Heartbreaker (34 page)

“You knew about the bombs?” Jess asked her.

“Yes.”

“Michael Stewart designed them,” Louis burst out bitterly from the backseat. “No one was supposed to know outside of the Inner Circle. It was a sacred trust that he was not supposed to reveal even to his family. Yet
she
knows! You see now that he
was
a traitor! He betrayed the trust of the Lamb!”

“He told us nothing until we had left the congregation. He was no traitor! He woke up and saw the truth!” Theresa turned her head to glare at Louis. “Everything Robert Talmadge says is nothing but lies! Robert Talmadge is
evil
!”

“Hush your mouth, girl, before Yahweh punishes you for your blasphemy!” Louis’s voice quivered with outrage.

“All right, hold it right there, both of you!” Jess intervened. “Your father designed the bombs, Theresa? Do you know anything about them? Did he ever tell you anything about how they worked or anything like that?”

“No.” Theresa took a deep breath, then burst out passionately, “My father was wrong to do what he did, but he was deceived! We all were! We all truly believed Robert Talmadge was the Lamb of God, that God came to him and spoke to him and told him His name was Yahweh and made divine revelations to him! When Robert Talmadge told my father that Yahweh had chosen him to help fulfill the prophecies in the Holy Bible about the end of the world, my father
believed
Yahweh spoke through him! My father was wrong, but he wasn’t evil!”

“Anybody can make a mistake,” Jess said, his tone soothing, while Louis muttered under his breath and Rory patted Theresa’s arm with clumsy commiseration. Lynn’s eyes met Jess’s through the mirror, and she realized that they were thinking the same thing: Being trapped in the cab of a pickup with warring cult members was like being swung in a sack with a pair of angry cats.

“If your dad knew they were planning to blow us all up, why didn’t he go to the police?” Rory asked.

It was such a reasonable question that Lynn was proud of her daughter anew.

“He was afraid that if he did, the True Disciples would be after us forever. He said they would never forgive a public betrayal, and they would hunt us down.” Theresa caught her breath. “He thought that if he just went away quietly, they might leave us alone. He didn’t know they would hunt us down even if he didn’t betray them.”

“But he did betray us! He did! Yahweh Himself proclaimed Michael a Judas when he left!” Louis leaned forward, practically yelling in Lynn’s ear.

“Liar!” Theresa jumped at him, one arm locking the baby to her chest, the other grabbing for Louis’s face. Her face was contorted, her fingers curled into claws.

“Enough!” Jess roared, catching Theresa’s wrist, making Lynn jump, and waking Elijah, who immediately began to cry.

Releasing the girl’s wrist, Jess added more mildly, “You’ll get justice for your family, Theresa, don’t think you won’t. But for now Louis is on the side of the good guys. He had a visit from Yahweh, who told him that Talmadge has got the timing of the end of the world all wrong, and Louis means to help us find him so he can tell him so. Isn’t that right, Louis?”

“The Lamb is only mistaken about the date,” Louis muttered.

“The Lamb
is
a mistake,” Theresa said, joggling Elijah in her arms to quiet him.

“You—” Louis began heatedly, only to be silenced by Jess’s upraised hand.

“No more,” Jess said. “The new rule in the truck is, we just don’t talk. Quiet, everybody.”

For some time after that no more was said.

The road sloped downward. Lynn realized they were descending out of the mountains. The shadows across the pavement had lengthened, and the sky was no longer as bright as it had been. In one place a small furry animal stood on its hind legs at the side of the road to sniff the air for the coming of night. The day was slowly drawing to a close.

The last day of their lives?

Lynn shuddered at the thought. A surreptitious glance at Jess’s wrist revealed the time in digital numbers: 7:32
P.M
.

A little less than thirteen and a half hours left.

Lynn felt herself begin to sweat.

A small green roadside sign flashed by. The truck was already flying past before Lynn registered what it said: K
AMAS
, 12
MILES
.

Eight minutes later they were in the heart of town. It wasn’t much: a church, a used-car lot, a gas station, a Stop-and-Go market. A lot of green yards and neat, ranch-style homes. Everything, even the houses, looked deserted. Of course. It was Sunday night. In rural Utah. Everybody in this quiet town would be in church, Lynn realized.

Glancing at the small white clapboard church with its classic steeple and crowded parking lot, Lynn hesitated.

Even under these, the direst of circumstances, she discovered that she was squeamish about darting into a church full of people and breaking up the service by screaming her news.

“What we need is a phone,” Jess said.

A phone. Of course. Lynn looked around and pulled into the Stop-and-Go. A pay phone on the brick wall outside promised salvation.

“Anybody have a quarter?” Jess asked.

“You don’t need a quarter to dial nine-one-one.” Lynn slid out of the truck. Everybody else, even Louis, spilled out behind her.

“Lynn, honey, it’s about time you got this through your head: You’re not in Chicago anymore.” Jess came around the front of the truck toward her. “Out here in the wide open spaces you can’t just pick up any old pay phone and dial nine-one-one and get help. You have to have a quarter, and you have to actually punch in a number to get the police.”

Not prepared to just take his word for it, Lynn marched to the phone, picked up the receiver, and tried it. Jess was right. Without a quarter the phone wouldn’t work.

“Told ya,” Jess said. He was already heading inside the store. Lynn followed him.

It was only when she saw the plump, gray-haired woman behind the cash register eyeing Jess with growing alarm that she realized how disreputable he looked. Clad in jeans that by this time had been ripped almost to tatters, toes poking through holey, filthy socks, Jess was bare-chested, long-haired, and dirty, with that awful-looking wound in his shoulder.

If she’d been the clerk and he had walked up to her, she would have been scared of him herself.

“Ma’am, can I trouble you to use your phone?” he asked with his best ingratiating smile.

“Pay phone on the wall outside,” she replied, her manner abrupt as she returned his smile with a forbidding frown.

“There’s been an accident,” Lynn intervened, joining Jess at the counter so the woman would be reassured by her presence. “And we need to call the police. Please, may we use the phone?”

“What kind of accident?” the woman asked suspiciously. She looked Lynn over without softening. Her expression hardened into concrete as her gaze slid beyond Lynn to the rest of the party.

A quick glance back revealed Rory with her discolored forehead, Theresa in her tattered nightgown clutching a wailing baby, and cadaverous Louis.

Taken all together, Lynn realized, they were as grungy-looking a group as she personally had ever seen.

“A murder,” Jess said, reaching for the phone behind the counter as he fixed the clerk with an inimical stare. The clerk took a step backward, her face tightening, then reached downward and fumbled beneath the counter.

She came up with a nasty-looking pistol, which she pointed straight at Jess.

“Now you just hold it right there,” she said, one hand reaching beneath the counter again. Neither the gun nor her eyes ever wavered as she picked up the phone herself.

A quarter of an hour later the Stop-and-Go was aswarm with police.

Jess and Louis, hands cuffed behind them, sat in the back of one patrol car, while Lynn, Rory, and Theresa with Elijah were confined in the back of another. Lynn and Rory had their hands cuffed in front. Only Theresa was allowed to remain without handcuffs so that she could hold Elijah, who was howling in earnest now and whom the troopers clearly did not care to deal with.

The officers had been perfect gentlemen when they patted the women down. They were a little rougher on Louis and especially Jess. At one point Lynn thought a burly cop was going to clout Jess over the head with his nightstick. She had to admit, though, that Jess brought it on himself: He struggled when they cuffed him and cursed with furious vehemence between bouts of trying to explain to first one cop and then another about the coming end of the world. It didn’t help when Louis chimed in to second his claims.

If she didn’t know better, Lynn thought, she, too, would have marked them down as a pair of possibly dangerous mental cases.

Unfortunately, in this instance the dire warnings they spewed were all too true.

They wouldn’t listen to Lynn either. Or Rory. Or Theresa.

The troopers weren’t buying any part of so wild a tale. With their prisoners secured they took a few minutes to relax. Lynn stared at them through the window as they sipped cups of coffee and exchanged pleasantries with the clerk. As they were getting ready to get back in their cars, she hustled into the store and came back with a bottle of milk for Elijah.

One trooper opened the back door of the patrol car and handed the bottle to Theresa. The whole squad piled into their cars. Then, ignoring every single thing their irate captives said, they hauled them all off to jail.

I
T WAS ELEVEN P.M
. Lynn, Jess, Rory, Theresa with Elijah, and Louis were locked together in the single large holding cell in State Police Outpost Number 27. Jess had given up cursing and was now pacing. He paused from time to time to grip the bars at the front of the cell and glare at the indifferent officer on duty, who by now had heard their story at least a hundred times and ignored Jess’s demands to exercise his right to make a phone call at least a hundred more.

Lynn sat on one of the two mattressless bunks, her back against the concrete-block wall. Rory lay with her head in her mother’s lap, almost asleep. On the other bunk Theresa was curled up with a thankfully sleeping Elijah. Louis sat in a corner, his head in his hands.

In ten hours a dozen bombs would explode, killing millions and plunging the country into devastation.

They had managed the impossible, she and Jess, Lynn thought tiredly, escaping from a band of murderers and a flooded mine and making it across more than fifty miles of wilderness to sound the warning before it was too late.

And nobody believed them.

Under less dire circumstances it would have been downright comical.

The phone blared on the officer’s desk. He let it ring four times—he was sitting right beside it but must have held off answering to give the impression of being busy—before finally picking it up.

As he spoke into the receiver, then listened, his expression changed. He glanced at Jess, who was once again gripping the bars at the forefront of the cell with renewed interest.

“What? What is it?” Jess demanded.

Without answering, the officer replaced the receiver, stood up, and hurried to open the door that separated the holding area from the rest of the police station.

A brisk tap sounded on the door just as he reached it. The officer opened the door, and another man in police uniform—a higher-ranking officer from the way the first deferred to him—entered.

The door closed behind him.

“Listen, this is life or death—” Jess began desperately.

“We found the bodies,” the man said, interrupting. He looked Jess up and down. His gaze then slid over the other occupants of the cell as if weighing them. Feeling it on herself, Lynn had to fight the urge to flip him the bird.

Talk about your Keystone Kops. They almost deserved to be blown up.

“Then you realize that this is serious, and what I’m telling you is God’s honest truth,” Jess said. He gripped the bars with renewed urgency, his bare feet (he’d lost the remnants of his socks in the strip search that they had all endured) planted just slightly apart. Every muscle in his body seemed taut.

“Before you say anything else I want to caution you.” The man held up his hand to stop Jess’s words. He was about fifty, Lynn estimated, still reasonably lean but with a slight paunch that hung over his belt. His face was lined, and his salt-and-pepper hair was cut military-short. From the way he looked at Jess, he didn’t think much of long-haired, bare-chested men in torn jeans and bare feet.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You—”

“What?” Jess exploded, cutting him off. “
I
didn’t kill those people! Haven’t you idiots been listening to a single fucking thing I’ve said?”

Face hardening, the officer continued inexorably, while Jess pounded the flat of his hand against the bars in frustration. The other occupants of the cell, with the exception of Theresa and Elijah, both of whom were asleep, Watched this exchange with only tepid interest. If Rory and Louis felt the way she did, Lynn thought, they were too exhausted at the moment to care about anything but sleep. Fighting city hall was too much work.

If the world was destined to blow up in the morning, then so be it.

“Look, I told you the bodies were there, I told you the condition they were in, and I was right on the money, wasn’t I? Everything else I’ve told you is just as true. You don’t have to believe me. Just let me make one phone call. Just one, okay? Can you just at least do that?”

Both policemen looked at him with identical frowns. The younger officer stood a pace behind the older, mirroring him down to the hands clasped behind his back.

In other circumstances Lynn might have found that funny too.

“I’m not letting you out of that cell until we get your identity confirmed, and the phone won’t reach.”

“Then could you make the call for me? I’ll stand right here and tell you the number and everything to say. Please. Dammit, man, if you keep us in here much longer we’re all going to die. Do you have a family? They’re going to die. Do you hear what I’m saying? Half the freaking country is going to be blown to hell at nine in the morning!”