When all of the plywood had been thus insulated, they pulled over to the side of the road where Jones vindictively kicked all of the insulation, save one six-foot batt of it, out onto the shoulder. Once they were back under way, he busied himself again with plywood. When he had cut the first set of panels, he had always worked with double sheets, making two copies of each shape, and keeping half of them in reserve. Now he and Sharjeel put these spares up over the insulation and screwed them down into the studs. The Colorado School of Mines didn’t raise no dummies.
So the whole three-sided bay of the bedroom was now a completely opaque arrangement of insulated plywood walls. Presently it became even darker as Jones and Sharjeel unrolled long strips of black roofing paper and staple-gunned them over the plywood, covering the entire interior surface of the room, including the ceiling, with monochrome black, relieved only by the sporadic glint of staples. A few moments’ work with a box cutter removed a disk of tar paper from around the overhead light fixture, so that some dingy yellow light was shed into the space.
They then unlocked Zula’s ankle and let her know that her place was back there on the bed. She retreated, sat down, and busied herself picking wood shrapnel and loose tufts of fiberglass off the bedspread (a quilt that had quite obviously been hand-stitched by the old lady butchered yesterday) as Jones and Sharjeel applied a similar treatment to the inside of the bedroom door, reinforcing it with plywood and then building it out to a full depth of five inches, with a bat of insulation in the middle. This had the desired side effect of completely covering up the inside doorknob, making it impossible for Zula to open the door even if it were not locked.
Jones chucked a long fat bit into the drill and put a hole all the way through the reinforced door, then fed the little webcam’s USB cable through. Using a web of zip ties, duct tape, and drywall screws, he mounted the little eyeball to the inside surface of the door up near the top. Meanwhile Sharjeel had zip-tied the cable and its extension down the length of the RV’s central corridor to its kitchen table and plugged it into the laptop. A long adjustment procedure ensued in which Jones would close the door, leaving Zula alone in the room, and walk up to view the camera’s output on the laptop, then tromp back and open the door and wiggle the camera this way and that, getting the angle just right so that (Zula supposed) it could see all parts of the room.
The entire procedure had taken perhaps two hours. Like all home improvement projects, it had started with amazing energy and speed and then slowly petered out as Jones and Sharjeel had gotten hung up on details. But now it was done, and Zula was well and truly locked in. They slammed her shut in there and did not bother opening the door for maybe six hours.
There was now a train that would take arriving passengers directly from Sea-Tac to a downtown station that was practically in the basement of Corporation 9592’s headquarters. In every way it was faster, safer, and more efficient than the antiquated procedure of driving to the airport in a private vehicle to pick up a visitor. Richard had become somewhat cold-blooded about simply telling people to get on the goddamned train. But today the incoming passenger was John, and there was no question that this called for the ancient, full-dress ceremony: checking the flight’s true arrival time on the Alaska Airlines website, driving to the airport, napping in the phone lot, the long radio silence suddenly broken by one-word text messages blossoming on his phone (LANDED, TAXIING, STILL TAXIING!, WAITING TO DEPLANE, FAT LADY BLOCKING AISLE), the carefully timed plunge into the moil of the arrivals curb. John, a legless senior citizen/combat veteran, could have gotten special dispensation from airport authorities on at least three pretexts, but he seemed to find it amusing to stomp out the doors under his own power with his bags slung over his shoulders and to navigate on dead stilts through the vehicular mosh pit to the back of Richard’s SUV. He had packed for a long trip: a trip to China.
It had only been something like four days since Dodge had left Iowa, which was well under the threshold for hugging. And if they weren’t going to hug, there seemed little point in shaking hands. Anyway their hands were busy, pulling the SUV’s liftgate down. John, ever the older brother, initiated the move, and Richard, feeling as if he were being some kind of a bad host, reached up only a fraction of a second later and got his hands on the thing just as it was starting to move down. Four Forthrast hands slammed it shut with much more force than was really called for, and then they parted, each walking up his own side of the vehicle, and climbed into the front seats in unison.
“You can scoot that back,” Richard said, of John’s seat.
