Whatever might be out there in the night didn’t matter. The world was proving far more mysterious than even I had heretofore imagined, but that didn’t matter, either.
The task that I needed to perform was the same task that I had needed to perform since I first saw that vision of burning children earlier in the day. The thing to understand is that you have to do what you have to do, always and without complaint.
That’s the way.
Thirty-one
IN THE THIRD-FLOOR HALLWAY, THE CEILING LIGHTS were cycling brighter, dimmer, brighter, but there wasn’t another pretty, yellow-eyed chin-licking Goth-girl maniac or the equivalent waiting for me. That seemed to be a good sign. Stay positive.
I returned to Room 4, opened the door this time, and walked boldly into the temporary prison where the seventeen children were being watched over by two men.
When I saw that a felt-tip pen had been used to draw a line of hieroglyphics across the brow of each child, I recalled the severed heads in the breakfronts, and had to remind myself to stay positive. But the abhorrence, the hatred of corruption and the detestation of those who ate at the trough of corruption, which I would need if I were to lead the captives safely out of here, did not need to be ginned up; I was almost wild with a righteous hatred and knew that I must get a leash and muzzle on it to avoid reckless action that would ensure the children’s death and mine. I dared not let a trace of contempt color my voice or a shadow of loathing darken my face.
The two guards were absurdly handsome, coiffed as if they had a fetish for hair. They looked like Ken dolls that had been infused with life by a malevolent force, had dismembered Barbie, and had come here to take vengeance on these children for having spent years, as dolls, being dressed up in outfits that humiliated them.
The only pieces of furniture in the room were two straight-backed chairs. There were two floor lamps with pleated-silk shades, one in each half of the room, and they throbbed like the lights in the hallway and in Room 6. One of the Kens, a blond hunk with chiseled features, sat in a chair, holding a cattle prod across his lap. He wore a sweater that depicted Kermit the Frog in a Santa hat, overlaid with a shoulder holster and pistol.
“Contumax,” I said, pumping my fist in the air.
The other Ken, who wore a Rudolph sweater and also had a gun in a shoulder rig, stood at the window, on the farther side of the large room, watching the preparations for the festivities. He resembled the actor Hugh Grant if Hugh Grant were like three times better-looking than he’d been in his prime. If the two Kens had been close together, I would have been sure of dropping them without taking return fire, but this situation made me nervous. Besides, I didn’t want to shoot at a guy standing by the window, in case I blew out one of the panes and alerted the people on the deck below.
Ken #2 answered my “Contumax” with “Potestas” and a lame fist pump, but Ken #1 just wanted to know when the fornicating action was going to fornicating begin, though the word he used wasn’t fornicating. I said that my name was Lucius and I was from Arizona. Indicating my weaponry, I said that I was part of the show tonight, that I was a friend of Jinx’s, and that we were looking for her, because the action couldn’t begin without her. Ken #2 said that Jinx was probably outside somewhere, getting it on with one of the Dobermans, and Ken #1 said he couldn’t wait to see the show that witchy bitch was going to put on, she was always over the top, whereupon Ken #2 said Jinx had superdelicious mammaries, with megabounce, though he didn’t use the word mammaries. Ken #1 said that he liked her mammaries and her cool black fingernails but that the yellow contact lenses were just vampire-movie stupid, and Ken #2 agreed that the contacts were stupid and said that the only mammaries more superdelicious than Jinx’s were Nedra’s, to which Ken #1 replied that he shouldn’t have eaten those fornicating wasabi shrimp because now he had fornicating heartburn, by which time I realized that even head-collecting satanists who performed human sacrifices and who lived without rules could be dull conversationalists.
The captives sat on the floor, in a large semicircle, the three Payton children among them, all ten years old or younger, eight boys and nine girls. Some were numb with terror, some twitchy, and others appeared to be emotionally drained, exhausted. They must have cried themselves dry. Two had a sullen and defiant attitude; they might have resisted or tried to flee and been badly hurt, except that each of the seventeen was firmly linked to the next, wrist to wrist, with eighteen-inch lengths of tightly knotted red-satin ribbon, and this chain-gang arrangement hampered them.
The lights stopped pulsing. Whatever presence had disturbed the night by its approach had fully arrived, and the night had adjusted to it.
Annoyed with me even though I had been entirely cordial, Ken #1 said, “Listen, man, I’ll tell you what I told the others who’ve come sniffing around. We can’t let you take one of these [fornicating] little muffins into the [fornicating] bathroom for a taste. They have to be pure … for later. Besides, they’ve all just had a piss before we tied them, and now we can’t untie any ’cause soon, when we hear the gong, we have to lead them out to the [fornicating] stage.”
“Her or him,” Ken #2 said.
Ken #1 said, “What?”
“Her or him,” Ken #2 repeated. “We can’t let Lucius here get it on with one of the girls or one of the boys.”
“Man, that’s exactly just what I said,” Ken #1 declared, further annoyed.
“No, what you told him was that we can’t let him take her into the bathroom for a taste.”
After a few words of blasphemy, Ken #1 said, “Him was implied when I said her.”
“Maybe you implied it, but maybe he didn’t infer it.”
“What the hell’s that mean?”
Ken #1 asked. “When I said ‘taste,’ I didn’t mean taste, either, but Lucius knew what I was implying.” He looked up at me. “Didn’t you [fornicating] know what I was implying?”
“Absolutely. But that’s not what I came here for.”
Ken #1’s sneer was sharp enough to peel an apple. “Yeah, right.”
“No, really. Rob sent me up here to do something.”
“Rob who? There’s ninety people here tonight, and I know like three Robs. There’s at least twenty people I haven’t met before, and for all I know every [fornicating] one of them is Rob.”
Ken #2 said, “Except Rob Cornell is actually Robert, but he just doesn’t like Bob, so he calls himself Rob.”
Before Ken #1 could employ his profane vocabulary even more colorfully than before, I said to the Ken at the window, “I’ll need your help with this.”
“With what?”
“With what Rob Burkett sent me up here to do.”
Stepping away from the window, Ken #2 said, “Why didn’t you say Rob Burkett in the first place?”
Getting up from his chair, cattle prod in his right hand, Ken #1 said, “Shit, Lucius, you know how Rob is. He’s an office guy, not a field guy. He wouldn’t have known what to do if he’d been there in Vegas last night. So it got messy. But we still got those four kids.”
I remembered what Chet, the customer in the diner, told us: The kidnappers in Vegas murdered the parents to get their four children.
Looking concerned as he joined us, Ken #2 said, “Who would’ve thought a milksop Baptist minister and his wife would be carrying concealed weapons?”
Ken #1 sought my sympathy: “Hey, man, the TV news said that [fornicating] preacher and that bitch wife of his had permits to carry. What kind of crazy government bureaucrat asshole licenses [fornicating] preachers to walk around with [fornicating] pistols under their suit coats?”