F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (42 page)

“That’s easy
enough,” Uncle Matt said. “Hide her with the Appletons.”
Poppy would have leaped off the sofa if Katie hadn’t been on her lap.

“Oh, no! Not them!”

“Where else you gonna stay,
girl?” Uncle Matt said.

“They’ll be checking
every Mulliner in the pines. But nobody’ll be checking the Appletons,
even if they could find them.”

Oh, Jesus, she thought. Not the
Appletons.

“He’s right.
Poppy,” Uncle Luke said. “I’ll lead you out there come first
light. Soon as I can see the road. Don’t worry. They won’t turn you
away. You’re kin.” She knew. And the thought made her queasy.
She’d almost rather face Mac again than move in with the Appletons.

Bob Decker lay in his creaky motel
bed and glanced again at the glowing numerals on the clock radio.

Almost midnight. He needed sleep,
dammit. They’d all be up and moving in five hours or so.

But Gerry Canney’s suspicions
about Dan Keane kept echoing off the inner walls of his skull.

And maybe he hates them so much that he doesn’t want
to stop fighting them…

What was the one thing all his years
in the Secret Service had taught him? Never take anything for granted.

Which meant he couldn’t take
Dan Keane for granted.

As much as he
doubted—loathed—the possibility, he’d worked out a plan to
check out Keane. But he couldn’t do it alone.

He reached for the phone and dialed
Canney’s room.

“Where are we?” Katie
said, staring out the panel truck’s side window.

“We’re in the woods,
honey bunch. Like deep in the woods.” Poppy squinted through the
windshield into the dim predawn light as she followed her uncle’s pickup
along a narrow, winding back road. Weeds growing in the mound between the sandy
ruts scraped along the undercarriage.

The forty-foot scrub pines crowded
close to the road, leaning over it, seeming to open ahead as she approached,
and close in behind as she passed.

She’d been out here a number
of times as a girl with her dad when he’d make a run to bring the
Appletons some Christmas pies or stock up on their applejack, but she’d
never learned the way. Never wanted to. She’d been a passenger those
times and had never noticed how one stretch of road looked pretty much like
every other, almost as if they were driving in circles.

She wished she could like turn on
her headlights or something, but Uncle Luke had said it was safest to keep them
off—otherwise he would have brought her out here last night.

Thank God for little favors.
Appletons by day were bad enough, but Appletons by night…

She shuddered.

“It makes me feel lonely out
here,” Katie said.

“It is lonely. But some folks
don’t get lonely like us. And some folks don’t like to have much to
do with other folks, so they like it out here.” And some folk
shouldn’t be seen by the rest of us.

At least no one would find Katie
and her out here— not in a million years. But that cut both ways. She was
just as lost out here as anyone else—safe but trapped.

Uncle Luke finally made a sharp
right turn and pulled to a stop in a small clearing. Four other pickups in
various stages of rust rot were parked any which way in the sand. Poppy’s
truck brought the total to six.

“All right now,” Uncle
Luke said as he helped her and Katie from the truck. In his free hand he held a
gallon jug and the sleeping bag he was lending them. “Stick close to me
until they know who we are.”

“They don’t know
we’re coming?” Poppy’s stomach was cinched into a double
granny knot as she looked around. Trees. Nothing but trees and sand and scrub
brush… and a path leading away through the brush.

“How was I supposed to let
them know?”

“You
didn’t—?” She stopped herself. She’d been about to say
something about calling them, but remembered there were like no phone lines out
here. No electricity, no running water, either. “Never mind.”

She carried Katie along the path,
keeping close behind her uncle. At least the light was better now. The
cloudless sky was turning a pale blue as the path moved onto an upslope. Going
to be another beautiful sunny day.

“Are these more uncles
we’re visiting?” Katie said.

“Oh, no,” Poppy told
her. “I’m not related to—”

“ ‘Course you
are,” Uncle Luke said.

“Well, sure,” she said,
wishing her uncle would shut up. “Everybody in the pines is related one
way or another. I meant—”

“No, these are real kin. My
great-grandfather Samuel— your great-great-grandfather—married off
his sister Anna to Jacob Appleton way back when. These folk are your
cousins.” Poppy wanted to kick her uncle in the butt. Damn! Why’d
he have to go and say that sort of stuff in front of Katie? She didn’t
want the little thing to know she shared blood with the Appletons.

Suddenly Uncle Luke stopped and
Poppy bumped into his back.

“Hello to the house!”
he called.

Poppy jumped as a voice shouted
from no more than ten feet to their left. “Who the hell’s out here
so goddamn early in the mornin‘?”

“It’s me—Luke
Mulliner. I got my niece Poppy with me, and she’s got a little one with
her.” A grizzled-looking guy who could have been sixty or could have been
eighty, skinny as the scrub pine he’d been hiding behind, stepped into
the open. He held his shotgun ready while he gave them the once over.

And Poppy gave him her own
once-over. His overalls were worn through in spots—so fashionable in
Soho, but this was the real thing. He wore worn sneakers with no socks, and his
ankles were filthy. His hands weren’t much better. His left eye seemed to
be stuck looking at his nose while his gray hair shot from his scalp in tufts.
His back was bent and twisted, which made him lean forward and to the right.

She remembered this Appleton from
when she was a little girl, even though almost everything about him had
changed. Everything except his tongue. He kept licking his lips. Every two or
three seconds his beefy red tongue would zip out and run along his lips, then
disappear. Poppy remembered that tongue.

“Yeah,” he said
finally. “You look like a Mulliner.”

“And you’re Lester,
aren’t you?” Uncle Luke said. “I haven’t been out here
for a while.”

“That’s right,”
Lester said, lowering the shotgun. He didn’t offer to shake.
“C’mon. I’ll take you up the house.” He eyed the jug
dangling from Uncle Luke’s finger.

“Here for some jack?”

“Yep. Been a while since I
had some and I miss it.”

“It’s awfully good,
ain’t it.”

“That it is.”

Poppy remembered stealing some of
her dad’s stock of applejack when she was a teenager. Powerful
stuff— Jersey lightning. And no one made better applejack than the
Appletons. Matter of fact, she’d been high on Appleton applejack when she
and Charlie did it and conceived Glory.

But that wasn’t the
Appletons’ fault.

Another hundred yards uphill and
they came to a large clearing hazed with blue-white woodsmoke, and sprawled in
its center… the house.

Poppy stopped and stared as it all
came back to her.

The house… the crazy Appleton
house.

It looked like it might have
started out as like a oneroom shack. Then somebody must have added a shed to
one end, and then maybe an extra room to the other, then an extension on to the
shed, and so on… and so on…

That was because as the Appleton
kids grew up, they didn’t move away, they just like added a section for
themselves. Poppy guessed that if the Appletons had been some rich and
respectable clan like the Kennedys, this sort of thing would be called a
compound.

But this was no compound—this
was a… sprawl. A sprawl with lots of galvanized pipe acting as chimneys,
and all those chimneys smoking. The place looked like they’d built it out
of whatever scrap material they could find with little or no thought to
matching it with what they’d used before. No section looked like it was
any kin to any of the other sections nuzzling up against it. Corrugated metal
nailed to marine plywood abutting particle board and cedar shakes. Roofs of
genuine shingles, vinyl siding, sheet metal, or old rugs and linoleum tacked
over wooden slats.

The hide of a deer was tacked to
one wall; and over to the right, three dead rabbits hung head down from a
clothesline. She turned Katie slightly so she wouldn’t see them and ask
what had happened to Bambi and Peter Cottontail.

The Appletons had lived here as
long as anyone could remember. All of them. Nobody left, and nobody new was
allowed in. And that meant that with no outsiders to choose from, you had to
like pair off with somebody who was a pretty damn close relation. Which was why
a lot of the Appletons tended to be soft in the head and look the way they did.

“Company, everybody!”
Lester shouted. “Companeeee!” And then they started coming out. The
men in dirty shirts and jeans or work pants, the women in stained housedresses,
hardly any shoes on anyone, and the bare feet as tough as shoe leather and just
as brown. Some folks with no hair and misshapen skulls, some heads too big,
some way too small, some with pure white skin and hair and pink eyes, some
looking pretty normal at first glance, but a second look telling you that not
all the circuits were making contact inside. And the kids… some of them
were running in endless circles while others sat and rocked… and
rocked… and others just stared.

Poppy felt Katie’s arms
tighten around her neck in a fearful strangle-hold.

“I want to go h-home,”
she whimpered. “I want my Daddy.” And deep in her breaking heart
Poppy knew that had to be. Katie couldn’t stay here—couldn’t
stay anywhere with Poppy. Maybe it had been all the fear and stress and near
panic, maybe it had been the heat, but for a crazy time yesterday she’d
really thought she could keep Katie. Now she knew that was impossible. Too many
people were looking for them. She wanted what was best for Katie, and a life on
the run wasn’t it.

“I know you do, honey bunch.
And I’ll see that you get back to him. As soon as it’s safe.”
They’d stay here today—just today, but not overnight. No way
overnight. Maybe Uncle Luke could go back to Sooy’s Boot and find the
feds… make sure they were real feds, and help her like cut a deal.

Yeah. That could work. She’d
saved Katie’s life—two, maybe three times—and took good care
of her. Why couldn’t she get a suspended sentence and like some sort of
protective custody in return?

Hell, even a short jolt in a
federal joint would be better than moving in with the Appletons.

Dan Keane had barely seated himself
behind his desk when Decker called.

Please let this be good news, he
thought, knowing that good news for him would be quite different than for
Decker.

Dan so desperately wanted this
nightmare over. Another call had come from Salinas last night, telling him
about a tape that Poppy Mulliner had, a tape that would topple the entire house
of cards. And then he was demanding phone numbers and call frequencies, and when
Dan asked why, he was told not to worry about it, just do as he was told.

“Just do as you’re
told…” Carlos Salinas speaking that way to him! Giving Dan Keane
orders. Just two days ago that would have been unthinkable!

“We found Poppy
Mulliner,” Decker said.

“Alive?” Dan’s
heart and lungs suspended operations while he waited for an answer.

Please say dead.

“Very much alive.”

He almost sobbed as his heart and
lungs kicked back into action in triple time. Oh God oh shit oh Christ!

“Is she talking?”

“I said we found her—we
don’t have her.”

“I don’t
understand.”

“She’s in a motel in a
town called Tuckerton—the Adamston Motel. She’s got the little girl
with her. We could pick her up now, but since they both seem pretty safe and
healthy, we decided to wait and see what she does. We’ve got her phone
tapped. Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll call one of her
accomplices. We’ll give her the day. If nothing shakes out by
tonight—or it looks like she’s moving out—we’ll pick her
up.”

Dan’s mind screamed:
It’s over! They’ve got the woman, they’ll get the tape. What
do I do now?

“Dan?” Dan cleared his
throat and managed to keep his voice calm.

“Great work. Has she called
anyone yet?”

“Nope. But it’s still
early.”

“That it is. Keep me
informed, will you?”

“Want to come up here and be
on the scene?”

“I’d love to.
Bob.” That was the last place he wanted to be right now. “But you
guys are doing such a great job, I’d feel redundant. I’ll hold the
fort here. By the way, any word on how the patient’s doing?” Dan
had tried every avenue he knew to ferret out details on Winston’s
condition, but it was as if a wall had been erected around the presidential
suite at Bethesda, and only one message filtered through: “The
President’s fine. Nothing but routine tests that should be finished
soon.” Which told him nothing. Winston could be sick as a dog right now
and the message would be the same.

“All I hear is that
he’s doing fine. How about you?”

“Same thing. I hope
that’s true.”

“We’re all praying for
him,” Decker said.

Not all of us, Dan thought as he
hung up. He dropped his head into his trembling hands and squeezed his eyes
shut.

Only a matter of six or eight
hours—maybe less—before Decker got that tape. He wanted to run, but
where? He had no place to go. He had to stick this out.