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“We think so, and Underwood does, too. If we kill Scott, Rae and I won’t be joining the champagne lunch. Neither will the one hundred and thirty-four people in the church. If Detrick is right about this thing, a whole bunch of them are going to die. So, I wanted to let you know. No sign of Scott so far.”
“All right. I’d pray for you, but…”
“Yeah, yeah. You have more faith in pills.”
“Dad…”
“Keep your goddamned butt down, Letty. I’ll call you with more as soon as I know more.”
—
When Lucas rangoff, Letty called Cartwright to tell her what he’d said.
“So he’s infected, or might be?” Cartwright asked.
“He doesn’t think he is, but he killed Catton this morning.”
“Good for him. One to go…” Cartwright said.
Letty: “As far as we know.”
“Hey. That rhymes. One to go, as far as we know.”
“Great. Turn it into a song,” Letty said. “I’ll look for it on the Hot 100. In the meantime…I think I’ll go back to sleep.”
“Go ahead. Get as much as you can.”
“Don’t he a heroine, wake us up when our shift is due.”
“I will do that,” Cartwright said.
—
They got restlessafter four o’clock, spent some time talking about nothing, did some light necking, and then Letty said, “C’mon. Let’s get up. I’m wide awake. Maybe call Dad again, see where he’s at.”
They dressed and Letty called Lucas, who said he and Rae had moved into a house well on the outskirts of Taos and were now officially in quarantine. “The house has Wi-Fi and a TV and some streaming services charged to the Marshals Service. Gonna catch up on my old-timey movies.”
“What about the church?”
“Have you heard of the Black Hole of Calcutta?”
“Ah, man.”
“When they let the real media in town, gonna get worse,” Lucas said.
“Call me whenever,” Letty said.
—
She called Cartwrightto tell her about Lucas and Rae, and that she and Hawkins were going to brush their teeth and would be around in ten minutes.
“I sent a flunky through security up to the food place to get us a bunch of food. Hope you like Chinese,” Cartwright said.
“We like Chinese,” Hawkins said. “Tell them to get a lot.”
After washing their faces and brushing their teeth, they walked out to the baggage area, where Cartwright was stretched out on two chairs, attended by a couple of state cops. She said, “I was just telling these guys”—she poked a finger at them in turn, identified them as Ben and Tom—“how unfair it was that you two were sleeping together and I’m out here all by myself, and lonely.”
One of the cops said, “And we were explaining to her that there’s a cure for that.”
