“Just stay where y’are and keep quiet. Your name showed on one of our lists, boy.”
Jeff was already regretting giving them his real name. But he hadn’t been sure just how efficient their identity filing might be, and Sullivan wasn’t the kind of a person who looked as if he’d welcome being told a lie.
He’d been chewing tobacco and had spat it all over Jeff’s trainers, standing so close that the ex-journalist couldn’t avoid the stink of rancid sweat.
“Now we got your guns and you, too, sonny. Shame that Flagg’s no longer with us. That was a dude that sure enjoyed asking questions. ‘Specially to folks that didn’t know the replies.”
“Who’s in charge of you now?”
“What d’you do with a door swung open on a frosty day, boy?”
“Shut it.”
The man had smiled at him from behind the mirrored glasses. “Then do it.”
NANCI SAT on the narrow iron bunk, looking again at the cell. Six feet six inches long and four feet nine inches in width with walls of concrete blocks, painted a pale green. Very recently painted, as there was no graffiti or dirt on them. The door was steel, colored bright, sunburst yellow. There was a small grille in its center, bolted from the outside. The cell had no window.
They’d kept her locked in for nearly forty minutes, and nobody had come to see her. Nanci wasn’t that surprised. She’d been taught enough about techniques to break a prisoner, and initial social deprivation was the simplest and most common. Now it couldn’t be that far off dawn. Maybe someone might come to interrogate her before noon.
The patrol that had picked her up must have been waiting up on a ridge above the highway, in the darkness, simply watching.
They had come down on her with two four-wheel-drive pickups, each with three armed men, flashing their lights to warn her to pull over in the little green Volvo that had belonged to the dead brother and sister. She’d only gone a quarter mile, and one of the men had backtracked her, finding the two corpses, as well as the bodies of the group that had attacked her and Jeff.
She’d told the men, having noticed their sun-and-arrow flashes, that her name was Veronica Poole and that she was a retired English literature teacher from Fort Worth.
But there were simply too many dead for them to believe her story, so they’d brought her in. They’d been polite and distant, giving her no chances to find out anything.
Nanci had tried to ask where she was and why. And who was the Man? Was it Flagg?
But they wouldn’t tell her a thing, though the driver of the truck that brought her in had said that she was obviously a killer.
“And murderers don’t live long. They get to be hung real quick.”
The cell was temperature controlled, around seventy degrees. All Nanci had seen as she was brought in was a largish building that looked as if it might once have been a high school. With a lot of armed men around it.
She lay down on the plastic-covered mattress, trying to recover some of her strength, feeling the stitches already tugging painfully at the wound in her thigh.
It crossed her mind to wonder just how far Jeff Thomas had got by now.
“I’ll bet he’s already five hundred miles away from here,” she said to herself.
Though they’d searched her, taking away her gun and knife, they hadn’t made her remove her polished boots. Inside the right one, snug in a specially constructed sheath, was a slim razor with an inlaid ivory hilt.
It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.
With that thought in her mind, the sixty-year-old woman closed her startlingly pale blue eyes and slipped easily into sleep.
LESS THAN a hundred yards away, Jeff Thomas found that sleep wouldn’t come. The guards left him on his own, though the observation slit opened every fifteen minutes or so and a shadowed face peered in.
But whoever was out there wouldn’t respond to anything Jeff said.
Outside, the sun had risen for a bright new day.