31.
COOPER SITS in the trailer with Rigo.
Cooper says finally, “How did you know I’d say yes?”
“I didn’t, until you did.”
“And if I hadn’t?”
“We’d have found some other reason to intervene. The shootings are a convenient excuse, of course, but we could have cooked up something else. Some reason for the Institute to shut it all down. You fucked us up pretty good with that faked suicide, though. It’s hard to come charging in, guns blazing, just because some lonely old man offs himself.”
“So someone hired you to kill Colfax and Gable and Dean.”
“No, dummy, I hired you to do that.”
“But why those three?”
“Colfax was a test,” Rigo says. “Just to see if you’d actually do it. I figured if you weren’t willing to kill a psychopath like Colfax with sixty bodies on him, then we’d need to go to plan B. But you were. And you did. So we moved on to Gable. Then Dean.”
“For what? Bounties?”
“For closure.” He motions to the walls. “Is this trailer bulletproof?”
“I doubt it,” says Cooper. He doesn’t doubt it; he knows it isn’t. There’s only one building in the whole encampment that’s fortified in that way, and it’s not the one they’re sitting in right now.
“Then we might want to get to higher ground,” says Rigo. “Don’t worry about the money, by the way. It’s still waiting for you. The full two hundred. It’s still yours. A deal’s a deal.”
“So what are we waiting for now?” says Cooper.
“Are you familiar with the phrase ‘active shooter’?” says Rigo. He switches to an official-sounding tone. “During our recent visit to investigate the troubling incidents in Caesura, including several deaths and some unexplained acts of vandalism and animal cruelty, one of my men was overwhelmed by a particularly dangerous resident, a recent arrival, who then went on a killing spree. Thankfully, we were able to intervene and subdue him with our superior training and firepower, but, given the heavy casualties to the town’s populace, the decision was made by the Institute to shut down the program.” Rigo pauses, then says, “At least, that’s the story we’re going to tell everyone, once we’re back in the outside world. Don’t worry, Sheriff. Not to spoil the ending, but we’re going to make it out alive.”
“Who’s we?”
“You, me, my team, and the person we came for.”
“Fran Adams,” says Cooper.
“No, but you’re getting warmer.”
There’s a long, suspended moment of silence before the next thing happens, while Cooper contemplates just how fucked he is, how fucked Fran is, how fucked they all are, how fucked the town is.
And then the next thing happens.
Far away, but audible, and unmistakable.
Pop pop pop.
Gunshots.
And again.
Pop pop.
Cooper looks at Rigo. Rigo shrugs. He pulls his sunglasses out of his pocket. “Don’t worry, Sheriff. Dietrich knows who to avoid. The boy, for one.”
And the realization of what exactly is about to unfold surges into Cooper’s heart and overwhelms him, like water flooding the lungs of a drowning man.
“What about the boy’s mother?” Cooper finally brings himself to ask. “What happens to her?”
Rigo winces. “Honestly, I don’t think she’s going to make it.”
32.
ON THE FOURTH KNOCK, Ginger Van Buren answers. She finds Dick Dietrich standing in her doorway.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he says politely.
“You killed my babies,” she says. “Shot them dead in the street.” She’s dressed in a filmy caftan. Her face is deeply lined and pale and her eyes are red-rimmed from two days of crying.
“I’d argue that, by the time I found them, their fate was already determined. May I come in?” He stands in shadow, framed in the doorway, a silhouette against the sunlight. She squints at him. The sun today is so bright.
“Honestly, I’m not up to visitors.”
“Just for a moment,” he says. “There’s something coming and I thought it only fair to warn you. When it gets here, it’s best that you’re inside.”
Well, why not, Ginger thinks, and, to be honest, she’s not even really thinking anymore. She looks him over, this strange man, his head shorn, with all his tattoos, and thinks back over her life, or what scant parts of it she can recollect, and all of it seems like a dream since the other night. This whole strange coda, this house, this town, these people, it all seems like an errant epilogue to a much longer, more elaborate story that she can’t, for the life of her, recall. Even her pets are gone. All she can hear now is the absence of their howling. It’s deafening.
Well, why not, she thinks, and invites him in without another word, and when she turns, he’s already closed the door behind them both so the living room’s plunged back into its former gloom. He’s already pulling something from the back of his pants and wielding it and she sees now that it’s a gun.
“I’m sorry, but the thing I warned you was coming?” he says. “It’s already here.”
Well, why not, she thinks.
Dietrich knows the three shots are loud enough that people will notice.
Three shots.
Two more.
Well, why not.
The gun stuck back in the waistband of his pants, Dietrich walks back out into the sunlight on the porch, where he left the assault rifle propped up against the wall beside the front door, so as not to startle her. He hoists the rifle up by its strap and slings it over his shoulder. Then he spots that other woman, what’s her name, the new one, the pretty neighbor, the nervous one from the intake trailer with the nice expensive hair, the one they promised to move across town, coming out in her housecoat to her porch to see what the noise is all about.
Cooper’s mind searches for a plan. Comes up empty.
But Cooper’s fists have already formulated a plan.
The plan: Punch Rigo. Then punch Rigo again.
He knows he needs another, better plan.
If Cooper’s learned anything in the course of his life, it’s that the plans his fists come up with are never to be trusted. So he stalls. “What are you going to do about Dietrich?”
“Let him roam. For now,” Rigo says.
“Do you really think you can control a man like that?”
“Control? No. Kill? Yes. That we can do. You have to understand, Dietrich’s the man nobody wants—not the military, not the prison system—so it was easy to obtain his services for our special purposes.”
“What’s in it for him?” says Cooper. “Money?”
“There’s money involved, but someone like that? Money is never his motivation.” Rigo perches on the edge of a desk, leaning back on his arms, legs crossed at the ankles, like a man who’s got nowhere to be and all day to get there. “As far as our friend Dietrich knows, we’re all leaving together with what we came for, one big happy family. I’ve got two of my best men tailing him to make sure that doesn’t happen. But for now, we’ll let him, you know, work out his issues. All you and I need to do is sit tight and make sure we don’t get caught in the crossfire.”
Cooper’s still searching for that plan. Still coming up empty.
While he searches, his fists get impatient.
Decide to act alone.
Fucking fists, Cooper thinks, as he hoists one. Okay, here we go.
Rigo’s surprised at the swing, a clumsy, glancing one, given that he and Cooper were just moments ago discussing their newly revealed role as co-conspirators. Rigo dodges it easily and the blow doesn’t really connect. When Cooper takes another shot with his left fist, because what the hell, this is apparently the plan now, Rigo fends that one off easily, too. Then Rigo reaches for his pistol, which isn’t there. That’s right, he gave it to Dietrich. So he holds up his hands instead.
“Cooper—Cooper!” Rigo says, wheeling back. “You and I are o
n the same side. We’re about to walk out of here—”
Third swing. In Cooper’s experience, if the first two don’t land, you shouldn’t expect better results with number three. Yet here it comes, nonetheless. “Fuck you, Rigo,” he says, roundhousing like a drunk. “Get out of my town.”
Rigo feints again, easily. He’s all arms and angles. “Don’t worry,” he says, inching back to keep his distance. “Once Dietrich gets his jollies, we’ll take care of him. We’re not going to leave him alive.”
But Cooper keeps coming, keeps swinging. “You never should have come here, Rigo. You never should have stepped out from behind that fax machine.” His fists are angry, jumpy, anxious, and Cooper’s not inclined to hold them back. “The smartest thing you ever did,” he says, taking another hack at Rigo, “was make me look each of those three men in the eyes. Colfax, Gable, Dean. Because when they saw what was coming, they knew that they deserved it. Even if they didn’t remember why, they knew. And that made it easy for me.” Cooper lunges again, flailing. Rigo dances away. “And the dumbest thing you ever did, you fucking idiot, was come here and show your face to me. Because now I can look you in the eye, Rigo. And I see exactly what you deserve.”
Rigo circles behind a desk. “In about an hour, we’re leaving. You can either come with us or we can leave you here with Dietrich until he’s done. Believe me, he won’t stop until he runs out of bullets—he won’t even stop then. He’ll rip your fucking throats out with his teeth.”
As if on cue, from the distance: pop pop pop pop pop.
Cooper knows what the sound means. It’s the town being slaughtered, one by one.
“Leave now, for all I care,” Cooper says. “But you’re not taking that boy.”
“Not to mention the two hundred thousand dollars,” says Rigo. “You ready to forfeit that?”
Cooper stops. He’s winded. His punching is getting him nowhere. He needs a new plan, pronto.
“I didn’t think so,” says Rigo. “So let’s stop this—”
“I have a different idea.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to kick you in the balls,” Cooper says.
Rigo squints. “You’re what—?”
Then Cooper kicks him in the balls.
Cooper learned this in a lifetime full of barfights. If you try to kick someone in the balls, you almost never connect, because everyone instinctually protects their balls. But if you tell someone you’re going to kick them in the balls, they get momentarily distracted, because they’re busy thinking about how much it sucks to get kicked in the balls. Then whammo.
Rigo whimpers and drops.
Cooper kicks him in the balls again.
Well, that didn’t solve much, not in the big picture, thinks Cooper, and it definitely cost me $200,000.
Rigo murmurs on the floor.
Cooper kicks him in the face, for good measure.
That one was free.
Then he runs out of the trailer, into the empty street, toward the gunfire, toward Fran, and toward the boy.
33.
AGENTS COREY AND BIGELOW WATCH DIETRICH from a distance as he ambles his way down the road, stopping occasionally to heft his rifle and fire staccato shots into bungalow windows, moving with the lazy languor of a boy skipping stones in a pond on his way home from school. If Dietrich spots someone in the distance skittering across the roadway toward shelter, he sights the rifle and cuts them down expertly. Corey and Bigelow lay back, a good fifty yards or so, weapons holstered, ostensibly as Dietrich’s backup. Their real task, however, is to tail him and, once he’s managed to cleanse a good portion of the residents, take him down. There’s no way they’re letting a psychopath like Dietrich come back to the civilized world. He’ll be cut down in a valiant but belated effort by the agents to save the poor people of this town. This will be the official story, anyway.
So neither Corey nor Bigelow is what you’d call alarmed as they watch Dietrich at work. In fact, they both regard his display of cold skill with a kind of professional envy. Dietrich is alert yet relaxed, his movements efficient, his aim unerring, and his results inescapable. Both agents, at various times, have been involved in tasks that required certain proficient and lethal resolutions, so killing, per se, does not unsettle them. They are struck, however, by Dietrich’s peculiar strain of passionate competence—how he moves with the air of a man who is expert at, and deeply loves, what he is doing. The agents comment on it to each other in low tones. Neither Corey nor Bigelow is concerned in the least that they’ll be able to take down Dietrich when the time comes: there’s two of them; they’re well trained and well armed; and, as best they know, Dietrich has no idea what’s coming. Which allows them to regard his movements through the town as a kind of performance. A seminar, of sorts. Professional development.
They aren’t worried at all, even when they momentarily lose sight of him at fifty yards when he seems to circle behind a distant bungalow. They aren’t concerned when they travel down the road a bit farther and he’s not on the opposite side of the bungalow or, as expected, in the yard of the house adjacent. They’re not frightened, not yet, as they realize that Dietrich seems to be actively trying to evade them, though, at this point, Bigelow has the presence of mind to unholster his gun. Corey, for his part, does start to wonder, with an almost clinical curiosity, if maybe they, too, should have come armed with assault rifles. They’d discussed it but decided against it. But they’re not scared, not really, as they instinctually separate from each other and scan the yards of the clustered houses, looking for signs that he’s ducked inside somewhere, both of their pistols now drawn—and by the time they’re both beginning to feel the first invasive tendrils of cold fear, almost simultaneously, the crisp shots from Dietrich’s rifle, one-two, have felled them. After that, whatever they might have been feeling is left to pool in the dirt.
Dietrich makes a show of stepping over their bodies as he walks back to the middle of the thoroughfare. The AR-15 is held lightly in his hands. He looks at the dying agents with contempt. He wonders just how stupid Rigo is.
Stupid enough to give him an assault rifle, apparently.
No one’s coming out to their porches to investigate the noises anymore. Everyone’s hiding behind closed doors and drawn curtains, or running in the shadows for shelter like frightened children.
So it’s just Dietrich walking down the middle of the road like death come calling. Periodically raising his rifle and squeezing the trigger and pop pop pop into doors, into windows. He likes to watch the doors splinter, the windows buckle.
He walks up the steps of a porch to a house. Fires the rifle through the door four times.
Pop pop pop pop.
Watches the door blister. He reloads the rifle. Then kicks in the door.
Why this house? Why not this house? he thinks, as he steps inside.
He walks into the living room. Finds it empty.
So he walks into the kitchen. Finds a woman crouching in the corner, by the cabinets, crying. He recognizes her. It’s that librarian.
“What horrible thing did you do in your past, I wonder,” Dietrich says, “that you wound up living in this place?”
She looks up at him. Says nothing. Just cries.
He hefts the rifle.
Pop pop.
Canned hunting, just like Rigo said.
“You need to come with us,” says Santayana. “Both of you.”
“No,” Fran says.
“Ma’am, I’m not asking.”
“No,” Fran says again.
Then they all hear the noise in the distance.
Pop pop.
Everyone knows what it is.
Santayana looks at the boy, then back at his mother. She opens her blazer, giving the mother a glimpse of her holstered pistol. She’d rather not pull it out in front of the boy, but she will, if need be. That’s the message. She closes the blazer.
“We can protect you both. Think of the boy.”
Pop pop
pop, still in the distance.
Fran’s voice catches so hard as she says what she says that she barely nudges out the words. “He’s the only thing I ever think about.”
“Ma’am, please,” says Santayana. The two other agents form a solid wall behind her.
There’s nowhere to run, and nothing to do, and Fran knows the world has come for her. No matter what, the world will find her. If not here, then at the next place, or the next place after that. Her eight years of hiding out are over and it’s all coming for her now. She wonders what she should have done differently, until her wondering is interrupted.
Pop pop.
“Really, this is what’s best for everyone—” says Santayana.
“No, I don’t think so,” comes a different voice. Santayana turns toward the street to look. They all do.
And there, in the street, is Dawes. Holding a revolver. Leveled at the agents on the porch. She’s wearing a puffy brown winter coat, too, for some reason, even though it’s got to be ninety degrees in this sun. She keeps the revolver steady. Dawes has never held a gun before, let alone held one on a person. Santayana can tell that. Even Fran can tell.
“Fran, bring Isaac and come down here with me,” Dawes says.
“Where are you planning to go?” Santayana asks, with a contemptuous barb in her voice.
Pop pop pop in the distance again. Dawes does her best not to flinch at the sound. “Come on, Fran.”
Fran grabs Isaac’s arm and they start toward the steps, and Santayana grabs her by the elbow and Fran yanks her arm free and slaps Santayana, hard, with the back of her hand, as hard as she has ever hit anyone. Santayana falters, then straightens, and yanks her weapon free, and turns it on Fran, then sees the boy’s eyes widen. In anger, she swings her gun toward Dawes in the street and fires. A loud shot in the quiet of the afternoon, much louder than those distant pops.
Dawes’s brown puffy jacket coughs a small burst of white feathers, and then is stained suddenly red. Dawes yelps like a kicked dog, her cry chasing the loud bark of the shot.
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