The door of the Hummer opened, chunked closed. His father walked toward himr his briefcase banging one thigh. He didn't look suspicious, wary, or angry. He sat down beside Junior on the step without a word. Then, in a gesture that took Junior completely by surprise, he put a hand on the younger man's neck and squeezed gently.
'You heard?' he asked.
'Some,' Junior said. 'I don't understand it, though.'
'None of us do. I think there are going to be some hard days ahead while this gets sorted out. So I have to ask you something.'
'What's that?'Junior's hand closed around the butt of the pistol.
'Will you play your part? You and your friends? Frankie? Carter and the Searles boy?'
Junior was silent, waiting. What was this shit?
'Peter Randolph's acting chief now. He's going to need some men to fill out the police roster. Good men. Are you willing to serve as a deputy until this damn clustermug is over?'
Junior felt a wild urge to scream with laughter. Or triumph. Or both. Big Jim's hand was still on the nape of his neck. Not squeezing. Not pinching. Almost… caressing.
Junior took his hand off the gun in his pocket. It occurred to him that he was still on a roll—the roll of all rolls.
Today he had killed two girls he'd known since childhood.
Tomorrow he was going to be a town cop.
'Sure, Dad,' he said. 'If you need us, we are there! And for the first time in maybe four years (it could have been longer), he kissed his father's cheek.
PRAYERS
1
Barbie and Julia Shumway didn't talk much; there wasn't much to say. Theirs was, as far as Barbie could see, the only car on the road, but lights streamed from most of the farmhouse windows once they cleared town. Out here, where there were always chores to be done and no one fully trusted Western Maine Power, almost everyone had a genme. When they passed the WCIK radio tower, the two red lights at the top were flashing as they always did. The electric cross in front of the little studio building was also lit, a gleamir.g white beacon in the dark. Above it, the stars spilled across the sky in their usual extravagant profusion, a never-ending cataract of energy that needed no generator to power it.
'Used to come fishing out this way,' Barbie said. 'It's peaceful.'
'Any luck?'
'Plenty, but sometimes the air smells like the dirty ur derwear of the gods. Fertilizer, or something. I never dared to eat what I caught.'
'Not fertilizer—bullshit. Also known as the smell of self-righteousness.'
'I beg your pardon?'
She pointed at a dark steeple-shape blocking out the star;.'Christ the Holy Redeemer Church,' she said. 'They own WCIK just back the road. Sometimes known as Jesus Radio?'
He shrugged.'I guess maybe I have seen the steeple. Anc. I know the station. Can't very well miss it if you live around here j.nd own a radio. Fundamentalist?'
'They make the hardshell Baptists look soft. I go to the Congo, myself. Can't stand Lester Coggins, hate all the ha-ha-you're-going-to-hell-and-we're-not stuff. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Although I have often wondered how they afford a fifty-thousand-watt radio station.'
'Love offerings?'
She snorted. 'Maybe I ought to ask Jim Rennie. He's a deacon.'
Julia drove a trim Prius Hybrid, a car Barbie would not have expected of a staunch Republican newspaper owner (although he supposed it did fit a worshipper at the First Congregational). But it was quiet, and the radio worked. The only problem was that out here on the western side of town, CIK's signal was so powerful it wiped out everything on the FM band. And tonight it was broadcasting some holy accordion shit that hurt Barbie's head. It sounded like polka music played by an orchestra dying of bubonic plague.
'Try the AM band, why don't you?' she said.
Fje did, and got only nighttime gabble until he hit a sports station near the bottom of the dial. Here he heard that before the Red Sox-Mariners playoff game at Fenway Park, there had been a moment of silence for the victims of what the announcer called 'the western Maine event.'
'Event,'Julia said,'A sports-radio term if ever I heard one. Might as well turn it off.'
A mile or so past the church, they began to see a glow through the trees. They came around a curve and into the glare of lights almost the size of Hollywood premiere khegs. Two pointed in their direction; two more were tilted straight up. Every pothole in the road stood out in stark relief. The trunks of the birches looked like narrow ghosts. Barbie felt as if they were driving into a noir movie from the late nineteen forties.
'Stop, stop, stop,' he said. 'This is as close as you want to go. Looks like there's nothing there, but take my word for it, there is. It would likely blow the electronics in your little car, if nothing else.'
She stopped and they got out. For a moment they just stood in front of the car, squinting into the bright light. Julia raised one hand to shield her eyes.
Parked beyond the lights, nose to nose,—were two brown canvas-back military trucks. Sawhorses had been placed on the road for good measure, their feet braced with sandbags. Motors roared steadily in the darkness—not one generator but several. Barbie saw thick electrical cables snaking away from the spotlights and into the woods, where other lights glared through the trees.
'They're going to light the perimeter,' he said, and twirled one finger in the air, like an ump signaling a home run. 'Lights around the whole town, shining in and shining up.'
'Why up?'
'The tip ones to warn away air traffic. If any gets through, that is. Id guess it's mostly tonight they're worried about. By tomorrow they'll have the airspace over The Mill sewn up like one of Uncle Scrooge's moneybags.'
On the dark side of the spotlights, but visible in their back-splash, were half a dozen armed soldiers, standing at parade rest with their backs turned. They must have heard the approach of the car, quiet as it was, but not one of them so much as looked around.
Julia called, 'Hello, fellas!'
No one turned. Barbie didn't expect it—on their way out, Julia had told Barbie what Cox had told her—but he had to try. And because he could read their insignia, he knew what to try. The Army might be running this show—Cox's involvement suggested that—but these fellows weren't Army.