Under the Dome

1

Rusty was standing in the turnaround in front of the hospital, watching the flames rise from somewhere on Main Street, when the cell phone clipped to his belt played its little song. Twitch and Gina were with him, Gina holding Twitch’s arm as if for protection. Ginny Tomlinson and Harriet Bigelow were both sleeping in the staff lounge. The old fellow who had volunteered, Thurston Marshall, was making medication rounds. He had turned out to be surprisingly good. The lights and the equipment were back on and, for the time being, things were on an even keel. Until the fire whistle went off, Rusty had actually dared to feel good.

He saw LINDA on the screen and said, “Hon? Everything okay?”

“Here, yes. Kids are asleep.”

“Do you know what’s bur—”

“The newspaper office. Be quiet and listen, because I’m turning my phone off in about a minute and a half so nobody can call me in to help fight the fire. Jackie’s here. She’ll watch the kids. You need to meet me at the funeral home. Stacey Moggin will be there, too. She came by earlier. She’s with us.”

The name, while familiar, did not immediately call up a face in Rusty’s mind. And what resonated was She’s with us. There really were starting to be sides, starting to be with us and with them.

“Lin—”

“Meet me there. Ten minutes. It’s safe as long as they’re fighting the fire, because the Bowie brothers are on the crew. Stacey says so.”

“How did they get a crew together so f—”

“I don’t know and don’t care. Can you come?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Don’t use the parking lot on the side. Go around back to the smaller one.” Then the voice was gone.

“What’s on fire?” Gina asked. “Do you know?”

“No,” Rusty said. “Because nobody called.” He looked at them both, and hard.

Gina didn’t follow, but Twitch did. “Nobody at all.”

“I just took off, probably on a call, but you don’t know where. I didn’t say. Right?”

Gina still looked puzzled, but nodded. Because now these people were her people; she did not question the fact. Why would she? She was only seventeen. Us and them, Rusty thought. Bad medicine, usually. Especially for seventeen-year-olds. “Probably on a call,” she said. “We don’t know where.”

“Nope,” Twitch agreed. “You grasshoppah, we lowly ants.”

“Don’t make a big deal of it, either of you,” Rusty said. But it was a big deal, he knew that already. It was trouble. Gina wasn’t the only kid in the picture; he and Linda had a pair, now fast asleep and with no knowledge that Mom and Dad might be sailing into a storm much too big for their little boat.

And still.

“I’ll be back,” Rusty said, and hoped that wasn’t just wishful thinking.

2

Sammy Bushey drove the Evanses’ Malibu down Catherine Russell Drive not long after Rusty headed for the Bowie Funeral Parlor; they passed each other going in opposite directions on Town Common Hill.

Twitch and Gina had gone back inside and the turnaround in front of the hospital’s main doors was deserted, but she didn’t stop there; having a gun on the seat beside you made you wary. (Phil would have said paranoid.) She drove around back instead, and parked in the employees’ lot. She grabbed the.45, pushed it into the waistband of her jeans, and bloused her tee-shirt over it. She walked across the lot and stopped at the laundry room door, reading the sign that said SMOKING HERE WILL BE BANNED AS OF JANUARY 1^ST. She looked at the doorknob, and knew that if it didn’t turn, she’d give this up. It would be a sign from God. If, on the other hand, the door was unlocked—

It was. She slipped in, a pale and limping ghost.

3

Thurston Marshall was tired—exhausted, more like it—but happier than he had been in years. It was undoubtedly perverse; he was a tenured professor, a published poet, the editor of a prestigious literary magazine. He had a gorgeous young woman to share his bed, one who was smart and thought he was wonderful. That giving pills, slapping on salve, and emptying bedpans (not to mention wiping up the Bushey kid’s beshitted bottom an hour ago) would make him happier than those things almost had to be perverse, and yet there it was. The hospital corridors with their smells of disinfectant and floorpolish connected him with his youth. The memories had been very clear tonight, from the pervasive aroma of patchouli oil in David Perna’s apartment to the paisley headband Thurse had worn to the candlelight memorial service for Bobby Kennedy. He went his rounds humming “Big Leg Woman” very softly under his breath.

He peeped in the lounge and saw the nurse with the busted schnozz and the pretty little nurse’s aide—Harriet, her name was—asleep on the cots that had been dragged in there. The couch was vacant, and soon he’d either catch a few hours’ racktime on it or go back to the house on Highland Avenue that was now home. Probably back there.

Strange developments.

Strange world.

First, though, one more check of what he was already thinking of as his patients. It wouldn’t take long in this postage stamp of a hospital. Most of the rooms were empty, anyway. Bill Allnut, who’d been forced to stay awake until nine because of the injury he’d suffered in the Food City melee, was now fast asleep and snoring, turned on his side to take the pressure off the long laceration at the back of his head.

Wanda Crumley was two doors down. The heart monitor was beeping and her BP was a little better, but she was on five liters of oxygen and Thurse feared she was a lost cause. Too much weight; too many cigarettes. Her husband and youngest daughter were sitting with her. Thurse gave Wendell Crumley a V-for-victory (which had been the peace sign in his salad days), and Wendell, smiling gamely, gave it back.

Tansy Freeman, the appendectomy, was reading a magazine. “What’s the fire whistle blowing for?” she asked him.

“Don’t know, hon. How’s your pain?”

“A three,” she said matter-of-factly. “Maybe a two. Can I still go home tomorrow?”

“It’s up to Dr. Rusty, but my crystal ball says yes.” And the way her face lit up at that made him feel, for no reason he could understand, like crying.

“That baby’s mom is back,” Tansy said. “I saw her go by.”

“Good,” Thurse said. Although the baby hadn’t been much of a problem. He had cried once or twice, but mostly he slept, ate, or lay in his crib, staring apathetically up at the ceiling. His name was Walter (Thurse had no idea the Little preceding it on the door card was an actual name), but Thurston Marshall thought of him as The Thorazine Kid.

Now he opened the door of room 23, the one with the yellow BABY ON BOARD sign attached to it with a plastic sucker, and saw that the young woman—a rape victim, Gina had whispered to him—was sitting in the chair beside the bed. She had the baby in her lap and was feeding him a bottle.

“Are you all right”—Thurse glanced at the other name on the doorcard—“Ms. Bushey?”

He pronounced it Bouchez, but Sammy didn’t bother to correct him, or to tell him that boys called her Bushey the Tushie. “Yes, Doctor,” she said.

Nor did Thurse bother to correct her misapprehension. That undefined joy—the kind that comes with tears hidden in it—swelled a little more. When he thought of how close he’d come to not volunteering… if Caro hadn’t encouraged him… he would have missed this.

“Dr. Rusty will be glad you’re back. And so is Walter. Do you need any pain medication?”

“No.” This was true. Her privates still ached and throbbed, but that was far away. She felt as if she were floating above herself, tethered to earth by the thinnest of strings.

“Good. That means you’re getting better.”

“Yes,” Sammy said. “Soon I’ll be well.”

“When you’ve finished feeding him, climb on into bed, why don’t you? Dr. Rusty will be in to check on you in the morning.”

“All right.”

“Good night, Ms. Bouchez.”

“Good night, Doctor.”

Thurse closed the door softly and continued down the hall. At the end of the corridor was the Roux girl’s room. One peek in there and then he’d call it a night.

She was glassy but awake. The young man who’d been visiting her was not. He sat in the corner, snoozing in the room’s only chair with a sports magazine on his lap and his long legs sprawled out in front of him.

Georgia beckoned Thurse, and when he bent over her, she whispered something. Because of the low voice and her broken, mostly toothless mouth, he only got a word or two. He leaned closer.

“Doh wake im.” To Thurse, she sounded like Homer Simpson. “He’th the oney one who cay to visih me.”

Thurse nodded. Visiting hours were long over, of course, and given his blue shirt and his sidearm, the young man would probably be gigged for not responding to the fire whistle, but still—what harm? One firefighter more or less probably wouldn’t make any difference, and if the guy was too far under for the sound of the whistle to wake him, he probably wouldn’t be much help, anyway. Thurse put a finger to his lips and blew the young woman a shhh to show they were conspirators. She tried to smile, then winced.

Thurston didn’t offer her pain medication in spite of that; according to the chart at the end of the bed, she was maxed until two AM. Instead he just went out, closed the door softly behind him, and walked back down the sleeping hallway. He didn’t notice that the door to the BABY ON BOARD room was once more ajar.

The couch in the lounge called to him seductively as he went by, but Thurston had decided to go back to Highland Avenue after all.

And check the kids.

4

Sammy sat by the bed with Little Walter in her lap until the new doctor went by. Then she kissed her son on both cheeks and the mouth. “You be a good baby,” she said. “Mama is going to see you in heaven, if they let her in. I think they will. She’s done her time in hell.”

She laid him in his crib, then opened the drawer of the bedtable. She had put the gun inside so Little Walter wouldn’t feel it poking into him while she held him and fed him for the last time. Now she took it out.

5

Lower Main Street was blocked off by nose-to-nose police cars with their jackpot lights flashing. A crowd, silent and unexcited—almost sullen—stood behind them, watching.

Horace the Corgi was ordinarily a quiet dog, limiting his vocal repertoire to a volley of welcome-home barks or the occasional yap to remind Julia he was still present and accounted for. But when she pulled over to the curb by Maison des Fleurs, he let out a low howl from the backseat. Julia reached back blindly to stroke his head. Taking comfort as much as giving it.

“Julia, my God,” Rose said.

They got out. Julia’s original intention was to leave Horace behind, but when he uttered another of those small, bereft howls—as if he knew, as if he really knew—she fished under the passenger seat for his leash, opened the rear door for him to jump out, and then clipped the leash to his collar. She grabbed her personal camera, a pocket-sized Casio, from the seat pocket before closing the door. They pushed through the crowd of bystanders on the sidewalk, Horace leading the way, straining at his leash.

Piper Libby’s cousin Rupe, a part-time cop who’d come to The Mill five years ago, tried to stop them. “No one beyond this point, ladies.”

“That’s my place,” Julia said. “Up top is everything I own in the world—clothes, books, personal possessions, the lot. Underneath is the newspaper my great-grandfather started. It’s only missed four press dates in over a hundred and twenty years. Now it’s going up in smoke. If you want to stop me from watching it happen—at close range—you’ll have to shoot me.”

Rupe looked unsure, but when she started forward again (Horace now at her knee and looking up at the balding man mistrustfully), Rupe stood aside. But only momentarily.

“Not you,” he told Rose.

“Yes, me. Unless you want ex-lax in the next chocolate frappe you order.”

“Ma’am… Rose… I have my orders.”

“Devil take your orders,” Julia said, with more weariness than defiance. She took Rose by the arm and led her down the sidewalk, stopping only when she felt the shimmer against her face rise from preheat to bake.

The Democrat was an inferno. The dozen or so cops weren’t even trying to put it out, but they had plenty of Indian pumps (some still bearing stickers she could read easily in the firelight: ANOTHER BURPEE’S SALE DAYS SPECIAL!) and they were wetting down the drugstore and the bookstore. Given the windless conditions, Julia thought they might save both… and thus the rest of the business buildings on the east side of Main.

“Wonderful that they turned out so quick,” Rose said.

Julia said nothing, only watched the flames whooshing up into the dark, blotting out the pink stars. She was too shocked to cry.

Everything, she thought. Everything.

Then she remembered the one bundle of newspapers she had tossed in her trunk before leaving to meet with Cox and amended that to Almost everything.

Pete Freeman pushed through the ring of police who were currently dousing the front and north side of Sanders Hometown Drug. The only clean spots on his face were where tears had cut through the soot.

“Julia, I’m so sorry!” He was nearly wailing. “We almost had it stopped… would have had it stopped… but then the last one… the last bottle the bastards threw landed on the papers by the door and…” He wiped his remaining shirtsleeve across his face, smearing the soot there. “I’m so goddam sorry!”

She took him in her arms as if he were a baby, although Pete was six inches taller and outweighed her by a hundred pounds. She hugged him, trying to mind his hurt arm, and said: “What happened?”

“Firebombs,” he sobbed. “That fucking Barbara.”

“He’s in jail, Pete.”

“His friends! His goddam friends! They did it!”

“What? You saw them?”

“Heard em,” he said, pulling back to look at her. “Would’ve been hard not to. They had a bullhorn. Said if Dale Barbara wasn’t freed, they’d burn the whole town.” He grinned bitterly. “Free him? We ought to hang him. Give me a rope and I’ll do it myself.”

Big Jim came strolling up. The fire painted his cheeks orange. His eyes glittered. His smile was so wide that it stretched almost to his earlobes.

“How do you like your friend Barbie now, Julia?”

Julia stepped toward him, and there must have been something on her face, because Big Jim fell back a step, as if afraid she might take a swing at him. “This makes no sense. None. And you know it.”

“Oh, I think it does. If you can bring yourself to consider the idea that Dale Barbara and his friends were the ones who set up the Dome in the first place, I think it makes perfect sense. It was an act of terrorism, pure and simple.”

“Bullshit. I was on his side, which means the newspaper was on his side. He knew that.”

“But they said—” Pete began.

“Yes,” she said, but she didn’t look at him. Her eyes were still fixed on Rennie’s firelit face. “They said, they said, but who the hell is they? Ask yourself that, Pete. Ask yourself this: if it wasn’t Barbie—who had no motive—then who did have a motive? Who benefits by shutting Julia Shumway’s troublesome mouth?”

Big Jim turned and motioned to two of the new officers—identifiable as cops only by the blue bandannas knotted around their biceps. One was a tall, hulking bruiser whose face suggested he was still little more than a child, no matter his size. The other could only be a Killian; that bullet head was as distinctive as a commemorative stamp. “Mickey. Richie. Get these two women off the scene.”

Horace was crouched at the end of his leash, growling at Big Jim. Big Jim gave the little dog a contemptuous look.

“And if they won’t go voluntarily, you have my permission to pick them up and throw them over the hood of the nearest police car.”

“This isn’t finished,” Julia said, pointing a finger at him. Now she was beginning to cry herself, but the tears were too hot and painful to be those of sorrow. “This isn’t done, you son of a bitch.”

Big Jim’s smile reappeared. It was as shiny as the finish on his Hummer. And as black. “Yes it is,” he said. “Done deal.”

6

Big Jim started back toward the fire—he wanted to watch it until there was nothing left of the noseyparker’s newspaper but a pile of ashes—and swallowed a mouthful of smoke. His heart suddenly stopped in his chest and the world seemed to go swimming past him like some kind of special effect. Then his ticker started again, but in a flurry of irregular beats that made him gasp. He slammed a fist against the left side of his chest and coughed hard, a quick-fix for arrhythmia that Dr. Haskell had taught him.

At first his heart continued its irregular galloping (beat… pause… beatbeatbeat… pause), but then it settled back to its normal rhythm. For just a moment he saw it encased in a dense globule of yellow fat, like a living thing that has been buried alive and struggles to get free before the air is all gone. Then he pushed the image away.

I’m all right. It’s just overwork. Nothing seven hours of sleep won’t cure.

Chief Randolph came over, an Indian pump strapped to his broad back. His face was running with sweat. “Jim? You all right?”

“Fine,” Big Jim said. And he was. He was. This was the high point of his life, his chance to achieve the greatness of which he knew he’d always been capable. No dickey ticker was going to take that away from him. “Just tired. I’ve been running pretty much nonstop.”

“Go home,” Randolph advised. “I never thought I’d say thank God for the Dome, and I’m not saying it now, but at least it works as a windbreak. We’re going to be all right. I’ve got men on the roofs of the drugstore and the bookstore in case any sparks jump, so go on and—”

“Which men?” His heartbeat smoothing out, smoothing out. Good.

“Henry Morrison and Toby Whelan on the bookstore. Georgie Frederick and one of those new kids on the drug. A Killian brat, I think. Rommie Burpee volunteered to go up with em.”

“Got your walkie?”

“Course I do.”

“And Frederick’s got his?”

“All the regulars do.”

“Tell Frederick to keep an eye on Burpee.”

“Rommie? Why, for Lord sake?”

“I don’t trust him. He could be a friend of Barbara’s.” Although it wasn’t Barbara Big Jim was worried about when it came to Burpee. The man had been a friend of Brenda’s. And the man was sharp.

Randolph’s sweaty face was creased. “How many do you think there are? How many on the sonofabitch’s side?”

Big Jim shook his head. “Hard to say, Pete, but this thing is big. Must’ve been in the planning stages for a long time. You can’t just look at the newbies in town and say it’s got to be them. Some of the people in on it could have been here for years. Decades, even. It’s what they call deep cover.”

“Christ. But why, Jim? Why, in God’s name?”

“I don’t know. Testing, maybe, with us for guinea pigs. Or maybe it’s a power grab. I wouldn’t put it past that thug in the White House. What matters is we’re going to have to beef up security and watch for the liars trying to undermine our efforts to keep order.”

“Do you think she—” He inclined his head toward Julia, who was watching her business go up in smoke with her dog sitting beside her, panting in the heat.

“I don’t know for sure, but the way she was this afternoon? Storming around the station, yelling to see him? What does that tell you?”

“Yeah,” Randolph said. He was looking at Julia Shumway with flat-eyed consideration. “And burning up your own place, what better cover than that?”

Big Jim pointed a finger at him as if to say You could have a bingo there. “I have to get off my feet. Get on the horn to George Frederick. Tell him to keep his good weather eye on that Lewiston Canuck.”

“All right.” Randolph unclipped his walkie-talkie.

Behind them, Fernald Bowie shouted: “Roof’s comin down! You on the street, stand back! You men on top of those other buildings at the ready, at the ready!”

Big Jim watched with one hand on the driver’s door of his Hummer as the roof of the Democrat caved in, sending a gusher of sparks straight up into the black sky. The men posted on the adjacent buildings checked that their partners’ Indian pumps were primed and then stood at parade rest, waiting for sparks with their nozzles in their hands.

The expression on Shumway’s face as the Democrat ’s roof let go did Big Jim’s heart more good than all the cotton-picking medicines and pacemakers in the world. For years he’d been forced to put up with her weekly tirades, and while he wouldn’t admit he had been afraid of her, he surely had been annoyed.

But look at her now, he thought. Looks like she came home and found her mother dead on the pot.

“You look better,” Randolph said. “Your color’s coming back.”

“I feel better,” Big Jim said. “But I’ll still go home. Grab some shuteye.”

“That’s a good idea,” Randolph said. “We need you, my friend. Now more than ever. And if this Dome thing doesn’t go away…” He shook his head, his basset-hound eyes never leaving Big Jim’s face. “I don’t know how we’d get along without you, put it that way. I love Andy Sanders like a brother but he doesn’t have much in the way of brains. And Andrea Grinnell hasn’t been worth a tin shit since she fell and hurt her back. You’re the glue that holds Chester’s Mill together.”

Big Jim was moved by this. He gripped Randolph’s arm and squeezed. “I’d give my life for this town. That’s how much I love it.”

“I know. Me too. And no one’s going to steal it out from under us.”

“Got that right,” Big Jim said.

He drove away, mounting the sidewalk to get past the roadblock that had been placed at the north end of the business district. His heart was steady in his chest again (well, almost), but he was troubled, nonetheless. He’d have to see Everett. He didn’t like the idea; Everett was another noseyparker bent on causing trouble at a time when the town had to pull together. Also, he was no doctor. Big Jim would almost have felt better about trusting a vet with his medical problems, except there was none in town. He’d have to hope that if he needed medicine, something to regularize his heartbeat, Everett would know the right kind.

Well, he thought, whatever he gives me, I can check it out with Andy.

Yes, but that wasn’t the biggest thing troubling him. It was something else Pete had said: If this Dome thing doesn’t go away…

Big Jim wasn’t worried about that. Quite the opposite. If the Dome did go away—too soon, that was—he could be in a fair spot of trouble even if the meth lab wasn’t discovered. Certainly there would be cotton-pickers who would second-guess his decisions. One of the rules of political life that he’d grasped early was Those who can, do; those who can’t, question the decisions of those who can. They might not understand that everything he’d done or ordered done, even the rock-throwing at the market this morning, had been of a caretaking nature. Barbara’s friends on the outside would be especially prone to misunderstanding, because they would not want to understand. That Barbara had friends, powerful ones, on the outside was a thing Big Jim hadn’t questioned since seeing that letter from the President. But for the time being they could do nothing. Which was the way Big Jim wanted it to stay for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe even a month or two.

The truth was, he liked the Dome.

Not for the long term, of course, but until the propane out there at the radio station was redistributed? Until the lab was dismantled and the supply barn that had housed it had been burned to the ground (another crime to be laid at the door of Dale Barbara’s co-conspirators)? Until Barbara could be tried and executed by police firing squad? Until any blame for how things were done during the crisis could be spread around to as many people as possible, and the credit accrued to just one, namely himself?

Until then, the Dome was just fine.

Big Jim decided he’d get kneebound and pray on it before turning in.

7

Sammy limped down the hospital corridor, looking at the names on the doors and checking behind those with no names just to be sure. She was starting to worry that the bitch wasn’t here when she came to the last one and saw a get-well card thumbtacked there. It showed a cartoon dog saying “I heard you weren’t feeling so well.”

Sammy drew Jack Evans’s gun from the waistband of her jeans (that waistband a little looser now, she’d finally managed to lose some weight, better late than never) and used the automatic’s muzzle to open the card. On the inside, the cartoon dog was licking his balls and saying, “Need a hindlick maneuver?” It was signed Mel, Jim Jr., Carter, and Frank, and was exactly the sort of tasteful greeting Sammy would have expected of them.

She pushed the door open with the barrel of the gun. Georgia wasn’t alone. This did not disturb the deep calm that Sammy felt, the sense of peace nearly attained. It might have if the man sleeping in the corner had been an innocent—the bitch’s father or uncle, say—but it was Frankie the Tit Grabber. The one who’d raped her first, telling her she’d better learn to keep her mouth for when she was on her knees. That he was sleeping didn’t change anything. Because guys like him always woke up and recommenced their fuckery.

Georgia wasn’t asleep; she was in too much pain, and the longhair who’d come in to check her hadn’t offered her any more dope. She saw Sammy, and her eyes widened. “D’yew,” she said. “Ged outta here.”

Sammy smiled. “You sound like Homer Simpson,” she said.

Georgia saw the gun and her eyes widened. She opened her now mostly toothless mouth and screamed.

Sammy continued to smile. The smile widened, in fact. The scream was music to her ears and balm to her hurts.

“Do that bitch,” she said. “Right, Georgia? Isn’t that what you said, you heartless cunt?”

Frank woke up and stared around in wide-eyed befuddlement. His ass had migrated all the way to the edge of his chair, and when Georgia shrieked again, he jerked and fell onto the floor. He was wearing a sidearm now—they all were—and he grabbed for it, saying “Put it down, Sammy, just put it down, we’re all friends here, let’s be friends here.”

Sammy said, “You ought to keep your mouth closed except for when you’re on your knees gobbling your friend Junior’s cock.” Then she pulled the Springfield’s trigger. The blast from the automatic was deafening in the small room. The first shot went over Frankie’s head and shattered the window. Georgia screamed again. She was trying to get out of bed now, her IV line and monitor wires popping free. Sammy shoved her and she flopped askew on her back.

Frankie still didn’t have his gun out. In his fear and confusion, he was tugging at the holster instead of the weapon, and succeeding at nothing but yanking his belt up on the right side. Sammy took two steps toward him, grasped the pistol in both hands like she’d seen people do on TV, and fired again. The left side of Frankie’s head came off. A flap of scalp struck the wall and stuck there. He clapped his hand to the wound. Blood sprayed through his fingers. Then his fingers were gone, sinking into the oozing sponge where his skull had been.

“No more!” he cried. His eyes were huge and swimming with tears. “No more, don’t! Don’t hurt me!” And then: “Mom! MOMMY!”

“Don’t bother, your mommy didn’t raise you right,” Sammy said, and shot him again, this time in the chest. He jumped against the wall. His hand left his wrecked head and thumped to the floor, splashing in the pool of blood that was already forming there. She shot him a third time, in the place that had hurt her. Then she turned to the one on the bed.

Georgia was huddled in a ball. The monitor above her was beeping like crazy, probably because she’d pulled out the wires connected to it. Her hair hung in her eyes. She screamed and screamed.

“Isn’t that what you said?” Sammy asked. “Do that bitch, right?”

“I horry!”

“What?”

Georgia tried again. “I horry! I horry, Hammy!” And then, the ultimate absurdity: “I take it ack!”

“You can’t. ” Sammy shot Georgia in the face and again in the neck. Georgia jumped the way Frankie had, then lay still.

Sammy heard running footsteps and shouts in the corridor. Sleepy cries of concern from some of the rooms as well. She was sorry about causing a fuss, but sometimes there was just no choice. Sometimes things had to be done. And when they were, there could be peace.

She put the gun to her temple.

“I love you, Little Walter. Mumma loves her boy.”

And pulled the trigger.

8

Rusty used West Street to get around the fire, then hooked back onto Lower Main at the 117 intersection. Bowie’s was dark except for small electric candles in the front windows. He drove around back to the smaller lot as his wife had instructed him, and parked beside the long gray Cadillac hearse. Somewhere close by, a generator was clattering.

He was reaching for the door handle when his phone twittered. He turned it off without looking to see who might be calling, and when he looked up again, a cop was standing beside his window. A cop with a drawn gun.

It was a woman. When she bent down, Rusty saw a cloudburst of frizzy blond hair, and at last had a face to go with the name his wife had mentioned. The police dispatcher and receptionist on the day shift. Rusty assumed she had been pressed into full-time service on or just after Dome Day. He also assumed that her current duty-assignment had been self-assigned.

She holstered the pistol. “Hey, Dr. Rusty. Stacey Moggin. You treated me for poison oak two years ago? You know, on my—” She patted her behind.

“I remember. Nice to see you with your pants up, Ms. Moggin.”

She laughed as she had spoken: softly. “Hope I didn’t scare you.”

“A little. I was silencing my cell phone, and then there you were.”

“Sorry. Come on inside. Linda’s waiting. We don’t have much time. I’m going to stand watch out front. I’ll give Lin a double-click on her walkie if someone comes. If it’s the Bowies, they’ll park in the side lot and we can drive out on East Street unnoticed.” She cocked her head a little and smiled. “Well… that’s a tad optimistic, but at least unidentified. If we’re lucky.”

Rusty followed her, navigating by the cloudy beacon of her hair. “Did you break in, Stacey?”

“Hell, no. There was a key at the cop-shop. Most of the businesses on Main Street give us keys.”

“And why are you in on this?”

“Because it’s all fear-driven bullshit. Duke Perkins would have put a stop to it long ago. Now come on. And make this fast.”

“I can’t promise that. In fact, I can’t promise anything. I’m not a pathologist.”

“Fast as you can, then.”

Rusty followed her inside. A moment later, Linda’s arms were around him.

9

Harriet Bigelow screamed twice, then fainted. Gina Buffalino only stared, glassy with shock. “Get Gina out of here,” Thurse snapped. He had gotten as far as the parking lot, heard the shots, and come running back. To find this. This slaughter.

Ginny put an arm around Gina’s shoulders and led her back into the hall, where the patients who were ambulatory—this included Bill Allnut and Tansy Freeman—were standing, big-eyed and frightened.

“Get this one out of the way,” Thurse told Twitch, pointing at Harriet. “And pull her skirt down, give the poor girl some modesty.”

Twitch did as he was told. When he and Ginny reentered the room, Thurse was kneeling by the body of Frank DeLesseps, who had died because he’d come in place of Georgia’s boyfriend and over-stayed visiting hours. Thurse had flapped the sheet over Georgia, and it was already blooming with blood-poppies.

“Is there anything we can do, Doctor?” Ginny asked. She knew he wasn’t a doctor, but in her shock it came automatically. She was looking down at Frank’s sprawled body, and her hand was over her mouth.

“Yes.” Thurse rose and his bony knees cracked like pistol shots. “Call the police. This is a crime scene.”

“All the ones on duty will be fighting that fire downstreet,” Twitch said. “Those who aren’t will either be on their way or sleeping with their phones turned off.”

“Well call somebody, for the love of Jesus, and find out if we’re supposed to do anything before we clean up the mess. Take photographs, or I don’t know what. Not that there’s much doubt about what happened. You’ll have to excuse me for a minute. I’m going to vomit.”

Ginny stood aside so Thurston could go into the tiny WC attached to the room. He closed the door, but the sound of his retching was still loud, the sound of a revving engine with dirt caught in it somewhere.

Ginny felt a wave of faintness rush through her head, seeming to lift her and make her light. She fought it off. When she looked back at Twitch, he was just closing his cell phone. “No answer from Rusty,” he said. “I left a voice mail. Anyone else? What about Rennie?”

“No!” She almost shuddered. “Not him.”

“My sister? Andi, I mean?”

Ginny only looked at him.

Twitch looked back for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “Maybe not,” he mumbled.

Ginny touched him above the wrist. His skin was cold with shock. She supposed her own was, too. “If it’s any comfort,” she said, “I think she’s trying to get clean. She came to see Rusty, and I’m pretty sure that was what it was about.”

Twitch ran his hands down the sides of his face, turning it for a moment into an opéra bouffe mask of sorrow. “This is a nightmare.”

“Yes,” Ginny said simply. Then she took out her cell phone again.

“Who you gonna call?” Twitch managed a little smile. “Ghost-busters?”

“No. If Andi and Big Jim are out, who does that leave?”

“Sanders, but he’s dogshit-useless and you know it. Why don’t we just clean up the mess? Thurston’s right, what happened here is obvious.”

Thurston came out of the bathroom. He was wiping his mouth with a paper towel. “Because there are rules, young man. And under the circumstances, it’s more important than ever that we follow them. Or at least give it the good old college try.”

Twitch looked up and saw Sammy Bushey’s brains drying high on one wall. What she had used to think with now looked like a clot of oatmeal. He burst into tears.

10

Andy Sanders was sitting in Dale Barbara’s apartment, on the side of Dale Barbara’s bed. The window was filled with orange fireglare from the burning Democrat building next door. From above him he heard footsteps and muffled voices—men on the roof, he assumed.

He had brought a brown bag with him when he climbed the inside staircase from the pharmacy below. Now he took out the contents: a glass, a bottle of Dasani water, and a bottle of pills. The pills were OxyContin tablets. The label read HOLD FOR A. GRINNELL. They were pink, the twenties. He shook some out, counted, then shook out more. Twenty. Four hundred milligrams. It might not be enough to kill Andrea, who’d had time to build up a tolerance, but he was sure it would do quite well for him.

The heat from the fire next door came baking through the wall. His skin was wet with sweat. It had to be at least a hundred in here, maybe more. He wiped his face with the coverlet.

Won’t feel it much longer. There’ll be cool breezes in heaven, and we’ll all sit down to dinner together at the Lord’s table.

He used the bottom of the glass to grind the pink pills into powder, making sure the dope would hit him all at once. Like a hammer on a steer’s head. Just lie down on the bed, close his eyes, and then good night, sweet pharmacist, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Me… and Claudie… and Dodee. Together for eternity.

Don’t think so, brother.

That was Coggins’s voice, Coggins at his most dour and declamatory. Andy paused in the act of crushing the pills.

Suicides don’t eat supper with their loved ones, my friend; they go to hell and dine on hot coals that burn forever in the belly. Can you give me hallelujah on that? Can you say amen?

“Bullspit,” Andy whispered, and went back to grinding the pills. “You were snout-first in the trough with the rest of us. Why should I believe you?”

Because I speak the truth. Your wife and daughter are looking down on you right now, pleading with you not to do it. Can’t you hear them?

“Nope,” Andy said. “And that’s not you, either. It’s just the part of my mind that’s cowardly. It’s run me my whole life. It’s how Big Jim got hold of me. It’s how I got into this meth mess. I didn’t need the money, I don’t even understand that much money, I just didn’t know how to say no. But I can say it this time. Nosir. I’ve got nothing left to live for, and I’m leaving. Got anything to say to that?”

It seemed that Lester Coggins did not. Andy finished reducing the pills to powder, then filled the glass with water. He brushed the pink dust into the glass using the side of his hand, then stirred with his finger. The only sounds were the fire and the dim shouts of the men fighting it and from above, the thump-thud-thump of other men walking around on his roof.

“Down the hatch,” he said… but didn’t drink. His hand was on the glass, but that cowardly part of him—that part that didn’t want to die even though any meaningful life was over—held it where it was.

“No, you don’t win this time,” he said, but he let go of the glass so he could wipe his streaming face with the coverlet again. “Not every time and not this time.”

He raised the glass to his lips. Sweet pink oblivion swam inside. But again he put it down on the bed table.

The cowardly part, still ruling him. God damn that cowardly part.

“Lord, send me a sign,” he whispered. “Send me a sign that it’s all right to drink this. If for no other reason than because it’s the only way I can get out of this town.”

Next door, the roof of the Democrat went down in a stew of sparks. Above him, someone—it sounded like Romeo Burpee—shouted: “Be ready, boys, be on the goddam ready!”

Be ready. That was the sign, surely. Andy Sanders lifted the glassful of death again, and this time the cowardly part didn’t hold his arm down. The cowardly part seemed to have given up.

In his pocket, his cell phone played the opening phrases of “You’re Beautiful,” a sentimental piece of crap that had been Claudie’s choice. For a moment he almost drank, anyway, but then a voice whispered that this could be a sign, too. He couldn’t tell if that was the voice of the cowardly part, or of Coggins, or of his own true heart. And because he couldn’t, he answered the phone.

“Mr. Sanders?” A woman’s voice, tired and unhappy and frightened. Andy could relate. “This is Virginia Tomlinson, up at the hospital?”

“Ginny, sure!” Sounding like his old cheery, helpful self. It was bizarre.

“We have a situation here, I’m afraid. Can you come?”

Light pierced the confused darkness in Andy’s head. It filled him with amazement and gratitude. To have someone say Can you come. Had he forgotten how fine that felt? He supposed he had, although it was why he’d stood for Selectman in the first place. Not to wield power; that was Big Jim’s thing. Only to lend a helping hand. That was how he’d started out; maybe it was how he could finish up.

“Mr. Sanders? Are you there?”

“Yes. You hang in, Ginny. I’ll be right there.” He paused. “And none of that Mr. Sanders stuff. It’s Andy. We’re all in this together, you know.”

He hung up, took the glass into the bathroom, and poured its pink contents into the commode. His good feeling—that feeling of light and amazement—lasted until he pushed the flush-lever. Then depression settled over him again like a smelly old coat. Needed? That was pretty funny. He was just stupid old Andy Sanders, the dummy who sat on Big Jim’s lap. The mouthpiece. The gabbler. The man who read Big Jim’s motions and proposals as if they were his own. The man who came in handy every two years or so, electioneering and laying on the cornpone charm. Things of which Big Jim was either incapable or unwilling.

There were more pills in the bottle. There was more Dasani in the cooler downstairs. But Andy didn’t seriously consider these things; he had made Ginny Tomlinson a promise, and he was a man who kept his word. But suicide hadn’t been rejected, only put on the back burner. Tabled, as they said in the smalltown political biz. And it would be good to get out of this bedroom, which had almost been his death chamber.

It was filling up with smoke.

11

The Bowies’ mortuary workroom was belowground, and Linda felt safe enough turning on the lights. Rusty needed them for his examination.

“Look at this mess,” he said, waving an arm at the dirty, foot-tracked tile floor, the beer and soft drink cans on the counters, an open trashcan in one corner with a few flies buzzing over it. “If the State Board of Funeral Service saw this—or the Department of Health—it’d be shut down in a New York minute.”

“We’re not in New York,” Linda reminded him. She was looking at the stainless steel table in the center of the room. The surface was cloudy with substances probably best left unnamed, and there was a balled-up Snickers wrapper in one of the runoff gutters. “We’re not even in Maine anymore, I don’t think. Hurry up, Eric, this place stinks.”

“In more ways than one,” Rusty said. The mess offended him—hell, outraged him. He could have punched Stewart Bowie in the mouth just for the candy wrapper, discarded on the table where the town’s dead had the blood drained from their bodies.

On the far side of the room were six stainless steel body-lockers. From somewhere behind them, Rusty could hear the steady rumble of refrigeration equipment. “No shortage of propane here,” he muttered. “The Bowie brothers are livin large in the hood.”

There were no names in the card slots on the fronts of the lock-ers—another sign of sloppiness—so Rusty pulled the whole sixpack. The first two were empty, which didn’t surprise him. Most of those who had so far died under the Dome, including Ron Haskell and the Evanses, had been buried quickly. Jimmy Sirois, with no close relatives, was still in the small morgue at Cathy Russell.

The next four contained the bodies he had come to see. The smell of decomposition bloomed as soon as he pulled out the rolling racks. It overwhelmed the unpleasant but less aggressive smells of preservatives and funeral ointments. Linda retreated farther, gagging.

“Don’t you vomit, Linny,” Rusty said, and went across to the cabinets on the far side of the room. The first drawer he opened contained nothing but stacked back issues of Field & Stream, and he cursed. The one under it, however, had what he needed. He reached beneath a trocar that looked as if it had never been washed and pulled out a pair of green plastic face masks still in their wrappers. He handed one mask to Linda, donned the other himself. He looked into the next drawer and appropriated a pair of rubber gloves. They were bright yellow, hellishly jaunty.

“If you think you’re going to throw up in spite of the mask, go upstairs with Stacey.”

“I’ll be all right. I should witness.”

“I’m not sure how much your testimony would count for; you’re my wife, after all.”

She repeated, “I should witness. Just be as quick as you can.”

The body-racks were filthy. This didn’t surprise him after seeing the rest of the prep area, but it still disgusted him. Linda had thought to bring an old cassette recorder she’d found in the garage. Rusty pushed RECORD, tested the sound, and was mildly surprised to find it was not too bad. He placed the little Panasonic on one of the empty racks. Then he pulled on the gloves. It took longer than it should have; his hands were sweating. There was probably talcum or Johnson’s Baby Powder here somewhere, but he had no intention of wasting time looking for it. He already felt like a burglar. Hell, he was a burglar.

“Okay, here we go. It’s ten forty-five PM, October twenty-fourth. This examination is taking place in the prep room of the Bowie Funeral Home. Which is filthy, by the way. Shameful. I see four bodies, three women and a man. Two of the women are young, late teens or early twenties. Those are Angela McCain and Dodee Sanders.”

“Dorothy,” Linda said from the far side of the prep table. “Her name is… was… Dorothy.”

“I stand corrected. Dorothy Sanders. The third woman is in late middle age. That’s Brenda Perkins. The man is about forty. He’s the Reverend Lester Coggins. For the record, I can identify all these people.”

He beckoned his wife and pointed at the bodies. She looked, and her eyes welled with tears. She raised the mask long enough to say, “I’m Linda Everett, of the Chester’s Mill Police Department. My badge number is seven-seven-five. I also recognize these four bodies.” She put her mask back in place. Above it, her eyes pleaded.

Rusty motioned her back. It was all a charade, anyway. He knew it, and guessed Linda did, too. Yet he didn’t feel depressed. He had wanted a medical career ever since boyhood, would certainly have been a doctor if he hadn’t had to leave school to take care of his parents, and what had driven him as a high school sophomore dissecting frogs and cows’ eyes in biology class was what drove him now: simple curiosity. The need to know. And he would know. Maybe not everything, but at least some things.

This is where the dead help the living. Did Linda say that?

Didn’t matter. He was sure they would help if they could. “There has been no cosmeticizing of the bodies that I can see, but all four have been embalmed. I don’t know if the process has been completed, but I suspect not, because the femoral artery taps are still in place.

“Angela and Dodee—excuse me, Dorothy—have been badly beaten and are well into decomposition. Coggins has also been beaten—savagely, from the look—and is also into decomp, although not as far; the musculature on his face and arms has just begun to sag. Brenda—Brenda Perkins, I mean…” He trailed off and bent over her.

“Rusty?” Linda asked nervously. “Honey?”

He reached out a gloved hand, thought better of it, removed the glove, and cupped her throat. Then he lifted Brenda’s head and felt the grotesquely large knot just below the nape. He eased her head down, then rotated her body onto one hip so he could look at her back and buttocks.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Rusty? What?”

For one thing, she’s still caked with shit, he thought… but that wouldn’t go on the record. Not even if Randolph or Rennie only listened to the first sixty seconds before crushing the tape under a shoe heel and burning whatever remained. He would not add that detail of her defilement.

But he would remember.

“What?”

He wet his lips and said, “Brenda Perkins shows livor mortis on the buttocks and thighs, indicating she’s been dead at least twelve hours, probably more like fourteen. There’s significant bruising on both cheeks. They’re handprints. There’s no doubt in my mind of that. Someone took hold of her face and snapped her head hard to the left, fracturing the atlas and axis cervical vertebrae, C1 and C2. Probably severed her spine as well.”

“Oh, Rusty,” Linda moaned.

Rusty thumbed up first one of Brenda’s eyelids, then the other. He saw what he had feared.

“Bruising to the cheeks and scleral petechiae—bloodspots in the whites of this woman’s eyes—suggest death wasn’t instantaneous. She was unable to draw breath and asphyxiated. She may or may not have been conscious. We’ll hope not. That’s all I can tell, unfortunately. The girls—Angela and Dorothy—have been dead the longest. The state of decomposition suggests they were stored in a warm place.”

He snapped off the recorder.

“In other words, I see nothing that absolutely exonerates Barbie and nothing we didn’t goddam know already.”

“What if his hands don’t match the bruises on Brenda’s face?”

“The marks are too diffuse to be sure. Lin, I feel like the stupidest man on earth.”

He rolled the two girls—who should have been cruising the Auburn Mall, pricing earrings, buying clothes at Deb, comparing boyfriends—back into darkness. Then he turned to Brenda.

“Give me a cloth. I saw some stacked beside the sink. They even looked clean, which is sort of a miracle in this pigsty.”

“What are you—”

“Just give me a cloth. Better make it two. Wet them.”

“Do we have time to—”

“We’re going to make time.”

Linda watched silently as her husband carefully washed Brenda Perkins’s buttocks and the backs of her thighs. When he was done, he flung the dirty rags into the corner, thinking that if the Bowie brothers had been here, he would have stuffed one into Stewart’s mouth and the other into fucking Fernald’s.

He kissed Brenda on her cool brow and rolled her back into the refrigerated locker. He started to do the same with Coggins, then stopped. The Reverend’s face had been given only the most cursory of cleanings; there was still blood in his ears, his nostrils, and grimed into his brow.

“Linda, wet another cloth.”

“Honey, it’s been almost ten minutes. I love you for showing respect to the dead, but we’ve got the living to—”

“We may have something here. This wasn’t the same kind of beating. I can see that even without… wet a cloth.”

She made no further argument, only wet another cloth, wrung it out, and handed it to him. Then she watched as he cleansed the remaining blood from the dead man’s face, working gently but without the love he’d shown Brenda.

She had been no fan of Lester Coggins (who had once claimed on his weekly radio broadcast that kids who went to see Miley Cyrus were risking hell), but what Rusty was uncovering still hurt her heart. “My God, he looks like a scarecrow after a bunch of kids used rocks on it for target practice.”

“I told you. Not the same kind of beating. This wasn’t done with fists, or even feet.”

Linda pointed. “What’s that on his temple?”

Rusty didn’t answer. Above his mask, his eyes were bright with amazement. Something else, too: understanding, just starting to dawn.

“What is it, Eric? It looks like… I don’t know… stitches. ”

“You bet.” His mask bobbed as the mouth beneath it broke into a smile. Not happiness; satisfaction. And of the grimmest kind. “On his forehead, too. See? And his jaw. That one broke his jaw.”

“What sort of weapon leaves marks like that?”

“A baseball,” Rusty said, rolling the drawer shut. “Not an ordinary one, but one that was gold-plated? Yes. If swung with enough force, I think it could. I think it did. ”

He lowered his forehead to hers. Their masks bumped. He looked into her eyes.

“Jim Rennie has one. I saw it on his desk when I went to talk to him about the missing propane. I don’t know about the others, but I think we know where Lester Coggins died. And who killed him.”

12

After the roof collapsed, Julia couldn’t bear to watch anymore. “Come home with me,” Rose said. “The guest room is yours as long as you want it.”

“Thanks, but no. I need to be by myself now, Rosie. Well, you know… with Horace. I need to think.”

“Where will you stay? Will you be all right?”

“Yes.” Not knowing if she would be or not. Her mind seemed okay, thinking processes all in order, but she felt as if someone had given her emotions a big shot of Novocaine. “Maybe I’ll come by later.”

When Rosie was gone, walking up the other side of the street (and turning to give Julia a final troubled wave), Julia went back to the Prius, ushered Horace into the front seat, then got behind the wheel. She looked for Pete Freeman and Tony Guay and didn’t see them anywhere. Maybe Tony had taken Pete up to the hospital to get some salve for his arm. It was a miracle neither of them had been hurt worse. And if she hadn’t taken Horace with her when she drove out to see Cox, her dog would have been incinerated along with everything else.

When that thought came, she realized her emotions weren’t numb after all, but only hiding. A sound—a kind of keening—began to come from her. Horace pricked up his considerable ears and looked at her anxiously. She tried to stop and couldn’t.

Her father’s paper.

Her grandfather’s paper.

Her great-grandfather’s.

Ashes.

She drove down to West Street, and when she came to the abandoned parking lot behind the Globe, she pulled in. She turned off the engine, drew Horace to her, and wept against one furry, muscular shoulder for five minutes. To his credit, Horace bore this patiently.

When she was cried out, she felt better. Calmer. Perhaps it was the calmness of shock, but at least she could think again. And what she thought of was the one remaining bundle of papers in the trunk. She leaned past Horace (who gave her neck a companionable lick) and opened the glove compartment. It was jammed with rick-rack, but she thought somewhere… just possibly…

And like a gift from God, there it was. A little plastic box filled with Push Pins, rubber bands, thumbtacks, and paper clips. Rubber bands and paper clips would be no good for what she had in mind, but the tacks and Push Pins…

“Horace,” she said. “Do you want to go walkie-walk?”

Horace barked that he did indeed want to go walkie-walk.

“Good,” she said. “So do I.”

She got the newspapers, then walked back to Main Street. The Democrat building was now just a blazing heap of rubble with cops pouring on the water (from those oh-so-convenient Indian pumps, she thought, all loaded up and ready to go). Looking at it hurt Julia’s heart—of course it did—but not so badly, now that she had something to do.

She walked down the street with Horace pacing in state beside her, and on every telephone pole she put up a copy of the Democrat ’s last issue. The headline—RIOT AND MURDERS AS CRISIS DEEPENS—seemed to glare out in the light of the fire. She wished now she had settled for a single word: BEWARE.

She went on until they were all gone.

13

Across the street, Peter Randolph’s walkie-talkie crackled three times: break-break-break. Urgent. Dreading what he might hear, he thumbed the transmit button, and said: “Chief Randolph. Go.”

It was Freddy Denton, who, as commanding officer of the night shift, was now the de facto Assistant Chief. “Just got a call from the hospital, Pete. Double murder—”

“WHAT?” Randolph screamed. One of the new officers—Mickey Wardlaw—was gawking at him like a Mongolian ijit at his first county fair.

Denton continued, sounding either calm or smug. If it was the latter, God help him. “—and a suicide. Shooter was that girl who cried rape. Victims were ours, Chief. Roux and DeLesseps.”

“You… are… SHITTING ME!”

“I sent Rupe and Mel Searles up there,” Freddy said. “Bright side, it’s all over and we don’t have to jug her down in the Coop with Barb—”

“You should’ve gone yourself, Fred. You’re the senior officer.”

“Then who’d be on the desk?”

Randolph had no answer for that—it was either too smart or too stupid. He supposed he better get his ass up to Cathy Russell.

I no longer want this job. No. Not even a little bit.

But it was too late now. And with Big Jim to help him, he’d manage. That was the thing to concentrate on; Big Jim would see him through.

Marty Arsenault tapped his shoulder. Randolph almost hauled off and hit him. Arsenault didn’t notice; he was looking across the street to where Julia Shumway was walking her dog. Walking her dog and… what?

Putting up newspapers, that was what. Tacking them to the goddam Christing telephone poles.

“That bitch won’t quit,” he breathed.

“Want me to go over there and make her quit?” Arsenault asked.

Marty looked eager for the chore, and Randolph almost gave it to him. Then he shook his head. “She’d just start giving you an earful about her damn civil rights. Like she doesn’t realize that scaring the holy hell out of everyone isn’t exactly in the town’s best interest.” He shook his head. “Probably she doesn’t. She’s incredibly…” There was a word for

what she was, a French word he’d learned in high school. He didn’t expect it to come to him, but it did. “Incredibly naïve.”

“I’ll stop her, Chief, I will. What’s she gonna do, call her lawyer?”

“Let her have her fun. At least it’s keeping her out of our hair. I better go up to the hospital. Denton says the Bushey girl murdered Frank DeLesseps and Georgia Roux. Then killed herself.”

“Christ,” Marty whispered, his face losing its color. “Is that down to Barbara too, do you think?”

Randolph started to say it wasn’t, then reconsidered. His second thought was of the girl’s rape accusation. Her suicide gave it a ring of truth, and rumors that Mill police officers could have done such a thing would be bad for department morale, and hence for the town. He didn’t need Jim Rennie to tell him that.

“Don’t know,” he said, “but it’s possible.”

Marty’s eyes were watering, either from smoke or from grief. Maybe both. “Gotta get Big Jim on top of this, Pete.”

“I will. Meanwhile”—Randolph nodded toward Julia—“keep an eye on her, and when she finally gets tired and goes away, take all that shit down and toss it where it belongs.” He indicated the torch that had been a newspaper office earlier in the day. “Put litter in its place.”

Marty snickered. “Roger that, boss.”

And that was just what Officer Arsenault did. But not before others in town had taken down a few of the papers for perusal in brighter light—half a dozen, maybe ten. They were passed from hand to hand in the next two or three days, and read until they quite literally fell apart.

14

When Andy got to the hospital, Piper Libby was already there. She was sitting on a bench in the lobby, talking to two girls in the white nylon pants and smock tops of nurses… although to Andy they seemed far too young to be real nurses. Both had been crying and looked like they might start again soon, but Andy could see Reverend Libby was having a calming effect on them. One thing he’d never had a problem with was judging human emotions. Sometimes he wished he’d been better at the thinking side of things.

Ginny Tomlinson was standing nearby, conversing quietly with an oldish-looking fellow. Both looked dazed and shaken. Ginny saw Andy and came over. The oldish-looking fellow trailed along behind. She introduced him as Thurston Marshall and said he was helping out.

Andy gave the new fellow a big smile and a warm handshake. “Nice to meet you, Thurston. I’m Andy Sanders. First Selectman.”

Piper glanced over from the bench and said, “If you were really the First Selectman, Andy, you’d rein in the Second Selectman.”

“I understand you’ve had a hard couple of days,” Andy said, still smiling. “We all have.”

Piper gave him a look of singular coldness, then asked the girls if they wouldn’t like to come down to the caff with her and have tea. “I could sure use a cup,” she said.

“I called her after I called you,” Ginny said, a little apologetically, after Piper had led the two junior nurses away. “And I called the PD. Got Fred Denton.” She wrinkled her nose as people do when they smell something bad.

“Aw, Freddy’s a good guy,” Andy said earnestly. His heart was in none of this—his heart felt like it was still back on Dale Barbara’s bed, planning to drink the poisoned pink water—but the old habits kicked in smoothly, nevertheless. The urge to make things all right, to calm troubled waters, turned out to be like riding a bicycle. “Tell me what happened here.”

She did so. Andy listened with surprising calmness, considering he’d known the DeLesseps family all his life and had in high school once taken Georgia Roux’s mother on a date (Helen had kissed with her mouth open, which was nice, but had stinky breath, which wasn’t). He thought his current emotional flatness had everything to do with knowing that if his phone hadn’t rung when it did, he’d be unconscious by now. Maybe dead. A thing like that put the world in perspective.

“Two of our brand-new officers,” he said. To himself he sounded like the recording you got when you called a movie theater to get showtimes. “One already badly hurt trying to clean up that supermarket mess. Dear, dear.”

“This is probably not the time to say so, but I’m not very fond of your police department,” Thurston said. “Although since the officer who actually punched me is now dead, lodging a complaint would be moot.”

“Which officer? Frank or the Roux girl?”

“The young man. I recognized him in spite of his… his mortal disfigurement.”

“Frank DeLesseps punched you?” Andy simply didn’t believe this. Frankie had delivered his Lewiston Sun for four years and never missed a day. Well, yes, one or two, now that he thought of it, but those had come during big snowstorms. And once he’d had the measles. Or had it been the mumps?

“If that was his name.”

“Well gosh… that’s…” It was what? And did it matter? Did anything? Yet Andy pushed gamely forward. “That’s regrettable, sir. We believe in living up to our responsibilities in Chester’s Mill. Doing the right thing. It’s just that right now we’re kind of under the gun. Circumstances beyond our control, you know.”

“I do know,” Thurse said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s water over the dam. But sir… those officers were awfully young. And very out of line.” He paused. “The lady I’m with was also assaulted.”

Andy just couldn’t believe this fellow was telling the truth. Chester’s Mill cops didn’t hurt people unless they were provoked (severely provoked); that was for the big cities, where folks didn’t know how to get along. Of course, he would have said a girl killing two cops and then taking her own life was also the kind of thing that didn’t happen in The Mill.

Never mind, Andy thought. He’s not just an out-of-towner, he’s an outof-stater. Put it down to that.

Ginny said, “Now that you’re here, Andy, I’m not sure what you can do. Twitch is taking care of the bodies, and—”

Before she could go on, the door opened. A young woman came in, leading two sleepy-looking children by the hands. The old fellow—Thurston—hugged her while the children, a girl and a boy, looked on. Both of them were barefooted and wearing tee-shirts as nightshirts. The boy’s, which came all the way down to his ankles, read PRISONER 9091 and PROPERTY OF SHAWSHANK STATE PRISON. Thurston’s daughter and grandchildren, Andy supposed, and that made him miss Claudette and Dodee all over again. He pushed the thought of them away. Ginny had called him for help, and it was clear she needed some herself. Which would no doubt mean listening while she told the whole story again—not for his benefit but for her own. So she could get the truth of it and start making peace with it. Andy didn’t mind. Listening was a thing he’d always been good at, and it was better than looking at three dead bodies, one the discarded husk of his old paperboy. Listening was such a simple thing, when you got right down to it, even a moron could listen, but Big Jim had never gotten the hang of it. Big Jim was better at talking. And planning—that, too. They were lucky to have him at a time like this.

As Ginny was winding up her second recitation, a thought came to Andy. Possibly an important one. “Has anyone—”

Thurston returned with the newcomers in tow. “Selectman Sanders—Andy—this is my partner, Carolyn Sturges. And these are the children we’re taking care of. Alice and Aidan.”

“I want my binkie,” Aidan said morosely.

Alice said, “You’re too old for a binkie,” and elbowed him.

Aidan’s face scrunched, but he didn’t quite cry.

“Alice,” Carolyn Sturges said, “that’s mean. And what do we know about mean people?”

Alice brightened. “Mean people suck!” she cried, and collapsed into giggles. After considering a moment, Aidan joined her.

“I’m sorry,” Carolyn said to Andy. “I had no one to watch them, and Thurse sounded so distraught when he called….”

It was hard to believe, but it seemed possible the old guy was bumping sweet spots with the young lady. The idea was only of passing interest to Andy, although under other circumstances he might have considered it deeply, pondering positions, wondering about whether she frenched him with that dewy mouth of hers, etc., etc. Now, however, he had other things on his mind.

“Has anyone told Sammy’s husband that she’s dead?” he asked.

“Phil Bushey?” It was Dougie Twitchell, coming down the hall and into the reception area. His shoulders were slumped and his complexion was gray. “Sonofabitch left her and left town. Months ago.” His eyes fell on Alice and Aidan Appleton. “Sorry, kids.”

“That’s all right,” Caro said. “We have an open-language house. It’s much more truthful.”

“That’s right,” Alice piped up. “We can say shit and piss all we want, at least until Ma gets back.”

“But not bitch,” Aidan amplified. “Bitch is ex -ist.”

Caro took no notice of this byplay. “Thurse? What happened?”

“Not in front of the kids,” he said. “Open language or no open language.”

“Frank’s parents are out of town,” Twitch said, “but I got in touch with Helen Roux. She took it quite calmly.”

“Drunk?” Andy asked.

“As a skunk.”

Andy wandered a little way up the hall. A few patients, clad in hospital johnnies and slippers, were standing with their backs to him. Looking at the scene of the slaughter, he presumed. He had no urge to do likewise, and was glad Dougie Twitchell had taken care of whatever needed taking care of. He was a pharmacist and a politician. His job was to help the living, not process the dead.

And he knew something these people did not. He couldn’t tell them that Phil Bushey was still in town, living like a hermit out at the radio station, but he could tell Phil that his estranged wife was dead. Could and should. Of course it was impossible to predict what Phil’s reaction might be; Phil wasn’t himself these days. He might lash out. He might even kill the bearer of bad tidings. But would that be so awful? Suicides might go to hell and dine on hot coals for eternity, but murder victims, Andy was quite sure, went to heaven and ate roast beef and peach cobbler at the Lord’s table for all eternity.

With their loved ones.

15

In spite of the nap she’d had earlier in the day, Julia was more tired than ever in her life, or so it felt. And unless she took Rosie up on her offer, she had nowhere to go. Except her car, of course.

She went back to it, unclipped Horace’s leash so he could jump onto the passenger seat, and then sat behind the wheel trying to think. She liked Rose Twitchell just fine, but Rosie would want to rehash the entire long and harrowing day. And she’d want to know what, if anything, was to be done about Dale Barbara. She would look to Julia for ideas, and Julia had none.

Meanwhile Horace was staring at her, asking with his cocked ears and bright eyes what came next. He made her think of the woman who had lost her dog: Piper Libby. Piper would take her in and give her a bed without talking her ear off. And after a night’s sleep, Julia might be able to think again. Even plan a little.

She started the Prius and drove up to the Congo church. But the parsonage was dark, and a note was tacked to the door. Julia pulled the tack, took the note back to the car, and read it by the dome light.

I have gone to the hospital. There has been a shooting there.

Julia started to make the keening noise again, and when Horace

began to whine as if trying to harmonize, she made herself stop. She put the Prius in reverse, then put it back in park long enough to return the note to where she had found it, in case some other parishioner with the weight of the world on his shoulders (or hers) might come by looking for The Mill’s remaining spiritual advisor.

So now where? Rosie’s after all? But Rosie might already have turned in. The hospital? Julia would have forced herself to go there in spite of her shock and her weariness if it had served a purpose, but now there was no newspaper in which to report whatever had happened, and without that, no reason to expose herself to fresh horrors.

She backed out of the driveway and turned up Town Common Hill with no idea where she was going until she came to Prestile Street. Three minutes later, she was parking in Andrea Grinnell’s driveway. Yet this house was also dark. There was no answer to her soft knocks. Having no way of knowing that Andrea was in her bed upstairs, deeply asleep for the first time since dumping her pills, Julia assumed she had either gone to her brother Dougie’s house or was spending the night with a friend.

Meanwhile, Horace was sitting on the welcome mat, looking up at her, waiting for her to take charge, as she had always done. But Julia was too hollowed out to take charge and too tired to go further. She was more than half convinced that she would drive the Prius off the road and kill them both if she tried going anywhere.

What she kept thinking about wasn’t the burning building where her life had been stored but of how Colonel Cox had looked when she’d asked him if they had been abandoned.

Negative, he’d said. Absolutely not. But he hadn’t quite been able to look at her while he said it.

There was a lawn glider on the porch. If necessary, she could curl up there. But maybe—

She tried the door and found it unlocked. She hesitated; Horace did not. Secure in the belief that he was welcome everywhere, he went inside immediately. Julia followed on the other end of the leash, thinking, My dog is now making the decisions. This is what it’s come to.

“Andrea?” she called softly. “Andi, are you here? It’s Julia.”

Upstairs, lying on her back and snoring like a truck driver at the end of a four-day run, only one part of Andrea stirred: her left foot, which hadn’t yet given up its withdrawal-induced jerking and tapping.

It was gloomy in the living room, but not entirely dark; Andi had left a battery-powered lamp on in the kitchen. And there was a smell. The windows were open, but with no breeze, the odor of vomit hadn’t entirely vented. Had someone told her that Andrea was ill? With the flu, maybe?

Maybe it is the flu, but it could just as easily be withdrawal if she ran out of the pills she takes.

Either way, sickness was sickness, and sick people usually didn’t want to be alone. Which meant the house was empty. And she was so tired. Across the room was a nice long couch, and it called to her. If Andi came in tomorrow and found Julia there, she’d understand.

“She might even make me a cup of tea,” she said. “We’ll laugh about it.” Although the idea of laughing at anything, ever again, seemed out of the question to her right now. “Come on, Horace.”

She unclipped his leash and trudged across the room. Horace watched her until she lay down and put a sofa pillow behind her head. Then he laid down himself and put his snout on his paw.

“You be a good boy,” she said, and closed her eyes. What she saw when she did was Cox’s eyes not quite meeting hers. Because Cox thought they were under the Dome for the long haul.

But the body knows mercies of which the brain is unaware. Julia fell asleep with her head less than four feet from the manila envelope Brenda had tried to deliver to her that morning. At some point, Horace jumped onto the couch and curled up between her knees. And that was how Andrea found them when she came downstairs on the morning of October twenty-fifth, feeling more like her true self than she had in years.

16

There were four people in Rusty’s living room: Linda, Jackie, Stacey Moggin, and Rusty himself. He served out glasses of iced tea, then summarized what he had found in the basement of the Bowie Funeral Home. The first question came from Stacey, and it was purely practical.

“Did you remember to lock up?”

“Yes,” Linda said. “Then give me the key. I have to put it back.”

Us and them, Rusty thought again. That’s what this conversation is going to be about. What it’s already about. Our secrets. Their power. Our plans. Their agenda.

Linda handed over the key, then asked Jackie if the girls had given her any problems.

“No seizures, if that’s what you’re worried about. Slept like lambs the whole time you were gone.”

“What are we going to do about this?” Stacey asked. She was a little thing, but determined. “If you want to arrest Rennie, the four of us will have to convince Randolph to do it. We three women as officers, Rusty as the acting pathologist.”

“No!” Jackie and Linda said it together, Jackie with decisiveness, Linda with fright.

“We have a hypothesis but no real proof,” Jackie said. “I’m not sure Pete Randolph would believe us even if we had surveillance photos of Big Jim snapping Brenda’s neck. He and Rennie are in it together now, sink or swim. And most of the cops would come down on Pete’s side.”

“Especially the new ones,” Stacey said, and tugged at her cloud of blond hair. “A lot of them aren’t very bright, but they’re dedicated. And they like carrying guns. Plus”—she leaned forward—“there’s six or eight more of them tonight. Just high-school kids. Big and stupid and enthusiastic. They scare the hell out of me. And something else. Thibodeau, Searles, and Junior Rennie are asking the newbies to recommend even more. Give this a couple of days and it won’t be a police force anymore, it’ll be an army of teenagers.”

“No one would listen to us?” Rusty asked. Not disbelieving, exactly; simply trying to get it straight. “No one at all?”

“Henry Morrison might,” Jackie said. “He sees what’s happening and he doesn’t like it. But the others? They’ll go along. Partly because they’re scared and partly because they like the power. Guys like Toby Whelan and George Frederick have never had any; guys like Freddy Denton are just mean.”

“Which means what?”

Linda asked. “It means for now we keep this to ourselves. If Rennie’s killed four people, he’s very, very dangerous.”

“Waiting will make him more dangerous, not less,” Rusty objected.

“We have Judy and Janelle to worry about, Rusty,” Linda said. She was nipping at her nails, a thing Rusty hadn’t seen her do in years. “We can’t risk anything happening to them. I won’t consider it, and I won’t let you consider it.”

“I have a kid, too,” Stacey said. “Calvin. He’s just five. It took all my courage just to stand guard at the funeral home tonight. The thought of taking this to that idiot Randolph…” She didn’t need to finish; the pallor of her cheeks was eloquent.

“No one’s asking you to,” Jackie said.

“Right now all I can prove is that the baseball was used on Cog-gins,” Rusty said. “Anyone could have used it. Hell, his own son could have used it.”

“That actually wouldn’t come as a total shock to me,” Stacey said. “Junior’s been weird lately. He got kicked out of Bowdoin for fighting. I don’t know if his father knows it, but there was a police call to the gym where it happened, and I saw the report on the wire. And the two girls… if those were sex crimes…”

“They were,” Rusty said. “Very nasty. You don’t want to know.”

“But Brenda wasn’t sexually assaulted,” Jackie said. “To me that suggests Coggins and Brenda were different from the girls.”

“Maybe Junior killed the girls and his old man killed Brenda and Coggins,” Rusty said, and waited for someone to laugh. No one did. “If so, why?”

They all shook their heads. “There must have been a motive,” Rusty said, “but I doubt if it was sex.”

“You think he has something to hide,” Jackie said. “Yeah, I do. And I have an idea of someone who might know what it is. He’s locked in the Police Department basement.”

“Barbara?” Jackie asked. “Why would Barbara know?”

“Because he was talking to Brenda. They had quite a little heart-to-heart in her backyard the day after the Dome came down.”

“How in the world do you know that?” Stacey asked. “Because the Buffalinos live next door to the Perkinses and Gina Buffalino’s bedroom window overlooks the Perkins backyard. She saw them and mentioned it to me.” He saw Linda looking at him and shrugged. “What can I say? It’s a small town. We all support the team.”

“I hope you told her to keep her mouth shut,” Linda said. “I didn’t, because when she told me I didn’t have any reason to suspect Big Jim might have killed Brenda. Or bashed Lester Coggins’s head in with a souvenir baseball. I didn’t even know they were dead.”

“We still don’t know if Barbie knows anything,” Stacey said. “Other than how to make a hell of a mushroom-and-cheese omelet, that is.”

“Somebody will have to ask him,” Jackie said. “I nominate me.”

“Even if he does know something, will it do any good?” Linda asked. “This is almost a dictatorship now. I’m just realizing that. I guess that makes me slow.”

“It makes you more trusting than slow,” Jackie said, “and normally trusting’s a good way to be. As to Colonel Barbara, we won’t know what good he might do us until we ask.” She paused. “And that’s really not the point, you know. He’s innocent. That’s the point.”

“What if they kill him?” Rusty asked bluntly. “Shot while trying to escape.”

“I’m pretty sure that won’t happen,” Jackie said. “Big Jim wants a show-trial. That’s the talk at the station.” Stacey nodded. “They want to make people believe Barbara’s a spider spinning a vast web of conspiracy. Then they can execute him. But even moving at top speed, that’s days away. Weeks, if we’re lucky.”

“We won’t be that lucky,” Linda said. “Not if Rennie wants to move fast.”

“Maybe you’re right, but Rennie’s got the special town meeting to get through on Thursday first. And he’ll want to question Barbara. If Rusty knows he’s been with Brenda, then Rennie knows.”

“Of course he knows,” Stacey said. Sounding impatient. “They were together when Barbara showed Jim the letter from the President.”

They thought about this in silence for a minute.

“If Rennie’s hiding something,” Linda mused, “he’ll want time to get rid of it.”

Jackie laughed. The sound in that tense living room was almost shocking. “Good luck on that. Whatever it is, he can’t exactly put it in the back of a truck and drive it out of town.”

“Something to do with the propane?” Linda asked.

“Maybe,” Rusty said. “Jackie, you were in the service, right?”

“Army. Two tours. Military Police. Never saw combat, although I saw plenty of casualties, especially on my second tour. Würzburg, Germany, First Infantry Division. You know, the Big Red One? Mostly I stopped bar fights or stood guard outside the hospital there. I knew guys like Barbie, and I would give a great deal to have him out of that cell and on our side. There was a reason the President put him in charge. Or tried to.” She paused. “It might be possible to break him out. It’s worth considering.”

The other two women—police officers who also happened to be mothers—said nothing to this, but Linda was nibbling her nails again and Stacey was worrying her hair.

“I know,” Jackie said.

Linda shook her head. “Unless you have kids asleep upstairs and depending on you to make breakfast for them in the morning, you don’t.”

“Maybe not, but ask yourself this: If we’re cut off from the outside world, which we are, and if the man in charge is a murderous nut-ball, which he may be, are things apt to get better if we just sit back and do nothing?”

“If you broke him out,” Rusty said, “what would you do with him? You can’t exactly put him in the Witness Protection Program.”

“I don’t know,” Jackie said, and sighed. “All I know is that the President ordered him to take charge and Big Jim Fucking Rennie framed him for murder so he couldn’t.”

“You’re not going to do anything right away,” Rusty said. “Not even take the chance of talking to him. There’s something else in play here, and it could change everything.”

He told them about the Geiger counter—how it had come into his possession, to whom he had passed it on, and what Joe McClatchey claimed to have found with it.

“I don’t know,” Stacey said doubtfully. “It seems too good to be true. The McClatchey boy’s… what? Fourteen?”

“Thirteen, I think. But this is one bright kid, and if he says they got a radiation spike out on Black Ridge Road, I believe him. If they have found the thing generating the Dome, and we can shut it down…”

“Then this ends!” Linda cried. Her eyes were bright. “And Jim Rennie collapses like a… a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon with a hole in it!”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Jackie Wettington said. “If it was on TV, I might even believe it.”

17

“Phil?” Andy called. “Phil?”

He had to raise his voice to be heard. Bonnie Nandella and The Redemption were working through “My Soul is a Witness” at top volume. All those ooo-ooh s and whoa-yeah s were a little disorienting. Even the bright light inside the WCIK broadcast facility was disori-enting; until he stood beneath those fluorescents, Andy hadn’t really realized how dark the rest of The Mill had become. And how much he’d adapted to it. “Chef?”

No answer. He glanced at the TV (CNN with the sound off), then looked through the long window into the broadcast studio. The lights were on in there, too, and all the equipment was running (it gave him the creeps, even though Lester Coggins had explained with great pride how a computer ran everything), but there was no sign of Phil.

All at once he smelled sweat, old and sour. He turned and Phil was standing right behind him, as if he had popped out of the floor. He was holding what looked like a garage door-opener in one hand. In the other was a pistol. The pistol was pointed at Andy’s chest. The finger curled around the trigger was white at the knuckle and the muzzle was trembling slightly.

“Hello, Phil,” Andy said. “Chef, I mean.”

“What are you doing here?” Chef Bushey asked. The smell of his sweat was yeasty, overpowering. His jeans and WCIK tee-shirt were grimy. His feet were bare (probably accounting for his silent arrival) and caked with dirt. His hair might last have been washed a year ago. Or not. His eyes were the worst, bloody and haunted. “You better tell me quick, old hoss, or you’ll never tell anyone anything again.”

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 female street officer working with a bunch of small-town 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.”

“Jackie, I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can.” It was Rusty, standing in the doorway and looking relatively enormous in a pair of gym shorts and a New England Patriots tee-shirt. “It’s time to start taking risks, kids or no kids. We’re on our own here, and this has got to stop.”

Linda looked at him for a moment, biting her lip. Then she bent to one of the lower cabinets. “The Tupperware’s down here.”

23

When they came into the police station, the duty desk was unmanned—Freddy Denton had gone home to catch some sleep—but half a dozen of the younger officers were sitting around, drinking coffee and talking, high enough on excitement to get up at an hour few of them had experienced in a conscious state for a long time. Among them Jackie saw two of the multitudinous Killian brothers, a smalltown biker chick and Dipper’s habitué named Lauren Conree, and Carter Thibodeau. The others she couldn’t name, but she recognized two as chronic truants from high school who had also been in on various minor drug and MV violations. The new “officers”—the newest of the new—weren’t wearing uniforms, but had swatches of blue cloth tied around their upper arms.

All but one were wearing guns.

“What are you two doing up so early?” Thibodeau asked, strolling over. “I got an excuse—ran out of pain pills.”

The others guffawed like trolls.

“Brought breakfast for Barbara,” Jackie said. She was afraid to look at Linda, afraid of what expression she might see on Linda’s face.

Thibodeau peered into the bowl. “No milk?”

“He doesn’t need milk,” Jackie said, and spit into the bowl of Special K. “I’ll wet it down for him.”

A cheer went up from the others. Several clapped.

Jackie and Linda got as far as the stairs before Thibodeau said, “Gimme that.”

For a moment Jackie froze. She saw herself flinging the bowl at him, then taking to her heels. What stopped her was a simple fact: they had nowhere to run. Even if they made it out of the station, they’d be collared before they could get past the War Memorial.

Linda took the Tupperware bowl from Jackie’s hands and held it out. Thibodeau peered into it. Then, instead of investigating the cereal for hidden treats, he spat into it himself.

“My contribution,” he said.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” the Conree girl said. She was a rangy redhead with a model’s body and acne-ravaged cheeks. Her voice was a little foggy, because she had one finger rammed up her nose to the second knuckle. “I got sumpin, too.” Her finger emerged with a large booger riding the end of it. Ms. Conree deposited it on top of the cereal, to more applause and someone’s cry of “Laurie mines for the green gold!”

“Every box of cereal s’posed to have a toy surprise in it,” she said, smiling vacantly. She dropped her hand to the butt of the.45 she was wearing. Thin as she was, Jackie thought the recoil would probably blow her right off her feet if she ever had occasion to fire it.

“All set,” Thibodeau said. “I’ll keep you company.”

“Good,” Jackie said, and when she thought of how close she’d come to just putting the note in her pocket and trying to hand it to Barbie, she felt cold. All at once the risk they were taking seemed insane… but it was too late now. “Stay back by the stairs, though. And Linda, you keep behind me. We take no chances.”

She thought he might argue that, but he didn’t.

24

Barbie sat up on the bunk. On the other side of the bars stood Jackie Wettington with a white plastic bowl in one hand. Behind her, Linda Everett had her gun drawn and held in a double fist, pointing at the floor. Carter Thibodeau was last in line at the foot of the stairs with his hair in sleep-spikes and his blue uniform shirt unbuttoned to show the bandage covering the dogbite on his shoulder.

“Hello, Officer Wettington,” Barbie said. Thin white light was creeping in through his slit of a window. It was the kind of first light that makes life seem like the joke of jokes. “I’m innocent of all accusations. I can’t call them charges, because I haven’t been—”

“Shut up,” Linda said from behind her. “We’re not interested.”

“Tell it, Blondie,” Carter said. “You go, girl.” He yawned and scratched at the bandage.

“Sit right there,” Jackie said. “Don’t you move a muscle.” Barbie sat. She pushed the plastic bowl through the bars. It was small, and just fit.

He picked up the bowl. It was filled with what looked like Special K. Spit gleamed on top of the dry cereal. Something else as well: a large green booger, damp and threaded with blood. And still his stomach rumbled. He was very hungry.

He was also hurt, in spite of himself. Because he’d thought Jackie Wettington, whom he had spotted as ex-military the first time he saw her (it was partly the haircut, mostly her way of carrying herself), was better than this. It had been easy to deal with Henry Morrison’s disgust. This was harder. And the other woman cop—the one married to Rusty Everett—was looking at him as if he were some rare species of stinging bug. He had hoped at least some of the department’s regular officers—

“Eat up,” Thibodeau called from his place on the steps. “We fixed it nice for you. Didn’t we, girls?”

“We did,” Linda agreed. The corners of her mouth twitched down. It was little more than a tic, but Barbie’s heart lightened. He thought she was faking. Maybe that was hoping for too much, but—

She moved slightly, blocking Thibodeau’s line of sight to Jackie with her body… although there was no real need. Thibodeau was otherwise occupied with trying to peek under the edge of his bandage.

Jackie glanced back to make sure she was clear, then pointed to the bowl, turned her hands up, and raised her eyebrows: Sorry. After that she pointed two fingers at Barbie. Pay attention.

He nodded.

“Enjoy it, fuckstick,” Jackie said. “We’ll get you something better at noon. I’m thinking pissburger.”

From the stairs, where he was now picking at the edges of the bandage, Thibodeau gave a bark of laughter.

“If you’ve got any teeth left to eat it with,” Linda said.

Barbie wished she had kept silent. She didn’t sound sadistic, or even angry. She only sounded scared, a woman who wished to be anywhere but here. Thibodeau, however, didn’t seem to notice. He was still investigating the state of his shoulder.

“Come on,” Jackie said. “I don’t want to watch him eat.”

“That wet enough for you?” Thibodeau asked. He stood up as the women came down the corridor between the cells to the stairs, Linda reholstering her weapon. “Cause if it’s not…” He hawked back phlegm.

“I’ll make do,” Barbie said.

“Course you will,” Thibodeau said. “For a while. Then you won’t.”

They went up the stairs. Thibodeau went last, and gave Jackie a whack on the butt. She laughed and slapped at him. She was good, a lot better than the Everett woman. But they had both just shown plenty of guts. Fearsome guts.

Barbie picked the booger off the Special K and flicked it toward the corner he’d pissed in. He wiped his hands on his shirt. Then he began to dig down through the cereal. At the bottom, his fingers found a slip of paper.

Try to make it until tomorrow night. If we can get you out can you think of a safe place. You know what to do with this.

Barbie did.

25

An hour after he ate the note and then the cereal, heavy footsteps slowly descended the stairs. It was Big Jim Rennie, already dressed in a suit and a tie for another day of under-the-Dome administration. He was followed by Carter Thibodeau and another fellow—a Killian, judging by the shape of his head. The Killian boy was carrying a chair, and making difficulties with it; he was what old-time Yankees would have called “a gormy lad.” He handed the chair to Thibodeau, who placed it in front of the cell at the end of the corridor.

Rennie sat down, delicately tweezing his pantslegs first to preserve the crease.

“Good morning, Mr. Barbara.” There was a slight, satisfied emphasis on the civilian title.

“Selectman Rennie,” Barbie said. “What can I do for you besides give you my name, rank, and serial number… which I’m not sure I remember?”

“Confess. Save us some trouble and soothe your own soul.”

“Mr. Searles mentioned something last night about waterboarding,” Barbie said. “He asked me if I’d ever seen it in Iraq.”

Rennie’s mouth was pursed in a slight smile that seemed to say Tell me more, talking animals are so interesting.

“In fact, I did. I have no idea how often the technique was actually used in the field—reports varied—but I saw it twice. One of the men confessed, although his confession was worthless. The man he named as an Al Qaeda bombmaker turned out to be a school-teacher who’d left Iraq for Kuwait fourteen months previous. The other man had a convulsion and suffered brain damage, so there was no confession from him. Had he been capable, though, I’m sure he would have given one. Everybody confesses when they’re water-boarded, usually in a matter of minutes. I’m sure I would, too.”

“Then save yourself some grief,” Big Jim said.

“You look tired, sir. Are you well?”

The tiny smile was replaced by a tiny frown. It emanated from the deep crease between Rennie’s eyebrows. “My current condition is none of your concern. A word of advice, Mr. Barbara. Don’t bullspit me and I won’t bullspit you. What you should be concerned about is your own condition. It may be fine now, but that could change. In a matter of minutes. You see, I am indeed thinking of having you waterboarded. Am, in fact, seriously considering it. So confess to these murders. Save yourself a lot of pain and trouble.”

“I think not. And if you waterboard me, I’m apt to talk about all sorts of things. Probably ought to keep that in mind when you decide who you want in the room when I start talking.”

Rennie considered this. Although he was neatly put together, especially for such an early hour, his complexion was sallow and his small eyes were rimmed with purple flesh-like bruises. He really did not look well. If Big Jim just dropped dead, Barbie could see two possible results. One was that the ugly political weather in The Mill would clear without spawning any further tornadoes. The other was a chaotic bloodbath in which Barbie’s own death (quite likely by lynching rather than firing squad), would be followed by a purge of his suspected co-conspirators. Julia might be first on that list. And Rose could be number two; frightened people were great believers in guilt by association.

Rennie turned to Thibodeau. “Step back, Carter. All the way to the stairs, if you please.”

“But if he makes a grab for you—”

“Then you’d kill him. And he knows it. Don’t you, Mr. Barbara?”

Barbie nodded.

“Besides, I’m not getting any closer than this. Which is why I want you to step back. We’re having a private conversation here.”

Thibodeau stepped back.

“Now, Mr. Barbara—what things would you talk about?”

“I know all about the meth lab.” Barbie kept his voice pitched low. “Chief Perkins knew, and he was getting ready to arrest you. Brenda found the file on his computer. It’s why you killed her.”

Rennie smiled. “That’s an ambitious fantasy.”

“The State Attorney General won’t think so, given your motive. We’re not talking about some half-assed cook-up in a mobile home; this is the General Motors of meth.”

“By the end of the day,” Rennie said, “Perkins’s computer will be destroyed. Hers, as well. I suppose there may be a copy of certain papers in Duke’s home safe—meaningless, of course; vicious, politically motivated garbage from the mind of a man who always loathed me—and if so, the safe will be opened and the papers will be burned. For the town’s good, not mine. This is a crisis situation. We all need to pull together.”

“Brenda passed on a copy of that file before she died.”

Big Jim grinned, revealing a double row of tiny teeth. “One confabulation deserves another, Mr. Barbara. Shall I confabulate?”

Barbie spread his hands: Be my guest.

“In my confabulation, Brenda comes to see me and tells me that same thing. She says she gave the copy of which you speak to Julia Shumway. But I know it’s a lie. She may have meant to, but she did not. Even if she had—” He shrugged. “Your cohorts burned down Shumway’s newspaper last night. That was a bad decision on their part. Or was it your idea?”

Barbara repeated: “There is another copy. I know where it is. If you waterboard me, I will confess that location. Loudly.”

Rennie laughed. “Put with great sincerity, Mr. Barbara, but I’ve spent my whole life dickering, and I know a bluff when I hear one. Perhaps I should just have you summarily executed. The town would cheer.”

“How loudly, if you did it without discovering my co-conspirators first? Even Peter Randolph might question that decision, and he’s nothing but a dumb and frightened lickspittle.”

Big Jim stood up. His hanging cheeks had gone the color of old brick. “You don’t know who you’re playing with here.”

“Sure I do. I saw your kind again and again in Iraq. They wear turbans instead of ties, but otherwise they’re just the same. Right down to the blather about God.”

“Well, you’ve talked me out of waterboarding,” Big Jim said. “It’s a shame, too, because I always wanted to see it firsthand.”

“I’ll bet.”

“For now we’ll just keep you in this cozy cell, all right? I don’t think you’ll eat much, because eating interferes with thinking. Who knows? With constructive thinking, you may come up with better reasons for me to allow you to go on living. The names of those in town who are against me, for instance. A complete list. I’ll give you forty-eight hours. Then, if you can’t convince me otherwise, you’ll be executed in War Memorial Plaza with the entire town looking on. You’ll serve as an object lesson.”

“You really don’t look well, Selectman.”

Rennie studied him gravely. “It’s your kind that causes most of the trouble in the world. If I didn’t think your execution would serve this town as a unifying principle and a much-needed catharsis, I’d have Mr. Thibodeau shoot you right now.”

“Do that and it all comes out,” Barbie said. “People from one end of this town to the other will know about your operation. Try getting a consensus at your motherfucking town meeting then, you tinpot tyrant.”

The veins swelled on the sides of Big Jim’s neck; another beat in the center of his forehead. For a moment he looked on the verge of exploding. Then he smiled. “A for effort, Mr. Barbara. But you lie.”

He left. They all left. Barbie sat on his bunk, sweating. He knew how close to the edge he was. Rennie had reasons to keep him alive, but not strong ones. And then there was the note delivered by Jackie Wettington and Linda Everett. The expression on Mrs. Everett’s face suggested that she knew enough to be terrified, and not just for herself. It would have been safer for him to try and escape using the knife. Given the current level of professionalism in the Chester’s Mill PD, he thought it could be done. It would take a little luck, but it could be done.

He had, however, no way of telling them to let him try it on his own.

Barbie lay down and put his hands behind his head. One question nagged him above all others: what had happened to the copy of the VADER file meant for Julia? Because it hadn’t reached her; about that he was sure Rennie had been telling the truth.

No way of knowing, and nothing to do but wait.

Lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling, Barbie began to do it.