The Passage (28 page)

Five minutes later they heard the chopper, a pulsing presence coasting in low over the wall of trees to the southeast. It made a single, searching turn, dragging a cone of light, then dropped toward the parking lot with balletic precision, shoving a wave of shuddering air under its blades. A UH-60 Blackhawk with a full armament rack, rigged for night reconnaissance. It seemed like a lot, for one little girl. But that was the situation in which they now found themselves. They held their hands over their brows against the wind and noise and swirling snow.

As the chopper touched down, Sykes seized Richards’s elbow.

“She’s a kid!” he said over the din. “Do this right!”

Whatever that meant, Richards thought, and stepped briskly away, toward the opening door.

TEN

They were moving quickly now, Wolgast at the wheel, Doyle beside him, thumbing away furiously on his handheld. Calling in to let Sykes know who was in charge.

“No goddamn signal.” Doyle tossed his handheld onto the dash. They were fifteen miles outside of Homer, headed due west; the open fields slid endlessly away under a sky thick with stars.

“I could have told you that,” Wolgast said. “It’s the back side of the moon out here. And why don’t you watch your language?”

Doyle ignored him. Wolgast lifted his eyes quickly to the rearview to find Amy looking back at him. He knew she felt it too: they were joined together now. From the moment they’d stepped off the carousel, he’d cast his lot with her.

“How much do you know?” Wolgast asked. “I don’t suppose it matters now if you tell me.”

“As much as you do.” Doyle shrugged. “Maybe more. Richards thought you might have problems with this.”

When had they spoken? Wolgast wondered. While he and Amy were on the rides? That night in Huntsville, when Wolgast had gone back to the motel to call Lila? Or was it before?

“You should be careful. I mean it, Phil. A guy like that. Private security contractor. He’s little more than a mercenary.”

Doyle sighed irritably. “You know what your problem is, Brad? You don’t know who’s on your side here. I gave you the benefit of the doubt back there. All you had to do was bring her back to the car when you said you would. You’re not seeing the whole picture.”

“I’ve seen enough.”

A filling station appeared ahead of them, a glowing oasis in the gloom. As they approached, Wolgast eased off the gas.

“Christ. Don’t stop,” Doyle said. “Just drive.”

“We’re not going to get very far without gas. We’re down to a quarter tank. This could be the last station for a while.”

If Doyle wanted to be in charge, Wolgast thought, at least he would have to act like it.

“Fine. But just the gas. And both of you stay in the car.”

They pulled up to the pump. After Wolgast shut off the engine, Doyle reached across and withdrew the keys from the ignition. Then he opened the glove box and removed Wolgast’s weapon. He released the clip, buried it in the pocket of his jacket, and returned the empty gun to the glove box.

“Stay put.”

“You might want to check the oil too.”

Doyle exhaled sharply. “Jesus, anything else, Brad?”

“I’m just saying. We don’t want to break down.”

“Fine. I’ll check it. Just stay in the car.”

Doyle stepped around the back of the Tahoe and began to fill the tank. With Doyle out of the car, Wolgast had a moment to think, but unarmed and without the keys, there wasn’t much he could do. Part of him had decided not to take Doyle completely seriously, but for the moment, the situation was what it was. He pulled the lever under the dash; Doyle moved to the front of the Tahoe and lifted the hood, momentarily shielding the cabin from view.

Wolgast twisted around to face Amy.

“Are you okay?”

The girl nodded. She was holding her knapsack in her lap; the well-stroked ear of her stuffed rabbit was peeking through the opening. In the light of the filling area, Wolgast could see a bit of powdered sugar still on her cheeks, like flecks of snow.

“Are we still going to the doctor?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“He has a gun.”

“I know, honey. It’s all right.”

“My mother had a gun.”

Before Wolgast could assemble a response, the hood of the Tahoe slammed closed. Startled, he turned sharply in time to see three state police cruisers, lights on, tearing past the filling station in the opposite direction.

The passenger door of the Tahoe opened to a gust of damp air. “Shit.” Doyle handed Wolgast the keys and swiveled in his seat to look at the cruisers as they passed. “You think that’s about us?”

Wolgast angled his head to watch the cruisers through the side-view mirror. They were doing at least eighty, maybe more. It could have been something ordinary, a wreck or a fire. But his gut told him it wasn’t. He counted off the seconds, watching the lights recede into the distance. He had reached twenty by the time he was certain they were turning around.

He turned the key, felt the engine roar to life.

“That’s us all right.”

Ten o’clock, and Sister Arnette couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t even close her eyes.

Oh, it was awful, just awful, everything that had happened—first the men coming for Amy, how they had deceived her, deceived everyone, though Sister Arnette still didn’t understand how they could be both FBI and also kidnappers; and then that terrible thing at the zoo, the shouts and screams and everyone running, and Lacey holding on to Amy the way she had, refusing to let go; and the hours they’d spent at the police station, the whole rest of the day, not treated like criminals exactly but certainly not spoken to in a way that Sister Arnette was accustomed to, all of it vaguely accusing, the detective asking them the same questions over and over again; and then the reporters and camera trucks lined up on the street outside the house, huge spotlights filling the front windows as the evening wore on, the phone ringing nonstop until finally Sister Claire had thought to unplug it.

The girl’s mother had killed someone, a boy. That’s what the detective had told her. The detective’s name was Dupree, a young fellow with a prickly little beard, and he spoke to her courteously, a bit of old New Orleans in his voice, which meant he was probably Catholic, calling her
dawlin’
and
cher;
but wasn’t that what Sister Arnette had thought of the other two when they’d appeared at the door? Wolgast and the younger, good-looking one? Whose faces she had seen again on the grainy video Dupree showed her, from someplace in Mississippi, taken when—she guessed—they thought no one was looking? That they were nice men because they looked nice? And the mother, Detective Dupree told her, the mother was a
prostitute
. “A prostitute is a deep pit; she hides and waits like a robber, looking for another victim who will be unfaithful to his wife.” Proverbs, chapter 23. “For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell.”

Hold of hell
. The very words made Sister Arnette shudder in her bed. Because hell was real, that was a fact; it was a real place, where souls in torment writhed in agony forever and ever. That’s the kind of woman Lacey had let into their kitchen, who had stood in their very house not more than thirty-six hours ago: a woman who had
hold of hell
. The woman had ensnared this boy somehow—Arnette didn’t want to imagine that part—and then shot him, shot him with a
gun
in the
head
, and then given her girl to Lacey while she made her escape, a girl who had who-knew-what inside her. For it was true: there had been something … unearthly about her. It wasn’t nice to think it, but there it was. How else to explain what had happened at the zoo, all the animals running and making a ruckus?

The whole situation was awful. Awful awful awful.

Arnette tried to make herself sleep, but this accomplished nothing. She could still hear the thrum of the vans’ generators, could see, through the veil of her closed eyes, the ravenous glow of their spotlights. If she turned on the TV she knew what she’d find: reporters with their microphones, speaking in earnest tones and gesturing behind them toward the house where Arnette and the other sisters now attempted to sleep. The scene of the crime, they’d call it, of the latest development in this breaking story of murder and kidnapping, and federal agents somehow involved—though Dupree had forbidden, absolutely forbidden the sisters from talking about this part to anyone. When the sisters had returned home in the police van that had carried them back from the station, all of them wordless with exhaustion, to find the TV trucks, at least a dozen, lined up at the curb in front of the house like a circus train, it was Sister Claire who’d noticed that they weren’t just the local Memphis network affiliates but came from as far away as Nashville and Paducah and Little Rock, even St. Louis. As soon as they’d turned into the driveway the reporters had swarmed the van, pointing their lights and cameras and microphones and barking their furious, incomprehensible questions. These people had no decency. Sister Arnette was so frightened she began to shake. It had taken two police officers to move the reporters off the property—
Can’t you see they’re nuns? Whaddaya wanna go bothering a buncha nuns for? All of you just back it up, right now
—so the sisters could walk safely into the house.

Yes, hell was real, and Arnette knew where it was. She was in it, right now.

After that they’d sat together in the kitchen, none of them hungry but still needing to be somewhere—everyone except Lacey, whom Claire had taken straight upstairs to her room to rest. It was odd: of all of them, Lacey seemed the least shaken by the events of the afternoon. She’d barely uttered a word for hours, not to the sisters and not to Dupree, either, just sat with her hands in her lap, tears rolling down her cheeks. But then a funny thing had happened; the officers showed them the videotape from Mississippi, and when Dupree froze the image on the two men, Lacey stepped forward and looked, hard, at the monitor. Arnette had already told Dupree that that was them, she’d had a good look and there wasn’t a single doubt in her mind that the men on the screen were the same two who had come to the house and taken the girl; but the expression on Lacey’s face, which was something like surprise but not exactly—the word Arnette thought of was
astonishment
—made them all wait.

“I was wrong,” Lacey said finally. “It isn’t … him. He is not the one.”

“Which him, Sister?” Dupree asked gently.

She lifted a finger to the older of the two agents, the one who’d done all the talking—though it was the younger one, Arnette recalled, who’d actually taken Amy and put her in the car. In the image, he was looking straight up at the camera, holding a disposable cup in his hand. The time signature on the bottom right corner of the screen said that it was 06:01 on the same morning the two of them had come to the convent.

“Him,” Lacey said, and touched the glass.

“He didn’t take the girl?”

“He most assuredly did, Detective,” Arnette declared. She turned and looked at Sister Louise and Sister Claire, who nodded their assent. “We’re all agreed to that. Sister is just upset.”

But Dupree was not deterred. “Sister Lacey? What do you mean he’s not the one?”

Her face was shining with conviction. “That man,” she said. “Do you see?” She turned and looked at all of them. She actually smiled. “Do you see? He loves her.”

He loves her
. What to make of that? But these were the only words Lacey had offered on the matter, as far as Arnette was aware. Did she mean to imply that Wolgast actually knew the girl? Could he have been Amy’s father? Was that what all this was about? But it didn’t explain what had occurred at the zoo, a terrible thing—a child had actually been trampled in the chaos and was in the hospital; two of the animals, a cat of some kind and one of the apes, had been shot—or the dead boy at the college, or any of the rest of it. And yet for the remainder of the afternoon at the station, in and out of various offices, telling their story, Lacey had sat quietly, smiling that strange smile, as if she knew something no one else did.

It all went back, Arnette believed, to what had happened to Lacey so long ago, as a little girl in Africa. Arnette had confessed the whole thing to the sisters, as they sat in the kitchen waiting for the hour when they could go to bed. She probably shouldn’t have, but she’d had to tell Dupree; once they were back at the house, it had all just kind of come out. An experience like that didn’t ever leave a person, the sisters agreed; it went inside them and stayed forever. Sister Claire—of course it was Sister Claire, who had gone to college and kept a nice dress and good shoes in her closet as if at any moment she’d get an invitation to a fancy party—knew a name for it: post-traumatic stress disorder. It made sense, Sister Claire said; it added up. It explained Lacey’s protective feelings for the girl, and why she never went out of the house, and the way she seemed separate from all of them, living among them but also not, as if a part of her were always elsewhere. Poor Lacey, to carry such a memory inside her.