“Her or him,” Ken #2 said.
Ken #1 said, “What?”
“Her or him,” Ken #2 repeated. “We can’t let Lucius here get it on with one of the girls or one of the boys.”
“Man, that’s exactly just what I said,” Ken #1 declared, further annoyed.
“No, what you told him was that we can’t let him take her into the bathroom for a taste.”
After a few words of blasphemy, Ken #1 said, “Him was implied when I said her.”
“Maybe you implied it, but maybe he didn’t infer it.”
“What the hell’s that mean?” Ken #1 asked. “When I said ‘taste,’ I didn’t mean taste, either, but Lucius knew what I was implying.” He looked up at me. “Didn’t you [fornicating] know what I was implying?”
“Absolutely. But that’s not what I came here for.”
Ken #1’s sneer was sharp enough to peel an apple. “Yeah, right.”
“No, really. Rob sent me up here to do something.”
“Rob who? There’s ninety people here tonight, and I know like three Robs. There’s at least twenty people I haven’t met before, and for all I know every [fornicating] one of them is Rob.”
Ken #2 said, “Except Rob Cornell is actually Robert, but he just doesn’t like Bob, so he calls himself Rob.”
Before Ken #1 could employ his profane vocabulary even more colorfully than before, I said to the Ken at the window, “I’ll need your help with this.”
“With what?”
“With what Rob Burkett sent me up here to do.”
Stepping away from the window, Ken #2 said, “Why didn’t you say Rob Burkett in the first place?”
Getting up from his chair, cattle prod in his right hand, Ken #1 said, “Shit, Lucius, you know how Rob is. He’s an office guy, not a field guy. He wouldn’t have known what to do if he’d been there in Vegas last night. So it got messy. But we still got those four kids.”
I remembered what Chet, the customer in the diner, told us: The kidnappers in Vegas murdered the parents to get their four children.
Looking concerned as he joined us, Ken #2 said, “Who would’ve thought a milksop Baptist minister and his wife would be carrying concealed weapons?”
Ken #1 sought my sympathy: “Hey, man, the TV news said that [fornicating] preacher and that bitch wife of his had permits to carry. What kind of crazy government bureaucrat asshole licenses [fornicating] preachers to walk around with [fornicating] pistols under their suit coats?”
“Good thing,” said Ken #2, “the preacher didn’t realize there were two of us.”
“Good thing,” Ken #1 agreed. “A preacher ought to know the Bible says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”
“Actually,” I corrected, “if you go back to the root language of the original commandments, it said ‘Thou shalt not murder,’ but over the millennia and through a lot of translations, it ended up saying ‘kill.’ ”
Puzzled, Ken #2 said, “Murder or kill, kill or murder, what the hell’s the difference?”
“Anyway,” I said, “Rob is cool with Vegas. It turned out all right, and we have four juicy preacher kids raised pure, the way we need them to be. He sent me up here to do this thing with the little darlings.”
“What thing?” both Kens asked.
Winking at them, I said, “You’re going to like this.”
Inside of me there seemed to be a butterfly farm where two thousand wings fluttered out of a thousand split cocoons all at once.
These kids would have to live with this trauma all the days of their lives, and I didn’t want to do anything that would leave them with even darker memories of these events.
Turning to the captives, I remembered that Mr. Hitchcock had said they didn’t know what was going to happen to them, that the cultists wanted to surprise the remaining sixteen when the first of them was slashed or chopped, or hammered. “Listen up, kids. It’s going to take another day or two for the ransom to be paid, and we can’t let you go until then.”
One of the two that had an openly defiant attitude, a girl of nine or ten, with a blond ponytail and celadon eyes, said, “That’s a crock of horseshit.”
“Well, personally, I don’t use that kind of language,” I told her, “though I can understand why you might feel the way you do. But the truth is, we know you’re bored, and since there are a few people here who’re magicians, we’re going to put on a show for you kids in a little while.”
“That’s more horseshit,” the girl said.
Because I was standing a step in front of the Kens, I was able to wink at her without them seeing what I did. She frowned, not sure what to make of the wink.