Asher enjoys the feel of himself under the slickness of the sudsless soap. He spends a quarter of an hour caressing his lean but muscular torso and limbs, with special attention to the delightful vacancy where once his testicles depended. As further testament to his rejection of his humanity, he’d wanted to shear off his flaccid penis, too, but he hadn’t done so because management of the bleeding would have been difficult and because thereafter urination would have been less convenient.
In the first few minutes of Asher’s ablutions, the coyote comes out of the trees and appears on the farther shore, where it sits to watch him bathe. Every morning—often at other moments of the day, as well—a coyote observes him, never with what seems like predatory intent. Sometimes it is a male, at other times a female, one day a graybeard and the next a younger specimen.
Initially, he’d wondered why these creatures took such intense interest in him. But soon he realized that this was Mother Nature’s way of saluting him for his commitment to her, because no other man or woman has ever made—or ever would make—as profound a sacrifice as Asher has made. As the coyotes are cousins to wolves, so Asher is now a cousin to coyotes, and through them Nature makes clear her approval of his manifesto and his murders.
Some people believe that dogs have a psychic sense, and Asher feels sure that coyotes are greatly gifted in this way, that they can read his intentions, if not his every thought. A few times a week, while under their observation, he loses all sense of purpose for ten minutes or twenty or half an hour, and goes into something like a trance, on some occasions while standing here in the river. When he regains awareness, he can see the coyote pacing back and forth in great agitation, though never with the intent to attack, rather as if the beast is excited by some bonding that occurred between them while Asher was in a fugue state.
This morning, after he wades ashore and towels dry and dresses, just as he is about to turn away from the river and enter the former saloon to continue his work on the manifesto, Asher falls into one of these strange fugues for perhaps ten minutes. When he wakes, he is still standing on the riverbank with his feet planted wide apart and his hands raised, his fingers combing the air as if to harvest something from the golden sunlight. The coyote on the farther shore is in a frenzy, circling on itself and biting at its tail, its ears flat against its skull, making shrill, urgent sounds. It endures in this behavior for a minute, then stops and, panting as if exhausted, gazes at him across the water for a moment before, hackles raised, it sprints north along the grassy strand for about ten yards. Then it vanishes into the shadows among the pines and other evergreens.
26
Kenny Deetle was a white-hat hacker, internet buccaneer, data diver extraordinaire, thirty years old but still as quick of mind as any twenty-year-old punk who’d been steeped in the craft since the cradle. He could backdoor any computer system and worm deep into it and plant a rootkit, giving him easy access and control that no IT-security special forces could detect, although he didn’t do this illegally or for nefarious clients. He was a good guy. He hadn’t always been one of the good guys, but he’d wanted to be one ever since he was twenty-four, when his best friend, Max Gurn, hacked into the computer system of a Dark Web drug operation. Max locked it down and tried to extort four million dollars in Bitcoin in return for allowing cartel jackboots to regain access to their inventory and supply-chain records. Max was the very best at spoofing through a maze of telecom exchanges, a wizard at concealing his identity and true location. He knew the bad guys—or worse guys, if you will—could never find him. But they found him. Max went on the run across three continents, two oceans, and four islands before the cartel caught up with him in Oklahoma, the Sooner State, in the city of Tulsa, where they cut his head down the middle with a chain saw while he was—briefly—alive, then methodically dismembered him, packed him into a hermetically sealed, metal trunk labeled GURN FAMILY MEMENTOS, and had him delivered by FedEx to his mother in Topeka.
Since then, thankful that he hadn’t participated in Max Gurn’s big score, although he’d been invited to assist, Kenny Deetle did white-hat hacking for certain Fortune 500 companies. He also took assignments from Rider Investigations because, five years earlier, when police showed little interest in what they thought was a crank threat, Wyatt Rider identified an anonymous stalker who intended to rape Kenny’s sister, Sandy, and feed her to hogs. Wyatt got evidence on the creep—one Proctor Lash, now serving a life term—who turned out to have done to another woman what he wanted to do to Wendy.