Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(11)
It takes several trips to unload the truck, and she pauses to survey the woods again every time she steps outside. An open-air shed, cluttered with garbage cans, yard tools, a wheelbarrow, rusted rolls of chicken wire, stands a ways off from the driveway. She collects an extension ladder from it. The cabin is shaped like a shoebox, with its porch and entryway on the shorter face of it. She climbs the ladder to install two motion detectors beneath its gables and centers the other two along the broad sides of the cabin.
She opens the entry door and uses a hammer and flathead screwdriver to knock the pins from the hinges. She is strong enough to wobble only a little when she picks up the wooden door and lays it on the porch and excises its knob and deadbolt and hinges and then screws them into the steel door with the price still stickered to it. After thirty minutes the new door is hung, not strong enough to keep Magog out, she knows, but enough to slow him down.
Inside, she snaps her measuring tape along the windows and jots down their dimensions on a piece of paper she pockets. There are ten windows in the house, all of them the same size except for the bathroom, the kitchen, and the big bay window in the living room. She lays out each sheet of plywood in the yard and uses the measuring tape and a Magic Marker to sketch out their shape. From the shed she collects two sawhorses with lichen furring them over and sets them in the front yard and heaves the sheets up on them and sets to work cutting their edges and then, into their centers, a foot-wide slit big enough to accommodate her eyes or the muzzle of a gun.
This takes a long time because she lets the saw spin for only thirty seconds at a time, its blade spitting out sawdust like freshly fallen snow, and then she lifts her finger from the trigger, the whine of the blade receding as she surveys the woods.
There is a tall stack of firewood at the leeward side of the cabin, and she tosses the litter of plywood there before dragging the freshly cut sheets inside. Twilight has come and she claps out the remaining light by hanging the plywood blinds, bracing them with a raised knee, screwing their four corners into the window frame. Across the front door, the only door, she hammers three two-by-fours.
She fills her cupboards with the groceries. She shoves the gas containers to the back of the broom closet. She feeds batteries into the flashlights and staggers them throughout the cabin. She can’t fit the water bottles in the sink so she undoes the hose from the washing machine and runs it into them, splashing them full and setting them aside.
Her dinner she doesn’t taste—the chicken and pesto left over from last night—and barely remembers eating it either, surprised to scratch her fork against an empty plate.
She pads the bathtub with several blankets and a pillow, and next to it lays down a ten-inch silver dagger with a textured grip, two Glocks, six clips loaded with silver hollow-points, a shotgun with a shoulder-strap decorated with red cartridges packed tight with silver ball bearings, and finally, the photo she always keeps next to her bed, the photo of her daughter, whose face she touches before killing the light and crawling into the tub to stare at the darkness and wait for sleep.
Chapter 4
CHASE CAN’T GET used to it. Eight months into his first term and every time somebody nods at him and addresses him as Governor Williams, he feels like he ought to turn around, see if some blue-blood Yale grad is standing behind him. He likes to think of himself as country. He knows this is what got him elected. “He’s real people,” his supporters like to say.
He still wears Justin cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans, but usually with a Calvin Klein sport coat. He still speaks with a twang, but especially when he takes to the microphone at a press conference or town hall forum. But it has been a long time since he mucked out a horse stall, hefted irrigation pipe, mended a fence, fired a shot at anything except a paper target. And Salem is a long way from the ranch in Eastern Oregon, where he grew up, the three thousand acres of alfalfa, the six thousand head of cattle.
A long way indeed. Right now he sits cross-legged on the floor, holding a pair of chopsticks and clacking them together, hungrily, over a Japanese woman lying on a straw mat, her naked body decorated with a colorful array of sushi placed on tea leaves. He dines directly off her. She does not move—she barely breathes—even when he traces his chopsticks along her collarbone, to the base of her neck, where in the hollowed-out dip there rests a gunkanzushi—sea urchin wrapped in seaweed—that he plucks away and devours.
This is the Kazumi Teahouse, where Chase often comes for lunch, dinner, only a twenty-minute drive from the capitol building, in southeast Salem, off Lancaster Drive. Paper lanterns and tea lights softly illuminate the main dining room. Scrolls bearing Japanese characters hang from the walls, evenly spaced and separated by potted bamboo. A rectangular koi pond runs down the center of the restaurant, bright with water lilies, and to either side of the pond sit men who dine off female bodies, slowly unveiling their nakedness.
“Governor Williams?” The voice comes from behind him.
“What?” Chase turns to see the waiter—a woman in a black kimono with pink roses stitched along its edges—bowing toward him, carrying a tray on which rests the sake bomb he ordered, a ceramic bowl of Koro set next to a pint of Rogue Amber. The waiter pours the sake into the beer and hands it to Chase, who toasts the glass and takes a heavy gulp and smacks his lips and says, “Oh, is that good. That is so, so good. Thank you.”
Nearby, on a spotlighted circular stage, a gray-haired Japanese woman in a dark blue kimono kneels before a koto shaped like a crouching dragon. When strummed, the thirteen woven strings stretched over ivory bridges make the air vibrate.