Absolute Rage (54 page)

“My wife is very resourceful,” said Karp.

“You're suggesting that she's conspiring to commit murders?”

“I have no knowledge of any murders. Nor do you. I'm reporting my suspicions to you as officer in charge of this operation, which is my duty as a citizen and an officer of the court. The main thing I want to avoid is any more people getting hurt.”

“That's very good of you, Karp. Your federal government appreciates it. What you really have up there, in my opinion, is an Asian drug gang transporting dope. Or trying to. They got stuck up there when we locked the mountain down. Now, if you'll excuse me . . .”

Outside the command post, Hendricks said, “Nice fella. What do you think?”

“Of his theory? I liked the one about fairy wings better. Look, I'm going to hang around here for a while. If you've got stuff to do . . .”

“I got some sandwiches and Cokes in a cooler. Why don't we sit on that rock over there and have us a picnic. Maybe we can learn something watching how the big boys do it.”

They sat and ate as men in FBI jackets and SWAT attire and combat-dressed National Guardsmen strode or rode by. Pole lights were emplaced in the woods and along the road, giving the scene an air of carnival. They watched the bulldozer for a while, then went back to the car. Karp dozed. He awakened to gunfire.

“Sounds like something's going on,” said Hendricks. “Sounds like a firefight. Those just now were machine guns, I think. Damn! That's artillery. Mortar fire.”

“Yes, all your drug gangs have mortars nowadays. Let's go see what the FBI has to say about all this.”

When they found Morrisey, he seemed a good deal less confident than he had been, and nearly glad to see Karp's face again.

“I may owe you an apology,” he said into his shoulder. “One of our people picked up a kid wandering along Highway 712 in his Skivvies. We just got finished interrogating him. He says he's Bo Cade. He says your daughter's up there in some old mine buildings along with the whole Vietcong. According to him, she's best buddies with the chief Commie in charge. You know anything about this?”

“Not a thing,” said Karp with his stomach up around his throat. “They never tell me anything. Did he say whether she was okay?”

“She was alive and well when she helped him escape. We'll need to talk about this at some length, but not now. First light I intend to send a couple of teams up through those woods. Then we'll find out what the holy hell is going on here.”

*  *  *

When she heard the firing and explosions die down, Lucy let herself out of the strong room and moved among the buildings. The moon was nearly full and she hardly needed the flashlight. She found a place near the wreck of the coal tipple where she could climb onto the roof of a machine shed and lie down on her belly. Some hours passed. She dozed and was brought to full attention by the sound of men moving through brush. There was a line of them, not as many as there had been, some of them carrying stretchers, some in groups of four struggling with heavy chests. So they had the gold. She strained her eyes to see whether Tran was among them, but the distance was too far to make out anything but silhouettes. She heard the sound of the lift motor and the squeal of its gearing.

She slipped off the roof and went north, using the flashlight now, until she came to a nearly dry creekbed and began walking along it. After ten minutes, she found her first corpse, one of the Lost Boys. She didn't know his name. A little farther there was an older Vietnamese, Vo, who had kept the house in Bridgeport, and who had survived fifteen years of the French War and then the American War, only to die in his enemy's country. She said a prayer for the repose of his soul. Farther on, at just the place she would have chosen, her flashlight picked up a thick carpet of brass. This was where they had placed one of the flanking machine guns. Beyond that, she found the Cades, in small groups or individually, looking like dreamers in the moonlight, or smashed beyond humanity, like props from a horror movie. She passed a place where the ground was torn and bushes were uprooted, and where she had to walk carefully to keep from stepping on viscera and chunks of former people. This was the kill sack. The Cades had been pushed from both flanks back to what looked like a good defensive position, and then the mortar bombs had started to fall on them. Some, she found, had run and been cut down by automatic fire, probably from a squad that had infiltrated to their rear. There was another black-clad corpse, but his head had been so smashed she could not tell who it was. She rolled it over with her foot. There was no Stechkin holster and her heart lifted a little.

It was growing lighter in the east, a hint of dawn. She found a rutted road and walked down it, smelling smoke. As she walked, the smoke grew thicker and more acrid, mingling unpleasantly with the morning mist. A figure came toward her out of the fog, stumbling, a girl in a pink nightgown. Her face was smudged with ash and she was barefoot and grossly pregnant. She looked about fourteen.

She stopped when she saw Lucy. “Everything burnt up. I'm lookin' fer Ollie. Have you seen him anywheres?”

“No. But there's no one alive in that direction.” Lucy grabbed the girl gently by the shoulders and turned her around on the road. “Is Ollie your husband?”

The girl was pale, with a wandering in one of her close-set, slaty eyes; there was something subtly wrong with the proportions of her face. “My brother,” she said. “Papaw ain't give me no husband yet.”

“Papaw?”

“The Cade. I have to carry the first fruits of the Father afore I get me a husband. But it's all burnt up now. The hell devils took it all away.” This last syllable rose into a cry. “He has prophesied the end and the end has come!”

And more of that as they walked along, the idiot fragments of an insane faith. Like most such, the main part of it was that the old guys got to fuck all the young girls. The girl said that there were a good number of babies who were cursed by God. The girl hoped that hers would be one of the keepers, as she called them.

After some minutes, they came to a large clearing. On either side were fenced fields decorated by dead cattle and one white horse on its back with one leg in the air. There were mortar craters all around. Ahead, a large wooden structure was burning. Clumps of women and children stood around in nightclothes, wailing around the corpses of men. It looked to Lucy like a scene from Bosnia or Chechnya or Guatemala, someplace far from West Virginia, at any rate. The girl ran to one of the groups of women. Lucy sat down on a stump. She found that her head was still completely empty, all volition gone. A time to wait, then. She watched the dawn start to burn away the mists.

Then it seemed that men in black uniforms appeared as if by magic, poking warily into the smaller houses and mobile homes scattered around, collecting the women and kids. Then vehicles appeared, ambulances, trucks, and vans. A fire engine rolled in and firemen began putting out the fire. A man with a submachine gun told her to come along and she did, and joined the wailing women and children sitting on the ground in a circle, being guarded by black-uniformed men.

Lucy dropped to her knees and said, “Let nothing disturb thee, let nothing dismay thee, all things pass, God never changes, patience attains all that is strived for, she who has God finds she lacks nothing.” And repeated, over and over, St. Teresa of Avila's own prayer, not the sort of thing that was ever voiced in the maniac religion that Ben Cade had established on Burnt Peak, but after a time she became aware in a distant way that the wailing had stopped and even the children had grown quiet. All the women sank to their knees, surrounding Lucy as she prayed. Thus her father found her as the sun poked over the edge of the mountains.

*  *  *

The hospital had arranged for beds to be brought into Giancarlo's room, so that his brother and a parent could sleep there. Nothing was too much trouble for their most famous patient. When Lucy and her father arrived there, morning sun was lighting the windows. Zak was asleep and Marlene was sitting on the edge of her bed, fully dressed, her head in her hands.

“What's wrong?” Karp said.

“You keep asking that. You should say, ‘Anything more wrong?' I would reply, “ ‘Still the same amount of wrong, Butch.' ” Marlene rubbed her face and looked at them. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“They killed forty-two people, Marlene, your guys did, plus losing three of their own.”

“What are you talking about?”

Karp raised his voice. “Oh, for God's sake,
tell
me you're not going to compound this by pretending innocence! You brought a bunch of murderers down here for a goddamn vendetta. The FBI already knows about it.”

“You told them? You ratted me out?”

“Oh, for God's sake! You thought you could
conceal
it? You didn't think anyone would
suspect?
Are you
completely out of your fucking mind?”

“Oh, fuck you! They murder your son and you fart around with your clever legal tricks . . . what the fuck kind of man are you?”

“How could you, Mom?” said Lucy. “Forget the Cades, how could you do that to Tran?”

Now Zak was up, a look of dismay on his face. “Stop shouting,” he shouted. His parents continued to scream at each other, joined occasionally by Lucy.

“Yeah, stop shouting,” said Giancarlo.

“I can't believe this,” screamed Karp. “She still doesn't
realize
what she's . . .”

The whole family now did a double take, and in an instant the four of them had swarmed over Giancarlo, to the extent that the various tubes allowed.

“Oh, baby,” cried Marlene, “you're back. How do you feel?”

“It hurts, Mom. It hurts like a
bitch.”

Karp dashed out into the hallway bellowing for nurses, for doctors, for analgesics. Lucy and Marlene were weeping and clutching one another. Zak was holding his brother's hand.

“I caught a big fish,” said Giancarlo.

“I saw it,” said Zak. “Then you got shot. You got a bullet in the brain, but they took it out.”

“My head doesn't hurt, just my back.”

Nurses arrived, and Dr. Small, now the happiest non-Karp in McCullensburg.

“Can you move your toes?” asked Lucy.

“Yes.” Giancarlo demonstrated.

“You're going to be fine,” said Marlene, touching the boy's face.

He smiled at her, the famous GC smile. Then this faded and he asked in a puzzled voice, “Why don't you turn on the lights? Why are we sitting around in the dark?”

*  *  *

Karp and Lucy stood together on the roof of the medical center and watched the helicopter lift off, carrying Marlene and the twins back to civilization and a more advanced level of medical care. They watched it dwindle into a red speck. He put his arm around her shoulder.

“Let's go to Rosie's,” he said. “It's catfish day.”

They walked through normal small-town streets. The news vans were gone, after a frenzied week of reporting the aftermath of the Burnt Peak War and the simultaneous recovery of the Miracle Twin. At Rosie's the Karps got the kind of service that Edward VII used to get at the Café Royale. Everyone loved the Karps in McCullensburg.

“Why did they let her go?” Lucy asked. “I thought she'd be in jail for sure.”

Karp shrugged and sipped his iced tea. “Well, she denies everything. And what proof do they have? Her prior connection with Tran? That's not a crime. A helicopter trip for him from Bridgeport to here and back? The maps from Dan? Suspicious, but also not a crime. No money has changed hands that anyone can see. The Viets have vanished except for that old housekeeper, on which they have nothing. They took all their weapons with them. If they had Tran or his people and they could get them to implicate Marlene, it'd be a different story. But they don't even know their names.”

“But she did it.”

“Yeah, you know and I know how it went down because we know her. But the law deals in facts. Okay, let's say they decide to bring her to trial. Ernie Poole is a good lawyer, probably better than Stan Hawes, when you get right down to it, so it's going to be fought. That brings up the politics of it. Does Stan Hawes want to prosecute the grieving mom of the Miracle Twin in Robbens County? For eliminating a family that's terrorized this county for a hundred years? Could he even get an indictment? Hey, much easier for everyone concerned if it's a gang war massacre. It's not the worst thing that ever happened in Robbens County, and at least the bad guys lost for a change. The FBI will do their national manhunt and come up empty.”

“It's still wrong.”

“Yes, it is. The law's an imperfect instrument. I recall a couple of years back they had a case out in some Midwest town, probably just like this one. They had a fellow who was just bone bad—an arsonist, a tire slasher, a vandal, a bully, a rapist. He'd been in and out of jail a couple of times, and each time he got out, he headed home and kept behaving the same way, or worse. One day a group of guys came up to him on the street, broad daylight, middle of town, and beat him to death with pick handles. No arrests were ever made. Do I deplore it? Yes. Do I also understand it? Yes. We do the best we can. Meanwhile, the instigators of this disaster are going to get a trial, a scrupulously fair trial, and I confidently expect they will spend their entire remaining years in prison. So I have to be content with that.”

“Will you try the case?”

“I'll get it started. I want to see George in a courtroom at least. But Stan can carry it out as well as I can. Old Bledsoe isn't going to stand for any delay, so I figure ten days to can Floyd. Lester will plead if he's smart. After that . . .” Karp shrugged.

“Back to the City?”

“I guess. I hate my job.”