Perhaps because she was back in Montana, fresh from Rustling Willows Ranch, the recognition of the speaker’s identity no longer eluded her. In New Mexico, at a far remove from the land of her childhood, she could deny that this voice was that of her mother, but she could not deny it now.
The voice of her mother, but not her mother.
Her mother was dead.
The question echoed in her mind—How can you save me if you can’t save yourself?—and gave rise to an extraordinary suspicion.
The voice had been that of her mother, but somehow the caller had been Jimmy Two Eyes.
In the days after her mother’s death, in the hours following midnight, as she’d watched family videos alone in the house at Rustling Willows, the recording froze with Joanna’s face on the screen, and her mother had spoken words that the home movie had never contained on previous viewings. You will soon be going away, Jojo, going away to grow up elsewhere. I might reach out to you many years from now and ask you to come home.
That had not been a visitation by a spirit. That, too, must have been Jimmy.
She terminated the call and dropped the phone into her purse, shaken by a sense that the madness of recent weeks was a mere presentiment of greater insanity to come.
Looming over Jimmy, staring down at his tear-wet face, into his bottomless eyes, she demanded, “That was you, wasn’t it? Somehow that was you. My mother drowned. She’s been gone most of my life. She hasn’t come back. That was somehow you. Tell me the truth.”
Although his face glistened, his eyes no longer welled with tears, and his grief—if it had been grief—gave way to what seemed to be bitter resentment. His slumped and shapeless body stiffened into a disturbing configuration of misshapen bones and tortured muscles. He gripped the arms of the chair and sat up as straight as he could manage and raised his head as if in challenge.
His rough voice grew rougher, the words like hardwood and his voice a saw that cut them one from the other. “Truth? It’s truth you want? Then you’ll have it. The truth is, your mother’s death wasn’t an accident. She was murdered. Murdered. Murdered by your father.”
46
Once a black-hat hacker, now a white-hat hacker, Kenny Deetle was ready to go gray in a crisis. If the world harbored people who would, with pleasure, cut your head in two from skullcap to chin with a chain saw, stability was an illusion and lasting peace was a dream of fools. Yeah, evil was an irrational choice, because though evil could work in the short run, it never worked in the long run. And, yeah, evil people practiced to deceive, but not all deception was evil. Sometimes it was a survival technique.
The 1970 jet-black Pontiac GTO Judge, which Kenny kept in a spacious unit at an immense self-storage facility illiterately named “Storage R Us,” had been registered with the state by one Jamison Eugene Norwald, who didn’t exist, at an address in Spokane that was nothing but a mail drop. This had been possible because Kenny could backdoor the Department of Licensing computer and insert false data that even the most talented IT-security types couldn’t detect. Seemingly well-ordered and rational societies could go mad rapidly, as witness Germany in the 1930s, or they could be destroyed by corrupt kleptocrats like Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela, or they could be sucked into a vortex of irrationality by utopian ideologues—some religious, some atheistic—so it was always wise to have wheels that no one knew belonged to you, stashed where your enemies would not think to look for them, available for a quick getaway.
The Pontiac GTO had much to recommend it. A 455 cu. in. engine in V8, pushing out 325 horsepower. A smooth transmission with jackrabbit response. Sleek good looks.
Most important of all, the coupe had rolled off the line in Detroit long before a GPS navigation system was standard equipment. It couldn’t be satellite tracked by anyone—not by the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the state police, the FTC, the FCC, the EPA, the USPS, or a power-crazed hacker who, by remote control, flooded your apartment and burned down your lover’s house.
“It’s cool,” said Leigh Ann Bruce, sliding one hand along the sleek flank of the vehicle. “It’s retro and futuristic at the same time.”
“I take it for a drive once a week,” Kenny said, “keep the tank full and the battery charged. Two packed suitcases stashed in the trunk. We’ll stop somewhere and get you a couple pair of jeans, whatever else you need.”
As she got into the front passenger seat with the grocery-store tote, he started the engine. Putting the bag on the floor between her feet, she said, “Where are we going?”