The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [107]
She threw the tile on the bed and picked up the newspaper. The drips of paint had stiffened it like cardboard. Random drips of paint, seven different colors, dots and streams and globs, all coalesced in an imperfect, distended orbit around a single article.
An article about the recent unsolved murder of Marlena Falcone.
She read it and put the paper down on the bed. She picked it up and read it again.
Then she walked to the bathroom and mixed the solution Dr. Russo had given her and swallowed it in gulps.
38
SUNDAY, AUGUST 1
WAYNE HAD so little hope left, he hadn’t even stood when the car approached, but remained folded, elbows on his knees. Nevertheless, they pulled over and, with hardly a word, helped Wayne into the front seat of the yellow Subaru with Nebraska plates.
Cynthia was probably nineteen. Will must have been north of that—maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. They gave him water and a peanut butter sandwich from a small blue cooler in back. He was so dry, the sandwich mixed like cement in his mouth, but it felt good going down.
“What’s your name?” Cynthia asked. The gears in his tired mind creaked as it tried to come up with a false answer. Looking behind her, he saw a faded sticker on the hatch window for a failed presidential candidate known for his pro-environment stance. Wayne once had an employee named Dan with the same sticker on the side of his desk.
“Daniel,” Wayne said.
“What happened to you?” Will asked.
That was a more complicated lie, so he tried to tell the truth. “I got beat up.”
“By who?”
Wayne put up a hand, indicating that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“Should we take you to an emergency room?”
“No.”
“The cops?”
“No,” he said too quickly. He could feel their nervousness building. They had chosen to help, but now they were second-guessing themselves. Wayne was big and he was a mess—blistered with sunburn and filthy and more than a little bit incoherent and surly from more than twenty-four hours in the desert and the lingering effects of that pill Ginny had given him. He knew he needed to tell a good story if he wanted to stay in this car.
A good one came to him, one cobbled together from his memory of a newspaper article from a few years back and gossip he’d heard at a high school reunion about one of his old classmates, who’d become an anarchist and pot farmer.
“You know the nuclear power plant down in Palo Verde?” Wayne wasn’t exactly sure where they were, but they still couldn’t be too far from the Nevada-Arizona border.
“Heard of it,” Will said. “Biggest reactor in the country, right?”
Wayne liked the way Will said that, with a tiny trace of disgust. He said, “We were trying to pull off a monkey-wrench operation. Get over the fence and spray some tags. If we could show vulnerability in their security, we figured we might be able to shut it down for a while. Generate some bad publicity. Maybe even gin up support for solar and wind.”
“Hard to blow up a wind farm.” Will laughed. “We need cheap, clean energy in this country, not obvious targets for terrorists.”
“That’s right. Anyway, it turns out breaking into a nuclear power plant is harder than we thought. Security, not so vulnerable.” He laughed and then winced as the infected scab pulled at his side. “They beat us up good. Dumped us in the desert.”
“They didn’t call the cops?”
“We got far enough inside, they probably didn’t want the publicity, like I said. And they know we can’t go to the cops, because they’ll just arrest us. Probably on terrorism charges.”
“Damn,” Cynthia said, leaning in from the backseat. “You said ‘we.’ Where are your friends?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t drop us off together.”
“Palo Verde’s pretty far south of here.”
“I’ve been hitching my way back to