Jane returned to her chair and pulled it closer to Randall Larkin and moved her purse beside the chair and sat so that their knees were almost touching. She smiled warmly and leaned forward and patted the attorney’s left hand reassuringly. “How’re you doing, skipper?”
He didn’t know what to make of her. He had arrived at an inner crossroads, a bewildering intersection of rage and fear and guilt and confusion, with waning hope that he knew how to navigate from here to any kind of safety. He sat mute, without a plea, a line, a lie that seemed likely to work.
“You okay?” she asked again. “We have a way to go yet. I need you to be with me here. What we need now is clear thinking, Randy. No more of the old way, no more pretense of ignorance, no evasion, no manipulation.”
Although he could imagine ways that she might have learned about Aspasia, he was obviously rattled to have been nailed for being involved in the murder of Sakura Hannafin. Evidently he didn’t recall a most important thing he’d said to Lawrence Hannafin in the first of their phone conversations to which Jane had listened. When the journalist pressed to be elevated to editor of the newspaper, when he insisted he was owed some gratitude, Larkin had replied, Only a year, and you forget what’s already been done for you?
Sakura had been dead for a year.
To Larkin, Jane was now more than just his tormentor, more than merely an adversary to be deceived with words or eliminated with the violence about which he had no compunction. In his confusion and helplessness, she had begun to seem to a degree magical, her sources and ways mysterious. When you were dealing with a magical creature, you could not know what trick might be played next, what spell cast, what conjuration called forth for what terrifying purpose.
She said, “Officially, the firm that represents David James Michael, for both his business and personal legal issues, is in New York. You know the name of the firm?”
He hesitated, wondering what razor blade might be hidden in that innocent question, calculating, his eyes heavily lidded like those of some ancient tribe’s crocodile god. At last he said, “Forsythe, Hammersmith, Aimes, and Carroway.”
“Very good. Excellent.” She didn’t know for sure that the next thing she was about to say was true, but she was capable of adding numbers greater than two plus two. “If this conspiracy of yours was anything as clean and rational as the mafia, you would be known as D. J. Michael’s secret consigliere, the man he really turns to for legal advice in the most crucial matters.”
“We’re not some damn spaghetti-and-meatball crew,” Larkin said, actually capable of snobbery even in these circumstances.
“Yes, I am aware of that. Yours is an alliance of civic-minded power brokers and dazzling intellectuals unequaled in history.”
“You mock it because you can’t understand it.”
“Whether I understand it or not, you’ve just confirmed you’re the equivalent of D.J.’s secret consigliere.”
He opened his mouth to object, recalled his prideful spaghetti-and-meatballs remark, and decided to concede the point.
“I want you to tell me where and how I have the best chance of getting at D.J., past his security.”
“You can’t.”
“I want to know the weak points in his defenses.”
“There are none.”
“There always are.”
“Not with him.”
“When you think about it, you’ll see I’m right.”
She lifted her handbag onto her lap and removed a Taser, not the model that fired a dart on a wire, but one requiring the user to be within arm’s reach of the target. “Know what this is, Randy?”
“Yeah. So what?”
Being tough. Being cool. Not deigning to look at the device, unimpressed with the threat.
“My first thought was to work you over with this. I even have two sets of spare batteries. You pump iron in your home gym. You have a personal trainer. You’re fit, but at the core you’re soft. You haven’t known much pain in your pampered life. A hundred or so zaps with this, I figure you’ll tell me anything I want to know rather than take another hundred.”
“So try me.”
“I might yet.” She returned the Taser to the handbag. “But if possible, I’d like to spare myself the role of torturer.”
He straightened a little in his chair and lifted his chin, unaware that in repressing a smile of satisfaction, he had smoothed his face into a blandness so inappropriate to the moment that it was a de facto smirk. He thought she had admitted to having ethics that limited what actions she might take.
“No, not that,” she said, as though she could read his mind. “I want to spare myself the tedium of torture. You will resist, if only to prove that you’ve got at least a marginal spine. You’ll resist, and you’ll pass out, and I’ll have to revive you, and you’ll pass out again. You’ll vomit and piss your pants. I’d prefer to avoid the messy intimacy of torture, considering that you disgust me.”
Not even a faint smile now.
From her handbag she extracted a small Ziploc bag and showed him that it contained a frankfurter cut into four pieces. She opened the bag and threw the chunks of meat deeper into the factory, into different places in the gloom where paperwork had been discarded in mounds.
After a wary silence, rustling suddenly arose out there in the pestilential darkness, and the thin squeaks of contestants engaged in territorial disputes, the eager busyness characterizing a species that never quite satisfied its hunger. Disturbed by scrambling feet, nests and warren ways gave forth again transient odors of urine and mold and rodent musk.
“The place is infested with them. Nobody’s disturbed them in years. Maybe they no longer know they should be afraid of people.”
He turned his head to search the darkness.
As the activity declined, Jane leaned forward and tapped the cable tie on Larkin’s left wrist. “The way this is designed, it can be pulled tighter, but it can’t be loosened. It’s very hard, very break-resistant plastic. You need to cut it off, and you don’t have anything to cut with.”
He found the will to remain expressionless.
From her handbag, she extracted a fat roll of gauze. “A gag to shove in your mouth.” She produced a roll of duct tape. “To wind around your head a few times to secure the gag.” She returned them to the handbag. “You see the dog bowls on the table?”
His gaze went to the bowls.
“I’ll put them on the floor near the places where they’re nesting in all the trash. The four bottles of water are for the bowls. To get a drink, the poor things have to scurry all the way down into the basement, where water collects after a rain. But it’s nasty, dirty, stagnant water. They’ll like a taste of something fresh. But it’s not just water.”
Larkin’s attention had shifted to her. His body, his face, his khaki-brown eyes were as steady as if time had stopped, as if he sat now as part of a tableau on which the laws of physics no longer had any effect in a stilled universe.
“It’s water spiked with a concentration of an over-the-counter appetite stimulant that used to be available by prescription only. Cancer patients and others, with no desire to eat, find it highly effective. When the pharmaceutical company was developing this stuff, they tested it on lab rats. The little guys were positively ravenous. It takes two hours after they have a drink, especially at the concentration I’ve provided. That’ll be an interesting two hours for you, shouldn’t be a boring moment in it.”
Had the day been hot, there would have been some doubt; but the day was mild, the factory cool, and the emergence of a thousand tiny droplets across the width of Larkin’s paste-pale brow could have but one interpretation.
He arrived at the only conclusion that he could allow himself. “You’d never do it. You never would. Not this. It’s…it’s inhuman.”
Jane was surprised by her own laughter, genuine but so dark that it disturbed her. “Oh, honey, you really are quite a prize. You people strip away the minds of innocent girls, their memories and hopes, and you program them for hideous serial abuse. You turn those with whom you don’t agree into suicide machines, based on some idiot computer model. You threaten to rape and kill five-year-old boys, my five-year-old boy. And you think you have the right to judge me inhuman?”
She half rose from her chair and leaned over him. He tried to pull away, sure that she had violence in mind. But she only pinched his cheek, not hard, but as if with perverse affection.
“Randy, I can’t even begin to compete with you in a game of inhumanity. You have so much to teach and nothing to learn about the subject.”
She sat once more and wiped her eyes, as if the tears were those of only laughter.
The Coleman lantern hissed softly, and tiny muffled voices spoke of an unexpected banquet, their wordless sounds as thin as the creaking floorboards under the weight of a stalker in a dream.
Leaning toward Larkin, she said, “I’ve been on the run more than two months. I’m on the most-wanted list of every police agency in the country. I couldn’t begin to count the number of people who would shoot me on sight if they had the chance. I’m as desperate as desperate gets, Randy. If you don’t tell me how I can get to David James Michael and take him down, I’ll leave you to the rats and know that the only person who’d disapprove would be the Devil himself, because he wants you alive to do his work.”