He spent that night on a foldout couch, in the airless upstairs room Sweet’s wife used for sewing. Lying awake, Victor could smell her in the room. She had impressed him powerfully, a brisk, practical woman who worked as a midwife, who grew vegetables and baked bread and made all the children’s clothes. He saw that Sweet had chosen wisely. Acquiring such a female was like investing in a generator, an essential power source.
That evening, as they passed the dishes around the table, he’d come to certain realizations. The choice of a helpmeet wasn’t as difficult as he’d made it. Females, in most cases, were just what they appeared to be. Victor had picked one who served liquor to strange men, who cursed like a sailor and dressed like a whore. A blind man could have seen that it would end badly. And yet, when she killed his baby, he’d been genuinely surprised.
He lay awake and thought of Sweet’s daughter, sleeping on the other side of the wall. When he’d taken her hand for the blessing it had felt exactly like her mother’s, a fact he found significant. Both were warm and strong and delicate, as though they were attached to the same woman. Their hands were exactly the same.
He rose early and left in darkness, while the family was still sleeping. He never saw Larry Sweet again. For the rest of his life he would remember that hot summer night, the teenage girl sleeping on the other side of the wall.
I should have taken her, he thought.
In retrospect it seemed the obvious solution. Sweet’s daughter was small and slender. She weighed no more than a midsize dog.
BY THE TIME HE CROSSED THE NEW YORK BORDER, HIS TOOTH was throbbing. In the rearview mirror he studied his swollen face. He wished that he had packed aspirin, though he was probably too far gone for that. At home in his medicine chest was the one remedy that sometimes worked, Orajel Plus, made for infants who were teething.
“Pull it already.”
He spoke the words aloud, in a voice he recognized. It wasn’t God’s voice, or Doug Straight’s or Tim McVeigh’s, for that matter. He was speaking in his father’s voice.
Things were breaking down.
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN ON MERCY STREET REMAINED UNCLEAR.
In the first scenario, he would penetrate the clinic without resistance, his BCS. It seemed too much to hope for. How likely or unlikely this was, Victor could not say.
In the second scenario, he would be met with armed resistance—theoretically, at least, his WCS. But Victor Prine had never shrunk from danger. In his heart he was still a soldier, mentally and physically prepared to do what had to be done.
His jaw pulsed rhythmically.
Scenario three was the most complicated. In scenario three, he would be forced to pivot. If Columbia could not be located, the clinic offered other high-value targets—including, but not limited to, the abortionist himself.
Scenario three, it must be said, was vague to him. How he would find the abortionist, or recognize the guy when he saw him, was not clear. Better intel would have helped, a trusted lieutenant to make inquiries. What he needed, more than anything, was boots on the ground.
Of course, boots on the ground would have rendered the entire mission unnecessary. This was not a helpful thought.
In scenario four—his BCS—he would locate Columbia and contain her in an enclosed space.
He thought of the deer he’d lost in the woods north of Garman Lake, and of Larry Sweet’s daughter. He would not make the same mistake again.
Pull it already.
In a gas station men’s room in upstate New York, he reached into his mouth and pulled out the tooth.
VICTOR GOT BACK ON THE ROAD.
His mouth was now on fire. Pulling the tooth hadn’t solved the problem. Pulling the tooth had plunged him into new depths of pain.
Pull it already. His father’s voice, predictably, had led him astray. It was a lesson he’d learned many times and ought to have remembered. Only a fool took advice from Lovell Prine.