Andy, who had narrowly cheated death by pink water not long before, received Chef's threat with equanimity, if not good cheer. "You do what you have to do, Phil. Chef, I mean."
Chef raised his eyebrows in surprise. It was bleary but genuine. "Yeah?"
"Absolutely."
"Why you out here?"
"I come bearing bad news. I'm very sorry."
Chef considered this, then smiled, revealing his few surviving teeth. "There is no bad news. Christ is coming back, and that's the good news that swallows all bad news. That's the Good News Bonus Track. Do you agree?"
"I do, and I say hallelujah. Unfortunately--or fortunately, I guess; you'd have to say fortunately--your wife is with Him already."
"Say what?"
Andy reached out and pushed the muzzle of the gun floorward. Chef made no effort to stop him. "Samantha's dead, Chef. I regret to say she took her own life earlier tonight."
"Sammy? Dead?" Chef dropped the gun into the OUT basket on a nearby desk. He also lowered the garage door-opener, but kept hold of it; for the last two days it had not left his hand, even during his increasingly infrequent periods of sleep.
"I'm sorry, Phil. Chef."
Andy explained the circumstances of Sammy's death as he understood them, concluding with the comforting news that "the child" was fine. (Even in his despair, Andy Sanders was a glass-half-full person.)
Chef waved away Little Walter's wellbeing with his garage door opener. "She offed two pigs?"
Andy stiffened at that. "They were police officers, Phil. Fine human beings. She was distraught, I'm sure, but it was still a very bad thing to do. You need to take that back."
"Say what ?"
"I won't have you calling our officers pigs."
Chef considered. "Yeah-yeah, kay-kay, I take it back."
"Thank you."
Chef bent down from his not-inconsiderable height (it was like being bowed to by a skeleton) and peered into Andy's face. "Brave little motherfucker, ain't you?"
"No," Andy said honestly. "I just don't care."
Chef seemed to see something that concerned him. He grasped Andy's shoulder. "Brother, are you all right?"
Andy burst into tears and dropped onto an office chair under a sign advising that CHRIST WATCHETH EVERY CHANNEL, CHRIST LISTENETH EVERY WAVELENGTH. He rested his head on the wall below this strangely sinister slogan, crying like a child who has been punished for stealing jam. It was the brother that had done it; that totally unexpected brother.
Chef drew up a chair from behind the station manager's desk and studied Andy with the expression of a naturalist observing some rare animal in the wild. After awhile he said, "Sanders! Did you come out here so I'd kill you?"
"No," Andy said through his sobs. "Maybe. Yes. I can't say. But everything in my life has gone wrong. My wife and daughter are dead. I think God might be punishing me for selling this shit--"
Chef nodded. "That could be."
"--and I'm looking for answers. Or closure. Or something. Of course, I also wanted to tell you about your wife, it's important to do the right thing--"
Chef patted his shoulder. "You did, bro. I appreciate it. She wasn't much shakes in the kitchen, and she didn't keep house no better than a hog on a shitheap, but she could throw an unearthly fuck when she was stoned. What did she have against those two blueboys?"
Even in his grief, Andy had no intention of bringing up the rape accusation. "I suppose she was upset about the Dome. Do you know about the Dome, Phil? Chef?"
Chef waved his hand again, apparently in the affirmative. "What you say about the meth is correct. Selling it is wrong. An affront. Making it, though--that is God's will."
Andy dropped his hands and peered at Chef from his swollen eyes. "Do you think so? Because I'm not sure that can be right."
"Have you ever had any?"
"No!" Andy cried. It was as if Chef had asked him if he had ever enjoyed sexual congress with a cocker spaniel.
"Would you take medicine if the doctor prescribed it?"
"Well ... yes, of course ... but ..."
"Meth is medicine." Chef looked at him solemnly, then tapped Andy's chest with a finger for emphasis. Chef had nibbled the nail all the way to the bloody quick. "Meth is medicine. Say it."
"Meth is medicine," Andy repeated, agreeably enough.
"That's right." Chef stood up. "It's a medicine for melancholy. That's from Ray Bradbury. You ever read Ray Bradbury?"
"No."
"He's a fucking head. He knew. He wrote the motherfucking book, say hallelujah. Come with me. I'm going to change your life."
18
The First Selectman of Chester's Mill took to meth like a frog to flies.
There was a ratty old couch behind the ranked cookers, and here Andy and Chef Bushey sat under a picture of Christ on a motorcycle (title: Your Unseen Road Buddy ), passing a pipe back and forth. While burning, meth smells like three-day-old piss in an uncovered thunderjug, but after his first tentative puff, Andy felt positive that the Chef was right: selling it might be Satan's work, but the stuff itself had to be God's. The world jumped into an exquisite, delicately trembling focus he had never seen before. His heart rate spiked, the blood vessels in his neck swelled to throbbing cables, his gums tingled, and his balls crawled in the most delightfully adolescent way. Better than any of these things, the weariness that had lain on his shoulders and muddled up his thinking disappeared. He felt he could move mountains in a wheelbarrow.
"In the Garden of Eden there was a Tree," Chef said, passing him the pipe. Tendrils of green smoke drifted from both ends. "The Tree of Good and Evil. Dig that shit?"
"Yes. It's in the Bible."
"Bet your jackdog. And on that Tree was an Apple."
"Right, right." Andy took a puff so small it was actually a sip. He wanted more--he wanted it all--but feared that if he helped himself to a deep lungful, his head would explode off his neck and fly around the lab like a rocket, shooting fiery exhaust from its stump.
"The flesh of that Apple is Truth, and the skin of that Apple is Meth," Chef said.
Andy looked at him. "That's amazing."
Chef nodded. "Yes, Sanders. It is." He took back the pipe. "Is this good shit or what?"
"Amazing shit."
"Christ is coming back on Halloween," Chef said. "Possibly a few days earlier; I can't tell. It's already the Halloween season, you know. Season of the motherfucking witch." He handed Andy the pipe, then pointed with the hand holding the garage door opener. "Do you see that? Up at the end of the gallery. Over the door to the storage side."
Andy looked. "What? That white lump? Looks like clay?"
"That's not clay," Chef said. "That's the Body of Christ, Sanders."
"What about those wires coming out of it?"
"Vessels with the Blood of Christ running through em."
Andy considered this concept and found it quite brilliant. "Good." He considered some more. "I love you, Phil. Chef, I mean. I'm glad I came out here."
"Me too," Chef said. "Listen, do you want to go for a ride? I've got a car here somewhere--I think--but I'm a little shaky."
"Sure," Andy said. He stood up. The world swam for a moment or two, then steadied. "Where do you want to go?"
Chef told him.
19
Ginny Tomlinson was asleep at the reception desk with her head on the cover of a People magazine--Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie frolicking in the surf on some horny little island where waiters brought you drinks with little paper parasols stuck in them. When something woke her up at quarter of two on Wednesday morning, an apparition was standing before her: a tall, scrawny man with hollow eyes and hair that stuck out in all directions. He was wearing a WCIK tee-shirt and jeans that floated low on his meager hips. At first she thought she was having a nightmare about walking corpses, but then she caught a whiff of him. No dream had ever smelled that bad.
"I'm Phil Bushey," the apparition said. "I've come for my wife's body. I'm gonna bury her. Show me
where it is."
Ginny didn't argue. She would have given him all the bodies, just to get rid of him. She led him past Gina Buffalino, who stood next to a gurney, watching Chef with pale apprehension. When he turned to look at her, she shrank back.
"Got your Halloween costume, kid?" Chef inquired. "Yes ..."
"Who you gonna be?"
"Glinda," the girl said faintly. "Although I guess I won't be going to the party, after all. It's in Motton."
"I'm coming as Jesus," Chef said. He followed Ginny, a dirty ghost in decaying Converse Hi-Tops. Then he turned back. He was smiling. His eyes were empty. "And am I pissed."
20
Chef Bushey came out of the hospital ten minutes later bearing Sammy's sheet-wrapped body in his arms. One bare foot, the toenails painted with chipped pink polish, nodded and dipped. Ginny held the door for him. She didn't look to see who was behind the wheel of the car idling in the turnaround, and for this Andy was vaguely grateful. He waited until she'd gone back inside, then got out and opened one of the back doors for Chef, who handled his burden easily for a man who now looked like no more than skin wrapped on an armature of bone. Perhaps, Andy thought, meth conveys strength, too. If so, his own was flagging. The depression was creeping back in. The weariness, too.
"All right," Chef said. "Drive. But pass me that, first."
He had given Andy the garage door opener for safekeeping. Andy handed it over. "To the funeral parlor?"
Chef looked at him as if he were mad. "Back out to the radio station. That's where Christ will come first when He comes back."
"On Halloween."
"That's right," Chef said. "Or maybe sooner. In the meantime, will you help me bury this child of God?"
"Of course," Andy said. Then, timidly: "Maybe we could smoke a little more first."
Chef laughed and clapped Andy on the shoulder. "Like it, don't you? I knew you would."
"A medicine for melancholy," Andy said.
"True-dat, brother. True-dat."
21
Barbie on the bunk, waiting for dawn and whatever came next. He had trained himself during his time in Iraq not to worry about what came next, and although this was an imperfect skill at best, he had mastered it to some degree. In the end, there were only two rules for living with fear (he had come to believe conquering fear was a myth), and he repeated them to himself now as he lay waiting.
I must accept those things over which I have no control.
I must turn my adversities into advantages.
The second rule meant carefully husbanding any resources and planning with those in mind.
He had one resource tucked into the mattress: his Swiss Army knife. It was a small one, only two blades, but even the short one would be capable of cutting a man's throat. He was incredibly lucky to have it, and he knew it.
Whatever intake routines Howard Perkins might have insisted upon had fallen apart since his death and the ascension of Peter Randolph. The shocks the town had endured over the last four days would have knocked any police department off its pins, Barbie supposed, but there was more to it than that. What it came down to was Randolph was both stupid and sloppy, and in any bureaucracy the rank-and-file tended to take their cues from the man at the top.
They had fingerprinted him and photographed him, but it had been five full hours before Henry Morrison, looking tired and disgusted, came downstairs and stopped six feet from Barbie's cell. Well out of grabbing distance.
"Forget something, did you?" Barbie asked. "Dump out your pockets and shove everything into the corridor," Henry said. "Then take off your pants and put em through the bars."
"If I do that, can I get something to drink I don't have to slurp out of the toiletbowl?"
"What are you talking about? Junior brought you water. I saw him."
"He poured salt in it."
"Right. Absolutely." But Henry had looked a little unsure. Maybe there was a thinking human being still in there somewhere. "Do what I tell you, Barbie. Barbara, I mean."
Barbie emptied his pockets: wallet, keys, coins, a little fold of bills, the St. Christopher's medal he carried as a good luck charm. By then the Swiss Army knife was long gone into the mattress. "You can still call me Barbie when you put a rope around my neck and hang me, if you want. Is that what Rennie's got in mind? Hanging? Or a firing squad?"
"Just shut up and shove your pants through the bars. Shirt, too." He sounded like a total smalltown hardass, but Barbie thought he looked more unsure than ever. That was good. That was a start.
Two of the new kiddie-cops had come downstairs. One held a can of Mace; the other a Taser. "Need any help, Officer Morrison?" one asked.
"No, but you can stand right there at the foot of the stairs and keep an eye out until I'm done here," Henry had said.
"I didn't kill anybody." Barbie spoke quietly, but with all the honest sincerity he could muster. "And I think you know it."
"What I know is that you better shut up, unless you want a Taser enema."
Henry had rummaged through his clothes, but didn't ask Barbie to strip down to his underpants and spread his cheeks. A late search and piss-poor, but Barbie gave him some points for remembering to do one at all--no one else had.
When Henry had finished, he kicked the bluejeans, pockets now empty and belt confiscated, back through the bars.
"May I have my medallion?"
"No."
"Henry, think about this. Why would I--"
"Shut up."
Henry pushed past the two kiddie-cops with his head down and Barbie's personal effects in his hands. The kiddie-cops followed, one pausing long enough to grin at Barbie and saw a finger across his neck.
Since then he'd been alone, with nothing to do but lie on the bunk and look up at the little slit of a window (opaque pebbled glass reinforced with wire), waiting for the dawn and wondering if they would actually try to waterboard him or if Searles had just been gassing out his ass. If they took a shot at it and turned out to be as bad at boarding as they had been at prisoner intake, there was a good chance they'd drown him.
He also wondered if someone might come down before dawn. Someone with a key. Someone who might stand a little too close to the door. With the knife, escape was not completely out of the question, but once dawn came, it probably would be. Maybe he should have tried for Junior when Junior passed the glass of salt water through the bars ... only Junior had been very eager to use his sidearm. It would have been a long chance, and Barbie wasn't that desperate. At least not yet.
Besides ... where would I go?
Even if he escaped and disappeared, he could be letting his friends in for a world of hurt. After strenuous "questioning" by cops like Melvin and Junior, they might consider the Dome the least of their problems. Big Jim was in the saddle now, and once guys like him were in it, they tended to ride hard. Sometimes until the horse collapsed beneath them.
He fell into a thin and troubled sleep. He dreamed of the blonde in the old Ford pickemup. He dreamed that she stopped for him and they got out of Chester's Mill just in time. She was unbuttoning her blouse to display the cups of a lacy lavender bra when a voice said: "Hey there, fuckstick. Wakey-wakey."
22
Jackie Wettington spent the night at the Everett house, and although the kids were quiet and the guest-room bed was comfortable, she lay awake. By four o'clock that morning, she had decided what needed to be done. She understood the risks; she also understood that she couldn't rest with Barbie in a cell under the Police Department. If she herself had been capable of stepping up and organizing some sort of resistance--or just a serious investigation of the murders--she thought she would have started already. She knew herself too well, however, to even entertain the thought. She'd been good enough at what she did in Guam and Germany--rousting drunk troops out of bars, chasing AWOLs, and cleaning up after car crashes on the base was what it mostly came down to--but what was happening in Chester's Mill was far beyond a master sergeant's pay grade. Or the only full-time fem
ale street officer working with a bunch of smalltown men who called her Officer Bazooms behind her back. They thought she didn't know this, but she did. And right now a little junior high school-level sexism was the least of her worries. This had to end, and Dale Barbara was the man the President of the United States had picked to end it. Even the pleasure of the Commander in Chief wasn't the most important part. The first rule was you didn't leave your guys behind. That was sacred, the Fabled Automatic.
It had to begin with letting Barbie know he wasn't alone. Then he could plan his own actions accordingly.
When Linda came downstairs in her nightgown at five o'clock, first light had begun to seep in through the windows, revealing trees and bushes that were perfectly still. Not a breath of breeze was stirring.
"I need a Tupperware," Jackie said. "A bowl. It should be small, and it needs to be opaque. Do you have anything like that?"
"Sure, but why?"
"Because we're going to take Dale Barbara his breakfast," Jackie said. "Cereal. And we're going to put a note in the bottom of it."
"What are you talking about? Jackie, I can't do that. I've got kids."
"I know. But I can't do it alone, because they won't let me go down there on my own. Maybe if I was a man, but not equipped with these." She indicated her breasts. "I need you."
"What kind of note?"
"I'm going to break him out tomorrow night," Jackie said, more calmly than she felt. "During the big town meeting. I won't need you for that part--"
"You won't get me for that part!" Linda was clutching the neck of her nightgown.
"Keep your voice down. I'm thinking maybe Romeo Burpee--assuming I can convince him Barbie didn't kill Brenda. We'll wear balaclavas or something, so we can't be identified. No one will be surprised; everyone in this town already thinks he has cohorts."
"You're insane!"
"No. There'll be nothing but a skeleton crew at the PD during the meeting--three, four guys. Maybe only a couple. I'm sure of it."
"I'm not!"
"But tomorrow night's a long way away. He has to string them along at least that far. Now get me that bowl."