While they were traveling, changing campgrounds every night or two, no
one could try to get at him through them.
Since the attempted contact at the bank in Mission Viejo, Marty had been
subjected to no more of The Other's probes. He was hopeful that the
haste and decisiveness with which they'd fled north had bought them
safety. Even clairvoyance or telepathy--or whatever the hell it
was--must have its limits. Otherwise, they were not merely up against a
fantastic mental power but flat-out magic, while Marty could be driven,
by experience, to credit the possibility of psychic ability, he simply
could not believe in magic. Having put hundreds of miles between
themselves and The Other, they were most likely beyond the range of his
questing sixth sense. The mountains, which periodically interfered with
the operation of the cellular telephone, might further insulate them
from telepathic detection.
Perhaps it would have been safer to stay away from Mammoth Lakes and
hide out in a town to which he had no connections.
However, he opted for the cabin because even those who might target his
parents' house as a possible refuge for him would not be aware of the
mountain retreat and would be unlikely to learn of it casually.
Besides, two of his former high school buddies had been Mammoth County
deputy sheriffs for a decade, and the cabin was close to the town in
which he had been raised and where he was still well known. As a
hometown boy who had never been a hell-raiser in his youth, he could
expect to be taken seriously by the authorities and given greater
protection if The Other did try to contact him again.
n a strange place, however, he would be an outsider and regarded with
more suspicion even than Detective Cyrus Lowbock had exhibited.
Around Mammoth Lakes, if worse came to worst, he would not feel so
isolated and alienated as he was certain to be virtually anywhere else.
"Might be bad weather ahead," Paige said.
The sky was largely blue to the east, but masses of dark clouds were
surging across the peaks and through the passes of the Sierra Nevadas to
the west.
"Better stop at a service station in Bishop," Marty said, "find out if
the Highway Patrol's requiring chains to go up into Mammoth."
Maybe he should have welcomed a heavy snowfall. It would further
isolate the cabin and make them less accessible to whatever enemies were
hunting them. But he felt only uneasiness at the prospect of a storm.
If luck was not with them, the moment might come when they needed to get
out of Mammoth Lakes in a hurry. Roads * drifted shut by a blizzard
could cause a delay long enough to be the death of them.
Charlotte and Emily wanted to play Look Who's the Monkey Now, a word
game Marty had invented a couple of years ago to entertain them on long
car trips. They had already played twice since leaving Mission Viejo.
Paige declined to join them, pleading the need to focus her attention on
driving, and Marty ended up being the monkey more frequently than usual
because he was distracted by worry.
The higher reaches of the Sierras disappeared in mist. The clouds
blackened steadily, as if the fires of the hidden sun were burning to
extinction and leaving only charry ruin in the heavens.
The motel owners referred to their establishment as a lodge. The
buildings were embraced by the boughs of hundred-foot Douglas firs,
smaller pines, and tamaracks. The design was studiedly rustic.
The rooms couldn't compare with those at the Ritz-Carlton, of course,
and the interior designer's attempt to call to mind Bavaria with
knotty-pine paneling and chunky wood-frame furniture was jejune, but
Drew Oslett found the accommodations pleasant nonetheless. A sizable
stone fireplace, in which logs and starter material already had been
arranged, was especially appealing, within minutes of their arrival, a
fire was blazing.
Alec Spicer telephoned the surveillance team stationed in a van across
the street from the Stillwater house. In language every bit as cryptic
as some of Clocker's statements, he informed them that Alfie's handlers
were now in town and could be reached at the motel.
"Nothing new," Spicer said when he hung up the phone. "Jim and Alice
Stillwater aren't home yet. The son and his family haven't shown up,
either, and there's no sign of our boy, of course."
Spicer turned on every light in the room and opened the drapes because
he was still wearing his sunglasses, though he had taken off his leather
flight jacket. Oslett suspected that Alec Spicer didn't remove his
shades to have sex--and perhaps not even when he went to bed at night.
The three of them settled into swiveling barrel chairs around a
herringbone-pine dinette table off the compact kitchenette. The nearby
mullioned window offered a view of the wooded slope behind the motel.
From a black leather briefcase, Spicer produced several items Oslett and
Clocker would need to stage the murders of the Stillwater family in the
fashion that the home office desired.
"Two coils of braided wire," he said, putting a pair of plastic wrapped
spools on the table. "Bind the daughters' wrists and ankles with it.
Not loosely. Tight enough to hurt. That's how it was in the Maryland
case."
"All right," Oslett said.
"Don't cut the wire," Spicer instructed. "After binding the wrists, run
the same strand to the ankles. One spool for each girl. That's also
like Maryland."
The next article produced from the briefcase was a pistol.
"It's a SIG nine-millimeter," Spicer said. "Designed by the Swiss maker
but actually manufactured by Suer in Germany. A very good piece."
Accepting the SIG, Oslett said, "This is what we do the wife and kids
with?"
Spicer nodded. "Then Stillwater himself."
Oslett familiarized himself with the gun while Spicer withdrew a box of
9mm ammunition from the briefcase. "Is this the same weapon the father
used in Maryland?"
"Exactly," Spicer said. "Records will show it was bought by Martin
Stillwater three weeks ago at the same gun shop where he's purchased
other weapons. There's a clerk who's been paid to remem her selling it
to him."
"Very nice."
"The box this gun came in and the sales receipt have already been
planted in the back of one of the desk drawers in Stillwater's home
office, down in the house in Mission Viejo."
Smiling, filled with genuine admiration, beginning to believe they were
going to salvage the Network, Oslett said, "Superb attention to detail."
"Always," Spicer said.
The Machiavellian complexity of the plan delighted Oslett the way Wile
E. Coyote's elaborate schemes in Road Runner cartoons had thrilled him
as a child--except that, in this case, the coyotes were the inevitable
winners. He glanced at Karl Clocker, expecting him to be likewise
enthralled.
The Trekker was cleaning under his fingernails with the blade of a
penknife. His expression was somber. From every indication, his mind
was
at least four parsecs and two dimensions from Mammoth Lakes,
California.
From the briefcase, Spicer produced a Ziploc plastic bag that contained
a folded sheet of paper. "This is a suicide note. Forged.
But so well done, any graphologist would be convinced it was written in
Stillwater's own hand."
"What's it say?" Oslett asked.
Quoting from memory, Spicer said,"
"There's a worm. Burrowing inside.
All of us contaminated. Enslaved. Parasites within.
Can't live this way. Can't live."
"That's from the Maryland case?" Oslett asked.
"Word for word."
"The guy was creepy."
"Won't argue with you on that."
"We leave it by the body?"
"Yeah. Handle it only with gloves. And press Stillwater's fingers all
over it after you've killed him. The paper's got a hard, smooth finish.
Should take prints well."
Spicer reached into the briefcase once more and withdrew an other Ziploc
bag containing a black pen.
"Pentel Rolling Writer," Spicer said. "Taken from a box of them in a
drawer of Stillwater's desk."
"This is what the suicide note was written with?"
"Yeah. Leave it somewhere in the vicinity of his body, with the cap
off" Smiling, Oslett reviewed the array of items on the table. "This is
really going to be fun."
While they waited for an alert from the surveillance team that was
staking out the elder Stillwater's house, Oslett risked a walk to a ski
shop in a cluster of stores and restaurants across the street from the
motel. The air seemed to have grown more bitter in the short time they
had been in the room, and the sky looked bruised.
The merchandise in the shop was first-rate. He was quickly able to
outfit himself in well-made thermal underwear imported from Sweden and a
black Hard Corps Gore-Tex/Thermolite storm suit. The suit had a
reflective silver lining, foldaway hood, anatomically shaped knees,
ballistic nylon scuff guards, insulated snowcuffs with rubber ired
strippers, and enough pockets to satisfy a magician. Over this he wore
a purple U.S. Freestyle Team vest with Thermoloft insulation, reflective
lining, elasticized gussets, and reinforced shoulders.
He bought gloves too--Italian leather and nylon, almost as flexible as a
second skin. He considered buying high-quality goggles but decided to
settle for a good pair of sunglasses, since he wasn't actually intending
to hit the slopes. His awesome ski boots looked like something a robot
Terminator would wear to kick his way through concrete block walls.
He felt incredibly tough.
As it was necessary to try on every item of clothing, he used the
opportunity to change out of the clothes in which he'd entered the shop.
The clerk obligingly folded the garments into a shopping bag, which
Oslett carried with him when he set out on the return walk to the motel
in his new gear.
By the minute, he was more optimistic about their prospects.
Nothing lifted the spirits like a shopping spree.
When he returned to the room, though he had been gone half an hour,
there had been no news.
Spicer was sitting in an armchair, still wearing sunglasses, watching a
talk show. A heavyset black woman with big hair was interviewing four
male cross-dressers who had attempted to enlist, as women, in the United
States Marine Corps, and had been rejected, though they seemed to
believe the President intended to intervene on their behalf.
Clocker, of course, was sitting at the table by the window, in the fall
of silvery pre-storm light, reading Hucklebery Kirk and the Oozing
Whores of Alpha Centauri, or whatever the damn book was called. His
only concession to the Sierra weather had been to change from a
harlequin-pattern sweater-vest into a fully sleeved cashmere sweater in
a stomach-curdling shade of orange.
Oslett carried the black briefcase into one of the two bedrooms that
flanked the living room. He emptied the contents on one of the
queen-size beds, sat cross-legged on the mattress, took off his new
sunglasses, and examined the clever props that would ensure Martin
Stillwater's postmortem conviction of multiple murder and suicide.
He had a number of problems to work out, including how to kill all these
people with the least amount of noise. He wasn't concerned about the
gunfire, which could be muffled one way or another. It was the
screaming that worried him. Depending on where the hit went down, there
might be neighbors. If alerted, neighbors would call the police.
After a couple of minutes, he put on his sunglasses and went out to the
living room. He interrupted Spicer's television viewing, "We waste
them, then what police agency's going to be dealing with it?"
"If it happens here," Spicer said, "probably the Mammoth County
Sheriff's Department."
"Do we have a friend there?"
"Not now, but I'm sure we could have."
"Coroner?"
"Out here in the boondocks--probably just a local mortician."
"No special forensic skills?"
Spicer said, "He'll know a bullet hole from an asshole, but that's about
it."
"So if we terminated the wife and Stillwater first, nobody's going to be
sophisticated enough to detect the order of homicides?"
"Big-city forensic lab would have a hard time doing that if the
difference was, say, less than an hour."
Oslett said, "What I'm thinking is . . . if we try to deal with the
kids first, we'll have a problem with Stillwater and his wife."
"How so?"
"Either Clocker or I can cover the parents while the other one takes the
kids into a different room. But stripping the girls, wiring their hands
and ankles--it'll take ten, fifteen minutes to do right, like in
Maryland. Even with one of us covering Stillwater and his wife with a
gun, they aren't going to sit still for that. They'll both rush me or
Clocker, whoever's guarding them, and together they might get the upper
hand."
"I doubt it," Spicer said.
"How can you be sure?"
"People are gutless these days."
"Stillwater fought off Alfie."
"True," Spicer admitted.
"When she was sixteen, the wife found her father and mother dead. The
old man killed the mother, then himself--" Spicer smiled. "Nice tie-in
with our scenario."
Oslett hadn't thought about that. "Good point. Might also explain why
Stillwater couldn't write the novel based on the case in Maryland.
Anyway, three months later she petitioned the court to free her from her
guardian and declare her a legal adult."
"Tough bitch."
"The court agreed. It granted her petition."
"So blow away the parents first," Spicer advised, shifting in the
armchair as if his butt had begun to go numb.
"That's what we'll do," Oslett agreed.
Spicer said, "This is fucking crazy."
For a moment Oslett thought Spicer was commenting on their plans for the
Stillwaters. But he was referring to the television program, to which
his attention drifted again.
r /> On the talk show, the host with big hair had ushered off the
cross-dressers and introduced a new group of guests. There were four
angry-looking women seated on the stage. All of them were wearing
strange hats.
As Oslett left the room, he saw Clocker out of the corner of his eye.
The Trekker was still at the table by the window, riveted by the book,
but Oslett refused to let the big man spoil his mood.
In the bedroom he sat on the bed again, amidst his toys, took off his
sunglasses, and happily enacted and re-enacted the homicides in his
mind, planning for every contingency.
Outside, the wind picked up. It sounded like wolves.
He stops at a service station to ask directions to the address he
remembers from the Rolodex card. The young attendant is able to help
him.
By 2,10 he enters the neighborhood in which he was evidently raised.
The lots are large with numerous winter-bare birches and a wide variety
of evergreens.
His mom and dad's house is in the middle of the block. It's a modest,