Darnell Cooper. He was also wanted for questioning about a purse snatching that took place on the highway three days earlier. He's also suspected of being involved in a robbery and assault with a motor vehicle at a service station.'
'Yes?'
'He is also believed to have been involved in an assault on a police officer and the abduction of a young woman just outside of Chattanooga.'
'Not exactly covering his tracks. Where is he now?'
'Local and state police are in pursuit, but he has eluded them so far.'
Pegeen could not remember ever saying I eluded' aloud before. Get any stiffer and you'll be catatonic, kid.
'Kidnapping is a federal offense,' Pegeen said, having trouble believing that she was hearing herself correctly.
'It falls under our jurisdiction.'
She probably didn't know that, Pegeen, you halfwit.
Good of you to enlighten her, she'll appreciate it.:'I see,' Karen said.
'So we're entering the case directly,' Pegeen continued. She could feel the waves of hostility pouring through the phone and straight into her ear.
'Good. Was there anything else?'
'Well…' How about if I drive a spike through my head, will that make you happy? Pegeen thought. 'No.'
Pegeen felt that she should say something more, but she didn't know what it should be. It didn't seem that an agent in her position should be the one to terminate a conversation with an assistant deputy director, however.
Surely that prerogative belonged to the senior agent.
Karen did not oblige her, however, and the silence between them grew and expanded uncomfortably and the longer it stretched the more it seemed to fill with the unspoken. Becker. Pegeen had sat silently with a mute telephone to her ear before, but only with boys, only with romantic interests when the silence had been filled with unspeakable longing, never with another woman. An FBI agent, her superior, a tough-assed careerist federal officer.
It gave her the creeps.
Pegeen cleared her throat discreetly.
'One thing,' Karen said.
'Yes?'
'Watch your ass.'
The phone line went dead and Pegeen replaced the receiver as if it were something unclean. Watch my ass?
Meaning, be careful in your pursuit of Cooper? Or meaning, stay away from my man or I'll feed your giblets to the cats? Was this the way an assistant deputy director normally spoke to other agents? Watch my ass?
I won't have to, Pegeen thought. She'll be watching it for me.
It was only later, as she replayed the conversation in her mind for the hundredth time while driving towards Chattanooga, that her own thought about driving a spike through her head reminded her of Becker's comment about how to kill a werewolf. Why had he referred to himself like that?
Did he really think of himself that way?
Why did he perceive himself as a bad man when Pegeen could see so clearly that he wasn't? The man needed help and understanding, and it was obvious he wasn't going to get it from Crist, the frost queen. Some men were salvageable and some were not. She had pretty well come to the conclusion that Eddie, the man she was seeingsort of-fell into the category of irretrievable junk goods.
After six months he had proved to be as receptive to improvements as a shack made of wet cardboard. There was simply very little adjusting the structure could handle.
Also, Eddie had broken up with her twice already. She wasn't entirely certain that they weren't broken up right at the moment. Eddy was nonattentive as he was at the best of times, it was hard to tell.
It might be time to give up on Eddie, she thought. There were times when a girl wanted to feel that she was free to explore other opportunities.
Karen Crist couldn't hate her that much without some good reason.
The girl was worse than useless to him. Every time he took his hand from her mouth she started crying again, and the crying soon built into wailing, no matter how many times he told her to shut up. When Cooper asked her to help him, all she did was wail some more, so he hit her because he didn't know what else to do. He hurt his knuckle on her head, hurt it badly and he had to drive with that hand pressed against his lips while she continued to cry, moaning now along with it. It was driving him crazy.
She made so much noise that he didn't,hear the police sirens as soon as he usually would have and he almost didn't make the turn into the woods in time. The police went speeding past the access road, and Cooper drove as far as he could on the rutted path until it seemed to stop of its own accord at the base of a hill where two small streams joined together.
Cooper could hear sirens u ulating in the distance as the cop car bounced on the narrow path. He grabbed the girl with his left hand because one knuckle on his right was now hugely swollen and very painful. She clung to the steering wheel, howling, and Cooper was forced to squeeze her throat until she let go. She was still after that and he tossed her over his shoulder and started up the hill. Her silence was such a relief.
The hill was steep and Cooper's knuckle throbbed painfully with every step. Running down the other side was even worse, as each step jolted his legs and ran straight through his arm. The terrain changed on the far side of the hill and the clay soil of the woods gave way to a sandy loam that grew wetter with each step. He had gone only a few hundred yards before his shoes sank up to his ankles in muck, and each stride was accompanied by a loud sucking sound.
Cooper was well into the swamp before he realized that he could no longer hear the sirens behind him. He paused, listening to hear if he was being pursued, but it took him several moments before he could hear anything over his strained breathing. After a time he could discern voices, several people, yelling at each other, but they were too far away for him to make out what they were saying.
He continued, using the voices as a guide, heading away from them.
Otherwise there was nothing to serve as a landmark, no way to tell where to go, just funny-looking trees and weird grass that looked solid but wasn't.
Sometimes his legs sunk as deep as his calves and sometimes they barely dipped below the surface at all and there was no way to tell which it would be ahead of time.
He sucked on his knuckle as he trudged ahead, trying to remember what someone had told him once about telling direction by the sun. He could find the sun all right, but he didn't understand what it was supposed to be telling him. He decided the best thing would be to just head straight for it. He changed his course, veering towards the sun, and noticed that he was walking straight into the shadows. They were drawn as straight as lines, like arrows showing him the way. Cooper realized he had discovered the secret. He would simply follow the shadows and the sun would take him away from his pursuers and towards safety.
His shoes had been sucked off by the mud long since and when he lifted his knuckle to his mouth he noticed that his entire right hand was blown up to twice its size.
It hurt anywhere he touched it and it even pained him when he waved it in the air to aid his balance. He stumbled crossing a small pond and fell to one knee and the girl's body slid off his shoulder and into the water. Cooper was surprised to see her; he had forgotten about her, forgotten the added weight on his back. He studied her for a moment, trying to remember why he had brought her with him. He had wanted her to help him, but he couldn't see how she could help him now.
She wasn't so pretty now with her face and hair wet and muddy and the big, darkening bruise on the side of her forehead. One eye was swollen shut with a lump that reminded Cooper of his own hand. She was the reason he hurt himself, he realized with sudden anger. It was her fault that he couldn't use his hand. It was her fault that the police were chasing him. He ought to kill her, he ought to yank her head right off.
He ought to push her under the water and leave her there, stick her head right down into the mud with her feet in the air like a fence post.
