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In five minutes his shirt was soaked with sweat and the pot patch looked like a miniature version of a clear-cut forest. Devastation. Stumps. He emptied a can of kerosene over the waste-high pile of cannabis, then pulled out his lighter and se the flame to a piece of paper. "Throw off the chains of your oppressors," Marx had said. These plants, the habit that went with them, were Theo's chains: the boot that Sheriff John Burton had kept pressed to his neck these last eight years, the threat that kept him from acting freely, from doing the right thing,
He threw the burning paper, and the flames of revolution whooshed over the pile. There was no elation, no rush of freedom as he backed away from the pyre. Instead of the triumph of revolution, he felt a sense of sickening loss, loneliness, and guilt: Judas at the base of the Cross. No wonder communism had failed.
He went into the cabin, retrieved the box from the shelf in the closet, and was beating his bong collection into shrapnel with a ballpeen hammer when he heard automatic weapons fire coming from the ranch.
Ignacio and Miguel
Ignacio was lying in the shade just outside the metal shed, smoking a cigarette, while Miguel labored away inside, cooking the chemicals down into methamphetamine crystals. Beakers the size of basketballs boiled over electric burners, the fumes routed through glass tubes to a vent in the wall.
Miguel was short and wiry, just thirty years old, but the lines in his face and the grim expression he always wore made him look fifty. Ignacio was only twenty, fat and full of machismo, taken with his own success and toughness, and convinced that he was on his way to being the new godfath-er of the Mexican Mafia. They had crossed the border together six months ago, smuggled in by a coyote to do exactly what they were doing. And what a sweet deal it had turned out to be. Because the lab was protected by the big sheriff, they were never raided, they never ha
d to move on a moment's notice like the other labs in California, or bolt across the border until things cooled off. Only six months, and Miguel had sent home enough money for his wife to buy a ranch in Michoac??n, and Ignacio was driving a flashy Dodge four-wheel drive and wearing five-hundred-dollar alligator-skin Tony Lama boots. All of this for only eight hours of work a day, for they were only one of three crews that kept the lab running twenty-four hours a day. And there was no danger of being stopped on the road while transporting drugs, because the big sheriff had a gringo in a little van come every few days to drop off supplies and take the drugs away.
"Put out that cigarette, cabrone!" Miguel shouted. "Do you want to blow us up?"
Ignacio scoffed and flicked his cigarette into the pasture. "You worry too much, Miguel. " Ignacio was tired of Miguel's whining. He missed his family, he worried about getting caught, he didn't know if the mix was right. When the older man wasn't working, he was brooding, and no amount of money or consoling seemed to satisfy him.
Miguel appeared at the doorway and stood over Ignacio. "Do you feel that?"
"What?" Ignacio reached for the AK-47 that was leaning against the shed. "What?"
Miguel was staring across the pasture, but seemed to be seeing nothing. "I don't know. "
"It is nothing. You worry too much. "
Miguel started walking across the pasture toward the tree line. "I have to go over there. Watch my stove. "
Ignacio stood up and hitched his silver-studded belt up under his belly. "I don't how to watch the stove. I'm the guard. You stay and watch the stove. "
Miguel strode over the hill without looking back. Ignacio sat back down and pulled another cigarette from the pocket of his leather vest. "Loco," he mumbled under his breath as he lit up. He smoked for several minutes, dreaming and scheming about a time when he would run the whole oper-ation, but by the time he finished the cigarette he was starting to worry about his partner. He stood to get a better look, but couldn't see anything beyond the top of the hill over which Miguel had disappeared.
"Miguel?" he called. But there was no answer.
He glanced inside the shed to see that everything was in order, and as far as he could tell, it was. Then he picked up his assault rifle and started across the pasture. Before he got three steps, he saw a white woman coming over the hill. She had the face and body of a hot senorita, but the wild gray-blonde hair of an old woman, and he wondered for the thousandth time what in the hell was wrong with American women. Were they all crazy? He lowered the assault rifle, but smiled as he did it, hoping to warn the woman off without making her suspicious.
"You stop," he said in English. "No trespass. " He heard the cell phone ringing back in the shed and glanced back for a second.
The woman kept coming. "We met your friend," Molly said.
"Who is we?" Ignacio asked.
His answer came over the hill behind the woman, first looking like two burned scrub oak trees, then the giant cat's eyes. "Holy Mary, Mother of God," Ignacio said as he wrestled with the bolt on the assault rifle.
Theo
Eight years of living at the edge of the ranch and never once had Theo so much as taken a walk down the dirt road. He had been under orders not to. But now what? He'd seen the trucks going in and out over the years, occasionally heard men shouting, but somehow he'd managed to ignore it all, and there had never been gunfire. Going onto the ranch to investigate automatic weapons fire seemed an especially stupid way to exercise his newfound freedom, but not investigating, well, that said something about him he wasn't willing to face. Was he, in fact, a coward?
The sound of a man screaming in the distance made the decision for him. It wasn't the sound of someone blowing off steam, it was a throat-stripping scream of pure terror. Theo kicked the shards of his bong collection off the front steps and went back to the closet to get his pistol.
The Smith & Wesson was wrapped in an oily cloth on the top shelf of his closet next to a box of shells. He unwrapped it, snapped open the cylin-der, and dropped in six cartridges, fighting the shake that was moving from his hands to his entire body. He dumped another six shells into his shirt pocket and headed out to the Volvo.
He started the Volvo, then grabbed the radio mike to call for some backup. A lot of good that would do. Response time from the Sheriff's Department could run as long as thirty minutes in Pine Cove, which was one of the reasons there was a town constable in the first place. And what would he say? He was still under orders not to go onto the ranch.
He dropped the mike on the seat next to his gun, put the Volvo in gear, and was starting to back out when a Dodge minivan pulled in beside him. Joseph Leander waved and smiled at him from the driver's seat.
Theo put the Volvo in park. Leander climbed out of his van and leaned into the passenger window and looked at the . 357 lying on the seat. "I need to talk to you," he said.
"You weren't much for talking an hour ago. "
"I am now. "
"Later. I'm just going to check something out on the ranch. "
"That's perfect," Leander said, shoving a small automatic pistol through the window into Theo's face. "We'll go together. "
Eighteen
Dr. Val
The bust of Hippocrates stared up at Val Riordan from the desk. "First, do no harm. . . "
"Yeah, bite me," said the psychiatrist, throwing her Versace scarf over the Greek's face.
Val was having a bad day. The call from Constable Crowe, revealing that her treatment, or lack of it, had not caused Bess Leander's suicide, had thrown Val into a quandary. She'd zombied her way through her morning appointments, answering questions with questions, pretending to take notes, and not catching a word that anyone said to her.
Five years ago there had been a flood of stories in the media about the dangers of Prozac and similar antidepressants, but those stories had been set off by sensational lawsuits against the drug companies, and the follow-ups, the fact that not one jury found antidepressants to cause destructive behavior, had been buried in the back pages. One powerful religious group (whose prophet was a hack science fiction writer and whose followers in-cluded masses of deluded movie stars and supermodels) had fielded a media attack against antidepressants, recommending instead that the de-pressed should just cheer up, buck up, and send in some gas money to keep the Mother Ship running. The various professional journals had re ported no studies that proved that antidepressants increased the incidence of suicidal or violent behavior. Val had read the religious propaganda (it had the endorsement of the rich and famous), but she hadn't read the professional journals. Yes, automatically treating her patients with antide-pressants had been wrong, but her attempt to atone by taking them all off the drugs was just as wrong. Now she had to deal with the fact that she might be hurting them.
Val hit the speed dial button to the pharmacy. Winston Krauss answered, but his voice was muted, as if he had an incredibly bad cold.
"Pine Cobe Drug and Gibt. "
"Winston, you sound horrible. "
"I hab on my mask and snorkle. "
"Oh, Winston. " Val rubbed her eyes, causing her contacts to slide back in her head somewhere. "Not at the store. "
"I'm in the back room. " His voice became clear on the last word of the sentence. "There, I took it off. I'm glad you called, I've been wanting to talk to you about killer whales. "
"Pardon?"
"I'm attracted to Orcas. I've been watching a Jacques Cousteau tape about them. . . "
"Winston, can we cover this in session. . . ?"
"I'm worried. I was especially turned on by the male one. Does that make me a homosexual?"
Jeez, it didn't worry him that he was a wannabe whale-humper, as long as he wasn't a gay wannabe whale-humper. As a psychiatrist, she'd tried to drop terms like "full-blown batshit" from her vocabulary, even in thought, yet
with Winston, she couldn't keep the term from rising. Lately, Val felt as if she was running the batshit concession on the cave floor. It had to stop. "Winston, I'm putting everyone back on their SSRIs. Get rid of the placebos. I'm going to put everyone on Paxil to get their levels up as quickly as possible. Make sure to warn the ones who were on Prozac that they absolutely can't miss a day like they used to. I'll move those who need it later. "
"You want me to take everyone off of the placebos? Do you know how much money we are making?"
"Start today. I'm going to call my patients. I want you to give them credit for the unused placebos they still have. "
"I won't do it. I almost have enough saved to spend a month at the Cetacean Research Center on Grand Bahama. You can't take that away from me. "
"Winston, I won't compromise my patients' mental health so you can go on vacation and fuck Flipper. "
"I said I won't do it. You were the one who started this. What about your patients' mental health then?"
"I was wrong. I'm not going to put everyone back on antidepressants either, so you're going to lose some revenue there too. Some of them didn't need the drugs in the first place. "
"No. "
Val was shocked at the conviction in Winston's voice. His self-esteem problem no longer seemed an issue. What a crappy time for him to be making progress. "So you want the town to know about your little problem?"
"You won't do that. You have more to lose than I do, Valerie. If you blow the whistle on me, then I'll tell the whole story to the papers. I'll get immunity and you'll go to jail. "
"You bastard. I'll send my patients down to the Thrifty Mart in San Junipero. Then you won't even have the legitimate sales. "
"No, you won't. Things are going to stay just the way they are, Dr. Val. " Winston hung up.
Valerie Riordan stared at the receiver for a second be fore replacing it in its cradle. How? How in the hell had she given control of her life over to someone like Winston Krauss? More important, how was she going to get it back without going to jail?
Theo
Joseph Leander had the automatic stuck against Theo's ribs. He'd thrown Theo's gun into the backseat. Leander was wearing a tweed jacket and wool dress slacks and a film of sweat was forming on his forehead. The Volvo bounced over a rut in the dirt road and Theo felt the barrel of the automatic dig into his ribs. He was trying to remember what you were supposed to do in such a situation, but all he could remember from the cop shows that he'd watched was never to give up your gun.
"Joseph, could you pull that gun out of my ribs, or put the safety on, or something? This is a pretty bumpy road. I'd hate to lose a lung because I didn't get new shocks. " That sounded sufficiently glib, he thought. Professionally calm. Now if he could just avoid wetting himself.
"You couldn't leave it alone, could you? It would have just passed into history and no one would have noticed, but you had to dig things up. "
"So you did kill her?"
"Let's say I helped her make a decision that she'd been waffling about. "
"She was the mother of your children. "
"Right, and she treated me with about as much respect as a turkey baster. "
"Wow, you lost me there, partner. "
"They use them for artificial insemination, Crowe, you fucking stoner. One squirt and you throw them away. "
"You got tired of being a turkey baster, so you hung your wife?"
"Her herb garden killed her. Foxglove tea. Contains huge amount of digitalis. Stops the heart and it's almost undetectable unless you're looking for it. Ironic, isn't it? I would have never known about any of that crap if she hadn't blathered on about it constantly. "
Theo was not at all happy that Leander was telling him this. It meant that he was going to have to make some sort of move to save himself or he was dead. Ram a tree maybe? He checked Leander's seat belt; it was buckled. What kind of criminal kidnaps someone and remembers to buckle his seat belt? Stall for now. "There were heel marks on the wall. "
"Nice touches, I thought. I don't know, she may have still been alive when I hung her up there. "
They were coming out of the forest that surrounded the ranch into an open pasture. Theo could see a metal shed next to a double-wide house trailer a couple of hundred yards ahead. A bright red Dodge truck was parked by the shed.
"Hmmm," Leander said. "They got a new trailer for the boys. Pull up to the shed and park. "
Theo felt panic rise in his throat like acid and fought it down. Keep them talking and they won't shoot. Hadn't he heard that somewhere? "So you killed your wife for a big-screen TV and a tumble with Betsy? Divorce never occurred to you?"
Leander laughed and Theo felt a chill run through his body. "You really are dense, aren't you, Crowe? See that shed up there? Well, I hauled twenty-eight million dollars' worth of methamphetamine out of that shed last year. Granted, I only get a piece of that, but it's a nice piece. I move it all. I'm a salesman, a family man, innocuous and unnoticeable. Who'd suspect me? Mr. Milquetoast. "
"Your wife?"
"Bess found out about it. Funny thing is, she was following me because she suspected an affair, but she never found out a thing about Betsy and me. She was going to turn me in. I had no choice. "
Theo pulled up next to the shed and turned off the Volvo. "You have a choice now, Joseph. You don't have to do this. "
"I'm not doing anything but going back to my life until there's enough money in my offshore accounts to take off. Don't get me wrong, Crowe. I didn't enjoy killing Bess. I'm not a killer. Hell, I've never even taken any drugs. This isn't crime, it's just a well-paid delivery route. "
"So you're not going to shoot me?" Theo really, really wanted to believe that.
"Not if you do what I tell you to do. Get out of the car. Leave the keys. Slide over and come out on my side. "
Theo did as he was told and Leander kept the pistol trained on him the whole time. Where did Leander learn to do that? He'd hadn't had a television that long. Guy must have taken a mail-order course or something.
"Miguel! Ignacio! Come out here!" Leander gestured with the pistol for Theo to move toward the shack. "Go inside. "
Theo ducked to get through the door and immediately saw rack upon rack of lab glass, glass tubing, and plastic barrels of chemicals. A single metal chair sat in front of half a dozen electric burners that were filling the shed with a brutal heat.
"Sit down," Leander commanded.
As Theo sat, he felt the handcuffs being yanked out of his back pocket.
"Put your hands behind you. " Theo did as he was told and Leander threaded the handcuffs through two metal bars at the back of the chair and snapped them over Theo's wrists.
"I've got to go find these guys," Leander said. "Probably taking a siesta. What was Burton thinking when he put a house trailer down here? I'll be back in a second. "
"Then what?"
"Then Ignacio will shoot you, I'm guessing. "
Molly
This was a first: a guy that actually did what you asked him to do. When she heard a car coming down the ranch road, she asked Steve to make himself look like a trailer and he had done it. Sure, she had to make a little box diagram in the air with her hands, and he missed the first time, trying to make himself look like the tin shed next to him, a miserable failure that resulted in only his head changing and making him look like a dragon wearing an aluminum bag over his head, but after a few seconds he got it. What a guy. Okay, his tail, which had always hung down into the creek bed before, was showing, but maybe no one would notice.
"What a guy," she said, patting him on his air-conditioning unit. Or at least it was an air-conditioning unit now. No telling what body part it had been before he changed into a trailer.
She's patting my unit, Steve thought. A low growl of pleasure ro
lled out of his front door.
Molly ran and hid behind the shed, peeking out to watch the white Volvo pull up and stop. She almost stepped out to say hi to Theo, then saw the other man in the car holding a gun on him. She listened as the bald guy led Theo into the shed and made some threats. She wanted to jump out and say, "No, Ignacio won't be shooting anyone, Mr. Bald Guy. He's busy being digested right now," but the guy did have a gun. How the hell did Theo let himself be taken prisoner by someone who looked like an assistant principal?
When it was evident that the bald guy was coming out, she ran to the dragon trailer, caught the edge of the air-conditioning unit, and swung herself up onto the roof.
The bald guy was going around to the front door. She ran over Steve's back and looked down over the edge.
"Miguel! Ignacio!" the bald guy yelled. "Get out here!" He seemed uncertain about going into the trailer.
"I saw them go in there," Molly said.
The bald guy stepped back, looking like he was going to go into a fit searching for where the voice had come from.
"You're an assistant principal, aren't you?" Molly said.
The bald guy finally spotted her and tried to hide the gun behind his back. "You're that crazy woman," he said. "What are you doing here?"
Molly scooched up to the edge of the dragon trailer. "'Scuse me? Pardon me? Beg your pardon? I'm the what?"
He ignored her question. "What are you doing here?"
"Excuse me. Excuse me, excuse me," she almost sang. "There is an as-yet-unapologized-for aspersion on the floor. You'll have to handle that before we move on. "
"I'm not apologizing for anything. What are you doing here? Where are Ignacio and Miguel?"
"You're not apologizing?"
"No. Get down from there. " He showed her the gun.
"'Kay," Molly said, patting Steve on the head/roof. "Steve, eat this impolite motherfucker. "
She'd seen it before, but it was especially exciting to be sitting on Steve's head when he changed shape and his tongue leapt out below her to wrap around the assistant principal. After the initial slurp, the inevitable crunch (which had bothered her before) was sort of satisfying.
She couldn't figure out if it was because the assistant principal had pointed a gun at her friend and called her a crazy woman, or if she was just getting used to it.
"That was just swell," she said. She ran across Steve's back, slid down to the top of the air-conditioning unit, then jumped to the ground.
Steve growled and the angles of his trailer form melted into the curves and sinew of his dragon shape. He rolled over on his side and Molly watched as the scales on his belly parted and seven feet of dragon penis emerged as thick and stiff as a telephone pole. Luminescent colors flashed up the length of the organ.
"Wow, that is impressive," Molly said, taking a few steps backward.
Steve sent her a message similar to the one he had sent to the fuel truck. It worked better on Molly. Her knees went wobbly, a warm tingling ran up her thighs, and she could feel the pulse rising in her temples.
She looked into Steve's eyes (well, one of them anyway), stepped up to his face and gently touched him on the lips (or what would have been lips, if he'd had them), and let the sweetly acrid smell of his breath (a mix of Old Spice, manly Mexicans, and barfed cow) wash over her.
"You know," she said, "I never kissed a guy with assistant principal on his breath. "
