It’s not fear that’s makes me sick. It’s anger.

20. In The Bunker

Twelve hundred miles to the south, Ricky Lang heads for the bunker. A concrete cube, ready-made and then buried under a load of dirt and gravel long before Ricky was born. Supposedly it dates from the Cuban missile crisis. Some crazy white man shit, blow the whole world to pieces. The way he heard, a Cuban contractor buried the thing, all in a panic, convinced Fidel was coming to town on a rocket. Kept his family there for a few weeks, then walked away, never looked back. Whatever, Ricky’s been familiar with the bunker since he was a kid, when he used to play hide the weenie with some of the trailer girls down there. The trailer park is long gone, but the bunker still exists and you never know when a secure location will come in handy. Especially one that cannot be detected from the air.

Ricky is keenly aware that any fool with a computer can Google a satellite image these days, check out your backyard, see if you mowed the grass. He’s made sure the Beechcraft is concealed in a hangar, that activity in and around the airfield is kept to a minimum. The place is probably still under some sort of minimum DEA satellite photo surveillance from the bad old days. Nothing to draw their attention now—he made it his personal business to clean up the tribal drug trade. Couple of the stubborn old farts thought it was still a going concern, had to be fed to the gators. The others soon saw the error of their ways, agreed to live on tribal income and whatever they’d managed to hide in the ground.

Gator bait was usually ripe chicken, but like they say, everything tastes like chicken once you take the skin off.

“Smells bad down there,” Roy warns him, approaching the bunker.

Ricky stops, looks Roy in the eye. “White shit smells different from people shit, you ever notice? One sniff, I can tell.”

“Oh yeah?” Roy responds, glancing away. “The boy don’t know whether he’s coming or going, or where he’s at.”

“Uh-huh,” says Ricky. “Dug, you bring them loppers?”

“Yeah, Chief,” says Dug, bringing up the rear, letting the big-branch loppers bump against his trouser leg. Seems to think carrying the loppers is some sort of game he can win, if only he can figure it out.

Ricky holds out his hand, stops Dug in his tracks. “Ain’t no chief to you,” he says. “I am chief to my own people, only to them.”

No surprise, Dug looks confused, seeking help from his brother, who shrugs as if to say Roll with it.

“You got the key?” Ricky asks. “Open says me.”

Ricky’s laughing as Roy fumbles with the key. Neither brother registering the humor in “open says me,” puns and wordplay not being their thing. Which, in Ricky Lang’s febrile mind makes the Whittle twins more amusing than the usual swamp crackers, a tribe he has made use of, and thoroughly mistrusted, for his entire life. Started out helping his father, Tito Lang, swap tanned hides for the whiskey the crackers made in their hidden stills. Saw the contempt in their colorless eyes—drunk Indians selling their birthright for the poison that would surely kill them. A poison self-administered, and no different in its outcome than the hot bullets so many of the people fired into their own brains as punctuation to their defiled lives.

“Wait,” says Ricky, cocking an ear. “You hear that?”

Strange noises emanating from the bunker. Sounds like children keening. In his mind it feels like the transmission has slipped, can’t get in gear to the next thought. Stuck on children keening, eee eee eee.

“That’s the ventilation pipe,” Roy reminds him. “Wind goes across the top, makes a weird noise.”

Keening becomes wind and his mind moves on.

“Open the door,” he says.

Out comes the nasty smell. To Ricky a white smell. “Need to empty the bucket,” he points out.

“He kicked it over.”

“Then mop it up. Use Pine-Sol.”

Roy gives him a little look, like are you serious? gets it that Ricky is deadly serious, and looks away. “Okay, sure. Pine-Sol it is.”

Inside the fetid bunker Ricky clicks on his lantern flashlight. The beam finds a frightened face, hollow eyes, a handsome mouth distorted by a gag.

“Hey, Seth, I talked to your dad. He sends his love.”

Ricky jams a tranquilizer dart into the white boy’s thigh, sees his eyes registering a higher level of fear.

“Nothing to worry about,” Ricky says soothingly, watching the tranks hit him hard, making the eyes dull, the rigid limbs relax. “Won’t take anything you’re gonna miss.”

21. We All Scream

As young moms go, I was clueless. For instance, I’d never seen an infant nursed until Kelly started playing patty-cake on my left nipple. Never, for that matter, held a newborn baby. Worse, I had no concept of what really happens to the female body during pregnancy and after. Not to be gross, but for a couple of weeks we both wore diapers to bed, me and Kelly.

I was a child raising a baby. That’s one of my secrets. Kelly can do the math, but she has no idea how young I really was at seventeen, mentally and emotionally, or how much she frightened me. It’s true. I was scared of my own baby. Terrified I’d do something stupid and she’d either be taken from me, or die. All that stuff about maternal instincts, it wasn’t working for me. Yes, I loved the little bean from the very first moment, but that didn’t stop the fear or ease the anxiety.

My mother, bless her soul, carried little white paper bags in her purse, unfurled whenever I hyperventilated. Passed them to me like you might offer a Kleenex. Later she told me the bags came from the candy store, which somehow seems fitting. What’ll you have today, Janey, a quarter pound of nonpareils or a panic attack? Baby Ruth or a real baby?

Poor Mom. To this day I’ve no idea how she managed it. Somehow she worked full-time, taught me how to care for a baby, dealt with my father’s terrifying temper, navigated the divorce minefield, and made plans for my future. When Kelly was six months old she assumed the baby-care duties and more or less forced me to get my GED and then take design courses at Nassau Community College, where I eventually discovered my inner seamstress. Looking back, it may have been that she actually thought being a single mom was a good thing for me. One less complication, not having to deal with a man. No doubt a result of her own failed marriage, but at the time I appreciated that she never once made me feel ashamed for the strange circumstances of Kelly’s conception. The big secret we never spoke of. Whereas it poured through my father like acid, corroding whatever love he’d had for either one of us.

Why is Mom so much on my mind? Because I’m wondering what she’d make of Randall Shane. For that matter, what do I make of him? The big guy has been in my life for less than a day, but already I’m letting him influence decisions that could determine whether my daughter lives or dies.

For instance, his decision to stop for breakfast.

“It’s two in the morning!” I rant. “Are you crazy? Are you insane? We should be notifying the FBI or the media or both, not eating waffles!”

“I’m more of a scrambled eggs person,” Shane says, very calm and matter-of-fact. “Can’t notify my friends at the agency without protein. Preferably in the form of bacon.”

I know what he’s doing. He’s using gentle humor to calm me down. Just like he’d gently but firmly discouraged me from throwing rocks at Edwin Manning’s big glass house. Like he’d prevented me from grabbing the rich little weasel by the throat and shaking the truth out of him.

“If I thought that would work I’d do it myself,” he explains, coaxing me out of the place, back into the Town Car and away from the Manning estate. “The man believes his silence will keep his son alive. He’s clinging to that hope. Physical intimidation won’t change his mind. You could hook him up to a battery, he still wouldn’t talk.”