies in the warrant, quash the indictment. Hawes answered them well enough, and Karp thought that Bledsoe would have no problem in deciding all of them in the state’s favor. While Hawes was up arguing, Karp noted that young Sawyer was having difficulty attracting his client’s attention. His client was more interested, seemingly, in Karp. Karp met his stare, which was predictably malevolent. Then Cade made a choking gesture and bared his teeth in a nasty grin. This was actually quite unusual. Karp had tried people who could eat Wayne Cade for lunch, and typically the really hard boys had no personal animus at all against the people whose job it was to put them in jail. Things were apparently different among the Cades. Karp rolled his eyes and looked somewhere else. He felt embarrassed for young Sawyer.

  After court, Hawes and Karp went back to Hawes’s office. Bledsoe had promised to rule the next day and had announced that, without objection, he wanted jury selection to begin the day after. He expected a speedy trial, with no obstructionism.

  At 5:32, they were just about to knock off and go get a bite to eat when they heard a series of popping noises coming from below.

  “Someone’s got firecrackers left over from the Fourth,” Hawes observed, and was startled when Karp leaped up and ran headlong from the room.

  * * *

  Dan Heeney had Emmylou Harris playing out of his computer speakers, “Sweet Dreams” the song. He was lying on his bed watching Lucy Karp lip-synch the song and play air-guitar accompaniment. That Lucy liked Emmylou Harris seemed to him the final benediction on the relationship. For her part, Lucy was not conscious of ever having heard Ms. Harris before arriving in West Virginia, being in the main a world-music sort of girl. She had decided, however, that country was actually world music from the United States. And she actually spent a good deal of time gyrating and lip-synching, in a dozen tongues, in the privacy of her room. That she was now doing it in front of a boy was to her mind a greater intimacy, almost, than getting naked.

  The song ended; he applauded; she took a modest bow.

  “Can you actually play anything?”

  “No, not a thing. My mom tried to teach me guitar—she’s good at it—but I could barely get through the first two bars of ‘Go Tell Aunt Rhody.’ I have perfect pitch, of course, but I could never figure out how to read music. A tragedy, huh?”

  “I can play the banjo.”

  “You can? Oh, play something!”

  “I might later, if you’re good. You know, you look a little like Emmylou Harris used to.”

  She sputtered out a startled laugh. “Oh, yeah, I get that all the time. People stop me in the street. Except for . . .” She grabbed up the CD and consulted the face thereon. “She has shining, perfectly straight raven locks and I have curly brown fuzz not unlike pubic hair. She has razor-sharp cheekbones; mine are barely visible. She has a cute little absolutely straight nose; I have a hideous contorted bassoon; she has lush red lips; I have thin pale objects that resemble stretched rubber bands reaching nearly to my ears. She has a broad, noble brow; mine slopes backward like that of early man. She has huge, lustrous dark eyes; mine are tiny and resemble dog poo in color. Aside from that, we could be twin sisters.” She grinned at him, put a hand on her hip, cocked it, and said, “You must be in love, me bucko.”

  He slid away from that one, saying, “I hate it when you dis yourself like that. You have unbelievably beautiful eyes.”

  She nodded and batted the mentioned units ostentatiously. “Yes, I do. It’s my pathetic one good feature, and I’m proud as Lucifer of them, God forgive me.” She flopped next to him on the bed.

  “Do you always tell the truth like that?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh. I never lie, but the truth is not for everyone. My mom says that a lot, when lying. But I think I’m beginning to see what she means.”

  “I like your mouth, too.”

  “Unfashionably slitlike though it is?”

  He was demonstrating how much he liked it when a sound came from just outside the door, from where the two mastiffs had been lying, facing away from each other like a pair of bookends. It came from both dogs, a kind of growling whine. Lucy jumped up, cold sweat breaking out on her face. Another sound now, tires on gravel, the roar of an engine.

  “Get the boys, Dan!”

  He got off the bed. “Why, what’s wrong?”

  She ran out of the room, out the front door, confirming what she had feared.

  She ran back to Dan’s doorway. “Get the boys! Go, now! Get them and hide in the woods!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s the Cades, a bunch of them. Go out the back!”

  “But what about—”

  “I have the dogs. Oh, please, just don’t stand there, for the love of Christ, go!”

  He found himself running out the back. Lucy said something to Magog, who dashed out after him. Lucy and Gog went out onto the porch. She sat in the rocker and placed the dog next to her, talking to him gently. He was whining continuously and his back hairs bristled.

  There were three of them in a dirty green Ford pickup truck. Someone she didn’t recognize was driving it. The two passengers were Wayne and Earl Cade.

  They parked at the foot of the driveway, where it joined the access road. It was twenty yards away, but the wind was right and she could hear what they were saying.

  The driver said, “Goddamnit, Wayne, we ain’t got time for this.”

  “Henry, you listen here. I’m gonna shoot that dog there, grab up the girl, and blow up that house. It won’t take but a minute. Just set here and I’ll be right back.”

  Wayne walked toward the house. He was walking slowly and carefully, she observed, with a somewhat bow-legged gait. He had a large revolver in his hand.

  He stopped in front of the porch steps. “Well, honey, here’s what’s gonna happen now. I’m gonna gut-shoot that dog of yourn, then I’m gonna take you and your dog back to my home place, and I’m gonna cook it on a slow fire and skin it while it’s still alive. Then I’m gonna—”

  “It’s not my dog,” she said.

  “What?”

  “No, this is my mother’s dog. That’s my dog.” She pointed.

  Wayne heard the sound of running claws behind him and a shout from Earl. He whipped the upper part of his body around to his right, his gun hand extended.

  Magog was already airborne, but easily made a slight midcourse correction. She knew Wayne from before, knew he was a bad actor who would not, for some reason, learn his lesson, and so when she clampe
d her jaws down on his forearm just behind the wrist, she gave him the full twenty-six hundred foot-pounds. The pistol went flying; so did Wayne. As the other two Cade boys scrabbled in the cab of the truck to grab their weapons, Lucy called the dogs to her and disappeared into the house.

  * * *

  Giancarlo had just caught a largemouth bass that must have weighed a pound and a half. He detached it from the hook and ran to call his brother, who he knew was sitting in the deer blind waiting for a target for the rat rifle. He approached the tulip tree where the blind was and was all set to shout when he heard heavy, running footsteps and the voices of men in loud conversation. He stopped and remained still, the fish held in his hand.

  Two men came around the curve of the trail. One held a shotgun, the other a pistol. Giancarlo heard Dan Heeney call his name from the direction of the pond. The men heard it, too. They looked up and saw Giancarlo. The man with the shotgun raised it and pointed it at him. Still clutching his fish, Giancarlo dived into the laurel. Earl fired both barrels.

  Up in the blind, Zak had seen this happen, and without thinking he laid the crosshairs of his scope on Earl Cade’s head and pulled the trigger.

  “Oww! Goddamnit! Oww!”

  “What in hell is wrong with you?” Henry Cade cried. His cousin Earl had dropped his shotgun and was doubled over holding his hand to the left side of his head.

  “Something bit me or stuck me. Goddamnit, that hurts!”

  “Lemme see it,” said Henry, and pushed Earl’s hand away. A small, round wound an inch above his left ear was bleeding slightly. Henry laughed. “Looks like a pellet hit from your own gun. Must’ve ricocheted off’ve somethin’ and hit you in the head.”

  “Ah, shit, Henry, that never happened to me before. How in hell could a thing like that happen?”

  “Well, you prob’ly never shot no little boy before neither,” said Henry sagely. “C’mon, let’s get ol’ Wayne put together and get shut of this place. I swear, between the two of you . . .”

  “We all’re still gonna blow up that house,” said Earl, kneeling down carefully to retrieve his shotgun.

  “Yeah, and you better be quick about it, ’cause I think I hear sirens.”

  * * *

  Magog sniffed him out in the laurel hell. When Lucy went in, following the dog, she found him lying on his back with his eyes closed. For a glad instant she thought that he was kidding, pretending to be asleep, but he did not stir at her voice or touch, and when she shrieked and clutched him to her, she found that he was all soaked with blood from the crown of his head to the backs of his knees.

  17

  HAVING BEEN MARRIED TO MARLENE Ciampi for a long time, Karp had been exposed to more small-arms fire than the average attorney. Thus he had known instantly that it was the popping not of fireworks coming from the direction of the jail but of automatic weapons; hence the sound of a jailbreak. Halfway down the stairway, this impression was confirmed by an explosion that shook the courthouse and brought a blizzard of plaster dust upon him as he raced along. When he arrived at the door that led from the courthouse to the jail proper, he paused. No shots. A sound of flowing water. Shouts. A thin cry for help. He went through, down the flight of stairs, and into the dark and smoky wreckage of what had once been the jail’s front desk and reception area. A figure approached through the gloom. Karp saw that it was a man wearing a blackened and torn county deputy’s uniform, one of the jail guards. Peagram?

  “Peagram! What happened?”

  The man stared at him uncomprehendingly. “Sheriff’s dead. They shot him dead.”

  The man swayed. Karp grabbed him before he fell and helped him sit against the wall.

  “Who shot him?”

  “They had machine guns. Sheriff come out with his pistol, told ’em to get outa his jail, and they just blew him away.” The man put his face in his hands and started to sob.

  Crashing noises. Through the murk poked a shotgun, followed by the comforting form of Trooper Blake, accompanied by a pair of McCullensburg volunteer firemen in yellow reefer coats. They moved around, looking for survivors, making a lot of noise.

  “What the hell happened?” Karp asked the trooper.

  “We don’t exactly know, sir. Some folks out there said it was the Cades. Three truckloads of them. I guess the prisoners are gone.”

  “That would be my bet. Where’s Captain Hendricks?”

  “Chasing a couple of their trucks, I think. I was in my cruiser when I heard the shots and the explosion, so I just took a look and headed for the smoke. One of the deputies told me that Captain grabbed up all the men he could find, troopers and detectives and all, and went off after two of the trucks. They were headed north out of town on 130, probably making for Burnt Peak.”

  Karp felt his gut wrench. “The other truck went east on 119, didn’t it?”

  “Yessir, but I don’t think anyone went after them. Almost all of our people are back on regular duty. We put it out on the radio—”

  “They’re after my daughter. Come on!”

  Karp ran out of the jail, sidestepping and stumbling over wreckage, passing a stream of firemen and paramedics coming in. When he reached the street entry, he was happy to find Blake right behind him, shotgun at high port. They pushed through the growing crowd to Blake’s cruiser and got in. Blake hit the lights and siren. In two minutes they were at the junction of 130 and 119, and Blake was screeching into a tight left turn, accelerating to ninety on the two-lane blacktop. Karp looked at his hands. They were filthy with plaster and soot. Blood, too, from Peagram’s uniform. They were shaking. From somewhere ahead came the boom of an explosion.

  They could see the column of dust and smoke through the trees as they sped up the access road in a shower of gravel. Karp leaped from the car while it was still rolling and ran toward the house. Half of it was gone, a tumble of smoking wreckage. The kitchen range sat scorched in a flower bed. The front door was lying flat on the porch. A piece of paper fluttered from a splinter of the shattered doorframe. Karp snatched it up and read: “Dad: We’re going to the hospital. All safe except GC, badly shot. Earl, Wayne, another Cade, first two wounded. L.”

  He read it twice more, but it kept saying the same thing.

  * * *

  Two pictures on the wall of the waiting room, one a print of a kitten hanging by its claws (“Hang in There, Baby!”) and the other the familiar Rockwell of a boy getting a needle in the butt. Cheery, but Karp was not cheered. The room was small, carpeted in blood-colored industrial, and furnished with plastic chairs, orange and white, a white couch in tatty vinyl, and a white Formica table, with two ragged People and a week-old local paper strewn on it. It was lit by three long fluorescents, one dim, one flickering. Karp was not a great believer in hell, but thought that, if it existed, hell might be like this.

  Zak was asleep in his arms, a fitful sleep from which he awoke often with a cry and looked wildly about. Then Karp tried to comfort him, unsuccessfully he knew, because the only real comfort would be to tell him that it had been a bad dream, that his brother was not being operated upon by unknown doctors in this mingy little hospital. Karp shifted his burden and looked at his watch. Eight thirty-five. The last time he’d looked, about an hour ago, it had been 8:28.

  He had made the call earlier. After he had passed the doleful news, blurted it out, there had been no curse, no cry of alarm, from his wife, just a silence so long that he thought that the line had gone dead. I’ll be there as soon as I can, she had said, and then the line really had gone dead. He wondered vaguely how long that would be, even if she left the Island immediately. The surgeon’s name was Small. Karp knew nothing about him; for example, that Small had lost his license for drunken slicing in another state. There wasn’t any time to find out. No one had come to talk to him or tell him what was going on. Not a Jewish doctor, either. Bigotry, he knew, but there it was. Lucy was gone, he did not know where; she had run out of the place after they had watched the draped, still, intubated figure of Giancarlo b
eing wheeled out of the ER toward the elevator. But he could guess.

  Every time the brushed-steel doors of the elevator across the hall slid open, he looked up. Those doors had swallowed his son and they were taking their time about giving him back, or producing some messenger from the medical gods in whose hands he lay; that would be good, too.

  He checked again. Eight thirty-seven.

  * * *

  Lucy was running along the street, Third Street, wiping the tears away every few strides. It was twelve blocks, she had been told, from the medical center to Holy Family. She didn’t trust herself to drive. Also her Toyota was smeared with blood, as she was herself; it was all over her hands and arms, and on her shirt and shorts. She’d never worn shorts into church before, a mark of respect, although she knew people came to church in anything nowadays. What does God care what you’re wearing? But they’d howl if the priest wore a skirt.

  Here was the church, a squat, sooty-brick building in an eclectic style, a little Gothic, a little Romanesque, a little Baroque, ill-assorted and ugly as nearly all Catholic parish churches in America were. It always made her a little sad that the organization that had sponsored the greatest architecture in Europe had given up on beauty in that department. The great front doors were for show, but a side entrance was open. She crossed herself with the water from the font and went inside.

  Dark and empty, lit by small sconces on the walls and by evening light coming through stained-glass windows, crudely done in sentimental nineteenth-century style. The Good Shepherd. The eponymous Family. A crucifixion, Christ taking a little nap in a somewhat uncomfortable position. It had been Vatican Two’d, however: the altar, a carved wooden table that looked as if it had been made for a coal baron’s dining room, was squarely in the center, with dark wooden chairs arranged around it on four sides. A Mary chapel; a St. Joseph chapel; a glass case with a dusty doll in it—the Infant of Prague. The sanctuary was where the old altar had been, in a deep niche in the east wall. She went there, bowing to the altar as she crossed the aisle.