by Jen Blood
“So, let’s have it,” he said. “Top twenty-four records of all time, you two. Don’t think, just go.”
Juarez started to speak. “Don’t let him bait you,” I said. “It’s a trick. You start listing your favorite records of all time, and pretty soon you’re in a lengthy debate over popular music and the decline of civilization and whether Frank Zappa could kick Tom Waits’ ass in a fight.”
“I resent that,” Diggs said.
“But you don’t deny it,” I returned.
“Not completely.”
I turned the music back up. We drove on. Shortly thereafter, Juarez stopped the SUV and a bright white light moved toward us. It was raining outside. I’d been lulled into a kind of trance state between the music, the rhythm of the windshield wipers, and my own exhaustion, but the white light brought me out of that. A man in fatigues and a rain poncho appeared, rifle at his side.
He stopped at Juarez’s window and shined a MagLite inside.
“ID, please?” he asked. He lowered his light seconds before my retinas burst into flame.
Juarez handed over his badge. “Special Agent Jack Juarez. What’s the status?”
The man grimaced. He was early forties, clean cut, military posture. “They took out another cell tower—there’s still some reception, but we may need to switch to sat coms before the night’s out. Slippery bastards. Whoever they are, these sons of bitches are organized: they know the countryside a whole lot better than we do, and somehow or other they’re having no trouble getting around us. We’ve got people covering every road in or out of town, but it’s a lot of territory. Looks like it’s more widespread than we thought, too—maybe the whole county.”
“Thanks for all you’re doing,” Juarez said. He took his ID back. “Be careful—I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
“Agreed,” the soldier said. “And you watch yourself, too.”
The night was taking on a distinctly surreal quality.
“Can I ask you a question?” Diggs asked after we’d been on the road for a few minutes.
Juarez nodded. “Of course.”
“How the hell is this happening? I mean… What about the Patriot Act? Wire tapping and satellite surveillance and all the rest—isn’t that specifically to guard against something like this? Something this organized, shouldn’t there have been some chatter?”
“We’ve been hearing some rumblings recently about something happening in this region,” Juarez said. He didn’t seem to take offense to the question. “Allie—Agent Blaze—has been following Barnel’s activities for a while. But there’s never been anything to suggest a plan of this magnitude. Someone new must have come on the scene, because we’ve watched all the old players. No one is sophisticated enough for something like this.”
“But you don’t have any idea who this someone might be?” I asked.
Juarez shook his head. “I welcome any suggestions.”
I had none.
22:00:06
By two a.m., the rain was coming down in sheets and Crazy Jake was just kicking off The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East. Apparently, Jake wasn’t a fan of anything recorded after 1975. The wind blew hard enough to take down branches and blow wayward woodland creatures hither and yon. Diggs, Juarez, and I were all wide awake now, bouncing between the police scanner and WKRO as Diggs directed us along deserted backroads.
When we were still about half an hour from our destination, I saw flames up ahead. Juarez slowed down. In a field to our right, someone had erected and torched a giant cross—upside down, of course. They were nothing if not consistent. Juarez called in his location and pulled over.
“You know whose house this is?” he asked Diggs.
“When I lived here, it belonged to a guy named Dickie Johnson.” Clearly it wasn’t the time for jokes, but still… “He cooked meth in there last I knew. Has half a dozen kids. Not exactly a pillar of society.”
Juarez nodded, his hand already on the door handle. I grabbed his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“I need to go in and check on everyone. Evacuate the place. If that’s a meth lab, a fire that close to the house could kill everyone in there.”
“Shouldn’t you wait for backup?” I had no idea when I’d become the voice of reason in this trio, but I wasn’t loving it.
“I don’t know when they’ll get here. We’ve got people spread all over the county at this point. I’ll be careful.”
Diggs got out while Juarez and I were arguing. I followed.
“I’m not sitting here in the truck while you guys get blown up,” I said. “Besides which, if there are a bunch of kids in there, you’ll need help getting them out.”
“Yeah,” Diggs agreed. “Haven’t you heard? Kids love Solomon.”
I couldn’t even summon a proper glare. Juarez took the lead, with Diggs close behind and me bringing up the rear.
The cross was burning only about ten feet from the house—which wasn’t so much a house as a westward-leaning shack built on a hillside. The smell of gasoline fumes was strong in the air. A hound dog was chained outside, barking his head off at us. Beer cans and toys littered the yard. A garbage can had toppled over and animals had gotten into the bags, leaving soggy wads of trash drowning in the mud around us.
Juarez ordered us back behind a rusted-out car with no tires while he knocked on the door. I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t have his gun drawn, until I realized any spark from firing could send the whole place sky high. As realizations go, it wasn’t a heartening one. I realized I wasn’t breathing. Seconds later, he pushed the door open. Diggs crouched beside me in the rain. He didn’t appear to be breathing, either. Finally, after I lost just under a decade of my life, Juarez reappeared at the door and waved us inside.
The shack smelled like a heady combination of backed-up sewer, chemicals, stale cigarette smoke, and beer. Dishes were stacked high in the sink. Three fly strips hung from the ceiling, the most recent victim still buzzing as it tried to free itself from the glue.
I stopped in front of the refrigerator. A picture from a Dora the Explorer coloring book was held in place with a magnet advertising towing services for a local garage. The picture was colored in with precision—not a single mark outside the lines. At the top, written in a child’s hand, were the words:
To Daddy
Love Megan
I stared at the picture for a long time. My eyes burned. Juarez came over, took one look at the picture, and guided me away with his hand at my elbow.
“No one’s here,” he said.
“You think they were taken?”
“I don’t know—but they’re gone now. The fire crew should be along in five. I just checked in.”
“What about the dog?”
He looked at me blankly.
“There’s a dog outside, chained up. Is there somewhere we can take him?” I turned to Diggs.
“He’s better off here right now than the pound,” Diggs said. “We’ll leave him some food and water. It looks like he’s got shelter out there—we can check on him again tomorrow.”
I tried to think of an alternative.
I couldn’t.
We repeated the same procedure at another shack in the woods just down the road, with the same results: no one home, no indication whether the occupants had been hijacked or had taken off on their own.
The third time, Diggs spotted the cross first. “Shit,” he said under his breath, just loud enough for us to hear.
Juarez pulled over. This place was different from the others, surrounded on all sides by sturdy steel fencing, topped by a line of barbed wire. We were deep in the woods, the house barely visible from the road.
“What is this?” Juarez asked.
“A clinic,” Diggs said. He got out without elaborating. He didn’t have to. In this area, I was guessing abortion clinics didn’t exactly hang a neon sign out front.
The gate leading in was closed and locked, but the cross was burning on the othe
r side—which meant clearly someone had gotten through.
“There’s another way in around back,” Diggs said over his shoulder, already on his way. Juarez got out his flashlight and we followed Diggs into the woods, traveling along the fence line.
It took twenty minutes, traveling through dense brush and half-obscured trails before he finally found what he was looking for. There was a gap maybe a foot wide, a creek running right through.
“The woman who runs the place is named Sally Woodruff,” Diggs said. “She uses this when she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s gone.”
I looked at him quizzically.
“She’s not real popular around here—tends to get in trouble when she leaves the property, so she tries to fly under the radar.”
Right.
The air was cool, rain falling a little less ferociously now. I followed the fellas through the creek to the other side, barely registering the ice water seeping into my sneakers.
Diggs didn’t bother waiting for us once we were through, instead loping across the open yard toward a pretty, two-story brick house. Gardens that I suspected had been well tended were now in shambles, an arbor torn down, flowers trampled. A cherub that had obviously once topped the antique fountain at the head of those gardens had been knocked off. It lay in a pool of muddy standing water, one wing broken.
The cross continued to burn, the flames deep orange against the night sky.
The front door of the house stood open. We followed Diggs inside, and were greeted with chaos: furniture thrown, spray-painted epithets on the walls, more inverted crosses as far as the eye could see.
“She left,” Diggs said. He sounded relieved.
“How can you be sure?” I asked.
“Sally has dogs—she rescues pit bulls. Has at least half a dozen of them. If they’re not here, it’s because she took them and ran before anyone got here.”
He shook his head, running his hand through his hair. I tried to think of something comforting to say, but came up with nothing. It was five a.m. According to Barnel’s timetable, we had nineteen hours left until “judgment.” I wasn’t sure any of us were prepared to deal with whatever his followers had in store for those nineteen hours.
18:46:02
We stopped at the Durhams’ after Sally Woodruff’s place. Morning was just breaking, gray and drizzling. It felt like the night had gone on for years. I lowered my visor and looked in the vanity mirror, watching as Diggs stared out the window, his forehead tipped against the glass. I tried to imagine the kind of sanctuary the Durhams must have represented for him—a teenage boy whose parents had both as much as told him he’d ruined their lives with one stupid, disastrous mistake.
Given his background, I could understand why it might be appealing for him to disappear here for those five years when he’d married Ashley. Try to start a new life as an official member of the Durham clan.
Juarez stopped the car and cleared his throat. Diggs looked up. I snapped my vanity mirror closed again.
“We’ll just run in and check on them, and get our stuff,” Diggs said.
“Go ahead,” Juarez said, with a nod that included both of us. “I’ll wait.”
Einstein greeted me at the door with a kind of subdued, anxious enthusiasm—like he was well aware the world was falling apart around our ears, and he didn’t appreciate being sidelined during all the action.
Mae was on the couch in the sitting room, surrounded by candles. Ida slept with her head in her mother’s lap, her pale blonde hair hiding her face, while Mae thumbed through old photo albums. She put her finger to her lips when we came in.
“We just wanted to check on you,” Diggs whispered. He looked so guilty you would have thought he’d personally engineered this whole plot himself. Mae nodded to the photos in her lap.
“I’ve been looking over some things,” she whispered. “We had a lot of good times over the years, didn’t we?”
Diggs nodded, mute. Mae put her hand over his and squeezed. “This wasn’t your fault, darlin’,” she said softly. At the words, Diggs swallowed convulsively. A good stiff breeze and I expected the whole room to dissolve into tears. “You don’t listen to anything I said—you were lookin’ out for my boy, the way you’ve always done. That’s it.”
He kissed the top of her head. “We’ll get him back, Mae.”
“I know,” she said. Something about the hollow way she said it, though, made me think she didn’t believe him. “I’m gonna pack up the kids and move on over to Ashley’s as soon as everybody’s up, at least till this is over. It’s not good for them, me rattling around the house like this.”
“What about Rick?” Diggs asked.
“Sleepin’,” Mae said. “That boy can sleep through anything. Always could. Danny was always restless, colicky, always after somethin’. Rick never seemed to need anything. Danny needed the world.”
It felt like she wasn’t even talking to us anymore, gazing at the photos of a life she’d lost in the blink of an eye. Diggs and I stood there awkwardly for a minute more before we said our goodbyes, and went upstairs together to pack the rest of our things.
18:00:02
The war room looked much more warrish when we got there at six o’clock that morning. For one thing, Blaze had moved from the tiny room in the back of the police station to a classroom at the local elementary school, now being powered by generators. The kids’ desks had been moved out to make way for actual, grown up replacements. New computers and a dozen agents filled the space. In front of the chalkboard and a map of the U.S. was Blaze’s nifty super-computer.
“Wait in the hall, please,” she said to Diggs and me as soon as we crossed the threshold. She looked tired. And very pissed off.
We did as she ordered, seated in two of those god awful student desk/chair combo torture deals, beside a trophy case and a mural of dancing tigers. I had no idea why the tigers were dancing. Maybe they were excited about the end of the world.
Einstein took all of it in stride, seemingly just happy to be back under my feet again. A minute or two into our wait, however, he was up again, whining anxiously. Buddy Holloway came around the corner and Stein dashed after him like they were old friends, whimpering ecstatically. Another two seconds and it became clear that Buddy’s appearance had nothing to do with my pup’s warm reception.
Grace, the Burketts’ golden retriever, appeared a few steps behind Buddy. Her tail was down and her head was bandaged. She looked miserable. Buddy waved to us; he didn’t look all that happy himself. Einstein trotted over and gave Grace a perfunctory butt sniff before he very gently bumped against her side and licked her muzzle.
“Looks like you found a friend,” Diggs said to Buddy.
The deputy scowled. “I didn’t mean to, believe me. The dang vet closed his office, and nobody was around to take her. Otherwise they would’a taken her to the pound, and like as not she would’a been put down before the end of the day. My wife’ll kill me, though. We’ve got a little one on the way and two dogs in the house already—I’ll be sleepin’ with ’em if I bring Gracie here home.”
“I can watch her, if you want,” I said, long before I really had a chance to think it over. Buddy looked like he’d kiss me.
“You sure? That’d sure be a load off my mind.”
“What’s one more? Though just for a few days,” I qualified. “Assuming the world doesn’t end at midnight, we’ll need to find her a permanent home. One that’s not mine.”
“Sure thing,” Buddy agreed. He eyed the war room. “How’s everything goin’ in there?”
“Not sure,” Diggs said. “We haven’t made it inside yet. What’s the status on the DQ bombing? Any news?”
“Two dead. About twenty-plus injured. No damage beyond the Dairy Queen and…well, the sheriff’s van, of course. Looks like he used a few homemade Malatov cocktails. Had some explosives inside his car, too.” He shook his head. He looked as tired as I felt. “I still can’t believe he’s gone. And I sure can’t believe th
e way he went.”
Blaze opened the door then and greeted Buddy with a perfunctory nod. “You mind giving me a few minutes, Deputy? Go on in and find a seat—I’ll be in shortly to brief everyone.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said quickly and stepped past her. I had a feeling Diggs wasn’t getting off so easily.
Blaze nodded to our torture chairs. “Have a seat.”
We sat. The dogs settled at our feet and Blaze walked down the hallway until she found a normal chair and carried it over. She set it facing Diggs.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Few stitches. Nothing major.”
“That’s good,” she said. She looked at me.
“I’m fine,” I said before she could ask.
“Excellent. I heard what you two did after the explosion—how you helped getting people to safety. Well done.”
“Thanks,” Diggs said. “It was mostly Solomon, though—”
“I’m not finished,” Blaze said. Her eyes never left Diggs’. It was getting damned uncomfortable in that hallway.
“This worked out, in the sense that you’re both alive, and you apparently were not the motive behind Jennings’ attack. But, if you ever ditch me again, I will put that cute little ass of yours in jail faster than you can say ‘prison bitch.’”
“I didn’t—” Diggs began.
“Still not done,” she said shortly. “Make no mistake, Mr. Diggins: I believe these people will come after you. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. But I’m not just here to protect you; I’m here to stop a plot that as far as we know could kill dozens, if not hundreds.
“I know exactly what you and your little girlfriend here pulled on Agent Juarez in Canada over the summer. That will not happen here. When I tell you to do something, I want it done. And you two can roll your eyes and make snide comments all you want—I’m here to do a job. I’ll do everything in my power to see that you and everyone here makes it through this. But if that doesn’t happen, it sure as hell is not gonna be because you refused to follow basic instructions from me regarding this investigation.”