Devoted, page 27
This wasn’t because anyone lied.
Anyway, dogs didn’t lie. They couldn’t.
They weren’t sure why they couldn’t, but they couldn’t.
Yet details changed in the retelling, because their memories were, like those of human beings, not perfectly reliable.
Their history, therefore, had a certain quality of myth.
Regarding their origins, every story attributed their genesis to human beings.
The first of their kind came, so the legend had it, from a genetics laboratory. Born from experiments in enhanced intelligence.
They said the Pentagon funded this research.
The military was hoping to create intelligent dogs to serve as spies and perform reconnaissance in urban warfare.
Legend identified several places in California where those experiments might have taken place.
Devoted Mysterians had visited every potential cradle of their civilization, but found no laboratories.
They found housing developments. A supermarket. A shabby mini-mall. An athletic club. A tract of marshland.
They found a retirement home. A cheesy strip club with pole dancers. A sports park with baseball and soccer fields.
Of course the facility might be secret, lying underground or otherwise disguised.
Nothing, however, could be concealed from canine olfactory perception. Their noses revealed to them more clues than all the wits of all the detectives ever born.
But they found no hint of a hidden laboratory.
Now, on this night of nights, when the Wire hummed with news, Bella sensed history in the making. A history different from any they had ever imagined.
Something was happening out there.
Something big. Something wonderful.
Just today, in Pinehaven, Kipp had found a boy who could use the Wire.
Vulcan, a German shepherd, had reported a previously unknown community of their kind in Southern California.
Caesar and Cleo Ishigawa of San Jose had produced a healthy litter of six.
Just half an hour earlier, word came that Lucy and Ricky, companions of Nancy Peltz, of Vallejo, were parents of five pups.
More of their kind had been born in one day than in the past three or four years combined.
And now, from out of Oregon issued a transmission on the Wire alike to that from Vulcan in distant La Jolla.
According to a mixed breed named Ginger, a community of forty lived in and around the town of Corvallis.
The Oregon group had long hoped to make contact with other communities on the Wire, which they called “the Network.” They had tried for years without success—until now.
Event by event, Bella became more excited.
While the Montell family slept, Bella moved restlessly through the house.
She went to her water dish.
She went to the kitchen drawer where her cookies were kept.
She went to her toy box in a corner of the family room.
She didn’t want water or cookies or a toy.
At first she didn’t understand what she wanted.
And then she knew. She wanted to run.
All of the good news had incited in her such joy that she could not be still.
Bella ran through the family room. Sprinted along the first-floor hall.
She raced around and around the living room, leaping on and then off sofas and armchairs.
Into the kitchen. Through the pet door. Across the porch. She circled the yard again and again, as if it were a racetrack.
When she returned to the house, she collapsed on the cool tile of the kitchen floor, tongue lolling, panting, happy.
Later, after she’d recovered and had a drink, she considered sprinting upstairs.
She wanted to wake Andrea and Bill. Larinda, Sam, Dennis, Milly. Her people. Her loves.
She yearned to share her joy with them.
But she could not share.
They didn’t know how very intelligent she was, and she could not speak, and they weren’t on the Wire.
She loved them, and they loved her, and if she could have no more, what she had was more than enough.
Yet right now, her great joy rested on the quiet sadness of loneliness.
Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beauty was nonetheless a hard place, indifferent to its creatures.
It was mind that mattered, mind that cared, mind that loved, the best works of the mind that changed this hard world for the better.
Mind—and the heart—had bonded people and dogs for tens of thousands of years. They had formed an alliance for survival and a covenant of affection against the darkness of the world.
If the minds of dogs were undergoing change, enlightenment, then the bond between them and people might one day be even more satisfying than it had been for millennia.
As she composed another Bellagram to report the existence of the community in Corvallis, Oregon, she hoped that one day more people than just the boy Woody would be on the Wire.
She hoped that, when the time was right, Andrea and Bill and Larinda and Sam and Dennis and Milly would know her in her fullness.
She hoped that she would live long enough to see the mystery of the Mysterium solved.
She hoped to know why she’d been born as she was, what it all meant, where it was all going.
From her toy box, she retrieved a hard rubber bone infused with an interesting flavor.
For all that she was, she was no less a dog.
The toy bone was conceived by the human mind, crafted by human hands, given to Bella as an expression of love, so it comforted her even when she was alone, while her family slept.
89
Woody was in the world as he had never been before, embarrassed neither by himself nor others. As he’d shared his fear of closeness with Kipp, the dog had shared his need for closeness, for touching and sharing. Knots deep in Woody had been untied. He could not say what kind of knots they had been, whether psychological or physical, or both. He could not say how they had been untied, except that the means by which he and Kipp opened each to the other—the Wire—served not merely two purposes but as well a third; it wasn’t just a means of communication and swift education, but also a mysterious instrument of change. He intuited that Kipp understood the third purpose and how the Wire functioned to fulfill it. He wanted the golden retriever to explain it to him, how the Gordian knots of autism had been untied, but this was not the right time for that.
At the moment, in addition to himself, the house contained four people—his mom, Ben Hawkins, Rosa Leon, and Carson Conroy—three of whom had been total strangers an hour earlier, plus a dog who was no longer a stranger and as well-known to Woody as Woody was known to himself. Furthermore, there were deputies everywhere outside: two in a patrol car in front of the house, on Greenbriar Road; two in an all-wheel-drive SUV at the end of the backyard, near the forest; two more in another SUV that was parked at the foot of the back porch steps.
After what had happened earlier with the Shacket thing, all of this activity and all of these people would once have spooked Woody, so that he would have gone away to Castle Wyvern. He didn’t want to go away now. He thought maybe he would never want to go away again.
All of these people, minus the deputies, were gathered in the living room, where the draperies were closed over the windows. No one had been offered coffee yet or Mrs. Brickit’s excellent muffins, because everyone had something urgent to say, especially Mr. Conroy, who told them about Shacket’s escape and archaea and ninety-two dead in Springville, Utah. Ms. Leon told them about Dorothy and Kipp and the Mysterium, about the enormous inheritance and her legal custody of Kipp. It was all very exciting, like something in an adventure story, but also scary. Sitting on a sofa with Kipp’s head in his lap, Woody expected to embarrass himself when they asked him about the Dark Web and the site called Tragedy, but it all came rushing out of him without hesitation, everything he’d discovered over the past sixty weeks, the satisfaction he took in seeking justice for his dad. He was amazed by himself. He wondered . . . if his vegetables and potato and meat were all served on the same plate the next time he had dinner, would seeing the different foods in contact with one another sicken him as before, or would he be able to eat like a normal person?
When everyone had said what most urgently needed to be said, an uncomfortable silence settled over them, as though they had become autistic, though it was most likely amazement that left them briefly speechless, for they had fallen down a rabbit hole for sure. Then everyone but Woody started talking at once. They were in agreement about the situation in which they found themselves. Woody had kicked a hornet’s nest, and he was in deep shit. If Woody was in deep shit, so was his mom. Kipp wasn’t going to be separated from Woody, the only human being who could use the Wire, so Kipp was in deep shit. Because Rosa Leon was legally and morally responsible for Kipp, she, too, was in deep shit. And because Lee Shacket, in the hospital, told Mr. Conroy about the true nature of the Springville experiments, the medical examiner was in deep shit. All of them were now enemies of Dorian Purcell, who had a zero tolerance policy when it came to people he believed were a serious threat to him.
The only person in the room who wasn’t in deep shit, who could walk away and get on with his life, was Ben Hawkins. But he said that he had been in deep shit many times before, had gotten out of it, and in retrospect had enjoyed the experience and always learned something from it. They were forming a mutual-defense society here, or maybe an extended family, and Ben insisted on having a role in it because, he said, he wanted to be part of the magic that was Kipp. The magic-of-Kipp part was surely true, but the way he looked at Woody’s mom was how Woody imagined he himself would look at a girl he wanted to kiss, if one ever entered his life, so it wasn’t all about Kipp.
Mr. Conroy said, “Right now, Megan, the sheriff is flooding you with protection because he thinks this is where Shacket might go. He doesn’t care about you and your boy, only about his career. If they find Shacket and take him down, he’ll pull these deputies out of here. Then if someone shows up from this Dark Web operation . . .”
“We’re on our own,” she said.
Conroy shook his head. “It’s worse than that. Hayden Eckman is already doing the bidding of someone—maybe the NSA, maybe Purcell—by making no objection to the transfer of jurisdiction to the state attorney general. If Purcell wants these Dark Web killers to have a clean shot at you—at us—and he attempts to corrupt Eckman, he’ll find the sheriff eager to be bought. Then we won’t be able to rely on local law enforcement. Any deputy hired by the former sheriff, Lyle Sheldrake . . . well, I’d trust them. But Eckman has been purging Lyle’s best people and expanding the force as much as he can afford. There are some of his men, if they showed up to protect me . . . I’d want to be anywhere but here.”
“Should we leave?” Woody’s mom wondered. “Where would we go? I don’t like the idea of running.”
“There’s nowhere you can go that you can’t be found,” Ben said. “Not if someone with Purcell’s resources wants to find you.”
“We need a plan,” Woody said. “That’s what people do in stories when they’re in really bad trouble. They make a cool plan.” He slid off the sofa, and Kipp jumped to the floor with him. “Mrs. Brickit made some totally great muffins. Would anybody like one? Should we make some coffee?”
Although obviously tired and worried, Woody’s mom seemed to surprise herself with a quick laugh. “Woodrow Eugene Bookman, just look at you. The host with the most.”
A blush warmed his face, but this was a far different kind of embarrassment from that under which he had so long suffered. “I know how to make coffee,” he declared, and hurried off to the kitchen, with the dog close at his heels.
90
The wind was the voice of madness, and Hayden Eckman thought he heard deep within it the rabid-coyote cry, demonic-hyena call, evil-clown laugh of Shacket. The fugitive now seemed to be as swift and unrestrainable as the wind, as elusive as the rain that had been impending since the previous afternoon, as dark as the night into which he’d vanished much like Dracula, in those old movies, swirled his cape and became a bat and was gone.
The blood trail petered out along the south side of the hospital, only forty feet from the impact point below the third-floor window. The sheriff stood at the end of it, his back against the wall of the building, waiting while three deputies with Tac Lights searched the concrete sidewalk and the blacktop parking lot for a telltale crimson drop.
Being an attorney had entailed no risk other than potential disbarment, and during his five years as a deputy in generally quiet Pinehaven County, he’d never needed to draw his gun. Nor had he even once faced the muzzle of an adversary’s firearm. He anticipated that a four-year term as sheriff would be a pleasant ride with numerous opportunities for self-enrichment, various civic honors bestowed by organizations of grateful businesspeople and charities, the respect accorded law enforcement, and the special attention of those women who were enchanted by men in uniform.
Instead, not quite nine months into his first year in office, here he stood with his back to the wall, his hand on the grip of the pistol in his belt holster, nervously surveying the night, expecting to be suddenly assaulted by a naked maniac. Not just a naked maniac. A naked maniac who had torn loose of restraining straps that were guaranteed escape proof, overpowered an armed deputy who stood six feet four and weighed two hundred ten pounds, survived a fall from the third story onto a concrete walkway, and carried off a dead or crippled lawman for some purpose that didn’t bear contemplation.
With $300,000 and a fortune in diamonds in the trunk of his patrol car, the sheriff was pondering a different future from the one he had planned when he ran for office.
Given the chaos of the past twelve hours—three murders, one deputy badly bitten, Megan Bookman and son terrorized, all of them victims of the sole escapee from the catastrophe at Springville—there would be investigations at the state and perhaps even the national level. As long as Hayden Eckman remained in office, he would have some ability to influence the results of those inquiries. If he left office, he’d become an easy scapegoat for the bureaucrats and politicians who cared even less about the truth than Hayden did.
He was spared further consideration of an assuredly bleak future when a deputy, Freeman Johnson, hurried to him with the news that a uniform shoe, evidently belonging to Thad Fenton, the missing deputy assigned to guard Lee Shacket, had been found toward the east end of the hospital grounds.
Although he was accompanied by Johnson, each with his right hand on his holstered pistol, and although two more men were waiting for them at the shoe, Sheriff Eckman didn’t want to be part of this investigation. He preferred to call a higher authority, relinquish jurisdiction, but he was the highest officer of the law in Pinehaven County, an unfortunate consequence of winning an election.
The particular parking lot east of the hospital was reserved for the staff of the institution. The wind whistled and hissed off the polished flanks of at least two dozen vehicles, among which—or in one of which—Shacket could have been hiding. The two deputies who had run a quick search of the cars and SUVs assured him that the fugitive was not here. But they were men Eckman had hired for their lack of curiosity and blind loyalty, and he didn’t trust them to have done a thorough job.
Freeman Johnson, a holdover from the Sheldrake administration, who had earlier cattle-prodded Shacket into submission, inspired more confidence. He was the one who had found the shoe, and he led them past the vehicles, out of the parking lot, onto a service road that encircled the grounds.
The shoe lay on its side in that road, the knot in the laces having slipped loose. In the beam of Johnson’s Tac Light, the shoe was a pitiable sight, like that of a snatched child whose parents would never see him again, except this shoe was a size twelve.
Directly across the road, a separate building housed the gas-fired heating and cooling plant that serviced the hospital through a four-pipe fan-coil system, allowing every patient room, surgical unit, and office to be set at a different temperature from the others.
Freeman Johnson said, “That’s where he is. That’s where he took Thad Fenton. I’d bet my pension on it.”
The heating plant was built of slumpstone painted gray, with a metal roof. Inside were boilers and chillers and a maze of other machinery, including a cooling tower. Through a tunnel under the road and parking lot, one large pipe carried superchilled water to the HVAC equipment in the hospital, and another carried superheated water; two return pipes brought exhausted water back to the building to be filtered, chilled or heated again, and recycled. There weren’t many windows, and at this hour, half were dark. A thick corpus of steam, rising from a cooling-tower stack, was dismembered by the wind and harried through the night like a withering procession of damned spirits.
Sheriff Eckman didn’t want to go into that place. The building might as well have had a neon sign on the roof that said Come Here To Die. Because Freeman Johnson had always done what was required of him during a long career of service, he was ready to draw his pistol and search the building. Deputies Hardy and Drew were not merely game, but eager to bring Shacket to justice, because they were stupid.
Hayden Eckman made two phone calls, the first for backup. He wanted two more men, both with shotguns. He also called the night administrator of the hospital to find out who might be at work in the heating-cooling plant at this hour.
