The most troubling thing is the name they keep citing—Jane, Jane Hawk, Jane, Jane, Jane Hawk—because they understand this has something to do with her, with her in-laws, and with the fact that Chase Longrin and the late Nick Hawk were once best friends. They don’t speak of Jane Hawk as though she’s a traitor to her country and a threat to national security, not as if she’s a murderer, but as if she’s a victim of slander and libel.

Indeed, more concerning to Chris is that some of these people speak of her not just with the affection that she might earn merely by being one of their own, but with admiration and even veneration. It’s as if, by foiling the entire apparatus of the all-powerful state that’s been pursuing her for months, she has ascended to the mystical status of a folk hero.

They demand to see Chase and Alexis and the children. They want to know why the employees are being held. They have no right to see anyone or have any questions answered, and they surely know as much. They are intruders here. They are being told they’re engaged in the obstruction of justice, but they aren’t going to go away. This is quickly becoming a standoff that may go on for days … unless it becomes something worse.

The youngest of the Austin agents doesn’t bother to shake his badge at the angry crowd. He draws his pistol, holding it against his chest, as if pledging allegiance to it, which is foolish and likely to inflame passions. Some of the people in the crowd are openly armed, but their weapons are in their holsters. Those who don’t obviously carry firearms might have them concealed. In this atmosphere, brandishing a gun is like striking a match in the dark to find the source of a gas leak.

Chris Roberts works his way around the mob, toward the wet-behind-the-ears agent to tell him to get a grip and put the gun away. After all, they are operating far beyond the limits of the law, by the rules of a thugocracy, the Constitution be damned—and there are risks to that approach. They have friends in high places, yes, and judges who will protect them, yes, and friends in the media who will do their best to bury an embarrassing story, but maybe not if a shootout results in a lot of people dead and others wounded.

16

LAURIE LONGRIN THOUGHT maybe it was safe to move. If the Janis monster had not by now gone downstairs and outside to meet whatever contingent of firemen and firewomen had arrived, then surely she’d gone back to the Black Lagoon or Transylvania, or to whatever hole in the ground she called home.

Rising once more to her feet, her back pressed to the stacked cartons at row’s end, she took a deep breath, held it, listened. The helicopter moved off a little way, and the attic no longer trembled under it, but the noise from its engine and rotary wing remained loud enough to mask most other sounds.

She didn’t want to hide like this. She felt childish and weak. She hadn’t been born to hide from trouble. Daddy said you couldn’t hide from trouble anyway, that the trouble you were hiding from would find you sooner or later, and while you were hiding from it, the trouble was getting bigger, so that when it finally found you, it was harder to deal with than if you’d just faced up to it in the first place.

So she turned to her left and leaned forward and peered into the aisle. From a distance of less than two feet, she met the eyes of Janis Dern. Even beneath a veil of shadow, something about the woman’s face was different from what it had been, distorted by terror or hatred or both, like an early version of the human face before it was refined and the species was put into production. A faint trace of the amber attic light found its way into those fierce eyes, coloring them more yellow than usual, so that they appeared electrified and incandescent.

Her voice was a vicious whisper: “My little pet.”

Before Laurie could respond, the yellow-eyed freak jabbed her with something. Even through her T-shirt, she felt the two cold points of pressure. Buzzing, both sound and sensation, filled her from muscle to marrow, and disabling pain crackled across the soles of her feet and across her scalp and everywhere in between. She lost all control of her body and went to the floor as if her bones had melted in an instant. She heard herself making wordless sounds of distress as she spasmed like some fish hooked and reeled in and lying on a riverbank, forever beyond hope of water.

17

FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA. The sound softer NOW, though still bringing vividly to mind the torture of hands clapping her ears, the pressure of Francine’s knees on her chest, her heart compressed as the breast bone bends under the weight …

While the little whore is paralyzed, Janis sets aside the handheld Taser and takes a bundle of zip-ties from an inner pocket of her sport coat. She uses one tie to cuff the slut’s hands.

“You’re gonna get what you deserve,” she declares. “You’re done, you’re finished, you’re gonna get just what you’ve always deserved.”

The girl recovers enough to kick out at her, trying for her face, landing a feeble blow on her shoulder.

Infuriated, Janis snatches up the Taser and jolts the little tart again, puts it right on her throat and watches her face convulse and her eyes roll back in her head.

She uses three more zip-ties to fetter the girl’s ankles to each other, allowing just enough play in those shackles for the brat to shuffle along but not run.

18

MOTHS ABANDONING the boring glow of house windows and driveway lampposts, drawn to the bright shaft, swirling up toward the source as if the searchlight is a tractor beam that levitates them through the night and into some extraterrestrial vessel …

As the crowd grows noisier and more insistent, Sally Jones is unable to placate them with reassurances of legal process, and the young agent from Austin doesn’t want to put away his gun.

“Hell, look at them,” he tells Chris Roberts, “they’re not just a bunch of hick farmers. They’re roughscuff, rabble with an entire freakin’ gun store inventory among them, and they’re photographing us with their phones.”

“All the more reason not to be photographed breaking Bureau protocol and brandishing a gun.”

“If the shit hits the fan and bullets fly, you want your face all over the Internet?”

“The Internet isn’t the Wild West anymore,” Chris says. “We’ve got laws, we’ve got a boot on it.”

“Yeah, maybe, but we don’t have a chokehold on it.”

“We’ve also got high-placed friends on the private side,” Chris insists. “Anything gets posted from this tonight, it’ll be taken down within the hour, even quicker. They can make it so you google Longrin Stables and it’s like the place never existed.”

The young agent shakes his head, scanning the crowd for the first indication that the worst is about to happen. “I don’t like being photographed, not here, not like this, don’t like it at all.”

19

THE OBNOXIOUS LITTLE SLUT doesn't want to get to her feet. She isn’t cool with the way the tables have turned. She acts as though she’s still disoriented, too loose-limbed to stand and walk, but it’s just an act, pretense, deceit. She lives to deceive. She’s the bitch queen of deception. Everything she ever says is a lie, and Janis doesn’t buy a word of it.

“Get your ass in gear, get on your feet,” Janis orders, looming over her. “Get up or I’ll Taser your hateful face. I’ll make you bite on it, and I’ll Taser your lying tongue. You want to take a jolt through that dirty little tongue of yours?”

The threat works. The girl struggles to her feet and stands swaying. There’s such contempt graven on her face. But when hasn’t there been? That’s among the primary identifying qualities of her type: conceit, vanity, arrogance, and the never-ending contempt of one who sees herself above all others.

The shuffling girl weaves along the central aisle, across oval pools of light and bridges of shadow, toward the trapdoor and the ladder, bumping against the walls of boxes, pretending still to be suffering residual effects of the Taserings. By clambering to her feet after claiming that she could not, the little slut has proved her weakness is mere pretense, and yet she can’t stop pretending, because guile and trickery are no less components of her blood than is plasma.

“Move, move, damn you,” Janis orders, prodding the treacherous little whore.

Backing down the ladder, clutching the side rails, the girl hesitates to place each foot, as though her spatial awareness remains disrupted by the shocks she has taken.

When the cunning little sleaze is halfway down, Janis follows, but she doesn’t turn her back on her captive. She knows too well the danger of letting the bitch get behind her. Instead, she faces forward, perches on the trapdoor frame, and then sits from one step of the ladder to the next.

Below Janis, three steps from the bottom, the girl looks up, hair hanging across her face, one eye revealed and bright with calculation.

Before the hateful little weasel can try whatever trick she has conceived, Janis kicks out, booting her in the chest, knocking her backward onto the closet floor.

Off the ladder, Janis grabs a fistful of the brat’s T-shirt and yanks on it. “Come on, come on, you little shit, you’ll never win an Oscar with a performance like this.”