don't get 'em mad!'
'
Rae tittered. 'Aural, you sure do have your very own outlook on life.'
'I know men,' Aural said. She returned the knife to her boot and closed the Velcro strap over it. 'Bring on this anti-fan. If he has balls, I know how to deal with him.
Cooper awoke to barking. A savage-looking dog, part Doberman, part mutt, stood just outside the car door, feet planted solidly as if to give full purchase for barks, as if the sheer volume of its noise would send it scooting across the ground like a loose cannon if it didn't brace itself. The dog retreated a step when Cooper's head appeared in the window, then held its ground once more and unleashed a fresh volley of yaps.
It took Cooper a moment to realize where he was and what was going on.
Last night he had parked the car in the lot behind the Dairy Queen so he would be there as soon as the girl showed up. The dog had found him and taken offense at his presence-they always did. Cooper didn't trust animals and they returned the sentiment, dogs in particular. They howled at him as if he were an invading wolf come for the sheep in their care, following him on the street, snarling and barking, sometimes lunging at his leg. Cooper had seen other people calm strange dogs with a word, watched with amazement as they knelt before the snapping beasts and offered a hand to smell and then petted them as easily as if the preceding frenzy of aversion had just been a charade. Cooper could not believe it, it was as if they had something magic to say to the dogs that Cooper could never hear. People had told him that dogs could hear things that humans couldn't, and he wondered if some people knew how to speak in that language. Whatever the trick, Cooper didn't know it and the dogs knew he didn't know it. He would yell at them to leave him alone if they got too close, and when that didn't work, he would kick at them. Sometimes, when the dogs were large and unusually insistent, he would run from them, but that never worked as it seemed to make them all the more furious at him.
Cooper was hungry and he wanted some breakfast but he was afraid to get out of the car as long as the dog was there. He lay back down on the seat, hiding, but the animal continued to bark and bark. It took a long time for Cooper to realize he could just drive away.
In the late afternoon Cooper returned to the Dairy Queen and parked in the same spot where he had spent the night. The dog started barking as soon as he got out of the car, but this time the sound was distant and Cooper realized the dog was fenced-in now in some neighboring yard.
The girl was working behind the counter, and Cooper waited until she was finished with her customer, standing by the video games and pretending to play. Two animated characters on the screen were kicking and punching each other and although they fell down, neither seemed to get hurt. That did not accord with Cooper's experience of violence. When he hit someone they got hurt, they didn't bounce up again. They stayed down and begged him to stop and sometimes they cried. The characters in the video game wore bandanas on their heads the way a lot of brothers did in Springville, but the characters weren't brothers.
Cooper couldn't figure out what they were supposed to be.
When the girl was free, Cooper stepped up to the counter.
She smiled at him, a real friendly smile, showing her gums.
'Can I help you?' she asked.
'I need help,' Cooper said. He knew she was just asking about his order, but he hoped she could help him anyway.
Yes, sir?'
He stood there for a moment, not certain what it was he wanted to say to her.
'I have a car,' he said at last.
She blinked but she didn't stop smiling.
'Can I take your order, sir?'
'I want you to come in my car,' Cooper said.
'Pardon me?'
'Come in my car.'
The girl looked at him curiously, tilting her head to one side like a bird. 'Sir, I'm working. Did you want to place' an order?'
Cooper did not know how to explain what he needed.
He knew he was doing it wrong, but he couldn't think of a better way.
'I want to show you something,' he said. 'In the car.'
The girl turned around, looking for someone.
'Dwayne? Could you come out here. This gentleman needs some help.'
Cooper shook his head. Now she had it all wrong. He didn't need anything from anyone named Dwayne. He needed help from her. He needed her.
'Just come on,' he said. He reached over the counter and took hold of her arm and when she started to protest he grabbed her other arm and lifted her over the counter.
'Dwayne! Help!'
Dwayne came running from the kitchen, took one look at the size of the man who had hold of Sybil, and stopped in his tracks. He let them go out the door before he called for the police.
But the police were already there. A cop stood next to Mayvis's Oldsmobile, peering inside. He straightened up when he saw Cooper advancing towards him, half carrying and half dragging a girl.
'Is this your car, sir?' the cop asked, trying to figure out just what was going on between the man and the girl.
He was always reluctant to involve himself in domestic disputes, but this one seemed awfully one-sided.
The man kept coming straight at him, not slowing down at all, holding the girl with just one arm now.
'You can't drive around with your rear end like that,' the cop said, knowing even as he said it that he was too late to help himself.
Cooper grabbed the cop's neck and pushed his head into the side of the car. He did it twice more until the cop went limp and then he kicked him once for good measure as he fell.
The girl was kneeling over the fallen policeman, making wailing noises and Cooper got into the car and was about to leave when he remembered why he was there in the first place. He grabbed the girl and yanked her into the car and drove off.
Pegeen made the call hoping Deputy Crist would be away from her desk, too busy to talk, out of communication, anything but there so that Pegeen would not have to speak to her directly. If she wasn't around, Pegeen could fax the information and be done with it. She remembered the baleful stare which Karen had given her at their last encounter and had no illusions that the other woman would have forgotten who she was. She was the nitwit who had sat around in the motel bedroom while the Deputy Director's man took an unscheduled, spontaneous, and poorly explained shower in the other room.
No one believed in the innocence of the occasion and Pegeen didn't blame them, but the men who knew of it were assuming the guilt was Becker's.
Karen Crist, however, blamed Pegeen, and she did so because she saw the guilt in Pegeen's face. You couldn't hide that from another woman, although men, God knows, were as clueless as stumps about such things.
It's not that I actually did anything, Pegeen thought defensively, it's not that anything actually happened I didn't even towel him off. He came out of the bathroom fully dressed and we left. But of course the facts were beside the point in Karen Crist's mind-it was what Pegeen felt about John Becker that mattered, and Pegeen knew that. And agreed. She was just as guilty in her own mind as she was in Crist's. The difference was that in her own mind being guilty didn't make her bad.
To her dismay, the Bureau in New York put her call straight through.
'Director Crist, this is Special Agent Pegeen Haddad from the Nashville office.'
Yes.
She remembers me all right, Pegeen thought. Thank God it's not a television phone. 'There's been a development in the Darnell Cooper case, and we have instructions to keep you posted personally..
'Yes.'
Like talking point-blank to a glacier. All that came back was a blast of cold air.
'We have a report of a stolen car. The suspect was working at a fast-food restaurant under the name of
