“Hey, everybody,” Lucas said.
“Lucas,” somebody said. Faces turned toward him.
“You’ve all probably heard about the Manette kidnapping case. The guy who took her is a gamer. I’ve got a composite sketch, and I’d like you all to look at it, see if you recognize him. And I’d appreciate it if you’d fax it or ship it to everybody you can think of, here in the Cities. We really need the help.”
He passed out copies of the composite: nobody knew the face.
“He’s a big guy?” asked one of the programmers, a woman named Ice.
“Yeah. Tall, muscular, thin,” Lucas said. “Crazy, apparently. Maybe medically crazy.”
“Sounds like my last date,” Ice said.
“Will you put it on the ’Net?” Lucas asked.
“No problem,” Ice said. She was a throwback to the days of punk, with short-cropped hair, bright red lipstick that somewhat flowed out of the lines of her lips, and nose rings. Hunt said she wrote more code than anyone in the place. An idea began to tickle the back of Lucas’s head, but he pushed it away for the moment.
“Good,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
On the way out, Hunt said, “Lucas, we need to get together.”
“Trouble?” Lucas feared the day that the IRS would knock on the door and ask for his records. Records? We don’t got no steenking records.
“We need a loan,” Hunt said. “I’ve talked to Norwest, and there won’t be any problem getting it. You’d have to approve.”
“A loan? I thought we were…”
“We need to buy Probleco,” Hunt said. “They’ve got a half-dozen hardware products that would fit with ours like the last pieces in a puzzle. And they’re for sale. Jim Duncan wants to go back to engineering.”
“How much do you want to borrow? Maybe I could…”
“Eight mil,” Hunt said.
Lucas was startled. “Jesus, Barry, eight million dollars?”
“Eight million would buy us dominance in the field, Lucas. Nobody else would be close. Nobody else could get close.”
“But, my God, that’s a lot of money,” Lucas said, flustered. “What if we fall on our butts?”
“You hired me to keep us off our butts, and we are,” Hunt said. “We’ll stay that way. But that’s why we’ve got to meet, so I can explain it all.”
“All right; but we’ll have to wait until after this Manette thing. And I’d like you maybe to come up with a couple of other options.”
“I can think of one big one, right off the top of my head.”
“What?”
“Take the company public. It’s a little early for that, but if you wanted out, well…we could take the company public and probably get you, I don’t know, something between eight and ten mil.”
“Holy cats,” Lucas said.
He’d never said that before, in public or private, but now it bleated out and Hunt jerked out a quick smile. “If we borrow the eight mil, and hang on for another five years, it’ll be thirty mil. I promise.”
“All right, all right, we’ll talk,” Lucas said, starting down the hall. “Give me a week. Thirty mil. Holy cats.”
“Say hello to Weather,” Hunt said. He seemed about to say something else but stopped. Lucas was halfway out the door before he realized what it was, and walked back. Hunt had just sat down in his office, and Lucas stuck his head in. “This Manette thing can’t last for more than a couple of weeks, so set a meeting with the bank. And lay out the stock thing we talked about—the share plan.”
Hunt nodded. “I’ve been meaning to bring it up.”
Lucas said, “Now’s the time. I told you if it worked, you’d get a piece of it. It seems to be working.”
WEATHER .
Lucas toyed with the engagement ring: he should ask her. He could feel her waiting. But the advice was rolling in, unsolicited, from everywhere, and somehow, it slowed him down.
Women suggested a romantic proposal: a short preface, declaring that he loved her, with a more or less elaborate description of what their life together would be like, and then a suggestion that they marry; most of the men suggested a plain, straightforward question: Hey babe, how about it? A few thought he was crazy for tying up with a woman at all. A park cop suggested that golf would be a complete replacement for any woman, and cheaper.
“Fuck golf,” Lucas said. “I like women.”
“Well, that’s the other half of the equation,” the guy admitted. “Women are also a complete replacement for golf.”
“ANYTHING?” WEATHER ASKED as soon as he came in the door. He could feel the ring in his pocket, against his thigh. “With the Manettes?”
“Bizarre bullshit,” he said, and he told her about the oil barrel. “Elle’s coming over at six-thirty; I promised her steak.”
“Excellent,” Weather said. “I’ll do the salad.”
Lucas went to start the charcoal and touched the ring in his pocket. What if she said no, not yet…? Would that change everything? Would she feel like she had to move out?
Weather was bustling around the kitchen, bumping into him as he got the barbecue sauce out of the refrigerator. She asked with elaborate, chatty unconcern, “Do you think you and Elle would have gotten married, if…”
“If she hadn’t become a nun?” Lucas laughed. “No. We grew up together. We were too close, too young. Romancing her just wouldn’t have seemed…right. Too much like incest.”
“Does she think the same way?”
Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. I never know what women think.”
“You wouldn’t rule it out, though.”
“Weather?”
“What?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
SISTER MARY JOSEPH —Elle Kruger—still wore the traditional black habit with a long rosary swaying by her side. Lucas had asked her about it, and she’d said, “I like it. The other dress…it looks dowdy. I don’t feel dowdy.”
“Do you feel like a penguin?”
“Not in the slightest.”
Elle had been a beautiful child, and still ran through Lucas’s dreams, an eleven-year-old blonde touched by grace and merriment: and later scarred by acne so foul that she’d retreated from life, to emerge ten years later as Sister Joseph. She’d told him that her choice was not brought by her face, that she had a vocation. He wasn’t certain; he never quite bought it.
Elle arrived in a black Chevrolet as Lucas was putting the first of the steaks on the grill. Weather gave her a beer.
“What’s the status?” Elle asked.
“One’s dead, maybe; the others aren’t yet,” Lucas said. “But the guy is cracking open and all the gunk is oozing out of his head. He’s gonna kill them soon.”
“I know her—Andi Manette. She’s not the most powerful mind, but she’s got an ability to…touch people,” Elle said, sipping the beer. The smell of steak floated in from the porch. “She reaches out and you talk to her. I think it’s something that aristocrats develop. It’s a touch.”
“Can she stay alive?”
Elle nodded. “For a while—for longer than another woman could. She’ll try to manipulate him. If he’s had therapy, it’s hard to tell which way he’ll jump. He’ll recognize the manipulation, but some people become so habituated to therapy that they need it, like a drug. She could keep him going.”
“Like Scheherazade,” Weather said.
“Like that,” Elle agreed.
“I need to keep him talking,” Lucas said. “He calls me on the telephone, and we try to track him.”
“Do you think he was in therapy with her? A patient?”
“We don’t know. We’re looking, but we haven’t found much.”
“If he is, then you should go to his problem. Not accuse him of being ill.”
“I did that this afternoon,” Lucas said ruefully. “He got pissed…sorry.”
“Ask him how he’s taking care of them,” Elle suggested. “See if you can make him feel some responsibility, or that you think
he’s shirking a responsibility. Ask him if there’s anything you can do that would allow them to go free. Something he would trade. Ask him not to answer right away, but to consider it. What would he like? You need questions on that order.”
Later, over the steaks, Lucas said, “We’ve got another problem. We’re going through Manette’s records. She was treating people for child abuse—and she hadn’t notified anybody.”
Elle put down her fork. “Oh, no. You’re not going to prosecute.”
“That’s up in the air,” Lucas said.
Now Elle was angry. “That’s the most primitive law this state has ever passed. We know that people are ill, but we insist on putting them into positions where they can’t get help, and they’ll just go on…”
“…Unless we slap their asses in jail…”
“What about the ones you never find out about? The ones who’d like to get treatment but can’t because the minute they open their mouths, the cops’ll be on them like wolves?”
“I know you’ve got a point-of-view,” Lucas said, trying to back out of the argument.
“What?” Weather asked. “What happens?”
Elle turned to her. “If a person abuses a child in this state, and realizes he’s sick, and tries to get treatment, the therapist is required to report him. If she does that, her records get seized by the state and are used as evidence against the patient. So as soon as the state acts, the patient, of course, gets a lawyer, who tells him to get out of treatment and keep his mouth shut. And if the man’s acquitted—they frequently are, since he’s admitted that he’s mentally ill and that casts doubt on the records, and the therapists are very reluctant witnesses—well, then he’s turned loose and all he knows for sure is that he can’t ever go back to treatment, because he might wind up in prison.”
Weather stared at her for a moment, then said to Lucas, “That can’t be right.”
“Sort of a Catch-22,” Lucas admitted.
“Sort of barbaric is what it is,” Weather said sharply.
“Child abuse is barbaric,” Lucas snapped back.
“But if a person is trying to get help, what do you want? Throw him in a hole somewhere?”
“Listen, I really don’t want to argue about it,” Lucas said. “You either believe or you don’t.”
“Lucas…”
“Listen, will you guys let me chicken out of this thing and eat my steak? For…gosh sakes.”
“Makes me really unhappy,” Elle growled. “Really unhappy.”
LATE THAT NIGHT, Weather rolled up on a shoulder and said, “Barbaric.”
“I didn’t want to argue about it with Elle right there,” Lucas said. “But you know what I really think? Therapy doesn’t work with child abusers. The shrinks are flattering themselves. What you do with child abusers is you put their asses in jail. Each and every one of them, wherever you find them.”
“And you call yourself a liberal,” Weather said in the dark.
“Libertine. Not liberal,” Lucas said, easing toward her.
“Stay on your side of the bed,” she said.
“How about if I put just one finger over?”
“No.” And a moment later, “That’s not a finger…”
10
JOHN MAIL WATCHED the late news with a sense of well-being. He was alone except for the wide-screen television and his computers. He had a dial-up Internet link, and monitored twenty-four news groups dealing with sex or computers or both. He had two phone lines and three computers going at once. As he watched the news, he punched through alt.sex.blondes on the ’Net, and now and then pulled out a piece and shipped it to a second computer.
Mail was a little sleepy, a little burned out, with a pleasant ache in his lower belly and a burn on his knees. Andi Manette was a package, all right: he’d known that when he’d first laid eyes on her ten years earlier. She was everything he’d expected: nice body, and she fought him. He enjoyed the fight, and enjoyed smothering it. Every time he rode her, he finished with a sense of victory.
And now here he was, on television, dominating the news. Everybody was looking for him—and they might find him, he thought, given a few weeks, or months. He’d have to do something about that, eventually.
He pushed the thought away and went back to his favorite: Davenport. Davenport was in hiding. Nothing was said about him. Nothing.
Mail ran through the Internet news groups as he watched TV, sorting the messages by subject. He was tempted to post something about Manette and what he was doing with her. He might do that, if he could get to a machine at the university. Some people on the alt.sex groups who would appreciate what he had to say…
Maybe just a quick note now, just a hint? No. There was always a path they could get back on, a way to trace him—his Internet link had his real phone number.
Though not his real name.
On the Internet, he was Tab Post and Pete Rate, names he got off his computer keyboard. Down at the store, and with the store van, he was Larry F. Roses. The real Larry F. Roses was down south somewhere, Florida, Louisiana. He’d sold the van and its papers for cash, to avoid having to split the money with his ex-wife. To the mortgage company, he was Martin LaDoux. He had Marty’s papers—driver’s license, with his own photo on it now, a Social Security card, even a passport. He paid Marty’s income taxes.
He wasn’t John Mail anywhere. John Mail was dead…
Mail sat up and pushed away the TV tray with the aluminum foil chicken-pot-pie tin. Chicken-pot-pie and a Coke; just about his favorite. And he thought about Grace. Got up, went to the kitchen, got another can of Coke, and thought about her some more.
Grace might be good. Fresh. Her body was just starting to turn, and she’d fight, all right. He dropped on the couch and closed his eyes. Still, when he looked at her, he didn’t feel the hunger he felt for the mother. That still surprised him. The first time he’d taken Andi Manette to the mattress, he’d almost blacked out with the joy of it. Maybe, Grace. Sometime. As an experiment. Bet she’d freak out when she saw it coming…
He’d just finished the Coke when the phone rang on the corner table behind his head. He groped for it, found it. “Hello?”
“Yes, Mr. LaDoux.” Mail sat up: this voice he paid attention to.
“They are looking for your boat. The police know you were watching her from the lake.” Click. Mail stared at the phone. Shit. He wished he knew who it was: a face-to-face talk would be interesting.
But the boat. He frowned. When he’d rented the boat, he’d had to show an ID, the LaDoux driver’s license, his home name. The old guy at the rental place had stamped it on the back of a duplicate form. Where he put the form, Mail didn’t know. Hadn’t paid attention. Damnit. That’s how Davenport would get him: when he didn’t pay attention.
Mail stood up, got a jacket and a flashlight, and went outside. Chilly. But the clouds had vanished with the sun, and overhead, the Milky Way stretched across the sky like God’s own Rolex. Drive up? Nah. Good night for a stroll. Maybe some pussy at the end of it, although his testicles were beginning to ache.
With the flashlight picking out the bumps and holes, Mail took the driveway down to the gravel frontage road, checked the rural mailbox out of habit. Nothing; the mailman always came before ten o’clock, and Mail had picked up the day’s delivery when he’d got up. He shut the mailbox and went down the gravel road.
To the north, the lights of the Cities were visible as a thin orange glow above the roadside trees. But when he turned south, up the track to the shack where he kept the women, it was as dark as the inside of a bone; and it all smelled of corn leaves.
Mail lived on what once had been a small farm. A neighbor had bought it when the farm could no longer support itself, had shorn a hundred and fifty acres of crop land from the original plot, and had sold the remaining ten acres containing the original farmhouse and a few crumbling outbuildings. The new owner, an alcoholic slaughterhouse worker, had allowed the house to fall apart before he killed himself. The n
ext owner built a small house closer to the road, and a two-horse stable out back. When his children had grown, he’d moved to Florida. The next owner converted the stable to a garage, got lonely in the country winter, and moved back to the city. The next owner was Mail.
By the time Mail took the place, the old house was a ruin, a shack. A caved-in chicken coop squatted behind the shack, with the remains of what might have been a machine shed, now reduced to a pile of rotting boards. A still-recognizable two-seater outhouse was out to one side, nearly buried in the corn. Farther to the back was the foundation of a barn.
If the farmhouse was a ruin, the basement and root cellar were solid. Mail had run a new electrical cable out to the place from his own house, a job that had taken him two hours.
He had worried, for a while, about keeping the women in the house. A trespassing antique hunter might accidentally stumble over them. Antique hunters were everywhere, stripping old farmhouses of their antique brass doorknobs and doorstops and forced-air register fittings, old pickle crocks—those were getting hard to find—and even nails, if they were hand-forged and in good shape.
But antique scavengers were a nervous lot. Judges treated them like burglars, which is what they were, so Mail had put in two Radio Shack battery-operated motion alarms and felt fairly safe. Any antique hunter tripping an alarm would be out of the house in an instant; and if it was anybody else, the cops, for instance, the jig would be up anyway.
The only other danger was Hecht, the neighboring farmer. Hecht was a phlegmatic German, a member of some weird religious sect. He had no television, there was no newspaper box on his mailbox post. He had never shown much interest in anything beyond his tractor and his land. Mail had never seen him near the old house, except at planting and harvest time, when he was working in the adjacent fields. By then, the women would be long gone.