The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [126]
“Ms. Van Urden,” she says. “I was wondering if you are related to Ivy Van Urden?”
It would be simplest to lie, but the nurse’s tone suggests something more than mere curiosity.
“She’s my sister,” she says, straightening out.
“I thought so, maybe. You look so much alike. The reason I asked is she’s on the morning news. She’s got a bomb. It’s on TV in the waiting room.”
Remembering
Policemen move the outer barricade, and the squad car taking Ursula to the scene inches through but doesn’t make it much farther. They’ve cordoned off the block to car traffic, but the pedestrians continue to stream in unabated, mingling with the firemen and paramedics and news crews, some of them leaning on parked cars, others huddling for warmth around doorways and laundry steam vents, all of them looking up at Ivy’s window and waiting for something to happen. The amount of activity on the street overwhelms Ursula’s drowsy senses. She can barely make her eyes focus on anything. The atmosphere, she thinks, seems festive. She can’t help thinking the police have accidentally brought her to a block party.
Ivy’s threat to blow herself up along with close to two million dollars began last night, apparently, but didn’t generate any widespread attention until eight-thirty this morning, when she stepped through the computer screen and into the real world by tossing a small homemade bomb and a couple of hundred twenty-dollar bills out the window. The only casualty from the explosion was an unoccupied, illegally parked Jaguar. The largest beneficiaries of the rain of money were a group of teenage squatter punks who had been camping out on the street, perhaps with the idea something like this might happen sooner or later. The punks, solemnly brandishing handfuls of the half-burned bills, were being interviewed on TV when Ursula hurried into the waiting room. She recognized them from Banister Park; they were the ones who’d bartered with the savage girl, trading food and raw materials for her handcrafted garments and armaments, which they now wore beneath their long military overcoats. One boy had on an amulet made out of beer-bottle glass, and strips of pelt tied around the shins of his camouflage pants; another wore a black baseball cap to which had been sewn a squirrel’s pelt, its sneering face and little clawed feet splayed forward atop the visor; and a girl, her face streaked with bright-violet warpaint, leaned on a gnarled wooden staff with a spiked metal head. Then the report cut back to the live Internet feed: Ivy staring the camera down, a single, huge, green, slightly blurred eye filling the screen.
Walking through the crowd now, a policeman to either side, Ursula reaches the inner barricade. Beyond it, in the space between a haphazardly parked sedan and a bomb-squad van, stands James T. Couch, comparing trenchcoats with a man next to him. Looking up, Couch spots her and points her out, and the other man motions to the cops at the barricade to let her through.
“How’s, um . . . Javier?” Couch asks, stepping up to her with his nervous, bottom-feeding smile.
“He’s fine,” she explains. “He’s just sleeping. He’s so tired.”
Couch nods uncertainly, his lower teeth pressing deeper into his upper lip. The other man approaches behind him. He has an effete, catlike face and a long, flat nose. His trenchcoat, she notices, sports an eye-catchingly tall collar, turned up around his cheeks like a vampire’s cowl.
“Follow me, please,” he says, his voice liquid and nonchalant, then turns and leads them toward a building across the street from Ivy’s loft.
“What’s happening?” she asks.
The catlike man opens the door and begins leading them up a flight of stairs. “We’ve got your sister’s accomplice up here,” he says. “And more information about the bombs.”
“I’m going to kill him,” she mutters to Couch. “That bastard.”
“Who?” he asks.
She doesn’t bother to reply. They follow the man into the front apartment, a domestic