though this was much smaller, about thirty feet long and fifteen feet in
diameter at its widest point. The curving surfaces were sheathe not in
that glassy, gold-flecked substance but in what appeared to be ordinary
copper.
My heart soared when I saw the four missing children sitting with their
backs to the wall in the shadows at one end of the room. They were
exhausted and frightened. Their small wrists and ankles were bound, and
their mouths were covered with strips of cloth tape. They were not
visibly injured, however, and their eyes widened with amazement at the
sight of Doogie and me.
Then I spotted Orson, lying on his side, near the kids, muzzled and
restrained. His eyes were open, and he was breathing. Alive.
Before my vision could blur, I looked away from him.
In the center of the room, frozen by Doogie’s gun, two men sat in padded
folding chairs, facing each other across the card table that held the
storm lamp. In this stark tableau, they reminded me of characters in a
stripped-down stage set from one of those stultifying minimalist plays
about boredom, isolation, emotional disconnection, the futility of
modern relationships, and the sobering philosophical implications of the
cheeseburger.
The guy on the right was the abb who had tried to brain me with a two
by-four under the warehouse. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been
wearing then, and he still had those tiny white teeth, although his
smile was considerably more strained than it had been previously, as
though he had just discovered a corn worm among that mouthful of white
kernels.
I wanted to pump one shot into his mug, because I sensed not just
smugness in the geek, but also vanity. After he took a magnum round at
such close range, the only word adequate to describe his face would also
spur on a dog sled team.
The man on the left was tall, blond, with pale green eyes and a puckered
scar, in his mid-fifties. He was the one who had snatched the Stuart
twin sand his smile was as winning as it had been when he was a boy of
twelve with the blood of his parents on his hands.
John Joseph Randolph was unnervingly self-possessed, as if our arrival
neither startled nor concerned him. “How’re you doing, Chris? ” I was
surprised he knew my name. I’d never seen him before.
Whispery echoes of his voice were conducted like a current along the
copper walls, one word overlaying the next, “Your mother, Wisteriashe
was a great woman.” I couldn’t understand how he knew my mother.
Instinct told me that I didn’t want to know. A shotgun blast would
silence him, and scour that smile off his face the smile with which he
charmed the innocent and the unwaryturning it into a lipless
death’s-head grin.
“She was deadlier than Mother Nature, ” he said.
Renaissance men ponder, brood, and analyze the complex moral
consequences of their actions, preferring persuasion and negotiation to
violence. Evidently, I’d forgotten to renew my membership in the
Renaissance Man Club, and they had repossessed my principles, because
all I wanted to do was blow away this butchering creep and with extreme ,
prejudice.
Or maybe I’m just becoming.
It’s the rage these days.
With my heart made brittle by bitterness, I might have pulled the
trigger if the kids hadn’t been there to witness the carnage. I was also
inhibited because the copper skin on the curved walls was guaranteed to
spin deadly ricochets in all directions. My soul was saved not by the
purity of my morals but by circumstances, which is a humbling
confession.
With the barrel of the Uzi, Doogie gestured at the playing cards in the
two men’s hands. “What’s the game? ” His voice echoed tinnily around the
curved copper walls.
I didn’t like these two men’s watchful calm. I wanted to see fear in
their eyes.
Now Randolph turned his hand of cards face up on the table and replied
to Doogie’s question with too much dry amusement. “Poker.” Before Doogie
decided how best to restrain the card players, he needed to determine,
if he could, whether they had guns. They were wearing jackets that could