Devoted Page 3

  7

  For a few hours, Dorothy phased in and out of sleep, her hand always on Kipp, either still or caressing.

  He remained awake, alert to her condition, asking only for another minute of her company, another and another.

  Then she passed away.

  Kipp smelled his mistress leaving first her flesh and then the room.

  He cried the only way that his kind could cry, spilling not a tear, but issuing a series of thin, miserable whimpers.

  In tears, for she had loved Dorothy, Rosa said, “Oh, sweet Kipp, please stop, please don’t, you sound so pathetic, you’re breaking my heart twice.”

  But for the longest while, he could not stop, because Dorothy had gone where he couldn’t follow.

  He was not merely alone now. He was reduced to half of who he had been.

  8

  Woody never needed more than five hours of sleep. Perhaps he’d slept more when he’d been a fat-cheeked baby, but though he had an exceptional memory, he could recall nothing of his infancy other than a mobile that hung over his crib: colorful Lucite birds—coral pink, yellow, sapphire blue—circling around and around, casting cheerful prismatic patterns on the walls. Maybe the mobile was why, all these years later, he sometimes dreamed that he could fly.

  Medical authorities unanimously agreed that everyone needed eight hours of sleep every night. Less sack time supposedly led to difficulty focusing the mind, disordered thought processes. Most people who wound up as vagrants or embezzlers or serial killers had perhaps been shaped by sleep deprivation. That was a theory, anyway. In Woody’s case, however, if he languished in bed too long, that left him fuzzy-headed, with a lingering attention deficit. At 3:50 a.m., his eyelids flipped up with an almost audible click, and he became awake, with no chance whatsoever of falling back into sleep.

  This embarrassed him. He was different from other people in half a gajillion ways. If only he had needed eight hours in the sheets, he would have been a little less alien.

  On this Wednesday morning, Woody did what he always did on arising. He had his routines. Routines were his salvation. The world was vast and complex, part of a larger and even more complex solar system, an enormous galaxy, an infinite universe—trillions of stars!—and he didn’t want to think too much about that. There were uncountable choices that were yours to make, innumerable things that could happen to you. The options could paralyze you with indecision, and all the threats could petrify you with fear. Routines made the infinite finite and manageable. So he took his usual four-minute shower and dressed and went quietly downstairs.

  He was allowed to prepare his own breakfast cereal and toast, but it was too early to eat.

  Anyway, he liked to have breakfast with his mother when she got up for the day. He never spoke a word as they ate, but he enjoyed listening to her. Sometimes she didn’t say much, either, and that was okay, too, as long as she wasn’t quiet because she was sad.

  He always knew when she was sad. Her sadness passed through him like windblown sleet, and he became chilled into sadness, too, which he otherwise never was.

  From a kitchen drawer, he retrieved a Bell and Howell Tac Light and his trusty Attwood signal horn. The latter was a small aerosol can with a red plastic Klaxon on top, which could produce an earsplitting WAAAAAHHHHH that reliably scared off potentially dangerous animals, though he had rarely seen any of those and had only used the horn twice.

  Thus equipped, he stepped to the security alarm keypad next to the back door. He entered the four numbers, and the recorded voice said, “System is disarmed.” The volume was turned low so that his mother wouldn’t be awakened by anything but the alarm itself.

  The back porch offered a pair of teak chairs with thick blue cushions, a little table between them, a bench swing hanging from stainless-steel chains, and darkness all around.

  Woody wasn’t afraid of the night.

  The night could be magical. Cool things had happened to him in the dark morning hours while his mother still slept. Once he’d seen a fat opossum waddling across the lawn, trailed by her babies, all their tiny lantern eyes shining with curiosity when they saw him. He had seen foxes and countless rabbits and families of deer. The only thing he’d needed to scare away with a long blast of the horn had been raccoons that approached him hissing and baring their teeth.

  His faithful obedience had earned him the right to sit on the porch at night as long as he was careful to leave the door unlocked to facilitate a quick retreat. He wasn’t permitted to venture into the yard alone. It was a deep yard, almost three acres, and at the farther end waited the forest.

  Animals more dangerous than mean raccoons lived in the forest. Mother Nature wasn’t really motherly. Mom said nature was more like a bipolar aunt who treated you kindly most of the time but, now and then, could be a real witch, conjuring killer storms and vicious animals, like big toothy mountain lions that, if given a menu, would always order tender children.

  He sat on the porch steps. His mother expected that he would sit in one of the chairs or on the swing, or stand at the railing. But the steps put him closer to the action, if there should be any action, and he was still living by the rules, the primary one of which was that he should not go into the yard. The Tac Light lay beside him, unused, and he kept the air horn in his right hand.

  The moon floated in the west, not yet behind those mountains, as radiant as some exotic jellyfish in the sea of space, and the sky twinkled with more stars than Woody could count in a lifetime. After his father’s death—murder!—they moved from a busy town in Silicon Valley, which his mother said was more of a concept than it was a real place, and they came here to the outskirts of the community of Pinehaven, in Pinehaven County, where no city-light pollution dimmed the stars.

  Woody was on the steps not more than ten minutes when the three deer materialized out of the darkness: a buck bearing a magnificent rack of antlers, a doe, and a fawn that was maybe five months old and still wore a spotted coat. He’d lose his spots in winter, as he finished growing into an adult.

  Deer didn’t always travel in families, often in small herds and equally often alone, but the previous year, a family like this had visited almost nightly for three months, drawn by the sweet grass of the lawn. Woody had come to know them, quartered apples for them, and put the fruit on the porch steps and retreated to a chair. Gradually they had become confident enough to eat the apples off the bottom step while he had sat on the top one, and eventually, with their soft lips, they had taken the apples from his hands.

  These three visitors were not those from the prior year. Woody remembered the markings of those adults, and these were different. The deer were aware of him, and they were cautious, remaining at a distance as they grazed, their shadowy forms vaguely patinaed with moonlight.

  Sometimes he wondered what had happened to that other family, if one or more had been killed by hunters, if perhaps a mountain lion had gotten the doe or her fawn. Keeping a family together and safe was really, really hard.

  He didn’t dare go into the kitchen and quarter a few apples and try to lure these new deer to the steps. Just by getting up he might scare them away. If they returned a few times and became accustomed to his presence, he could begin to try to make friends with them.

  For the time being, watching them was pleasure enough. They enchanted him. They were beautiful and graceful, though neither their beauty nor grace was what most moved him. What fascinated, enthralled, spellbound him was that they were three, together and safe and grazing under the stars, unafraid in this world of fear, looking as though they would be together forever.

  The night lay so quiet that Woody imagined he could hear the stars burning light-years away, though of course what he heard was the circulation of his blood through the capillaries in his ears.

  He whispered, “Hello.”

 
Although the boy’s voice had been soft, the buck raised its antlered head to stare at him.

  They regarded each other for a long moment, and then Woody whispered, “I love you,” because the deer couldn’t spoil the moment with the wrong words and because the gulf between their species ensured that neither of them could embarrass himself or the other.

  9

  Megan Bookman was awakened by the voice of the security system when Woody entered the disarming code. The volume was low through most of the house, so that he would not worry about waking her, but louder here in the master suite, to ensure that she would always know when he had gone to the back porch.

  She got out of bed and eased through the gloom to the Crestron unit embedded in the wall. The screen brightened when she touched it, and she selected the word Cameras from the menu. Fourteen two-camera modules were installed at points around the exterior of the house, one camera that could record either by daylight or outdoor lamps and the other gathering infrared images when, as now, there was neither sun nor landscape lighting.

  The system translated the red images into wavelengths that were nearest 555 nanometers, the green part of the spectrum to which the human eye was most sensitive. Nevertheless, the video offered little detail. Although she could see Woody sitting on the top step, gazing out at the backyard and the forest beyond, he was a pale-green form among shadows of various shades of green, as if he might be a forest spirit drawn by curiosity to this human habitat.

  He would have his Attwood signal horn and Tac Light. He never forgot those things.

  At the first suggestion of a threat, he would use the horn and bolt into the house. Megan had no concern that Woody might fail to recognize a threat. He feared strangers and anything with which his routine had not familiarized him.

  Pinehaven wasn’t a hotbed of crime. Even the national drug epidemic had thus far not seriously sickened this quiet backwater. Their property was just beyond the limits of the town in which she had been born and raised, and she had come to feel safe here.

  Leaving Woody alone on the back porch wasn’t ideal. But he was eleven, and he cherished what independence his condition allowed him. She couldn’t be at his side around the clock, and it wouldn’t be good for either of them if she kept him close with a tether of fear as inhibiting as a leash.

  She returned to bed, where she would most likely need half an hour to go back to sleep.

  A small gun safe was attached to the bed rail. On retiring each night, she opened it for access to the weapon. On rising for the day, she’d lock it again. The pistol was a 9 mm Heckler & Koch USP with a ten-round magazine.

  She had bought the gun a week after Jason died. She had taken shooting lessons from a former police officer who ran a self-defense school. Three years later, she continued to practice regularly.

  Lying awake in the dark, she wondered if she really felt as safe as she claimed to be.

  10

  As far as Lee Shacket is concerned, southwest Utah sucks, sixty miles of austere moonlit “scenery” on State Route 56 from Cedar City to the state line, as far from a Starbucks or a good sushi restaurant as anywhere on the planet. But he still believes it’s necessary to travel by tertiary routes that are less policed than the interstates.

  Compared to southeast Nevada, however, Utah is a lush paradise. Toured via a series of two-lane back roads, Lincoln and Nye Counties prove to be a hellish wasteland over which a fierce sun now rises like an omen of an impending thermonuclear holocaust. From the sleepy whistle-stop called Caliente to the nowhere burg of Rachel, he races through eighty-seven miles of Nevada nothing. The next town lies beyond another fifty-four miles of desolate land and lonely blacktop, a stretch of hara-kiri pavement on which rattlesnakes, bored and despairing, slither and lie waiting for the wheels of fate that will release them from the tedium of desert life.

  Miles in the distance, to either side of the highway, fester settlements with names like Hiko and Ash Springs, served by state and county roads, and others like Tempiute and Adaven that can be reached only on unpaved tracks. At 6:50 a.m., he stops to fill the fuel tank at a combination service station and convenience store that, with a house behind it, stands alone at a crossroads a few miles short of Warm Springs. The gasoline at the two pumps is an overpriced brand he’s never heard of, and the building housing the store is fissured pale-yellow stucco with a blue ceramic-tile roof.

  With his old life in ruins behind him and his new life with Megan still far away in California, Shacket has been in a foul mood since leaving Cedar City. Mile by mile, the arid Mojave leaches out of him what little human kindness has not been drained away by the endless injustices he has suffered.

  The gas pumps aren’t as old as the fossil fuel they provide, but they aren’t of a generation that reads credit cards. He goes into the store to provide the cashier with his Nathan Palmer Visa, to activate the pump.

  The man is evidently the owner, and Shacket despises him on sight. He is old and fat. He wears khaki pants with suspenders, a white T-shirt, and a narrow-brimmed straw hat, which seems like a costume, as if he is playing at being a desert bumpkin.

  After Shacket fills the tank, when he returns to the store to sign the Visa form and get his card, the old guy says, “Beautiful mornin’, isn’t it?”

  “Hot as a furnace,” Shacket says.

  “Well, you’re not from here. To us, it’s a mellow mornin’.”

  “How do you know I’m not from here?”

  “Seen your plates when you pulled in. They’re not Nevada. Looks like maybe Montana.”

  As Shacket signs the form, he says nothing. He concentrates on the signature, because for a moment he forgets the name that’s on the credit card. He almost signs Lee Shacket. Something is wrong with his mind.

  “Only eighty-two degrees,” the cashier says. “That’s cool for these parts, this time of year.”

  Shacket gets the Nathan Palmer right. He meets the old guy’s rheumy eyes. “What parts are you talking about? Your private parts?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Excuse you from what?”

  The cashier frowns and slides the Visa card across the counter. “Well, you have a nice day.”

  Shacket doesn’t understand the anger and contempt he feels for this stranger. It scares him a little. And is irresistible.

  “Excuse you from what?” Shacket asks again. This geezer pisses him off with his phony howdy-neighbor style. “Did you fart? Excuse you from what?”

  The cashier breaks eye contact. “I didn’t mean no offense.”

  “Did you offend me?”

  “Sir, I truly don’t believe I did.”

  A buzzing arises in Shacket’s head, as if a hive of wasps has taken residence in his cerebellum. “That’s what you believe, is it?”

  The cashier looks at the window, toward the pumps, maybe hoping another customer will drive in. Nothing is moving out there except a cloud shadow that slides a measure of darkness along the highway.

  The old guy’s tension, his unexpressed fear, excites Shacket. “Do you have a core belief?” he asks as he takes a candy bar from a display on the counter.

  Shacket himself once had core beliefs, a sense of limits. He’s sure of it. He just can’t remember what those limits were.

  “What do you mean?” the old man asks.

  “Well, like, do you believe in God?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where is God?” Shacket asks, stripping the wrapper off the candy bar and letting it fall to the floor.

  The old guy meets his eyes again. “Where is God?”

  “I’m just wondering where you think He is.”

  “God is everywhere.”

  “Is He over
there by the cooler with the beer and soda pop?”

  The cashier says nothing.

  Shacket takes a bite of the candy bar, chews it twice, and then spits the sticky lump on the counter. “This thing tastes like shit. It’s a decade past the expiration date. What’s your God think of you selling shit like this? Doesn’t He notice? Where is He? Is God maybe back there by the potato chips and Doritos?”

  The cashier looks down at the credit card processor. “I run your card, it’s electronic, over the phone is how it works. The number and name, they’re out there at Visa already, the purchase.”

  He’s telling Shacket that if something mortal happens here, there’s proof that Nathan Palmer stopped for gas around the time that it all went down.

  But of course Shacket is not Nathan Palmer.

  The angry buzzing in his head grows angrier. He needs to do something to stop the buzzing. He knows what he needs to do.

  He takes another bite of the candy bar and chews once and spits it on the counter. “Is God over there by the magazines? You have some dirty magazines over there, don’t you? Some skin magazines?”

  A tremor has arisen at one corner of the fat old guy’s mouth, which further excites Shacket.

  Yet the trembling reminds him of his grandfather, a kind man, who had a tremor. Something that might be pity for the cashier overcomes him. It passes quickly.

  “You’re not much of a conversationalist, are you? You say it’s a beautiful morning, then you have nowhere to go after that.”

  Shacket throws the remainder of the candy bar at the old man, and it sticks to the white T-shirt.

  Shacket isn’t Nathan Palmer, but he needs to use the Palmer driver’s license and credit card for a while yet. If he’d paid cash, he could do what he needs to do to stop the buzzing.