Bestial (13 page)

“Yeah, this place just ain’t as busy as it usually is,” he’d said. He’d frowned then, thought a moment, and added, “Come to think of it, the streets ain’t as busy during the week, either. Hmph. It’s almost as if folks just ain’t goin’ out as much as they used to.”

A thin crowd of shoppers wandered over the grounds, walking between rows of booths selling everything from electronics and antiques to pet hermit crabs, dog-eared paperbacks and second-hand clothes. The smells of popcorn and hot dogs and cigarette smoke blended into a strange aroma that hovered in the hot summer air. A low murmur of chattering voices was punctuated by the occasional shouts of children, and country and western music played from a nearby booth selling stereo equipment.

“I think we’re being shadowed,” Karen said casually as she and Gavin paused at a table covered with DVDs for sale at discount prices.

“Oh?” Gavin picked up a copy of
Pan’s Labyrinth
and examined the copy on the back of the case as if he were interested. “Where?”

“Behind us. Right now. About seven o’clock. Tall, skinny, completely bald. Grey sport coat over a pale blue shirt. I saw him earlier when we went into the bar. He was standing across the street. Then I saw him again in the shopping mall. He was in about the same position back then, too. Behind us. Following us, but not looking at us. Like he’s doing now. I thought maybe it was a coincidence. This
is
a small town. But I don’t think that anymore.”

Gavin put his arm around Karen’s shoulders and steered her into a U-turn away from the DVD table, past a booth selling clocks, then away from the merchants and into the crowd. He leaned his head close to hers as if to say something to her, his eyes darting around until they found the man she’d described. “Well, it’s easy enough to see if it’s a coincidence,” he said as he directed her toward the parking lot. “It’s way past lunchtime, and I’m starving. And I’ve got a headache from the beer I drank in the bar. Let’s go find a place to eat.”

As they walked to the parking lot, Gavin took his keys from his pocket. He clumsily and intentionally dropped them, walked on a couple of steps, then turned back and bent down to pick them up. As he did so, his eyes quickly sought out the bald man and found him for a fraction of a second. He grabbed the keys, then they walked on.

“He’s making every effort not to look like it,” Gavin said quietly, “but he seems to be coming this way.” As they approached the Escalade, Gavin thumbed the button on his keychain and the doors unlocked. “While I’m driving, you try to track him to his car, see what he’s driving.”

Once inside the Escalade, Gavin started the engine. Karen adjusted the side view mirror so she could keep an eye on the rear of the vehicle. Gavin let the engine idle for a bit.

“See him?” he said.

“Yep. He’s a couple rows back, getting into a silver car. Looks like a BMW.”

The tires crunched over gravel as Gavin backed out of the parking space. He drove to the lot’s exit, checked for traffic, then pulled out and turned left. As he drove away from the fairgrounds, Gavin tossed a backward glance out the side window and saw the BMW slowly making its way out of the parking lot.

“What sounds good for a late lunch?” Gavin said. “Chinese? Italian? Deli sandwiches? A burger?”

With her eyes on the side mirror, Karen said, “See if you can find a place with a salad bar.”

Gavin drove through town, looking for a restaurant. “See him?”

“Oh, yeah, he’s back there. But he’s keeping his distance.”

At an intersection, Gavin stopped for a red light.

“He’s coming up close,” Karen said as she grabbed her purse from the floorboard. She removed a notebook and pen. As the BMW drew nearer, her eyes moved back and forth between the license plate in the mirror and the notebook as she wrote.

“Can you read it backwards?” Gavin said.

“Yep. Got it.”

The light turned green and Gavin drove ahead for another block. He spotted a place called the Blind Dog Bar & Grill. A sign in front read “Lunch Buffet and Salad Bar!” He pulled into the small paved lot beside the grey building.

“He just turned down a side street,” Karen said.

“He won’t go far, I’m sure.” He parked the SUV.

They got out, walked along the sidewalk to the front entrance of the restaurant, and went inside.

Coming in from the bright sunlight, the Blind Dog Bar & Grill seemed very dark inside and it took a moment for their eyes to adjust. The bar was to their left, the restaurant to their right. They were directed to a booth by a hostess, and given ice water and menus by a waitress. A large moose head was mounted on one of the walls—the moose wore enormous red sunglasses and a white cap that bore the slogan “I [HEART] BIG ROCK” on the front. Karen ordered unlimited trips to the salad bar, Gavin a mushroom swiss burger with a side order of fried zucchini, and both asked for coffee.

“Give me the plate number,” Gavin said.

Karen removed the notebook from her purse, tore out the page, and handed it to him. As she got up and headed for the salad bar, Gavin took his cell phone from his pocket and placed a call to Burning Lizard Security and Investigations, his company in San Francisco.

“Dudley,” he said when a man answered. “Gavin. I need you to run a plate number ASAP.”

“Let’s have it,” Dudley said.

Gavin gave him the number. “I’m on my cell. Call me as soon as you’ve got something.”

There were no windows, so as they waited for their lunch, Gavin got up once and went to the front entrance, looked out the glass door, and spotted the silver BMW parked at the curb across the street and up the block. The side windows were tinted and he could not see the driver. He returned to the table and took his seat. They chatted quietly about nothing in particular as they waited for their orders, each of them looking around and taking in their surroundings.

As their lunch arrived, Gavin’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket.

“The car belongs to a Dr. Jeremiah Goodman of Big Rock, California,” Dudley said.

Gavin took a pen from his shirt pocket and wrote down the name just below the plate number. “Doctor?”

“He’s a dentist in Big Rock,” Dudley said.

“A dentist?”

“Yep. Here’s his home address.”

Gavin wrote down Woodman’s address as Dudley recited it.

“You want the address of his practice, too?”

“Sure, Gimme.” Gavin wrote that down, too. “Anything about this guy stand out? Anything at all?”

“Nope, nothing.”

“Thanks, Dud.” As he put his cell phone back in his pocket, he said to Karen, “We’re being shadowed by a dentist.”

“Maybe he wants to make sure we floss after our meal.”

“He won’t go anywhere. He’ll wait for us. Let’s enjoy our lunch and let him wait. Then I want to take him on a little trip and see what he does.”

In the house that was once owned by used car salesman Marvin Cooper, Sheriff Irving Taggart gathered in the family room with Vanessa Peterman and several of his deputies. Taggart and some of the others sipped from a cold bottle of Heineken, some had soft drinks, while Vanessa nursed a tall glass of ice tea. Some of them sat on the half-dozen chairs and two couches, while the rest stood around as they chatted. Golden Saturday-afternoon sunlight brightened the spacious room through the large windows and French doors. Taggart stood at one of the windows, a dark figure backlit by the sunlight, one hand holding his beer, the other on his hip, elbow jutting.

“Are we going to have to
keep
going to church every Saturday?” Vanessa said, a curl of annoyance in her voice. “Those sermons are torture. A few years ago, an old boyfriend dragged me to a two-hour lecture on the relationship between amino acids and neurotransmitters, and I nearly slashed my wrists. But it was
still
better than those goddamned sermons.”

Taggart smirked. “You’re not there for the sermons.”

“Then why
are
we there, pray tell?” she said. “You told us it was important, but you’ve never really said
why
.”

He dropped his hand from his hip and walked away from the window, perched himself on the armrest of one of the couches. He sipped his beer, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“We’re establishing a base,” he said. “We’re steadily getting a foothold on this community, and ultimately the county. Pine County is the smallest in California and gets very little attention. It’s a perfect place for us—a small population, mostly rural. We’re taking it piece by piece. We have the Sheriff’s Department. That’s given us a conduit to the entire county. In seven months, we’ve managed to grow some roots here in Big Rock. We have road crews monitoring most of the traffic in and out of town and all around the county. We have several businesses around town, some of them prominent. Some we’ve taken over completely, others we’ve infiltrated. We have people in the phone company, particularly linemen who can control communication for us if necessary. We have people in the hospital, some doctors, a good deal of nurses and technicians, a couple in administration, and we’re growing there. We’re growing everywhere. As we discussed some months ago, we’ve had to curtail our...
needs
a little. No more random raping. Spreading the virus too widely so soon would be counterproductive. On top of that, we now have this latest development to contend with—reproduction. Cynthia was... raped... by one of us. The result was the First Born. We don’t know why yet, we don’t understand it. But we’re adjusting to it. Now when we fuck outsiders, we risk spreading the virus
and
reproducing. So we’re being careful for now, until we’re more settled, more established.”

Taggart took another swig of his beer, then stood and slowly walked around the room.

“The Seventh-day Adventist church does a good deal of work in the community,” he said. “It gives us access to the businesses owned and run by its members, and it has an academy in the area. We’ve been settling in there the last few months, making friends, getting familiar with everyone. Becoming accepted. You’ve been getting to know the people at the church, picking out the weakest links. As I told you on the way back from church today, it’s now time to close in on those targets. Fuck them, turn them. I’ll be having a meeting with Pastor Edson tomorrow morning in his office. I’ll introduce myself to him.
Really
introduce myself. Let him know who’s in charge now.”

“Why the Seventh-day Adventist church?” Vanessa said. “Why not the Baptists, or the Methodists, or Catholics, or
any
church?”

Taggart smiled slightly. “My momma was an Adventist, and that’s how she raised me. I went to Sabbath school and church every Saturday as a boy, went to an Adventist school until the seventh grade. They’ve got schools all over the fuckin’ place, you know. Biggest protestant school system in the world. I
know
Adventists. I know what they believe, how they think. They don’t eat meat or smoke or drink—not even caffeine. They don’t wear jewelry or dance. They’re not supposed to go to movies or read novels or watch TV on the Sabbath.
But...
when nobody’s looking, they fuck like bunny rabbits. And their state of mind makes them useful to us.”

“State of mind?” Vanessa said.

“Religion in general is a kind of brainwashing,” Taggart said. “But Adventists take it further. They not only believe in God and Jesus, they also believe the prophecies of a little-educated Victorian-era woman named Ellen G. White to be divinely inspired. In the last twenty years, it’s been proven she plagiarized her writings from other writers of her time, that some of her prophecies came from gossip and rumor, and that she behaved
very
differently than she preached. That caused a schism in the church. But to the most faithful, it didn’t alter their belief in her. Adventists claim their doctrine is based purely on the bible, but the fact is, it’s based entirely on White’s goofy
interpretation
of the bible, and her writings. They
can’t
admit the truth about her, because if they did, their church would collapse. But it’s more than that. They believe in her
so
hard that no amount of proof or truth can sway them. Her writings are infallible, her interpretation of the bible absolute. They don’t worship her... but they might as well. They call her ‘Sister White’ and talk about her like she glowed in the dark and crapped daisies. So, you see, they already believe in something
other
than God. They believe totally and completely... in a
person
. And an unremarkable person, at that. We can use that weakness to our advantage. If they can be persuaded to believe so completely in someone so obviously flawed and corrupt, then they can be persuaded to believe in anything. When I’m done with Pastor Edson, he’ll believe in
me
. And through him... we’ll have
them
. We’ll make the Adventist church in Big Rock a strong base. We can work through it to reach other parts of the community, the whole county, and beyond. We’ll make it our own. And that will start right away, with your relationships with some of the members. Use their gullibility and intellectual weakness. Use it well.”

Taggart grinned as he lifted his beer in a toast. “To the Seventh-day Adventists!”

While Karen and Gavin ate their lunch and Taggart spoke to the group in the family room downstairs, Ella Hurley sat in a small anteroom reading a book called
Wolves
by Seymour Simon. She had read the book before, but was going through it a second time, more slowly than the first, absorbing the information, thinking about it, studying the photos of wolves in the wild. It was not the only book she’d read about wolves in recent months. Ella was learning—not only about wolves, but about herself, about what she had become.