Devoted, page 37
“We’re not finished,” Verbotski disagreed. “Each of us has his getaway stash, plus offshore accounts, alternate identities. We fly out of Sacramento to four different cities. Change our appearance. Meet in Miami a month from today. We start over and build something bigger and better than what we lost.”
“Damn right,” said Speer. “And a year from now, when nobody’s expecting us, we go back to Pinehaven and kill that slut and her snarky kid.”
“Something weird was going on there, all those dogs, something strange,” Verbotski said. “Better we stay away from there forever.”
Speer said nothing. Neither did Rodchenko.
Knacker said, “I like Miami. Sun, sand, nookie.”
Trying to sound as if he were still a partner in good standing, referring to the four other principals in Atropos, Rodchenko said, “We better warn the guys in Reno, so they can scatter, too.”
Verbotski said, “Fuck ’em. We only need four to start up again. They were all later add-ons, anyway.”
“You can’t launch a new operation,” Speer said, “if it’s top-heavy with profit-sharing talent.”
“Exactly,” Verbotski agreed. “Initially, we’ll be eaten alive by start-up costs, monthly overhead. We need to achieve a reliable cash flow that meets expenses and provides adequate compensation for six before we think about bringing in a fifth partner.”
Speer sighed. “No rest for the wicked. You realize how much harder it would be to do this if we paid income taxes?”
“We’d be working for the man all our lives,” Verbotski said.
At the Oxley house, they parked in the driveway and entered by the front door. On the way through the house, Verbotski made sure each of the thermostats—in the living room, bedroom, kitchen—was on Heat instead of Cool and that each temperature-control slide was set at forty degrees, to prevent a premature detonation. The current temperature in the house was sixty-eight.
In the kitchen, Verbotski said, “Rodchenko, you and I will get everyone’s gear out of here. Knacker, Speer, go to the cellar and finish setting up the oil furnace to blow like we planned.”
Knacker grimaced. “Why? The old fart’s dead as dead gets, we can’t kill him twice. After what’s happened, the faster we split, the better.”
“Speer,” Verbotski said, “Can you explain it to him?”
He worried that Speer would agree with Knacker; but the creepy snake handler came through. “We may be on the run, Bradley, but we aren’t on the run from killing the old man down there. So let’s keep it that way, let’s not add that to our shit-we’re-wanted-for list. We leave here, the furnace blows, the house burns to the ground, there’s only bones left of the geezer, and no evidence of nothing.”
“Okay, all right,” Knacker said. “Let’s get it done. But I’m gonna kick that old bastard around some.”
“He’s already dead,” Speer said as he opened the door to the cellar. “What’s the point of kicking him now?”
“Because it’ll make me feel better.” Knacker followed Speer down the stairs.
Verbotski pointed to a pile of gear—suitcases, duffel bags—and said to Rodchenko, “Load all that in the Suburban. You and Speer drove it here, you can drive it away. I’ll get Knacker’s stuff and mine, stow it in the Escalade.”
After Rodchenko snatched up two half-empty duffel bags and a suitcase, and headed along the hall toward the front of the house, Verbotski conducted a quick search of the kitchen drawers until he found interesting cutlery. He selected a meat cleaver.
He hurried along the hallway, intending to stand concealed to one side of the front door and chop the Russian rat as he returned from the Suburban.
Rodchenko, however, had not gone outside. As Verbotski entered the living room from the hallway, the dog-fearing puke lunged at him from the left, wielding a switchblade as he would have a dagger. He plunged the blade into his senior partner’s side, burying six inches of razor-edged steel in descending colon and small intestines.
Shock and pain did not prevent Verbotski from swinging the meat cleaver with his right hand. Steel met neck, and steel prevailed. As he collapsed, Rodchenko spouted blood like a fire hose in Hell, but by the time he hit the floor, the stream had already stopped, for he was as dead as he deserved to be.
As Verbotski dropped the cleaver on the corpse and gingerly withdrew the switchblade from his side, his vision darkened at the periphery, though he didn’t pass out. The wound was small but deep. A sharp but tolerable pain wrung a light sweat from him. Less blood than he expected. He clamped the puncture closed with one hand. He needed medical attention. In a few hours, acute peritonitis would set in. He was confident he’d be able to drive to Sacramento in the Escalade and get treatment there in a first-class hospital, under the protection of Tio Barbizon.
He returned along the hallway to the kitchen. At the open door to the cellar, he took a deep breath, steadied his voice, and called down to Knacker and Speer. “Are you about done with that?”
“Finished!” Speer shouted as a hard thud rose from below.
“Just one more kick,” Knacker promised as Speer appeared at the foot of the stairs.
Verbotski closed the cellar door and slid the latch bolt shut. He stepped to the thermostat, which was fixed on Heat, and adjusted the temperature-setting slide from forty degrees to eighty.
The thermostat was essentially the trigger for the device they had installed in the furnace. A standard HVAC system like this had maybe a five- or six-second delay between the call for heat and the ignition of the electric pilot light. Flame would at once erupt around the oil-fed ring wick, instantly burn away the trigger string, and detonate the explosive.
Speer shouted angrily as he ascended the last of the cellar stairs, and Verbotski started across the kitchen toward the back door with four or five seconds to go, plenty of time.
Knacker was shouting, too, and Speer pounded on the cellar door. They were never the quality of partners that Verbotski needed to reach the very top of his profession. Knacker was just too thick, and Speer was creepy, with his snake tattoos that, as rumor had it, weren’t limited to his arms. There were better associates out there, waiting to be found.
Verbotski was one second away from the exterior door, with at least two or three seconds remaining, an acceptable margin, when something inside him tore. Pain intense beyond his experience robbed his legs of all strength. He collapsed to the floor at the threshold of the back door.
Acid and something worse washed into his throat, and he gagged it down. The furnace blew, the floor leaped under him, the entire house shook, part of the ceiling collapsed. It seemed as though fate—Atropos herself—decided that his paralysis was insufficient to guarantee that he would burn and, to seal the deal, pinned him in place with ceiling joists and other debris.
As he lay there waiting for the flames, he thought of the hard rain drenching the night, but he could take no hope from it. He knew the intensity this engineered fire would quickly achieve; it could not be easily quenched. He heard the flames below, rushing upward, and felt the floor warming under him.
In one of his psychology classes, he’d been taught that, as a person lay dying, the brain produced hormones intended to induce a sense of well-being. This supposedly explained why some on their deathbeds hallucinated ministering angels and why those who briefly died and came back often spoke of a tunnel leading to a welcoming light and a world of wonder beyond.
He saw no angels, no tunnel leading to a light. But as tendrils of smoke began to slither through the room, a long-repressed memory returned to John, and his heart raced with unexpected delight as images from the past flooded through his mind. He was six years old when his father brought Daisy home, a two-year-old golden retriever that he had rescued from the pound expressly for the boy. Daisy and young John enjoyed many adventures together, and for a while there was a reliable source of joy in a house that otherwise was filled with suspicion, contention, and loud arguments. The marriage didn’t last, and one year to the day after Daisy came into the Verbotski home, she died in young John’s arms. To his alcoholic mother, Daisy was an avatar of her hated husband, and that was sufficient reason for her to poison the dog. What had been a year of wonder became, with the death of Daisy, too painful for him to recall. Now the fire reached for him, and with the blaze were memories brighter than the flames, memories repressed no longer, recollections of tenderness and laughter and love that he had never experienced before that long-ago year and had never known again in the days that followed.
129
Amory Cromwell, estate manager of the five-acre property in Tiburon, was not a stupid man, quite the opposite, and neither was he a coward.
When he returned to the house on Monday morning, after four nights in a superb resort in Pebble Beach, he arrived at seven o’clock, an hour ahead of the staff, as was his policy. He stopped inside the big roll-up door and got out of the BMW that had been provided with his position, and he disarmed the alarm system with the Crestron panel embedded in the wall. As the door rolled down, he parked in that part of the vast garage reserved for employees, separate from the carousels of collectible cars. When he got out of the BMW this time, he heard the distant yet raucous music of forty-six pinball machines, which were housed in the arcade on the same level of the house as the subterranean garage, the movie theater, and the two-lane bowling alley.
Dorian Purcell’s habit, when he spent a weekend here, was to leave Sunday night. On the aboveground floors, when the house was uninhabited, the lights and TVs and music system were programmed to turn off and on in a pattern that suggested to any burglar casing the residence that it was occupied by three or four people. The machines in the arcade were not part of that ruse.
This suggested to Amory Cromwell that Purcell must still be here.
And this deviation from the Great Man’s customary practice further suggested that something might be wrong.
Having had martial arts and weapons training as part of his preparation for his profession, and aware that he was being paid not merely for his expertise but also for his discretion, Cromwell did not at once consider calling the police. The überwealthy paid men like Cromwell also to prevent their follies from becoming public knowledge, at least until those follies became felonies. He went to a gun safe concealed in the cabinetry associated with the mechanic’s shop that was part of the garage, and he obtained a 12-gauge shotgun that fired slugs. He loaded one shell in the breach, three more in the magazine, and dropped two spares in a coat pocket.
In the arcade, he found Dorian Purcell’s body in less than ideal condition. In addition to other evidence of extreme violence and cannibalism, the billionaire’s head was missing.
At this point, Cromwell might have called the police if he had not been a man who recognized a golden opportunity when he saw one.
Shotgun at the ready, he followed a trail of bloody footprints and bits of unthinkable debris, which led upstairs to the library on the main floor.
The man, who didn’t seem to be strictly a man, who appeared to be something out of an H. P. Lovecraft story by way of a Tim Burton movie, was sitting in an aisle between two rows of bookshelves, his back to one set of stacks, his feet to the other. Purcell’s head lay in his lap.
The bizarre intruder had shed his clothes somewhere along the way. Horrid lumps and discolorations covered his pale body. Weeping sores issued gray gossamer filaments that formed webs across parts of him, with radials and spirals sloping up to anchor him to the shelves between which he slumped. These weren’t the elegant and precisely geometric webs of a spider, but were without pattern and as ugly as the grotesque individual whom they partly cocooned.
The intruder was perfectly still. Amory Cromwell assumed that this was a corpse before him, but he nevertheless kept his distance and said, “Sir?”
The man’s head, which faced away from Cromwell, slowly turned until the face came into view.
In spite of the distorted features and the dull eyeshine, like that of a cat at night, enough resemblance remained for Cromwell to inquire, “Mr. Shacket?”
The former CEO of Refine, who was believed to be dead in Utah, formed what perhaps he thought was a smile. He spoke, but his voice was weak, a mutter, and what he said made no sense. The words popped out of him like the numbered balls from an automated bingo hopper. Further diminishing any hope of intelligent communication, Shacket produced, in addition to words, clicks and keenings and chittering noises, like those of insects, and an animal mewling, and a hissing as if a serpent lived in him.
Clearly the man had no remaining strength, no presence of mind, and was dying.
Throughout his career, Cromwell had assiduously protected his clients not just from bad publicity but also from rude intrusions into their privacy by media and others of the hoi polloi. Their dignity and the respect they deserved were uppermost in his mind.
Not so much with Dorian Purcell, especially now that the Great Man was dead.
Cromwell laid his shotgun aside and used his smartphone to video Shacket for two minutes as the pathetic creature muttered senselessly, clicked, chittered, and whimpered not like a man but like an animal with its leg caught in a trap. He took a number of pictures, making sure that he got several clear shots of Purcell’s severed head.
He retrieved the 12-gauge and returned to the arcade, where he photographed the headless corpse and the carnage around it. Then he went through the mansion, photographing its most fabulous, luxurious features, anything that might thrill readers of the worst tabloids and those who viewed the tackiest cable programs.
While in the employ of a family in Boston, Cromwell had made the acquaintance of Vaughn Larkin, who was an attorney as well as a licensed private investigator. Larkin periodically had done work for that family regarding matters involving a son who had a taste for cocaine, porn stars, petty theft, and revolutionary politics.
He called Larkin now, described what he had found, and asked for an informed estimate of the value of the video and photographs in his possession. The number so impressed Cromwell that he hired Larkin as his agent and sent everything to him before calling 911.
By the time the police arrived, the thing that had been Lee Shacket was as dead as Dorian Purcell.
130
Kipp had his boy, and the boy had his dog.
All was right with the world.
Or as right as things could be in the world’s current condition.
Considering how scary things had been for a while, the days after that Thursday in September were remarkably sunny in every sense of the word.
Ben Hawkins sold his house in Southern California.
He rented a place in Pinehaven.
He and Megan began to date.
She finished the painting of Woody and the deer.
The gallery that represented her thought it would bring a record price for her work.
Instead, she hung it in the living room. Behind the piano.
Rosa Leon sold the house in Lake Tahoe.
She moved to Pinehaven to be a part of all that was to come.
In early October, Rita Carrickton and Deputy Andy Argento were indicted for the murder of Sheriff Eckman and held without bail.
Eckman had secreted tiny cameras in his bedroom and bath.
He recorded all his sexual adventures with Rita and every shower she’d taken there.
Including their final, unfinished coupling.
And his murder.
The former sheriff, Lyle Sheldrake, was returned to office in a special election in November.
At the election-night party, Kipp got a good smell of him.
Sheldrake wasn’t a Hater.
Or crazy.
In December, Rosa Leon and Carson Conroy began to date.
In January, Tio Barbizon was indicted for covering up events related to the catastrophe in Utah and the crimes of Lee Shacket.
Two days later, he declared his innocence.
And announced that he was running for governor.
Sometimes, Megan and Ben and Woody and Kipp took road trips.
They visited the various communities of Mysterians who, with their human companions, had come to Pinehaven that desperate day.
Which everyone called “the Day” with an uppercase D.
New communities were announcing themselves to Bella.
Some were as far away as Kansas and Alabama.
Then Canada. And Mexico.
In March, Megan married Ben.
Rosa was her bridesmaid.
Kipp was best man.
A court declared that Dorian Purcell’s fortune could be used to compensate the families of those murdered in Utah and elsewhere.
Haskell Ludlow was arrested in the South of France.
Living under the name Mary Seldon.
After having undergone gender reassignment.
Cable news would never be done with the genetic-monster-from-Utah story.
They were utterly unaware of the bigger story of the Mysterium and that one day all news would be true.
Then it was May.
Eight months after the Day.
Kipp and family visited a secret Mysterian community in Idaho.
Seventy-five dogs with twenty-six human companions.
Seventy-four of the dogs were paired.
One female golden retriever had no four-legged companion.
