42 THE BATS TAKE FLIGHT

42

THE BATS TAKE FLIGHT

Strangely, to Regis Duroc-Jersey, the rapids roaring under the bridge sound less like rushing water than like a fierce fire in a blast furnace where ore is being smelted into iron. Sometimes he is certain that he hears screaming within that ceaseless detonation. He attributes this to exhaustion. Striving to profit handsomely from the slow-motion destruction of the current civilization involves a mental and moral high-wire walk that can fatigue even an exercise enthusiast who meditates faithfully and adheres to a rigorous low-carb diet.

"Deacon was supposed to use a burner phone to call the big guy's burner," Regis says, referring to Boschvark, "but he didn't call."

"When was this supposed to happen?" Galen Vector asks.

"This morning. No later than noon."

"Call him about what?"

"About Sheriff Montrose."

"That prick. What about him?"

"Friday, Montrose said he wants his job back."

"You're jackin' me."

"I don't have the energy."

"The prick retired."

"Under pressure. He wants to change his mind."

"He can't."

"No, he can't. But there were negotiations on Saturday."

"Negotiations? Shit. Montrose is an unreliable ally. You don't negotiate with weasels like him."

Regis agrees. "Can't trust him. He has sympathy for the Nochelobo crowd."

"He sold them out," Vector says, raising his voice, offended by the former sheriff's sudden attack of conscience. "If the shithead feels guilty, he wants to give the money back, then we soak it in gasoline and make him eat it and light his breath on fire, see if does he just become a human blowtorch or maybe his gut explodes."

Not for the first time, Regis finds it puzzling that a man who looks as frivolous as Galen Vector can be so ruthless. Holding a forefinger beside his lips to remind the crime boss that discretion is required in this world of eavesdroppers, Regis mutters, "Killing a sheriff is no small thing."

"Former sheriff. And never popular. He wasn't a people's sheriff."

"They elected him."

"Some did. Most didn't."

"You're saying it was fixed?"

"As sure as I know my name."

"Well, I didn't need to know that."

"Yeah, you did. I'm making a point here."

"What point?" Regis asks.

"Say a prick like Montrose dies in a house fire."

"So then?"

"You think a thousand assholes are gonna show up with flowers and teddy bears to lay in his front yard?"

"Hard to picture."

"Most are gonna say it should've happened years ago."

"Still, it's got to look like a heart attack or something, and Nash Deacon's got to be in the loop."

"You said Nash is dead."

"I said something happened to him, he might even be dead, but we don't know."

"If he was supposed to call the big guy by noon, but he hasn't called him yet, then he's stupid or dead, and he's not stupid."

"He's been stupid in the way men sometimes are, thinking with his little head instead of his big head."

"Yeah? Who's the bitch?"

"Nochelobo's squeeze."

"Are you shittin' me?"

"GPS says he went there four days last week, including Friday, when he never left."

"That Trans Am is too old for GPS."

"We planted a civilian unit in it."

This does not sit well with Vector. "You do that to me, you'll all be too dead to get your project built."

"We'd never do that to you."

"I'm gonna put my guys on my Escalade as soon as I get back to town, have them strip it down, see what they find."

"Nothing to find."

"Damn well better not be."

"By our definition, you're a partner, but Sheriff Deacon is an employee."

"Belden Bead was also a partner, huh?" Vector says.

"Funny you should mention him."

"Am I laughing here?"

"Belden just disappears, we don't know where, and eight months later Nash Deacon disappears. We don't believe in coincidences."

"You said Deacon is at her place."

"When he didn't call at noon today, we discovered the tracking unit had stopped working at three o'clock Saturday morning, thirty-three hours earlier. We don't know why. He was still there then. He had been there since Friday evening."

"But now he could be anywhere."

"Four o'clock this afternoon, we put a drone over her property, gave it a good lookover. No sign of the Trans Am. Nobody's seen it or Deacon since Friday."

"He could be anywhere," Vector insists.

"He's there. Even if he isn't there, it's the place you've got to start looking, and she's who you've got to talk to first, before we start searching the whole world over."

"I've got to talk to her, huh? Why not the sheriff's office?"

Regis says, "Most deputies are in our pocket, but not all."

"Work on that."

"We are."

"Work on it harder."

"You've always got a few Dudley Do-Rights."

"Frame them for something."

"One by one," Regis agrees. "The thing is, if for some reason Belden went to this bitch and if what happened to him is what's happened to Deacon, we need to find out if she knows anything true about Nochelobo's death. If she knows too much, we don't want the wrong deputies hearing what she says."

"Whether she knows everything or nothing, once we interrogate her, then we'll have to waste the slut."

"Whatever you feel is appropriate. It's for delicate work like this that we brought the Bead family—and you—into this project."

Just then the bats take flight by the hundreds, surely more than a thousand, erupting from whatever cave provides their shelter. Because of their numbers, the flutter and flapping of their tri-jointed wings and the thin squeaks they produce in order to navigate by echolocation compete with the roar of the river. These little horrors usually come out at sunset, and Regis is not expecting this late appearance of the swarm. He hunches down and clasps his hands over the top of his head, flashlight beam spearing up through nightmarish forms with squinched, whiskered faces and ravenous, fanged mouths. Bats never tangle in people's hair. That's an old wives' tale. Regis knows it's a stupid wives' tale. Nevertheless, he covers his head and hunches during the minute the swarm takes to fan away into the darkness, snatching insects and devouring them in flight, as swift as swallows on wings five times thinner than surgical gloves. In a city, Regis might see one bat every decade, or maybe never see one. In this uncivilized territory, where there are many churches but not one high-end theater playing classic films on a big screen, where every restaurant offers a hamburger but not one provides any sushi, where half the locals homeschool their moronic offspring and where even the public schools cling to outdated definitions of literacy and science, there are swarms of rabid bats. There are poisonous snakes in great variety and wolves and bears and mountain lions and countless other reasons why all the smart people long ago fled to hermetically sealed apartments in comfortable high-rise buildings, in the cities where Nature has been tamed and fenced in parks and kept presentable with daily grooming. Regis hates this place.

When he stands upright and lowers his hands, the beam of his light falls on his companion. Vector's face is as expressionless as that of a dead man whose features a talented mortician has smoothed so perfectly as to suggest this person passed through life without ever experiencing an emotion of any kind. Behind his sunglasses, his eyes might be sharp with contempt, but his voice remains flat when he says, "I'll take three guys with me. We'll wait until midnight, when she's almost sure to be sleeping. We'll grab her by surprise. If she knows what happened to Deacon—maybe even Belden—we'll break her down and get the truth. She won't be able to lie to us. She'll try, but she won't be able. Then my guys will want to use her. Me too. Subsequent to all that, a properly staged house fire might be the best way to erase evidence of what we do to her. If for some reason it doesn't seem as if a fire can be made to look accidental, then come morning, we'll take her body into the woods, drop it down a sinkhole into a cavern far off any trail, where either it'll never be found or it won't be discovered until nothing's left but yellowed bones filled with mold instead of marrow. How does that sound?"

"Okay," says Regis.

Vector says, "Okay?"

"Good," Regis amends. "That sounds good. Perfect."

"Whatever we learn, I share with you. But I never want to be second-guessed how maybe there was some other information I could have cut out of her."

"All right."

"What does that mean?"

"All right, yes, it's a deal, no second-guessing."

"I'll be in touch," Vector says.

They leave the bridge at different ends.

After the bats, Regis doesn't feel that he can handle another close encounter with a fifty-pound rat in the reeking confines of the sawmill. Instead of taking a shortcut through the building, he walks around the massive structure to his Lexus SUV.

Having read about bats to confirm that they won't tangle in human hair, he knows that their eyes can magnify starlight to such an extent that any night landscape glows as though with a radiant frost. Those individuals that have remained in the immediate area might be looking down from on high even now, watching him as he makes his way to the sanctuary of his vehicle.

Behind the wheel of the Lexus, he locks the doors and starts the engine but does not immediately drive away.

A melancholy quasi-philosophical mood settles over him. He wonders how he's gotten to this place in his life. The Montessori school, Pencey Preparatory School, Harvard: Regis considers his academic journey, lingering on selected memories as if they are worry beads that, fingered long enough, will inspire in him the conviction that he made the right decisions. He hopes to convince himself that his work with Boschvark is in the service of what is right and true, even noble. When peace of mind continues to elude him, he focuses instead on the billions of dollars in subsidies the company has been granted to build this huge project, the additional billions that will be shoveled out to cover the cost overruns, the percentage of those staggering sums that can be siphoned off without risking discovery, and how much of that fortune will be passed along to him in a form that's taxed at a low rate if it's taxed at all. This approach to an analysis of his career is much more satisfying than pondering what is right and true.

At last, he releases the hand brake and puts the SUV in gear. His nerves are soothed by this pause for meditation, though as he begins his drive into Kettleton, he's overcome by the irrational suspicion that the sawmill is collapsing behind him, and not just the mill, but also the night itself and the world as he has known it.