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Scott and Catton poked at the vegetables and fruit and ready-to-eat vegetarian groceries in Callister’s sack, then Scott looked in the refrigerator and found a mound of frozen microwave food, including chicken pot pies intended for an oven, and packs of microwave mushroom risotto. Catton had never cooked, she said, so Scott and Callister figured out Wong’s oven, and put in two of the pot pies; the risotto would wait until the pies were done.
—
Foss had beendesignated to get razors and hair color from the supermarket, so they didn’t have that. Catton went into the master bath, and found that Wong had pink disposable razors, the kind women use to shave their legs. Scott went to look, and when he came back, he found Callister on her hands and knees, cleaning up a blood puddle where Wong’s head had landed on the floor.
“Oh, Lord, let me do that,” he said.
“No, no, I got it,” Callister said, scrubbing furiously. “I’ll throw the paper towels in the garbage. Not that it’ll make any difference to anyone.”
“Do you think you could help Clarice shave her head? I don’t think I’d be good at it,” Scott said.
“I guess. But…” She shook her head.
“But what?”
“She enjoyed doing that. Killing Marilyn.”
Scott said, “Clarice is…what she is. She’s valuable and committed. We can’t do this without her.”
“Okay, but I’m right. She’s crazier than a Marburg fruit bat. About the hair…the hair will take a while.”
While the pot pies were cooking, Catton sat on a toilet with a towel around her neck and Callister used a pair of scissors to crop her hair to a half inch. There was some pulling that must have been painful, or at least annoying, but Catton was stoic, and sat without flinching.
She talked politics: “…the stupid shit approved that whole area for oil exploration, which is going to do nothing but encourage the people with the big SUVs and those ridiculous pickup trucks. How many trucks do you actually see that are hauling anything? You could buy a hybrid or an all-electric for half of the price of one of those trucks, and on the rare occasions you actually had to haul something, you could rent a truck. Save money all around, but your Bud Light boycotting asshole buddies would think you were gay or something, maybe a tranny…”
Callister agreed with that assessment, but shuddered every time she had to touch Catton, whose scalp seemed soft and wobbly andnastyto the touch, almost like a dead person’s cheek. She was also moderately shocked at the words coming out of Catton’s mouth; she was supposed to be some kind of aristocrat, but when Callister thought about it, she wasn’t sure heiresses of tire-store chains were usually considered to be aristocrats. Maybe, she thought, Catton came on the language naturally.
—
When the hairwas cropped all around Catton’s head, they used shampoo as shaving cream and Callister managed to shave the rest of the hair without nicks or cuts. When they were finished, Catton used a washcloth to rinse her scalp, dried it, and then checked herself in the bathroom mirror.
“If I’d known I’d look like this, I’d have done it years ago,” she said, approvingly. “My own parents wouldn’t recognize me—not that my father ever recognized me anyway. He thought I was some annoying kid passing through the house.”
“At least you had one, and you knew who he was,” Callister said.
Catton went into Wong’s bedroom and began rummaging through her chests of drawers, eventually coming up with two Hermès scarfs. “Who would have thought,” she said, pleased.
When Scott called them from the kitchen, where he’d taken the pies from the oven and was microwaving the risotto for Callister, Catton walked in wearing one of the scarves and a black Covid mask. “I’m immune-suppressed: What do you think?”
“You don’t look anything like Clarice Catton,” Scott said. “It’s strange, a complete transformation. If I were a police officer, I would look at that photograph, and then look at you, and see no resemblance whatever.”
—
They got fourhours of sleep, woke to a cell phone alarm, started moving Callister to the Subaru, sputtered last minute instructions at her…
“I got it, I got it,” Callister said. “Albuquerque to Dallas, and from Dallas to Charles De Gaulle and then, settle for a while. Lay down a patch in Albuquerque, two in Dallas, and whatever is left in Paris.”
“One modification,” Scott said, as he humped her suitcase out to the car. “If you get south, just outside Santa Fe you’ll come to the bypass around the city, Highway 599. You’ll see it, there are big signs. The 599 goes just a few blocks from the Santa Fe airport. Stop at the airport, go inside, like you’re waiting for someone, lay down a patch outside the departure area, and then continue to Albuquerque. All the flights out of Santa Fe go to hub airports. If you can do that…that might be all we’d need. Then, just one in Dallas, in one of the domestic terminals. A gate for a Los Angeles flight, or New York, or Atlanta.”
She nodded. “I can do that.”
“I’m giving you two of the phones,” Scott said. “We’ll still have four. Use the gray phone first. I’ve called it, you can call me back by looking at the ‘recents.’ ”
“Got it.”
—
At three-thirty, shewas on the highway south. A mile or so out of town, she ran into a checkpoint, with thirty or forty cars waiting. She’d spent time in an earlier part of her life trying unsuccessfully to practice meditation as a way to reduce stress. For the next hour, she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, without noticeably reducing her stress levels.
