Under the Dome

  12

  Barbie needed to take a piss but held his water. He had done interrogations in Iraq and knew how it worked over there. He didn't know if it would be the same here just yet, but it might be. Things were moving very rapidly, and Big Jim had shown a ruthless ability to move with the times. Like most talented demagogues, he never underestimated his target audience's willingness to accept the absurd.

  Barbie was also very thirsty, and it didn't surprise him much when one of the new officers showed up with a glass of water in one hand and a sheet of paper with a pen clipped to it in the other. Yes, it was how these things went; how they went in Fallujah, Takrit, Hilla, Mosul, and Baghdad. How they also now went in Chester's Mill, it seemed.

  The new officer was Junior Rennie.

  "Well, look at you," Junior said. "Don't look quite so ready to beat guys up with your fancy Army tricks right now." He raised the hand holding the sheet of paper and rubbed his left temple with the tips of his fingers. The paper rattled.

  "You don't look so good yourself."

  Junior dropped his hand. "I'm fine as rain."

  Now that was odd, Barbie thought; some people said right as rain and some said fine as paint, but none, as far as he knew, said fine as rain. It probably meant nothing, but--

  "Are you sure? Your eye's all red."

  "I'm fucking terrific. And I'm not here to discuss me."

  Barbie, who knew why Junior was here, said: "Is that water?" Junior looked down at the glass as if he'd forgotten it. "Yeah. Chief said you might be thirsty. Thursday on a Tuesday, you know." He laughed hard, as if this non sequitur was the wittiest thing to ever come out of his mouth. "Want it?"

  "Yes, please."

  Junior held the glass out. Barbie reached for it. Junior pulled it back. Of course. It was how these things went.

  "Why'd you kill them? I'm curious, Baaarbie. Wouldn't Angie fuck you no more? Then when you tried Dodee, you found out she was more into crack-snacking than cock-gobbling? Maybe Coggins saw something he wasn't supposed to? And Brenda got suspicious. Why not? She was a cop herself, you know. By injection!"

  Junior yodeled laughter, but underneath the humor there was nothing but black watchfulness. And pain. Barbie was quite sure of it.

  "What? Nothing to say?"

  "I said it. I'd like a drink. I'm thirsty."

  "Yep, I bet you are. That Mace is a bitch, idn't it? I understand you saw service in Iraq. What was that like?"

  "Hot."

  Junior yodeled again. Some of the water in the glass spilled on his wrist. Were his hands shaking a little? And that inflamed left eye was leaking tears at the corner. Junior, what the hell's wrong with you? Migraine? Something else?

  "Did you kill anybody?"

  "Only with my cooking."

  Junior smiled as if to say Good one, good one. "You weren't any cook over there, Baaaarbie. You were a liaison officer. That was your job description, anyway. My dad looked you up on the Internet. There isn't a lot, but there's some. He thinks you were an interrogation guy. Maybe even a black ops guy. Were you like the Army's Jason Bourne?"

  Barbie said nothing.

  "Come on, did you kill anybody? Or should I ask, how many did you kill? Besides the ones you bagged here, I mean."

  Barbie said nothing.

  "Boy, I bet this water is good. It came from the cooler upstairs. Chilly Willy!"

  Barbie said nothing.

  "You guys come back with all sorts of problems. At least that's what I breed and see on TV. Right or false? True or wrong?"

  It isn't a migraine making him do that. At least not any migraine I ever heard of.

  "Junior, how bad does your head hurt?"

  "Doesn't hurt at all."

  "How long have you been having headaches?"

  Junior set the glass carefully down on the floor. He was wearing a sidearm this evening. He drew it and pointed it through the bars at Barbie. The barrel was trembling slightly. "Do you want to keep playing doctor?"

  Barbie looked at the gun. The gun wasn't in the script, he was quite sure--Big Jim had plans for him, and probably not nice ones, but they didn't include Dale Barbara being shot in a jail cell when anybody from upstairs could rush down and see that the cell door was still locked and the victim unarmed. But he didn't trust Junior to follow the script, because Junior was ill.

  "No," he said. "No doctoring. Very sorry."

  "Yeah, you're sorry, all right. One sorry shack of sit." But Junior seemed satisfied. He holstered the gun and picked up the glass of water again. "My theory is that you came back all fucked up from what you saw and did over there. You know, PTSS, STD, PMS, one of those. My theory is that you just snapped. That about right?"

  Barbie said nothing.

  Junior didn't seem very interested, anyway. He handed the glass through the bars. "Take it, take it."

  Barbie reached for the glass, thinking it would be snatched away again, but it wasn't. He tasted it. Not cold and not drinkable, either.

  "Go on," Junior said. "I only shook half a shaker in, you can deal with that, can't you? You salt your bread, don't you?"

  Barbie only looked at Junior.

  "You salt your bread? Do you salt it, motherfucker? Huh?"

  Barbie held the glass out through the bars.

  "Keep it, keep it," Junior said magnanimously. "And take this, too." He passed the paper and pen through the bars. Barbie took them and looked the paper over. It was pretty much what he'd expected. There was a place for him to sign his name at the bottom.

  He offered it back. Junior backed away in what was almost a dance step, smiling and shaking his head. "Keep that, too. My dad said you wouldn't sign it right away, but you think about it. And think about getting a glass of water with no salt in it. And some food. Big old cheeseburger in paradise. Maybe a Coke. There's some cold in the fridge upstairs. Wouldn't you like a nice cone Cole?"

  Barbie said nothing.

  "You salt your bread? Go on, don't be shy. Do you, assface?" Barbie said nothing.

  "You'll come around. When you get hungry enough and thirsty enough, you will. That's what my dad says, and he's usually right about those things. Ta-ta, Baaaarbie. "

  He started down the hall, then turned back.

  "You never should have put your hands on me, you know. That was your big mistake."

  As he went up the stairs, Barbie observed that Junior was limping a tiny bit--or dragging. That was it, dragging to the left and pulling on the banister with his right hand to compensate. He wondered what Rusty Everett would think about such symptoms. He wondered if he'd ever get a chance to ask.

  Barbie considered the unsigned confession. He would have liked to tear it up and scatter the pieces on the floor outside the cell, but that would be an unnecessary provocation. He was between the cat's claws now, and the best thing he could do was be still. He put the paper on the bunk and the pen on top of it. Then he picked up the glass of water. Salt. Seeded with salt. He could smell it. Which made him think about how Chester's Mill was now ... only hadn't it already been this way? Even before the Dome? Hadn't Big Jim and his friends been seeding the ground with salt for some time now? Barbie thought yes. He also thought that if he got out of this police station alive, it would be a miracle.

  Nonetheless, they were amateurs at this; they had forgotten the toilet. Probably none of them had ever been in a country where even a little ditchwater could look good when you were carrying ninety pounds of equipment and the temperature was forty-six Celsius. Barbie poured out the salt water in the corner of the cell. Then he pissed in the glass and set it under the bunk. Then he knelt in front of the toilet bowl like a man at his prayers and drank until he could feel his belly bulging.

  13

  Linda was sitting on the front steps when Rusty pulled up. In the backyard, Jackie Wettington was pushing the Little Js on the swings and the girls were urging her to push harder and send them higher.

  Linda came to him with her arms out. She kissed his mouth, drew back to look at h
im, then kissed him again with her hands on his cheeks and her mouth open. He felt the brief, humid touch of her tongue, and immediately began to get hard. She felt it and pressed against it.

  "Wow," he said. "We should fight in public more often. And if you don't stop that, we'll be doing something else in public."

  "We'll do it, but not in public. First--do I need to say again that I'm sorry?"

  "No."

  She took his hand and led him back to the steps. "Good. Because we've got stuff to talk about. Serious stuff."

  He put his other hand over hers. "I'm listening."

  She told him about what had happened at the station--Julia being turned away after Andy Sanders had been allowed down to confront the prisoner. She told about going to the church so she and Jackie could talk to Julia in private, and the later conversation at the parsonage, with Piper Libby and Rommie Burpee added to the mix. When she told him about the beginning rigor they had observed in Brenda Perkins's body, Rusty's ears pricked up.

  "Jackie!" he called. "How sure are you about the rigor?"

  "Pretty!" she called back.

  "Hi, Daddy!" Judy called. "Me'n Jannie's gonna loop the loop!"

  "No you're not," Rusty called back, and stood to blow kisses from the palms of his hands. Each girl caught one; when it came to kiss-catching, they were aces.

  "What time did you see the bodies, Lin?"

  "Around ten-thirty, I think. The supermarket mess was long over."

  "And if Jackie's right about the rigor just setting in ... but we can't be absolutely sure of that, can we?"

  "No, but listen. I talked with Rose Twitchell. Barbara got to Sweetbriar at ten minutes to six. From then until the bodies were discovered, he's alibied. So he would've had to kill her when? Five? Five thirty? How likely is that, if rigor was just setting in five hours later?"

  "Not likely but not impossible. Rigor mortis is affected by all sorts of variables. The temperature of the body-storage site, for one. How hot was it in that pantry?"

  "Warm," she admitted, then crossed her arms over her breasts and cupped her shoulders. "Warm and smelly. "

  "See what I mean? Under those circumstances, he could have killed her someplace at four AM, then taken her there and stuffed her into the--"

  "I thought you were on his side."

  "I am, and it's really not likely, because the pantry would have been much cooler at four in the morning. Why would he have been with Brenda at four in the morning, anyway? What would the cops say? That he was boffing her? Even if older women--much older--were his thing ... three days after her husband of thirty-plus years was killed?"

  "They'd say it wasn't consensual," she told him bleakly. "They'd say it was rape. Same as they're already saying for those two girls."

  "And Coggins?"

  "If they're framing him, they'll think of something."

  "Is Julia going to print all this?"

  "She's going to write the story and raise some questions, but she'll hold back the stuff about rigor being in the early stages. Randolph might be too stupid to figure out where that information came from, but Rennie would know."

  "It could still be dangerous," Rusty said. "If they muzzle her, she can't exactly go to the ACLU."

  "I don't think she cares. She's mad as hell. She even thinks the supermarket riot might have been a setup."

  Probably was, Rusty thought. What he said was, "Damn, I wish I'd seen those bodies."

  "Maybe you still can."

  "I know what you're thinking, hon, but you and Jackie could lose your jobs. Or worse, if this is Big Jim's way of getting rid of an annoying problem."

  "We can't just leave it like this--"

  "Also, it might not do any good. Probably wouldn't. If Brenda Perkins commenced rigor between four and eight, she's probably in full rigor by now and there isn't much I can tell from the body. The Castle County ME might be able to, but he's as out of reach as the ACLU."

  "Maybe there's something else. Something about her corpse or one of the others. You know that sign they have in some postmortem theaters? 'This is where the dead speak to the living?'"

  "Long shot. You know what would be better? If someone saw Brenda alive after Barbie reported to work at five fifty this morning. That would put a hole in their boat too big to plug."

  Judy and Janelle, dressed in their pajamas, came flying up for hugs. Rusty did his duty in this regard. Jackie Wettington, following along behind them, heard Rusty's last comment and said, "I'll ask around."

  "But quietly," he said.

  "You bet. And for the record, I'm still not entirely convinced. His dog tags were in Angie's hand."

  "And he never noticed they were gone during the time between losing them and the bodies being found?"

  "What bodies, Dad?" Jannie asked.

  He sighed. "It's complex, honey. And not for little girls."

  Her eyes said that was good. Her younger sister, meanwhile, had gone off to pick a few late flowers but came back empty-handed. "They're dying," she reported. "All brown and yucky at the edges."

  "It's probably too warm for them," Linda said, and for a moment Rusty thought she was going to cry. He stepped into the breach.

  "You girls go in and brush your teeth. Get a little water from the jug on the counter. Jannie, you're the designated water-pourer. Now go." He turned back to the women. To Linda in particular. "You okay?"

  "Yes. It's just that ... it keeps hitting me in different ways. I think, 'Those flowers have no business dying,' and then I think, 'None of this has any business happening in the first place.'"

  They were silent for a moment, thinking about this. Then Rusty spoke up.

  "We should wait and see if Randolph asks me to examine the bodies. If he does, I'll get my look without any risk of hot water for you two. If he doesn't, it tells us something."

  "Meanwhile, Barbie's in jail," Linda said. "They could be trying to get a confession out of him right now."

  "Suppose you flashed your badges and got me into the funeral parlor?" Rusty asked. "Further suppose I found something that exonerates Barbie. Do you think they'd just say 'Oh shit, our bad' and let him out? And then let him take over? Because that's what the government wants; it's all over town. Do you think Rennie would allow--"

  His cell phone went off. "These things are the worst invention ever," he said, but at least it wasn't the hospital.

  "Mr. Everett?" A woman. He knew the voice but couldn't put a name to it.

  "Yes, but unless this is an emergency, I'm a little busy right n--"

  "I don't know if it's an emergency, but it's very, very important. And since Mr. Barbara--or Colonel Barbara, I guess--has been arrested, you're the one who has to deal with it."

  "Mrs. McClatchey?"

  "Yes, but Joe's the one you need to talk to. Here he is."

  "Dr. Rusty?" The voice was urgent, almost breathless.

  "Hi, Joe. What is it?"

  "I think we found the generator. Now what are we supposed to do?"

  The evening went dark so suddenly that all three of them gasped and Linda seized Rusty's arm. But it was only the big smoke-smudge on the western side of the Dome. The sun had gone behind it.

  "Where?"

  "Black Ridge."

  "Was there radiation, son?" Knowing there must have been; how else had they found it?

  "The last reading was plus two hundred," Joe said. "Not quite into the danger zone. What do we do?"

  Rusty ran his free hand through his hair. Too much happening. Too much, too fast. Especially for a smalltown fixer-upper who had never considered himself much of a decision-maker, let alone a leader.

  "Nothing tonight. It's almost dark. We'll deal with this tomorrow. In the meantime, Joe, you have to make a promise. Keep quiet about this. You know, Benny and Norrie know, and your mom knows. Keep it that way."

  "Okay." Joe sounded subdued. "We have a lot to tell you, but I guess it can wait until tomorrow." He took a breath. "It's a little scary, isn't it?"

  "Ye
s, son," Rusty agreed. "It's a little scary."

  14

  The man in charge of The Mill's fate and fortunes was sitting in his study and eating a corned beef on rye in big snaffling bites when Junior came in. Earlier, Big Jim had caught a forty-five-minute power nap. Now he felt refreshed and once more ready for action. The surface of his desk was littered with sheets of yellow legal paper, notes he would later burn in the incinerator out back. Better safe than sorry.

  The study was lit with hissing Coleman lanterns that threw a bright white glare. God knew he had access to plenty of propane--enough to light the house and run the appliances for fifty years--but for now the Colemans were better. When people passed by, he wanted them to see that bright white glare and know that Selectman Rennie wasn't getting any special perks. That Selectman Rennie was just like them, only more trustworthy.

  Junior was limping. His face was drawn. "He didn't confess."

  Big Jim hadn't expected Barbara to confess so soon and ignored this. "What's wrong with you? You look peaky as hell."

  "Another headache, but it's letting go now." This was true, although it had been very bad during his conversation with Barbie. Those blue-gray eyes either saw too much or seemed to.

  I know what you did to them in the pantry, they said. I know everything.

  It had taken all his will not to pull the trigger of his gun after he'd drawn it, and darken that damnable prying stare forever.

  "You're limping, too."

  "That's because of those kids we found out by Chester Pond. I was carrying one of them around and I think I pulled a muscle."

  "Are you sure that's all it is? You and Thibodeau have a job to do in"--Big Jim looked at his watch--"in about three and a half hours, and you can't mess it up. It has to go off perfectly."

  "Why not as soon as it's dark?"

  "Because the witch is putting her paper together there with her two little trolls. Freeman and the other one. The sports reporter who's always down on the Wildcats."

  "Tony Guay."

  "Yes, him. I don't particularly care about them being hurt, especially her"--Big Jim's upper lip lifted in his doglike imitation smile--"but there must not be any witnesses. No eyeball witnesses, I mean. What people hear ... that's a very different kettle of cod."

  "What do you want them to hear, Dad?"

  "Are you sure you're up to this? Because I can send Frank with Carter instead."