Under the Dome

“I’m fine,” Junior said. He wasn’t, but he was better, the latest poisonous headache finally lifting. Being with his girlfriends had helped, as he’d known it would. The McCain pantry didn’t smell so good, but after he’d sat there awhile, holding their hands, he’d gotten used to it. He thought he could even come to like that smell.

“Did you find anything in his apartment?”

“Yes.” Junior told him what he had found.

“That’s excellent, Son. Really excellent. And are you ready to tell me where you put the… where you put him?”

Junior shook his head slowly back and forth, but his eyes stayed in exactly the same place while he did it—pinned on his father’s face. It was a little eerie. “You don’t need to know. I told you that. It’s a safe place, and that’s enough.”

“So now you’re telling me what I need to know.” But he said it without his usual heat.

“In this case, yes.”

Big Jim considered his son carefully. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look pale.”

“I’m fine. Just a headache. It’s going now.”

“Why not have something to eat? There are a few more fettuccinis in the freezer, and the microwave does a great job on them.” He smiled. “Might as well enjoy them while we can.”

The dark, considering eyes dropped for a moment to the puddle of white sauce on Big Jim’s plate, then rose again to his father’s face. “Not hungry. When should I find the bodies?”

“Bodies?” Big Jim stared. “What do you mean, bodies?”

Junior smiled, lips lifting just enough to show the tips of his teeth. “Never mind. It’ll help your cred if you’re surprised like everyone else. Let’s put it this way—once we pull the trigger, this town will be ready to hang Baaarbie from a sour apple tree. When do you want to do it? Tonight? Because that’ll work.”

Big Jim considered the question. He looked down at his yellow pad. It was crammed with notes (and splattered with alfredo sauce), but only one was circled: newspaper bitch.

“Not tonight. We can use him for more than Coggins if we play this right.”

“And if the Dome comes down while you’re playing it?”

“We’ll be fine,” Big Jim said. Thinking, And if Mr. Barbara is somehow able to squirm free of the frame—not likely, but cockroaches have a way of finding cracks when the lights go on—there’s always you. You and those other bodies. “Now get yourself something to eat, even if it’s only a salad.”

But Junior didn’t move. “Don’t wait too long, Dad,” he said. “I won’t.”

Junior considered it, considered him with those dark eyes that seemed so strange now, then seemed to lose interest. He yawned. “I’m going up to my room and sleep awhile. I’ll eat later.”

“Just make sure you do. You’re getting too thin.”

“Thin is in,” his son replied, and offered a hollow smile that was even more disquieting than his eyes. To Big Jim, it looked like a skull’s smile. It made him think of the fellow who now just called himself The Chef—as if his previous life as Phil Bushey had been canceled. When Junior left the room, Big Jim breathed a sigh of relief without even being aware of it.

He picked up his pen: so much to do. He would do it, and do it well. It was not impossible that when this thing was over, his picture would be on the cover of Time magazine.

4

With her generator still running—although it wouldn’t be for much longer unless she could find some more LP canisters—Brenda Perkins was able to fire up her husband’s printer and make a hard copy of everything in the VADER file. The incredible list of offenses Howie had compiled—and which he had apparently been about to act on at the time of his death—seemed more real to her on paper than they had on the computer screen. And the more she looked at them, the more they seemed to fit the Jim Rennie she’d known for most of her life. She had always known he was a monster; just not how big a monster.

Even the stuff about Coggins’s Jesus-jumping church fit… although if she was reading this right, it was really not a church at all but a big old holy Maytag that washed money instead of clothes. Money from a drug-manufacturing operation that was, in her husband’s words, “maybe one of the biggest in the history of the United States.”

But there were problems, which both Police Chief Howie “Duke” Perkins and the State AG had acknowledged. The problems were why the evidence-gathering phase of Operation Vader had gone on as long as it had. Jim Rennie wasn’t just a big monster; he was a smart monster. That was why he had always been content to remain the Second Selectman. He had Andy Sanders to break trail for him.