PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG 6 page

“Oh my goodness, Ginny’s in love,” Rusty said, grinning.

“Don’t be juvenile.” She glared at him.

“What rooms are the Rennies in?”

“Junior in Seven, Senior in Nineteen. Senior came in with that guy Thibodeau, but must have sent him off to run errands, because he was on his own when he went down to see his kid.” She smiled cynically. “He didn’t visit long. Mostly he’s been on that cell phone of his. The kid just sits, although he’s rational again. He wasn’t when Henry Morrison brought him in.”

“Big Jim’s arrhythmia? Where are we with that?”

“Thurston got it quieted down.”

For the time being, Rusty thought, and not without satisfaction. When the Valium wears off, he’ll recommence the old cardiac jitterbug.

“Go see the kid first,” Ginny said. They were alone in the lobby, but she kept her voice low-pitched. “I don’t like him, I’ve never liked him, but I feel sorry for him now. I don’t think he’s got long.”

“Did Thurston say anything about Junior’s condition to Rennie?”

“Yes, that the problem was potentially serious. But apparently not as serious as all those calls he’s making. Probably someone told him about Visitors Day on Friday. Rennie’s pissed about it.”

Rusty thought of the box on Black Ridge, just a thin rectangle with an area of less than fifty square inches, and still he hadn’t been able to lift it. Or even budge it. He also thought of the laughing leatherheads he’d briefly glimpsed.

“Some people just don’t approve of visitors,” he said.

“How are you feeling, Junior?”

“Okay. Better.” He sounded listless. He was wearing a hospital johnny and sitting by the window. The light was merciless on his haggard face. He looked like a rode-hard forty-year-old.

“Tell me what happened before you passed out.”

“I was going to school, then I went to Angie’s house instead. I wanted to tell her to make it up with Frank. He’s been majorly bummin.”

Rusty considered asking if Junior knew Frank and Angie were both dead, then didn’t—what was the point? Instead he asked, “You were going to school? What about the Dome?”

“Oh, right.” The same listless, affectless voice. “I forgot about that.”

“How old are you, son?”

“Twenty … one?”

“What was your mother’s name?”

Junior considered this. “Jason Giambi,” he said at last, then laughed shrilly. But the listless, haggard expression on his face never changed.

“When did the Dome drop down?”

“Saturday.”

“And how long ago was that?”

Junior frowned. “A week?” he said at last. Then, “Two weeks? It’s been awhile, for sure.” He turned at last to Rusty. His eyes were shining with the Valium Thurse Marshall had injected. “Did Baaarbie put you up to all these questions? He killed them, you know.” He nodded. “We found his gog-bags.” A pause. “Dog tags.”

“Barbie didn’t put me up to anything,” Rusty said. “He’s in jail.”

“Pretty soon he’ll be in hell,” Junior said with dry matter-offactness. “We’re going to try him and execute him. My dad said so. There’s no death penalty in Maine, but he says these are wartime conditions. Egg salad has too many calories.”

“That’s true,” Rusty said. He had brought a stethoscope, a blood-pressure cuff, and ophthalmoscope. Now he wrapped the cuff around Junior’s arm. “Can you name the last three presidents in order, Junior?”

“Sure. Bush, Push, and Tush.” He laughed wildly, but still with no facial expression.

Junior’s bp was 147 over 120. Rusty had been prepared for worse. “Do you remember who came in to see you before I did?”

“Yeah. The old guy me and Frankie found at the Pond just before we found the kids. I hope those kids are all right. They were totally cute.”

“Do you remember their names?”

“Aidan and Alice Appleton. We went to the club and that girl with the red hair jerked me off under the table. Thought she was gonna fair it right off before she was fun.” A pause. “Done.”

“Uh-huh.” Rusty employed the ophthalmoscope. Junior’s right eye was fine. The optic disc of the left was bulging, a condition known as papilledema. It was a common symptom of advanced brain tumors and the attendant swelling.

“See anything green, McQueen?”

“Nope.” Rusty put the ophthalmoscope down, then held his index finger in front of Junior’s face. “I want you to touch my finger with your finger. Then touch your nose.”

Junior did so. Rusty began to move his finger slowly back and forth. “Keep going.”

Junior succeeded in going from the moving finger to his nose once. Then he hit the finger but touched his cheek instead. The third time he missed the finger and touched his right eyebrow. “Booya. Want more? I can do it all day, you know.”

Rusty pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’m going to send Ginny Tomlinson in with a prescription for you.”

“After I get it, can I go roam? Home, I mean?”

“You’re staying overnight with us, Junior. For observation.”

“But I’m all right, aren’t I? I had one of my headaches before—I mean a real blinder—but it’s gone. I’m okay, right?”

“I can’t tell you anything right now,” Rusty said. “I want to talk with Thurston Marshall and look at some books.”

“Man, that guy’s no doctor. He’s an English teacher.”

“Maybe so, but he treated you okay. Better than you and Frank treated him, is my understanding.”

Junior waved a dismissing hand. “We were just playin. Besides, we treated those rids kite, didn’t we?”

“Can’t argue with you there. For now, Junior, just relax. Watch some TV, why don’t you?”

Junior considered this, then asked, “What’s for supper?”

Under the circumstances, the only thing Rusty could think of to reduce the swelling in what passed for Junior Rennie’s brain was IV mannitol. He pulled the chart out of the door and saw a note attached to it in an unfamiliar looping scrawl:

Dear Dr. Everett: What do you think about manitol for this patient? I cannot order, have no idea of the correct amount.

Thurse

Rusty jotted down the dose. Ginny was right; Thurston Marshall was good.

The door to Big Jim’s room was open, but the room was empty. Rusty heard the man’s voice coming from the late Dr. Haskell’s favorite snoozery. Rusty walked down to the lounge. He did not think to take Big Jim’s chart, an oversight he would come to regret.

Big Jim was fully dressed and sitting by the window with his phone to his ear, even though the sign on the wall showed a bright red cell phone with a red Xover it for the reading-impaired. Rusty thought it would give him great pleasure to order Big Jim to terminate his call. It might not be the most politic way to start what was going to be a combination exam-discussion, but he meant to do it. He started forward, then stopped. Cold.

A clear memory arose: not being able to sleep, getting up for a piece of Linda’s cranberry-orange bread, hearing Audrey whining softly from the girls’ room. Going down there to check the Js. Sitting on Jannie’s bed beneath Hannah Montana, her guardian angel.

Why had this memory been so slow in coming? Why not during his meeting with Big Jim, in Big Jim’s home study?

Because then I didn’t know about the murders; I was fixated on the propane. And because Janelle wasn’t having a seizure, she was just in REM sleep. Talking in her sleep.

He has a golden baseball, Daddy. It’s a bad baseball.

Even last night, in the mortuary, that memory hadn’t resur-faced. Only now, when it was half-past too late.

But think what it means: that gadget up on Black Ridge may only be putting out limited radiation, but it’s broadcasting something else. Call it induced precognition, call it something that doesn’t even have a name, but whatever you call it, it’s there. And if Jannie was right about the golden baseball, then all the kids who’ve been making Sybil-like pronouncements about a Halloween disaster may be right, too. But does it mean on that exact day? Or could it be earlier?

Rusty thought the latter. For a townful of kids overexcited about trick-or-treating, it was Halloween already.

“I don’t care what you’ve got on, Stewart,” Big Jim was saying. Three milligrams of Valium didn’t seem to have mellowed him out; he sounded as fabulously grumpy as ever. “You and Fernald get up there, and take Roger with y … huh? What?” He listened. “I shouldn’t even have to tell you. Haven’t you been watching the cotton-picking TV? If he gives you any sass, you—”

He looked up and saw Rusty in the doorway. For just a moment Big Jim had the startled look of a man replaying his conversation and trying to decide how much the newcomer might have overheard.

“Stewart, someone’s here. I’ll get back to you, and when I do, you better tell me what I want to hear.” He broke the connection without saying goodbye, held the phone up to Rusty, and bared his small upper teeth in a smile. “I know, I know, very naughty, but town business won’t wait.” He sighed. “It’s not easy to be the one every-body’s depending on, especially when you’re not feeling well.”

“Must be difficult,” Rusty agreed.

“God helps me. Would you like to know the philosophy I live by, pal?”

No. “Sure.”

“When God closes a door, He opens a window.”

“Do you think so?”

“I know so. And the one thing I always try to remember is that when you pray for what you want, God turns a deaf ear. But when you pray for what you need, He’s all ears.”

“Uh-huh.” Rusty entered the lounge. On the wall, the TV was tuned to CNN. The sound was muted, but there was a still photo of James Rennie, Sr., looming behind the talking head: black-and-white, not flattering. One of Big Jim’s fingers was raised, and so was his upper lip. Not in a smile, but in a remarkably canine sneer. The super beneath read WAS DOME TOWN DRUG HAVEN? The picture switched to a Jim Rennie used car ad, the annoying one that always ended with one of the salespeople (never Big Jim himself) screaming “You’ll be WHEELIN, because Big Jim’s DEALIN!”

Big Jim gestured to it and smiled sadly. “You see what Barbara’s friends on the outside are doing to me? Well, what’s the surprise? When Christ came to redeem mankind, they made him carry His own cross to Calvary Hill, where He died in blood and dust.”

Rusty reflected, and not for the first time, what a strange drug Valium was. He didn’t know if there really was veritas in vino, but there was plenty of it in Valium. When you gave it to people—especially by IV—you often heard exactly what they thought of themselves.

Rusty pulled up a chair and readied the stethoscope for action. “Lift your shirt.” When Big Jim put down his cell phone to do it, Rusty slipped it into his breast pocket. “I’ll just take this, shall I? I’ll leave it at the lobby desk. That’s an okay area for cell phones. The chairs aren’t as well padded as these, but they’re still not bad.”

He expected Big Jim to protest, maybe explode, but he didn’t so much as peep, only exposed a bulging Bhudda-belly and large soft manbreasts above it. Rusty bent forward and had a listen. It was far better than he’d expected. He would have been happy with a hundred and ten beats a minute plus moderate premature ventriculation. Instead, Big Jim’s pump was loping along at ninety, with no misbeats at all.

“I’m feeling a lot better,” Big Jim said. “It was stress. I’ve been under terrible stress. I’m going to take another hour or two to rest right here—do you realize you can see all of downtown from this window, pal?— and I’m going to visit with Junior one more time. After that I’ll just check myself out and—”

“It isn’t just stress. You’re overweight and out of shape.”

Big Jim bared his upper teeth in that bogus smile. “I’ve been running a business and a town, pal—both in the black, by the way. That leaves little time for treadmills and StairMasters and such.”

“You presented with PAT two years ago, Rennie. That’s paroxysmal atrial tachycardia.”

“I know what it is. I went to WebMD and it said healthy people often experience—”

“Ron Haskell told you in no uncertain terms to get your weight under control, to get the arrhythmia under control with medication, and if medication wasn’t effective, to explore surgical options to correct the underlying problem.”

Big Jim had begun to look like an unhappy child imprisoned in a highchair. “God told me not to! God said no pacemaker! And God was right! Duke Perkins had a pacemaker, and look what happened to him!”

“Not to mention his widow,” Rusty said softly. “Bad luck for her, too. She must have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Big Jim regarded him, little pig eyes calculating. Then he looked up at the ceiling. “Lights are on again, aren’t they? I got you your propane, like you asked. Some people don’t have much gratitude. Of course a man in my position gets used to that.”

“We’ll be out again by tomorrow night.”

Big Jim shook his head. “By tomorrow night you’ll have enough LP to keep this place running until Christmas if it’s necessary. It’s my promise to you for having such a wonderful bedside manner and being such an all-around good fellow.”

“I do have trouble being grateful when people return what was mine to begin with. I’m funny that way.”

“Oh, so now you’re equating yourself with the hospital?” Big Jim snorted.

“Why not? You just equated yourself with Christ. Let’s return to your medical situation, shall we?”

Big Jim flapped his large, blunt-fingered hands disgustedly.

“Valium isn’t a cure. If you walk out of here, you could be firing misbeats again by five PM. Or just vaporlock completely. The bright side is that you could be meeting your savior before it gets dark here in town.”

“And what would you recommend?” Rennie spoke calmly. He had regained his composure.

“I could give you something that would probably take care of the problem, at least short-term. It’s a drug.”

“What drug?”

“But there’s a price.”

“I knew it,” Big Jim said softly. “I knew you were on Barbara’s side the day you came to my office with your give me this and give me that.”

The only thing Rusty had asked for was propane, but he ignored that. “How did you know Barbara had a side then? The murders hadn’t been discovered, so how did you know he had a side?”

Big Jim’s eyes gleamed with amusement or paranoia or both. “I have my little ways, pal. So what’s the price? What would you like me to trade you for the drug that will keep me from having a heart attack?” And before Rusty could respond: “Let me guess. You want Barbara’s freedom, don’t you?”

“No. This town would lynch him the minute he stepped outside.”

Big Jim laughed. “Every now and then you show a lick of sense.”

“I want you to step down. Sanders, too. Let Andrea Grinnell take over, with Julia Shumway to help her out until Andi kicks her drug habit.”

Big Jim laughed louder this time, and slapped his thigh for good measure. “I thought Cox was bad—he wanted the one with the big tiddies to help Andrea—but you’re ever so much worse. Shumway! That rhymes-with-witch couldn’t administrate herself out of a paper bag!”

“I know you killed Coggins.”

He hadn’t meant to say that, but it was out before he could pull it back. And what harm? It was just the two of them, unless you counted CNN’s John Roberts, looking down from the TV on the wall. And besides, the results were worth it. For the first time since he had accepted the reality of the Dome, Big Jim was rocked. He tried to keep his face neutral and failed.

“You’re crazy.”

“You know I’m not. Last night I went to the Bowie Funeral Home and examined the bodies of the four murder victims.”

“You had no right to do that! You’re no pathologist! You’re not even a cotton-picking doctor !”

“Relax, Rennie. Count to ten. Remember your heart.” Rusty paused. “On second thought, fuck your heart. After the mess you left behind, and the one you’re making now, fuck your heart. There were marks all over Coggins’s face and head. Very atypical marks, but easily identifiable. Stitch marks. I have no doubt they’ll match the souvenir baseball I saw on your desk.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” But Rennie glanced toward the open bathroom door.

“It means plenty. Especially when you consider the other bodies were dumped in the same place. To me that suggests the killer of Coggins was the killer of the others. I think it was you. Or maybe you and Junior. Were you a father-and-son tag-team? Was that it?”

“I refuse to listen to this!” He started to get up. Rusty pushed him back down. It was surprisingly easy.

“Stay where you are!” Rennie shouted. “Gosh-dammit, just stay where you are!”

Rusty said, “Why did you kill him? Did he threaten to blow the whistle on your drug operation? Was he part of it?”

“Stay where you are!” Rennie repeated, although Rusty had already sat back down. It did not occur to him—then—that Rennie might not have been speaking to him.

“I can keep this quiet,” Rusty said. “And I can give you something that will take care of your PAT better than Valium. The quid pro quo is that you step down. Announce your resignation—for medical reasons—in favor of Andrea tomorrow night at the big meeting. You’ll go out a hero.”

There was no way he could refuse, Rusty thought; the man was backed into a corner.

Rennie turned to the open bathroom door again and said, “Now you can come out.”

Carter Thibodeau and Freddy Denton emerged from the bathroom where they had been hiding—and listening.

“Goddam,” Stewart Bowie said.

He and his brother were in the basement workroom of the funeral parlor. Stewart had been doing a makeup job on Arletta Coombs, The Mill’s latest suicide and the Bowie Funeral Home’s latest customer. “Goddam sonofabitch fucking shitmonkey. ”

He dropped his cell phone onto the counter, and from the wide front pocket of his rubberized green apron removed a package of peanut butter–flavored Ritz Bits. Stewart always ate when he was upset, he had always been messy with food (“The pigs ate here,” their dad was wont to say when young Stewie left the table), and now Ritz crumbs showered down on Arletta’s upturned face, which was far from peaceful; if she’d thought quaffing Liquid-Plumr would be a quick and painless way to escape the Dome, she had been badly deceived. Darn stuff had eaten all the way through her stomach and out through her back.

“What’s wrong?” Fern asked.

“Why did I ever get involved with fucking Rennie?”

“For money?”

“What good’s money now?” Stewart raved. “What’m I gonna do, go on a fuckin shopping spree at Burpee’s Department Store? That’d give me a fuckin hardon for sure!”

He yanked open the elderly widow’s mouth and slammed the remaining Ritz Bits inside. “There you go, bitch, it’s fucking snack-time.”

Stewart snatched up his cell, hit the CONTACTS button, and selected a number. “If he isn’t there,” he said —perhaps to Fern, more likely to himself—“I’m going to go out there, find him, and stick one of his own chickens right up his fucking a—”

But Roger Killian was there. And in his goddam chickenhouse. Stewart could hear them clucking. He could also hear the swooping violins of Mantovani coming through the chickenhouse sound system. When the kids were out there, it was Metallica or Pantera.

“Lo?”

“Roger. It’s Stewie. Are you straight, brother?”

“Pretty,” Roger agreed, which probably meant he’d been smoking glass, but what the fuck.

“Get down here to town. Meet me n Fern at the motor pool. We’re gonna take two of the big trucks—the ones with the hoists—out there to WCIK. All the propane’s got to be moved back to town. We can’t do it in one day, but Jim says we gotta make a start. Tomorrow I’ll recruit six or seven more guys we can trust— some of Jim’s goddam private army, if he’ll spare em—and we’ll finish up.”

“Aw, Stewart, no—I got to feed these chickens! The boys I got left has all gone to be cops!”

Which means, Stewart thought, you want to sit in that little office of yours, smoking glass and listening to shit music and looking at lesbian makeout videos on your computer. He didn’t know how you could get horny with the aroma of chickenshit so thick you could cut it with a knife, but Roger Killian managed.

“This is not a volunteer mission, my brother. I got ordered, and I’m ordering you. Half an hour. And if you do happen to see any of your kids hanging around, you shanghai em along.”

He hung up before Roger could recommence his whiny shit and for a moment just stood there, fuming. The last thing on earth he wanted to do with what remained of this Wednesday afternoon was muscle propane tanks into trucks … but that was what he was going to be doing, all right. Yes he was.

He snatched the spray hose from the sink, stuck it between Arletta Coombs’s dentures, and triggered it. It was a high-pressure hose, and the corpse jumped on the table. “Wash them crackers down, gramma,” he snarled. “Wouldn’t want you to choke.”

“Stop!” Fern cried. “It’ll squirt out the hole in her—”

Too late.

Big Jim looked at Rusty with a see what it gets you smile. Then he turned to Carter and Freddy Denton.

“Did you fellows hear Mr. Everett try to coerce me?”

“We sure did,” Freddy said.

“Did you hear him threaten to withhold certain lifesaving medication if I refused to step down?”

“Yeah,” Carter said, and favored Rusty with a black look. Rusty wondered how he ever could have been so stupid.

It’s been a long day—chalk it up to that.

“The medication in question might have been a drug called verapamil, which that fellow with the long hair administered by IV.” Big Jim exposed his small teeth in another unpleasant smile.

Verapamil. For the first time, Rusty cursed himself for not taking Big Jim’s chart from its slot on the door and examining it. It would not be the last.

“What kind of crimes have we got here, do you suppose?” Big Jim asked. “Criminal threatening?”

“Sure, and extortion,” Freddy said.

“Hell with that, it was attempted murder,” Carter said.

“And who do you suppose put him up to it?”

“Barbie,” Carter said, and slugged Rusty in the mouth. Rusty had no sense of it coming, and didn’t even begin to get his guard up. He staggered backward, hit one of the chairs, and fell into it sideways with his mouth bleeding.

“You got that resisting arrest,” Big Jim remarked. “But it’s not enough. Put him on the floor, fellows. I want him on the floor.”

Rusty tried to run but barely got out of the chair before Carter grabbed one of his arms and spun him around. Freddy put a foot behind his legs. Carter pushed. Like kids in the schoolyard, Rusty thought as he toppled over.

Carter dropped down beside him. Rusty got in one blow. It landed on Carter’s left cheek. Carter shook it off impatiently, like a man ridding himself of a troublesome fly. A moment later he was sitting on Rusty’s chest, grinning down at him. Yes, just like in the schoolyard, only with no playground monitor to break things up.

He turned his head to Rennie, who was now on his feet. “You don’t want to do this,” he panted. His heart was thudding hard. He could barely get enough breath to feed it. Thibodeau was very heavy. Freddy Denton was on his knees beside the two of them. To Rusty he looked like the ref in one of those put-up-job wrestling matches.

“But I do, Everett,” Big Jim said. “In fact, God bless you, I have to. Freddy, snag my cell phone. It’s in his breast pocket, and I don’t want it getting broken. The cotton-picker stole it. You can add that to his bill when you get him to the station.”

“Other people know,” Rusty said. He had never felt so helpless. And so stupid. Telling himself that he wasn’t the first to underestimate James Rennie Senior did not help. “Other people know what you did.”

“Perhaps,” Big Jim said. “But who are they? Other friends of Dale Barbara, that’s who. The ones who started the food riot, the ones who burned down the newspaper office. The ones who set the Dome going in the first place, I have no doubt. Some sort of government experiment, that’s what I think. But we’re not rats in a box, are we? Are we, Carter?”

“No.”

“Freddy, what are you waiting for?”

Freddy had been listening to Big Jim with an expression that said Now I get it. He took Big Jim’s cell phone from Rusty’s breast pocket and tossed it onto one of the sofas. Then he turned back to Rusty. “How long have you been planning it? How long you been planning to lock us up in town so you could see what we’d do?”

“Freddy, listen to yourself,” Rusty said. The words came out in a wheeze. God, but Thibodeau was heavy. “That’s crazy. It makes no sense. Can’t you see th—”

“Hold his hand on the floor,” Big Jim said. “The left one.” Freddy did as he was ordered. Rusty tried to fight, but with Thibodeau pinning his arms, he had no leverage.

“I’m sorry to do this, pal, but the people of this town have to understand we’re in control of the terrorist element.”

Rennie could say he was sorry all he wanted, but in the instant before he brought the heel of his shoe— and all of his two hundred and thirty pounds—down on Rusty’s clenched left hand, Rusty saw a different motive poking out the front of the Second Selectman’s gabardine trousers. He was enjoying this, and not just in a cerebral sense.

Then the heel was pressing and grinding: hard, harder, hardest. Big Jim’s face was clenched with effort. Sweat stood out under his eyes. His tongue was clamped between his teeth.

Don’t scream, Rusty thought. It’ll bring Ginny, and then she’ll be in the cooking pot, too. Also, he wants you to. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

But when he heard the first snap from under Big Jim’s heel, he did scream. He couldn’t help it.

There was another snap. Then a third.

Big Jim stepped back, satisfied. “Get him on his feet and take him to jail. Let him visit with his friend.”

Freddy was examining Rusty’s hand, which was already swelling. Three of the four fingers were bent badly out of true. “Busted,” he said with great satisfaction.

Ginny appeared in the lounge doorway, her eyes huge. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

“Arresting this bastard for extortion, criminal withholding, and attempted murder,” Freddy Denton said as Carter hauled Rusty Everett to his feet. “And that’s just a start. He resisted and we subdued him. Please step aside, ma’am.”

“You’re nuts!” Ginny cried. “Rusty, your hand !”

“I’m all right. Call Linda. Tell her these thugs—”

He got no further. Carter seized him by the neck and ran him out the door with his head bent down. In his ear Carter whispered: “If I was sure that old guy knew as much about doctorin as you, I’d kill you myself.”

All this in four days and change, Rusty marveled as Carter forced him down the hallway, staggering and bent almost double by the grip on his neck. His left hand was no longer a hand, only a bellowing chunk of pain below his wrist. Just four days and change.

He wondered if the leatherheads—whatever or whoever they might be—were enjoying the show.

It was late afternoon before Linda finally came across The Mill’s librarian. Lissa was biking back toward town along Route 117. She said she’d been talking to the sentries out at the Dome, trying to glean further information about Visitors Day.

“They’re not supposed to schmooze with the townies, but some will,” she said. “Especially if you leave the top three buttons on your blouse undone. That seems to be a real conversation-starter. With the Army guys, anyway. The Marines … I think I could take off all my clothes and dance the Macarena and they still wouldn’t say boo. Those boys seem immune to sex appeal.” She smiled. “Not that I’ll ever be mistaken for Kate Winslet.”

“Did you pick up any interesting gossip?”

“Nope.” Lissa was straddling her bike, and looking in at Linda through the passenger window. “They don’t know squat. But they’re awfully concerned about us; I was touched by that. And they’re hearing as many rumors as we are. One of them asked me if it was true that over a hundred people had committed suicide already.”

“Can you get in the car with me for a minute?”

Lissa’s smile broadened. “Am I being arrested?”

“There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Lissa put down the kickstand of her bike and got in, first moving Linda’s citation clipboard and a nonfunctioning radar gun out of the way. Linda told her about the clandestine visit to the funeral home and what they’d found there, then about the proposed meeting at the parsonage. Lissa’s response was immediate and vehement.

“I’ll be there—you just try to keep me away.”

The radio cleared its throat then, and Stacey came on. “Unit Four, Unit Four. Break-break-break.”

Linda grabbed the mike. It wasn’t Rusty she was thinking of; it was the girls. “This is Four, Stacey. Go.”

What Stacey Moggin said when she came back changed Linda’s unease to outright terror. “I’ve got something bad to tell you, Lin. I’d tell you to brace yourself, but I don’t think you can brace yourself for a thing like this. Rusty’s been arrested.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 492