Radley Dubose places a call to the Desert Flora Study Group. He asks about the Airbus H120 that he earlier ordered into the air to search for Minette Butterworth and for signs of chaos related to the people who were brain-screwed the previous night. He inquires if the flight crew of that aircraft might have noticed anything unusual on this length of county highway.

Apparently, the helo pilot and copilot have reported in excess of a single disturbance, because Dubose does more listening than talking for perhaps four minutes. He punctuates the Desert Flora Study Group agent’s report with “Huh” and “Really” and “Shit,” and “Not good, compadre, not good.”

When Dubose terminates the call, Jergen says, “If together we can devise an accidental death for my aunt Deirdre, I would split with you what’s likely to be a minimum hundred-million-dollar inheritance. Maybe a great deal more.”

Dubose is disapproving, though not of homicide. “Let’s avoid being distracted by such mundane concerns as money. Not with the revolution at stake. Do you recall that one of the fifty people injected last night was a Mr. Arlen Hosteen?”

“I’ve got enough on my mind without having to remember the names of fifty losers.”

“Arlen Hosteen,” Dubose says, “is the owner of Valleywide Waste Management, the local trash-collection firm. He sometimes services one of his company’s routes himself when a driver is sick. He seemed a good enlistee in the hunt for the Hawk brat. No one thinks twice about a garbage truck pulling up to house after house, so he has a chance to give each place a lookover, check trash cans at curbside to see if any contents suggest the presence of a small child in a family that doesn’t have kids.”

“Brilliant,” Jergen says sarcastically.

“Not as it has turned out, I’m afraid. Hosteen is driving an immense trash-collection truck with front-loading arms that can lift the heaviest dumpster with ease. It’s like a tank.”

“So he’s gone through the forbidden door, has he? Just like Minette.”

“He has obviously deteriorated mentally, but evidently not as much as she has. And by all reports, he’s not naked.”

“That’s something to be thankful for.”

Dubose drives onto the highway once more. “The Airbus crew saw Hosteen rampaging, but they haven’t stayed on him because other more disturbing incidents require their attention.”

“More disturbing than Hosteen? How many other incidents?”

“Six. Not to worry. We’ll find Hosteen and shut him down.”

“In his garbage-truck tank? That won’t be easy.”

“You may remember, I met your aunt Deirdre. Killing Hosteen in his truck will be a lot easier than killing that ballbuster.”

14

JANE ON THE MOVE. Heckler in a two-hand grip, just under her line of vision. A short, narrow hall served the bedrooms and study.

When she stepped into the living room, she saw that the old, weathered, desiccated front door had cracked loose of its hinges; it hung askew, fixed to the frame only by its deadbolt. Having kicked in the door, a fortyish man, pale and disheveled and sweating profusely, looking both angry and bewildered, stood just inside the room, maybe fifteen feet from her, holding an iron pry bar that had an angled neck and lug wrench at one end.

Keeping the Heckler’s front sight on the intruder, positioned so that peripheral vision might alert her to movement in the hallway to her left, Jane said, “Put it down.”

He was costumed neither in black leather nor in a vest made from human nipples, nor with a necklace fashioned from the teeth of his victims, in neither a leather mask nor a hood imprinted with the face from Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, as movies routinely portrayed existential threats like this. He wore a blue-and-yellow-striped polo shirt, white slacks, and white topsiders without socks, a mundane monster for an insipid age when imagination had gone digital and the true horrors of the world were so disturbing that a lot of people found it easier to fear imaginary threats.

Ignoring Jane’s command, he said, “Was you? Was you, is you the bitch, bitch? The bitch in my head, you?”

He must be on one drug or another, maybe an entire apothecary. His blue eyes were wide and lunatic, yet as clear and alert as the eyes of a hunting owl. Anger contorted his face; not anger alone, but also perhaps some neurological disorder. Every muscle from hairline to chin and ear to ear moved not in concert but in disjunctive arrangements, producing a shifting kaleidoscope of grotesque expressions. Although every look was unnatural in the extreme, they all conveyed rage, hatred, and demented lust.

“Put down the crowbar,” she repeated.

He took one step toward her and raised his voice, loud and menacing. “Is you? Is you? Is you whisper sex me, sex me, kill me, kill you, kill you, sex me, kill, kill, whisper inside head?”

The whispering room.

He was one of the adjusted people, and something was very damn wrong with his program.

Maybe because the pry bar looked almost as long as a Taser XREP 12-gauge shotgun, she thought of Ivan Petro on Monday, coming for her from out of the oak trees. She thought of the hammer with which she’d been pounding the burner phone, of how she hadn’t dropped it before drawing her gun but instead had thrown it. Life was raveled through with inexplicable patterns that could never be understood but could be recognized by anyone who acknowledged their existence, so Jane knew what this creature was about to do even before he knew. Insane as he might be, he still wasn’t going to charge into a pistol pointed at him; he would throw the pry bar.

Whoever this man might have been, he was no longer that person. He was enslaved by a nanoweb, but also coming apart psychologically under the control mechanism’s influence. What she had to do next was an act of mercy, not murder; and if she hesitated to grant him that mercy, he would smash her face, crack her skull.

He drew back the iron bar. She shot him in the chest. The bullet convulsed him, but he threw the weapon. Half a second after the first round, the second didn’t just tear through his throat. The .45 hollow-point removed his throat, took out the spine, so his head wobbled like one of those bobble-head figures that people put on the dashboards of their cars. His empty body collapsed with so little sound that it seemed as if the greater part of his substance had been the mind and soul no longer contained in the package of flesh and bone. His pitch was feeble. The pry bar went wide of her and bounced along the floor—just as the naked woman erupted from the hallway and slashed hard with the butcher knife to cut deep.

15

IMMEDIATELY BEFORE THE CRAZY PERSON came out of nowhere and the waking nightmare started, Bernie Riggowitz was thinking about the three Ls—life, loss, and love.

Life is finding people you love and then losing them, sometimes after sixty years, sometimes after a few months or even a week, all the loss meant to keep you humble and remind you that your life is likewise stamped with an expiration date, so that you’ll use your days to the best of your ability, in the service of what is good. Bernie understood the grand strategy of life’s design, and he didn’t presume to think that he knew better how it should have been done, but—shit, shit, shit!—he was fed up with all the losing of people.

Bernie in the Tiffin Allegro cockpit, behind the wheel, was too nervous to do anything other than stare out at the grounds of the RV park, hoping to absorb some of the tranquillity from the sun, the majestic palm trees, the glimmering water in the pool.

It didn’t work. He anxiously checked his wristwatch every five or six minutes, thinking an hour had gone by.

Only three times in his life had he come to love someone in mere hours or less. Miriam had always said that she fell in love with him at first sight, and he said he did, too, but the truth was that he needed maybe an hour to fall in love with her, but then he fell all the way and hard. He fell in love with Nasia, his only child, in less than half a minute after his first look at her. What kind of monster didn’t love his own baby with every fiber of his being? He’d needed maybe two hours to fall in love with Jane, who’d called herself Alice at the time. His love for Miriam involved heart and mind and body, but his love for Jane was a heart-and-mind thing. In truth, if he’d been thirty-one instead of eighty-one, and if he’d never met Miriam, this would have been a heart-mind-body thing, but he didn’t have it in him to be a dirty old man.

If Jane died, Bernie’s life of optimism was going to end as a life of despair. And if she lost her boychik, Bernie was damn well after all going to assume that he knew better how the world and life should have been designed.

He checked his watch yet again, having expected to hear from Jane by now, certain that two hours had passed, that something had gone wrong. But she and Luther had set out from the RV park only a little more than an hour earlier.

That was when the crazy person appeared on the deck surrounding the big pool and began to pitch the lounge chairs into the water.

16