Devoted, page 35
He intended to introduce them in this order: Rhodes, Colby, and Daniels. Rodchenko was being Daniels, and when his name was spoken, it would be the signal to pull their Tasers.
Then Verbotski hesitated because he saw the idiot smile slip off the boy’s face, saw intelligence in those blue eyes, saw contempt in the black man’s face, saw Ben Hawkins putting a hand on the mantel clock as though to reach behind it. Suddenly he knew that intuition was not Volkskunde, after all, that he should have shot Hawkins on the doorstep, that he needed to shoot the bastard now, shoot the black dude and shoot the Latina bitch and shoot the kid, shoot them all before they made a move, and take Megan captive. She was the only one they really needed.
119
Deputy Foster Bendix was assigned to a winding rural route where nothing ever happened except DUI arrests, teenagers busting themselves up while back-road drag racing, good old boys blasting away at road signs just for the fun of it, if you called that fun, and vehicle breakdowns to which he could lend a helping hand. At times, Foster thought he was more of a janitor, cleaning up messes, than he was a cop.
In the dismal gray light of the storm, through thick curtains of rain, as he passed the former trailer park, where the planned bird-slaughtering system had failed to be approved, he thought he was seeing a mirage, a fata morgana, except not illusions of cliffs and buildings, but ranks of cars and SUVS.
No one had lived there in years. The mobile homes were gone. There had once been power hookups and connections for gas and septic tanks, but the utilities had been cut off long before the decision was made not to build the windmills. The property wasn’t suitable for any kind of gathering.
In fact, the county owned the land, couldn’t find a buyer for it, and was liable for any injuries that anyone might sustain there. No funds had been provided for a fence, but they had staked some no-trespassing signs at the entrance.
Because it fell to Foster Bendix to pursue any miscreants who ignored the signage, he drove off the county road and onto the buckled and cracked blacktop of that forlorn property. The most vehicles he’d ever seen here before was one, always at night. One teenage couple or another with nowhere else to go, doing the Meat Loaf thing, like he sang about in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
Standing side by side in the pelting rain, these vehicles all appeared to be without drivers or passengers, unless everyone was lying down, which Foster didn’t credit. There were Hondas and BMWs, SUVs and crew-cab pickups, a couple of vans with sliding side doors. Most of the license plates were from California, but three were from Oregon. He counted forty-one vehicles.
Not sure what to do, he called the current watch commander, Cecil Kalstrom, and Cecil said, “Did you have a close-up look at ’em, see if there’s maybe dead people slumped in ’em or something?”
“Why would there be so many dead people?”
“Could be some cult, like that Jim Jones thing years ago, and they all met to kill themselves.”
“You’ve got some imagination, Sarge.”
“All my imagination ten times over couldn’t keep up with the weirdness that’s really out there. Look in some of the cars.”
“The way it’s raining, some Noah somewhere is building himself an ark.”
“It’s a rough life being a uniformed hero.”
“Ten-four,” Foster said.
120
Thunder and rain and voices below.
Kipp in the upstairs hall, at the top of the stairs, standing ready, head raised. Every muscle tense.
Trembling with the expectation of action.
Woody on the Wire: Now, now, now!
Kipp howled, not just on the Wire, but for real.
Behind him in the hall, other dogs howled, as did still others in the bedrooms.
The dogs he had summoned on the Wire. Before dawn of this very day. According to the plan worked out with Ben and Megan.
These Mysterians had been silent, waiting. They had been still and poised.
Now they cried their outrage and flew to the fight.
Kipp raced down the stairs.
A thunder separate from the thunder of the storm filled the house, the booming of paws pounding down the steps behind him.
121
Verbotski reached under his suit for a cross-body draw, and all the demons in Hell howled at once. As he pulled the pistol from his belt holster, the pack exploded off the stairs, across the foyer—German shepherds, golden retrievers, Labradors, Dobermans, mastiffs, rottweilers—barking, snarling, teeth flashing, a score of dogs, a double score, even more than that, a crashing sea of dogs breaking onto the shore of the living room. A mastiff leaped, a hundred-plus pounds of irresistible force, and John Verbotski proved not to be an immovable object, staggering backward as the dog slammed into him. A golden retriever seized his wrist in its mouth, the pistol flew from his grip, he stumbled sideways and collided hard with an end table, lost his balance, fell to his knees. Dogs swarmed him, nipping at his hands when he tried to reach for his Taser, for the pressurized can that would stream chloroform. When he attempted to struggle back onto his feet, they tore at the sleeves and panels of his suit coat and pulled him to the floor, flattened him facedown, flopped across his back and legs to pin him in place. A rottweiler licked the back of his neck and breathed on it, every hot exhalation a mortal threat that Verbotski, even in his bewilderment, took seriously.
Bradley Knacker had never gotten a degree in psychology, had never gone to college, had never seen any purpose for high school other than that it provided a convenient pool of targets, smaller kids he could intimidate and beat senseless and from whom he could steal. His talent and genius were for violence, from common street thuggery to the planning and execution of murders made to look like accidents and suicides, or that set up innocent people to take the fall for the crime. In spite of his high homicidal intelligence, Bradley was in other matters often slow on the uptake. When he heard the howling, he looked to the drapery-covered windows, because he could not conceive that such a large pack of animals could be in the house. When the beasts erupted into the living room, he was amazed, but he didn’t at once realize that they were anything more than an uncommon number of pets, until they attacked Verbotski and took him down as if he really were nothing more than a candy-ass Bureau agent instead of a hard-core blood junkie who killed people for money and fun. It was his nature to think of the animals not as defenders of home and family but instead as attack dogs trained to kill. At that instant, Bradley Knacker’s homicidal brilliance kicked in big-time, and with the mathematical felicity of a certified public accountant, he required half a second to compute that the snarling horde bolting toward him constituted an overwhelming force against which a ten-round pistol and a Taser were inadequate. He then did what he had done in high school when a brute bigger than he was made a move on him: He turned and ran, this time toward the connecting door to the dining room. That didn’t work out well.
Speer admired snakes. His only pets were garden snakes kept in a large aquarium and a freedom-of-the-house boa constrictor to which he fed mice and gerbils and rabbits that he bought in quantity. A tattoo of a rattlesnake twined around his left forearm and biceps; on his right arm, it was a cobra. He envied snakes their quickness, their cruelty, and he tried to style himself after them. The moment the dogs appeared, he knew intuitively that somehow they were not just ordinary dogs. Speer wasn’t a complex man. He believed in only five things—violence, sex, money, snakes, and intuition—and he believed in them profoundly, passionately. The instant he saw the coordination among the scores of dogs, he hissed and pivoted and took two steps and hissed and grabbed the boy, intuitively convinced that the dogs would not harm him if he was holding a knife to the kid’s throat. But as he pulled the switchblade from a coat pocket, before he could push the button to spring the blade from the handle, he realized that his snake-quick response to the snarling dogs had been matched by Ben Hawkins’s snake-quick reaction to him, when the cold muzzle of a pistol pressed hard against his right temple.
When Verbotski reached under his suit coat, cross-body with his right hand, going boldly for the pistol on his left hip, instead of reaching with his left hand for his Taser, Rodchenko knew that his partner had picked up on some tell, some detail that convinced him the operation was about to go wrong. Rodchenko reached for his own pistol, intent on killing them all, everyone except Megan Bookman. It would take about four seconds—two of them sitting down, easy head shots, easier chest shots. He actually got the weapon out of his holster, and then all the dogs in the world cascaded down the steps, through the foyer, into the living room, big bitches and big sonsofbitches, enough teeth for ten nightmares. There was supposed to be a dog, one dog, and Rodchenko had been given permission to kill it, a pleasure to which he looked forward. Now it seemed that the dog had known Rodchenko was coming for it and had called in backup of its own kind, more dogs than Rodchenko could kill before they took him down. Over the years, he’d been bitten three times, and every dog that had ever crossed his path had looked at him as though it wanted not only to bite him but to tear out his throat. All dogs looked at him the way wise cops looked at him, the way attractive women with street smarts looked at him, the way mothers with tender young daughters looked at him: with suspicion, disgust, and contempt.
Although Rodchenko had his pistol out and pointed at the head of the Latina in the armchair, Megan Bookman held a 9 mm Heckler & Koch in a professional two-hand grip, aimed at his face. Point-blank. Maybe ten or eleven feet. In spite of her grip and stance, maybe she was a piss-poor shot. If he drilled the brain of the Latina, and Megan squeezed off a round but missed him, and he pivoted and fired and took her out, at least he’d have the satisfaction of wasting two of them before he was dragged down and savaged. Better to go out with a double score than to die having failed to make this douchebag and her friends pay a price. This strategy made perfect sense to Rodchenko—except that all the mean-eyed dogs staring at him and that forest of dripping teeth so unnerved him, he wasn’t able to keep a steady grip on his pistol. His heart boomed, shaking his arms, and the gun jumped left, right, off target, so maybe he wouldn’t be able to hit even an elephant at four feet.
“Drop it, drop it now, shithead,” she said, and as she spoke, people appeared in the foyer, having come down the stairs in the wake of the dogs. Men and women, all ages and races. Twenty, thirty, maybe more. Some of them had guns.
As dogs jostled around Rodchenko, snarling and nipping at his shoes, at his pants, he understood that something extraordinary was going on here, something stranger than just the startling number of animals, and he dropped the weapon. “Don’t let them kill me.”
“I’d love to watch them kill you,” she said. “Give me any excuse, and I’ll tell them to tear you apart.”
“I have a Taser and an aerosol can of chloroform,” Rodchenko revealed, as he dropped his weapon, eager to curry favor with this queen of canines. “So does each of the other guys.”
122
The Tiburon house. In the third and deepest of the panic rooms, the one Dorian now understood that he’d created with a subconscious desire to indulge in a level of sexual freedom that society was not yet advanced enough to permit, he had finished his chocolate vodka. He’d been sitting on the floor, in a corner of the windowless room, fantasizing about what desires could be fulfilled here, until the ice in the glass had melted and he had drunk that, too.
He wasn’t concerned about events in Springville or Pinehaven. Every crisis would be resolved, just as every past crisis had been extinguished. To ensure success, one had only to understand how the world worked: Nature set the only rules that mattered. There were predators and prey, and the losers were the weak, both the prey who could not or would not protect themselves and those predators who were incapable of fully embracing the fact that the only virtue was winning and the only vice was losing.
Some people said the arc of history led to justice, but that was foolishness. There was no justice, or very little. The word was too political to have an enduring meaning; the definition of justice was continuously changing. Those who fancied themselves champions of justice always had a price—money or prestige, or the adoration of crowds, or self-esteem—and when Dorian got them what they wanted, every one of them traded his or her cause for the price paid.
Truth was something else again. If ever a large number of people became hell-bent on knowing the truth of things, not merely a few stiff-necked crusaders but a majority of humanity, then he’d be in trouble. Never going to happen.
Because the purpose of the Tiburon house was self-indulgence, he decided to have another drink. This time he’d mix vanilla- and orange-flavored vodkas to make an adult Creamsicle.
He left the hidden room, swung shut the eight-hundred-pound door, departed the vestibule, closed the bookcase door, and climbed the stairs to the ground floor.
To his right, at the entrance to the hidden corridor behind the library, stood the door disguised as a wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling framed mirror on both sides. It was open. He was surprised, because his habit had always been to close every door behind him, even when it was in an already secret space like this.
He stepped into the corridor and clicked the big mirror into place and went to the door that was a bookcase on the farther side.
He said, “Ochus Bochus,” and it opened, and he went into his library, where the words “Hoc est corpus meum” caused the pivot-hinged section of shelves to arc back into place, making a seamless wall of books.
Cool. He would never tire of this house.
In the kitchen, as he stood at the white quartzite island with two bottles of vodka, pouring vanilla and orange in equal measure over ice, he smelled something different from either. Although it was an unpleasant odor, it was even stranger than it was offensive, not chemical in nature, neither suggestive of rot nor ordure. He was reminded somewhat of the peculiar smell in the library, although this was stronger.
He circled the immense kitchen, trying to locate the source, opening cabinets, but the scent proved elusive, coming and going. When he arrived at the walk-in pantry, he hesitated to open the door, wondering if he might find a dead rat.
No. Impossible. The house was too soundly built ever to be vulnerable to rodents.
He opened the door, and the pantry light came on automatically. At first, the malodor was stronger in this enclosed space. But it quickly dissipated, as though the cause was no longer present. He scanned the shelves of foodstuffs, but he could see nothing amiss.
Now the odor relented, and he could smell nothing unusual.
He shrugged and returned to the island and finished making his adult Creamsicle.
123
Lightning flared around the edges of the draperies. Thunder rolled and rain drummed.
It had been quite a day. Evening was coming.
Kipp was not jealous of the other dogs.
Woody remained in the living room, where three of the four killers were restrained with zip ties.
The boy wasn’t interested in the killers.
He was having fun with all the dogs.
Having fun with them and talking with them telepathically.
All the dogs loved Woody and were fascinated by him.
The first human on the Wire.
In a state of excitement and relief, the visiting Mysterians and their human companions were mingling throughout the downstairs.
Everywhere but here in the study.
In the study, Rodchenko was spilling his guts to Ben, Megan, Carson, and Rosa.
Kipp sat close to the thug, staring hard at him, now and then growling and baring his teeth.
Sweating as if the study were a sauna, Rodchenko was afraid that Kipp would bite off his man package.
Apparently, another dog had once tried to do this.
No doubt with good cause.
Rodchenko was willing to tell everything without the drugs.
However, Ben didn’t trust him.
Aware of the proper dosages of thiopental and the Russian drug cocktail, Ben administered them.
Rodchenko became a Vesuvius of words.
He answered every question at greater length than wanted.
He answered questions that weren’t even asked.
He incriminated himself and his partners and all manner of other people, including a man named Alexander Gordius.
Thanks to Woody’s research, they already knew Gordius was Dorian Purcell.
Megan recorded it all.
She emailed the recording to Rosa Leon’s attorney, Dorothy’s dear friend, Roger Austin.
Online, Ben went to the Atropos & Company site on the Dark Web.
Following Rodchenko’s instructions, he hacked their computer and downloaded everything onto a flash drive.
A copy of this was also sent to Roger Austin.
Roger would have to work out how to extract evidence from all this, as well as from Woody’s report.
That was a difficult job. But essential.
When the evidence was given to some trusted authority, it must not be traceable to Woody or Megan.
Because of the Mysterium.
