Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [107]
“No! You can’t do that! I’m fine. I’ll take back everything I said!”
“I am deeply concerned about your safety. What would you like me to do?”
“I need to talk to my contact agent, Mike Donnato. He’s the only one I trust.”
“What do you mean, the only one you can trust?”
“I wasn’t feeling crazy before I came here, but I’m sure feeling crazy now. Do all your patients say that? Doctor? That was a joke. Look, I have to go. My partner is meeting me downstairs. I’ll talk to him, and then—can I call you?”
“Please.”
“As I said, it will probably be from a hazelnut tree.”
“I’ve had stranger phone conferences. Are you okay to wait alone?”
“Yes.”
“Let me hear from you.”
The dusky street smells of falafel and pigeons. The city has a faraway look as seen through a fishbowl. Disoriented by the flash-bang of cars and urban walkers, I realize my perceptions are confused. I am trying to understand what the psychiatrist said, but it is hard to think clearly. I am waiting for Donnato. When he arrives, it will make some kind of sense.
“Get in the car,” Mr. Terminate says.
The biker’s wrenchlike fingers close around my arm. A gun presses my ribs. We are in an alley and I don’t know how we got there, but with the full force of his body, he twists my shoulder and pops me like a cork into the open door of the car, where Mountain Man is waiting behind the wheel.
Thirty-seven
When we arrive at the farm, the thermometer on the barn reads 110 degrees—candy-apple red and about to burst. Unlike the dry heat of Los Angeles, a sultry fever rises from the earth, with a smell like roasting barley and manure. It hangs there, baking you to a stupor. The coolest spot in the valley is the hazelnut orchard. When Mr. Terminate and Mountain Man deliver me from Portland, Dick Stone is sitting on a beach chair set in its oasis of shade.
Old-timers say the first nut drops on the first of September. Those late-summer days, each of us on the farm seemed suspended in a kind of waiting. Sara and I would climb the ladders in 106-degree heat to count the dried-up moths in the traps, then spend the rest of the day reading fashion magazines. Nobody cooked anymore. The vegetables were sold, allegedly to help pay for the Big One. Despite the abundance of the garden, we were living on pancakes.
Slammer was so creepily polite to Megan and Stone, I thought one day he’d go berserk and kill them with an ax. But Mom and Dad kept him busy, preparing for the harvest. Inside the steamy shed, Slammer and Stone labored over the homemade nut sorter, a ludicrous contraption of green scrap metal, gas motors and exhaust pipes, rusty conveyor belts, and plywood hammered together with no apparent logic. I was really looking forward to what happened when they turned it on.
In the heat, brushfires kept breaking out among the troops.
“He’s lying,” I heard Slammer whispering to Sara. “He’s flat-out lying when he says the Big One’s coming. It’s just to keep us here.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s him. He’s a liar. Don’t defend him, ’ho.”
“I’m not defending him, and don’t you dare call me that. It’s like nobody cares what I’m going through. Nobody cares if I walk out the door into the middle of the freeway.”
“If nobody gives a shit, why don’t you do it?”
Megan and I weren’t getting along, either. To prepare for brittle making, she had me disassemble and clean every part of the industrial stove in the sweltering basement. She kept hauling out giant spoons and candy thermometers, and I dreaded the hellish days and nights when we would have to keep pots of scalding sugar syrup boiling around the clock.
Indications are the harvest will be good, and standing in the full-blown orchard, I can’t help feeling pride in our fake little farming family. Stone’s prudent trimming has created thick new growth. Underneath the leafy canopy is an Alice-in-Wonderland world of cool shadows and secret whisperings.