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The detector screeched again like a ravenous pterodactyl.
“What the hell,” Evan said, holstering his gun, “is that noise?”
“The battery needs to be changed,” she said.
“That’sthe low-battery alert?” It was the worst sound he had ever heard in his life. “It sounds like an incoming-missile siren.”
“Yes.” She dragged a chair over from the defunct telephone nook. “And, miraculously, they only go off in the middle of the night to create maximum psychological distress. Don’t you have one?”
Evan had electronic noses with quartz-crystal microbalance sensor arrays and AI pattern-recognition systems embedded in the door and window frames that could detect and analyze theslightest trace of smoke, airborne pathogens, or dangerous gases. When triggered, they sent a three-toned distress signal to his RoamZone and threw a colored sunrise simulation into the room during sleeping hours.
He said, “No.”
Deborah stepped up onto the chair, wobbled a bit as she reached for the ceiling. Another life-ending screech vibrated Evan’s brain and nearly sent her toppling.
He said, “Why don’t you let me—”
With a wrench she twisted the circular unit free, ripped out the battery, and let both pieces tumble to the carpet.
They breathed the blissful silence.
Evan offered his hand, and she took it daintily and stepped down. She gave him a smile. “As long as we’re up,” she said, “we might as well eat something.”
“You need to send Norris,” Rath said into the phone.
The Town Car bobbed smoothly along 1-95 toward the airport. Sitting beside him, Gordo crushed the second of two Nacho Party Packs from Taco Bell. He’d balanced each tray on the wide ledge of a thigh. Sucking liquid cheese from his thumb, he was content to leave Rath to deal with Tenpenny.
“Why can’t you just finish out the job?” Tenpenny’s voice held its trademark irritation.
“Because the Seabrook girl lives in a fancy-ass college town.” Rath scratched the burned morass of his right cheek, which the car heater had set tickling. “They got neighborhood watch, private security patrols, all that shit.”
“So you want me to send the black guy?”
“Hell yeah. Everyone’ll be too politically correct to call the cops on Double N. You know how rich white people are.”
“You’re there right now. I need this done.”
“Sure. Send Gordo waddling in. He looks like Jabba the Hutt. And I look like Jabba the Hutt’s ballsack.”
Gordo snorted. “That’s us,semper malus.”
“Fine,” Tenpenny said. “Get back to the jet. I’ll pay Norris’s assto go tomorrow morning. By nightfall I want the girl to be past tense.”
Deborah left her cigarette in the ashtray on the window ledge, the tendril of smoke sucked out through the crack into the cool night air. She opened the freezer and refrigerator doors, took a moment to lean in and breathe the coolness, and when she turned around, her arms held a shelf of items—brown soda bottles, ice-cream carton, two freezer-chilled parlor glasses.
She set them down carefully on the kitchen table, took another drag of her cigarette, stooped to blow, then got to work fixing root-beer floats. “I did all that discipline stuff,” she said. “My whole life. But now? When I most should? I don’t want to. I want to drink root-beer floats and get fat.Fatter.”
She was perfectly slender, but Evan decided that hearing that from him right now was not what she wanted.
She slid a float across to him.
“No, thank you,” he said.
“Oh, shut up.”
Leaning back on the cushions of the bow window, she took a loud slurp through a straw and followed with another drag from the contraband cigarette. Stubbing it out, she tucked it away in another miniature preserves jar that once again appeared in her palm like a close-up magic trick.
The east-facing bow windows were heavily tinted, but even so Evan made sure to choose a chair out of the sight line from the street. “Doesn’t the smoke alarm wake up the others?” he asked.
