woman in the pant suit. “Stackhouse, sure. Has to be. I need to get in touch with him. How do I do that?”
Mrs. Sigsby only stared at him. Tim knelt beside Luke. What he saw in the pant suit woman’s eyes was pain, disbelief, and hate. He couldn’t be sure which of those predominated, but if forced to guess, he would have said hate. It was always the strongest, at least in the short term.
“Luke—”
Luke paid no attention. All of his attention was focused on the wounded woman. “I need to get in touch with him, Mrs. Sigsby. He’s holding my friends prisoner.”
“They’re not prisoners, they’re property!”
Wendy joined them. “I’m thinking you must have been absent on the day your class learned about Lincoln freeing the slaves, ma’am.”
“Come in here, shooting up our town,” Annie said. “Guess you found out, didn’t you?”
“Hush, Annie,” Wendy said.
“I need to get in touch with him, Mrs. Sigsby. I need to make a deal. Tell me how to do it.”
When she didn’t reply, Luke jammed his thumb into the bullet hole in her red pants. Mrs. Sigsby shrieked. “Don’t, oh don’t, that HURTS!”
“Zap-sticks hurt!” Luke shouted at her. Glass shards rattled across the floor, forming small creeks. Annie stared, eyes wide with fascination. “Injections hurt! Being half-drowned hurts! And having your mind ripped open?” He jammed his thumb against the bullet wound again. The door to the holding area slammed shut, making them all jump. “Having your mind destroyed ? That hurts most of all!”
“Make him stop!” Mrs. Sigsby screamed. “Make him stop hurting me!”
Wendy bent to pull Luke away. Tim shook his head and took her arm. “No.”
“It’s the conspiracy,” Annie whispered to Drummer. Her eyes were huge. “That woman works for the conspiracy. They all do! I knew it all along, I said it, and nobody believed me!”
The ringing in Tim’s ears was starting to fade. He heard no sirens, which didn’t surprise him. He guessed the Staties might not even know there had been a shoot-out in DuPray, at least not yet. And anyone calling 911 would have reached not the South Carolina Highway Patrol but the Fairlee County sheriff—this shambles, in other words. He glanced at his watch and saw with disbelief that the world had been rightside up only five minutes ago. Six, at most.
“Mrs. Sigsby, is it?” he asked, kneeling beside Luke.
She said nothing.
“You are in a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Sigsby. I advise you to tell Luke here what he wants to know.”
“I need medical attention.”
Tim shook his head. “What you need is to do some talking. Then we’ll see about medical attention.”
“Luke was telling the truth,” Wendy said to no one in particular. “About everything.”
“Didn’t I just say that?” Annie almost crowed.
Doc Roper pushed his way into the office. “Holy Jesus on Resurrection Morn,” he said. “Who’s still alive? How badly is that woman hurt? Was it some kind of terrorist thing?”
“They’re torturing me,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “If you are a doctor, as that black bag you’re carrying would seem to suggest, you have an obligation to make them stop.”
Tim said, “The boy you treated was running away from this woman and the raiding party she brought with her, Doc. I don’t know how many are dead out there, but we lost five, including the sheriff, and it was on this woman’s orders.”
“We’ll deal with that later,” Roper said. “Right now I need to take care of her. She’s bleeding. And somebody needs to call a goddam ambulance.”
Mrs. Sigsby looked at Luke, bared her teeth in a smile that said I win, then looked back at Roper. “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you.”
“There’s a biddy with sand in her craw,” Annie said, and not without admiration. “Fella I shot in the foot, maybe not so much. I’d go see him, were I you. I think he’d sell his own grammaw into white slavery for a shot of morphine.”
Mrs. Sigsby’s eyes widened in alarm. “Leave him alone. I forbid you to talk to him.”
Tim got to his feet. “Forbid and be damned. I don’t know who you work for, lady, but I believe your days of kidnapping children are over. Luke, Wendy, come with me.”
38
House lights had come on all over town, and DuPray’s main street was full of milling people. The bodies of the dead were being covered by whatever came to hand. Someone had taken Orphan Annie’s sleeping bag out of the alley and draped it over Robin Lecks.