The Art of the Devil (28 page)

Knox ran fingers through his thick brown beard. ‘Sir?'

‘You know. Hidden inside something else, innocent looking? A lamp, a book, a length of pipe, like that?'

The sheriff looked at him closely. ‘No, sir.'

‘A harness,' Spooner suggested. ‘To keep the weapon hidden under the clothing, evade a search …?'

‘Nossir.'

‘The clothing itself: some kind of uniform, some kind of disguise?'

‘Nossir. Street clothes. Little bit ripe, too.'

‘But how did he plan on …?'

‘Sir?'

Spooner shook his head. A bracket had formed on either side of his mouth, a cross-hatching on his high forehead.

Elisabeth opened her eyes.

Enough moonlight came through the window to limn the bureau, the blanket and pillows, the JESUS LOVES YOU wall plaque. When she pulled the guitar case out from under the bed – inch by cautious inch, holding her breath – the clasps gleamed like precious metal.

Hitting the high and low catches, she removed the steel-string Gibson from its backing of red velvet. The gunsmith's work had been excellent; the guitar looked exactly as it had when she had purchased it at the pawn shop eight days before.

Setting the instrument on the bed, she explored from top to bottom, feeling for hidden seams or screws. After the initial examination, she loosened the tuning keys, relaxing the strings until they fell free. Setting the strings out of the way inside the case, she examined the guitar again. Removable screws held pick guard and bridge to body, and headstock to neck. From the dresser's bottom drawer she fetched a butter knife, palmed days earlier from the kitchen.

She labored for ten minutes before the pick guard came off. Beneath the nicked plate she found only pale wood. After five more minutes of work, the saddle bridge came loose. She immediately sensed that it was more tubular than strictly necessary. A moment's exploration revealed the reason: stuck against the back was a high-powered scope, cunningly concealed.

Two open clips would attach the scope to the rifle's stock. Two tiny grub screws, for adjusting the cross hairs, had been glued into place. She had made clear that she expected no chance to sight the rifle, and would need the weapon to fire true the first time.

Placing the scope inside the case beside the strings, she returned her attention to the guitar. Working the screws connecting headstock to neck took forever. But finally the stock had been emancipated. Inside, she found a magazine containing eight .30-06 cartridges. Removing the bullets, she inspected each individually before repacking the clip.

The magazine went into the tweed case, beside the scope.

Peering inside the neck she found the truss rod, traveling the length of the instrument, glinting mellowly in the moonlight. Usually the truss would have been attached to a nut on one end and held carefully in place by longitudinal bracing – a guitar was essentially an air pump – but this rod was thicker, unbraced, floating free except for loose padding. Still, the thing had played sweetly enough to get past the guard at the front gate – although he had needed to tune it, she remembered. It had also passed two other cursory inspections coming up the long driveway. Considering the loosey-goosey inner workings, however, a few good thumps would probably knock it out of pitch irrevocably. No matter; its days of making music were past.

She managed to work one end of the tube out of the headless neck and then upended the guitar, bringing the rod sliding out another few inches. Reaching in through the soundhole, she located the far extreme of the truss and nudged it down, watching as the instrument disgorged a perfect rifle barrel—

—then her forearm bumped against the guitar's body; a booming dull thud reverberated across the darkened room.

She froze. For the longest moment of her life she remained motionless, one hand inside the soundhole, the other teasing the truss rod out through the headless neck, wondering if she must return instrument to case and feign sleep, or if she could continue with her work.

Seconds pooled, formed a minute, and then repeated the trick.

At last, furrowing her brow, she returned to the task of shimmying the rod from the neck. The barrel was particularly thick and heavy: a so-called bull barrel, which would decrease vibration during shooting and hence increase accuracy. Once the piece was free she raised it to the moon-glowing window and peered through, pleased by the intricacy of the groove tracing the interior of the cylinder. Extra grooving meant extra spin stabilization, which in turn meant still-greater accuracy. In every respect, the workmanship was first-rate.

The missing piece was the stock, which would hold all the rest together, which must be inside the body of the guitar itself, accessible only by cracking open the wood – hardly a silent proposition. She inspected the instrument's ribs, tapping gently with her knuckles, determining exactly which sections were hollow. Presently, she decided that anything hidden inside was beneath the soundhole. Therefore she concentrated on opening the section above the hole, so as not to risk damaging anything vital. First she tried the butter knife to pry off the guitar's side, and then her fingernails. When neither proved effective, she resorted to brute force: Wrapping the guitar's body in a blanket, forming a vise of two pillows in an effort to further absorb the sound, and then using a swift sharp blow from one elbow to splinter the wood.

Unwrapping the instrument again, she discovered a long winding crevice wandering from fretboard down to missing pick guard. Inserting the knife into the crack, she widened the crevice and used her fingers to tear off a plank of wood. Peeling strips from the guitar's body, she deposited them in the empty case. Thus did she uncover, more than withdraw, the stock. Tucked within the last shards of the guitar's shell she found the rifle's butt and trigger mechanism. Fitting barrel to stock, she lined up grooves and smacked them together – the snap was louder than she might have liked, but time was short. The scope clipped neatly above the breech. The butt went onto the rear of the stock, helped home by another smack. That left the trigger mechanism: trickier than the rest, requiring careful insertion and adjustment.

But the rifle felt good – better than good. Keeping well away from the window, she socked the butt into her shoulder and placed wood against cheek. Her left hand steadied the barrel, her right closing over the trigger. She brought eye to scope. Perfect.
Pluperfect
, as Josette would have said. The thumb of her right hand extended seamlessly over the small of the stock, creating a spot weld between cheek, thumb, and gun. The rifle was an extension of her body. Her body was an extension of the rifle. If she kept the contact firm, she would not lose her aim between shots, if indeed more than one shot proved necessary.

She sighted on the wall plaque, the letters of which had been magnified by the scope to ridiculous proportions. Closing her eyes, she made herself relax, exhaling. When she opened her eyes again, the cross hairs remained dead on target: she read a giant E from the name JESUS.

Gently, she squeezed the trigger.

From within the breech came a soft answering snap.

Satisfied, she lowered the rifle.

A faint knock at the door. In the next heartbeat Josette stepped into the room, wearing a white nylon peignoir. ‘I heard you moving around,' the younger girl stage-whispered. ‘I'm sorry about before, Libby. I guess I can be …'

Trailing off, she took in the scene before her.

I
sherwood dreamed.

Sometimes silhouettes blocked out the light above him, coming and going and then coming again. Sometimes the edges of the silhouettes took on a brush stroke of gold, making him think of Evy, her hair backlit as she read a book in bed at night. Sometimes the darkness intensified – an undertow, a sucking rip tide – and then the dreams surfaced, finely hewn, pressing away everything else.

He dreamed he was sitting with the Chief and Evy and the President in the parlor of a big, empty country house. On an upper floor, something larger than a man clumped around noisily. Outside, the wind lifted, rattling windows in their panes. But one window, facing east, stood open to a keening blade of freezing air. And the footsteps – or were they beating hooves? – from the house's second floor sounded ever louder
…

Then he and Eisenhower sat together in a fancy hotel lobby, carried with nary a ripple from one setting to another by the fluid logic of dreams, facing each other in matching red-upholstered armchairs. They held dainty teacups filled with whiskey and tried to speak politely above the overwhelming bustle of bellhops and desk clerks and knocking machinery in the walls. But neither man could make himself heard. Nevertheless, it struck Isherwood as absolutely vital, in the dream, that he find and raise his voice – in fact, the very fate of the free world might depend upon it. But he had already sampled the whiskey, and a warm glow tangled his tongue. He found himself unable to speak, unable even to resist raising the teacup for another taste
…

He stood in the backyard of the Anacostia house, holding a shovel. Cats watched through windows, arching and pressing against glass, as he heaved the shovel up and then down, biting the blade into frozen earth. He was digging a fallout shelter – and a good thing too, because sirens wailed in circles, air horns blasted, and it had finally happened; the fools had finally done it. The Bomb was on its way. But the shelter would not be finished in time. The lawn was littered with state-of-the-art equipment – chemical toilets and backup oxygen tanks and hermetically sealed food supplies – all of which would prove useless, because Isherwood had moved too slowly. Yet there was a dusky relief in failure, in giving up. Rocking back onto his heels, he dropped the shovel and watched hellfire rain from the sky. Pastels turned to primaries, crust to magma. Einstein and Truman and the warrior-poet Oppenheimer had spat in God's eye, and now God was spitting back …

Faces hovered above dark water, taunting him. There was Evy; and there was Eisenhower; and there was Richard Hart. And beside Hart was the Chief.
Last chance,
the Chief was saying.
Last chance to make things right.

Elisabeth stepped forward.

The rifle came swinging up, catching Josette full-force on the left temple – Elisabeth could actually feel the girl's brain bounce inside her skull. But a thick skull it must have been, for although Josette teetered, with a look of pained amazement coming over her features, she did not fall.

Elisabeth swung again, aiming for the exact spot on which her previous strike had landed. This time Josette's eyes rolled back in her head like a cartoon character's, showing whites. Down she went. Elisabeth lurched forward, juggling the gun, and managed to catch the dead weight before it hit the floor.

Dragging Josette into the room, she softly closed the door. Her eyes moved to the window. A smear of stars, a diffuse rosy glow high in the sky. Dawn was not far off.

Clinically, she looked back at her friend. Even through closed lids, Josette seemed to gaze at her reproachfully. The girl was breathing so shallowly that one might have thought her already dead. Her head skewed at a strange angle atop her neck, emphasizing her double chins.

For several moments Elisabeth considered, a fine crease appearing on her pale brow. Then she gently set down the rifle. Strangulation would be fast and simple. She reached for the loose folds of flesh gathered beneath Josette's jaw …

… but the girl's eyelids were fluttering.

Confusion and hurt and anger registered on the round, unhappy face. For an instant Elisabeth paused, despite herself.

Harshly, she reminded herself: the fate of empires lay in the balance.

She closed her hands around the girl's throat.

Fingernails came up, raking across Elisabeth's brow.
Good
, she thought icily. So long as the pig fought back, pangs of conscience would not interfere.

Without loosening her grip, she drove a knee into the girl's abdomen. Josette's lungs emptied like bellows. The sounds coming from the fat throat took on a gooey quality. Elisabeth adjusted her grasp, pressing harder. The girl grunted, gasped, wriggled and writhed, thrusting forward and back; to no avail. One foot beat a weak, jerky tattoo against the floor. Horrible, now, the sounds coming from her throat.

Suddenly, a wet stickiness was gumming Elisabeth's eyes. The wound on her forehead was suppurating blood. Grimacing, she shook her head. Tiny droplets scattered like dew. But she felt no pain. Again she flicked her head, scattering wet strands of hair from her eyes, and refocused on Josette, whose movements were slackening now, like a winding-down toy. Just a few more seconds, and it would be finished …

The sounds coming from Josette's mouth turned thin, and then cut off. Her struggles lessened, then ceased.

But Elisabeth kept up the pressure for another full minute, just to be sure.

GETTYSBURG HOSPITAL: NOVEMBER 23

Isherwood's eyes opened.

Reflexively, he took hold of a tube coming from his nose – the damned thing was interfering with his breathing – and started tugging. Two hands closed over his, restraining him. ‘Hold on, Ish. Easy does it.'

Filtered through a warm screen of painkillers, the face hovered very close to Isherwood's own: hollow-cheeked, smelling of Winstons, eyes webbed red. The Chief.

Moments later a white-coated doctor passed the room, waylaid a passing nurse, and took over the job of detaining Isherwood's hands as the nurse inserted a syringe into a small canvas pouch coming off the tube. The pouch drained sibilantly. The tube was withdrawn, scratching painfully against a parched throat – a phenomenon as distinctive as it was unpleasant. ‘Breathe,' the young doctor commanded, and Isherwood thought,
No shit, asshole
.

He sucked in an aggrieved breath. Released it shuddering, and drew another. ‘Breathing off the ventilator,' the doctor told the nurse.