As on those other rare evenings during which they dined mostly in silence, Daddy resorted to an audiobook for entertainment. They couldn’t listen to an entire novel during one dinner, and neither of them wanted to break a rattling-good story into like twenty dinners. So on these occasions, they listened to the same novel to which they had listened an amazing number of times before, The Princess Bride by William Goldman. They remembered every turn in the story better than they recalled many of the details of their own past, but the oft-told tale was never boring. No bullsugar. The story really and truly delighted them so much that, when they came to certain scenes, they recited the dialogue or the funnier lines of text in sync with the audio narrator, though they had never made an effort to memorize any of it.
Through salad and pizza, they listened to the second and third chapters. The third was titled “The Courtship,” in which the vile Prince Humperdinck proposed marriage to a very beautiful milkmaid named Buttercup, whereupon she said that she had loved once before, it had gone badly, and she could never love another. Not accustomed to rejection, the prince seasoned his proposal with a threat.
Three voices—those of the narrator, Amity, and her father—served as the voice of the prince: “So you can either marry me and be the richest and most powerful woman in a thousand miles and give turkeys away at Christmas and provide me a son, or you can die in terrible pain in the very near future. Make up your own mind.”
And Buttercup said, “I’ll never love you.”
Said the prince, “I wouldn’t want it if I had it.”
Replied Buttercup, “Then by all means let us marry.”
At the end of the chapter, Amity and her dad laughed together, which was a fine thing, though it was also a strange thing because, among their favorite fantasy adventures, The Princess Bride was like no other. The story lacked a happy ending. It was a satire filled with stupidity, treachery, suffering, loss, and death—all of which were played for laughs. Few girls short of their twelfth year would take such delight in it. However, Amity was smart and precocious, and years earlier she had learned the primary lesson of The Princess Bride: As wondrous as life was, it was also full of sadness, and the best way to get past the sad parts and enjoy all the rest was to find the humor in even the darkness. Laughter wasn’t just a medicine for melancholy,
but also a sword raised against evil. A laugh said, You can’t scare me into surrender, I’ll fight you hard to the end.
She hoped that, in desperate straits, she could laugh in the face of pure evil. Until today, she’d not had much experience of evil. Of sadness, yes, she’d known her share of that, but not the kind of evil that turned your blood to ice water. She supposed she had done all right in that nasty version of Suavidad Beach, with the commie fascists and Good Boy and all. But worse might be coming.
With his paternal sonar sensing fear in the depths of his daughter, Daddy said, “Are you okay, honey?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m good, I’m cool.” But it was then, for the first time in a while, she became aware of the three teeth and the fragment of jawbone in a pocket of her jeans.
38
Although he intended eventually to split to a better world, there were things about this one of which John Falkirk approved.
In this age of ever-increasing state surveillance of its citizens, even a town of forty thousand, like Suavidad Beach, had cameras monitoring traffic at all major intersections, in municipal parks, as well as in and around public buildings. Local authorities archived the video for sixty days or six months or a year, but it was transmitted in real time to the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center, where it would be forever available, filed under the community’s name and accessible by date.
A year earlier, Foot-Long Frankfurt had planted a rootkit in the NSA’s computer system, allowing him and Selena to enter by a back door and swim through its ocean of data without drawing the attention of the IT-security forces. Together they had tracked Jeffrey and Amity Coltrane from Constance Yardley’s neighborhood through the heart of town.
Selena had edited sequential bits of video into a twitchy stream of images. Falkirk stood behind her, watching her computer screen, as the radio repairman and his mouse-keeper brat eventually made their way to the town library on Oleander Street.
“They were there for eight minutes,” Selena said. “And here they come.”
Coltrane and his daughter exited the library and turned north on Oleander. He seemed to be carrying a book. A traffic cam at the first major intersection showed them turning east on Oak Hollow Road. They were heading home to their funky house on Shadow Canyon Lane, about a mile from where the last camera lost track of them.
“For some reason, Ed Harkenbach entrusted the key to Coltrane,” Foot-Long Frankfurt said, “and Coltrane used it, and they were under attack by the Bestpet when they ported back to Prime. I’d bet my dick on it.”
“Winning that bet,” said Falkirk, “would be like taking home the throwaway from a Brith Milah.”
Selena laughed, and Foot-Long asked what a Brith Milah was, and she said, “The Jewish rite of circumcision.”
To his credit, Foot-Long laughed and said, “Man, I owe you for that.”
Falkirk wished he hadn’t said such a thing, not because he gave a shit about hurting Frankfurt’s feelings, but because it might be mistaken for camaraderie, might suggest he was one of them. He was not. He was singular. He’d known he was better than all of them, better than the ruck of humanity, had known it for twenty-one years, ever since he was fifteen, when he murdered a classmate at boarding school and got away with it, attracting no suspicion whatsoever.
Without further comment, he stepped out of the motor home and walked to a black Suburban parked nearby. Vince Canker sat behind the wheel, Louis Wong in the front passenger seat. Both men were eating deli sandwiches, washing them down with beer.
Falkirk slid onto the back seat. “We’re going to move hard on Coltrane. But not for hours yet. Finish your meal. I need to put the best team together and take the bastard when he’s least expecting it. We’ll slam him when he’s sleeping, after midnight.”
Canker, who had the body of a mob enforcer and a face hard enough to break the ram of a junkyard auto compacter, believed that he possessed a low-burning psychic power that one day would suddenly flash brighter. He said, “I got a funny thing going here, like a far voice from the Other Side, from beyond the veil, you know, telling me this here is the night, this here is the time, we find the key tonight.”
Wong swallowed a wad of sandwich. “You heard a voice before.”
“Not this here voice. No. This is another voice.”
“You recognize who it is?”
“It’s real faint, but I think it’s my mother’s voice.”