long steel box from one of them. From the back of another van came holster-belts, which the woman handed around to everyone except for the sportcoat man, another man with short blond hair, and the woman in the flower-dress. The steel box was opened, and from this came a couple of long guns that were not hunting rifles. They were what Annie Ledoux thought of as school shooter guns.
The woman in the flower-dress put a small handgun in her purse. The man beside her stuck a bigger one in his belt at the small of his back, then dropped the tail of his shirt over it. The others holstered up. They looked like a raiding party. Hell, they were a raiding party. Annie didn’t see how they could be anything else.
A normally wired person—one who didn’t get her nightly news from George Allman, for instance—might have merely stared in dismayed confusion, wondering what on earth a bunch of armed men and women might be doing in a sleepy South Carolina town where there was only a single bank, and that one locked up for the night. A normally wired person might have whipped out her cell phone and called 911. Annie, however, was not a normally wired person, and she knew exactly what these armed men and women, at least ten of them and maybe more, were up to. They hadn’t come in the black SUVs she would have expected, but they were here for the boy. Of course they were.
Calling 911 to alert the folks in the sheriff’s station wasn’t an option in any case, because she wouldn’t have carried a cell phone even if she’d been able to afford one. Cell phones shot radiation into your head, any fool knew that, and besides, they could track you that way. So Annie continued along the path, running now, until she reached the back of the DuPray Barber Shop two buildings down. A rickety flight of stairs led to the apartment above. Annie climbed them as fast as she could, holding up her serape and the long skirt beneath so she wouldn’t trip and take a tumble. At the top, she hammered on the door until she saw Corbett Denton through the ragged curtain, shuffling toward her with his big belly leading the way. He pushed the curtain aside and peered out, his bald head gleaming beneath the light of the kitchen’s fly-specked overhead globe.
“Annie? What do you want? I’m not giving you anything to eat, if that’s—”
“There’s men,” she said, panting to catch her breath. She could have added there were also women, but just saying men sounded more fearsome, at least to her. “They’re parked behind the Gem!”
“Go away, Annie. I don’t have time for your foolish—”
“There’s a boy! I think those men mean to go to the station and take him away! I think there’s going to be shooting!”
“What the hell are you—”
“Please, Drummer, please! They had machine guns, I think, and that boy, he’s a nice boy!”
He opened the door. “Let me smell your breath.”
She seized him by the front of his pajama shirt. “I haven’t had a drink in ten years! Please, Drummer, they came for the boy!”
He sniffed, frowning now. “No booze. Are you hallucinating?”
“No!”
“You said machine guns. Do you mean automatic rifles, like AR-15s?” Drummer Denton was beginning to look interested.
“Yes! No! I don’t know! But you have guns, I know you do! You should bring them!”
“You’re out of your mind,” he said, and that was when Annie began to cry. Drummer had known her most of his life, had even gone stepping with her a time or two when they were much younger, and he had never seen her cry. She really believed something was going on, and Drummer decided what the hell. He had only been doing what he did every night, which was thinking about the basic stupidity of life.
“All right, let’s go look.”
“And your guns? You’ll bring your guns?”
“Hell no. I said we’re going to look.”
“Drummer, please!”
“Look,” he said. “That’s all I’m willing to do. Take it or leave it.”
With no other choice, Orphan Annie took it.
25
“Oh my dear God, what am I looking at?”
Wendy’s words were muffled, because she had a hand over her mouth. No one answered. They were staring at the screen, Luke as frozen with wonder and horror as the rest.
The back half of Back Half—Ward A, Gorky Park—was a long, high room that looked to Luke like the sort of abandoned factory where shoot-outs