Ashley Bell: A Novel (20 page)

They tore off their ear protection, snatched up the MK12s, ventured outside as the air slowly cleared. Approaching the target house, they were cautious, though the chance of anyone within having survived seemed nil. Perry and Gibb came in from the street to the east, which was when Pax learned that two had been sniped, leaving five under the rubble.

Time now to call in the carrier-based helo to extract the team, though the task remaining would not be easy. The point was to prove you could not kill 317 Americans and live long enough to brag about it to your grandchildren. They needed to find al-Ghazali, photograph his face or what remained of it, and take a tissue sample for DNA. Otherwise, some anonymous Internet-savvy bonehead would fake proof that he was al-Ghazali, and 31 percent of Americans would believe him.

Pax started to call for the helo when Bibi’s face bloomed so vividly in his mind’s eye that the ruins of the ghost town ceased to exist for a moment. If previously he’d suspected she was in trouble, he knew it now. This was battleground intuition on steroids—and more than intuition. He had to wrap the op, ditch this cesspool country, and call Bibi as soon as the blackout rule no longer applied, when they were at sea, aboard the aircraft carrier.

Calida Butterfly was a whirlpool, a vortex of dark energy that could not be resisted, so that Bibi was caught up in the woman’s fear, felt it swirling through her. So convincing was the diviner’s anxiety, so distraught the series of expressions that tortured her face, it proved impossible quite to believe that she could be a fraud with criminal intent. And there had been too many bizarre occurrences to dismiss her as a delusional paranoid. Something extraordinary was happening, about to happen, approaching fast, and the prudent course seemed to be to get out of its way before it arrived.

In the bedroom closet, as Bibi opened the shoebox and retrieved the holster with the Sig Sauer P226, Calida said, “I’ll leave my massage table. It’ll slow me down. I’ll get it later, next week, whenever. Can you
hurry,
kid? Come on,
come on
!”

Bibi shrugged into the shoulder rig, adjusted it, pulled a blazer off a hanger, and slipped into it. The pistol already held a full magazine. She glanced at herself in the closet-door mirror. The gun didn’t show under the coat. Her reflection did not quite resemble the one to which she was accustomed: hair kind of wild, windblown on a night without wind; strangeness swimming in the dark pools of her eyes; hard edges in her face that she hadn’t seen before. She thought she looked like a desperado. Or a perfect idiot.

In the living room, as Calida snatched up her suitcase, Bibi grabbed her purse and laptop. “Damn it, why did Mom and Dad sic you on me?”

“Not their fault. They couldn’t know. Nothing like this ever happened when I did them.”

“Nothing like what?”

“The disgusting rotten smell, the cold from nowhere, the weird candle crap, the clocks. The wrong people coming.”

Following the woman to the front door, Bibi said, “I figured stuff like that
always
happened.”

“Never happened to me before.”

“Never?” Bibi pulled shut the door. She fumbled with the key to engage the deadbolt. “But you’re the diviner, the big kahuna.”

Hastening along the balcony toward the stairs, Calida said, “It happened to my mother sometimes. She warned me about it, but maybe I didn’t take her seriously enough.”

“Wait up.” Bibi hurried after the blonde. “Didn’t take her seriously? Really? I mean,
really
? Your mother, who was tortured and dismembered?”

“No need for the snarky tone, kid. Sometimes you can be pretty damn insensitive.”

The long-legged Scrabblemancer bounded down the stairs two at a time, her footfalls hammering reverberant groans from the ironwork. In vanilla-white slacks and top, flamboyant sash and scarf, multiple hoop earrings, and a glittering trove of finger rings, she might have been a glamorous fugitive from a 1950s movie comedy about a Las Vegas showgirl on the run from the Mob.

Nimble and agile, Bibi plummeted after her, risking a bad fall, but proving, if there had been any doubt, the symptoms of gliomatosis cerebri were gone without a trace. “Hey, you know, sometimes you can be damn frustrating.”

“Better than snarky.”

“I wasn’t snarky.”

“Ear of the beholder,” Calida said as she came off the last flight of stairs and made her way between the row of sun loungers and the glimmering pool, where the trout-swift young man had earlier been swimming laps.

Sprinting to close the gap between them, Bibi reached with her left hand and snared the expensive-looking gold-star-on-blue-field silk scarf that trailed behind Calida, hoping to use it to ransom a few answers from the panicked diviner. The exquisite scarf was not merely wrapped around the woman’s throat, however, but was instead loosely knotted, which called before the court the laws of physics, in particular those that dealt with motion, action, and reaction. With a choking sound, Calida Butterfly abruptly ceased forward motion and dropped her ostrich-skin suitcase to clutch at the strangling silk, simultaneously staggering backward two steps and colliding with Bibi, whose forward speed was at that instant decisively checked. For a moment they wheeled around each other like the gimbal mountings of a gyroscope, but though one of the functions of a gyroscope was to maintain equilibrium, they were not able to maintain theirs. They teetered together on the pool coping, a mere degree of tilt away from a wet plunge. When Bibi thought to let go of the scarf, the forces of Nature, which had been cunningly engineered to make amusing fools of human beings in most circumstances, at once rebalanced themselves, thereby casting both women off balance. Calida fell to her knees on the pavement, while Bibi tottered backward and dropped hard into a sitting position on one of the sun loungers.

The Amazon diviner had progressed from fear and anger to terror and rage. She acted on the latter as she thrust to her feet, cursing Bibi and the Thorpe children that she hadn’t yet produced. “Get away from me, stay away from me, you insane crazy bitch.”

As Calida turned toward her dropped suitcase, Bibi said, “Crazy bitch? Me?
Me? Meeeee?
I was just having the best day of my life, that’s all,
free of cancer,
then you show up and…”

But she abandoned that line of response. She loathed the whine in her voice, did not want to paint herself as a victim. Valiant girls did not whine. They never played the victim even if there were benefits to be had from inhabiting that role, which there were, huge benefits, which was why everyone wanted to be a victim these days.

Half of Calida’s custom-crafted two-sided suitcase had fallen open when she dropped it, spilling the silver bowl and some of the other items that she used for divination. She stooped to repack with urgency.

Bibi rose from the lounge chair. “Look, maybe I am crazy, running from my apartment because you say someone’s coming—someone or something—I don’t even know who or what or why, crazy for buying in to this Ashley Bell thing, but here I am. So tell me how to find her. Tell me who these
wrong people
are.”

Turning to face her, suitcase in hand, Calida said bleakly, “Oh, you’ll know them.”

Because the apartment complex catered to young professionals, most of them single, thought had been given even to the lighting in the courtyard. In the service of romance, or whatever the hippest of the cool called it these days, the tall bronze lamps and every fixture used in the landscape lighting produced a calculated radiance—a candescence, resplendence—that flattered every face, that buttered an appealing sheen of health on the skin of every limb and curve that might be revealed.

In this well-schemed, computed, designed light, Calida remained as pale as bleached flour. Oppressed by fear, she had a face that appeared sliced-bread flat, incapable of offering any expression other than dread. “You’ll know them when you see them.”

“What’re we going to do?” Bibi asked.

“
We
aren’t doing anything. I don’t want to be anywhere near you. Not now. Not ever. What
I’m
going to do is run. Run and hide.”

With that, she turned away and hurried toward the parking lot, all of her bejeweled and silk-scarfed glamor gone, now just one more desperate woman overwhelmed by the madness of the world.

For six happy years, the foundling Olaf had been an exemplary companion: as pure of heart, as noble, as joyful, as loving as any dog who had ever lived. He had walked out of the rain to become his beloved girl’s best friend, and he had kept faithfully at her side through every mood and circumstance, taking to the sea and surfboard as enthusiastically as she did.

When he first showed symptoms, the cancer had already spread from his spleen to his liver and heart. Dr. John Kerman called it “hemangiosarcoma.” Although Bibi was a lover of language, that was a word she would hate for the rest of her life, as if it were not merely a word, but also one of the names of Evil. Neither chemo nor radiation would extend the dog’s life. The veterinarian estimated that Olaf had a week—at most two weeks—to live.

Bibi gave her cherished friend all the affection that could be squeezed into so little time, fed him all of his favorite treats and some that he’d never tasted before. She took him on easy walks, not where she determined, but where he seemed to want to go. They sat on the bench at Inspiration Point for hours, watching the sea in all its serenity and all its tossing glory, while she shared with the golden retriever every confidence, as always she had.

Her mother and father were not surprised by Bibi’s devotion, but they did not expect that her commitment to Olaf’s comfort in his last days would extend to participation in the act of euthanasia. The moment might arrive when the cancer, thus far largely painless, would begin to work its agony in the flesh. With human beings, a natural death was a death with dignity. But animals were innocents, and as their stewards, people owed them mercy. Bibi decided not only that Olaf must not suffer, but also that he must not be in the least afraid when the moment came to put him down. The dog liked his vet, but he didn’t like needles and became anxious at the sight of them. Only his trusted mistress, so precious to him, might inject him without causing him so much as a moment of fear.

Dr. John Kerman was a good man, extending every kindness and courtesy to people and animals alike, but he did not at first think it wise to grant young Bibi’s request to administer the mortal drugs herself. Although mature for her age, she was nevertheless only sixteen. Soon, however, she convinced him that she was up to the task both emotionally and intellectually. During that week, each time he had a dog to be anesthetized for teeth cleaning or other procedures, Dr. Kerman welcomed the girl into his surgery to observe how a catheter was placed in a leg vein. She also attended two emergency euthanasia sessions, observing solemnly—and wept only later, at home. Using green grapes and hypodermic syringes, she practiced the carefully angled insertion of a needle.

On the morning of the tenth day after they had been given Olaf’s prognosis, the dog came to a crisis, suffering a sudden weakness in his legs. His breathing became labored, and he began whimpering in distress. John Kerman arrived at the bungalow with his medical kit, confirmed that the moment had come, and on the nightstand in Bibi’s bedroom, he placed the instruments that she would need.

Murph carried Olaf to the bed, and for a few minutes, they left the girl alone with the retriever, that she might look into his eyes and whisper endearments to him and promise him that they would meet again one day in a world without death.

When Bibi was ready, the vet returned to stand to one side and watch, prepared to intervene if the girl lost her courage or if she appeared to be about to make a mistake of procedure. Nancy and Murph got onto the bed with Olaf, to hold and stroke and reassure him.

The dog exhibited none of his usual fear at the sight of the needles, but watched his mistress’s hands with interest. They were delicate but strong and steady hands. Once the catheter had been placed in the femoral artery of the left rear leg and taped in place, Bibi inserted the needle in an ampule of sedative and expertly drew the required dose. Through the catheter port, she slowly administered the injection. Dr. Kerman’s preferred two-step technique was not to put the dog down in a sudden hard fall, but first to bring on sleep in a gentle fashion. As the barbiturate flowed from the barrel of the syringe into the vein, Bibi looked into Olaf’s eyes and watched as they clouded with weariness and fluttered shut to enjoy his last rest. When the dog was deeply asleep and certain not to feel even the barest moment of panic when his cardiac muscles stuttered, Bibi used the second needle to inject the drug that stopped his noble heart.

On the drive to the pet cemetery with her mom and dad, Bibi sat in the backseat, holding the blanket-wrapped body of Olaf in her lap.

The Power-Pak II Cremation System was housed in a garagelike building behind the pet-cemetery offices. Usually, if the family wished to wait during the cremation, they did so in the visitors’ lounge in the front building. After watching Olaf’s body be placed alone in the cremator—Bibi insisted his ashes must not be mingled with those of other animals—Nancy and Murph preferred to wait in the lounge, where there were magazines, a television, and coffee. Bibi remained in the back building, perched on a chair in one corner, watching the hulking cremator, sitting witness to her companion’s voyage through fire. More than two hours later, when the ashes were presented to her in a small urn, the bronze was warm in her cupped hands.

The Vikings believed that fallen warriors were conveyed to Valhalla by beautiful maidens known as Valkyries. On the bench at Inspiration Point, on beach walks, and elsewhere, Bibi sometimes had explained to Olaf that the world was a battleground, that in a sense, every man and woman was a warrior, which was part of Captain’s philosophy that he shared with her in the years before Olaf had come along. Everyone struggled; everyone fought the good fight—or raised arms against those who fought it. “You’re a warrior, too,” she said, and the retriever always looked at her as though with understanding. “Dogs try to do what’s right. Most of them, anyway. And dogs suffer. They’re tormented and starved and abused by people unworthy of them. Who knows what you endured before you found me? My furry warrior.”

That afternoon, leaving the crematorium, she was Olaf’s Valkyrie, although she could not take him to Valhalla, only home to the bungalow and to her bedroom, where she holed up for three awful days, felled by grief, unable to talk to anyone, not even to her mom and dad.

In the meeting with Nancy and Murph, when he had delivered the news of Bibi’s brain cancer, Dr. Sanjay Chandra had wanted to know what kind of girl Bibi was, her psychology and personality, so that he could determine how best to share with her the diagnosis.

Murph had said,
Bibi is an exceptional girl. She’s smart….She’ll know if you’re putting even the slightest shine on the truth….She’ll want to hear it blunt and plain….She’s tougher than she looks.

When those words had not adequately conveyed the kind of girl she was, Olaf’s euthanasia was the story that Murph had then shared with the physician.