from the storm cellar after one of the worst tornadoes in West Texas history tore through downtown Lubbock and reduced her neighborhood to splinters. At first, she thought her mother was floating high above the earth, suspended by an invisible force, her body eerily lit by the explosions of blue sparks from the battered power pole nearby.
Another few flashes from the transformer and Marjorie saw that her mother had been speared by a dozen leaf-stripped branches of the cedar elm tree. Like Saint Sebastian and his arrows. And one of those branches had been run straight through her mother’s throat, a sight that almost sent Marjorie to her knees. But prayer, she realized, was not the language of the god who had sent her this vision. This god taught you how to channel the darkness of men and storms for your own benefit, and he had used both of those things to set Marjorie free. This god spoke in thunder alone.
He’d silenced her mother, and in this was the key to Marjorie Payne’s liberation.
The phone is ringing. Tinny and distant, coming from the house.
The lure of talking to another one of her boys is so strong she’s halfway back to the house before she becomes aware of the pain in her hip. But even as she hurries through the dark house, it feels like the exhaustion of killing the two tweakers has been pumped from her system. Then she gets to the phone and finds herself breathless again.
“Good evening, ma’am. Is Sheryl there?”
It’s Jonah, the handsomest of her boys. If Cyrus is the smarty-pants and Wally the sweetheart, Jonah’s the soulful one, the one prone to fits of darkness and too much self-reflection and, in her opinion, too much book reading. Jonah, out of all of them, is the one who struggles mightily with the gifts of focus and direction she’s provided them for most of their adult lives. It’s because he’s the handsomest and therefore perpetually distracted and deceived by the women who desire him sexually. For him, the added benefit of a planting is that it will purge him of natural urges he might accidentally unleash on the women he insists on sleeping with. She’s explained this to him many times, and each time he seems to get it. Then, a year later, he’s mired in the same self-doubt. Given the demons that haunt his mind, she’s always most relieved by his call.
“I’m sorry, did you say Sheryl?”
“That’s correct, ma’am. Sheryl Peterson. She gave me this number.”
Peterson. Good. Everything’s going well on his end.
“Well, that’s odd. Could you read me the number, because there’s no Sheryl here?”
“Sure.”
She grabs a pen that’s sitting by the phone and writes it down. As with Wally a little while earlier, the first three and last two numbers are the same as hers—the middle five are the seedling’s height and weight. This one’s 5ʹ9ʺ and 180 pounds.
“Sorry, son, but sounds like Sheryl gave you the wrong number.”
“Ah, well. Thanks for your patience, ma’am.”
“Sure thing. ’Night, now.”
She hangs up. The call with Jonah has restored her some, even if the boy did sound as exhausted as she currently feels.
26
Highway 287, near Harrold, Texas
Charlotte should be long past the point of being amazed by the technology available to Cole Graydon and his business partners, but by the time she discovers the third camera hidden inside the cargo area of Mattingly’s truck, she can’t help but shake her head and exhale in a long, slow hiss.
It’s not a camera so much as a patch of translucent gel-like material. The tiny swirl of milk-colored wiring inside only became visible when she pressed the lens of Luke’s halogen flashlight almost flush with the metal wall and began moving the beam in slow sweeps over it. There’s no lens she can see, so it’s probably less of a camera and more of a motion detector that uses vibrations to send some sort of digital image back to Kansas Command.
However it works, it doesn’t belong here and sure as hell isn’t Cyrus Mattingly’s.
Instead of trying to peel it from the wall, she punches it, leaving a fist-size crater in the wall.
Bound to the gurney, Mattingly yelps and sucks snot through his nose.
If she’s already enraged Cole’s business partners by defying their order to stand down, no doubt they’re currently screaming bloody murder over her casual destruction of another several million dollars’ worth of their secret technology.
As if he’s an obstacle on par with an ottoman in a crowded living room,