Abra opened her mouth to speak. Her father stayed her with a raised hand.
“I believe that you believe,” he went on. “All three of you. And I believe that some group of dangerously deranged individuals might—I say might—be after my daughter. I’d certainly go along with your idea, Mr. Torrance, if it didn’t mean bringing Abra. I won’t use my kid as bait.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” Dan said. He was remembering how Abra’s presence in the loading dock area behind the ethanol plant had turned him into a kind of human cadaver dog, and the way his vision had sharpened when Abra opened her eyes inside his head. He had even cried her tears, although a DNA test might not have shown it.
“What do you mean?”
“Your daughter doesn’t have to be with us to be with us. She’s unique that way. Abra, do you have a friend you could visit tomorrow after school? Maybe even stay with overnight?”
“Sure, Emma Deane.” He could see by the excited sparkle in her eyes that she already understood what he had in mind.
“Bad idea,” Dave said. “I won’t leave her unguarded.”
“Abra was being guarded all the time we were in Iowa,” John said.
Abra’s eyebrows shot up and her mouth dropped open a little. Dan was glad to see this. He was sure she could have picked his brain any old time she wanted to, but she had done as he asked.
Dan took out his cell and speed-dialed. “Billy? Why don’t you come on in here and join the party.”
Three minutes later, Billy Freeman stepped into the Stone house. He was wearing jeans, a red flannel shirt with tails hanging almost to his knees, and a Teenytown Railroad cap, which he doffed before shaking hands with Dave and Abra.
“You helped him with his stomach,” Abra said, turning to Dan. “I remember that.”
“You’ve been picking my brains after all,” Dan said.
She flushed. “Not on purpose. Never. Sometimes it just happens.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“All respect to you, Mr. Freeman,” Dave said, “but you’re a little old for bodyguard duty, and this is my daughter we’re talking about.”
Billy raised his shirttails and revealed an automatic pistol in a battered black holster. “One-nine-one-one Colt,” he said. “Full auto. World War II vintage. This is old, too, but it’ll do the job.”
“Abra?” John asked. “Do you think bullets can kill these things, or is it only childhood diseases?”
Abra was looking at the gun. “Oh yes,” she said. “Bullets would work. They’re not ghostie people. They’re as real as we are.”
John looked at Dan and said, “I don’t suppose you have a gun?”
Dan shook his head and looked at Billy. “I’ve got a deer rifle I could loan you,” Billy said.
“That . . . might not be good enough,” Dan said.
Billy considered. “Okay, I know a guy down in Madison. He buys and sells bigger stuff. Some of it much bigger.”
“Oh Jesus,” Dave said. “This just gets worse.” But he didn’t say anything else.
Dan said, “Billy, could we reserve the train tomorrow, if we wanted to have a sunset picnic at Cloud Gap?”
“Sure. People do it all the time, ’specially after Labor Day, when the rates go down.”
Abra smiled. It was one Dan had seen before. It was her angry smile. He wondered if the True Knot might have had second thoughts if they knew their target had a smile like that in her repertoire.
“Good,” she said. “Good.”
“Abra?” Dave looked bewildered and a little frightened. “What?”
Abra ignored him for the moment. It was Dan she spoke to. “They deserve it for what they did to the baseball boy.” She wiped at her mouth with her cupped hand, as if to erase that smile, but when she pulled the hand away the smile was still there, her thinned lips showing the tips of her teeth. She clenched the hand into a fist.
“They deserve it.”
PART THREE
MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CLOUD GAP
1
EZ Mail Services was in a strip mall, between a Starbucks and O’Reilly Auto Parts. Crow entered just after 10 a.m., presented his Henry Rothman ID, signed for a package the size of a shoebox, and walked back out with it under his arm. In spite of the air-conditioning, the Winnebago was rank with the stench of Barry’s sickness, but they had grown used to it and hardly smelled it at all. The box bore the return address of a plumbing supply company in Flushing, New York. There actually was such a company, but it had had