“Every four hours,” Roland said.
“What’s that, honey?” Wendy said. She sat curled on the window seat, between the maidenhair fern and the wax begonias, sketching in the midday sun. Her T-shirt was a Jackson Pollock mess of spilled paint and stains.
“Does that mean anything to you? Every four hours?”
“Sounds like a TV commercial.”
The cabin didn’t have a television. If they wanted to watch something, they had to rent a Redbox movie and huddle around the laptop. Not that Roland cared. That made movies a good excuse for snuggling and popcorn and then some dangerous erotic play.
What he did care about was Wendy’s memory of the Monkey House. As a long-time alcoholic, he understood obliterating chunks of consciousness. And he’d done it by choice, at least as far as drunks had any control in their own self-destruction.
Wendy, however, had been an innocent victim of Briggs’s drug experiments. Seethe had scrambled her senses and driven her into a confused, hedonistic hurricane. She hadn’t been herself when she’d fallen for Briggs’s sick seduction.
Yeah. Keep telling yourself that. Just like you only killed Briggs in self-defense, not because he was fucking your wife. So much for a twelve-step program built on honesty.
Roland tried to tell himself the Seethe had driven him to murder, but he remembered the pleasure he’d felt in pulling the trigger and watching Briggs leak. Sure, Seethe was designed to evoke such a reaction. But just like a drunk on a blackout was still acting from a core impulse, no drug could totally alter personality.
All Seethe had done was make him more like himself.
Wendy paused in her sketching, noticing he’d dropped the conversation. “Why are you talking about ‘every four hours’?”
“One of my clients is using it for a book title,” Roland said. “I have to wrap the words around a picture of a scantily clad woman.”
“Tough duty, huh?”
“Beats selling billboards.” He opened his e-mail program and looked again at the message he’d received that morning. Just like the first one, it had the subject line “Every four hrs or else” and was from the same National Clandestine Service address.
This one also had a message in the body of the e-mail. It said, “Surely you didn’t think we could let you live, after what happened.”
“Is she cuter than me?” Wendy said.
“Who?”
“The scantily clad woman.”
“It’s a cartoon. Old pulp-fiction style. Boobs the size of watermelons and a waist like Gandhi.”
“Blonde?”
“If I paint it that way.”
“Make her blonde so I don’t get jealous.”
“You never get jealous.” Only me.
“Yeah, out here I guess there’s not much competition.” She tucked a leg under her rear in a motion of feline grace and continued with her work.
Roland studied the e-mail for clues, but he couldn’t read anything between the lines. First the “David Underwood” trick and now this new threat.
On a whim, he hit “Reply,” and when the message window opened, he typed, “Maybe we can help each other.” He paused, then typed “David Underwood” as a signature beneath the message and hit “Send.”
“What’s it about?” Wendy asked.
Roland jerked upright. “What?”
“The book. Every Four Hours. That sounds familiar.”
“It’s by a new mystery writer.” He waited. “David Underwood. You haven’t heard of him.”
“There are too many writers in the world. Who can keep track of them all?”
“Not like you artists. Supply perfectly matches demand.”
“Hey, smarty-pants.” Wendy perched her sketchbook on the ledge of the bay window. “Come over here and kiss me.”
“I’m working,” Roland said, watching his e-mail to see if a response was forthcoming. The message hadn’t bounced, so it must have been routed to
someone’s inbox, although he doubted it went to the CIA.
Wendy curled up on the window seat and gave a fake pout. He grinned at her and went back to his laptop screen.
“Ro?” she whispered.
He ignored her. Work was work, and even pretending to work was work.
“Honey?” she said, louder.
He logged out of his e-mail program, annoyed. If somebody was playing cat and mouse, he wanted to be the cat. “What?”
“Something’s moving out there.”
“Is the fox back?” Roland had reloaded the pistol and returned it to the bedside table because he hadn’t expected the fox to return. The creatures were most active at dawn and dusk, and it was rare to see one in full daylight. That’s why he’d suspected the one he’d shot at that morning had been rabid.
He’d hated to kill it, because it was just trying to survive, and it might even have a pack of kits in a den somewhere. But he and Wendy had grown fond of their chickens, treating them like pets and also enjoying the fresh brown eggs. It was part of their new game of playing hillbilly homesteaders.
“I don’t think it’s the fox,” Wendy said. “It’s bigger.”
What could be bigger than a fox? A stray dog? A deer? A bear?
Roland set his laptop on the sofa and went to the window. He peered into the woods, scowling. Wendy leapt up and grabbed him around the neck, pulling him down.
“Gotcha!” she squealed with a laugh. They wrestled as she giggled, and Roland finally pinned her against the window seat and kissed her.
“Who got who?” he whispered, running his hands over her hips.
He glanced out the window again, glad they were out in the country and didn’t have to worry about Peeping Toms and Shit. Was that a reflection?
The light flashed again in the woods, its distance difficult to gauge. Hunting season was long past, but hikers might be exploring the Blue Ridge trails, wandering away from the nearby national park.
“Come on, zookeeper,” Wendy said, unaware of his unease. “Tame your tiger.”
“Shh,” he said, still on top of her but no longer pressing his weight against her.
“What’s wrong?”
He moved toward the glass, peering out. “Something’s out there.”
“I already used that trick,” she said. “You have to come up with your own.”
“No, really. I saw a glint of light, like the sun bouncing off of metal.”
Wendy rolled up beside him, leaning on the ledge. “I can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Roland glanced down at her sketchbook. What the fuck?
It was a slightly surrealistic treatment, with distorted and oversized eyes, but the portrait was unmistakable. David Underwood. The older, psychotic David, as they’d found him in the Monkey House, hollowed out from Briggs’s deranged experiments, not the teen David from the original clinical trials.
The sketch caused Roland to realize just how much they’d all changed since the first trials. But some had changed more than others.
“Who is this?” Roland asked, tapping the pad.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just a face.”
“Not bad.” He studied her dark eyes, looking for any sign of confusion or suspicion. “He looks familiar, though.”
“Maybe it’s like your book title. Everything’s been done before.”
