Quinn purses his lips like a man figuring a price on something. ?The day after, maybe. Depends on how interesting you make things. If you didn't know so fucking much, I?d keep you around for
the weekend. Rent you out. Lots of big boys coming in for the next couple of weeks. They like their business mixed with pleasure.?
The boat leaps free of the water, then smashes back down. Soon it?s bouncing like a tractor over farm rows.
It?s a wake,
Linda realizes.
Now the spotlight makes sense. We must be overtaking a tugboat pushing barges.
?I have to go the bathroom,? she says. ?Bad.?
?Go in your pants. You already did it once.?
?No, I mean
really
go. I can?t hold it. I'm sick. You don'?t want it in the boat.?
?Christ on a crutch. There?s an ice chest under the seat behind Benny. Go in that.?
Linda works herself up onto her elbows, which is more difficult than she thought with her hands bound, then crawls back to the stern, where Ben Li looks desperately at her through bloodshot eyes. Putting her mouth beside his ear, she says, ?I wish I could help you. I'm sorry.?
She smells fear coming off him like body odor. She remembers her thought back on the
Queen,
that she?d entered a state beyond fear. Then later, in the chair, she?d realized that only the dead are beyond fear. But now, struggling to her feet, using Ben Li as a prop for her bound hands, she isn?t so sure.
For a moment the fog breaks, and she can see the shore, lone treetops whipping past fifty yards to her right. To her left she sees only mist. A hundred yards in front of them, a tugboat churns the river into a maelstrom. Quinn is running fast enough to pull a half dozen water-skiers.
?Can you slow down a little?? she calls.
?Just do your business! Christ.?
Bending carefully at the waist, Linda pulls the edge of the rear seat up with her bound hands. She marvels at the bright white lid of the Igloo. The logo brings tears to her eyes. She remembers picnics and parties from years long past, reaching down with a sweating arm and pulling a wine cooler from the ice?
?I thought you had to go,? Quinn shouts, looking back at her with annoyance. ?Take your bloody pants down. Give us a preview, eh??
Linda glances down at Ben Li. Before, his eyes had been pleading,
but now they watch her with a strange fascination, waiting to see if she?ll take down her pants. It is all about power, she knows. Ben Li heard Quinn talking about him and the dogs. He knows he?ll be the first to die, and all he can do is lie there watching, waiting, probably praying for some kind of miracle, or even just a diversion before death.
Around the boat the fog has thickened again, turning the night a deeper shade of black.
Linda straightens up. From deep within her, so deep that she?s forgotten it was there, something begins to rise. The density of it fills her as it expands. It?s love, she realizes. Or whatever you call the thing that huddles in the last dark closet you'?ve locked against the world, waiting to find something like itself. Linda has never known why she let herself go so far with Tim. She knew all along that he wouldn'?t leave his family. She wouldn'?t have asked him to, though she wanted it desperately. But now?standing almost in the river Tim died within sight of?she knows.
She wanted a child.
Over thirty and she?d never even been pregnant. But she was still young enough. And Tim wouldn'?t have had to leave Julia to give her that. Tim was the closest thing Linda had ever had to a child of her own, a big little boy who wanted the world to be better than it was. Now he was gone, and with him her hope of a child.
?He loved me,? she says aloud, once, for all the times she?d yearned to say it to the people around her.
This knowledge surges in her breast, filling her so profoundly that a faint radiance shimmers from her skin. She feels like the Madonna in the old Italian painting printed in her grandmother?s Bible. All of this she gives to Ben Li in a single downward glance, one long look that holds a woman?s infinite mercy.
?Do you have to go or not, you crazy cunt??
Seamus Quinn?s angry voice pierces night and fog, but not the light that shines from Linda Church.
?Yes,? she says. ?I have to go.?
With the grace of a bird taking flight, she steps onto the lid of the Igloo and leaps into the river.
CHAPTER
16
If physicists want to develop a time machine, they should explore fear. Fear dilates and compresses time without limit. For desperate people awaiting rescue, every instant stretches into unendurable agony; for those awaiting death by cancer, the earth spins relentlessly, shortening the days until they pass like fanned pages in a book. Trapped in our bodies, perception is all, and the engine of perception is hunger for life.
Before tonight, I could not have imagined playing a six-hour card game with my father. Yet here we sit, betting matchsticks without expression, occasionally searching each others? eyes or looking with disbelief at the guns lying between us on the sofa. I'm not much of a cardplayer, so it?s been a one-sided contest. We?'ve spoken enough to persuade whoever might be listening that we?re passing a long night while Dad waits to see that my heart is all right, and typed enough that Dad is fully caught up on the circumstances surrounding Tim?s murder. I'm fairly confident that there?s no video surveillance of my upper hallway?ditto any keystroke-sensing technology around the house?for our desultory computer conversations would surely have earned us a call from Jonathan Sands by now.
?Ante,? Dad says.
?Sorry.? I push a red-tipped matchstick across the tatted surface of the sofa cushion.
?You keep playing like this, I'm going to own this house before the sun comes up.?
?Sorry I'm distracted. I keep thinking I feel my heart starting up again.?
?Let me worry about that. You play poker.?
We have not been without interruptions. Libby Jensen called twice, nearly catatonic with panic about what might happen to her son in jail. I did what I could to reassure her, but in truth the time has come for Soren to pay a price for his misbehavior. Looking at life through cell bars for a few weeks will probably do more than any treatment center to convince him that he?s had all the drugs he needs for a while. During her second call, Libby asked if she could come over, but I shot that idea down immediately, in a voice that brooked no appeal.
Two minutes after we hung up, I heard an engine stop in the street before my house. Thinking Libby had come anyway, I got up and walked to the front window. A Chevy Malibu with rental tags was parked in front of Caitlin?s house. The passenger door popped open, and Caitlin got out laughing. She said something to someone in the car, then ran up to her front door and waved back at the car. The bohemian filmmaker I?d met earlier got out
