What Would Satan Do? (26 page)

Whitford slapped the papers down the desk.  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

“Right.  Right.”

“And now, because you failed to take care of him, he’s burned down my mansion.  And let me tell you something,” Whitford propped an elbow on the desk and pointed a meaty finger at Cadmon, “I think it’s only a matter of time before he shows up here.”

Cadmon’s eyes got big and he began to look all around him.  “He’s—  I—  What do we do?”

Whitford stared dolefully at his partner in crime.  He sighed, and pursed his lips.  “I think,” he said, “that we’ve got no choice.”  Cadmon cast him an inquisitive look.  Whitford leaned over the side of his chair and, with a hearty wheezing sound, came back up and plonked a gas mask down on the desk.  “We’ve got to speed things up a bit.”

Chapter 32.
          
Straight into the Frying Pan

“I must say,” said Alistair Preston, “I’m very surprised by the sudden resurgence of interest in all of this.”

“What?”  Liam and Lola spoke in unison.

“Oh, well, I’ve had several people telephoning me recently, asking all sorts of questions.”

“Several?  Who?” asked Lola.

“Oh, who remembers such things?  Not me.”  He laughed the light, carefree laugh of an aristocrat.  Ramón laughed too.  His sounded more like “heh heh.” 

Preston tossed a single manila folder down on the table.  “This is everything I have.”  He leaned against one of the high-backed chairs, and watched for a moment as Lola leafed through the papers.

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning?” said Lola, opening the folder and then tossing it back on the table.

“Always a prudent point at which to begin,” said Preston.  He began to pace.  “It started out simply enough,” he said.  His teaspoon made a little clinking sound as he moved it from his cup to his saucer.  “We began by looking at mind control.  Part of all that LSD nonsense, you see – mind wipes, mass hysteria – but then it grew to other things, and we began investigating all manner of, well, paranormal phenomena – mind reading, action at a distance – all terribly exciting stuff really.”  He smiled a conspiratorial smile, as if mind control schemes were just the sorts of things one did, you know, when one got together with the boys after dinner.

Liam and Lola exchanged glances, their eyebrows raised.  Festus looked at each in turn, desperately trying to make eye contact with someone, but they both ignored him and looked back at Preston instead.

“And you were successful?” asked Lola, her voice indicating that she doubted they were.

“Oh well, you know.  I don’t like to brag.”  He placed one hand across his chest and looked away demurely.  After a sufficiently humble pause, he continued.  “We had a measure of
success.”  He took a dainty sip of his tea.

“Was this that thing where you guys killed goats?” asked Lola.

Preston threw up one hand in exasperation.  The other stayed put, holding on to his tea un-exasperatedly.  “What, my dear, do you have against goats?  Why does everyone want to kill goats?  The goat is a noble, willful creature that neither can nor should be killed using brain power alone.” 

“Oh, sorry.  Ramón said it was goats.”

Preston shot a dirty look at Ramón.  “You told them it was goats?  You?  Oh, Ramón.”  They stared at one another for a tense and sexually-charged moment, and then Preston returned his attention back to Lola.  “No, no.  It wasn’t goats at all.  It was sheep.”  He sipped his tea, calmer now. 

“And you killed these animals… with your—”

“With our minds.”  Preston made his eyes big. 

“Ah … ha,” said Lola.

“But it was just sheep,” he said, looking at them over the edge of his teacup.  “Well, not
just
sheep.  There were a few cats, and a dog.  Quite a few smallish quadrupeds, actually.  One time there was even a horse.”  He had a good chuckle at this, sighed, and wiped a tear from his eye.  When he spoke again, his voice had a gravelly, wizardy quality to it.  “Alas, my dear, it was mostly just sheep.”

“So, what you’re saying is that this was a caprine shenanigan?” asked Festus.  The words burst out of his mouth.  He’d clearly been holding them in, waiting for the first pause to make his joke.  Everyone turned and looked at him.  Preston made a face like he’d just taken a whiff of three-day-old milk. 

“I think,” said Preston, “that the word you’re looking for is ‘ovine.’  ‘Caprine’ means goat-like and, as I have attempted to make entirely clear more than once already, there were no goats involved.”

Ramón shook his head, disgusted. 

Preston shuddered and looked back to Lola.  “They were never really sure of the mechanism, you know.  Of course, you give any sheep, or horse for that matter, that much LSD, and well…”  He took another sip of his tea.  “Sadly,” he said, “that isn’t the sort of thing that garners a lot of funding.”

“Can’t imagine why,” said Lola.

“Oh,” said Preston, peering over his cup, “you’d be surprised at what the United States government will pay for.”

“Even so,” she said, “we’d like to get copies of anything you still have.”

“I’m sorry,” said Preston, “but there’s nothing left.  They destroyed everything.  Burned it all.”  He shrugged.

“Who is ‘they’—?”  She stopped though, and turned to watch Liam, who suddenly seemed to have lost interest in the conversation.  He stood up, and walked slowly toward the front door, craning his neck this way and that to look through the gauzy curtains that covered the windows on either side of the entry. 

Lola left the couch, following Liam toward the door.  “What’s up?”

Liam hushed her with his hand, and pulled one of the curtains to the side.  Through the window he could see a pickup truck, the body of which sat perched precariously on absurdly-large tires.  It was covered with lights, metal guards of various sorts, and stickers proclaiming the driver’s allegiance to the Republic of Texas and the National Rifle Association. 

“Alistair, are you expecting additional guests?” called Liam, over his shoulder.

“None other than you, my dear.”  Preston made his way toward the front door.

A car door slammed, and Liam peered back through the window.

“Who is it?” asked Festus, helpful as ever.

Outside, walking from the truck toward the house, was a man who Liam judged not to be very nice.  He based this judgment in part on the amount of flannel the man was wearing, which was a lot – far more than would normally be found covering a person with whom one might expect to strike up a pleasant, polite conversation that didn’t touch on things like the alleged shortcomings of certain ethnic groups or the question of whether the South would rise again – and partly on the fact that this flannel-clad individual was carrying a shotgun. 

Liam turned away from the window, and strode back into the living room.  He pointed to Preston and Ramón.  “You two.  Go.”  He waved one hand dismissively toward the rear of the house.  “Hide somewhere.”

“What?  What’s the matter?” asked Preston.

“There’s a man with a gun,” said Liam, “and you need to go hide yourselves right now.” 

“Oh, then.  Come along Ramón.”  The odd couple disappeared down a hallway.

“What about me?” asked Festus.

“You can hide, too.”  He gave Festus an encouraging shove, and Festus scampered off to try to catch up with Preston and Ramón.  “Lola, sit over there.”  He pointed at one of the fancy couches.

“What?” asked Lola.

“Sit.  There.”  He pointed at the couch again. 

Lola shrugged, squinted, and shook her head.

“Sit on the couch.  Act surprised when he comes in.  Don’t let him know I’m here.”  Liam stepped back toward the entryway, and crouched down behind a tall plant in the corner. 

If the man had come inside at that instant, he would have found Lola, sitting on a couch, making nasty, sullen faces at a house plant.  But the man didn’t come in.  Instead he knocked.

The knock was polite – a tiny bit timid, even.  It was certainly not the knock of a man carrying a shotgun.  Unless, of course, the man carrying the shotgun was just a neighbor who was returning the weapon after borrowing it to do some spring cleaning or something.  But then it would be unusual for a well-meaning neighbor to show up with the weapon actually aimed at the front door, or to load a shell into the chamber prior to knocking, making that “chig-chig” sound that, in movies, so often precedes a lot of noisy, unpleasant carnage.

Liam and Lola waited for the man to bust down the door.  But then there was another polite knock.  A little firmer this time, but still fairly dainty, as if the knocker had just wanted to make sure that the knockee had actually heard the knocking – without being too obtrusive or anything.

Lola shrugged, gesturing at the door, and mouthed, “Should I answer?”  Liam leaned out from behind the plant briefly and shook his head.  Lola glared at the plant some more.

There followed a moment of silence, during which Liam and Lola exchanged confused, slightly worried looks through the foliage.  Then the door knob rattled a bit, indicating that the man with the shotgun was quietly checking to see if the door was unlocked. 

Lola dropped her head into her hands and sighed.  She looked up at the house plant, her palm and fingers splayed across her face, and rolled her eyes.  She pulled her hand away, however, at the sound of smashing glass.

The butt of the shotgun appeared briefly where just before there had been a pane of glass in the window next to the door.  It caught on the gauzy curtains, which tore as the gun was pulled back through the window.  A hand appeared, and began groping around near the door knob. 

“Ow!  God damnit, sumbitch!”  The hand withdrew quickly, and after a short spell during which Liam and Lola could hear further swearing, the butt of the gun reappeared to knock out the remaining shards of glass from the window pane.  Then the hand came back, groping around some more until it found the deadbolt and unlocked the door.  It was another, eternally-long twenty seconds before the door finally creaked open. 

The man poked his head into the room.  He wore faded jeans that had a yellowish-brownish hue and were covered with mud splatters.  His flannel shirt had probably been red once upon a time, but now it was a pale, brownish-pink.  And of course, he had the obligatory red-neck mullet.  (Why anyone – even a stupid redneck – still sports this universally-derided hair style is one of the great, ineffable mysteries of life.)

The man stepped all the way into the room, and pushed the door closed – with a light “click” – behind him.  He moved slowly, the shotgun dangling in one of his hands, as if it were just a stick he’d found and had liked the look of.  He kept his body very still as he crept forward.  In fact, only his eyes – which were wide open and worried-looking – moved as he took in his surroundings.  Their frantic scanning of the room overcompensated for the lack of motion in the rest of his body.  But somehow he failed entirely to notice the woman sitting on the couch directly in front of him.

“Um, hi,” said Lola, offering a perfunctory wave.  “Want some lemonade?”

“Shit!”  The man jumped back.

At this point, it would not be unusual to be informed that the man in question “jumped a foot into the air.”  In fact, however, most people who don’t play professional sports can’t jump anything like twelve inches off the ground.  This particular redneck was no exception.  He did jump, but he only cleared and inch or two, and most of his panic response was directed to his arms, which flailed about, waving his shotgun this way and that.  He eventually got himself under control, and clutched the shotgun to his chest.  This would have been a great move had he come armed with only, say, a teddy bear, but issn’t the sort of thing that is generally regarded as proper shotgun-attack protocol.

Lola’s smile was pleasant and comforting.  She raised her eyebrows, as though she were awaiting an answer.

The man smiled back and let out a sigh of relief, he let the shotgun dangle by his side.  “Well, yeah,” he said.  “That’d be right nice.”

For a second, Lola’s jaw hung open as she stared at the man with the shotgun who had said that, yes, he would, in fact, like some lemonade.  She quickly wiped the surprise off her face, replacing it with the same pleasant smile.  But then nothing happened.  And after a few seconds more, nothing continued to happen.  Tension crept into her smile, and the muscles in her cheeks bulged as she clenched her jaw. 

Liam, meanwhile, just sat and watched from behind his houseplant, causing nothing to happen.  It was only a quick, sharp look from Lola that roused him to action. 

His first two steps toward the man were fluid – almost languid – and completely silent.  And then, just as quietly, he pounced.  He snatched the gun, tossed it onto one of the couches, and grabbed the man’s wrist, which he twisted and pinned to the middle of the man’s back.  Then he shoved the man forward, toppling him over the coffee table, and grabbed a handful of the man’s shirt, pulling it back tight against his throat.  Liam knelt on the small of the man’s back, bearing down with the full weight of his body. 

Liam looked up at Lola.  She scowled.  If they had been in a relationship, it would have been clear to everyone in the room that Liam was unlikely to get any that evening, and quite possibly the next.  But they weren’t, and so Liam just shrugged and dug his knee into the man’s back some more.  The man made a pathetic mewing sound.

Liam leaned in and spoke into the man’s ear.  “I’m going to let go of you.  When I do, you will not try to escape.  You will stand and do as I say.  Understood?”

The man whimpered and nodded his head, inasmuch as it was possible to do so with his face wedged in between a coffee-table book and the nastier bits of a small statue that some artist had carved as a tribute to the virility of well-hung and ripped youths everywhere.

Lola scoffed.  “They teach Jedi mind tricks in the CIA?”

Liam looked up.  His eyes were deadly serious.  “Go check on the others.  Take the gun.”

“I have one already,” she said. 

“Um, okay.”  Liam shrugged.  “Use yours instead.”

“I’m taking this one too,” she said.