Buzz Cut (38 page)

And she began to recite her father's abuses. His years of humiliating treatment. He didn't strike Irene, didn't bruise her, nothing so obvious. But when it was just the three of them alone, he'd spoken to her as you would a stupid pet. A dog that couldn't learn to pee outside. Giving Irene deep slices that didn't show, paper cuts that nicked the bone, day after day, hour by hour, wounding her, bleeding her dry. Emotional abuse. Not as dramatic as the physical kind, not as easy to detect, but just as real, Monica said, and in a way more terrible because her mother wasn't ever sure if she might be imagining it. Insecure, feeling guilty that she might be misreading everything, twisting Morton's innocuous remarks into something cruel. But Monica had been there, had heard the words, knew it wasn't her mother's imaginings. The man was hateful, destructive, a power monger.

Monica rolling along at a furious clip, letting it all rush out. Directing her speech to the audience but from time to time swinging her head around to fire a sentence or two in her father's direction.

A couple of minutes into Monica's speech, Lola's hands jerked to her ears as if she meant to strip off her earrings or bat away a cloud of bugs, then she caught herself and smoothed out the return flight, lowering her arms with graceful nonchalance. It was the first break in her composure Thorn had witnessed, and it set off another murmur in the audience.

Monica continued her list of terrors, incidents, verbatim fragments of conversation, imitating perfectly the hateful sarcasm, the dismissive barbs Morton had used against Monica's mother. As Thorn listened, he saw Murphy bustle out of the starboard hatch, glance around the Sun Deck till he spotted Sugarman at the rear of the audience, then lope back to join him.

"Stop," Sampson barked. "Please, don't, don't do any more of this. Not here, not like this. Please, no more, sweetheart."

Lola seemed to have imploded, shoulders hunched, all the luminescence vanished from her face. Looking nowhere.

No one stirred in the audience. The director had squatted down on her heels and was gazing at the stage with the awe and bewilderment of a soldier looking at a distant mushroom cloud. The end of the world as we knew it.

Without warning, Thorn's nausea passed. The air cleared, the sun brightened, and breath began to stream into him again. The audience became a colorful blur. He heard his own voice call out.

"Butler. Does anyone know the word
Butler
?"

One of the cameras dollied closer to him. The technician pressing his eye hard to the viewfinder. Another wacko about to erupt.

Monica craned forward to peer at Thorn. He could hear the strain in his own voice, knew he hadn't recovered fully, but there was a job to do, goddamn it. A homicidal lunatic to provoke.

"
Butler
is from the French
bouteillier
, which means bottle-bearer. From the Middle English
hotel
and the Old French
botele.
I'm probably mispronouncing them, but there it is. The word goes back to medieval Latin
butticula
and late Latin
buttis,
which means cask. So a bottle is a little cask. A
buttis.
A heavy, thick receptacle with a wide flared bottom. Which is the source of a bunch of English words like butt. Or ass. Someone butts in. Or butt as in object of scorn, the butt of a joke, or butt, as in the stub of a cigarette. Or butt as in ass. Posterior. From which we get buttface, buttbreath, buttbrain. Not a pretty word. Butler. He's the ass sent down to the cellar to get the wine, cart it back so the folks at the main table can swill it. Butler. The butt of jokes. A loser. Total loser."

Thorn stared into the shiny lens of the camera, and he could feel him, his eyes staring back. Burning.

***

"He's concealed in one of three places," Murphy told Sugar. "I laid out all the cross sections, did a comparative analysis of the blueprints. Used the computer, looking for intersections of the media lines, the navigational systems, any other crucial operations, and I narrowed it down to three places. I told Gavini, and he said I should come up here, let you know. Let you decide how to proceed."

Sugarman heard Murphy talking. Heard the words from a long distance away though the young man was standing right next to him. At the moment everything seemed a long way off. The stage up there. Thorn, Monica.

He was listening to Murphy, weighing what the kid said, deciding on the right course of action, his eyes continuing to sweep across the two or three places where Butler might surface, still doing his cop job while he stood there suffocating on the rich tropical air.

"I got it narrowed to those three places. I'm sure that's where he is, hiding in one of them."

"Three places," Sugar said.

Up on the stage they were still talking. Thorn finished with his little word history, sitting back in his chair looking relieved. And now Monica was taking her turn again, forging on with her denunciations of Daddy. Telling the world, the words rushing out of her, tears on her face, something about cleaning the blood out of a boat, her mother's blood. A suicide attempt. A jumbled story. Her father had made her do that, Sampson forcing Monica to get down in her own mother's blood, wipe it up. Sugarman listened to that, listened to Murphy too, all the while his eyes scanning the Sun Deck. Trying to breathe. Trying to swallow down a cup or two of air. That would be nice. Air in his lungs would be nice. Oxygen was important. Everyone said so.

"We could leave McDaniels here. He and Thorn could handle Butler if he shows up. You and me, we go check out the three places. Go down the list. Surprise attack. But if we don't hurry, it could turn out like the Dale Jenkins thing. Butler might've taken a hostage, be using their cabin. Passengers could be in danger. Because two of these places are in the ceilings above passenger cabins on D Deck. So we should go right away. We should move before he has a chance to get away."

She was about seventy-five but spry.
Spry
was the word that came into Sugarman's head. He should look it up sometime, see what its history was. Might learn something. Had to buy himself a better dictionary when this was finished. Seventy-five if she was a day, but marching with the spunk of someone half that. Steel-gray hair, good tight skin, dignified bearing, wearing a blue dress with white flowers on it. White tennis shoes. Something not right about her stride, a little hitch or something, he couldn't say. Coming down the middle aisle toward Sugarman and Murphy, causing a stir in the audience, one of her hands clutching the bodice of her blue dress as if she were chilled. Stopping right in their faces. A white envelope in her other hand. Face wrinkled, lips quivering. Holding up the envelope in Sugarman's face, a few dollar bills showing inside.

"Are you security?" she asked. "They said you were security."

Sugarman told her yes, yes he was. He glanced over at Maynard Krebs. The kid had a juicy grin. He was watching the stage, yammering into his microphone. Eating this up. Watching a family blow apart into bloody chunks on national television. The kid sniggering, talking to Kyra, letting this segment of the show run long, going to blow the cap off the ratings. Yes sir. Big-time megabusinessman and his TV star wife exploding like ripe watermelons before twenty million viewers and he was there. Maynard G. Krebs running the control board. Sugarman watching this. Finally getting a little oxygen down. Only a little, thinking maybe he needed to perform a tracheotomy on himself. Jam a drinking straw through his throat, get a good sip.

The spry grandmother was in his face. Her voice a feeble croak.

"A man in the chapel. I heard him up there. In the ceiling. He dropped down."

"Chapel?" Sugarman hadn't realized there was a chapel. But of course there had to be. This was a floating city. A bobbing metropolis. You never knew when you might want to get married. Have a christening, a funeral. A chapel. Yes.

"In the chapel ceiling."

Murphy bulled in front of the lady.

"That's one of the three," he sputtered. "One of the places I narrowed it to. Two cabins on D Deck and the ceiling above the chapel. It's on A Deck, four doors forward of the infirmary. Five main trunk lines intersect right there. He could control a half dozen of the most critical functions on the ship if he had the right equipment. And knew what the hell he was doing."

Up on the stage Monica was weeping. Morton Sampson laid his arm across her shoulder, trying to comfort her, but Monica squirmed away from him, scooted her chair a foot to the side. Thorn was talking again, seemed to be trying to drive a stake through Sampson's heart, asking him why the hell he would do that, make his daughter get down in her own mother's blood. What kind of fucking monster was he? The audience started to boo. Sugarman not sure who they were mad at.

Maynard Krebs was chuckling. Gobbling it up.

A foot in front of Sugar, the spry old woman in the blue dress wavered like a wisp of smoke. To her left Rafael moved close, gawking.

"Wager this," she said. "Keep it alive. Please?"

The lady waggled the envelope in Sugarman's face.

Her other hand came away from her bodice. A bright red hand. Holding it up, staring at it. She looked embarrassed. Her blue dress falling open, showing her slip with a ragged tear, a heavy bra dangling loose. Blood seeped from her bony white chest.

"He killed me," she said. "The man in the ceiling."

The spry old lady made one last shimmy and began to sink. Sugarman caught her, swept her into his arms, carried her a few feet, and laid her down in the shade of a life raft. Very light lady. Bones felt hollow.

On the speakers, Monica's voice abruptly halted. Sugarman stood up in time to see the TV monitors jitter for a second. Then the sound system squawked and Butler's face appeared, his long blond hair, the precise, girlish lips. At the control panel, Maynard Krebs was no longer grinning. He flicked his switches, tugged his slides up and down, but he could not make Butler Jack go away.

Sugarman jumped up, seized Murphy by the front of his white shirt, dragged him close.

"Get Metzger. Get the fucking doctor up here. Hurry. Do it now. Go! And you, you, Rafael." Sugar snatched the tall man's arm. "You stay with this woman till Metzger comes. Hold her chest together. Apply pressure to the wound. Do you understand me?"

Rafael stared down at the blood fanning out across the impenetrable teak.

"All right," he said. "All right."

"Where you going?"

"To church," Sugar said, and he was off. He was running.

As he passed by the edge of the stage, he stabbed his open palm at Thorn. Stay right there, do what we planned. Then ran through the side hatch door, down the short stairway, while Butler Jack informed the assembly about his first name. Setting the record straight. Correcting what the moron said earlier.

Butler.
Telling twenty million viewers that a butler was an officer of the highest rank. Equivalent to captain, to general, to admiral. A leader, a conqueror. And from the old French
bouteil-lier,
the bearer of the bottle, the rich red wine that was the symbol for the blood of Christ, in other words, the one entrusted to bear the holy sacrament. While at the same time, yes, it was true, butler was a humble manservant, in charge of the lowly wine cellar. Like other notable people he needn't mention, Butler was a man of extreme paradoxes. Born of the lowest ranks, ascending to the highest. Like others whose names he needn't speak aloud.

Sugarman sprinted toward the chapel. His heart flailing.

Sugarman rounded the last stairway and caught sight of Butler Jack as he was coming out of the chapel, shutting the door behind him. Fifteen feet away, Sugar slowed to a stroll as Butler turned and faced him. Shock flickered briefly on his face, then Butler spread his lips into a smile. The feral eagerness of a cornered wolf.

Behind him the hallway was empty. The lap of Butler's blue overalls was blotched with the spry old lady's blood.

"You found me. You're good."

Sugarman came forward two more steps, leaving only ten feet between them. There was no way Butler could turn and outrun him. Not unless the kid was a world-class sprinter, and even then, the mood Sugarman was in, the amount of adrenaline flooding his veins, he wasn't worried. He'd go against a cheetah at the moment, take any odds.

"If I'm good," Sugarman said, "I got it from my father's genes. The ones we don't share."

Sugar held his ground as Butler approached a single step. There wasn't going to be any footrace.

"Don't be so sure." Hair loose down his back, an easy grin that showed no teeth. "Lola's in both of us. Her cold conniving mind. That's where we get it, you and me. That's why we're here now but no one else is."

Sugar cut his eyes to Butler's hands. Both hanging easily at his sides as he narrowed the gap between them by another half step. Knife in his left, the silver prongs on the fingertips of the right. His arms went taut and he could feel the numbness creeping into his blood, the same dark paralysis he had suffered before when he'd faced off with Butler Jack.

"Covalent bonds," Sugarman said quietly. "That's what we are. We're atoms with shared electrons."

Butler lost his smile briefly, wowed by Sugar's command of the language.

"That's right," Butler said. "Exactly. Covalent."

"That's why you can't kill me," Sugarman said, still quiet. "You tried on the docks in the Everglades, you tried again when I caught you in the media room. And last night you went to the infirmary to do it again. But I wasn't there. I wasn't there because we have shared electrons. You can't kill me. We're partners. You move, I move. We anticipate each other. We're hooked together. You swing, I duck. I swing, you duck. We're the white fish and the black fish, each of them with the other's tail in his mouth. Neither of us can swallow. We depend on each other. We circle and we circle. We're the same fish, and a single fish can't swallow itself."