“That’s not a plan. That’s a bunch of serious felonies.”
“Plan B is the one where we sit on our asses watching Colt put a puppet into the Oval Office in a series of incredibly unlikely landslide victories.”
“I prefer Plan A,” said Lovecraft.
“Only ’cause Plan B sucks so bad,” said Harrelson.
“Seriously, man, are you in?” Carter asked Harrelson. “It’s fun pretending to be the Scooby Gang while there’s beer on the table, but we’re going to have to ante up on this, and soon. Colt’s pissed off with me, and he will have another try at offing me. Nothing is more certain. I’m not going to give him the chance.”
“Slow down, cowboy.” Harrelson leaned back in his seat. “When are we talking about?”
Carter and Lovecraft exchanged glances. “Tomorrow,” she said.
“In broad daylight?”
“Night sure as hell won’t work to our advantage. Them, I’m pretty sure it will.”
“‘Our’?” Harrelson gave her a hard look. “Ma’am, there’s a chance it’s going to get messy.”
Lovecraft returned the hard look with a few percent interest. “And?”
Harrelson shot Carter a glance, but he was staying out of this one. Harrelson tried to find a way to put it delicately. “There may be trouble. Anybody goes in there needs to know how to handle a gun. Do you?”
Lovecraft angled her head back until she was looking at Harrelson down her nose. “I trained as a librarian, and I run a bookstore. Fucking right I can use a gun.”
“Seriously?” asked Carter, surprised despite himself.
“There’s a Mossberg 930 with a folding stock under the store counter. Never had to use it in anger, but I trained to use it five years ago after a guy came in and got … fresh. Mace got me out of trouble that time, but it was close. So, yeah, a shotgun. I retrain every year. I know my way around it. I even reorganized the shelving, so if I have to engage somebody between the counter and the door, only the political autobiographies are in danger and who gives a fuck about those?”
Harrelson nodded, impressed. “Library school sounds a bunch more two-fisted than I’d thought.”
Carter thought back to when he’d been listening in on Colt’s conversation with her, while pretending to browse the shelves. He’d actually noticed the block of political memoirs and thought at the time that they seemed out of place. That they had been placed like that so they could be sacrificed if necessary while Lovecraft was laying down 12-gauge fire from behind the counter was a sobering realization.
“Holy shit,” he said quietly.
“Looking pale there,” said Lovecraft. “Better get in some more drinks.”
Chapter 23
THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS
They were back at the apartment over the bookstore, and they were looking at guns. Lots of guns.
“Holy shit,” Carter said quietly, for the second time that evening.
“Thinking of opening a gun store, Detective?” asked Lovecraft. She was sitting with the Mossberg across her lap, cleaning it. By her legs was a bag containing its cleaning kit and some accessories. Carter could see a sling strap; then Harrelson craned over to look in the bag and said, “Is that a tactical sight? Sweet.”
Lovecraft fished in the bag and produced a short length of steel tube. “And a two-shell magazine extension. Never needed it for anything but training.” She started fitting it.
Carter returned his attention to the odd collection of weapons Harrelson had brought in a large black duffel. He knew it wasn’t uncommon for cops to occasionally misappropriate weapons found on the job, but this was altogether too wholesale an array for that. “Where did these come from?”
“Some half-assed ‘Kill the President to Protect the Constitution’ bunch of morons. This is nowhere near the amount of firepower they had. We did a combined operation with the FBI and cleaned them out pretty quickly. They were no real threat; just a shitload of weapons and jerking off to a fuckwit manifesto they’d written on Big Chief writing tablets. There was so much evidence we ended up just sticking it into any car with an empty trunk. I didn’t put any in mine, but somebody did and didn’t tell me. A week later, I pop my trunk and there’s this survivalist’s party favor sitting there looking at me.
“I shoulda handed it in, obviously. But I didn’t, and nobody said anything.”
“Are they on record?” Carter picked up a Beretta, thought better of it, and put it back down.
“Nope. All brand-new. Still grease on a lot of it, and the serials aren’t in the system. They’re clean.”
The weapons certainly looked new. The Beretta Carter had examined was a Pico .380, a relatively recent release. He took it up again, and nodded. It was time he accepted that they were well outside the law with what they were planning, and that he should just get on with it. “Okay. Okay,” he said to himself. He offered the pistol to Lovecraft. “How are you with pistols?”
“I’ve fired on a range with one, but that was a long time ago.” She regarded the pistol with suspicion. “Kind of small, isn’t it? I’m happy with my shotgun.”
“You’ll need a backup weapon. The Mossberg takes, what? Seven in the tube and one in the chamber?”
“Nine in the tube,” said Lovecraft, tapping the magazine extension under the barrel.
“So ten shells, but it’s a semiauto. You can get through ten faster than you might think in combat. You run dry and there’s still trouble in the offing, you might not have time to reload.” He offered her the pistol again. “Take it. It’s a good gun.”
She accepted it pragmatically rather than gracefully. “It’s so thin.”
“Compared to that bazooka of yours, everything looks thin,” said Harrelson. “There’s a couple of spare mags in the bag and a box of Fiocchi Extrema hollow points. They’re good rounds. You can fuck somebody up really good with those things.”
She examined the resin frame below the metal slide. “It says here I should read the manual before use.” She looked meaningfully at Harrelson.
“Gee, I’m sorry,” he said with no sincerity whatsoever. “The bag of illegal firearms came without documentation. Whatever was I thinking?”
She smiled and put the pistol to one side. “I’m going to need a holster.”
“We’ll pick one up in the morning.”
In the morning. In the morning, they would go to a gun store, chat up the guy behind the counter, discuss the practicalities of holsters, joke, make some purchases, say good-bye to the guy behind the counter, and then later that same day, chances were that they would use those purchases in the commission of multiple homicides.
It was a sobering thought. Carter found a bottle of wine and some beer in his fridge to reverse the thought’s effect.
* * *
Colt was awoken at two in the morning by a phone call. He fumbled for his phone in the darkness of his bedroom, despite a small voice of remembrance saying, But didn’t you turn it off? But it was ringing, so obviously he hadn’t.
He checked the display and saw the number was withheld. The last call he’d had like that was from Carter. This one surely was, too. Colt hesitated, thinking, the phone thrumming in his fingers. He wasn’t sure what to do about Carter. He was certainly a nuisance, and maybe even a threat, but the way he’d escaped at least made him an interesting threat. Colt was beginning to treasure interesting things. Since the cube had shown him that so much he had previously regarded in life as interesting was instead merely flawed, he had found that his pleasures in life were decreasing as his powers increased. He had been faced with the specter of an all-consuming ennui if he had carried on as he had been doing, with only an eye to simple temporal pleasures.
Carter had inadvertently helped him away from that path. He had traced Carter to the bookstore, and there he had met Emily Lovecraft. An actual Lovecraft! He’d thought that bloodline had died with the writer. That was nice, but Carter’s protectiveness toward her was even better. Such a white knight, suc
h a platonic cicisbeo, while her boyfriend fucked her regardless.
And what a boyfriend. The serendipity of a putative senator falling into Colt’s path at the exact moment he was wondering how to proceed. It was perfect; why scrabble for every yard of growing power when you can have boring people do it for you? Colt was confident he would have had Rothwell in the Senate soon enough. Then a run for the White House backed with some astonishing good luck.
That had been the plan, anyway. Taking Rothwell to Waite’s Bill had been a mistake, though. Oh, well. Plenty more politicians where he came from. Colt would just have to find a new one to puppeteer.
William Colt, the éminence grise. He liked the sound of that. He’d do a better job of being the president’s brain than Karl Rove ever had for George W. Bush. A moron backed by an idiot. Colt was going to be the best power behind the throne since the days of Richelieu. And nobody would ever suspect him of being more than … oh, whatever. Oh! The guy who predigests the data and serves it up like pap for the president every morning. Didn’t Reagan used to have his briefings delivered as cartoon drawings?
The phone was still ringing. Colt took the call.
“Good morning, William,” said a voice. “I hope I am not disturbing you?”
It wasn’t Carter. The voice was male, middle-aged, educated, and slightly amused. Probably New England? Not a strong Bostonian accent, but there was a hint of it.
“Who is this?”
“I would say, ‘a friend,’ William, but that would probably raise your hackles. So I shall just say, ‘a concerned party.’ I wanted to warn you. All your plans are about to take a knock.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your plans. I’m sure you have some, a clever fellow like you. Well, somebody is about to stick an unwanted spoke in your wheel. After they’re done, you’ll just be a socially inept mathematician that nobody likes again.”
Colt didn’t trust himself to speak.
“A clever fellow, but perhaps not a wise one. Would that be fair to say, William? I think you must know the truth of it yourself. I’ll just tell you, shall I? Daniel Carter. He’s far more dangerous than you’ve given him credit for. Dangerous in ways I don’t think you entirely understand.”
“I’m going to hang up.”
“How kind of you to warn me. But you’re still going to listen, because you’re wondering how I can know these things, which is really the big question. Who I am is small potatoes compared to that. Anyway, here’s the important thing that you need to know. You know Carter already knows about Waite Road, of course. What you don’t know is that he intends to do something about it.”
“Do? Do what?”
“Well, he has a very hands-on approach to problem solving, so I’m sure you can figure that out yourself. By this time tomorrow, the Perceptual Twist will be fixed permanently, and you won’t be able to play with it any longer. Bye-bye, dreams of glory.”
“Will you answer even one question?” Colt was trying to think of ways The Twist could help him find who the caller was. Currently, sorting through Scrabble tiles to form a name was the only thing he could think of, but it was so close to casting lots that it repelled him aesthetically, and aesthetics had a lot to do with using The Twist. If it felt wrong, it didn’t work.
“Yes, just the one. And that was the one. If only you’d asked, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ instead. Get some sleep, William. You have a destiny to save in the morning.”
The line went dead.
* * *
This was a bad game. A good game was where you knew all the rules, could work out a viable strategy and the tactics needed to achieve it. A good game was a game where new players didn’t keep appearing in a puff of smoke and fucking everything up.
William Colt sat up in his bed in semidarkness, looking at the phone as if it were going to give him any answers. He was beginning to regret his early moves in the game. He’d told himself that Belasco was just a useful guinea pig and that there was nothing personal in what had happened, but that was bullshit. He could have just chosen somebody at random and there would have been no trail to follow. But no. He’d been an asshole and killed a man with whom he was known to be at loggerheads. Then he went to Atlantic City and showed off. The money hadn’t been enough to make up for exposing himself like that. He should have gone with his first idea of influencing the state lottery; millions of dollars just sitting there for the taking, and nobody would have thought anything of his winning because it would have appeared to be blind luck. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He’d done it for another lottery for a smaller prize, after all.
He’d been drugged with the power of it, though. The discovery that there really is no such thing as “random” was too much to be taken soberly. It meant everyone was wrong about everything, and he was the first man to truly be right. Maybe not the first. Maybe the stories of Simon Magus, Merlin, possibly even Muhammad were about guys just like him, who’d seen how things weren’t like how other people saw them. He’d briefly considered starting a religion. It had made L. Ron Hubbard a rich man, after all, and unlike that old fraud, Colt could actually perform miracles. The trouble was that starting a religion pretty much also meant writing a holy book, and that looked like hard, boring work.
If he couldn’t get rich and powerful through organized religion—a path whose institutionalized mendaciousness didn’t appeal in any case—there was always politics. Still plenty of lying, but at least he wouldn’t have to pretend that he was behoven to some god or another.
Despite which, sometimes he still had little power fantasies about going to Mecca, proclaiming himself the new prophet, and doing all the Muhammad stuff like flying around on a horse. Even if they didn’t buy it, it would be worth it just to see the look on their faces. They wouldn’t buy it, no, but only because he was a pasty white guy. So fucking racist.
Then along came Carter. Colt still wasn’t being smart when he set up the trap in his own house, and provoked Carter by going to the bookstore. Yes, Carter had fallen for it, but then …
But then he’d escaped. Colt couldn’t understand that. He hadn’t slept a full night after he got back, all set to “Oh, gasp, Officer! There’s some dead guy in my house! He must have broken in and then had some sort of fit!” but somehow the son of a bitch had gotten out.
How? That question had robbed him of his sleep. The trap was perfect. He’d worked hard to make sure Carter wouldn’t get out. It was impossible, but the trap itself was impossible, and that gave Colt pause. Maybe Carter understood the cube, too? Maybe not completely, but enough to get him out of a bad situation like that. Impossible plus cube equaled possible, as Colt understood all too well.
This wasn’t part of the game. Only Colt was supposed to understand the cube. It was supposed to be a game for one. Everybody else, everybody else was supposed to be just a pawn. If Carter was another player, Colt didn’t feel so secure anymore. Carter was an ex-cop. He knew how to beat the shit out of somebody. Colt’s only advantage was the cube, and if Carter had it, too, the playing field tipped in his favor. Colt didn’t want to have the shit beaten out of him.
Carter’s phone call had unnerved him further. Colt had played it cool throughout, but he’d been sweating. The mention of Martin Suydam had been the worst, though. Colt had heard of Suydam—of course he had, he didn’t live in a cave—but he’d just been a serial killer, not something the country was short of.
The media had shut up about the Child-Catcher pretty quickly after he’d died, now that Colt thought about it. He hadn’t been much interested, so he hadn’t cared at the time. After he’d finished talking to Carter, however, he’d gone straight online and searched for whatever he could find.
There wasn’t much. Much less than he would have expected. The arrest had gone wrong, a cop had died, and the surviving cop was one Detective Daniel Carter. That shook Colt. He’d been inclined to blow Carter’s story off as a lie, but that changed his attitude toward it. The reports didn’t have much to
say about what Suydam was doing with the stolen kids, but it wasn’t pedophilia, which might have been why they lost interest so rapidly. One news site said he was carrying out occult experiments “akin to those of the Nazis,” which seemed to Colt to be assuming a lot. A conspiracy site specifically said Suydam was carrying out experiments in perception, and even referenced some old Jeffrey Combs horror movie like that was a clinching argument.
Maybe that reference was coincidence, but as a man who could manipulate coincidences, Colt felt very sensitive to those he hadn’t manufactured.
Then Carter had thrown in another hand grenade. Somebody had gone out of their way to get him involved.
Colt would bet serious money that exact “somebody” had just gotten off the phone with him. Which meant his situation was even worse than he’d previously thought. Not only was he not the only player in the game, but he was being played himself. He hesitated before thinking he was a pawn like everyone else, but he knew, despite finding the keys of destiny, he was not entirely in control of his own.
This sucked. It sucked so fucking hard. He had to start steering again, get himself out of this. The voice on the phone had said Carter was going to hit Waite Road. Colt couldn’t countenance that; he was sure there were other viable sites in the world, but he didn’t know where any were and he would be vulnerable while he looked. Again he cursed himself for going too fast when the cube’s power was new to him. Why did he kill those people? Just stupid showing off. Everything was going too fast and it was his own fault.
He had no choice. He had to defend Waite Road, despite knowing he was dancing to the voice’s tune. It was an unavoidable bottleneck in his options, though. If his political plan was going to go anywhere, Colt needed Waite Road untouched. Once Carter was no longer a problem, Colt would have breathing space to broaden those options so he never got cornered like this again. Find the voice and deal with the voice; that was next.
Good. Good. He was planning. It was all good.
Colt controlled his breathing, and lay back down. Sleep took some time to come.
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