Taking a deep breath, then speaking the name as an exhalation, Dusty said, “Dr. Yen Lo.”
Skeet cocked his head. “Huh?”
“Dr. Yen Lo.”
Martie gave it a try: “Dr. Yen Lo.”
And then Fig: “Dr. Yen Lo.”
Skeet surveyed the expectant faces around him, including that of the dog, who had stood up with his forepaws on the table. “What is this, a riddle, a quiz or something? Was this Lo some guy in history? I was never any good at history.”
“Well,” said Fig.
“Clear cascades,” Dusty said.
Baffled, Skeet said, “Sounds like a dish-washing soap.”
At least the first part of the plan had worked. Skeet was no longer programmed, no longer controllable.
Only the passage of time would prove, however, whether or not Dusty’s second goal had also been achieved: Skeet’s liberation from his tortured past.
Dusty pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. To Skeet, he said, “Get up.”
“Huh?”
“Come on, bro, get up.”
Letting the clinic blanket slip off his shoulders, the kid rose from the chair. He looked like a stick-and-straw scarecrow wearing a fat man’s pajamas.
Dusty put his arms around his brother and held him very tight, very tight, and when at last he could speak, he said, “Before we go, I’ll give you some money for vanilla Yoo-hoo, okay?”
The wheel of luck was turning. Two seats on United, out of John Wayne International Airport, to Santa Fe by way of Denver, were available on an early-morning flight. Using a credit card, Dusty secured the tickets from the phone in Fig Newton’s kitchen.
“Gun?” Fig asked, a few minutes later, as Dusty and Martie were at the front door, preparing to leave brother and dog in his care.
“What about it?” Dusty asked.
“Need one?”
“No.”
“Think you will,” Fig disagreed.
“Please tell me you don’t have an arsenal big enough to start a war,” Martie said, clearly wondering if Foster Newton was something more troubling than a mere eccentric.
“Don’t,” Fig assured her.
“Anyway, I’ve got this,” Dusty said, drawing the customized
“Flying, aren’t you?” Fig said.
“I’m not going to try to carry it on the plane. I’ll pack it in one of our suitcases.”
“Might get random scanned,” Fig warned.
“Even if the baggage isn’t carry-on?”
“Lately, yeah.”
“Even on short-haul flights?”
“Even,” Fig insisted.
“It’s all these terrorist events recently. Everyone’s nervous, and the FAA's issued some new crisis rules,” Skeet explained.
Dusty and Martie regarded him with no less astonishment than they would have shown if he had suddenly opened a third eye in the center of his forehead. Subscribing to the philosophical contention that reality sucks, Skeet
Recognizing the source of their amazement, Skeet shrugged and said, “Well, anyway, that’s what I overheard one dealer telling another.”
“Dealer?” Martie asked. “Like in
“Not blackjack. I don’t gamble.”
“Drug dealers sit around talking current events?”
“I think this impacted their courier business. They were ticked off about it.”
To Fig, Dusty said, “So how random is random scanning? One bag in ten? One in five?”
“Maybe some flights, five percent.”
“Well, then —”
“Maybe others, a hundred percent.”
Looking at the pistol in his hand, Dusty said, “It’s a legal gun — but I don’t have a permit to carry.”
“And crossing state lines,” Fig warned.
“Even worse, huh?”
“Not better.” Winking one owlish eye, he added: “But I have something.”
Fig disappeared into back rooms of the trailer but returned only a minute later, carrying a box. From the box, he extracted a gleaming toy truck. With a swipe of one hand, he spun the wheels. “Vrooooom! Transport.”
From black sky, black wind. Black, the windows of the house. Does wind live within?
On the back porch of the Rhodeses’ miniature Victorian, which Ahriman found too precious for his taste, he hesitated at the door, listening to the maraca rhythms of the shaken trees in the night, and to the black-wind haiku in his mind, pleased with himself.
When he’d first come here to conduct programming sessions with Dusty, a couple months ago, he had acquired one of the Rhodeses’ spare house keys, just as he had kept a key to Susan’s apartment. Now he stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind him.
If the wind lived here, it wasn’t home. This blackness was warm and still. No one else was in residence, either, not even the golden retriever.
Accustomed to a royal right of passage in the homes of those whom he ruled, he boldly switched on the kitchen lights.
He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he was confident that he would recognize it when he saw it.
Almost at once, a discovery. A padded mailing envelope, torn open, discarded on the dinette table. His attention was snared by the return address on the label: Dr. Roy Closterman.
