Page 52 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“We planted a civilian unit in it.”

This does not sit well with Vector. “You do that to me, you’ll all be too dead to get your project built.”

“We’d never do that to you.”

“I’m gonna put my guys on my Escalade as soon as I get back to town, have them strip it down, see what they find.”

“Nothing to find.”

“Damn well better not be.”

“By our definition, you’re a partner, but Sheriff Deacon is an employee.”

“Belden Bead was also a partner, huh?” Vector says.

“Funny you should mention him.”

“Am I laughing here?”

“Belden just disappears, we don’t know where, and eight months later Nash Deacon disappears. We don’t believe in coincidences.”

“You said Deacon is at her place.”

“When he didn’t call at noon today, we discovered the tracking unit had stopped working at three o’clock Saturday morning, thirty-three hours earlier. We don’t know why. He was still there then. He had been there since Friday evening.”

“But now he could be anywhere.”

“Four o’clock this afternoon, we put a drone over her property, gave it a good lookover. No sign of the Trans Am. Nobody’s seen it or Deacon since Friday.”

“He could be anywhere,” Vector insists.

“He’s there. Even if he isn’t there, it’s the place you’ve got to start looking, and she’s who you’ve got to talk to first, before we start searching the whole world over.”

“I’ve got to talk to her, huh? Why not the sheriff’s office?”

Regis says, “Most deputies are in our pocket, but not all.”

“Work on that.”

“We are.”

“Work on it harder.”

“You’ve always got a few Dudley Do-Rights.”

“Frame them for something.”

“One by one,” Regis agrees. “The thing is, if for some reason Belden went to this bitch and if what happened to him is what’s happened to Deacon, we need to find out if she knows anything true about Nochelobo’s death. If she knows too much, we don’t want the wrong deputies hearing what she says.”

“Whether she knows everything or nothing, once we interrogate her, then we’ll have to waste the slut.”

“Whatever you feel is appropriate. It’s for delicate work like this that we brought the Bead family—and you—into this project.”

Just then the bats take flight by the hundreds, surely more than a thousand, erupting from whatever cave provides their shelter. Because of their numbers, the flutter and flapping of their tri-jointed wings and the thin squeaks they produce in order to navigate by echolocation compete with the roar of the river. These little horrors usually come out at sunset, and Regis is not expecting this late appearance of the swarm. He hunches down and clasps his hands over the top of his head, flashlight beam spearing up through nightmarish forms with squinched, whiskered faces and ravenous, fanged mouths. Bats never tangle in people’s hair. That’s an old wives’ tale. Regis knows it’s a stupid wives’ tale. Nevertheless, he covers his head and hunches during the minute the swarm takes to fan away into the darkness, snatching insects and devouring them in flight, as swift as swallows on wings five times thinner than surgical gloves. In a city, Regis might see one bat every decade, or maybe never see one. In this uncivilized territory, where there are many churches but not one high-end theater playing classic films on a big screen, where every restaurant offers a hamburger but not one provides any sushi, where half the locals homeschool their moronic offspring and where even the public schools cling to outdated definitions of literacy and science, there areswarmsof rabid bats. There are poisonous snakes in great variety and wolves and bears and mountain lions and countless other reasons why all the smart people long ago fled to hermetically sealed apartments in comfortable high-rise buildings, in the cities where Nature has been tamed and fenced in parks and kept presentable with daily grooming. Regis hates this place.

When he stands upright and lowers his hands, the beam of his light falls on his companion. Vector’s face is as expressionlessas that of a dead man whose features a talented mortician has smoothed so perfectly as to suggest this person passed through life without ever experiencing an emotion of any kind. Behind his sunglasses, his eyes might be sharp with contempt, but his voice remains flat when he says, “I’ll take three guys with me. We’ll wait until midnight, when she’s almost sure to be sleeping. We’ll grab her by surprise. If she knows what happened to Deacon—maybe even Belden—we’ll break her down and get the truth. She won’t be able to lie to us. She’ll try, but she won’t be able. Then my guys will want to use her. Me too. Subsequent to all that, a properly staged house fire might be the best way to erase evidence of what we do to her. If for some reason it doesn’t seem as if a fire can be made to look accidental, then come morning, we’ll take her body into the woods, drop it down a sinkhole into a cavern far off any trail, where either it’ll never be found or it won’t be discovered until nothing’s left but yellowed bones filled with mold instead of marrow. How does that sound?”

“Okay,” says Regis.

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