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“If you come over here…”
—
The clerk helpedthe little old lady load the Norco Fluid FS4 in the back of the Jeep; a wheel stuck out, but would be okay. The actual list price for the bike was $1,999. After some dickering, the little old lady conceded that she had another hundred dollars in her purse, and while that wouldn’t cover all the sales tax, the clerk offered to cut the retail price to the point where it all came out at $2099.
“Could you throw in a helmet and bicycle gloves?”
More dickering, and it turned out that she had twenty-five hundred dollars. The smiling clerk got it all. “What am I going to do with more money, anyway?” she asked, touching her scalp.
The clerk shied away, thought about other things, took the cash, and helped load the bike.
As he watched her drive away, he said to the other clerk and the cyclist, “That’s one dead-ass old lady.”
—
Back at Wong’shouse, a pleased Lionel Scott wheeled the bike around the inside of the garage and said, “I like it. A lot. Did you have them check the tire pressure?”
“I had them do everything. They said it’s ready to ride.”
“Tonight, then,” he said. “By tomorrow night, we’ll have been successful, or we’ll…”
“Be dead,” Catton finished. “I’m old enough to have thought a lot about being dead. It doesn’t bother me anymore.”
“Bothers me a bit,” Scott said.
“Only a bit?”
“Only because I’d like to know how all this worked out. If we were successful. If we saved Gaia.”
22
Lucas showered and shaved, because he wouldn’t feel awake and human if he didn’t, and popped a Dexedrine. He and Rae had checked into another Hampton Inn late the night before, and he called her as he dug through his travel bag.
“I was waiting to hear from you,” she groaned.
“I woke you up to tell you to go back to sleep,” Lucas said. “I figured you’d be up soon, and you don’t have to be. Shit is going on, but nothing that you have to worry about right now. Somebody leaked about the virus, things could get crazy. I’m going out to scout around.”
“Then Iamgoing back to sleep. Call me when you’re done scouting.”
As he was getting dressed, Mellon, the Taos chief, called and said, “You better get down here.”
“What happened?”
“About a million cops are headed up here. MPs from Fort Bliss, ordered here by the Army. There’s a rumor that the President has declared martial law in New Mexico, but I haven’t heard anything directly about that, and there’s nothing on the news channels except the rumor. Everybody knows about the virus, we got hundreds of cars at the checkpoints. We’re holding on for now…”
“Jesus. When will the Army get here?”
“I took a call five minutes ago, I guess the commander is in town looking for the police station. They want to know what they need to do. And he told me a helicopter unit will be coming in later in the morning. It’s like a flock of ducks landed on my head; I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
“I’m coming,” Lucas said.
—
Lucas had touse his iPhone’s navigation app again to get him back to the police department, where he saw a single military vehicle in the parking lot, and no MPs hanging around. Inside, he found Mellon talking to a lieutenant colonel named Harris Foley and a major named Anna Vincent.
When Lucas walked in, Mellon said to the soldiers, “Here he is. Talk to him.”
Lucas shook hands with Foley and Vincent, and Foley said, “We need to know everything, because we don’t know much except the Army chief of staff called me and the base commander during my kid’s Little League game last night and jacked us up, and here we are. He said something about terrorists and a virus.”
