Breathless

“Sleeping quarters, mess hall, latrine, communications center, conference space,” one of the agents explained as they descended the porch steps.

Cammy stood at the railing with the wolfhound and with the sniper who shot words and bullets with equal marksmanship.

He said, “It’s like some circus from Hell is setting up for a two-day stand. They don’t have any elephants, their acts are boring, and their clown isn’t funny.”

“Vivisection. Dissection of a living animal. What if that’s on their agenda? What’s going to happen to Puzzle and Riddle?”

“Nothing.”

“But they’re already gone.”

“They’re not gone. They’re here.”

“I don’t see us getting them back.”

“I do,” he said.

“How?”

“Somehow.”

Fifty-three

The grenades made Henry Rouvroy happy. He had worried that the haiku-writing sonofabitch had looted the Land Rover. If the grenades had fallen into the mysterious poet’s hands, the balance of power would have shifted dramatically against Henry.

He enjoyed sitting on the living-room floor, staring at the grenades, handling the grenades, and even kissing them. The casing of a hand grenade was actually a steel waffle of shrapnel waiting to be blown apart and rip savagely through the bodies of everyone within range. It was a beautiful thing.

The senator, whom Henry had served as chief aide and political strategist, had acquired considerably more ordnance than Henry could have dreamed of getting his hands on, but right now the grenades and his cache of firearms were enough. When civil order collapsed, the senator would be at a specially prepared retreat, one of many that were well-concealed and protected for the highest of high government officials. He expected Henry to come with him and his family to ride out the half year or year of blood in the streets. But Henry knew in his bones that the social tension in a remote and fortified compound with a slew of politicians and their kin could lead only to paranoid suspicion, ferocious infighting, and eventually cannibalism. While allowing the senator to think he was in for the plan, he made plans of his own. Henry didn’t want to be eaten alive.

Now he began to distribute the grenades throughout the house, hiding them under cushions, in drawers, under chairs. If his enemy launched an assault on the place, Henry wanted to have a grenade always within arm’s reach, so he could open a window and surprise the hell out of the bastard, blow his booty off and put an end to this game. He hid twenty-nine grenades and decided to carry the last one with him everywhere he went until he killed his tormentor.

When he finished, he noticed the disgusting filth under his fingernails. He didn’t know how he could have gotten so grimy just unloading the Rover. Manual labor was such dirty work, it was amazing that the blue-collar class didn’t lose millions a year to pestilence and disease.

He returned to the bathroom, drew a sinkful of hot water, and set to work with cheaply scented soap and with the clever brush that he had discovered the previous night. He scrubbed diligently for forty minutes before his hands were clean enough to satisfy him. His nails were white and shiny.

As he dried his hands, he wondered if something more than a desire for cleanliness drove him to wash his hands until they were fiery red from hot water and bristle abrasion. Having graduated from Harvard, he knew quite a lot about psychology. Excessive washing of the hands could be a subconscious acknowledgment of guilt. Perhaps murdering his brother had affected him more deeply than he thought.

Well, what was done could not be undone. One thing you learned from a good education was to face the reality of existence and not live with the illusion that wrong was always wrong and right was always right. Sometimes wrong was right, and sometimes right was wrong, and most of the time neither word applied. Think, do, accept, move on.

In the kitchen, as he was preparing an inadequate lunch from the pathetic provisions left to him by his departed kin, he heard noises in the attic. Someone was crawling around up there.

Fifty-four

Monday morning, less than two hours after his meeting with Liddon Wallace on the eighteenth green, Rudy Neems flew out of Seattle to San Francisco.

He had told the attorney that he would make the trip that afternoon. He also promised to kill the wife and son Tuesday night.

In both instances, Rudy lied.

He didn’t trust Liddon Wallace. A guy who hired you to kill his family couldn’t be relied on to treat you with fairness and respect.

Wallace admitted having other guys like Rudy on tap. Say one of them was named Burt.

Say Burt’s job was to be waiting in Rudy’s hotel room when Rudy got back from killing Kirsten and her little boy.

Say Burt killed Rudy and made it look like suicide.

The suicide note, composed by Burt in a perfect imitation of Rudy’s handwriting, might say Rudy killed a lot of girls over the years and hated himself and hated Liddon Wallace for getting him acquitted in the Hardy case when what he really wanted was for someone to stop him before he killed again.

Alive, Rudy was a loose end. Dead, he couldn’t rat on Wallace.

With Rudy dead, you wouldn’t want to be Burt.

Say one of Liddon Wallace’s other guys was named Ralph — or it could be Kenny or anything. When Burt returned to his own room in the hotel, maybe Ralph would be waiting for him.

Ralph wouldn’t know that Burt just killed Rudy, so when Burt was dead, no one survived who could link the attorney with the murders of his wife and child. No more loose ends.

Or maybe when Ralph returned to his room in the hotel, Kenny — or maybe his name might be Fred — was waiting to kill him. Maybe it just went on and on until the hotel filled up with dead people.

Rudy Neems possessed sufficient self-awareness to know he was paranoid. That was one of the reasons why he killed people. Although not the primary one, of course, because if it had been the primary reason, he would have been insane.

Rudy was as sane as anyone. He did not kill in mad rages. He knew exactly why he killed. His motivation was complex and arrived at by reason: masterless freedom.

So he lied to Liddon Wallace. He flew out of Seattle eight hours before he said he would. And Rudy intended to kill Kirsten and Benny that same night rather than on the following night, when Burt would be waiting to kill Rudy.

The flight from Seattle could not have been more pleasant. They encountered no turbulence, and they didn’t crash.

Rudy chatted all the way with Pauline, an elderly woman en route to San Francisco for the birth of her great-great-grandson.

She carried a little album of snapshots of her family. She had pictures of her two cats, as well. They were cuter than her family.

Rudy had no desire to kill Pauline. Because he didn’t have sex with elderly women, he never killed elderly women.