Charlotte begins rubbing two pieces of rebar together to see how long it takes her to make sparks. The answer—ten seconds. They light up the vast, shadowy interior of the warehouse, making it clear how much her eyes have adjusted to the darkness.
“I’m not trying to be a pain in the ass,” Marty says. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea to have any of this on film. Not yet.”
“I understand you feel that way, and I’m not asking you to store it on your phone for longer than it takes to transfer it to some kind of portable hard drive. And I don’t want either of you on camera. I’ll keep you out of it as best I can—I promise. But I’ve got to have some kind of record that this is actually happening.”
Marty’s staring at her, wide-eyed and frightened. It takes her a few seconds to realize it’s not the prospect of putting all this on film that’s got him scared. Not in this moment, at least. It’s that she just gave him an order in a firm tone of voice, and right now, when she’s capable of breaking steel, her orders mean more than they did an hour ago.
“You’ve got the pills, Charley,” Kayla says. “That’s your proof.”
“Yeah, and we saw how easy it was to prove they work. All I have to do is set myself up to be raped and murdered. You can’t trick this drug, guys. If I know the threat’s not real, nothing happens. I mean, come on. Imagine I’m in police custody, trying to get them to believe my story, but the only way to prove it is to get them to drop me in the worst neighborhood in town, where I might end up breaking some guy’s neck or, you know, destroying private property. Do you really see that going well for me?”
It’s dark again inside the warehouse, but she can tell from the shapes of their bowed heads they’re studying the shadows at their feet, considering her words.
“Also, there’s another reason we need the film,” she says.
“What’s that?” Marty asks.
“It might be all you guys have if something happens to me.”
“All right now,” Marty says, closing the distance between them. He seems to have forgotten what she’s capable of until he’s curled an arm around her back. By then it’s too late to pull away without being insultingly obvious about it. But he does stiffen briefly before he begins walking her toward the ruined entrance. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you, Charley. Come on. Let’s go do your little movie shoot. We’ve only got two hours left.”
They’d agreed to do the shoot back at the safe house. When they’d first rolled up, and Kayla and Marty asked her to hang back while they cased the place, she’d had to remind them she was the one capable of breaking someone’s spine with a light shove, so why not have her go in first? With bowed heads, they’d complied. The house had turned out to be as empty as they’d left it.
Now, the shoot complete, she’s in the shower, washing off the grime of that awful bar, scrubbing her ear of the sticky film left by her assailant’s hot whiskey breath.
The strength left her a few minutes ago. Three hours after being triggered, just as she’d expected. And even though she feels newly vulnerable, there’s a comfort to knowing the pill keeps a regular schedule. That parts of it are knowable, quantifiable. It makes it seem a little less frightening than it was the night before.
Under the spray, she studies the mottled skin on her hand. She’d spent several minutes passing it back and forth through the stove’s open flame while Marty filmed. The skin should be badly discolored, but instead it looks like it’s been drawn on with a red marker and the ink has already started to fade. The effect was similar to when she pressed the spike against her palm: a riot of sudden bruising accompanied by dull pain that was mostly pressure. There’s probably some threshold, some intensity level at which the heat and the flames become unbearable. But if the first test is any indicator, it’s more than can be produced by a single stove.
Recounting her story for the unbiased lens on Marty’s phone felt therapeutic, more cathartic than repeating it to Kayla and Marty, maybe because she didn’t feel like she had to make anyone believe her. The proof was right there in her hands, in the way the flames kissed her skin. For good measure, she also bent several pieces of rebar they’d brought from the warehouse, and cracked some chunks of concrete, the latter of which Kayla and Marty convinced her to carry in from the car with the two of them flanking her like Secret Service agents so nosy neighbors couldn’t observe her impossible strength.
There’d been one other endurance test she’d wanted to try, but when she asked them to head out to the backyard with her, they just glared at her.
Good call, she thinks now. Maybe I’m not ready to try taking a bullet, either.
But there was another test they had agreed to help with.
Once they’d finished making the video, Kayla drove to a gas station and came back with a box of wine and two bottles of vodka. Charlotte has always been a lightweight—one glass of wine usually makes her powerfully dizzy. And the hard stuff makes her sick to her stomach after a few swallows. Given her past, and her grandmother’s genes, she’s always figured this for a blessing. Her weak stomach and delicate sense of balance are probably what kept her from self-medicating over the years. But they also ruled out evening libations as potential sleep aids, which made her more vulnerable to Dylan’s plot, so maybe she shouldn’t be so grateful for these metabolic quirks. Not yet anyway.
But with Zypraxon thundering through her system, she was able to drink two glasses of straight vodka without so much as a wince. Same story with the wine. As Marty and Kayla looked on in astonishment, she metabolized both bottles like they were iced water with lemon. The pill doesn’t give her just strength but a kind of temporary imperviousness to any physical limitation.
Except flying, she thinks, laughing under her breath. But maybe if I ran fast enough to get started . . .
There’s a knock on the door. It’s Marty, checking to make sure she’s OK.
A few minutes later, she’s toweling off, realizing she’s got no idea where she’s headed next and wondering if she should have been giving more thought to that than to Dylan’s deceptions and magic pills.
Is she spending the night here? The choice makes her feel suddenly exhausted, in the way everything she did while on the drug should have made her feel but didn’t.
What would the AA folks say?
One step at a time.
Which in this particular instance means it’s a better idea to change into a real outfit and not pajamas.
Kayla and Marty are waiting for her in the living room. They’ve got steaming cups of coffee, which they’re taking absent sips from as they watch Jason’s disposable phone do absolutely nothing on the coffee table between them. They’d bought a charger for the thing when they bought Charlotte’s change of clothes.
Neither of them looks the slightest bit tired, even though it’s after two in the morning.
“I don’t mean to be blunt,” Marty says, “but should you really be carrying around the cell phone of a guy who tried to rape you?”
“It’s a disposable,” Kayla said. “I looked it up online. It sells for about twenty bucks.”
“Guess that’s why it looks a decade old,” Charley says. “He probably bought it for cash. And it’s Dylan’s only way of getting in touch with me.”
“Which he hasn’t done,” Marty says. “Which is strange.”
“He seems like a pretty resourceful bastard psychopath asshole,” Kayla says. “Something tells me he’d find a way to get in touch with you even if he lost the number to Briffel’s burner.”
“We’ll get you a new phone on the way to Altamira,” Marty says.
“Altamira?” Kayla says. “Hiding out in her former hometown? That sounds like a good plan to you?”
“She doesn’t even know who she’s hiding from. How’s she gonna figure out the best place to hide? He might know where she is right now. I don’t know.”
“He knows everything,” Charlotte says quietly. “He knows everything about me. For three months, I met him once a
week, and I told him everything. He knows how I lost my virginity. He knows everything I’m afraid of. He knows what my favorite movies are, my favorite books. There’s no hiding from him. There’s no hiding from what I told him.”
“You’re not just saying this because you want to go home again?” Kayla asks.
“What am I going to do? Change my name again? Go off the grid again? Look how well it worked out the first time. I mean, here we are in the middle of . . . whatever the fuck this is. He found me before. He’ll find me again.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Kayla says. “We don’t have any evidence he targeted you because of your background. He could have been stalking that health center for anybody he thought was right for this plan of his. Any damaged, frightened woman who walked through the door. And with your background, you just turned out to be the supercharged version of what he was already looking for.”
“Which explains why he put in three months of work on you,” Marty offers.
“Maybe,” Charlotte says.
“Or maybe not,” Marty adds quietly. “Look, all I’m saying is, there’s no perfect decision here, so she might as well make the one that’s best for her.”
“And you think that’s going back to Altamira? With you?”
Kayla’s not giving in easily, but there’s less bite in her tone, and it feels to Charlotte like she’s transitioned into a cooler, analytical mode.
“The one time that Briffel asshole tried to make trouble for her in Altamira, we showed him to the freeway, and he never came back. A lot of the guys that helped me that night, they’re still there, they’re still sober, and they still do what I say.”
“Charley?” Kayla asks. “What do you want to do?”
“One thing, though, if you do decide to come back,” Marty says. “There’s something I need to take care of first.”
“Oh, Lord,” Kayla says. “What does that mean?”
Shaking his head, Marty says, “Just something weird I gotta figure out.”
“Weirder than everything else that’s happened tonight?” Kayla asks.
“I just gotta find out if it’s a coincidence or not.” To Charlotte he says, “You remember a guy named Luke Prescott?”
“Luke Prescott.” The name comes out like an involuntary grunt. Hearing it now, in the midst of all this, is like waking from a coma to be told your dog tore apart the living room.
Luke Prescott. The guy who’d treated her like she was some dark force invading their pristine small-town high school, all because she got called on more in class than he did, which was because she knew the right answer a lot more often than he did. He was a slick bastard, even at seventeen. Sometimes his strategy against her worked; other times it got his ass called to the carpet. By constantly accusing her of trying to work her past for sympathy, he was able to hang that past around her neck like a scarlet letter. Years ago she would have called him a bully. Now she thinks back on his bullshit and just finds it competitive and desperate. Luke tried to be smarter and better at everything than anyone. With her, he had just had big, obvious targets to use.
Whatever his motives, Luke was the primary reason her life in Altamira didn’t turn out to be quite as normal or pristine as she would have liked it to be. As Luanne would have liked it to be. The guy made it his job to constantly remind everyone of what had happened to her and where she’d come from, and always in a way that hinted she might have been perverted by the darkness she’d been exposed to at such a young age.
“Why are we talking about Luke Prescott right now?” Charlotte asks.
“He’s back in town,” Marty answers. “And the circumstances of his return are a little weird. And they sound a lot weirder now in light of all this.”
“Slow down. You think Luke Prescott is working with Dylan? I thought that guy would be some asshole lawyer by now.”
“Hey,” Kayla whispers.
“For the bad guys. You work for the good guys. Marty, what are you talking about?”
“Prescott’s one of Mona’s deputies now.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Apparently, he went up to San Francisco State, learned a couple different foreign languages, graduated with honors, got an MBA. Was all prepped to ace his interview for the FBI. Then for some reason he doesn’t get past the front door, and he’s back in Altamira, hanging his head and asking Mona for a job.”
“Nothing against Altamira, but that’s a pretty long fall,” Kayla says.
“Exactly,” Marty says. “And it’s suspicious.”
“You don’t think he interviewed with the FBI?” Charlotte asks.
“No, I think he did. What if the FBI’s involved in this somehow? What if he’s working for them?”
“That’s a reach, Marty,” Kayla says.
“You want to know where I was when you called me? I was at the Copper Pot with Luke. Who was asking me for your contact information so he could apologize. When’d you say this Dylan guy first approached you? About three months ago, right?”
Charlotte nods.
“That’s around when Luke first got in touch with Mona. She had a deputy set to retire, Bill Poindexter, so Luke had to wait until early this month to start.”
“That’s still a reach,” Kayla says.
“About twelve hours ago, this would have all seemed like a reach, Kayla.”
“Still,” she says, “guy comes crawling home with egg on his face. Knows he’s going to be seeing folks he was a dick to back in the day. Makes sense he would try to make amends.”
“Look, I knew Prescott. Charley knew Prescott. That kid thought he might run the FBI someday. Now there’s only two ways an arrogant know-it-all like that’s going to come crawling back home on his hands and knees. One, he knows he’s never got a shot in hell at a government job. Or two, he’s made some kind of backroom deal that guarantees him one if he does something else first.”
“I need a nap,” Kayla says. “This is making my head hurt.”
“And,” Charlotte says, “I should add that Marty also believes that space aliens have infiltrated our government at the highest levels.”
“My personal beliefs about our country’s strained relationship with extraterrestrial life is a complicated conversation for another evening,” Marty says. “The point here is that I need to make sure Luke isn’t trying to set some kind of trap with this apology business.”
“No,” Charlotte says, “I do.”
“You going to take one of your pills before you do it?” Kayla asks.
The lawyer’s penetrating glare is on her now and not Marty.
“I don’t know,” she says, averting her eyes. “I’m almost out.”
“And you’ve got big plans for the ones you have left?” Kayla asks.
“Let’s take this one step at a time,” Charlotte says, forcing herself to look into Kayla’s eyes again.
“Uh-oh,” her lawyer says with a half smile. “Looks like someone’s been bit by the superhero bug.”
“You believe me, Charley?” Marty asks.
“I believe you’re right—we have to be sure. And even if it’s bullshit, I won’t mind hearing an apology out of Luke Prescott’s mouth. The guy was a real jerk.”
“Still, try not to break his neck or throw him into a tree.”
“I won’t be able to if he doesn’t attack me,” Charlotte says.
Marty stands.
“Now?” Kayla asks. “You’re gonna head out now?”
“Better to arrive in the dark, when most of the town’s asleep,” he says. “As for me, I probably won’t be sleeping for the next five years anyway, so . . . You ready, Charley?”
She hadn’t thought it all the way through, but she’s relieved to have an objective, a direction. And after the dislocation of the past twenty-four hours, the prospect of some kind of homecoming, a return to the familiar, slows her heart rate some, makes her feel as if she’s coming to rest on something soft.
So she stands, too.
And then Kayla
stands, and suddenly the three of them are staring at each other as if they all feel like they’ve forgotten some important piece of business. But Charlotte can tell the desire to keep moving is strong in all of them, driven in no small part, she fears, by a desire to leave all the dread that seems to radiate from this little prison of a house.
“All right,” Kayla says, clearing her throat. “I guess I’ll head back to the city. See if whoever’s investigating the biker blast has made any noise about your house.”
“Thank you. Seriously, Kayla, I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done.”
“Well, when you see my bill, maybe you’ll feel differently.”
“Jesus Christ,” Marty grumbles. “Really?”
“No. Not really.” Kayla rolls her eyes. “But don’t thank me yet. I’m not done. None of us are.”
She hugs Charlotte quickly but firmly, as if she fears committing to the embrace fully will unleash some storm of further emotion that will do them all in. She offers a smile. She’s halfway out the door when Charlotte says, “Call me when you get home safe.”
“On what?” Kayla asks. “Jason’s burner? No, thanks. I don’t call dead people.”
“Call me,” Marty says. “I’m listed.”
“Let’s not move too fast, Marty.” As Kayla pulls the door shut behind her, she points to the electronic peephole viewer on the wall next to her. Marty steps forward, makes sure the door closes all the way, and watches as she makes her way to her BMW.
“You two would make a cute couple,” Charlotte says.
“Yeah, we’re a regular Mothra and Godzilla.”
18
“This is a mistake, Cole.”
Cole looks at the paper cup of coffee trembling in the armrest next to him. He’s pretty wired already, so maybe his director of security is right. Maybe he should lay off the caffeine. But surely that’s not what Ed means. The man wouldn’t care if Cole were guzzling whiskey on the way to this meeting.
It’s the meeting he objects to.
And he’s probably also a little pissed Cole refused to let several well-armed members of their private security team travel alongside them in the leather-upholstered passenger compartment of this spacious helicopter. But he’d never say so directly. Ed’s nothing if not loyal, one of the only holdovers from his father’s era who’s never treated Cole with anything less than respect.
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