Carter & Lovecraft (28 page)
“He’s killed twice, he tried to kill Dan—”
“He
what
?”
“—he isn’t suddenly going to grow some morals. Yeah, so by ‘stop,’ I mean ‘kill.’”
“Maybe not,” Carter said quietly.
“Dan,” said Lovecraft, “there’s no alternative. The man’s a sociopath. There’s something wrong in his head. You can’t fix him.”
“I’m not talking about fixing him. I’m taking about stopping him without killing him. There’s a common factor here in everything he’s done. Maybe that’s his weakness.”
Lovecraft frowned, then understood. “Waite Road.”
“Waite Road?” said Harrelson. “The place out on that spit of land? What do you know about Waite Road?”
Carter briefly described Colt’s visits, but didn’t mention his own experiences there, or how he had woken up on Waite’s Bill when he should have been dying in Colt’s house. He wasn’t even close to understanding that himself; he didn’t want to put it out there so others could scratch their heads and treat it as a curiosity.
Harrelson sighed and said “Fuck” under his breath. He ordered more drinks and, when the bartender had gone, said, “Waite Road doesn’t have a great rep. When I was a rookie, the precinct used to haze us by sending us on a fool’s errand out there, just to freak us out. The Waites … Jesus, have you
met
any of them?”
“One of the men,” said Carter. “I think there was something wrong with him.”
“There’s something wrong with
all
of them, and not necessarily the same thing, either. The men are kind of dead behind the eyes, and the women … they’re way too
alive
behind the eyes. Few years ago I was passing the courthouse and one of the Waites was getting married. I recognized the groom, too. Petty crook, bad guy. There he was in a cheap suit looking like he was brain-damaged. Not smiling, hardly looking around, like he was dreaming it all. He falls clean off the radar after that. Rap sheet that kicked off in juvie, couldn’t keep out of trouble if it meant his life. And then, boom, he’s a solid citizen. Wish I could say it was the love of a good woman, but the bride scared me more than he did, and he’s six-three. She’s some little thing, maybe five-four, hardly more than a teenager. Good-looking, too. But, Jesus, I finish shaking the guy’s hand, trying to give him some bullshit speech about having responsibilities now, and he’s just looking at me like he doesn’t understand English anymore, and I turn around and
she’s
there, grinning at me, and it’s like a great white shark has snuck up on me, because, man, there was something scary about her. I forget all about how good-looking she was at a distance because, close up? My balls pretty much sucked up into my body.”
“I like your friend, Dan,” said Lovecraft. “He’s graphic.”
Harrelson ignored her. “You know how some guys just sweat trouble? You know they like hurting people, because you smell violence on them? Like, they stink of it? She did that, too, in spades. I walked away. Straightaway, and I could hear her and the other Waite women laughing. The men? Not a peep. They just stood around like zombies.” He flinched at an unpleasant thought. “Hey … you don’t think—”
“No,” said Carter. “Just because Colt and probably the Waites deal in weird shit doesn’t mean we start treating
Famous Monsters of Filmland
as a mug book. The Waite men are, I don’t know,
wrong
somehow, but they’re alive.”
“Okay. Brass tacks. What exactly are we talking about doing? What is this hypothetical lawbreaking that I am absolutely not going to be involved in?”
“We just need to know what it is about Waite Road that’s so important to whatever Colt’s doing.” Carter looked at Lovecraft. “Is it just because Randolph and H. P. L. did whatever they did there? Is that why it’s important?” Even as he said it, he knew he was being optimistic. That would have meant the site was reproducible, and they might be able to do whatever the fuck needed to be done wherever. But life rarely makes things easier.
Lovecraft shook her head. “No. The place was important. The Waites owned it then, too, remember. It’s been their land before there was even a Providence to speak of. The record’s patchy. If H. P. L. wrote about it in detail—and if he didn’t, that’s not like him—whatever he wrote is long lost. Whatever Randolph did there, he did because it
had
to be done there. There’s something off about that spit of land. Probably why the Waite family claimed it in the first place.”
“Okay. Back to Plan A, then.”
Harrelson frowned. “I musta missed something. What Plan A? Hypothetical Plan A.”
“The one where we go in like gangbusters and generally fuck the Waites up. Find whatever’s so important to Colt and take it or wreck it.”
“That’s not a plan. That’s a bunch of serious felonies.”
“Plan B is the one where we sit on our asses watching Colt put a puppet into the Oval Office in a series of incredibly unlikely landslide victories.”
“I prefer Plan A,” said Lovecraft.
“Only ’cause Plan B sucks so bad,” said Harrelson.
“Seriously, man, are you in?” Carter asked Harrelson. “It’s fun pretending to be the Scooby Gang while there’s beer on the table, but we’re going to have to ante up on this, and soon. Colt’s pissed off with me, and he will have another try at offing me. Nothing is more certain. I’m not going to give him the chance.”
“Slow down, cowboy.” Harrelson leaned back in his seat. “When are we talking about?”
Carter and Lovecraft exchanged glances. “Tomorrow,” she said.
“In broad daylight?”
“Night sure as hell won’t work to our advantage. Them, I’m pretty sure it will.”
“‘
Our
’?” Harrelson gave her a hard look. “Ma’am, there’s a chance it’s going to get messy.”
Lovecraft returned the hard look with a few percent interest. “And?”
Harrelson shot Carter a glance, but he was staying out of this one. Harrelson tried to find a way to put it delicately. “There may be trouble. Anybody goes in there needs to know how to handle a gun. Do you?”
Lovecraft angled her head back until she was looking at Harrelson down her nose. “I trained as a librarian, and I run a bookstore. Fucking right I can use a gun.”
“Seriously?” asked Carter, surprised despite himself.
“There’s a Mossberg 930 with a folding stock under the store counter. Never had to use it in anger, but I trained to use it five years ago after a guy came in and got … fresh. Mace got me out of trouble that time, but it was close. So, yeah, a shotgun. I retrain every year. I know my way around it. I even reorganized the shelving, so if I have to engage somebody between the counter and the door, only the political autobiographies are in danger and who gives a fuck about those?”
Harrelson nodded, impressed. “Library school sounds a bunch more two-fisted than I’d thought.”
Carter thought back to when he’d been listening in on Colt’s conversation with her, while pretending to browse the shelves. He’d actually noticed the block of political memoirs and thought at the time that they seemed out of place. That they had been placed like that so they could be sacrificed if necessary while Lovecraft was laying down 12-gauge fire from behind the counter was a sobering realization.
“Holy shit,” he said quietly.
“Looking pale there,” said Lovecraft. “Better get in some more drinks.”
They were back at the apartment over the bookstore, and they were looking at guns. Lots of guns.
“Holy shit,” Carter said quietly, for the second time that evening.
“Thinking of opening a gun store, Detective?” asked Lovecraft. She was sitting with the Mossberg across her lap, cleaning it. By her legs was a bag containing its cleaning kit and some accessories. Carter could see a sling strap; then Harrelson craned over to look in the bag and said, “Is that a tactical sight? Sweet.”
Lovecraft fished in the bag and produced a short length of steel tube. “And a two-shell magazine extension. Never needed it for anything but training.” She started fitting it.
Carter returned his attention to the odd collection of weapons Harrelson had brought in a large black duffel. He knew it wasn’t uncommon for cops to occasionally misappropriate weapons found on the job, but this was altogether too wholesale an array for that. “Where did these come from?”
“Some half-assed ‘Kill the President to Protect the Constitution’ bunch of morons. This is nowhere near the amount of firepower they had. We did a combined operation with the FBI and cleaned them out pretty quickly. They were no real threat; just a shitload of weapons and jerking off to a fuckwit manifesto they’d written on Big Chief writing tablets. There was so much evidence we ended up just sticking it into any car with an empty trunk. I didn’t put any in mine, but somebody did and didn’t tell me. A week later, I pop my trunk and there’s this survivalist’s party favor sitting there looking at me.
“I shoulda handed it in, obviously. But I didn’t, and nobody said anything.”
“Are they on record?” Carter picked up a Beretta, thought better of it, and put it back down.
“Nope. All brand-new. Still grease on a lot of it, and the serials aren’t in the system. They’re clean.”
The weapons certainly looked new. The Beretta Carter had examined was a Pico .380, a relatively recent release. He took it up again, and nodded. It was time he accepted that they were well outside the law with what they were planning, and that he should just get on with it. “Okay. Okay,” he said to himself. He offered the pistol to Lovecraft. “How are you with pistols?”
“I’ve fired on a range with one, but that was a long time ago.” She regarded the pistol with suspicion. “Kind of small, isn’t it? I’m happy with my shotgun.”
“You’ll need a backup weapon. The Mossberg takes, what? Seven in the tube and one in the chamber?”
“
Nine
in the tube,” said Lovecraft, tapping the magazine extension under the barrel.
“So ten shells, but it’s a semiauto. You can get through ten faster than you might think in combat. You run dry and there’s still trouble in the offing, you might not have time to reload.” He offered her the pistol again. “Take it. It’s a good gun.”
She accepted it pragmatically rather than gracefully. “It’s so
thin
.”
“Compared to that bazooka of yours, everything looks thin,” said Harrelson. “There’s a couple of spare mags in the bag and a box of Fiocchi Extrema hollow points. They’re good rounds. You can fuck somebody up really good with those things.”
She examined the resin frame below the metal slide. “It says here I should read the manual before use.” She looked meaningfully at Harrelson.
“Gee, I’m sorry,” he said with no sincerity whatsoever. “The bag of illegal firearms came without documentation. Whatever was I thinking?”
She smiled and put the pistol to one side. “I’m going to need a holster.”
“We’ll pick one up in the morning.”
In the morning
. In the morning, they would go to a gun store, chat up the guy behind the counter, discuss the practicalities of holsters, joke, make some purchases, say good-bye to the guy behind the counter, and then later that same day, chances were that they would use those purchases in the commission of multiple homicides.
It was a sobering thought. Carter found a bottle of wine and some beer in his fridge to reverse the thought’s effect.
* * *
Colt was awoken at two in the morning by a phone call. He fumbled for his phone in the darkness of his bedroom, despite a small voice of remembrance saying,
But didn’t you turn it off?
But it was ringing, so obviously he hadn’t.
He checked the display and saw the number was withheld. The last call he’d had like that was from Carter. This one surely was, too. Colt hesitated, thinking, the phone thrumming in his fingers. He wasn’t sure what to do about Carter. He was certainly a nuisance, and maybe even a threat, but the way he’d escaped at least made him an interesting threat. Colt was beginning to treasure interesting things. Since the cube had shown him that so much he had previously regarded in life as interesting was instead merely flawed, he had found that his pleasures in life were decreasing as his powers increased. He had been faced with the specter of an all-consuming
ennui
if he had carried on as he had been doing, with only an eye to simple temporal pleasures.
Carter had inadvertently helped him away from that path. He had traced Carter to the bookstore, and there he had met Emily Lovecraft. An actual Lovecraft! He’d thought that bloodline had died with the writer. That was nice, but Carter’s protectiveness toward her was even better. Such a white knight, such a platonic
cicisbeo
, while her boyfriend fucked her regardless.
And what a boyfriend. The serendipity of a putative senator falling into Colt’s path at the exact moment he was wondering how to proceed. It was perfect; why scrabble for every yard of growing power when you can have boring people do it for you? Colt was confident he would have had Rothwell in the Senate soon enough. Then a run for the White House backed with some astonishing good luck.
That had been the plan, anyway. Taking Rothwell to Waite’s Bill had been a mistake, though. Oh, well. Plenty more politicians where he came from. Colt would just have to find a new one to puppeteer.
William Colt, the
éminence grise
. He liked the sound of that. He’d do a better job of being the president’s brain than Karl Rove ever had for George W. Bush. A moron backed by an idiot. Colt was going to be the best power behind the throne since the days of Richelieu. And nobody would ever suspect him of being more than … oh, whatever. Oh! The guy who predigests the data and serves it up like pap for the president every morning. Didn’t Reagan used to have his briefings delivered as cartoon drawings?
The phone was still ringing. Colt took the call.
“Good morning, William,” said a voice. “I hope I am not disturbing you?”
It wasn’t Carter. The voice was male, middle-aged, educated, and slightly amused. Probably New England? Not a strong Bostonian accent, but there was a hint of it.
