New Jersey's Famous Turnpike Witch

Epilogue

2010-01-25T21:17:00.002-05:00

Midnight. The Turnpike Witch stands twenty yards off the roadside in a field of muck. She’s wearing brown-heavy camo pants and a light jacket over a pair of thermal long johns. The night sky is clear, and between the flashes of passing cars a stillness sets in like blocked concrete. The temperature hovers around the freezing point; the ground crunches under her feet.

The Witch has her game face on. She packs away a peanut-butter sandwich in three bites, smears the Jif squish-out off her lips with a sleeve. She snaps on latex gloves, extracts a 20-ounce bottle of Diet Coke from her bag, twists it open, gulps down the contents, heaves the empty bottle out toward the roadside. In her backpack are ten more print-free empties. She dumps them out into a pile, kicks them around until they settle into a satisfactorily random pattern. Let those jerks from Pepsi come down here and clean it all up.

She rolls the ski mask down from its perch on her head. Its fringe of safety pins jangles cracks into another solid block of quiet. She pins them in place with deliberate, skillful fingers. The orange coat in her backpack is rolled around her pylon, with two forty-foot bungee cords wound over top. She draws out this package, unravels it, separates the cords. Coat and hat put aside for the moment, while she tends to her skates: white leather booties with four wheels in electric orange, and round rubber stop-knobs on their fronts to match. Djinn had nothing good to say about these old-timey models. He had proposed in-line skates: hipper, sleeker. He doesn’t have to wear them in traffic. The Witch stagger-walks out of the woods in her skates, concerned just a little about the gobs of mud collecting on the wheels. She pulls on her coat, straps her pylon hat on her chin, pitched forward from her forehead to drill into the wind. The two bungees are coiled in either hand for easy release. There was talk about fashioning a rod-and-reel system for casting out these cords. Alice couldn’t wait. The Witch was up and warming in the bullpen of her consciousness. Tonight is the night.

A Volkswagen Jetta happens around a bend in the road, some one hundred yards behind her. The Witch jumps into the road, breaks into a full run on the skates with the VW gaining on her. The driver swerves left to avoid her. Just as the car flashes by, the Witch reaches out and, with a flick of her wrist, twirls one of her bungees into the air. The hook on its end lands smartly on the rear wiper-blade of the car, slides down and grabs on the crook of its metal arm, right where it’s fixed to the chassis. Her first throw, and it’s perfect — all Witch.

The slack in her line picks up instantly, and in another instant the car yanks the cord to its elastic limit, and she is rolling. The Jetta continues to slow down. The Witch reaches into her right coat pocket, drops her second cord inside for the moment, withdraws her flare gun. She lifts the gun to her forehead, draws a bead and fires. A streak of light jets out ahead, inches from the roof of the car. The driver’s eyes are locked in his rear-view mirror by now; the Witch pockets the gun and gives a thumbs-up sign with her free right hand: faster.

The Jetta doesn’t get the message. Its occupants do not lack for enthusiasm. The driver raps at his horn — staccato happy-taps — lowers his window, hangs his left hand out, gives the Turnpike Witch a thumbs-up sign in return. Half of a woman heaves out through the sunroof, like a jack-in-the-box. She hoots and whoops as young women do when they hang through sunroofs. For all the show of support, though, the car is not moving any faster, and, if anything, it has decelerated since Passenger Babe issued forth from the roof.

Fucking hell. They all think this is a big party.

The Turnpike Witch hooks her end of the bungee to her belt, swings out left and reels herself in toward the car hand-over-hand. The bungee cord bends around the side of the car, and the Witch pulls up outside the rear driver’s-side window. Three knocks and a crank signal with her hand: the driver powers down the glass.

“FASTER!” the Witch yells into the car, then lets go of the rope. The slack slithers through her fingers, and the tow-car lurches twenty, forty, sixty feet ahead of her before she clamps her hands down tight on the rope again and is yanked forward. She reaccelerates to roughly the same rate of speed as before. Hand in pocket, flare gun out: she fires a second shot over the Jetta’s bow. The driver throws up his hands in frustration. The car’s blinkers go on. At this rate, she might as well have had Virgil drive her.

Car, driver, woman, and Witch putter along in solitude for several minutes, until other options ride up from behind. First among these is a station wagon. Mid-1980s, she decides. She can tell from the look of its grill. It should have a nice rear bumper-lip to latch onto. The Witch jerks her line, slackens it, flicks her wrist and frees its hook from the Jetta. She waves goodbye and ducks down, cannonballs backward into the ranks of oncoming cars. An illusion, she understands: she is only slowing down as they speed up. The station wagon closes on her in the right lane. She veers left, scissors her legs in and out around the raised road reflectors tacked in between the two lanes.

The wagon rides up beside her. She and its driver exchange hand signals. Two Witchy fingers: I come in peace. One driver’s thumb: Hop on. The Turnpike Witch throws her second hook and catches the wagon’s back bumper, tightens her tuck as she picks up speed. The speed whips her right arm. She tucks the cord’s loose end to her belt, hangs on for dear life. Her other cord trails along behind her, in her left hand. As she reaches top speed, she stands erect, whirls her left hand around, coiling up the idle bungee around her wrist and forearm.

With that loose end tied up, the Witch brings her free hand to the taut elastic cord in front of her. She must be doing 65, 70 mph right about now. The wind knifes through coat and jacket and her underwear’s tight weave of heat-trapping fibers. Cars crowd around her, windows unravel, arms wave hello to her. Somebody throws a fistful of coins over her head. They rain down like confetti. By this time, the world is operating in slow motion for the Turnpike Witch, and she is able to count $2.77 in shimmering change out of the air. The moonlight dances off the pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters — they glow like the sparks radiating chaotically from an exploded rocket. $.47 of it hits her in the face and really smarts.

The Turnpike Witch skates behind the station wagon for twenty miles, up through Middlesex County and into Edison and Metuchen. The night, the wind, the impromptu motorcade of sedans, trucks, and SUVs gathering in her wake — she savors it all, swallows it down carefully into a lockbox for safekeeping and later regurgitation to Sarah Ann Rapp.

Not so long ago Sarah agreed to help her write a book. Alice and Witch have spent much of the time since monitoring their pooled thoughts for material worthy of transcription. The work is still in its planning stages, but it promises to be a sort of limited exposé of the Turnpike Witch — limited because Anne, Djinn, and Virgil will each in turn carefully vet the content and excise any passage that might furnish useful information to the authorities. Jerry Biggs-Hibbard will perform a final read-through, editing from the perspective of a former Witch Hunter who knows what sort of datum investigators find useful. In the end probably 90% of the text will be redacted, fact and narrative blackened, leaving only impressionistic fluff on par with ooh — the night I skated in traffic was so beautiful. The trick will be modulating the detail to hold the attention of the reading public while at the same time furnishing nothing remotely informative. She and Sarah are still working out the concept, obviously, although they have agreed that thirty percent of sales will go to battered women’s shelters.

Anne Saint James heartily approves this enterprise of authorship. She sees in it a certain opportunity for self-discovery, or at least catharsis: Even if you DON’T PUBLISH IT — landing hard on those three words — you’ll learn so much about yourself from the PROCESS. Djinn sees dollar signs and the potential to feed false leads to the floundering Special Committee. Virgil has pronounced this business to be “unnecessarily risky” and is threatening to quit Engineering the minute Sarah puts Alice’s first word to paper. In truth, the root of his displeasure has less to do with the book in principle than it does its ghost-writer. Sarah’s growing affinity with Jerry Biggs-Hibbard obviously galls him. He has become the odd man out — an eventuality that should have occurred to him before he made a practice of whoring himself out to the likes of Myrna Kovatch.

Context intrudes on the meandering thoughts of the Turnpike Witch, in the form of a blinking yellow tail-light. They are coming up on Exit 10. METUCHEN, PERTH AMBOY: NEXT RIGHT. The station wagon is getting off. Time for the Turnpike Witch to catch another ride. She yanks on her cord, shakes it loose from the car’s bumper, drops into backward free-fall, as friction sucks the speed off her skates. A Ford Explorer is creeping up on her in the passing lane, well-positioned now to catch her up on the left.

The Explorer passes by, and the Witch casts her third line at the car’s side mirror. The hook misses its mark and clinks on the ground. The Explorer speeds away. A disappointed passenger cries “YOU SUCK, WITCH!” out the window from a shotgun seat. She has no time to process this criticism — to take it to heart, to beg to differ — because another ride, a minivan, is pulling up in the passing lane. Rolling hand over hand like some disco dancer, or a football referee calling illegal procedure, she reels in her line post-haste. A semi truck bears down on her from behind, no-nonsense driver leaning on his horn, flashing his lights — and accelerating.

What are you doing, woman? You’re going to get yourself killed. The bungee cords are tangling in her arms. Alice heaves them blindly at the side of the van. One of the two hooks catches, and the minivan driver drops his pedal to the floor. The van takes off like a rocket, the rope snaps taut, whips the Turnpike Witch into the passing lane behind her. The rig motors by, grimly, taking a shot from the Witch’s flare gun on its broadside. In retrospect not the best idea, given the multiple decals on the truck’s tank trailer, which read DANGER: FLAMMABLE CHEMICALS, and so on.

The government will probably make great hay of that reckless gesture in its statement to the press tomorrow. Or it might not. The new SpeshCom chair, Ari Gotschall, has pledged to do his damnedest to bear down and catch the Turnpike Witch, but Barney tells her that in his gut he’s an admirer and protégé of Strad Washington. Somebody in a high place is on her side tonight: she’s been out twenty minutes already and has not seen hide nor hair of a SCRU trooper or police officer. Someday she’ll be caught. Unless she is hit by a car and killed, Mick Verbatim or some determined SCRU recruit (it won’t be the Witch Hunters) will get lucky and nail her. It’s a reality that she will be captured and unmasked. But it won’t be tonight.

Tomorrow Martha Cadwallader will run a review of this performance on Crimedog; she’ll likely complain that the Witch is just ripping off Spider-Man.

Martha Cadwallader can go fuck herself.

Chapter 27

2010-01-25T07:08:00.007-05:00

November 3, 2004. Wednesday night. Sarah Ann Rapp should be sleeping by now. Her mind should be running its defrag utility, organizing the accumulated trivia of the waking day into something manageable for use in the morning. She should have lost consciousness the moment her back hit the mattress. The only sleep she has had in a week has come in catnaps, taken in stiff-backed hospital chairs and a plastic booth in the Barton Service Area.

Alice Merkel tells Sarah that she has not slept in a bed in three years. She will steal an hour in a Service Area booth, drop a sleeping bag along the roadside in the summer months, hunker down in the backseat of a Common Car in winter, with the car’s engine running for heat. Alice also talks about a stolen truck that provides a mobile operations center for the Turnpike Witch publicity machine. There is a couch in that truck. It folds out into a queen-sized deck that, citing the inch-thick layer of foam rubber laid over top, the manufacturer markets to the public as a “bed.” But it isn’t really a bed. Not like Sarah’s bed here. Alice has to live that way, because some faulty wiring in her brain incapacitates her when she tries to get away from the Jersey Turnpike.

Sarah had to fight for this bed. The good people at the Marriott Residence Inn in Cherry Hill had, at some point during her five-day absence from her suite, kicked her out of the room. Sarah might have expected this. The Attorneys had been putting her up here, along with their other employees. One of her hundred job duties as assistant to Henry Lugash was to make sure that payment was wired to the Marriott before close of business each Monday night. The attack on Club WW having disrupted business as usual, of course no one paid the weekly bill (indeed, it’s likely most everyone else affiliated with the Attorneys had moved out). She had no occasion even to consider any of this until she arrived at the door to her room an hour ago, slipped her magnetically-encoded key card into the slot on the door, and it didn’t work. She tried again another ten times before her suite’s current tenant opened the door and, rubbing his eyes, told her to fuck off. Earlier this morning the good people at the Marriott Residence Inn had gathered up her clothes and other belongings, packed them into plastic bags, and locked them in the luggage room pending her return. When she presented herself at Reception forty-five minutes ago, the clerk muttered something about a “solved mystery,” handed her the bags, and wished her a nice life.

“I need somewhere to sleep,” Sarah said. She had nowhere to go and no way to get there. Jerry Biggs-Hibbard had brought her here from the Clara Barton in his car. He had pulled up outside the hotel entrance to drop her off, and by now he was long gone.

The clerk offered his apologies, but all the rooms in the hotel were taken.

Sarah reintroduced herself as Sarah Ann Rapp, administrator of Club WW Enterprises, the one who booked fourteen rooms here for the past three months. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

At this point a manager happened by the counter, elbowed aside the clerk, rapped at computer keys for a minute, and managed to conjure up a two-room suite, non-smoking, with king-sized bed. As someone who has spent a great deal of time on the road promoting her books, Sarah has always marveled at the ability of certain higher-level hotel agents to create vacancies from thin air, when pressed to do so. Do they keep the listings for these rooms secreted away in some manager-only part of the computer database? Are the managers actually wizard-trained astrophysicists who can tap into, tastefully furnish, and stock minibars in compartments on the far side of space-time wormholes? Sarah kept these questions to herself.

“We still have four people from that group rate you booked, never came back for their stuff, and it’s cluttering up our back room. Got any ideas?”

“Give them a break,” Sarah said, reaching for her new key card. “They’re probably still in the hospital.”

Hence her king-sized bed. She has done all the foreplay, exhausted all the rituals in which an exhausted person engages when finally presented with a hotel room and bed. She cracked open her laptop, jacked into the Net, checked email. She read the online Crimedog review of the Attack on the Whitman — Martha Cadwallader awards a scant two stars, compares the Witch’s inexplicable attack on the Pikers to the crap albums U2 made in the mid-1990s:

If Thursday night’s garble of violence gives any inkling at all into what Our Witch is thinking, it tells us that she is on a mission to reinvent herself. Good show, then, Queenie: you finally read these columns and got the message. Thing is, if all you’re gonna do is turn on your fan base, it’s sort of a cop-out, isn’t it? And girl — since when did you need a bunch of American Gladiators to do your dirty work for you?

Sarah brushed, flossed, peed three times, then finally collapsed on the mattress. That brings her to the here and now, to the not-sleeping. To thoughts of Alice Merkel, probably knee-deep in REM-stage slumber in the back of some idling community-owned Chevy Vega. And to the ex-Witch Hunter, Jerry Biggs-Hibbard — ex- because the government fired him, and ex- because he does not need to hunt the Witch anymore. Because he found her today.

He told her so on the drive over. Sarah already knew; it was obvious from the way he was behaving at the Barton. But they were in the car when he spilled his guts and asked her, fumbling over his tongue, whether she knew Alice Merkel was the Turnpike Witch.

She played it cool: “Well, I do now.”

Causing him to ask, “Did you know before I told you?”

“That’s academic, isn’t it?”

Points to Jerry for snapping back, “Academic is what I do.” He paused. “Why wouldn’t she accept a ride from me?” Jerry asked.

“Women don’t get into cars with men they don’t know.”

“You just did.”

Sarah thought hard about how to answer. She considered taking a chance, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “I have to go home,” she said, finally. “I haven’t slept in days. I think I’m getting the flu.”

“But why was she staying there?”

“She’s not getting the flu? Look: you can ask me anything about me. Anything, and I’ll tell you. Ask me about my wildest dreams and deepest secrets. Ask me if I’m lonely, if I’m terrified. Ask me if I worry I’m going to die alone in a Manhattan apartment full of cats, surrounded by the books I wrote to show people I was strong, and not at all worried about dying alone in an apartment full of cats.”

“Sarah —”

“But you can’t ask me about her. Because that’s someone else’s trust. Not my own.”

“And you trust me, personally?” Jerry said. They were parked, by this time, in the semicircular turn-in ubiquitous to hotel parking lots, where savvy doormen ought to be on hand to butt in with offers to carry the lady’s luggage, thereby cutting short awkward conversations. The Marriott Residence Inn, with its flickering signage, was at best a three-star facility. Comfortable, clean, and flush with all the amenities of First World living, but doormen don’t come to bail you out.

“I’m sorry. I’m tired,” Sarah said. Jerry just looked at her.

“I am, too,” he said, batting alternating hands on the steering wheel in a way Sarah found endearing. “We sound like we might be at the same stage in life.” He was the one who took the chance, and that was the break they needed. The mutual spilling of guts that followed went on for twenty minutes. It might never have ended, but Jerry was parked in the drop-off lane, and eventually two minivans pulled up behind them and hammered on their horns.

“I’d better pull up,” Jerry said.

“I’ll just go,” Sarah counterproposed.

And that was it. She went to her room, tried her key card, pleaded her case to the Front Desk, was awarded another key card, fiddled around, went to bed, spent the last half hour rehashing what got her to this point. And once again she has arrived at the here and now. Unable to sleep, and on the verge of rehashing all this again, with particular emphasis on her conversation in the car with Jerry Biggs-Hibbard. Never mind all the time spent today with Alice, and what she has learned from her over the past twelve hours, none of which she has had the opportunity to recollect or even consider in tranquility.

Sarah is lost. She has all this information now, and a book to write, but she is sworn to secrecy, and she doesn’t even want to write the book anymore, really. It is not good enough just to know that Alice is the Turnpike Witch, or even to know all the dirty particulars of how she does what she does on the highway — the cops she has compromised, the times she left the Pike and almost died. Sarah does not know why, but she is unsatisfied. She needs to do something.

Sarah sits up, turns on her light, picks up her mobile phone. She finds Virgil Ayres’ number programmed on the phone and dials it. He had written her once and said she was beautiful. The phone rings into his voice mail greeting. Sarah sighs, powers down the phone. She has nothing to say to Virgil Ayres. Sarah pauses a minute, with the phone in her hand. Taking a deep breath now, she turns it on again, dials 411.

“City and state, please?”

“Hoboken, New Jersey,” Sarah says.

“What listing?”

“Biggs-Hibbard. Biggs with two Gs, hyphen, Hibbard. H-I-B-B —”

“I’ll put you through.”

The phone rings twenty-five times before he picks up.

“It’s Sarah.”

“I — I just walked in the door.”

“I know. I mean, I guessed —” Sarah catches herself, takes a breath. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“I haven’t tried yet. But I didn’t have any grand expectations.”

“I told you I was tired, and now I can’t sleep.”

“It’s a certain kind of tired. I’m familiar with it,” Jerry says. She can hear his refrigerator open, then close. She wonders what it’s like, this life of his.

“Jerry, she wouldn’t leave with me because she can’t. She has to stay there.”

“At the Clara Barton?”

“On the Turnpike. It’s some kind of illness. It sounds silly, I know. But it’s very real. She had a seizure in the hospital when I left her alone. She crashed completely. I don’t understand it. I don’t know her all that well. I just wanted to ask you —”

“I don’t know her at all.”

“You do, though,” Sarah insists. “You know the Witch. From all your profiling work. We could pool our information. We might be able to help her.”

“I’m happy to do that, Sarah, but —”

“You have to do this, Jerry,” and right now she can feel her hair stand on end, like she might start to cry. “Promise me you’ll help me — that you’ll help us.”

“I will, Sarah. I promise.”

•

The posted placards are everywhere, and maddeningly repetitive: USE OF MOBILE PHONES IS PROHIBITED. So Virgil has to go out to the hospital parking lot to check his voice mail messages. Prohibited. It’s one of those ten-dollar words you would not think is a ten-dollar word, because you see it everywhere, and you learn it when you’re five. At a certain point, it would conserve space to put up signs to tell you what you can do. Virgil humphs, mutters a bit to himself, tries to think more constructively. He steps out into the open space in front of the building and punches a password into the phone’s keypad.

You have 5 new messages. To listen to your voice-mail messages, please press 1.

A part of Virgil does not want to press 1. He resents that the woman inside his phone requires him to jump through such hoops. To have to press 1 is no grave inconvenience. Conceded. But if you give these people an inch today, tomorrow they’ll have you cram your thumb in your anus while singing “I’m a Little Teapot,” record the entire program with the phone’s otherwise purposeless video camera feature, then mail it to the Woman Inside the Phone to review for vigor of presentation before she releases your messages.

Virgil Ayres is tired. His blood sugar is low. He presses 1.

Message 1, delivered Tuesday, at 2:26 p.m. Anne Saint James has finalized Michael’s travel plans back to Michigan. His itinerary calls for him to depart from Newark on Northwest Flight 3477 tomorrow at 6:15 p.m. Thomas Wexford, Duke of Whatever has affirmed by email that he will collect Michael at Baggage Claim. Anne has booked a return flight that night, just in case the Duke ditches. She expects Virgil to clear his calendar for Michael’s goodbye lunch — Batchelder’s Banisters at noon tomorrow for Michael’s favorite, fried chicken in buckets.

Noon tomorrow. That could cut it close. He promised to stay here at least until after the birth. So now he has to sit here and wait, and wait, until Myrna Kovatch delivers her damned baby already. If that hasn’t happened come 11 a.m. tomorrow — 11:30 at the latest — he will just have to decide: either he no-shows Anne and pisses her off, or he bags on Myrna and calls the wrath and disapprobation of the entire Piker Community down on his head. That is no choice at all, really. He can deflect and absorb the wrath and disapprobation of a thousand or more acquaintances. Anne Saint James is an entirely different animal.

Virgil sighs aloud into the mouthpiece of his phone, prompting the Woman Inside to observe, That is not a valid entry. He could have called her a cab. Cab pulls up at the Barton, you stuff that swelled-up howling Myrna Kovatch and her baby inside, you hand the driver a fifty, and you forget about it. There were a million reasons to play it that way. First, Myrna has told him a hundred times over that the kid is not his. Virgil accepts this, in much the same way that one friend will allow another to pick up a dinner check — after a put-on show of reluctance, a half-hearted brandishing of wallet, and an are you sure? to follow up.

Virgil, I’m sure. You’re not the only guy I sleep with. I know who it was.

And with that settled between the two of them, it would only make a hash of things to carry on like he actually has some responsibility to her. Rumors would spread that he is the father, and then he would be in a worse position than if he actually were. He would have all the expectations from the larger community, but the kid won’t be his. Get it in writing, was Djinn’s advice to him, so Virgil periodically writes email messages to Myrna, deftly phrased to elicit responsive language along the lines of This baby is not your father. Other than that, he has done his best to curtail his interactions with Myrna, since she started showing.

And yet there is something hard-wired into Virgil Ayres that makes him respond promptly when a woman suddenly grabs her abdomen and crumples to the floor. Other folks, sure — they make a show of concern, but they time their reactions so they arrive on the scene just after Virgil does. In this case, these faint-of-heart heroes made up the first of three concentric rings around Myrna Kovatch. Beyond them was a band of gossip types whose curiosity had landed them ahead of the slack-jawed gawkers in the third circle, some of whom had to stand on chairs and booth benches to see what exactly was going on.

But at the epicenter of the seismic event that was Myrna’s first contraction, standing alone, was Virgil Ayres. Well, Myrna and her kid were there, but they were not much help to anybody. While he spoke soothing words to Myrna, cradled her head, called for water, Virgil was acutely aware of the gawkers and gossipers. While he watched the idiots around him fall over themselves trying to figure out just who would get the water, Virgil knew the wheels of the Great Gossip Machine were turning. The rumors would get to the Lombardi and back before the water even arrived. The one saving grace: the worst gossip on the entire Pike was on the floor beside him, incapacitated, and she knew the truth that Virgil could not now — and not very well ever — shout to the world without coming off like an asshole:

THE KID’S NOT MINE!

By that point, he had as much as stuck a flag in Myrna and claimed her as his own. Nobody else was going to get her to the hospital. So he took her in his arms and carried her outside. Giggles issued from behind as they crossed the threshold together. And standing on the sidewalk, at the front of the line to get in the Barton, were Sarah Ann Rapp and Alice. He had to walk right by them — the Pikers generally acknowledged them as traitors, and he could not be seen consorting with them — with fucking Myrna Kovatch in his arms. Sarah’s eyebrows shot so sky-high that, in returning to her face, they could have brought down rain. Alice smirked. Myrna caught sight of this and called her a horrible name.

Virgil needed to talk to these two. He had not — and still hasn’t — seen or spoken with Alice since the assault on Club WW and her subsequent hospitalization. He is fairly sure that Sarah now knows Alice’s secret identity. Djinn saw Sarah slip out of Club WW’s back offices before the attack Thursday night, hustling out of harm’s way with her computer slung over her shoulder, just as the Berserkers were closing in on the building. Alice had surely tipped her off that they were coming. She had likely explained her role in the event to Sarah as well.

That sort of reckless revelation, to a journalist, has serious implications. Ideally the three of them could sit down and discuss them together, except that (1) because of Alice’s illness, they cannot meet off the Turnpike; (2) he can’t be seen talking to Sarah and Alice, the traitors, anywhere on the Turnpike; (3) Djinn has made clear that Batchelder’s Banisters, the usual forum for discreet meetings between Alice and her Engineers, is off-limits to Sarah; and (4) he is stuck here at the hospital taking care of Myrna Kovatch in any event.

Message 2, 5:45 p.m. A representative of the Berserkers Local 109, trying once again to negotiate a pay hike for additional services rendered. Virgil sighs. He should never have given these guys his phone number. The Berserkers claim to have encountered and “neutralized” (their word) a strike team of stealth advertisers last Thursday night, after the Massacre at the Whitman. This is the fifth message Virgil has taken on this matter in a week, so he knows the story by heart:

The Berserkers were withdrawing, scattershot, back to their cars. A pack of them stumbled upon three men in the weeds off I-295. The men wore cat burglar outfits; two of them were hastily stuffing parachutes into packs, and the third, with his hand chained to the strap of a gigantic army surplus duffel bag, kept a lousy watch. The Berserkers took the three men by surprise, knocked them out, and took the bag, which was filled to the top with flattened two-liter Pepsi bottles and wads of Taco Bell product wrappers. The Berserkers patted down the unconscious men, turned out their pockets, found no ID. They took the duffel bag, tied the men up inside one of their parachutes and left them there, as one big man-Burrito Supreme.

The Berserker negotiator thinks all this was worth $10,000. Virgil agreed to that amount on Friday, on the spot and unilaterally. Now Anne and Djinn are balking at making the payment — how do we even know any of this actually happened? Virgil does not see what the big deal is. The Unofficial Website expects to pull down six figures in ad revenue and memorabilia sales this month — authenticated pieces of brick and shattered glass from the Club are hot sellers. We’re selling RUBBLE at $50 an ounce, and we’re begrudging these guys a tip? Now the Berserkers are calling every day to press for details about the cash drop, which looks to be coming out of Virgil’s own pocket. Virgil hopes that Alice, once properly briefed, will bring Anne and Djinn to heel on this issue. Her non-sponsorship of Pepsi is important to her.

Message 3, 8:59 p.m. “Virg — Djinn here. I think Anne’s running roughshod over us on The Michael Question. The kid knows everything about our operations, and we’re just sending him home? Look: I’m not hell-bent on screwing this kid over. There’s a lot to like about him — he is resourceful, a good liar. He turned us on to the Berserkers. But can you trust a twelve-year-old to keep quiet about something like this? A seventh-grade kid will do or say anything to get a crack at a cheerleader —”

Message 4, 9:02 p.m. “Hey — your phone cut me off. I think we should at least vote on whether or not he gets to leave. Anne wants to send this kid to a ‘stable living situation.’ Is the fucking Earl of Whatchamacallit a stable living situation? That’s better than living with us?”

Message 5, 10:12 p.m. This one is a hang-up: a sigh and a deliberate click to disconnect. The Woman Inside the Phone pauses respectfully to commemorate the passing of the phone call, then reads back the nine-digit caller ID. It’s the number of Sarah Ann Rapp’s mobile phone.

Virgil grimaces. He wonders what she wanted. Virgil has not heard Sarah’s voice in weeks: she was in deep cover, spying on the Attorneys for him from her point of infiltration at the Inner Whitman. All he saw of her face was what she pressed against the window when the Attorneys bused her into work in the morning. Over these last weeks they kept up a steady stream of emails. Some might have touched upon personal matters. But it was never safe to talk on the phone, with her on one side of the fence, beholden to the enemy, and Virgil on the outside with his People.

It is hard to get out of the habit of thinking that it is unsafe for them to talk — even now, with the chastened Attorneys retreating into Manhattan. A phone call from Sarah Ann Rapp now disrupts the continuity of their relationship, which has followed a trajectory it might not otherwise have taken, due to the constraints of email. Sort of like a bonsai tree, this queer friendship of theirs. He wonders how a bonsai plant responds, once it’s freed of the straps and bindings that cause it to grow so unnaturally. Virgil is accustomed to — and comfortable with — pursuing women in a very straightforward way. He finds them, talks to them, and sleeps with them. Silvertongue does its work over the course of an afternoon and evening, and relations advance methodically from first introduction to a reckless copulation in a motel room or the backseat of a Common Car.

The easy conclusion to draw from his conduct is that he is just another libertine, but Virgil does not see it that way. Each of these “conquests” is a failure. They’re failed attempts at intimacy — he does not romanticize the wild nights, the ejaculations, the various positions ho-hum and acrobatic. What he can recall from every tryst is the spark, the flash of friction first struck in promising conversation, or in the simple recognition that passes between two pleading pairs of eyes. But then the spark would snuff itself out in a decidedly ordinary lay or start a wildfire that would burn off in minutes. There was nothing to distinguish either eventuality: either way, he never sustained a current. He tried, failed, and was left alone.

With Sarah, things are different. For weeks now he has been connecting with Sarah Ann Rapp, in writing and by remote — and with a real, seaworthy fence between the two of them to keep their genitals from substituting one connection for another, deeper and more meaningful. When he considers the situation from that perspective, it seems less of a cliché to say that the longer he goes without seeing or speaking with Sarah Ann Rapp, the more deeply he falls for her. And so the proton pumps in his stomach double their acid production when the Woman Inside the Phone recites Sarah’s phone number. He should not call her back.

Virgil, you are superstitious and stupid. She wants to talk to you. Call her back.

He belches up something from the angry broil in his stomach. He would say it tasted like witch’s brew, if the word witch were not so loaded. He punches in nine digits and waits.

•

Sarah’s phone rings. It is actually set to vibrate, so it does not ring so much as putter itself against the bedside table. At this moment she is half in tears and straddling the naked body of Jerry Biggs-Hibbard. Sarah will not take this call. The phone continues to vibrate in desperate, three-second spurts that send it skittering toward the edge of the bedside table, until finally it leaps to its death on the carpet.

•

Thanksgiving Day. Windy and cold, with snow flurries. This is foreplay. Winter is hovering, teasing: it licks the pavement here and there, leaving scattered patches of ice. The full-on fucking will come over the weekend, eight inches deep. Alice is racked out in her booth at the Clara Barton, napping. Three weeks have elapsed since Sarah Ann Rapp left with the enlightened Witch Hunter, and Alice has been living alone among enemies. It’s been open warfare with the Pikers here. She walks around dumping their food trays; they’ll trip and kick her as she walks by. Yesterday someone pepper-sprayed her in a bathroom stall. Virgil Ayres seems to circle above the Turnpike with a sixth sense for trouble: he sniffs it out, swoops down, snuffs it out: Pikers have to behave, or the cops will take you away. The Bartonites complain that this rule does not seem to apply to Alice: her acts of provocation are constant. She should be long gone by now, but she remains here, defiant. Nobody does anything about Alice.

On that score, a masked man has just entered the Barton. He is wearing a long trenchcoat. The mask is not immediately noticeable, because he has on a cowboy hat, too, with its broad brim turned down over his face. For that matter, the mask is flesh-colored, and if you did not look directly at it, you would not know he was wearing it. The man crosses the floor of the Barton, moving in a straight line, deliberately, with his eyes fixed on Alice’s sleeping figure. He pulls up in front of her booth and grabs her legs, which stiffen upon contact with the man’s gloved hands. The left leg straightens, kicks weakly, and drops limp. The man pulls a leather belt from his pocket, wraps it twice around Alice’s legs, pulls it taut, buckles it. Alice moans. She is sluggish. Anyone who knows her would have expected better from her. A second belt, likely pulled from a Big & Tall store, lashes her arms to her sides.

By this time the man’s actions have the Pikers’ full attention of the Pikers. The room goes quiet, as everyone turns to watch what he does next. He sloughs a backpack off his shoulders, fishes out a pink wool blanket, and lays it on the floor. He lays Alice down on the blanket and rolls her up inside it, diagonally. The man then leans over and, after a long moment of exertion, hoists Alice over his shoulder. With Alice rolled up and thrown over his right shoulder, like a Persian rug, the man turns around and walks toward the door. If anyone is going to try to stop this man from kidnapping Alice Merkel, now is the time to make the move. Really, now — all it would take is one person who cares, because the man is stagger-stumbling across the room under Alice’s weight.

But nobody moves. Nobody even makes a sound until he gets to the door, when someone over by the deli counter yells:

Nana-na-na. Nana-na-na. Hey hey hey: Goodbye.

The crowd of Pikers breaks out into applause. Someone — finally — with the guts to get rid of that whore who worked for the Attorneys. The chant picks up: Nana-na-na. Nana-na-na.

The man staggers across the parking lot, pulls open the side door to a rented van: black, probably twenty years old, with a psychedelic desert scene airbrushed on its side. In its every inch and detail this van is a kidnapper’s van. Its shag carpet interior has probably seen at least four gang-rapes since its last steam-cleaning. The Pikers are gathering now on the sidewalk outside, just along the margins of the parking lot. The man in the mask pulls the van’s side door closed, goes round front, gets in the van and drives off. The Pikers chant:

Hey, Traitor: Goodbye.

•

Virgil maneuvers his Common Car — blue Geo Metro, ca. 1990 — into the Barton parking lot. He just wants to check on Alice. He doesn’t like that she insists on staying down here. She ought to be at home in Batchelder’s Banisters. Plenty of room on the couch, with Michael now gone. He arrives to find the Barton contingent assembled on the sidewalk. He pulls the car up into the fire lane. Window down, he asks what’s happening. They insist that they had nothing to do with the abduction. The guy just came in and took off with her.

Oh. Oh Jesus.

He asks when this happened. Barely five minutes ago, they say. The car went by in the northbound lanes just a moment ago: he must have U-turned in a cut-out. Nobody lifted a fucking finger, apparently, to stop him. And can he believe none of them were in on it? Shit. Virgil slams his foot down on the accelerator. After what seems like a week, Virgil’s front tire finds asphalt, and he is off like a shot — hits 110 before he even merges into traffic, cuts hard into the passing lane. With his right hand he dials up Barney Lopatt and briefs him.

“Do you think they’re going to take her off-Pike?” Virgil asks. He knows Barney can’t answer this. “Barney, where are you?”

“I’m just up the road. I’m in a position to intercept them. You fall back, Virgil.”

“The hell I will, Barney.” Right now he hopes the kidnapper is some pissed-off Bartonite Piker, someone she hit with one of her soda-grenades. Last time something like this happened, David Crilly’s alter ego was threatening to kill her.

At the speed Virgil is traveling, in this little bug-fleck of a car, on this stretch of road with its scattered slicks of ice, he could die any minute. It would not take much of a coincidence to kill him right now. But he has to keep the pedal down. It’s this damned sense of obligation he has to people. He hasn’t heard from Sarah Ann Rapp since he felt compelled to come to the rescue of Myrna Kovatch (baby boy, by the way — 8 pounds, 15 ounces); he suspects Sarah has him pegged for the father, so she has ruled him out of her life. Now, because of Alice Merkel’s distress, he could well end up an elongated smear on the Turnpike asphalt.

He sees blue flashing lights up ahead.

•

Barney Lopatt flips his phone open, works the thumb of his free hand into the keypad, dialing the driver in the car ahead of him. “It’s Barney.”

“I saw you back there.”

“I’ve got Virgil Ayres behind me. He pulled into the Barton lot just after you left.”

“Shit.”

“I just talked to him on the phone. He’s going to wonder why I’m not running you off the road.” The phone blips its call waiting blip. “In fact, that’s probably him now.”

“What do we do?”

“I think we have to explain to him what’s going on.” Silence on the end of the line. The phone beeps again, and a horn blares from behind. “If we don’t, he could end up trying something stupid and desperate,” Barney says. “It’s what he does for women in distress.”

•

Alice is in a fog. She is not aware of much of anything. Her arms and legs won’t move. Her mouth is dry. She doesn’t know why. She has questions, but her mind won’t put them into words. It occurs to her to groan. She tries that, and it’s enough to elicit an response from some agent on the far side of her fog.

“You wouldn’t have come willingly, Alice.”

Blue light flashes above her, through windows to her left and right.

“We put the drug in your soda. It’s dosed to wear off after a couple hours.”

That is shag carpet under her neck. Nothing in the world itches quite like shag carpet.

“We drugged you because we’re taking you off-Pike.”

Through the floor Alice can feel a humming under her back. Asphalt passing under tires.

“It’s just us, Alice. Sarah and me. But she couldn’t be here. We have an idea for getting you off the Pike, but if Sarah is here, we won’t know for sure if it works.”

The voice is coming from behind her head, presumably from whoever is driving the van.

“That’s Barney Lopatt behind us, Alice. If anything happens to you — anything at all — he’ll take you right back to the Turnpike in the squad car. I promise you’ll be all right.”

She rolls to the right. The van is slowing down, turning. Alice’s body is swelling. The straps cut into her. Her head and neck are bouncing off the floor. The air is thickening around her. Cries for help shoot off her lips like bullets, but they have to burrow through this air and they stop, spent of their momentum, barely an inch from her face. Jerry isn’t listening, anyway.

•

Alice is in a world of her own when they haul her out of the van. Jerry is not sure how much of her altered state is attributable to the drugging, how much to her removal from the Turnpike. He doesn’t know what exactly this woman’s mind does to her when she is removed from the Jersey toll road. He has only heard the secondhand stories from Sarah.

Barney Lopatt does have an idea of what to expect from Alice under these conditions, and he warns Jerry to keep clear of her left foot. During the trip Alice’s legs somehow squirmed free of the belt. She kicks wildly at the van’s sliding door as they lift her down to the pavement. That spring-loaded foot sends the door screaming off its rollers. It pops free of the van, lands on its edge and falls forward onto the ground. Alice is half standing now, supported by Jerry, balanced on one planted foot and kicking the other at Barney something ferocious. It takes three rounds of parry-and-thrust, but Barney somehow catches Alice’s left leg in his hand and cuffs her ankles together. For the moment they hold her, howling, at waist level. Jerry cups his hands under her shoulders, and Barney takes hold of her ankles. They lift their respective ends of the Turnpike Witch — Alice’s legs land on Barney’s shoulder. Jerry’s shoulder gets the benefit of Alice’s screaming, spitting head.

The van is parked in a lot, otherwise empty, that fronts on a public beach in Surf City, an hour’s drive east from the Turnpike. Late November is not beach season. The hard wind off the sea is adamant on this point. Barney and Jerry turn into that brutal, breathtaking wind, and with Alice’s body settled on their shoulders, they start across the parking lot to the beach. Jerry could almost believe the Turnpike Witch has conjured up this tremendous wind to resist them. If she had something handy to catch it, it might blow her the seventy miles back to the Turnpike.

Jerry inhales, and with the benefit of that air he alerts Barney: “To your left.”

Virgil Ayres is storming across the lot. His face is screwed up, his lips pouring forth a stream of exaggerated curses to no purpose, because he is crying out into the wind. With his free hand — the hand that is not clutching Alice’s ankle — Barney reaches across his body, pulls his gun from its holster, and points it at Virgil, who stops in his tracks. As he pulls up, Virgil’s shoe slips on a sheet of sand blowing across the asphalt. He cries out as he falls to the ground, and Barney’s gun discharges. The bullet misses Virgil by several feet and buries itself in the engine block of Virgil’s car. Windshield washer fluid bleeds blue out of the hole in the chassis.

This was an accident, a horrible accident, but Barney would be a fool not to take advantage of it. “YOU STAY BACK,” he says.

“BARNEY,” is the word framed on Virgil’s lips, but the Lieutenant does not hear it. The wind has taken Barney’s side and made this conclusively a one-way conversation: threats and commands blown from Barney to Virgil, and Virgil’s protests blown away behind him.

Jerry and Barney turn and resume their progress toward the margin of the parking lot. Ahead of them lie one hundred yards of swirling sand, then the Atlantic Ocean. Its waves beat their swollen fists on the beach, and the inland sand, dried and granular, skitters across the pavement, all boundaries blurring. Barney lifts Alice’s legs over his head, turns around under them to face leeward, with one eye on Virgil, who is grabbing his ankle. That could be a ruse. Virgil has a certain talent for dissembling. Walking backward now, Barney sees Batchelder’s Banisters, coming like gangbusters into the parking lot. Anne almost rolls the truck over. A sharp turn of its broadside into the wind brings the truck up on two wheels.

“THEY DON’T COME OUT HERE, EITHER,” Barney shouts.

Barney brandishes the gun at Virgil. An interesting feeling: it’s the bad guys who brandish. Cops point. Cops give instructions. Any police trainer will tell you that if you have control of the situation, you don’t need to (and should not) brandish the weapon. Virgil yells back something Barney can’t hear, then signs his acquiescence with an exaggerated nod. The wind sends a burst of sand into his eyes, and he buries his face into his jacket. Jerry and Barney proceed with Alice to the beach, where an old man sits, alone, in a folding chair. He has a windbreaker jacket on over a plaid bathrobe. His chair faces the ocean and he is holding an open umbrella out ahead of him like a shield. To his right an open beach umbrella and second chair are tumbling down the coast. They take flight for short periods, land, skid on the sand, bounce, take to the air again.

Alice cannot see ahead of her. Jerry has her turned face down, looking into the ground. Sand blows in her eyes when she opens them, so she tries to keep them closed. The police officer who has taken custody of her feet has eight inches on the Witch Hunter under her chin, causing her blood to rush to her head, a condition exacerbated by the downward slope the beach takes toward the water. Other fluids gravitate headward, too, and she vomits the morning’s coffee, chunked up with muffin, into Jerry’s shoulder. She gathers this product behind sealed lips until it bursts out, and she has to gasp for air. Jerry coughs, gags.

“It’s all right, Alice.” That’s Barney’s voice behind her. “We’ll turn right around and take you back if it gets too bad. If we have to, we can knock you out for the ride home.”

If it gets too bad?

The sound of the ocean roils in her ears. It burrows into her skull, like tidewater carving out a grotto. Her arms remain pinned to her sides. She is entirely helpless, and with each passing second, as she comes further off the drug, she acquires a greater understanding of her helplessness. If Alice did not retain the smallest pearl of trust in the two men underneath her, she thinks her heart would have given out by now. Into the Overwhelming, from some unreached, undaunted part of her core, a voice calls out, a voice she remembers:

Yea, though I’m walking — walking through the Valley —
the Valley of the Shadow of Death
I fear no evil — ’cause I’m the evilest baby
that ever went walking in that Valley.

She sings these words to herself, tries to believe them. This half-assed mantra borrowed from a Bow Wow Wow song.

Suddenly she is on the ground. Sand she remembers from long ago — its feel, its get-everywhere quality — from afternoons in some neighbor’s sandbox. She remembers cat shit, gobs of it, under the surface of the sand. Not so here. Under the sand is simply more sand. She works her bound hands into it, digs for cat shit she will not find.

“You only brought one chair?” Barney complains.

“Two people, two chairs,” Jerry says, showing a first sign of annoyance. “The other one blew off down the beach. Lay out the blanket.”

A pair of arms reaches down from behind her, hands slip into notches under her armpits. “Stand up, girl,” Barney instructs. “You can do it.” He withdraws his hands; her weight settles on her wobbling feet, still chained together. Alice lurches left to right, trying to find her balance.

“Is she drunk?” asks a third, familiar voice.

“She’s ill,” Barney Lopatt says, which is not entirely fair. Anyone would have the same devil of a time standing on these uneven sands, in this wind, with ankles snapped in handcuffs and arms strapped to her sides. On stuttering feet Alice turns herself around. Jerry and Barney are shaking out a pink blanket into a stiff square; they set it on the sand and step on its corners.

The third man is turned in his chair, looking at her, behind these two grown men and their pink blanket. Alice tries to focus her eyes on him. “Will she be all right?” he asks. Alice recognizes this man by the patently false concern in his voice. Her confusion of the past ninety minutes gives way to fury. She flexes her knees, takes two bunny-hops toward Jerry — he is closest — with every intention of knocking him to the ground and biting off his ear. But Alice’s nervous system is too poorly equipped right now to coordinate the dozens of muscles that must work in concert to bring her to within bite range of Jerry Biggs-Hibbard’s earlobe. The blood drains from her head on the first hop. The beach spins wildly around her, and, with her ability to discern up from down entirely lost, she pushes desperately off the ground a second time and collapses. She manages to glance off Jerry’s hip in the process, but she does him no damage on the way down. She lands on her back on pink wool.

“Hold her down,” Barney says. Jerry sits down on her legs while the police officer unlocks and removes the cuff from her right foot, swings it around and clamps it to the lawn chair on her left, where her father is sitting, twirling a glove-box umbrella in one hand and sipping beer from a can in the other.

The two pricks here who aren’t blood relations stand up, satisfied with themselves, and withdraw. Jerry is off in pursuit of his beach umbrella and second lawn chair. Barney turns back toward the parking lot to deal with Alice’s Engineers. Alice and her father are left alone now, to consider what they might say to one another after almost three years of estrangement. Some discussion of their immediate, common predicament seems appropriate:

“Your friend Sarah brought me here,” Stephen Merkel says to his daughter. “She set me up in this chair, with that umbrella —” he points down the beach at the green-and-white wheel rolling away from Jerry Biggs-Hibbard’s grabbing hands — “and just went away.”

“How did they get you out of the house?” Alice asks.

Her father either misses completely or ignores the scorn in her voice. He picks up his feet, pulls them apart, clinking the chain between them. “Looks like they got me the same way they got you.” Stephen spreads his legs, and the chain between them snaps taut at about eighteen inches. “Seems they were willing to give me a bit more slack, though.”

Alice is almost completely off the drug dose now. She should be barking and snarling and spitting and vomiting, blacking out and dying. But she just sits, with her knees pulled up under her chin and arms looped over them, as round and compact as she can be. It seems the best way to manage is to streamline yourself, let the Outside hit you and roll off. Every grain of sand on this beach gets beaten round, or into some shape close to it.

“Now that we’re here, it’s not so bad, is it?”

“I’ve never been before,” Alice says. It occurs to her that her left foot has the ability to overturn this folding chair and spill her frail father out of it, into the sand. At which point she will be free to sprint up the beach, past Barney Lopatt’s posted guard, to Batchelder’s Banisters. Anne and Djinn can take her home, and she will have what looks like a nice $30 lawn chair attached to her ankle, to commemorate her escape. “You never took me to the beach.”

“Well, now that you’re here, you need to make sure you take it all in. You know, if you can look into the wind long enough to really see it, that ocean is something else.”

They both try.

“It’s powerful,” Alice says.

“It’s beautiful,” is Stephen Merkel’s correction, which he softens with a compromise. “Well, it’s both.” His eyes have had enough of the sand blasting into them. He cranes his neck around and examines his daughter, and he starts talking. In monologue and at length, about the beach: how the water pounds the sand, how cold it is, how merciless it is in going about its business, which is simply to pound the sand. God told the ocean to go pound sand, and it does. And that is part of its beauty. There is beauty in delicate things, things too capable of breaking, but there is beauty, too, he supposes, in things that are strong.

Stephen Merkel goes on like this, on and on, in stream-of-consciousness style. Alice barely listens and instead looks out over the water, past the more immediate violence of crashing waves to the calmer waters that brace the deep sea. Alice has read that you can will away seasickness if you fix your eyes on the horizon. She wonders now if that might not be true of every kind of illness. At some point, like it always does, Stephen’s mind comes round to the subject of his dead wife, the one Alice killed from inside on her birthdate. His yammering dissolves into sobs. Alice keeps her sight line on the horizon while he cries, and then, finally, he says her mother’s name aloud. Diana. Oh, Diana.

“Dad,” she says. The word feels sticky in her mouth. “Dad, look at the ocean.”

•

Alice takes one last look down the beach, toward the water, then turns and traverses the parking lot toward the squad car, where Anne, Djinn, and Virgil are haranguing Barney Lopatt. At this point it would be grave understatement to describe her as a woman transformed. She walks with a poise and grace none of the people assembled here have ever seen before, even inside her Turnpike sanctuary. If there is a hitch in her step, it is only because right now she has a folded lawn chair clamped on her ankle. She moves slowly, to keep pace with her father’s leg iron-shortened strides. In front of them is Jerry Biggs-Hibbard, triumphantly leading this parade of three, with his recovered beach umbrella cradled in two hands like a flag. (He had to abandon pursuit of the second lawn chair.) He looks like he should be leading some kind of color guard.

Virgil Silvertongue is on a roll and does not seem to mind that the two subjects of his current rant have strolled within earshot. “Barney, the government paid him money to help them catch the Turnpike Witch. That fact so taints his character that —”

Anne throws an elbow into his ribs and points a finger at Alice. “Look at her.”

“‘THE FATHERS OF YOUNG WOMEN WILL TAKE THEIR DAUGHTERS TO BEACHES,’” Jerry Biggs-Hibbard pronounces, not so much interrupting as smoothing over the sudden quiet. “Proclamation 12 of New Jersey’s beloved Turnpike Witch.”

“She’s — all right,” Virgil says, then adds, possessively, “What did you two do to her?”

“Does it matter?” Anne wants to know. Jerry leads Alice and her father over toward the Engineers. Barney Lopatt calls for Stephen and Alice to stop short. He wants a twenty-foot buffer zone between Engineers and Merkels. The policeman excuses Jerry with a nod, and Jerry wanders off to put away his beach umbrella. “Are you really all right?” Anne asks.

“I am,” is Alice’s affirmation. “I’m fine. It’s a weird feeling. I mean, to be out here like this. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it doesn’t.”

Djinn makes a sudden move toward Alice. “Come on, Alice. We’re taking you home.” Officer Lopatt turns his gun on him:

“Don’t test me, Djinn. I fired on Virgil already today, and he’s the one I like.”

A ringing phone defuses the situation a bit. It’s Jerry’s. He dumps the umbrella in the open maw of the van, now doorless, thanks to Alice’s left foot. He pulls on a Bluetooth headset, clicks it on. “Jerry,” he says. His face cracks into a smile. “She looks great. No — really,” he says. He pauses. “Well, I wish you could have seen her coming off the beach a minute ago.” He talks like a proud parent, and truth be told, Alice finds it just a little bit patronizing.

“Do you want to talk to her?” Jerry says into the headset, approaching Alice.

“Wait,” Virgil says, cutting in. “Wait a minute. Who is that?”

“It’s Sarah,” Alice says.

“Sarah?” Barney had not named the third conspirator in the morning’s exercise. “What is she doing on the phone with the Witch Hunter? Give me the phone.”

“For the sake of politeness,” Anne butts in, “you might consider calling him Jerry.”

“She wants to talk to Alice,” Jerry says.

“Give him the phone,” Alice says. “This conversation needs to happen sooner or later.”

A queer look takes over Virgil’s face. Jerry tosses the headset to him, underhand. Virgil catches it, clips it on his ear, works through his backlog of questions for Sarah Ann Rapp. “It’s Virgil, Sarah. What’s going on? What’s your involvement with this Witch Hunter?” The others present — Alice, Anne and Djinn, Jerry, Barney, and even Alice’s father — see the potential for drama here. Virgil’s eyes widen as Sarah Ann Rapp offers her answers. He turns his back on the spectators and walks around to slump down on the back bumper of the squad car.

Alice takes the occasion to introduce her friends and coworkers, Anne Saint James and Djinn Makhmud, to her father. As Barney has not yet approved the Engineers to approach him, Stephen confirms the acquaintance with a shy wave. Something snaps in Anne at this point, and she bum-rushes through Officer Lopatt’s No Man’s Land and wraps her arms around Alice, crying. This leaves Djinn standing by himself to complain:

“You’re going to let her get away with that, Barney?”

Barney stows his gun in its holster and folds his arms. After a suitable time, Alice slips out of the grasp of Anne, who turns her attentions now to Alice’s father: “We’ve been sending you checks,” she says. “You stopped cashing them.” Stephen Merkel worms his head around, trying to avoid eye contact. Anne will have none of it: “Look at me and answer. Why aren’t you cashing our checks?” Recoiling at this familiarity, Alice’s father swats at Anne with his arms.

Several minutes later, Virgil limps over to Jerry with the earpiece in his hand. “She wants you,” is all he says. Jerry takes the equipment with the solemnity of a man who can afford to be kind to a rival. He walks off toward his van, talking excitedly to Sarah about how the coming days will truly decide the matter, but he has seen enough to pronounce Alice Merkel preliminarily cured. Her years of bondage to the toll road are over, and she can come and go in this world as she pleases. Alice is even free, he suggests, to quit her job as the Turnpike Witch.

•

So this is how it ends.

Alice is sprawled out on her back in the van. They are riding northbound on the Atlantic City Expressway, the freeway that links Camden and the Philly suburbs to the Jersey Shore. It’s cold back here. Jerry and Djinn had, with the limited materials available to them back at the beach, jury-rigged the van’s side door back in place. But it was still letting in cold air. Alice’s father has the shotgun seat. Jerry Biggs-Hibbard is driving and delivering an unsolicited disquisition on how he and Sarah hit on this idea, to reunite Alice and her father on The Beach.

“The Witch Hunters were always fixated on that one line from you, Alice. We had it all committed to memory: THE FATHERS OF YOUNG GIRLS WILL TAKE THEIR DAUGHTERS TO THE BEACHES.”

Yes, yes, yes. She knows where this is going. It is a nauseatingly simple pop-psychology theory, and with stomach churning she has already arrived at the crux of it — ten, twenty minutes before Jerry himself will get there:

I am the Turnpike Witch by compulsion. I am emotionally shackled to a toll road because I am flawed as a person. Flawed as a person because of certain deficits in my childhood, just one of which is the fact that my father never took me to The Beach. By some cheap trick of symbolism, reuniting me with my father on a beach has magically filled the hole in my heart. It’s given me a developmental do-over, cured my panic disorder or whatever the hell it was, and broken the hold that awful Turnpike had over me.

“You see, Stephen, Sarah was privy to the details of Alice’s disorder — she’d personally witnessed one of her off-Pike breakdowns. And because of my work at SpeshCom, I had insights into the particular neurotic preoccupations of the Turnpike Witch. Between us, we had the tools to figure this problem out. We just needed to find each other.”

Alice pictures Sarah off in seclusion somewhere, waiting for Jerry to come home to her, so they can jump into one another’s arms and cry, “WE DID IT!” Alice has drawn some conclusions about these two and their relationship. Theirs is the sort of dynamic that might describe two people falling in love. But in their case, it isn’t love, really. They are two heterosexuals with shared interests, starving for an intellectual match, someone who will give them a reason to know all the essentially useless things that they have fought so hard, often beyond endurance, to know. Groping blindly around the landscape for someone to talk to, Sarah and Jerry found each other, and they have mistaken that for love.

“There was a consensus — I won’t say there was unanimity, but most of us on the team were convinced that this one line of hers, the one about the fathers and the beaches, was the key to the mystery. But it wasn’t the key to her identity. It was the key to her suffering.”

Is there a difference?

“I don’t know, Jerry. That’s my daughter you’re talking about. She’s a beautiful, complicated person, and I think it’s unfair to say she wasn’t healthy for these several years because we never went on vacation.”

You tell him, Dad. For about a half hour now Alice has been lying stock-still on this carpet, gnawing the inside of her lip, quietly resentful of Jerry and his absent partner-in-Genius. With her mind racing like it was, she had not been able to put her finger on the precise complaint she has with these two saviors of hers until her father, feeling compelled to defend against the charge that a failure of his parenting confined his daughter to three years’ imprisonment on the New Jersey Turnpike, laid it out for her.

She owes her freedom right now, her ability to engage in the rational internal discourse she is enjoying this very moment, to Jerry Biggs-Hibbard and Sarah Ann Rapp. But all this comes at a price. They have killed her in their minds. They have subjected her to the vicious kind of analytical short-cutting that takes life away and substitutes it with the substance of one-hour Lifetime Channel teleplays, that wrings the complexity and richness out of human beings and turns them into characters. This is the treatment that Alice resisted, often to the point of violence, when some geek civil servant ascribed all her behavior to PMS, when Djinn tried to make a comic book out of her life, when Sarah interviewed her in the hospital and asked pointedly about what childhood slights might have made her into a Witch.

When Alice thundered out on the Turnpike these past three years, whatever might have been the medium for each particular night’s expression, the message was always the same: You don’t know me. I am too big for you to grasp, too slippery for you to catch, too much for you to process. And here come these two people, they pool their “knowledge,” and in one morning they turn her life upside-down. And they’re acting like they’ve done her a FAVOR.

“It took some time to find you, Stephen. We had to run public records searches —” Jerry’s voice breaks off in mid-sentence. Not because anything in this world could stop him talking right now, but because Alice has found another audio input on the ground beside her: her Discman and headphones. The Best of Bow Wow Wow. Volume slammed up to 10.

The shuffle play setting cruelly kicks off this afternoon’s set with an early single: “W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah No No My Daddy Don’t),” a song that too aptly describes Alice’s father’s contribution to society these last twenty years. She considers what living with him again will be like. It was decided in the parking lot — the passive voice is crucial here — after extensive negotiation and namecalling between Anne, Barney, and Jerry in favor of the proposition and Djinn, Virgil, and Stephen Merkel against, that Alice would go home with her father. Just for a few weeks, to give her time to think about her future. Alice might have had the seventh vote on this question, but she never cast it; in the end it was Barney’s gun that broke the tie.

The next fifteen minutes of this ride are close to unbearable. She considers and reconsiders how her whole life just spun on a dime because of her susceptibility to amateur psychoanalysis. She starts to breathe heavily. Jerry takes the car around a gentle curve. The side door hangs loose on its rigging and cracks open. A rush of cold air hits her in the face. “Go Wild in the Country” — a psych-up track Alice used to play in the minutes before her appearances as the Witch — lands hard on its final note, and the CD player spins its lottery wheel once more. Next up: “Elimination Dancing.” Her hands are twitching. There is no goddam way she will go home to a life of spoon-feeding her dad tomato soup. Not with this itch. She needs to show people that her psychological defects are not as easily “corrected” as Jerry Biggs-Hibbard believes. She needs to manufacture some complexity here. She needs to do it quickly, and decisively.

From the compact disc, Annabella whispers words of counsel: Use your muscles — because it’s with your muscles that you most easily obtain knowledge.

The van bumps and grinds as its tires land on grooved pavement. The road here is due for repaving. Alice gets up on her knees and presses her nose against the window. There’s a road sign. I-295 — WILMINGTON, PHILADELPHIA — 2 MILES. They are about a mile from the Turnpike. Route 42 passes over it a mile before it joins with 295. That is a familiar overpass. Not so long ago, the Turnpike Witch hanged herself from it.

Alice stops for a moment and thinks about that. Thoughts about compulsion, and in its absence, choice, set against the driving soundtrack of Bow Wow Wow: Don’t stop dancing, is Annabella Lwin’s message to Alice. This is a fight. A fight to the finish.

The anthropologist and sociologist do not get to decide who Alice Merkel is. Alice gets to decide. Their job is simply to stand aside as she reveals herself to them. That is how all this ends. An all-too-familiar rush of blood passes up over Alice’s face. Her heart rate quickens and her stomach begins to squinch itself closed, flushing only stale air up into her mouth, because she had gagged up everything else back on the beach. These symptoms are rooted in the soul-crushing proposition that They got into my head, and they figured me out. The van continues to grind on the unpaved surface. They are probably thirty seconds away from the Turnpike right now. She can feel it ahead of her. It’s waiting for her. “Elimination Dancing,” a song Anne and Djinn always regarded as inane and lyrically impenetrable, rises brutally to its chorus:

Insist! Persist! Knock out! Resist! Like this! Knock out!
You gotta beat them all! You gotta beat them all! Knock out!

Alice stands up. She crosses the van in one step, plants her right foot, and for the second time today kicks the side door off its frame. The force of her left foot is irresistible. The ropes that tied the door down all snap simultaneously. The door hovers in the air a moment and disappears, blown behind the van, tumbling into the road, sparking off the grooved pavement. Jerry freaks out and slams the brakes. The van goes into a skid, then a tailspin. It has no room in it for Alice Merkel, New Jersey’s Famous Turnpike Witch.

She jumps out, tumbles, rolls forward, with her hands in front of her, to protect her head. The road eats up her knees when she lands. It turns the fleshy part of her palms into worms of ground chuck. She springs to her feet, finds herself on the upward slope that leads to the Route 42 overpass. She breaks into a run, back the way she came, veers off to the left into the woods, runs and runs and runs until she sees it, ahead of her:

The Turnpike. She comes here again, one last time — because this time she is here to stay. This is Alice Merkel’s big middle finger to anyone — everyone — who thought they knew her, inside and out. She has no money in her pocket, she is bleeding from her hands and knees, and everything she has eaten in the past twenty-four hours is lying in a puddle on the beach seventy miles away. She takes a deep breath. That sickness back there, whatever it was, is gone. This is not compulsion anymore, Alice tells herself. This is her considered choice. This is who she is, and who she wants to be.

Chapter 26

2010-01-19T07:16:00.003-05:00

October 2003. Alice Merkel had not spoken with Djinn Makhmud since the day he went off half-cocked and spent the afternoon shooting BBs into the legs of the squatters at the Vince Lombardi Service Area back in August. This gesture of Djinn’s was widely attributed to the Turnpike Witch and hailed in the media, like everything she did, as a coup. The Lombardi Boys talked a lot of shit afterward, while they rubbed cortisone cream into their shins, about getting back at the “Turnpike Bitch.” But in the end most of them went home and didn’t come back. The several dozen who stayed assumed markedly less threatening postures toward civilian travelers. They might fight amongst themselves, but they were now careful not to injure any civilians in their brawls. Combatants holding one another at knifepoint on the sidewalk were known to unswitch their blades, pocket them, and tip their caps at tourists on the way into the Vince Lombardi building.

Despite all this, Alice preferred to dwell on the negatives of Djinn’s attack, which, in her mind, were abundant. She faulted Djinn for the Lombardi Boys’ introduction of “Turnpike Bitch” into the nation’s vernacular. The New York Times Magazine even dignified the term with a cover-page photo: headshot of a woman in an orange ski mask, with the words WITCH OR BITCH? written over her mouth in black magic marker. Unlicensed T-shirts reading THE BITCH IS BACK appeared at the Southern Stops. Darleen Murphy had to go out and buy up thirty-six Internet domains incorporating the term (turnpikebitch.com/.org/.net, tpbitch, njtpbitch, pikebitch, jerseybitch, and so on), to keep them away from the Witch’s detractors.

“She can’t pin that one on me,” Djinn had complained to Virgil Ayres in mid-September. “Witch, Bitch: somebody was bound to come up with it sooner or later.”

At this Virgil threw up his arms, limped to the truck bay door, and climbed out to sit by himself in the rain. By this time he was widely celebrated as a hero at the Southern Stops — and Alice gathered that he would have been thrilled to slip on orange vest and spend the weeks after his discharge from the hospital calling on each of the Service Areas in turn to receive hosannas and blow jobs from his adoring flock of Pikers. But Anne was insisting that he lie low for a time, to keep his name and face out of the news. Virgil had come away from his ridiculous Jesus act at the Lombardi with head trauma, some internal hemorrhaging, and a series of second-degree burns on his wrist, which he was continually treating with various medicated ointments. He rarely complained about his aches and pains, and if he was at all insufferable, it was for constantly asking Anne and Alice and Djinn how he could be useful. The words “duty” and “service” came out of mouth with great frequency. At some point Virgil decided that he was most useful serving as a sort of mediator between Alice and Djinn. He played this role with great perseverance, but there were times when he simply couldn’t take the pettiness anymore.

Alice felt that Djinn had set an awkward precedent for the Turnpike Witch: her fan base had made demands of her, and through Djinn she had responded to their cues. This fundamentally changed the stakes of the Witch’s relationship with the Pikers, her “studio audience,” whose role to that point had been only to react to what she did. It just looked like the Stocktonites had held a meeting and called upon the Turnpike Witch to move on the Lombardi, and out of deference to her supporters, she had done it. It just looked bad.

To Alice, this was just one regrettable emerging aspect of the Turnpike Witch’s public image, which she could not help but feel was spiraling out of her control. The knock on the Turnpike Witch was that she was mean to start with and getting meaner, that she was beginning to play a little too rough, that all this was getting out of control. It did not help that this David Crilly character was making this point in exaggerated fashion on the 6:00 news every night. The man’s toxic tongue was every bit the equal of Virgil’s silver counterpart, and he had an uncanny ability to find a microphone:

“You SMILED,” he said on September 3, in what would become the most notable of his exhortations to the press. “You smiled when she scattered snack food over the road your tolls and taxes built. She gathered courage from that. You laughed when she broke off your car antenna. She gathered more courage. You looked away when she fired a machine gun into the legs of innocent people to avenge one of her fans —” taking some license with the facts here, but no one corrected him — “and she still gathers courage. What’s next?”

To recap, the Turnpike Witch was a psychopath and danger to society, but she was not even her own psychopath: she was a whore and slave of these idiot Pikers.

The truth was that if any of the hundred media commentators who helped construct and reinforce this conventional wisdom in October 2003 could have spent an afternoon with Alice Merkel, they would have seen a person almost irreconcilable with their understanding of the Turnpike Witch. They would have seen a frightened young woman living out of the back of a truck, with a support network consisting of three persons who were becoming increasingly alien and untrustworthy in her mind. They would find her agitated, directionless, abstracted and alone.

•

Eighty miles north of Pino’s Frozen Specialties, in the offices of a publishing company on the 15^th floor of the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, one such commentator checked in at Reception for a 9 a.m. appointment with her editor. Moments later Sarah Ann Rapp was seated in Jacob Perriman’s office. A cup of coffee she didn’t want had been thrust into her hand.

“Loved your piece in the Times Magazine,” Jacob said. “First insightful commentary I’ve seen in months on this Turnpike Witch. Nice counterpoint to this Crilly character.”

“Thank you, Jacob.” Sarah said.

“I don’t suppose I can prevail upon you to give up this Piker project and give me three hundred pages on the Witch?”

Sarah sighed and smiled. She had known this was coming.

“A study of the Turnpike Squatters, and specifically, of (1) the emergence of a working social structure at the Service Areas, and (2) the formation of a subcommunity based entirely on a single shared mythology, developed in real time by an abstracted cult figure.” Jacob had found her proposal on his desk. Looking up: “You’re killing me with this, you know.”

“I’m not going to write you The Adventures of New Jersey’s Famous Turnpike Witch, Jacob. You know that’s not what I do.”

“And that’s a damned shame, Sarah. People are interested in the Turnpike Witch. What they’re not interested in is people who are interested in the Turnpike Witch.”

“So you’ve told me,” Sarah said. “Look, I’ll admit that the proposal is kind of dry —”

“Kind of dry? ‘Subcommunities’ and ‘shared mythologies?’”

Sarah gestured to the shelf behind Jacob’s desk, which prominently displayed a copy of her prize-winning first work, Kellyanism: A Firsthand Account. “I think by now I should have earned the benefit of the doubt from you, Jacob. I’m not asking for a six-figure advance,” Sarah said, “though God knows it would be nice. I want only sponsorship — a comfortable per diem to keep me fed and expensed while I’m down there conducting my research.”

“Yes, fine,” Jacob said, suddenly conceding the point. “Go do your thing. But if anyone of the boys upstairs asks you, tell them I tried, will you? For my sake?”

Sarah laughed. “I’ll tell them I’ve never seen so half-hearted and lackluster an effort.”

Jacob humphed. “Of course you will. Get on out of here and write me a book.” Sarah turned to leave with Jacob slyly admiring her, from his desk.

•

November. After two rounds of preliminary interviews, Jerry Biggs-Hibbard had been invited to the SpeshCom offices one final time. Head Witch Hunter Dan Kessel there to greet him: “To be candid, Jerry, Jock and I think you’d be a great fit on this team. I just wanted to bring you in, have you meet some of the guys, go over some final points.”

“Great,” Jerry said, picking at his shirt collar. “That’s great.”

The next half hour was a whirlwind, as Kessel ushered him from cubicle to cubicle, cycled him through the names and qualifications of the twelve other Witch Hunters on the team. Then, suddenly, Jerry found himself sitting alone in a small, windowless room. He shifted nervously in his chair. By this time he was three months out of school, had quit the graduate program with a Master’s degree back in August. His father had commented, “on the bright side,” that a Master’s in Anthropology was probably more marketable than a doctorate. If Jerry didn’t get this job, the dream was over. He would be selling annuities or medical supplies by the end of the year. Jerry rapped his knuckles on the small table in front of him, contemplated his rounded reflection in the picture tube of a switched-off television across the room, on a cart.

The door opened. Kessel and Committeeman Barberton entered the room.

The Committeeman shook Jerry’s hand. “You thirsty? What do you want?”

“I’m fine.”

Kessel and Barberton pulled up chairs across from him. Barberton did the talking. “Couple things, Jerry. First off: commitment. The Witch Hunters pretty much live here. They’re in the office when I get here in the morning; they’re hanging around when I leave. It’s not backbreaking work. It’s just a team culture. Do you have a wife? Kids?”

“Neither,” Jerry said.

“Good answer. Any family obligations? Aged or disabled? Kind of thing where you call off because Grandma has to get her polyps checked?”

Jerry shook his head.

Kessel nodded approvingly. “We’ve been at this for almost a year now, and I can speak from experience: no one ever had a breakthrough sitting on his duff at home. We believe in group problem-solving. We obtain investigative synergies by sharing ideas.” Jerry nodded. “One more thing.” Kessel flashed a remote, and David Crilly appeared, raging and spitting, on the TV in the corner of the room. The “she gathers courage” speech. “THAT,” Kessel said, “is not what we’re about. Do you understand me? Because this is important.”

Jerry nodded.

“The Witch Hunters have been asked to solve a problem. To do that, we apply our knowledge, experience, and intuition to the problem. This is an exercise of our intellects, and nothing more. If we’re dedicated, determined, indefatigable in our investigation, it’s not because we want to bring down the Witch. It’s because we just want to know who she is.”

“I get that,” Jerry says. “That guy’s insane.”

“I just want to make sure we’re on the same page. David Crilly may very well be insane, but a lot of good, reasonable people in New Jersey and elsewhere are coming round to his point of view, and we don’t want any fanatics on our team.”

Jerry threw out his hands. “If you want me to take an oath, I’ll do it.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Kessel said.

•

November and December brought détente between Alice Merkel and Djinn Makhmud. Pino’s Frozen Specialties had been due for an overhaul, and Anne and Virgil had hit on a concept that they thought might heal the ailing psyche of their Turnpike Witch. A number of celebrities had, in times of turmoil, turned to Eastern religions, Virgil had noted. It was an open question whether or not the two gigantic airbrushed caricatures of the Buddha that Nino Castiglione and Sal had painted on the Ryder truck would afford Alice any real inner peace. But the Bloated Buddhas did make her smile.

On Christmas Day Alice finally resumed speaking with Djinn. This after the Turnpike Witch completed an overnight ride up and down the Southern Pike on a rented reindeer, pinging hard candies off the chassis of passing cars. This operation had come together at the last minute, and against all odds — live reindeer are hard to acquire on short notice in December, and riding one bareback takes practice. Alice had envisioned a stag-sized animal, prancing and spry, with twiggish antlers from which she might hang a festive set of bells and colored bulbs. What she got instead was a bulky, recalcitrant beast of burden. But somehow she had pulled it off — the animal only bucked her once — further proof that the Turnpike Witch was at the peak of her powers. More importantly for Alice, it had been an upbeat, feel-good performance.

At the after-party, in the truck bay strung around with blinking Christmas lights, Alice sipped egg nog and listened to a CD recording of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Anne was illegally downloading holiday music off the Internet, dealing her usual determined squint to her laptop screen. Virgil and Djinn were embroiled in a debate about Christmas traditions. Virgil had been describing his family’s three-day holiday routine in minute-by-minute detail, but then Djinn managed to work a controversial word in, to ask Virgil which traditions he would keep when he was married with his own family, and what he would discard.

“What would I discard? Nothing — these are traditions.”

“A tradition becomes a tradition because, on its own merits, it’s worth repeating,” Djinn said. “Traditions lapse when they’re no longer worth repeating.”

“But if you’re constantly reevaluating a tradition, to decide whether you want to keep doing it, then it’s not really a tradition, is it? It’s just like anything else you decide to do.”

“Or not to do.”

Alice looked out at these three, the three people in the world who were interested in spending Christmas with her. She knew she couldn’t afford to keep alienating a full third of them. She crossed the truck bay and kissed Djinn on the cheek. “Merry Christmas.” A part of her felt compromised, but the holidays are no time to be hard on yourself.

•

They landed together — six of Them — at the airport in Newark in mid-February. They had Blackberry handhelds out, to check email, before Their 767 had made the jetway. They filed out of Business Class in a column, trailing Their black standard-issue wheelie bags behind Them to the Hertz counter. They jumped to the head of the queue, because They had Hertz #1 Club Gold status, which meant that They were better people. They loaded wheelie bags into the trunks of Their six midsize sedans, synchronized watches, agreed to meet at the hotel bar at exactly 7 p.m. for margaritas on The Firm. They got inside Their cars, put on designer sunglasses, slipped keys into ignition sockets and turned them, and fanned out over the New Jersey Turnpike.

Number One was assigned to the Al Hamilton, Number Two the Thomas Edison, Number Three the Molly Pitcher, and so on down the road until Number Six pulled in at the Clara Barton. They entered the Service Areas in plainclothes, bought coffee, and settled in booths from which They could run crowd demographics: age, race, sex, height, weight, ethnicity, sexual orientation, geographically distinct accent, hair color, eye color, degree of education, apparent household wealth (indicators: clothing, jewelry, condition of teeth), personality type. At the same time, They eavesdropped on conversations. They looked for evidence of underlying power dynamics in the group, and They listened for subculture-specific slang. All this with no notepad, no Blackberry, no PDA to record Their data, because it would tip off the subjects. This was a three-stage operation, and this Stage One, this raw observation without notes, was the most taxing. But They were experts in this sort of thing, some of Them government-trained spies before They went commercial. They lived for this.

Stage Two: They identified a handful of representative subjects and conducted one-on-one interviews. Starting with some disarming greeting: “Wait — you’re Pikers, aren’t you? Wow!” Then following quickly with questions about where they came from, how long they’d been here, why they were here. And moving from there to the Witch, asking what the attraction was, whether they thought she was making money off all this Witch business (hit the word business hard), whether they cared. In Stage Two They worked early to bank goodwill with the Pikers, then slowly spent down the cache for usable information. At the zero point the subjects were onto Them, starting to squirm, thinking they were SpeshCom Ops.

At which point They advanced to Stage Three, when They revealed Themselves for who They were. They went to Their cars and got the duffel bags with the T-shirts and surveys in them, gave them away to anyone — Piker, Service Area staff, even civilian travelers — who would fill them out. An easy two pages, with the four-question capper at the end:

*What do you admire most about the Turnpike Witch?
*What do you think the American public admires most about the Turnpike Witch?
*Would you buy a product if she endorsed it (yes/no)?
*What is your favorite soft drink?

The Pikers did not take to the questionnaires at first, but when they saw civilians filling them out, they had to do it, too: the Pikers did not want anyone, even Pepsico, to take home some skewed, negative take on the Turnpike Witch. Some of those civilians might be plants of David Crilly, writing up filthy lies that did not represent the general views of the population.

After Stage Three They collected Their surveys, packed them away, and drove off. After drinks, They adjourned to Their rooms, jacked into data ports, wrote up notes into standardized report formats and submitted them to the Team Supervisor at Corporate Central Marketing. Their conclusion, uniformly expressed under the Next Steps headings of Their several memoranda: We should go with this. We should get a promotion in place by early summer, and if at all possible, we should bring the Witch on board herself.

One of Them had given Alice Merkel a survey. She pocketed it blank, never filled it out. She instead wandered off into the weeds behind the back lot of the Whitman, where she called up Djinn Makhmud and read off the survey into her mobile phone, question by question, for him to write down.

•

11:30 p.m. March 14, 2004. Mount Laurel, New Jersey. David Crilly was on his horse in full gear, wearing the chain mail and the overlay with the boar’s head on it, with quiver and bow strapped over his shoulder. For three weeks now he had been Lord Rottingham at night, patrolling the South Jersey countryside. Down and back from the Delaware border, hunting for his Witch, logging more than a thousand miles through secluded areas. Over these three weeks Rottingham had broken up six teenager trysts and aided in the recovery of ten stolen vehicles — typically cars and SUVs taken from stripmall parking lots, but on one occasion Rottingham happened upon an East Asian grocery truck. Hijacked by gangsters and relieved of its perishable cargo, he figured, then ditched down by Swedesboro under a camouflage tarp, where he had found it. The truck had a phone number painted on its outside. Crilly dialed the number several times over the course of the following day, only to find the line was disconnected. In the end he called the police and left the matter to them. It was not his life’s business to see these cars returned to their owners.

Rottingham’s life business was instead (in the light of day) to pursue his campaign to dislodge Stradivarius Washington from the Special Committee and (under moon and stars) to canvass the roadside on horseback for signs of his ultimate quarry, the Turnpike Witch. His daytime activity — the petty politics, the incitement of the rabble — required effort and dissembling, whereas the midnight rides were a kind of release for him. On his horse, in his armor, wearing the Rottingham crest, he could be his true self. And who knew? One night he might just find that filthy, wicked woman and assert his dominion over her.

Lord Rottingham recognized that the odds were long that he would just run into the Turnpike Witch. She had made only two appearances in the New Year. First, a treacherous run of traffic-surfing way up north, by the Newark Airport, during an ice storm. She had lost her footing on a BMW, landed hard enough to spider-web its sunroof glass. The driver gave interviews to the local news, and photos of his broken roof window circulated on the Net. The usual police sweep and processing followed this event, and the Witch Hunters, poor excuses for men, sat in their tower and did their usual review of the detainees by video surveillance. They held for further questioning any women whose gait appeared awkward or irregular.

The Witch’s second appearance was one of her signature late-night adventures in vandalism, accomplished in the wee hours of February 29. This time she made war on the IKEA furniture store in Elizabeth, the blue and gold warehouse behemoth, visible — a damn-near horizon-swallower — from the road. A simple job done in orange spray-paint, on an extension ladder, after the Witch had shot out all of the parking lot lights. She embellished the store’s existing signage, and the “writing on the wall,” when she had finished with it, read I KAN’T EXPLAIN ANYTHING. Security guards said they saw nothing.

Lord Rottingham had been on his horse that second night, but he had not seen her. She was working too far up the Turnpike. His territory was down south, in the wilderness. He could range on his horse down in this part of the state, whereas upstate the roadside was better populated and more exposed: airports and IKEAs, great poisonous industrial zones creeping right up alongside the Turnpike. He could not ride there and not be seen. It was exasperating that the Witch had taken her act up north, and until she beat a retreat down to the Whitman, Rottingham could not fairly expect to bump into her. He supposed, as most people did — except for the Witch Hunters, clinging to their blasted predictable Sweeps of the Service Areas — that after the Turnpike Witch finished one of her criminal acts, she went back to her home in the suburbs in South Jersey, maybe even in Philadelphia.

Rottingham circled back often to Moorestown Station, up here in the Camden-Philly suburbs. In early January, after the holidays, the slick-talking Stradivarius Washington had wowed the fawning press corps with his proposal to create an elite corps of street-level operatives, dressed in fanciful yellow outfits, whome he charged with capturing the Turnpike Witch. The laughably-named SCRU (Special Committee Roadside Unit) Initiative was just another in a series of gestures carefully crafted by Washington to make it look as though he were serious about pursuing the Witch. Scuttlebutt from the State Police — David Crilly had several sympathizers on the force — was that they did not welcome this incursion on their turf. Accordingly, the Troopers (certain of them, anyway) were as determined as ever to respond, quick-time, to reports of suspicious activity on the Turnpike, in the hope of catching the Witch themselves. Lord Rottingham was resolved not to stray far from Moorestown Station on his rides, because he could bet that the first sign the Turnpike Witch was on the road would be the sudden, squealing departure of squad cars from this police station.

So it was that around midnight on the 14^th of March in the Year of our Lord 2004, Rottingham waited under cover, in a small copse of trees flush on the road shoulder a furlong north and across the Pike from the police station. The mood of the night was soft and quiet. Pendragon was fresh off a gallop and happy to rest, and the Lord himself looked out over the Turnpike and grew pensive. A reporter had asked David Crilly earlier in the day why he was so personally invested in the situation on the Turnpike. Crilly could not answer that question honestly; it wasn’t Crilly but Lord Rottingham who so obsessed himself with the Turnpike Witch. Why that should be was another question, one the reporters, and this quiet moment here on the edge of spring, gave him occasion to consider. He supposed that Lord Rottingham needed a purpose, a quest object, in the days after his expulsion from the Caucus. Shorn of his medieval associations, shut out of the Council of Thirty’s many angles and alliances, power plays and upheavals, Rottingham had to turn his mind to an object, to train his consciousness on a fixed star. Failing that, he feared, he would dissolve into this vacuous and dishonorable modernity. After the Council jury had pronounced him guilty of Wexford’s trumped-up charges, and after the leering dog-woman executed their judgment against him with a boot to Rottingham’s face, he had considered forming an army. He could have mounted guerrilla raids on the next year’s convention. But in the end he chose to channel his energies in another direction. Rottingham had no interest in reasserting his supremacy over these CPR baboons.

He reconstituted himself as a wandering adventurer, independent of any institution like the Caucus. He bought himself a horse, recommitted to his David Crilly cover, and set himself to settling the score with New Jersey’s Famous Turnpike Witch, for the role she had played in bringing him low. And so, he was, on his horse, on a brisk night in March, keeping watch. Rottingham allowed himself a few minutes of repose under the deep and impenetrably dark, vaulted night sky. A light wind blew from the northwest, cars made soothing swooshes as they passed by him on the Turnpike, and for a moment Lord Rottingham allowed himself to doze.

A moment later — it could have been longer — Rottingham heard police sirens. He snapped his eyes open and sat up straight. The night’s peace was broken; six, maybe seven cars igniting in the Station lot, and three more already screaming northbound up the Pike.

Rottingham’s eyes caught fire: the Witch was on the move. He sprang into action. Later that night, when his boiling blood cooled, when the night air cleared the cobwebs from his head, Rottingham would consider that he had acted rashly. But in the fog of his sudden awakening, there was only one course for him to take, and that was pursuit and engagement. “HA! HUZZAH!” Lord Rottingham cried, kicking his horse into motion. Pendragon, having himself succumbed to the night’s seductive calm, turned his head, as if to assess whether his Lord was truly serious. “HA!” Rottingham called out, and he gave his horse a harder kick.

Pendragon responded, and they reached the Turnpike at a full gallop. The southbound lanes were devoid of traffic, and Pendragon crossed them without breaking stride. This was fortunate because Rottingham had not stopped to look for oncoming cars. His mind was fixed on a single object: the Turnpike Witch. Eight squad cars had gone careening by in front of his eyes as Pendragon advanced on the Turnpike. Lord Rottingham never saw them.

A clean jump cleared the guardrail in the median. Lord Rottingham’s horse landed square in the northbound passing lane, a hundred feet ahead of the last of the squad cars, which was well clear of ninety, trying to catch up to its counterparts. The driver hit the brakes, and the car went into a skid. The four screeching tires and siren made an unholy chorus. Pendragon never stopped running. He skipped across the two paved lanes and carried his Lord safely into the road shoulder. The police car lurched left and hammered into the guardrail.

Steam and smoke billowed out of the squad car’s crumpled hood. Screech and siren wound out into silence. The impact brought Rottingham into something close to his right mind. He dug his heels into Pendragon’s haunches and directed the excited animal off into the woods. He looked back over his shoulder. It did not look like anyone saw him. The other police cars were gone up the road, rounding a curve; no other vehicles were in sight. Whatever the Witch was doing upstate — Crilly was sure it was her — had probably stopped traffic. Rottingham took his horse into cover. He paused and took stock. Every nerve in his body was burning for him to resume his pursuit, but the more prudent course, given what had just happened here, was simply to recede into the trees. Live to fight another day, he told himself.

There were no stirrings inside the wrecked squad car, which continued to give up a ghostly admixture of black smoke and water vapor.

Lord Rottingham skipped off on his horse, away from the accident scene. As he rode, always finding points of cover, he strategized. Tomorrow David Crilly would give another press briefing. He would call once more for Stradivarius Washington to relinquish his post as chair of the Special Committee. The man could not even protect his own policemen.

•

Alice and her Engineers gathered the next morning for an emergency meeting. No one in particular called it. Alice simply picked her way back to Bloated Buddha. She had landed at the Stockton after her appearance. Rumors had beaten newspapers to the Service Area. The crowd at the Dick offered conflicting reports about the crash. Pikers had named eight different Troopers, including Barney Lopatt, who might have been in the car. The Stocktonites were peddling the story of an eyewitness from the Molly Pitcher who claimed to have seen the Witch stop in the road and turn her head south, as if she saw or heard something. She paused for a moment, made a series of arcane hand gestures, then got on with her business. The argument was that the Witch had done magic and crashed the police car. (Never mind that eight others had made it through and caused her to abort her mission.)

Alice could not get out of the Stockton fast enough. She took a Common Car, drove, ditched it, walked off into the woods to Bloated Buddha. She arrived bleating out anguished questions about the crash. Virgil cut her off and reported that there were more and more of these horse prints — some leading right up to the truck. “Probably just some civilian out for a ride, but we should probably move hiding places, just in case.”

“Fine,” Alice said. “Done. Now somebody tell me Barney wasn’t in that crash.”

“It was Angstrom and Hotchkiss in the car. Per the official press release,” Anne said.

“Who’s Hotchkiss?” Alice asked.

“Kinda squat, one eyebrow,” Virgil said. “Nice guy. He and Angstrom both.”

“Should have been Verbatim,” Djinn chipped in.

“What’s their status?”

“Both in surgery. Angstrom had internal bleeding. The other guy’s spinal.”

“We’re so screwed,” Virgil said. “So screwed.”

The news that Barney Lopatt was not a casualty gave Alice some relief, but still: “My God, I never meant for something like this to —”

“No one’s blaming you, Alice,” Djinn said. He saw some kind of drama moment looming, and he swooped in to cut it off. “The question is how to play it.”

“Play it?”

“Djinn’s right,” Anne said. “What happened happened, and you can bet David Crilly is going to try to capitalize on this.”

“I think we should post an apology on the Unofficial Website,” Virgil said.

“Apology? But it wasn’t — it wasn’t my —”

“No apology,” Djinn kicked in. “We write up something schlocky like The Turnpike Witch regrets that two State Police officers were involved in a car accident late last night —”

“Not regret,” Anne said. “Pick another word.”

“Hold on. I don’t want to lose my train of thought. She regrets — insert suitable word — that there was an accident, and her heart goes out to the victims and their families.”

“THAT’S NOT SCHLOCKY. THAT’S HOW I FEEL,” Alice said.

“That’s how I feel, too,” Virgil said. Anne nodded in agreement.

Djinn clarified, coldly: “When I said schlocky, I wasn’t describing the sentiment, but the expression of the sentiment.”

“Can we say it better?” Alice asked. She looked, instinctively, to Virgil.

“No. There are certain set ways to say something like this. Repetition of them makes them meaningless, but if you go off the script, it looks like you’re trying to show off.”

“Virgil’s right.”

Alice didn’t get this. She was by no means stupid. She “got” a great many things, and some people would say that in her own way, she was a genius. She had said quite a few meaningful things to the world through her megaphone over the past two years, but all these remarks were crafted to induce a feeling of epistemological discomfort in her audience. To shake them up. Why someone would go to the bother of saying something concededly devoid of meaning in order to give comfort, to cover the speaker and listener in a shared blanket of only ostensible empathy — that was ass-backward, and she didn’t get it.

“Good,” Anne said. “Let’s get a new word for regret —”

“Just leave it,” Virgil said. “It’s all the same, anyway.”

“Fine. Let’s write this up, send it to Murphy to post on the site, and be done with it.”

“That’s the short term,” Djinn said. “In the long term, I think this could land Crilly a seat on the Special Committee, if he plays it right.”

“Hm,” said Virgil, extending silver tongue out and up toward his nose.

“But in the long long term,” Djinn continued, “I think it can be good for us. A good story needs conflict — real, measurable conflict to roll it along. Rabid old David Crilly on board at SpeshCom might just give the Turnpike Witch story a much-needed boost of intensity.”

This talk had Alice’s world spinning. She understood that this was how Djinn dealt with his own unease. He pretended. He talked through it rationally, in cold, calculating words. What threw her was this talk about a “story.” She had heard this before from him; back then it had seemed to make sense. It might have been a fairy tale that she had scripted. The New Jersey Turnpike, its entire 118 miles of road, was a blank page for her to write on. It maintained its own charmed existence, apart from the lurid reality that waited for her off-Pike. But there were real-life consequences to her “story.” These policemen could die. And rather than recognize that, Djinn had simply incorporated them into the narrative. That could work. It could make this situation psychologically manageable to say that everything she could not control — David Crilly, too — was just part of the story. Problem was she had not asked for any of these crucial plot twists, had not even imagined that they could happen. If this was really a story, then certainly Alice was not alone doing the writing.

So she asked, her voice gauged not to challenge Djinn or anybody else, not to make a rhetorical point with the question, but because she seemed genuinely to want to know:

“If all this really is a story — if that’s how I’m supposed to look at my life, like it’s a story — then how do you think it ends? For me?”

Djinn sat up straight in his folding chair and looked blankly at her.

Chapter 25

2010-01-12T07:12:00.003-05:00

November 2004. The celebrity casualty count from the Club WW Massacre has been described as “astronomical.” Not everyone got it bad: notwithstanding Ben Affleck’s dramatic airlift from the Walt Whitman parking lot to Boston for treatment, word leaked out quickly that he had suffered only a minor ankle sprain and abrasions. Certain others are less interested in garnering sympathy: Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in Sunday’s Post swearing revenge on the Turnpike Witch — the printed word being his preferred medium after doctors wired his jaw closed on Saturday morning. The best source for information is the Celebrity Deathwatch page posted at the Unofficial Website of the Turnpike Witch, which claims an Unimpeachable Source who sat in the weeds Thursday night and watched the whole affair — as well as the carting-off of the Who’s Who in its aftermath — through infrared binoculars.

People Magazine’s next issue corroborates much of the Unofficial Site’s reports. They had a staff photographer on-site at Club WW to take red-carpet shots. The fold-out cover shows a paramedic about to pop Charlize Theron’s dislocated shoulder back into place with what appears to be a carpenter’s mallet. Two high-level editors resign in protest.

America is aghast and abuzz with talk of the Massacre. Viewed from 30,000 feet, the several hundred million cell-phone, coffee-room, and email once- and twice-overs of this news event resolve into a national coping paradigm of four stages. On Friday come the outbursts of shock and horror. By Saturday afternoon come the calls for the government to take its usual limited responsive steps — formation of a joint task force, stern public remarks from some elected official — to deal with the Turnpike Witch. Sunday brings inclusion of the victims in the “nation’s prayers.”

Monday morning awakens the nation’s latent cynicism (as it is wont to do), and the marginal, whispered asides of yesterday’s curmudgeons — good for her/they had it coming — soon swell into a dull roar. The media chalks this backlash up to Everyman’s envy of The Rich and Beautiful, and it suddenly remembers that the Turnpike Witch vented her wrath on ordinary people as well. An army of Barbara Walters-types are deployed in hospital parking lots, poised to grieve with the real victims of the Club WW Massacre — the Pikers. But the Pikers are uniformly bursting in triumph from their wheelchairs as the orderlies push them out. They bump fists, mug for the cameras like college kids on spring break. They hold up signs: HI MOM — SEND MONEY FOR PHYSICAL THERAPY! As their wheelchairs recede into the building, three men pull off their shirts to reveal the letters T, P, and W painted on their chests with tincture of iodine. They form an awkward kickline — one wears an air cast, another a knee brace, and the third’s head is immobilized in a halo orthotic. They break out into song:

Daddy says to me, “Girl, where’s your manners?”
Brother says to me, “Girl, I don’t like your boyfriend.”

Mama says to me, “Girl, you GOT NO CONSCIENCE!”

I said, “Yes I have, and it’s lying in the cupboard.”

Where’s my snake? Everybody say, “Where’s my snake?”

And off they go parading in a conga line. Pikers break off interviews to join in, and they circle the parking lot for a period of fifteen minutes, steadily accumulating new discharges, winding their growing serpentine queue around and between the ten or more TV vans.

One woman steps, breathless, out of the conga line and grabs a microphone: “My name is Carly Mappelthorpe. I was in the Greystone Psychiatric Hospital when David Crilly broke in to hang all the women. And I was at the Whitman when the Witch came with her soldiers. I’ve got this elbow reconstruction surgery next month and that sucks and all? But the Witch recognizes us and respects us. Otherwise she wouldn’t have had us beaten up.” She hands back the mike, thanks the interviewer, and runs off.

Carly Mappelthorpe’s endorsement is aired and quoted over and again through Monday night. By this time public sentiment has swung round to favor the Witch. It helped that certain fire-and-brimstone preachers spent their Sunday mornings celebrating Halloween’s scourging of the sinful and dissipated entertainment elite. The notion that the Witch was become an instrument of their vengeful Old Testament God percolated in the minds of congregationers over the next eight hours, while they stuffed down corn chips and called for their home cities’ linebackers to break the ribs of rival cities’ quarterbacks.

The entertainment industry is in disarray. Letterman and Leno have lost half their week’s guest rosters to the Club WW casualty count. Six of nine MTV veejays are incapacitated, and the network has scheduled marathon Real World episode-strings that are 70% longer than usual. Certain film production schedules are pushed back indefinitely while their stars convalesce; other projects are canceled outright. Insiders predict an estimated $375 million in losses.

All this information already resides in Alice Merkel’s head when she rejoins the waking world at 6:33 p.m. on Monday, November 1, four days after she knocked herself senseless at the Walt Whitman. She has not registered any of the foregoing data at the Intake Window of her consciousness. It all worked its way in through a back door while she slept. The source is the television mounted on the wall of her hospital room, tuned right now to the E! network.

She sits up in bed.

“You’re awake.” Sarah Ann Rapp is sitting in a chair beside her bed. She looks like hell. She has her laptop open, is squinting into it, typing edits into her manuscript.

“You look like hell,” Alice croaks. Her mouth is cottony and crusted over.

“You’re no prize, either,” Sarah says.

“It’s Monday night. I’ve been here for three days.”

“I know it,” Sarah says.

“You’ve been here all this time?”

“Normally I’d be bored, but the quiet is a kind of gift. You had a roommate for a while,” Sarah says, gesturing at the empty bed on Alice’s left. “She had a lot of visitors. They finally discharged her this morning, and I’ve done quite a bit of writing today.”

“Has anyone else come to visit?”

“Elsie did, before they discharged her. That Impala kid was with her. The nicer one.”

“David Schultz.”

“He carried her out of the rubble at the Whitman, sat with her in the ER. Elsie looked like she wanted rid of him. She’s going back to Texas, wanted to say good-bye. Apparently the Turnpike Witch knocked some sense into her, if not anybody else.”

“Did she say that?”

“If you take all the usual Elsie-blather and distill it down to its essence, that would be it. She left a phone number. And you have flowers.” Sarah points across the bed at a vase. A fasces of a dozen dyed Gerbera daisies rubber-banded round a sunflower. “There’s a note,” Sarah adds unnecessarily, because Alice has already picked it up.

YOU’RE THE ONE IN THE MIDDLE, AND WE LOVE YOU. GET WELL SOON.

— YOUR FRIENDS AT BATCHELDER & SON CUSTOM BANISTERS.

“Are you hungry? The nurse brought you Jello. A double helping.” Sarah sets a plate down on a bed table, rotates it over the bed. It appears like a horizon just beyond Alice’s chin. A glowing green mound of shuddering gelatin enters her field of vision. “That cop Lopatt keeps coming by. Says he wants to take a statement from you.”

“A statement?”

Sarah shrugs. “Police have been milling around in the halls like ghouls all weekend, but none quite so much as Barney Lopatt outside this room.” After a long pause, Sarah adds, “I don’t think he wants to take a statement from you at all. I think it’s something else entirely.”

Alice does not answer. It did not occur to her until now. She is off-Pike — way off-Pike — and has been for almost three days. She fixes her eyes on the trembling pile of gelatin on the table in front of her and considers the subject of pathological fear, and specifically, why she is not suffering through it this very minute. Clearly Barney expected her to seize up, flip out, something — he was waiting out in the hall so he could intercept her and take her back to safety before bad shit happens. Bad shit can follow from Turnpike withdrawal in a hospital setting. She sees this IV pulled out of her arm, this Craftmatic folding bed thrown down to barricade the door. Maybe Sarah’s chair goes through the window, with Alice following it out, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“No dice on the Jello?” Sarah saves her Word file and stands up. “Fair enough. It’s awful. I’ll go get the nurse, tell her you’re awake.”

Alice kicks her head back, listens to the diminuendo of Sarah clogging her way out of earshot. She tries to think. She has a lot going on: (1) she has given up her secret identity to a journalist in a moment of blind trust; (2) she is at a crossroads in a relationship with this journalist (a friend?); (3) her Turnpike Witch character has taken a hard, violent turn, the legal and political implications of which will not be worked out for some time; (4) though she knows it’s not fair, because they could never have come to the hospital (and they did send flowers), she is angry at the Engineers for not coming to visit her; (5) she is pretty sure her period is starting; and (6) she has no clue why she hasn’t yet succumbed to panic and flipped her shit.

She calls for Sarah. But Sarah is gone. Didn’t she just watch her leave the room? And right now, Alice’s life decides to simplify matters for her just a bit. It eliminates complication (6), and she succumbs to panic and flips her shit.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH —

In a second she is on the floor, with the IV machine crashed down on top of her. Her fist slams down on a full pouch of Whatever she had on the drip. It explodes open and splatters all over her. She rolls over on her knees. The IV machine goes airborne and clatters into the wall. Tiny green globules skid, squish, and roll across her field of vision. They splatter down into beads and skitter away like marbles, demonstrating the physical properties of mercury and the green menace of liquefied Kryptonite. If Alice had any presence of mind at all, she would know this is just the Jello, which she has all but atomized in her fifteen seconds of thrashing around on the floor. But she is long gone, and she wails and screams, and for all that she can’t hear herself over the wash and wreck of panic flooding between her ears. In between her cries she takes deep, gasping breaths, and in between breaths she gags, as dry heaves wrack her body. Certainty, stability, understanding are torn completely out from under her. What is left — her only anchor — is an abiding conviction, proven empirically time and again, that if she could just get back to the New Jersey Turnpike, all of this would go away.

Strong arms scoop her up off the floor and deposit her back into her bed. Someone calls loudly for someone to get STRAPS to tie this woman DOWN. Someone is trying to cram a bite-plate into her mouth so her gnashing teeth won’t sever her tongue. Then, suddenly:

“Alice. ALICE. Look at me.” Cold hands — friendlier hands than those brandishing straps and mouthpieces — close on her face and hold her head still. Alice looks up into Sarah Ann Rapp’s face. The sight of that face turns the panic off like a switch. She feels a literal SNAP inside her head, and sense and sensibility returns to her, like Charlize Theron’s dislocated shoulder, popped back into its ball-and-socket joint.

“It’s all right,” Sarah says. And it is.

“How —” Alice begins meekly, stops, draws a breath. “How did you do that?”

“We’re going to keep her here for another day or two,” says the nurse. She disconnects the IV tube from Alice’s arm, calls for an orderly to mop up the Jello and saline and haul away the wrecked drip machine. A doctor comes in and speaks in unintelligible acronyms. The word Valium stands out from the jargon. Once he is gone, the nurse moves to draw a curtain around the bed.

“I’m just going to sponge this Jello and gunk off of you,” the nurse explains.

Alice takes a deep, trembling breath as Sarah disappears from view.

•

3 a.m. now. The only sounds in the room are Sarah’s fingers clattering on computer keys and the rhythm of Alice’s breathing, shortening up as she begins to come off her tranquilizers. A night-shift nurse was due to supply a second dose at midnight, but she could not be bothered and is perusing an old Us Magazine at the reception desk. Alice reaches for a cup of ice chips, lubes up her throat to break up the quiet: “You can’t leave me alone in here again.”

Sarah stands up, goes to the door and closes it. “I don’t understand what happened.”

Alice explains about her and the Turnpike. That this has gone on for going on three years now. That in the absence of much else to do, and perhaps because her mind’s quirks don’t end with an irrational attachment to the toll road, she took up certain of the personality traits and eccentric behaviors of a Witch —

“You’re not writing any of this down,” Alice says, breaking up her story.

“I’m treating what you tell me today as off-the-record,” Sarah replies, “because you’re not in a condition right now to decide.”

“Get your notepad out and take this down.” Sarah grudgingly complies. Alice picks up again: “What you saw hours ago — me on the floor — that’s what happens to Alice Merkel when she’s taken away from her beloved Turnpike.”

“But you’re fine now.”

“That’s why you can’t leave me alone again,” Alice says. “It happened when you left me alone, and it stopped when you came back. And when you went to the door just now — to close it — I felt it starting to happen again.”

Sarah nods her head.

“Look: I don’t have some lesbian crush on you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“It’s not what I’m thinking,” Sarah says. “Because that wouldn’t explain it.”

“The thing is, if I’m going to have to rely on you to stay with me, I owe you something.”

“That’s not how it works, Alice. We’re friends.”

“It is how it works. It works the same, whether two people are friends or family or they don’t know each other from Adam. With friends, the negotiating is just easier.”

Sarah sits and ruminates on that last part before responding. “Fine,” she says, finally. “I want the interview that Virgil promised me back in June. The exclusive interview with the Witch. There are questions I want answered. I want to know how this happened to you.”

“The Turnpike Witch?” Alice means to sound unfazed. She reaches for the cup with the melting ice chips and works an inch-high stack between grinding slabs of back teeth. “That’s who I am. You want to know how I became who I am?”

“All right,” Sarah says, conceding that point. “Why do you do it?”

“I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything?”

“That’s letting yourself off easy, isn’t it?”

“Is this a therapy session or an interview?” Alice wants to know.

“Right now it’s not much of either.” Sarah sighs, thinks for a minute. “What was going on in your life? What brought you to the Turnpike? What first set you off?”

“Let’s talk about that school shooting in Colorado. Columbine.”

“Columbine?” Sarah looks confused. “Are you saying it was Columbine that caused you to come to the Turnpike?”

“No. I just want to talk about it.” She pauses. “Do you remember what it was like right after? Everyone was asking, how could this happen? And everyone was desperate to come up with some explanation that fit their worldviews. The gun people blamed Hollywood. Hollywood people blamed guns. Most everyone else blamed the parents. But it just happened, didn’t it? These kids decided to kill their classmates in cold blood, and they went out and did it.”

This discussion is right up Sarah’s alley: “I agree with you that it wasn’t just movies, guns, and negligent parents. There were hormones in play, and fairly rigid and unaccommodating adolescent social structures contributed something to their motives —”

“Of course you’re going to say that,” Alice interjects, “because you’re a feminist and people treated you like crap when you were in high school. But it wasn’t any one thing, any two things, any dozen things that made it made happen. Just like there isn’t any one or two or twelve things that made me this way. To think so is unfair to me.”

“You just said I think a certain way because I’m a feminist and people treat me like crap.”

“It’s a cheat. I’m not saying I don’t use it. Everybody does.” Alice pauses. “I know you want to find the magic keys that explain everything. My mother died in childbirth. That’s a good one. My father was the only person left to love me, but he also hated me and was afraid of me, because he thinks I killed his wife. My dad didn’t work, and he wore his bathrobe all day. Other kids teased me about it. Like everyone else in the world I had a crappy sexual awakening. You can take all those things and add them together if you want, but you won’t get the Turnpike Witch. I don’t have the first clue where she comes from.”

“All right, fine. I’ll move on. These Pikers — they’re all taking a break from life, to come chase the Turnpike Witch? But one day they’ll all go home. Where does that leave you?”

“Alone on the Turnpike, to be me — without distractions and demands on my time.”

“But the Turnpike is just a road, Alice. A channel. There’s no there there.”

“I thought you wanted an interview, but now you’re lecturing.”

“I guess I want to know where you think you’re going in life.”

At this point a male nurse unceremoniously throws open the door to Alice’s hospital room. “You’ve got a roommate,” he announces, and he wheels a gurnee past the foot of Alice’s bed. “Transfer from post-op,” the nurse explains. The gurnee-to-bed transfer goes badly, and Sarah and Alice are afforded a view of the roommate’s bare backside. Sarah goes over and pulls the curtain closed between the beds.

“We’ll talk later,” Sarah says to Alice. “You should sleep.”

•

A day later — Wednesday afternoon. Jerry Biggs-Hibbard occupies a solitary booth inside the dining room of the Clara Barton Service Area. He sips coffee and takes in the scene. The room is thick with Pikers bearing hallmarks of the beating the Turnpike Witch and her mystery army dealt to spectators in the Walt Whitman parking lot last week. The weather outside is below freezing, but the men wear short sleeves and short pants to show off the bruises and welts on their arms and legs. The folks with only minor injuries look on the braces, slings, and crutches of others with obvious envy. The Pikers are truly out in force at the Clara Barton. A fire marshal at the front door keeps close count of the Barton’s current occupancy. When one person leaves, he admits another from a long line outside. People have dropped folding chairs on the sidewalk to make the waiting more comfortable. A certain loud, red-haired pregnant woman wants everyone to know that she has passed her due date, and that she intends to deliver her child here in the Clara Barton before the week is up. Jerry has heard this woman make this pronouncement five times now. He wonders if the fire marshal has clued in to this. This place will surpass its legal limit of occupancy when that woman gives birth, and the marshal’s otherwise sound one-in/one-out scheme will be frustrated.

Notwithstanding the density of the Barton crowd, not one person has come within twenty feet of Jerry Biggs-Hibbard since his arrival. He has a semi-circular buffer of empty booths and tables around him. The perimeter of this dead zone is marked off with yellow tape, tied between chairs. Jerry watched three leering men accomplish this several hours ago. The tape reads POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS — the usual stuff, bought from a novelty store.

When the men finished this work, they went away for a few minutes, came back with eight yellow plastic placards, the kind that janitors place on mopped surfaces to post WET FLOOR warnings to slip-susceptible pedestrians. No doubt swiped from a nearby supply closet, these placards were arranged along the 180-degree arc that presently pins Jerry to the wall. English-language sides out, so that Jerry is treated to the Spanish flipsides. CUIDADO: PISO MOJADO. The chorus of a pop song he heard in Tenerife rings continually in his head as a result. He does not know the song’s words, and they’re not cuidado: piso mojado, but the song lingers nonetheless, because it is Spanish. For as much as he understood the lyrics at the time, they might as well be cuidado: piso mojado.

¡Cuidado! ¡Cuidado! ¡Piso — esta — mojado!

The Pikers have set off Jerry from the crowd because he is reputed to have been one of the Special Committee’s Witch Hunters — and would be with the government still, were it not for budget cuts. He does not have the first idea how they know this. But they do. The crowd peeled away from the Barton front door the moment he crossed the threshold. The freedom of movement the Pikers gave him felt at first like privilege. But he soon realized this was the kind of privilege evil spirits get when they wander down from the mountains into tribal settlements. But whatever. He found himself a booth, settled inside it, and the three Piker priests came to draw their magic line, to try to contain his evil mojo inside. ¡Cuidado!

Jerry can’t stand that he is still obsessing about his job, two months after the Witch Hunters unceremoniously fired him, sacrificed him to appease an angry Committee Chair who was strong-armed to the slab in his own right only a week later. It was a job. A fucking job, and that was all. But one he can’t quit: he still wonders about the identity of the Turnpike Witch, and it nettles Jerry beyond endurance that he flew across the ocean to buy a drink for a woman who knows who the Witch is, and he got nothing for it but two dollar bills and a lecture about his unhealthy pursuit of knowledge. That lecture from Sumitra Chandrasekhar might have contained a kernel of truth. There was certainly a kernel of something in it, because as best he can figure, it was her lecture that caused him to bag his dearly-bought return flight from Tenerife in favor of a month-long bender on the island.

It is not in Jerry’s nature to surrender himself so completely to alcohol. He ended up insulting some powerful figure in the local club scene, and the Mother Pumpkin Goddess had to swoop down and save him from a back-alley kneecapping. The Goddess won Jerry clemency, on the promise that he not piss into the leather seats of any more valet-parked convertibles, and that he leave the island immediately and never come back. Sumitra/Ariel paid his way home, and he detoxed on the plane. What a miserable fucking eight hours that was.

That much of the story gets him back to America. But why is he here now, in the Clara Barton, roped off into quarantine by yellow tape? What keeps him from getting up and leaving? It has to be that he has nowhere better to go. Simply put, Jerry is a dork. All this background story, and all the introspection that winds him through it, is just a long, tangled mountain road that leads inevitably to Destination Dork. He sits here because some desperate part of him thinks the Witch is going to come in the front door and make herself known to him — and only him — so that he can write her name and social security number on a Post-It, fix it on an arrowhead and fire it into Dan Kessel’s neck. ¡Cuidado! Jerry Biggs-Hibbard is a daydreaming dork!

It appears now that the pregnant woman has fainted. It is not so much the gasping crowd that catches Jerry’s attention here, nor either the sudden compression of an already-packed Piker community into a curious circle. What Jerry has noticed that this woman’s grating, self-promotional patter has dropped out of the background noise. She must be unconscious or dead. The worst contractions could not have silenced her. Jerry stands up on the booth-seat to see what’s happening. After a long moment of confusion, a man in an orange reflective vest (that’s Virgil Ayres, a Turnpike personality well known to Witch Hunters) carries the woman out in his arms. The fire marshal flicks his thumb twice — he must be holding a hand counter — as they pass by. He waves his arms to admit two people from the line outside. The marshal just took a position on the fetus-as-person question: pregnant woman and Virgil Ayres count as two. An Operation Rescue phone-tree has just caught fire: in ten minutes South Jersey pro-life activists will descend on the fire marshal’s suburban home with axes and torches.

The new admissions to the Barton Party are women — one in her late twenties, another several years younger. Sisters, possibly. From the look of them, Jerry can’t figure what other than family would bring these two together. The younger one is a wild child in clashing layers of torn and grimy clothes that might have been stylish on first delivery from the catalog store. With her broken nose and slinged arm, she should have some cachet with the Pikers. The other is more sensibly dressed, toting a stuffed shoulder bag. The crowd parts ways for the two of them — respectfully, Jerry thinks, but then he realizes the Pikers are gathering in such a way as to channel these women through the Dining Area into Jerry’s enclave along the back wall. The women do not break stride, although the older one pulls her bag off her shoulder and presses it against her chest, with both arms. The young one rolls her eyes.

Somebody spits at them from behind. Another person throws a handful of change at them, makes some shouted reference to prostitution. The fire marshal reaches for his whistle, and the crowd self-sedates. Pikers police themselves rather well. It has been made quite clear just how little these two women are liked at the Clara Barton, but nothing more is done than to flush them in the general direction of Jerryland. Jerry expects the women to stop short of his booth. They have just ducked under the yellow tape. The older woman smiles at him:

“Mind if we sit with you?”

Jerry shrugs, gestures at the open space next to him. “Please.”

“I’m Sarah, and this is Alice.” They slide into position opposite him.

“Jerry Biggs-Hibbard.”

“A pleasure,” Sarah says, wryly. She reaches into her bag, extracts a notebook — a steno pad, with a pen crammed inside the wire spiral at the top. “So what are you in for, Jerry?”

“In the penalty box here?” Sarah nods. “I used to hunt the Witch. For the government.”

Sarah’s eyebrows go up. She extends her hand across the table for Jerry to shake. She has long, pale fingers. “I hunted her, too. For journalism.”

“That doesn’t seem the sort of crime that would land you at my table,” Jerry says.

“It’s a bit more complicated. Alice, would you care to explain why those lovely people were spitting at us?”

“Fuck them.”

“By which she means to say, we are content with the company we’re presently keeping in this booth. So tell me, Jerry — were you on the Special Committee?”

“The Witch Hunt team. Fired the day David Crilly took office.”

Sarah writes these details down. “Why are you back here now?”

“Why are you?” is Jerry’s answer, which Sarah notes as dutifully as the others.

Sarah looks up from her pad. “Well, here is certainly the place to be, isn’t it?”

“Very much so,” Jerry agrees.

“So much so that they’ve made a little observation deck for the journalists and former government investigators, where they can stand to the side and watch.”

“I think there are certain people in this world who prefer to live that way, on the far side of a partition, looking on.”

Sarah’s pen lurches excitedly across her notebook page. Her slender fingers constrict intently around the pen, which Jerry expects would go off scribbling incomprehensible poetry, if left unrestrained. “Ooh. That is interesting,” Sarah says. Her lips, too, seem barely governed.

“I’m hungry,” the other girl announces. Jerry tries to remember what Sarah said her name was. Alex? Alice? “Does anyone else want anything to eat?”

Jerry and Sarah together turn their eyes toward the POLICE LINE.

“For God’s sake — what do you think they’ll do to you?” Alice/Alex says. Jerry will not call this woman by name until he hears her name spoken again, and clearly. “Sarah, I’ll get you a chicken sandwich.” And she is off. She snaps right through the caution tape, and advances on the Burger King counter. Two young men take up the loose ends of tape and tie them together. Deprived of a chaperone, Jerry and Sarah do not leap over the table into a passionate embrace. They instead allow the conversation to lapse, and Jerry alternately imagines how that passionate embrace might feel and obsesses about the quantity of dandruff that might be collecting on his shoulders, just beyond the limits of his peripheral vision. At some point Jerry realizes, suddenly, that his eyes are locked on Sarah’s, and that they likely have been for some time, while his astral self mauled her to orgasm on the tabletop between them, and tiny flecks of his scalp steadily accumulated in conical piles on either shoulder.

“What sort of work did you do as a Witch Hunter?” Sarah asks him.

Jerry’s eyes jump clear of Sarah and settle on one of the plastic placards. CUIDADO: PISO MOJADO. He answers: “I can’t really say. I signed a confidentiality agreement.”

“How confidential could the work be, if everybody here knows you did it?”

“It’s not so much who we are: what they worry about is the Witch getting wind of our leads and methods.”

“What’s to stop the Witch from kidnapping you now and forcing you to give up the Witch Hunters’ ‘leads and methods?’”

“I can’t say. I suppose you would have to ask her if she was up to that sort of thing.”

By this time the other one has returned to the table. Jerry watches closely as Alex or Alice sets down her food tray: for no other reason than to divert his eyes from Sarah Ann Rapp’s — and because in his time as professional anthropologist, watching the Witch Hunters jostle one another for cheese blintzes, he has acquired a sensitivity to the underlying power dynamics that can reveal themselves in the distribution of food.

Alice or Alex mistakes Jerry’s interest in the food tray. She pauses for a moment, standing. “I’m sorry,” she says to Jerry. “Did you want something?”

“No — no, I’m fine,” he says, his mind fixed on Alex/Alice’s manipulation of the food tray. Will she move her own lunch to the table and allow Sarah to eat off the tray? Or is she the type to keep the tray for herself? Alice or Alex shrugs and seats herself across from Sarah. The food tray lands on the table, midway between them. Alex or Alice squints at the tray for a moment, then swings it round 180 degrees, at which point both women reach easily for their respective meals. She must have hit on this approach at the counter and sorted the food there. This suggests an attention to administrative detail that clashes just a little with her runaway chic. He wonders what it was she ran away from.

Sarah’s chicken sandwich gets cold while she continues to grill Jerry about his prior work with the Witch Hunters: “Were they close to catching her when you left?” “Was there a bonus in it for you if you were on the team when they caught her?” Jerry’s answers are diplomatic and vague. He is guarded. He is not sure why. These days Jerry is increasingly unable to explain himself, and he has to content himself instead with theories that, while unprovable, have their support in logic. He supposes this is a by-product of six years in graduate school. So although he cannot say for sure why he is playing coy with Sarah about his time with the Witch Hunters — “It’s not like you owe them anything. They fired you.” — Jerry has a working theory, unprovable. It starts with two premises. The first is that Sarah’s mind works like his: she shares his commitment to the pursuit of inaccessible answers. If he serves up adequate answers to her questions, she will use him up in a day and look elsewhere. The second premise is that although he has just met her, Jerry is determined to hold Sarah’s interest for as long as he can.

“Eat your sandwich,” says the woman next to Sarah. She has finished her lunch and is futzing with the change on the tray.

Sarah puts her notebook aside. “We’re breaking,” she tells Jerry. “But this interview isn’t over, so don’t go anywhere.” Sarah unwraps her chicken sandwich, halves it with a plastic knife. She takes a tremendous bite out of her half-sandwich, so grand and deep that there remains only a slim crescent of bun in her hand, when her mouth pulls back from it. Jerry takes this as a sign of honesty; the women he has known don’t eat like this in front of men. Sarah picks up talking again, just as she takes a second bite of sandwich. “We’re boring you, Al[—]” Jerry listens intently for the second syllable of Alex/Alice’s name, but he cannot make it out. Lost in a bolus of mashed-together bun and chicken patty. Sarah swallows. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to entertain me,” Sarah’s friend says. “I’ve spent years hanging out in the Service Areas. I know how to amuse myself.” And to prove it, she flattens a five-dollar bill on the table in front of her and starts to fold it into the shape of a duck.

While she does this, Jerry Biggs-Hibbard’s heart climbs incrementally up the inside of his chest and into his throat. It does not leap into his throat, as it might if a pipe bomb had just exploded here. It takes time to fold a five-dollar bill into the shape of a duck, after all, and it takes Jerry a comparable amount of time to grasp the significance of the fact that this woman (whose name, to his great exasperation, he still does not know) is doing it right now. But once forty seconds elapse, a too-familiar origami duck is sitting on the table in front of Jerry, and his heart has completed its slow, galumphing progress into the back of his mouth, Jerry feels just as he would if the aforementioned pipe bomb had detonated in the Dining Area.

Oh my fucking God.

In the pocket of his coat, thrown down on the booth seat between his hip and the wall, are two dollar-bill ducks made by the Turnpike Witch, folded in a manner identical to the five-dollar model on the table in front of him. Sumitra Chandrasekhar gave these ducks to him on the condition that when he found the Witch, he would return them to her.

He knows. He knows the identity of the Turnpike Witch. It just fell in his lap. She’s —

“I’m sorry. Did you say your name was Alice or Alex?” Sarah gives him a weird look. Yes, it’s WAY too goddam late for me to ask. “So which is it?” Alex or Alice is annoyed. “Wait — wait a minute,” Jerry says. He grabs his coat and fumbles inside it, pulls out his two ducks and sets them down on the table. “Two years ago you left these with my friend, Sumitra. From the Whitman gift shop. She wanted me to return them to you.”

“My name is Alice,” says — well — Alice. She has tears in her eyes. “Alice Merkel.”

Jerry stands up. Like any ordinary person would if he actually had been within the blast radius of a detonated pipe bomb (and survived), he feels compelled to pull himself up and dust himself off. He will not be able to sit down and sustain polite conversation for several hours.

“What is this?” Sarah Ann Rapp wants to know. “What’s going on?” Jerry appreciates that Sarah is not so fundamentalist on the finer points of polite conversation, so it troubles him less that he is standing over these two, that he is gawking, speechless, stupid, lurching from one foot to the other. He is trying to come to grips with these two women: one it took him half an hour to fall in love with, and the other woman, so much less compelling — the one he just realized he has been chasing for what feels like most of his adult life.

Chapter 24

2010-01-09T15:29:00.000-05:00

Summer 2003. On the New Jersey Turnpike marauding gangs were consolidating their takeover of the Vince Lombardi Service Area, Barney Lopatt was trying to rein in their excesses, and David Crilly and Stradivarius T. Washington were battling for the hearts and minds of the public. During this time Virgil Ayres was out on Long Island rethinking his life.

The death of Virgil’s father set off all kinds of worries for him — about his own mortality, about what he wanted to accomplish in his time on Earth, about his responsibility to make the world a better place. He felt guilty. He wondered what Martin Ayres would say about his son’s life, now that he was positioned to survey it from a better vantage point. Virgil thought about his abandoned college education. He worried about his mother, who when this period of bereavement ended would be left alone. He considered what it might mean to stumble upon true love, as his mother and father had. Was that something he would ever find? Would he ever want to find it, knowing that it necessarily ends in the worst imaginable feeling of loss?

Virgil had ample time to reflect on these insoluble questions, because he was in meetings every day as executor of his father’s will. Martin had taken full advantage of the twenty years between his two strokes to get his affairs into disorder. The result was an estate-planning scheme so convoluted that any tax savings that might have accrued to the family went right back into the pockets of the professionals Widow Ayres hired by the hour to explain it all to her. So it was that corporeal vessels of Virgil and his mother spent long weekday mornings through June and July in indistinguishable office conference rooms lost in their own thoughts, while off in the periphery of their awareness, various lawyers, accountants, and financial planners droned over the bullet points on their handouts. At the close of each session, Virgil would be presented with an expensive pen and some inscrutable document for his signature. Virgil would then propose that he not sign the document until he and his mother consult with their lawyer (if they were meeting with the accountant), accountant (if they were with the lawyer) or their lawyer and accountant (if they were with the financial planner). A meeting would be set for the following week. In the afternoons, mother and son walked the beach together, in silence — picking up where they had left off before the morning’s meeting had so rudely intruded on them with its Mont Blanc pen and SIGN HERE stickie-tabs.

Death had delivered Virgil a dose of brutal perspective. It was as if someone had given him a magnifying glass, and he could not turn its lens on anything he wanted to see without setting it on fire. His mother started to get on him about going to the doctor. It was possible, thought Gretel Ayres, that whatever ticking time bomb Martin had in his head was a hereditary trait. The consults with neurologists and radiologists gave some welcomed variety to the schedule of morning appointments, so Virgil shrugged and went along with them. If his mother wanted him to have CAT scan, he would have it. He could give her some peace, at least.

High tide, conference rooms, low tide, lunch, waiting room, MRI, high tide, dinner.

The world beyond Virgil’s Island went on without him in the meantime. Certain of its occupants missed him and would call and leave messages on his powered-down mobile phone. One was Myrna Kovatch, who must have consulted one or more etiquette books and concluded that six weeks was long enough to wait before leaving indelicate suggestions in his voice mailbox on the order of Call me if you need someone to fuck you out of your skull. Another caller was Alice: Call me if you need someone to talk to, was her proposition. The third caller was Officer Barnabas Quentin Lopatt of the New Jersey State Police. The State was having problems managing a swarm of troublemakers on the North Pike. (North Pike was the settled term for the part of the toll road extending north from the Cleveland and Edison Service Areas to the George Washington Bridge. Northern Pike would have been more denotatively accurate, but the Pikers who had caucused and decided that what the term forfeited in clarity, it gained back from the fact that it did not also refer to a jut-jawed freshwater fish.)

Barney seemed to believe that Virgil could help resolve this crisis, which was centered at the Vince Lombardi Service Area. Virgil had been a force of goodwill on the Pike. He had managed complicated relationships between business owners, police, and the roving fan club of the Turnpike Witch. Barney was appealing to Virgil’s sense of responsibility, by reading into the phone detailed daily reports of vandalism, harassment and gang violence up at the Lombardi. As he played back these messages with those Myrna left in between — messages that, like Barney’s, were growing increasingly lurid and explicit by the day — Virgil’s emotional state toggled between strong feelings of disgust and sexual arousal. He wondered if these awkward juxtapositions might, through behavioral conditioning, turn him into some kind of pervert.

Three A&Bs at the Lombardi today, and six Hell’s Angels stormed the MEN’s room and tore off all the stall doors. Calls like this made more of a dent in Virgil’s armor than the summonses from Alice or Myrna. On August 15, Barney’s daily briefing happened to strike at the heart of Virgil’s weakness for self-destructive, possibly exploited women: at 300 hours this morning, we found a 19-year-old girl lying unconscious and half-clothed on the side of the road, four miles south of the Lombardi Service Area. Turns out she had overdosed on a cocktail of heroin and crack cocaine. We don’t know whether the woman ingested these drugs voluntarily.

For half the day, after he played back Barney’s message, Virgil walked around with a dull ache in his stomach. That woman, found on the roadside, could easily have been Alice Merkel. He tried calling Barney back — a big step for him — but Barney had his phone off, was probably on duty. It belatedly occurred to Virgil that the all-day cable news channels might have more of the story. When he clicked the remote, a wild-eyed, crooked-nosed man landed and splattered, shrilly screaming, on the picture tube, like a bug impacting a windshield:

“CRACK WHORES on the shoulders of our ROADS. In our SUBURBS. THIS IS WHAT STRAD WASHINGTON HAS GIVEN US. We need to arrest and imprison, or better yet, INSTITUTIONALIZE these Pikers. When you cut out a CANCER, you have to ACT QUICKLY, and you have to take all of it, or it GROWS ANEW. WE NEED TO CUT OUT THE PIKERS, AND WE NEED TO CUT OUT THE TURNPIKE WITCH.”

Roars of applause greeted the end of this man’s tantrum, which, from all appearances, had been delivered in a Service Area parking lot several hours earlier. Virgil could not say for certain — it was a tight shot — but he thought it was the Joyce Kilmer. The screen caption identified the man as DAVID CRILLY, TURNPIKE ACTIVIST.

In the middle of the night, Virgil got dressed and packed his clothes. He stopped by his parents’ bedroom, and he stepped inside. Gretel Ayres was asleep on her side, facing the wall. There was a big empty spot where his father used to sleep. He listened to her breathe for a few minutes. He needed to go now, or the fire under him might burn down again, and he’d be in a funk again for another three months, possibly forever. He would leave her a note, and he would be back soon. Not today or tomorrow or the next day, but depending on how fit he was to travel, maybe in a week. He slipped on his orange hunter’s vest and left the room.

•

A sick root-beer-float feeling bubbled up in Virgil’s stomach when he pulled into the Vince Lombardi Service Area, three hours later, at around 5 a.m. The parking lot was a wreck. There were cars, trucks, motorcycles jammed in every which way and at odd angles. Some ordered society had once painted yellow lines on the asphalt here. People who honored that society’s rules had contrived to park between those lines, but no longer. The slapped-together arrangement of vehicles that greeted Virgil was not, on its own, particularly menacing, but it hinted at bigger problems.

As Virgil wound his Common Car through the Lombardi lot, he came to understand that each gang had taken a patch of asphalt for its own and used its members’ cars and trucks to mark off its borders. The vehicles formed the sides of seven or eight irregular polygons that subdivided the parking lot. The gangs had pitched tents in the open spaces inside their car cordons. One group had rigged up a big top — a tarp tied down on its four corners to the side mirrors of four border cars, with poles jammed up under it in strategic positions, to raise a roof. Certain cars had shields of corrugated sheet-metal fastened to their sides. These shields were dented and pock-marked, and in some places blackened in a way that suggested it had been impacted by incendiaries. One bunker was fortified on all six sides with stainless steel doors torn from bathroom stalls.

Despite all the obvious indicators of hard living — overturned kegs, broken glass, bongs, butts, syringes — no signs of life were immediately apparent to Virgil. He allowed his car to idle quietly around to the rear of the Lombardi building, over by the loading dock. There were two, maybe three more campsites back there. Virgil stopped the car and pulled his keys from the ignition. He turned around to reach into the backseat for his bullhorn. Someone knocked on his windshield. Virgil turned around in a panic to find Jan Larsen, personal slave of Anne Saint James, standing by his driver’s side door. Virgil powered down his window. Jan raised a finger to his lips and motioned for Virgil to follow him. Virgil got out of the car and followed Jan over to the loading dock, an alcove cut out of the rear of the Lombardi building. In the center of the dock, on a raised stoop, was a red metal door. Virgil climbed up on the stoop after Jan and, following his escort’s example, flattened himself against one of the walls flanking this rear door.

“No one can see us talk,” Jan said. “What are you doing here, Virgil?”

“You first.”

Jan snorted. “I’m here spying for Anne. I’ve insinuated myself into the community.”

Virgil furrowed his eyebrows in a way that would have prompted Jan to elaborate, if Jan had been able to see him. There was a pause. “What are you talking about?” he asked, finally.

“I — I perform for them. Swallow stuff mostly. Cigarettes, motor oil, gunpowder —”

“GUNPOWDER?”

“Shhhh. From the fireworks. They have bottle rocket fights between the forts. Or they did before somebody scored a hit on a gas tank. Now they have rules. Virgil, you shouldn’t be here. They treat anybody unfamiliar as a narc. You could get hurt.”

“Good,” Virgil said. “I’m shooting for spectacularly hurt.” That sounded like something Alice would say, when she contemplated doing something stupid and audacious. It did not sound like Virgil Ayres. He seized on that, because today was not a day for him to behave like Virgil Ayres. He tried to imagine how Alice would approach this business. She would jump off the porch, slap the soles of her shoes hard on the pavement, to signal that she had just stepped irrevocably out of hiding. Then she would sashay over to the car to get the bullhorn. She would switch it on and, with clear-as-bell articulation, say what she needed to say.

Virgil followed in Alice’s hypothetical footsteps, mimicked her every imagined gesture, and before he knew it Virgil Ayres, to this point scared shitless of what he had seen at the Lombardi, was circling the parking lot on foot, addressing the gangs through his bullhorn:

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE VINCE LOMBARDI SERVICE AREA PIKER DELEGATION, MY NAME IS VIRGIL AYRES. I AM HERE TODAY TO NOTIFY YOU OF CERTAIN RULES OF CONDUCT THAT THE PAN-PIKER COMMUNITY HAS ADOPTED TO HARMONIZE ITS RELATIONS WITH THE DAY TRAVELERS, COMMUTERS, AND VENDORS WITH WHOM WE SHARE PUBLIC SPACES. IN RECENT WEEKS WE HAVE HEARD A NUMBER OF DISQUIETING STORIES ABOUT WHAT YOU FOLKS HAVE BEEN UP TO HERE, AND IT OCCURS TO US THAT WE OWE YOU A CONVERSATION ABOUT TURNPIKE-SPECIFIC RULES YOU MANY NOT KNOW, AS WELL AS A REFRESHER COURSE ON CERTAIN BASELINE RULES THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW, BUT APPEAR TO HAVE FORGOTTEN.

I HAVE RESERVED SPACE INDOORS, IN THE DINING AREA, FROM 6 TO 10 A.M. TODAY, DURING WHICH TIME I WILL GIVE A TWO-HOUR LECTURE WITH Q & A, AFTER WHICH YOU WILL HAVE AN HOUR TO COMPLETE A CONDUCT TEST THAT WILL CERTIFY YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT WE’VE DISCUSSED —”

All this, of course, was a bluff, as Virgil was fairly sure he would be hospitalized by 7:30.

•

Jan stood idly by and hated himself while it all happened. But he never blew his cover. In the end the Lombardi Boys tied up an unconscious Virgil Ayres and pitched him into the back seat of somebody’s El Dorado. The car left the lot southbound. The two cars that adjoined it along the exterior of its particular bunker were maneuvered to close the gap the El Dorado had left in their wall. Jan walked around the corner of the building, pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and called Anne Saint James.

•

Veteran Pikers Jimmy Prudhomme and Mort Axelrod found Virgil Ayres dumped on the sidewalk outside the Walt Whitman Service Area at 8 a.m. He was about half-conscious and his face was beaten purple. They called paramedics. Jimmy took hold of Virgil’s right hand, Virgil screamed in pain. “Burns,” Virgil said. There were circular burn marks all around his wrist.

“Who did this to you?” Jimmy asked him.

Virgil smiled. “It happened at the Lombardi,” he said. “But don’t do anything.”

“Don’t DO ANYTHING?” Mort said. “Are you kidding? It’s an act of war —”

Virgil: “Pull up my shirt.” An ambulance had pulled up behind them. Two paramedics went around back to pull out the snap-down gurnee. Mort unzipped Virgil’s orange vest and pulled up the T-shirt underneath. Virgil had the remains of a small microphone taped to his chest, in the middle, in the breastbone depression. It was smashed to bits, and there were deep gouges where the shards of plastic had cut him. A wire led down this wreckage on his chest into Virgil’s pants pocket. “I got some good stuff before one of their kicks broke the mike,” Virgil said. Take the tape and have copies made. Send them to all the news outlets.” Mort pulled the recorder from Virgil’s pocket, unplugged the mike wire and pocketed it. “This is what I’m doing with my life,” Virgil said. The paramedics put Virgil on the stretcher and carried him off.

•

June, July, and early August had been a busy time for Djinn Makhmud. Although the Witch rightly walked away with the credit for the Great Road Sign Swap of August 2003, it was Djinn who had done all the legwork. He had all the substitute signs made — the standard road-sign green with white reflective lettering — per Alice’s specifications, and that had not been easy. None of the first thirty road signage firms he had contacted would do the work. These were businesses built on practicality and common sense, and when an anonymous customer called and offered cash for a series of road signs that read (to take just one example) EXIT 14B: SETTLING FOR LESS, they tended to say something nasty and hang up the phone. In the end Djinn had to fax Alice’s product specs to a Hollywood prop company instead, and once they came on board, he then had to arrange untraceable payment and delivery of the signs, then swing the complicated logistics of swapping them in for the existing road signs up and down the Turnpike. Not only that, but he had to get all the signage up in one night on August 10.

A piece of cake, it turned out: Monday’s commuters had to blink twice and rub their bleary eyes as they approached their Turnpike exits, because the signs that immediately preceded each off-ramp, northbound and southbound promised altogether different (if about as appealing) destinations to them than they had before the weekend. The Turnpike Witch had seen to it that these road signs were edited for accuracy: at Exit 1 (formerly the Delaware Memorial Bridge), “Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here”; at Exit 4 (Camden, Philadelphia), “Modernity, Alienation”; and at Exit 6A (Pennsylvania Turnpike, Florence), “Road to Nowhere, Nowhere.” Exit 7A’s Trenton, Hamilton became “Numb Resignation, Prescription Drugs.” Newark Airport became “Your Anus Snapped Open with Tweezers.” “Where Everyone Is Cooler Than You” marked the Holland Tunnel, and the Lincoln Tunnel, Secaucus exit promised “The False Consolation of Consumer Goods.”

It would take the Turnpike Authority six weeks to prepare a complete set of replacement signs, as state procurement laws required them to start a bidding process from scratch. The State left the Witch’s signs in place in the meantime, because these at least correctly identified the Exits by number — this notwithstanding protests from the New York Giants that they had been in the Super Bowl as recently as 2001, and it was not fair to judge the current year’s team as “underachieving” solely on the basis of last week’s first preseason game.

The Road Sign project ate up a lot of the summer, and after he wrapped it up Djinn took up a project of his own. He had been monitoring a long-running Internet pissing contest over who could build the smallest mobile methamphetamine lab. A guy named “Gato” from Argentina had logged into the Yahoo! Groups MethLab chat and posted photos of works he had built into a 1993 Jeep Wrangler; board moderators hopped a flight to Buenos Aires and certified the product. Djinn was convinced he could beat that, and the minute his work responsibilities let up, he petitioned T.P. Witch & Co. for time off. He tracked down a used 2002 Golf GT at a VW dealership in Piscataway. He paid cash for the car. From Piscataway Djinn drove the Golf down to Nino Catiglione’s garage in Trenton and started to work. Nino regarded the whole enterprise as something akin to mad science; under Djinn’s tutelage he had just graduated from homemade wine to ouzo. This wasn’t fermentation art — it was chemistry, and fine with him that Djinn insisted on working alone: “Has to be just me,” Djinn said, “or I get an asterisk.”

Djinn was five days into his work when he got word from Anne Saint James that Virgil had been attacked. While Nino stood by, bewildered, Djinn flipped his cell phone closed, tore the existing apparatus out of the Golf’s hatchback and heaved it into a corner of the garage. Seconds later, Djinn had the car in reverse and was gone. He returned to Nino’s three hours later, driving a Chevy Caprice. He handed Nino a printout from the Web: schematics of John Allen Muhammed’s kitted-up D.C. Sniper car, downloaded from Crimedog.com.

Nino flinched. “They want to execute that guy for this,” he said. “And the kid, too.”

“That’s Virginia,” Djinn said, shrugging it off.

“Dunno that it’s a good idea to copycat someone who’s going to death row.”

“We’re copycatting the guy because it worked. He fired undetected from that compartment in the trunk for weeks. And I’m not going to kill anybody.” Djinn reached into his car, pulled out what looked like a standard air rifle, except for the latticework of thin-gauge piping and rubber tubes wrapped around the barrel. He tossed the weapon to Nino. “I’m just going to pepper their legs.” Djinn explained that the pellet gun’s appendages supplied more oomph to the shot. “Do you remember ten-pumping the old Daisy rifles for maximum velocity?”

Nino nodded.

“This gun shoots like a twenty-pump. It’ll turn a guy’s ACL into pulled pork from three hundred yards. A shot on the ankle will burrow into bone. But it won’t kill anybody,” Djinn said. “Well, not if you don’t aim high.”

Nino dropped the gun. “I’m sorry, brother. I have a wife. I don’t want any part of this.”

“Virgil’s in the hospital. Those punk gangs at the Lombardi beat him half to death and dumped him downstate. They burned up his arms. Brutal.”

Nino gaped at Djinn. “Our Virgil?” he asked, and Djinn nodded. “If you’re back in that compartment shooting,” Nino said, “you’re going to need a driver.”

•

The outcry over Virgil Ayres was considerable. If anyone’s body should have been inviolate, it was Virgil’s. Everyone on the Turnpike — Pikers, road crews, cops, everybody — said so. “You don’t lay a hand on Virgil,” Lorenzo Williams, shift manager at the Whitman Roy Rogers, told a Times reporter. “He’s like the U.N. around here.” Lorenzo snapped a plastic lid on the customer’s chocolate shake. “No, you don’t lay a hand on my man Virgil.”

The Stocktonites called an emergency assembly to discuss an actual declaration of war against the Vince Lombardi. They worked themselves up into such a deliberative frenzy that ad hoc delegations from the Whitman, Clara Barton, and Joyce Kilmer had to intervene and talk them off the ledge. It was emphasized that no one except rabid old David Crilly stood to gain from a civil war on the Turnpike and — don’t you see? — Virgil had given the Pikers a gift here. He had forced the public to recognize that the Pikers and the Lombardi population were not one and the same, and they did not deserve to be treated the same. What would Virgil want? the visiting delegations asked. What would the Witch want? This prompted the Stocktonites to argue well into the night about what exactly the Turnpike Witch did want from them. In the end, they voted not to retaliate. Instead, they issued legislative findings stating that the question of how to respond to the cowardly and unwarranted assault on the unarmed envoy, Virgil Ayres, was a matter appropriate for disposition by the Turnpike Witch.

Crimedog.com’s August 17 column on the Lombardi crisis said it best in a three-word opening sentence: Your Move, Witch.

But the Witch didn’t do anything, because she didn’t know what to do. Alice had been at the Walt Whitman — had in fact overnighted there — when the Lombardi rebels dumped Virgil outside the building. She had been inside sipping coffee, oblivious, when the ambulance came. The flashing lights caught her eye, she stepped outside to see paramedics carrying off a man in an orange vest on a stretcher. It can’t be Virgil, was Alice’s first thought. It has to be somebody else in that orange vest. Then her phone rang:

“Alice it’s Anne. Something’s happened to Virgil.”

And she was off and running, first to catch the ambulance, which got away — then to escape the calming arms of Mort and Jimmy. They were chasing her, calling for her to stop, to come with them to the hospital. But she couldn’t go with them off-Pike to some hospital, and she couldn’t explain why. For an hour she just kept running, until she was ten miles down the road, into the woods, banging on the rear door of the Pino’s truck, screaming at Anne to goddam fucking let her inside.

“Alice — it was open,” Anne said, after she raised the door. Anne explained everything that Jan had witnessed at the Lombardi. Her face was white like bleached bone. “We don’t know where they took him,” Anne said. “We don’t know if they’ve taken him away to —”

“They left him at the Walt. Paramedics came and got him.”

“Where did they take him? What hospital?”

Alice shook her head. “I — I don’t know. I can find out. WHY DID HE DO THAT?” she shouted. She kicked Djinn’s vacated folding chair, sent it screaming into the side wall of the truck bay. Anne packed away her laptop into its padded case and put it into her foot locker.

“I think he thought he was helping,” Anne said quietly, when this was finished.

“I DIDN’T ASK HIM TO HELP. I ASKED HIM TO TAKE CARE OF HIMSELF.” She sat down, breathed deeply. “This is not how someone takes care of himself.”

“What are you going to do now?” Anne asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“What are you going to do about this? About the Lombardi?”

Alice sat up and dropped her hands in her lap. “You think this is my fault.” Anne didn’t answer. “You think I should have been up there lobbing tear gas into the Lombardi bunkers three weeks ago.” Anne had been pressing for the Witch to act against the gangs at the Vince Lombardi, even before Barney Lopatt suggested it to Alice in last month’s staged traffic stop. The Witch had the full support of the Special Committee to act, and Anne had been urging Alice for the last ten days to accept and act on it.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Alice insisted. “He went — he just went and did this. This isn’t what I signed up to do, Anne. My gig is just to screw around. But this now, this is politics.”

Anne did not answer that, and the conversation died there. The two of them sat in silence for several hours. Anne heaved her body around in her desk chair, puffing and grunting. She had a great deal to say to Alice on a number of points, and swallowing it all was causing her actual physical discomfort. Alice turned her back on Anne’s paroxysms. She wanted to scream aloud: What was Virgil THINKING? Except she knew what he was thinking, Anne knew it, too, and it would be so like her to blunt the force of Alice’s rhetorical question by serving up a perfectly sound and obvious answer to it: He was trying to dissociate the Piker population from the lawlessness at the Lombardi. He was responding to David Crilly’s argument that the crimes of the Lombardi gangs warrant a sweeping retaliatory response from the State against all Pikers. It was sound strategy, but he should have discussed it with her first. He should have given her a chance to talk him out of it. She always gave him that courtesy.

And now the Turnpike Witch was supposed to do something. She was supposed to cave in, finally, and stoop to participate in this ground-level “Piker” subplot. The expectation was that she would impose some kind of order at the Lombardi, that she would discipline these people who were breaking the rules and mistreating her fans. And yet nothing she had ever said or done as Turnpike Witch should have given any indication that she intended to babysit these people. If people were going to require things of her, what was the goddam fucking point? But then there was Virgil — poor, sweet Virgil. She should want to do something, for Virgil. She should want to make those people suffer.

Djinn dialed in. Anne took the call. Alice didn’t need to hear Djinn’s side of the conversation; it was easy enough to guess it: What’s the plan? What do you mean there’s no plan? What’s holding her back? What’s her problem? That’s our friend in the HOSPITAL. It’s just her we’re waiting on? JUST ALICE? And he hung up.

Martha Cadwallader’s editors had no sooner published her three-word solicitation of violence against the Lombardi — Your Move, Witch hit the Crimedog site at 9:03 p.m. August 16 — than Djinn Makhmud began pouring shot into the legs of anyone who moved at the Vince Lombardi Service Area, firing silently from the shooting compartment retrofitted into his Chevy Caprice, strategically parked on a high-ground off-ramp one hundred yards clear of the parking lot. The compartment was only a rough match of the D.C. Sniper specs, given the time constraints. But it worked just fine: within minutes, Djinn had scored direct, below-the-knee hits on forty-one of the Lombardi Boys. Saturday night, and they had been whooping it up in the parking lot; now they were down and bewildered. Fired from a distance, and from an air rifle, with no explosion of powder, the metal balls seemed to explode into their ankles, soundless and from nowhere. Grabbing their legs, they crawled for cover in their bunkers.

In the front seat of the car, Nino Castiglione sat quietly, taking in the middle innings of the Yankees-Orioles game on the radio, looking out for police that, despite all the calls the victims were making to 911, would not be coming anytime soon.

Chapter 23

2010-01-05T07:06:00.002-05:00

Michael’s Berserkers Local 109 are an interesting bunch. They are big players in the Delaware Valley medieval reenactment subculture — card-carrying members of the Caucus for Premodernity Revisited — and a select two dozen of the finest hand-to-hand fighters in the Western Realm. Through hard work and the paid assistance of a retired Marine sergeant personal trainer, they have made themselves strapping, disciplined Men of Adventure. Each Berserker is a CPR board-certified swordsman, archer, and halberdmaster. The prototypical Berserker is still a dork at heart, but increasingly susceptible to unpredictable and transformative gushes of testosterone.

The Berserkers have a strong community presence in South Jersey. They put on fighting demos at middle schools up and down the Shore and stage paid-admission battles for Salvation Army fundraisers. But it’s not all volunteer work: the organization keeps a second foam-and-bamboo weapons cache to loan out to anyone who would pay to fight them. These battle gigs — typically with fired-up stag parties down Atlantic City way, or office workers on retreats — bring in some revenue for the Berserkers, but not enough to let them quit their day jobs. The going rate for an hour’s buttkicking in the field by the Berserkers Local 109 is $600 per dozen casualties. Parties over 48 require ad hoc negotiation. The battles, however much the parties consent to them in good fun, are no joke. A spirited twelve-on-twelve usually ends with at least five stitchworthy cuts, three ankle sprains, and a broken nose, and only an ironclad liability waiver keeps the team in business. The waiver proved its worth in court three years ago, when a group of college kids faked a bachelor party, took dives on the Princeton Battlefield, and filed fourteen separate civil suits for battery and false imprisonment.

That awful, uncertain period of litigation sits fresh in the minds of the Berserker brain trust on October 8, while they wait in a hotel suite to meet with the mystery man who called their secretary the night before to set up an appointment. The entirety of the communication:

“If you would consider a Halloween Night raid-for-pay on a Turnpike rest-stop, rent a room in the Bally’s in Atlantic City tomorrow night. Do it under your name. I’ll call up from Reception at 10 p.m.” Click.

The negotiator arrives and knocks at around a quarter after ten. He is wearing a clown suit with red wig, false nose and glasses, a Santa Claus beard. Several of the Berserkers remember him from the lobby; he was tying balloon animals for drunk middle-aged couples. They offer him a drink from the minibar. He declines and goes straight into his pitch: the setting for the attack will be the grand opening of the nightclub at the site of the old Walt Whitman Service Area. As the clown elaborates, it becomes clear that the job he is describing is a surprise hit on third parties — club employees and celebrity guests.

The idea of storming a private club uninvited and thrashing the unarmed persons inside has the Berserkers more than a little queasy. But the clown does come to them with credentials. He has to dump a shopping bag on the floor to find it — rubber chickens, packets of balloons, a slide whistle spill out on the floor — but eventually the clown produces a letter of introduction on the formal stationery of Henry Botherbroke, Earl of Wexford — the most respected member of the CPR’s governing Council of Thirty. The letter, dated October 7, asks the Berserkers to extend every courtesy to the bearer of this communication, however motley his attire.

The clown-client has also produced an insider’s list of VIP guests confirmed to attend Club WW’s Grand Opening. The prospect of beating shit out of Hollywood types and jocks is intriguing. Russell Crowe is on the list; at least three Berserkers have a bone to pick with him over historical inaccuracies in Gladiator. Another Berserker has an unspecified beef with Jason Sehorn.

The forty grand in cash on the table in front of them also carries some weight. That’s a big-time deposit, with another forty payable after the attack. The plan calls for limited exposure: get in and out in the dark. A surgical strike coordinated with a power outage. Even if they are identified, the clown has the resources to produce back-dated forgeries of the Berserker’s consent slips — access to all the victims’ signatures and precision instruments for reproducing them. He shows them a mock-up waiver signed by Bianca Jagger. It looks professionally made. Several of the Berserkers wonder how this clown got hold of their form.

Ultimately twenty-one Berserkers opt into the scheme. Three conscientious objectors threaten to quit over the vote, but they’ve never been particularly good fighters, and the group can get along without them.

•

Virgil Ayres’s clown-suit handshake agreement with the Berserkers was a transformative moment. To that point, an assault on Club WW had been merely the subject of idle talk inside Batchelder’s Banisters, a fantasy kicked around not for its merits as an idea, but rather for its ability to seize the imagination of an angry listener, and, by God, wrest his or her attention away from more quarrelsome matters. The idea sprang first from the consciousness of Michael Churchwell, who was determined to cover his backside after a trip to an audiologist landed him in hot water with Anne Saint James: I lied to you for months, I know, but — look over there! Medieval infantry assailing your objectionable night club! Some greater specificity would be required of him an hour later, when Anne had to report back to Djinn Makhmud that Michael had been faking his hearing loss in the truck bay. But before Djinn could get in a snit, Anne blurted out that Michael had an idea on how to fix the problem with the Attorneys.

Anne swung Michael between herself and Djinn, set the kid to fast-talking. He began to spin forth elaborate Djinn-worthy schemes involving staged power outages, trained men with night-vision goggles storming dance floors with medieval weaponry, celebrity blondes issued modesty-reinforcing crew-cuts at knifepoint in the VIP rooms of Club WW. Anne led Djinn to his drafting table, worried his fist open to receive a pen, and set his hand to real-time storyboarding Michael’s improv act. And Djinn quickly put aside the issue of Michael’s hearing.

A day later Virgil would prove even more susceptible to distraction. It took Michael barely sixty seconds to usher Virgil from Wait a minute: you’re telling me HE CAN HEAR? to No no no — this is a TERRIBLE idea. By this time, Djinn had created a scaled topographical map of the area (1” = 6’) immediately surrounding the Whitman property, built up the elevations with Styrofoam and model-train trees. He began to spend his afternoons tacking green plastic army men into various positions on the map, then moving them. When Virgil took the matter to Anne — does he really think we’re going to try something like this? — she did not gainsay the notion. Djinn had been withdrawn in recent weeks, had spent long stretches of time out of the truck. She suspected he was launching another of his meth operations. So long as he pursued this other nefarious plot under her watchful eye, she told Virgil, everyone was better off.

Two weeks before Virgil brought his cash deposit to the Berserkers Local 109, the Engineers proposed the attack to Alice. The meeting was unplanned and hastily arranged: Barney Lopatt called them at 3 a.m. to report that Alice had requested a 7 a.m. arrest. This call came in probably two hours after David Crilly was arrested, and the three Engineers had been up all night on that project, which, among other things, entailed cleaning Jan Larsen’s garbage out of the trunk of Crilly’s Mercury Topaz before police found and impounded it. But they could not miss an opportunity to talk to her. Alice had shut them out completely for three months.

Alice was, of course, close-minded and hostile from the moment of her forced entry into Batchelder’s Banisters: “I’ve got a job. I’m making money, making friends with other people. Why would I want to come back to you?”

“Those other people are dangerous,” Virgil said. “Look what they did at the Lombardi.”

“So now you’re caring about the people at the Lombardi, Virgil?” Alice pointed to the bracelet of burn marks around his left wrist.

Michael had to ask, at this point, “Is that what happened to your hand?”

Alice caught on quick: “Wait. Wait a minute. He can hear?”

Anne: “This is not an orderly conversation, Alice. Let’s just take on one topic at a time.”

“The kid can hear? And you didn’t TELL ME? You let me keep going around thinking I’d MADE HIM DEAF?”

“You haven’t really made yourself available for updates, Alice.”

“So he was faking? All this fucking time?” Alice was out of her chair and moving toward the back door of the truck bay. Djinn rose from his chair to intercept her.

“Alice,” he said. “Stay for just a minute. We have a proposition for you. That’s — um — why we had you brought here. To ask you to consider Michael’s idea.”

Djinn prodded Michael into the limelight, and over Virgil’s protests he described, for the fourth time, the peculiar expertise of the Berserkers Local 109. He went on to discuss logistics: “The Berserkers will arrive in separate cars and park in nearby Haddon Towne. They’ll set off on foot and meet in a copse of trees right here”: and he pointed to a spot on Djinn’s wall map east-southeast of the Walt Whitman complex, in a wedge-shaped snippet of land between the Turnpike and I-295, which run barely 300 yards apart in that neck of the woods. “Under cover of darkness they’ll gear up for the attack. Afterward they’ll rendez-vous back here, ditch weapons and uniforms, put on civvies, and dissolve into the population. But escape routes and cleanup come later. Here’s the plan of attack —”

Djinn moved his plastic soldiers around the map, while Michael talked. Some thirty minutes elapsed, with Alice listening, rapt. When Michael finished, she turned to Anne:

“All these people are going to get hurt? The Attorneys and their guests?”

“That is how it would work.” Virgil groaned, from a distant corner of the room.

“If I get this army, can I give direction and commands to them?”

Anne and Djinn looked at each other. Djinn shrugged, nodded.

“Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.”

“WHAT? Alice, you can’t be serious about this — Anne, you never were serious about this —” The room fell silent. Virgil’s eyes danced from face to face in search of the first, faintest sign of weakness he could work a word’s fingernail under. He had nothing. “Fine,” he sighed, finally. “If it brings her back to us, then we do this.”

And then Alice was gone. Back to the Inner Whitman, but with a phone in her hand, one she now answers when it rings. Anne does not understand Alice’s sudden change of heart. She had left them — forever, had been her promise — citing accidents, claiming her Engineers exploited her for profit and put innocents at risk of bodily harm. Then, weeks later, she shrugs and recommits to T.P. Witch & Co., on the promise that a lot of people would be thwacked unconscious by medieval reenactors with sticks. Something is awry, and so Anne has been calling Alice regularly at the Whitman — at night, when Alice can steal away to talk in secret. She calls to try to get some glimmer of insight into what Alice is thinking. Alice answers her many questions in monotone — they’ve slotted me in as a cigarette girl, they’re fitting me for some sort of black-top boustier, I have an appointment for a bikini wax — talking as though she has other, better friends with which to discuss these matters. When Alice does speak with enthusiasm, it is about this reporter woman, Sarah Ann Rapp. Alice loves to talk about Sarah Ann Rapp, Sarah’s book about the Pikers, Sarah’s observations about the calcification of social structures in modern America.

Anne tries to avoid saying Sarah’s name on these calls, preferring instead “Virgil’s girl on the inside” or “the reporter.” She means to depersonalize Sarah, to emphasize to Alice that Ms. Rapp’s value is in what she does — streaming operations data, building schematics to Virgil from the Inner Whitman — and not who she is. When she ceases to serve her current purposes, Virgil and Alice will have to cut bait. For that matter, Sarah is a journalist who surely understands the respective economies of “friends” and Pulitzer Prizes. It’s only a question of whose betrayal comes first. In the meantime, she does keep the information flowing. She recently forwarded a Power Point file describing the Attorneys’ structure of operations: swipe-ID photos of each employee plotted over captions with names and pertinent information, including her own assessment of their respective importance to the organization. Djinn is at work processing this document into a deck of MOST WANTED cards to mail to the Berserkers.

The hierarchy tree is largely devoid of actual bar-admitted, barking-dog Attorneys. Henry Lugash is one, and the names of several hotshot New York litigators are listed as investors. They don’t visit the site. Virgil’s reporter-girl has placed a question mark over Lugash’s head — she believes he answers to some Higher Power by cell phone. At the bottom of the chart is a diptych of slag handlers Raymond Festo and David Schultz, “the Ray and Schultzie we saw performing at the Dick Stockton.” Anne marks these two down as prime candidates for Berserker bodywork. Not far above them sits a headshot of Alice herself, smiling. Smiling. Hm.

Time marches steadily on toward Club WW’s Opening Night Gala on Thursday, October 28, and Alice slips away one more time — claiming a court date on her earlier assault arrest — to Batchelder’s Banisters to finalize the details. At this meeting Alice asks about Sarah Ann Rapp. Sarah has no idea that the Turnpike Witch is planning an attack on the Club. On that issue everyone was agreed. But then Virgil notes that, as with Alice herself, some manhandling of Sarah will be required, to keep her free from suspicion of involvement:

“At worst the Berserkers break a bone or two. The alternative is that the Attorneys peg her for a spy and really hurt her.”

Alice does not find it so implausible that Sarah might get through the ordeal unscathed. She’s a day-staffer. She probably won’t even leave her office. Alice does not understand why Virgil is so stubborn on this point. At Anne and Djinn’s urging, they move on:

The parties are all agreed that the assault cannot proceed except in total darkness. They discuss using Djinn’s newest EMP device — Version 2.0 — to knock out the power, but they soon reject that idea as too risky. What is required, then, is an advance team to slip in from the backside woods to cut off the feed of power to the Club. Djinn has volunteered to lead this effort, which will also take the temperature of the Attorneys’ defenses along this side of their perimeter. The blue-suited Security will surely focus on the Pikers and other undesirables in the front lot. Djinn and his three Berserkers scouts will approach the Club from behind.

The wheels are in motion: the pantries and wine cellars of Club WW are stocked, the guest list is set, the Berserkers Local 109 are mustered and rallied and awaiting their orders. Reclamation of the Walt Whitman is two days away.

•

October 28: Opening Night. 10 p.m. Lying face-down in the weeds, one hundred meters from Club WW’s rear parking lot, Djinn can feel his cell phone against his thigh. Freezing rain rockets diagonally across his night-vision goggles. The ground is iced over. He’s lost pretty much all sensation from his neck down. But the cell phone in his pocket — he can feel that.

He wonders how that can be. He understands the psychoanalytic angle: the cell phone, and the question it poses to him — whether or not to make The Call — is his chief preoccupation right now. This over pressing matters like how to get his advance troops up to the back door without setting off the multiple motion-sensor lights mounted on the rear of the building. The Call takes priority because the rest of this is gravy. If he calls Henry Lugash and tip him off to the impending Berserker assault, the importance of motion-sensor lights becomes considerably mitigated. Police would arrive and lock down the Club’s perimeter, the Berserkers would call off the assault, and the Club’s kickoff gala would proceed uninterrupted.

He needs to make a decision. He has drawn this battleground, set the terms and stakes of the engagement to his own specifications, moved the armies of Berserkers and Attorneys into opposition just like they were the green plastic figures thumbtacked into his War Room map. But he still has not decided yet who should win the war. The power to dictate an outcome is in his pants pocket, pulsing. He just has to decide whether to make the motherfucking Call.

The cell phone stands for his betrayal of Alice — and of Virgil and Anne and Nino Castiglione and anyone he’s lied or dissembled to since he dreamed up and staged into execution the Attorneys’ counterbid for Turnpike supremacy. Djinn gets all that. He understands, then, how, face down in the mud, he swears he can “feel” the cell phone digging into his leg.

What he doesn’t get is how, with the rest of him numb from the cold, he can really, physically, feel it down there, gouging him, burrowing to nest in his quadriceps. The thought of it sets his stomach churning. He looks at his watch: 10:10 p.m. His four-man team will cut the power by 10:30. So he has twenty minutes to call in the threat to Lugash. They will bum-rush the back door, overwhelm the guard if they have to. But ideally they do it by stealth, sprinting to the back door while the Big Boys circling the building converge around front to address a mass diversion organized by Virgil Ayres. The Attorneys have painted a red line on the parking lot — to mark off the Inner Whitman from the area still designated as commons — and are daring the Pikers to cross it. Virgil will not cross the line himself: the Engineers have scaled back his exposure here, lest some picture of him make its way to the Special Committee and some smart guy draws Bert McCluskey appurtenances over top of it. Virgil is cooling his heels with Anne under cover of Batchelder’s Banisters in a KOA campground in Stroudsberg, PA — outside the jurisdiction. But he has sent orders instructing the Pikers to picket Club WW peaceably until 10:25, when a select rank of Pikers will advance — “Redcoat style,” is the description in his orders — three giants steps over that line. They will pull up just at the edge of the red carpet rolled out hours ago to receive Club WW’s celebrity clientele, most of whom arrived at this costume-optional party hours ago to be photographed in flattering twilight and to beat the early winter storm that came thrashing in around 8:00. The Piker diversion should draw all the guards at least momentarily away from the rear door. Once the coast clears, Djinn’s Berserkers will move on the back door and wind their way to the Club’s circuit-breaker box.

The Club looks good — even from behind. A sturdy structure with an angled façade done in triangular panes of tinted glass. This gigantic fractured picture window juts out twenty feet above the building and can be seen from behind. Ornamental floodlights fire into the sky from either side of the building. Their white beams wave over the sky. The interior of the joint is given over in large part to a gigantic single room, done in three tiers — bar level, lounge level, and dance floor, in order of elevation. This much he knows from CAD renderings: Sarah Ann Rapp’s leaks to Virgil, and updates from Lugash. VIP rooms are set off a corridor at the rear of the room: access to this hallway is governed by honest-to-God tollbooths flanking the entrance. These were bought at government auction; automated tolltaking had made them superfluous. The club’s décor is otherwise understated and tasteful, with the dance floor the only other concession to the Turnpike theme: done in genuine Jersey road asphalt, with sprayed-on laminate. Djnn has seen .jpeg photos, fired off from Lugash to his cell phone for approval.

10:20 p.m. now. He is soaked through to the bone. His three Berserkers are inching on ahead of him in side-winding jungle crawls — vintage ’68 in-the-shit locomotion. Djinn pulls the phone from his pocket and flips it open. 10:22. Djinn reads a text from Lugash: IT’S HOPPING. There is big money in this. Club WW will turn pure profit in six months, and that’s not counting the ecstasy and speed he plans to move in the back rooms. He has crunched the numbers, spun out every scenario — he can’t see how keeping up T.P. Witch & Co., with all its risks and partner shares and moving parts, can match the profitability he projects for Club WW, into which he’s already sunk three hundred thousand dollars of his own money. So why isn’t he dialing the phone?

The cell phone is warm in his right hand. Its working battery worms blood into his fingertips so that he can feel the phone’s heat — cause and effect he understands. He’s still not making The Call. He wants a more rational, self-serving answer as to why than simple loyalty to Alice. It’s 10:28 now. Two minutes’ notice to Lugash isn’t even worthwhile. Some laughable attempt at a bird call grabs his attention. The Berserkers are waiting for him.

Fuck it. He shuts down the phone, chucks it deep into the cattails, wriggles forward in his own laughable imitation of the Berserker Crawl.

•

David Schultz is fed up. He left good summer work at UPS to come to the Turnpike. His buddy Ray Festo, a Rutgers flunk-out — first clue — had been there since March. “Come hang with me,” Ray said. “Bring the Impala. We’ll be telling our grandkids about our stint on the fucking Pike.” Ray was so desperate for Schultzie to bring the car. Second clue. Then there were the money issues. David needs cash, Ray’s driving. They pull up at an off-Pike drive-thru ATM. Ray won’t pull in backward so David can do the transaction himself. “Give me your PIN number and I’ll do it. What — don’t you trust me?”

Third clue.

Schultzie surrenders his card and the four-digit number. Two days later Ray ditches him at the Lombardi and disappears with the car — Schultzie’s cash card in the glove box. He empties Schultzie’s account and dumps it all into roofies. That’s all their gas-and-food money diverted to Ray’s hapless plan to suppress the inhibitions of Piker women. Never mind that they would soon be stranded and starving. Ray was convinced that the girls he wanted, but could never quite get in the bag, would suddenly appear in front of them like locked safes full of sandwiches and sex, and the roofies would spring them open like skeleton keys.

And if you ask Ray, he’ll tell you that this is exactly what happened, albeit in an ironic Monkey’s Paw kind of way. The first woman to show up was the Turnpike Witch, and after Ray dosed her doctor hostage she did, to her credit, fill Schultzie’s tank and spring for provisions at a gas station food mart (though she did not, as Ray keeps telling people, give it up). From there Ray sniffed his way to the Dick Stockton, where he latched on to these porn-star Attorney women. Now, two months later, Schultzie is stuck on the Pike plunging toilets and dumping garbage in a night club. His parents have stopped payment on his fall-term tuition check to UCLA. He has $14 in his pocket, and after today’s twelve-hour shift he’ll have $15. His “employers” deduct from his paycheck the company-store costs of his room and board — amounts he suspects do not comport with market rates for frozen pot pies and a cot.

Of course Ray is still having the time of his life. Has been talking for days about the employee after-party Club WW has planned for tonight. Ray says he’s going to mickey the whole wait staff, grab their titties like handles and dry-hump them for three hours. Never mind the dozens of gigantic brass-knuckled men in blue suits, who are paid to ensure that does not happen. Right now is the closest either of the Impalers will ever be to an orgy, and they’ve been ferreted away to scrub pots in the kitchen, lest their greasy hair and residual acne be factored by Village Voice and Time-Out reviewers into the Club’s overall Beauty Index.

“SCHULTZ! Take this trash out back.” He looks up, prune-fingered, from the dishwasher. Two twelve-foot-long garbage bags appear, wormlike, on the floor in front of him. “SCHULTZ! HOP TO!” The Powers That Be here at the Club know that Ray is a total loss. Give him the trash and he’ll have it all out on the floor, rooting through it to find some cocktail napkin with Paris Hilton’s lip gloss on it, so he can sell it on eBay.

He loops the Glad handles over his wrists and drags the bags — too heavy to carry — to the service entrance at the rear of the building. One of them springs a leak on the way. It leaves a trail of clear liquid he will have to mop up later. The back door is closed and locked. He drops the bags, works the door open. It’s spring-loaded to close, so he has to shift one of the bags between it and the jamb. Schultzie then jumps over the trash bag onto the porch. He tugs gently at this first bag, understanding that if he pulls it free too suddenly, the door will close, and he doesn’t have a rear-door key. The bag is caught on the threshold and will not slide. He pulls at the bag four more times, incrementally harder each time, without success. A fifth pull brings the bag bounding out on the porch. Schultzie slips on the wet porch and falls down.

The door slams closed, with part of the bag snagged on the threshold. The bag tears open and spills garbage all over his jeans. David Schultz is now locked out for the night: his bosses would not take kindly to him appearing round front in soaking wet in his apron, covered in garbage. And even so, it would be a cold day in hell before he presents himself before Elsie Spitzer in this condition. He has never believed in Lady and the Tramp-style romances. If that was how the world worked, Ray Festo wouldn’t be resorting to roofie to get his first kiss.

He tries the door, just for the hell of it. No dice. “Mother fucker,” he says, and then four men jump up out of nowhere and slam him down on the asphalt. One puts his knees on his chest, while another gags him and a third ties his ankles together. They prop Schultzie, bound and gagged, against the foot of the back stoop. He squirms, makes and repeats a noise that would sound like “OH, COME ON!” if he did not have a bandanna stuffed in his mouth.

“Breathe through your nose,” he is told. They pick up what look like imitation swords and battle axes, climb the stoop, pick the lock, and disappear into the building.

Schultzie leans back, looks up at a blank, starless night sky. The wind blows sheets of rain over his chest and legs. A minute or two passes, and the floodlights above him go out.

•`

Alice is in a bathroom stall, pinning her ski mask to her collar, when the lights go out. There are three young actresses sharing a preparation of cocaine in the stall beside her. The darkness takes them by surprise. They flinch, bump into one another in the cramped space, and a mirror falls to the tile and breaks. The three users fumble out of the stall and follow the towel girl out the door. It irks Alice that the Attorneys have installed a towel girl in the Whitman’s WOMEN. The bathroom fixtures were entirely replaced in the Renovations, the old black-and-white tile uprooted and replaced by a new, somehow more hip pattern of black-and-white tile, and the room’s four walls covered in thinning mirrors. The towel girl seems nice enough, but she’s a symptom of a larger problem — one she and twenty-some-odd armed men are going to resolve over the next half hour.

She is wearing a species of her Witchy garb. Jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers, the orange coat and the old ski mask. No pylon today, because it would interfere with the dual chrome-belled desk lamps, with adjustable snaking metal arms, mounted on either shoulder. It is a sturdy rig, these lamps screwed into a set of form-fitting shoulder pads and wired into a battery pack on her hip that powers her megaphone as well. All this to ensure that she is seen and heard over the darkness and ruckus. Feeling around in the pitch black, the Turnpike Witch packs away her cigarette-girl uniform — the ten-pound padded boustier, made of driveway sealer poured over a cast model of her chest, the miniskirt, nylons, and spike heels. She opens the stall door on an empty bathroom.

Five minutes ago Alice went to find Sarah Ann Rapp in the Club offices in the rear of the building. She went to warn her. Sarah was working on her book, sipping coffee in the grey glow of her laptop, thinking. When the door exploded open, she looked up. “What’s up?”

“You need to lock this door. Pull down the shades, shut off your laptop, and keep quiet.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“Nothing now.” Alice looked at her watch. “But very soon.” Sarah looked blankly at her. Alice took charge, slammed Sarah’s laptop closed and drew the blinds herself. She turned flashing eyes on her friend — pinged her, as between networked computers: Hello? The turnaround was slow, and therefore dramatic, but it came. Recognition, in Sarah Ann Rapp’s eyes. You know who I am. <-------> I know who you are. Sarah’s eyes sent more data: How could I not have known? But this changes everything. What now? “Three months ago, Virgil Ayres promised you an interview. Stay inside — do everything I told you — and you’ll have it.” Then she left, picked up her clothes and peripherals at the drop-point, geared up, and took up her post here in WOMEN. She tests her battery, flashes lamp lights on and off. They are aligned to cross beams right on her face. The guests are taking the power outage in good humor. She can hear the laughter that follows jokes that aren’t funny, the flicking of Zippo lighters.

And then a deafening smash of glass — my God, did they shatter that gigantic front window? — signals the arrival of the Berserker Squad. Battle cries follow: banshee-style shrieks. Furniture overturned. Bodies flying. Somebody just smashed the mosaic of stained glass behind the bar. It shares a wall with the bathroom. Amid the louder crushing and bumping she can pick up other nuances: crying, bitching, moaning, the distinct voice of Henry Lugash demanding to know the meaning of this rudely interrupted by a grunt and a thump. A cascade of beeps followed by anguished explanations, as guests call for their drivers on mobile phones.

Without warning, the weight of six people hits the bathroom door. Refugees, with Berserkers giving chase. The door slams her into the wall, pins her there, probably breaks her nose. That’s fine — that’s nice cosmetic damage for Alice to show off later, except that her nose is probably bleeding now, and one of her lamp bulbs is broken. And she’s crushed up against the wall by the pile of bodies on the ground on the far side of the door, trying to crawl inside WOMEN while two assailants bring rattan weapons — in essence, thick sticks — wildly and repeatedly down over them in angry strokes.

With a concerted kick Alice brings the door half-closed on the scrum and runs unseen into a stall to stanch her nosebleed with TP. She has to work the tissue in through an eyehole of her pinned-down balaclava. At some point her nose pokes free of the mask and streams blood down on her clothes. Fine, then, she tells herself. It’ll be sort of a Carrie effect. She yanks the broken lamp off her right shoulder. She bends the snake-arm of the other, working lamp around her neck, draws it up just below her chin, and turns it on. It shines straight up over her bloodied face. She can see herself in the mirrored stall, and she is terrifying.

More hubbub outside. Alice switches off her lamp, alights on the toilet seat and peers over the wall of her stall. Two Berserkers in camo outfits and night goggles are hoisting people out of the refugee pile. Alice is convinced that one of the fallen is Charlie Sheen. There is another familiar face. The guy is sitting up, with his back against the wall. His suit has four buttons and Tinkerbell-wing lapels. She swears she has seen him on television modeling shoes.

“Hey, look at this,” one of the Berserkers says. “Derek Jeter.”

The phone in her pocket rings. Djinn summoning her out of hiding. She switches on her light, kicks the stall door open and storms out of WOMEN, runs flush into the barrel chest of the Berserker who isn’t kicking Derek Jeter in the stomach right now.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks. The Berserkers were not told in advance that the Witch would be here, and this is at least nominally a Halloween ball.

“For you,” the Turnpike Witch says to the skeptic. She hands him the phone. “Really.”

He takes the phone, eyes her suspiciously, flips it open.

Djinn’s voice, tinned in the earpiece: “THIS IS SQUAD LEADER. PASSWORD: LADY OF THE LAKE. THAT’S YOUR BOSS. LET HER THROUGH.”

“Will do.” He hangs up the phone. He is looking her up and down, probably wondering if all that blood is real. “You want an escort out there? Some back-up? Something?”

“I can take care of myself,” Alice says.

“My lady, forgive me,” he says. It has penetrated his thick head that the Turnpike Witch is standing in front of him. “INTO THE FRAY!” He runs off to join the full-on brawl on the Lounge Level between cornered Berserkers and a crowd of ASF thugs: green camo on Brooks Brothers blue. Alice follows him out. Megaphone switched on:

“THE BALLPLAYER’S HAD ENOUGH,” she instructs. “MOVE ON.” The second Berserker steps away from Jeter, bows with a flourish, and skips off around the corner, taking wild hatchet swings at three ASF with his imitation battle axe, leveling them all. The Witch keeps walking. Some bouffant European woman in leather, lame, gold chains and baubles is cowering in a corner. The Witch walks over and biffs her under the chin. The woman snurfles, curses in a thick accent, and is now throwing up; twenty feet away Alice can hear the heaves, jewelry-jangles spelling out distinct subtremors of abdominal spasm. Strangely gratifying.

The Witch turns her lamp on her surroundings. Club WW is well on its way to destroyed. Large chunks of hardwood paneling have been pulled from the walls. The sixty-foot bar has been literally hacked into four pieces. Alice wonders if certain of the Berserkers’ axes are metal and edged for property damage. Furniture is overturned and broken. Stereo equipment heaved off the upper dance floor to splatter on the asphalt below. Kneecapped bouncer-types lie on their backs in agony. The destruction and human suffering is complete enough to evoke Picasso’s Guernica, the Attorneys’ upscale surreality fractured into crude geometric splinters.

The Berserkers are thorough.

At this point there are only two enclaves of fighting: some cleanup work in the three squirreled-away VIP rooms and a full-on battle on the raised dance floor above her. Alice turns her light on this latter setting. The ASF has reconstituted itself at the Lounge Level and flushed the Berserkers upward. The big boys in the blue suits have a threefold advantage of numbers here — thirty on ten — and their enemy cornered. Baseball bats are passed up from the rear to the front rank of ASF. Several of the Attorneys are landing good wood.

Alice thinks it appropriate to bark out an order: “ALL AVAILABLE MEN UPSTAIRS!” A half-dozen Berserkers spill up the stairs from the VIP rooms. They stop and stare at her, and she points to the sound stage.

“TO WAR!” they shout as one, storming the stairs two, three at a time. The sandwiched Attorneys begin to panic: one of them jumps over the railing to the bar level two tiers down. An easy ten-foot drop if your leg doesn’t catch on the railing, as his did. His head hits the arm of a leather chair: this spares him a blackout, so he can fully experience the moment of his arm’s compound fracture. The separated ranks of Berserkers close on one another, forcefully, crushing the big-boned adversaries between them. The cramped quarters favor the brute-force style of the ASF, as the Berserkers have too little swing range for their weapons. Still, the ASF are fighting two fronts. They fall back into an undisciplined phalanx and get the crap kicked out of them.

Down on Bar Level the few guests who can still walk are limping out of the building to applause from the Pikers. It feels as if the Walt Whitman itself is shifting out from under the layered weight of its Renovations. Feeling for the first time the pain of dramatic surgeries — entire extremities amputated, and other, larger wings tacked on over the open wounds — it thrashes wildly on its foundation, desperate to shake off alien appendages and the smothering cosmetic upgrades tacked and plastered over its skin. The Whitman body is purging itself. It is time for the Witch to claim her victory. She moves to the center of the room, confronts a contingent of fifty or more immobile Club guests and employees on the floor in front of her, and takes a bow. What sounds like applause from the balcony is not applause at all, but the winding-out of the battle upstairs. Slaps, cracks, and war cries — but she will treat it as applause.

“THANK YOU. THANK YOU,” Alice turns to her Berserkers to say. “YOU’RE TOO KIND. PLEASE. ENOUGH. IT’S JUST TOO MUCH. THANK YOU. THANK YOU.”

The Berserkers let go of the shirts of held-and-hit opponents, leaving their fate to gravity. Other Berserkers, on their knees pounding ASF adversaries to the point of “UNCLE” or unconsciousness (at which point, by the CPR’s Amended Rule, “UNCLE” is presumed), stand up from what has become, in essence, busy work.

The Witch turns back to face the fallen. “VICTORY IS HAD THIS DAY. THE OCCUPIER ATTORNEYS ARE TROUNCED, AND THE WALT WHITMAN VINDICATED. THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT WITH HONOR,” she says, then trails off, as it occurs to her that a surprise attack on defenseless partygoers, including men on women, is not consistent with generally accepted notions of honor. But whatever. She strides over to the bar. Hiding behind it, in a puddle of what smells like bourbon or urine, is Henry Lugash.

“BARTENDER,” she says through her megaphone, plunking down two dollar bills that will certainly not come close to covering her order, “POUR ME THIRTY GLASSES OF YOUR FINEST. OR WHATEVER YOU’VE GOT,” she says, gesturing with comedic exaggeration at the ruined wine rack behind him. This plays well with the Berserkers descending the steps. “BARTENDER!!” the Witch booms, smashing a wine glass to the ground beside Lugash. “I WANT TO DRINK A TOAST WITH MY BOYS.” Lugash stands, trembling, begins to rummage, finds exactly twenty-two intact and serviceable vessels —most of them shot glasses, sturdier glassware designed to withstand repeated slams to the bartop. The Turnpike Witch sweeps an arm down two of the four dislodged sections of the bar, clears them of wreckage. Lugash takes his cue and lines up the glasses. The Berserkers set themselves in a row.

“Chateau Petrus, ’82,” Lugash says, quite at home in the role of obsequious sommelier.

“NOW POUR,” the Turnpike Witch instructs. Lugash speeds along the bar, dribbling the wine into shot glasses, granting more robust servings to the few holding stemware and pints.

The Turnpike Witch raises her glass. “WE DRINK TO THE ARMY OF THE WITCH,” she says. She knows better than to call the Berserkers Local 109 by name, and they appreciate her discretion. They bring their glasses to their lips, and Alice tears a slit in her mask and takes a deep draught. The Berserkers applaud. “IS EVERYBODY REFRESHED?” she asks.

“YES, MA’AM!” the Berserkers shout in unison.

“OH PLEASE. ‘MA’AM?’ I’M HALF YOUR AGE.” The Berserkers have a laugh at this. The Witch sighs into her megaphone. “COME WITH ME.” She goes around behind the bar and takes hold of Lugash. His legs drop out from under him like a toddler’s. She drags him out through the front door and down the red carpet, to present to the gathered crowd of puking Persons of Note, pristine Pikers, and paparazzi assembled at its end. The photographers are positioned for good, but not great shots: the Pikers are at the front of the crowd. The Berserkers, trailing behind, fan out behind her, off the carpet, to her left and right.

The Witch stops her march five feet from carpet’s end. Flash bulbs pop around her, and Pikers erupt in cheers. Alice Merkel’s left hand is screaming for leave to tear off her ski mask, to show the Pikers the face of a woman they called traitor and whore. But she has an even better idea. She drops Lugash’s arm. He throws his arms around her leg and begs for mercy — almost too good to be true. The crowd in front of her falls silent. “You stupid cunt,” she whispers to him, and she spits. That’s Part One of this night’s gratification accomplished. She raises her megaphone and speaks: “THE CLUB IS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.”

The Pikers renew their cheers, and it seems each handclap pops a camera flash. The Turnpike Witch turns around, faces her battalion of Berserkers. Part Two now: her moment of truth — the reason she agreed to this undertaking in the first place. She leans toward the soldier nearest her, cups a hand over his ear. “Take the crowd,” she whispers.

He turns toward her, confused, with face scrunched up under his mask: “Huh?”

“The Pikers. Take them, too. And don’t forget the photographers, unless you want your picture in the paper. Quickly now — and when you hear sirens, fall back into the weeds.”

The Berserker relays the order first to the man on his left, then to his right. An initial shock ripples down the line on either flank, followed quickly by clarity of purpose, then resolution. Alice Merkel kisses the first Berserker on the cheek. The roar of vindicated Pikers doubles in volume, and with her back to that crowd, Alice gives the go-order.

With weapons atwirl, the Berserkers sprint past the Turnpike Witch toward the crowd. Loud cracks and battle cries tear through the raucous ovation. Cameras, bodies, fall hard to the pavement. Cheers turns to curses in the same breath. Hands brought back to clap come together in anger, as the Pikers try to fend off the surprise assault. The Witch does not turn to watch, but she stands pat for a moment and listens. When she is satisfied that her Berserkers are showing the same zeal and frenzy that won them sovereignty of the Club, she powers down her megaphone and headlamp and walks up the red carpet into the building.

She closes the door behind her and proceeds across the dance floor. As she walks she disengages from the battery pack and lamp clamp, throws the whole mess — bullhorn, too — on the floor. Behind the bar is a full bottle of Sambuca. She takes it into WOMEN with her. She strips down in a hurry, piles her clothes in one of the sinks, douses them in alcohol. She changes back into her work clothes, pulls a Club WW matchbox from her pocket, strikes a match, and burns the evidence. With a wild roundhouse left she punches herself in the nose, turns it on like a faucet: she wants a fair amount of blood on her cigarette-girl civvies. Walks over to a stall next, opens its door, extends one arm between door and frame, slams the door closed repeatedly on her forearm until she’s fairly sure she’s broken a bone.

Now the hard part: knocking herself out. She rams her head five, six times into the restroom’s stainless steel door. Over and again and again, until she falls face down on the pile of wounded. She hears a faint murmur below her as she loses consciousness:

“You can’t do this to me. I’m Macaulay Culkin.”

Chapter 22

2009-12-31T12:46:00.001-05:00

TURNPIKE WITCH PULLS AHEAD IN RAT RACE

By Martha G. Cadwallader, Crimedog.com correspondent

(TRENTON: March 23, 2003) Wow. I mean, totally friggin’ WOW. Coming up on your left, in the passing lane, doing about 120, is New Jersey’s World-Famous Turnpike Witch. Anyone with a clue knows who released three dozen white rats inside the State Trooper Station adjoining the Jersey Turnpike yesterday. Sure — the Keystone Kops in Troop D are saying it was just a prank, it could have been college kids, anybody. But who are they kidding?

CRIMEDOG EXCLUSIVE #1:

Turns out a laboratory supply company filled a purchase order last week for exactly thirty-six ratti norvegici. The buyer? A bigtime pharmaco based in North Jersey. Off went the delivery truck, in the normal course of business. Problem was, somebody had hacked the suppliers’ network and changed the delivery address from the drug company’s lab to a warehouse in Secaucus. When the truck pulled up, three masked agents stun-gunned the driver and made off with the rats. The driver comes to, finds a Ziploc bag in the front seat next to him, filled with cash to pay the purchase order + a 15% tip. The sun visor is pulled down so he can see his face in the mirror: written on his forehead in black marker: DON’T BILL [DRUG COMPANY].

I’d like to party with the “college kids” that can plan and execute an operation like that.

CRIMEDOG EXCLUSIVE #2:

Our Source on the Force tells us detectives found the women’s locker room at the Trooper Station filled with steam on Saturday. Police spent the next four hours scouring the women’s room for evidence — hairs, fingerprints, footprints. They found nothing. The keep-it-quiet theory cops are running with now is that someone broke into the Station and took a shower while the Troopers were out in their squad cars hiding from the rats.

Until I hear otherwise, I’m crediting this latest Turnpike incursion to the Orange Queen, and awarding big points for style. This is a woman who covers her tracks, buys her own rats, and runs naked in the headquarters of law enforcement. Five stars for The Lady — and a bonus Wow!

•

It took the better part of an afternoon for the exterminator to clear the Trooper Station of rats. The Troopers took the Witch’s invasion of their sanctuary very seriously. They called Strad Washington and demanded that they be allowed some gesture of reprisal.

“Against whom?” Washington asked, as if he had any authority over the matter.

“Let us round up all those Pikers. Take them all in and book them,” Verbatim said.

“I don’t think we can do that,” another police officer protested. They had Washington on speakerphone. There were like twelve of them in on this call.

“Who’s talking?” Strad asked.

“Officer Barney Lopatt, sir. We don’t have the legal grounds to make these arrests.”

“Sure we do, Barney,” Verbatim chimed in. “They’re loitering. We could have kicked them all out months ago.”

Strad thought for a second. The surest way to win over the police would be to give them free rein here — and the surest way to lose them would be to deny it. “Go on and do it — but not on the loitering rap. Bring them in for questioning about this rat business, hold them for a while, then let them go. Just to show them we can do it.”

Lopatt’s voice: “Respectfully, Mr. Washington, I don’t think this is sound policy or good PR. It won’t play well with the press, and it presents an opportunity for abuse —”

Strad went out on a limb here: “If I hear any of those Pikers was roughed up — I’m talking hair mussed, collar jerked, anything — I will see to it personally that the offending party is shit-canned.” And while he was making all this up: “I’ll also make sure you’re off our insurance for the lawsuit. This will be a clean sweep. Symbolic. Nothing else. Got it?”

Mutters of agreement.

“Wonderful,” Strad said, and he hung up the phone. He sat for a moment, then buzzed Evelyn, asked her to call down to the State PD, get him a copy of Barney Lopatt’s file.

The next day was a Tuesday. Police came down with decommissioned school buses, hauled off hundreds of Turnpike squatters from the southern Service Areas. 504 was the formal count. The Pikers were held in the buses and admitted, twenty at a time, into Moorestown Station, of all places, to talk briefly with police before they were released without charges. The project came off less like a vulgar display of government power than a field trip — the Witch’s most committed fans given an authorized tour of the site of her latest, most daring exploit to date. Almost all of the captive females asked to use the bathroom while they were there.

When the Witch Hunters caught wind of the police sweep, they got Jock Barberton on the telephone and asked for access to the Pikers. They had spent weeks reviewing video, reading reports, taking photos of porcupine snow sculptures — they thought they had a profile of the Turnpike Witch. Dan Kessel touted a five-question survey that could narrow the field of Piker women down to twelve candidates. Barberton wondered out loud about the Witch Hunters’ working assumptions: was it necessarily the case that the Witch would be out, incognito, in the Service Areas? Kessel swallowed hard and said, “Well, we can’t say for sure. But if she isn’t, we’re stuck going door-to-door in South Jersey.”

Barberton said he would refer the matter to Washington. Jock spent the rest of the morning ducking David Crilly, who for the moment had set aside his bulk road salt ordering — or whatever the hell business he was charged with handling downstairs — in favor of peppering SpeshCom’s offices with phone calls demanding access to the detained Piker women. By this time Jock had completed his fling with his co-worker, Wanda Hilliard. The prospect of sexual intercourse with Wanda had furnished much of the impetus for Crilly’s hiring. It turned out that Wanda was a nice enough girl, but hardly the Jezebel that Jock had imagined. He never even got his hand up her shirt. And they had nothing in common: all she wanted to talk about was Ally McBeal. Now that he was on the far side of Wanda Hilliard, Jock deeply regretted giving the likes of David Crilly a window to muck around in his workday.

Around 1 p.m. the calls from Crilly stopped. Jock went to lunch. When he got back to his desk at 1:30, he had a voice mail.

“Mr. Barberton, this is Eric Angstrom at Moorestown Station on the Turnpike. We just picked up a guy in our parking lot, claims he can identify the Turnpike Witch. He showed us credentials from the Turnpike Authority —”

In the background, David Crilly was screaming: “I CAN SMELL HER. I KNOW WHAT SHE SMELLS LIKE. JUST LET ME INSIDE AND I CAN TELL YOU —”

“We wanted to check with you guys: did you really send this guy down here?”

“I CAN TELL YOU WHO SHE IS.”

Angstrom left a phone number. Barberton did not write it down.

Strad assented to the continued detention of twelve women, to be handpicked by Dan Kessel and the Witch Hunters for more in-depth interviews. Alice Merkel was not one of these twelve, as Barney Lopatt had tipped her off to the sweep. On Detention Day she was shacked up in Pino’s Frozen Specialties, watching a marathon of James Bond movies on DVD.

Fearing that the Pikers might be frightened off the Pike, Alice and the Engineers arranged to have pizzas and cake delivered to each of the Service Areas. The idea was to lure the famished crowds back to their haunts with a feast to celebrate their release: full-size square-cut pies from the Sbarro franchise at the Thomas Edison and Carvel cakes from the Woody. Virgil Ayres chartered a shuttle bus service to get the Pikers back to the Service Areas. The buses stopped a mile’s walk north of Moorestown Station and ran hourly. The released Pikers — otherwise stranded at the police station — found the bus ride back rather convenient. Most all of them went right back to their respective Service Areas, dreaming of big Sicilian sheets that had the words FREE THE TURNPIKE TWELVE written on them in sliced pepperoni.

David Crilly found the entire affair exasperating, and he got hold of Strad Washington’s home number and said as much, into the family answering machine. By this time he was accustomed to speaking in monologue on answer-tapes: “God’s Wounds, Washington! If you’re going to arrest people, arrest them. Don’t take them on a bloody field trip to the police station and then just let them go. You can’t take this investigation twelve women at a time, or the Enemy will walk all over you. Effective government requires grand, sweeping gestures to frighten these people back in line. Otherwise everything slips into CHAOS.”

At the same time David Crilly spoke these words into his phone, committed civil servant Martin Ayres was suffering a second stroke in his New York apartment. He died ten minutes later in the arms of his wife. It is not clear whether Crilly’s tirade against benevolent, incremental governing hit the open air with such poison to Virgil’s father’s deeply-held beliefs that it killed him from fifty miles’ distance. Layout and services were to be held out on the Island. Virgil took a Common Car to the Ayres’ summer home to meet his family. He did the two-hour drive in silence. Virgil’s idea had been to spend the time remembering his father, and yet he got stuck reviewing how he had failed Martin Ayres as a son. He was an outlaw and college dropout, living out of a cargo truck and sleeping with a 33-year-old divorcée.

Extended family fled the house after he arrived. Seemed like they were on the porch waiting for him, so they could leave. Hugs and sobs from his aunts in the driveway. The men were already in pallbearer mode, breezing by him with grim faces, hard handshakes, and ham-handed comments that had somehow, over the generations, become What You Say under these circumstances, notwithstanding their sheer vacuity: A good man, your father — He’s in a better place now, Virgil — He was so proud of you. Virgil wanted to scream.

Virgil made himself a lunch from the cold cut plate and several Tupperwared salads the aunts had prepared. Men get the platitudes, and women get to bustle around in the kitchen. The first words out of his mother’s mouth when they were alone: “He would have liked to see you get your degree.”

“I — I would only be a sophomore, if I’d stayed in school —” Like that made any bit of goddam difference. They held one another and cried together on the couch until well after dark.

Alice wanted to go to the funeral service. She felt very strongly about it, and when Anne and Djinn refused her, she threatened to go in a hired car. Djinn had the argument’s last word: “You can’t go because you’ll have one of your fits and you’ll fuck everything up. Virgil understands that. Why don’t you?”

So she watched the service by remote, on Anne’s laptop computer in the hidden Pino’s truck, via satellite web feed. Djinn shot the proceedings with a digital video camera, from the back of the chapel. He ran a line from the camera into the funeral director’s networked office computer. Access to these facilities, if you could call them that, required some negotiation, but Virgil saw to it that the director was well compensated for the incursion on his office space.

For the occasion Anne had brought Alice a black formal dress from a boutique in downtown Philly. On the morning of the service, Alice shaved her legs and stuffed them, angry and rashing, into nylons. Watching the feed was the next best thing to attending. Djinn panned left to right so that Alice could take in the room, swept the camera’s eye over the backs of heads. A shock of red hair stood out: is that Myrna? Myrna Kovatch is there? Djinn centered on the chapel pulpit when the ceremony began. The feed died in the middle of the 23^rd Psalm. Djinn brought it back up four minutes later. By this time Virgil’s mother was attempting the eulogy.

Djinn brought the grainy shot in close. Gretel Einschluss Ayres had dark hair — dyed black, it look like. She was bone-thin, and her gown, cut without sleeves, did not flatter her. She wore thick glasses and was squinting at her script. Her words were difficult to understand, and Alice wondered if the webcast was dropping certain crucial consonants. At a certain point in the oration, when she began to talk about her husband’s first stroke, she started to stammer. There came a point where she could not continue. She stepped off the podium, and suddenly Virgil was standing there in her stead. This had to have been a planned contingency.

Someone passed Gretel Ayres a hand towel.

Virgil Silvertongue cleared his throat and glibly transitioned into an anecdote on what his father had once had to say about the pigeons in Madison Square Park. Alice had not heard Virgil tell this story before. It had to do with goodness in the world, and it was touching. Virgil seemed to fix his eyes on Djinn’s camera lens. Alice had seen him address large crowds in the Service Areas. His usual practice was to bring his eyes slowly over the crowd, touching upon each audience member for just a moment. Today he was staring straight into the camera.

“A number of you have told me my father has gone to a better place. By definition, wherever he has gone is a ‘better place’ — better than it was before he arrived, and better than the world he left, because he deserves to trade up. And if we are privileged to go to that place, to see him again, you can bet the streets will be clean and the parking meters working —”

Somebody shouted something from the pews. The chapel got to chuckling, and Virgil smiled. “For those of you who didn’t hear,” Virgil said, and Alice wondered if he was repeating this only for her benefit, “my Uncle Frank said that in Heaven there are no parking meters. Fair enough. But I promise you that however perfect a place Heaven is, my father will find a way to improve it. If I’m fortunate enough to follow in Martin Ayres’s footsteps when I die —” He paused. “I — I look forward to seeing what he’s done with place.”

Virgil stepped down from the podium. The rest of the service was not memorable. Djinn gave Alice a close-up of Martin Ayres’s crematory urn. At the close of the ceremony, Virgil and his mother took the ashes to the seashore and scattered them. Only the two of them went to do it. Anne brought Alice back a plate of cookies from the reception at Virgil’s mother’s house. Alice had sent flowers from her personal credit card. The to/from card read:

MY POOR, SWEET VIRGIL, TAKE ALL THE TIME YOU NEED.

— YOUR SUPERVISOR AT PINO’S FROZEN SPECIALTIES.

Around the time Virgil was attempting to explain this note to his extended family, Alice was out traffic-surfing, in the rain, in her black dress. She had substituted the sausage-casing nylons for hardier tights, shed the high-heels for slick-soled curling shoes, and over her ski mask she wore a black veil. The obvious signs of mourning sent the Witch Hunters scurrying to the week’s obituary pages. But a lot of people die in America over the course of seven days.

•

A second sweep of the Service Areas followed on the heels of this last appearance of the Witch. Strad Washington appointed Barney Lopatt to supervise the arrests. He called Barney at home, told him he had a handful a civil rights complaints on his desk from the prior week’s operations. Washington wanted the police to overhaul their approach. Barney asked why they were going through this again. No one had enjoyed last week’s raids. His fellow Troopers had their satisfaction for the incident with the rats, but at the cost of mandatory double-shifts spent guarding the Pikers while they were processed. And the Pikers were annoying as hell, with all their songs and chants and secret handshakes.

“I’ve got an order from the Governor,” Washington said. That chain-of-command explanation would have satisfied Barney, but Washington seemed to want to build trust. “That order authorizes me to requisition the basketball arena up at Montclair State and trick it out with surveillance cameras.” The Witch Hunters wanted all the Pikers assembled in one room, so they could look over potential suspects on closed-circuit monitors from their War Room. They had quietly released the “Turnpike Twelve” the night before, after they confirmed sightings of the Turnpike Witch out traffic-surfing. They were now back to square one.

“Let me be frank with you, Barney. My job isn’t so much to crack heads and catch this Witch, so much as it is to keep a lot of people with conflicting interests happy.” Washington paused for a long moment. “And I need someone down on the ground I can rely on to help me. I need someone smart and savvy on the Turnpike, someone who has authority and can command the respect of the people there, whether it’s the shop owners, these Pikers, or his fellow policemen. Barney, do you get me?”

“I got you, sir.”

“Call me Strad, Barney. The Witch Hunters call me ‘sir.’ But you’re older than me, and God knows you’ve seen shit on the force that I couldn’t dream up on acid.”

He’s really working at this, Barney thought. And he’s good at it. “Strad it is, then.”

“Wonderful. Let’s keep in regular contact — at least three times a week. One more thing, before I let you go.” Another pregnant pause. “Barney, if there is anyone in those Service Areas you don’t want to see picked up tomorrow, you get in touch with him, or her, and make sure he, or she, gets clear before your Troopers move in on the place. Do you get me?”

Wow. “Yes, sir.” Barney reverted to formality here, because at this point in the conversation, he was in complete awe of Stradivarius Washington.

“Wonderful,” the Chairman of the Special Committee said, and he hung up the phone.

•

The summer months brought a shitstorm on the Turnpike, starting on Memorial Day weekend, when a crowd of gangsta types took over the Vince Lombardi. They just sprouted up there like mushrooms. Cars hopped up on hydraulics in the Lombardi front lot, booming their bass, and all these tough guys leaning on the hoods, with Glocks tucked in waistbands.

The Lombardi was the northernmost and closest of the rest-stops to New York. These kids were probably from Brooklyn and the Bronx. This was their idea of a holiday in the country — the same asphalt here, but room for everyone to park, and fast food close at hand. There were four or more rival groups co-occupying the parking lot, casting suspicious looks at each other, subdividing the Service Area, bargaining quietly — with guns bursting out of their shorts — for turf. Anxious store and restaurant owners had Barney Lopatt up at the Lombardi three times in the first week, clearing the lot. Kids came right back the minute he left.

The bangers displaced at least forty Lombardi regulars — latecoming Pikers flushed this far north because of fire codes and Percentage-of-Capacity Agreements Virgil Ayres had struck with the Service Area businesses. These folks naturally turned back south when the gangs arrived, tried to sad-face their way into the other rest stops. The refugees told exaggerated stories of bandits taking over the Lombardi, and this loose talk gave rise to rumblings among the Pikers about arming against barbarian invaders from the North. All of this unrest Virgil Ayres could have settled with soothing words and negotiated promises. But Virgil was off the reservation, and not returning Barney’s calls.

June came and went with increasing tension. A full-on brawl broke out in the Lombardi MEN’s room — fists only, by some gentleman’s agreement, but paramedics had to cart off three of the bangers after they shattered a mirror and rolled around in the broken glass. The Service Area was operating on a skeleton crew: the restaurant employees stopped coming to work after the fight. There were reports that gangstas were openly masturbating in the parking lot and chasing unaccompanied women out of the building to their cars. Sunoco attendants told Fox 4 News they would be carrying handguns during their shifts at the Lombardi. One hundred armed thugs throwing their weight around in a Service Area. The situation had Waco written all over it, and accordingly, once-bitten feds were leaving the matter to the state to fuck up.

By this time Strad Washington had Barney’s mobile on his speed-dial. The two of them talked every day about the situation upstate. The obvious solution was to send in a Riot Squad to take back the Lombardi — even Barney was resigned to this outcome — but the SpeshCom Chair would not hear of it, and he had the Governor on board. “Gang-on-cop warfare sends a message that the government is not in control of the situation,” he said.

And we’re not in control of the situation, Lopatt answered, but not out loud. We’ve conceded public space to criminals. It had been a month now, and Washington’s own people were starting to question his leadership. On July 3 an outburst from a Turnpike Authority employee, David Crilly, cracked the Special Committee’s façade of composure. It went down extemporaneously, in front of three network news cameras, after Washington stopped on the way to his car to take questions from the Turnpike Beat:

“Can you update us on conditions at the Vince Lombardi?”

“We’re keeping a close eye on the situation,” Washington answered. “We’ll act when we think it’s appropriate.”

And from behind him Crilly, unable to contain himself, started shouting. “IT WOULD BE BLOODY WELL APPROPRIATE TO DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW!”

Strad turned around, identified the heckler, and motioned to him to join the group. With Crilly beside him, Washington turned back to the reporters. In a precisely calibrated tone of voice — an admixture of contempt and strained tolerance, with just a dash of Master of Ceremonies — “I introduce the Committee’s resident Devil’s advocate, David Crilly.”

“WE NEED TO UNLEASH THE POWER OF THE SOVEREIGN STATE TO ERADICATE THE ENTIRE PIKER POPULATION.”

“Shock and awe, then?” Washington asked. He was envisioning a sort of Socratic dialogue here, wherein he could, with deft and pointed questions to David Crilly, demonstrate the logic and sound policy of not blowing the Vince Lombardi to smithereens.

“Is anyone SURPRISED that the Turnpike has lapsed into ANARCHY? First this — this WITCH appears, disrupting traffic, going on about her UNMENTIONABLE BODY PARTS. Then the deviants come to CELEBRATE her behavior. Not GOING ANYWHERE on the Turnpike, this Piker scum, but LOITERING in the Service Areas. YOU HAD TO KNOW THIS WAS COMING. The signs were always there. A concentration of miscreants, disregarding the social order. OF COURSE THERE WERE GOING TO BE SEXUAL ASSAULTS.”

“Do you think it’s fair to lump all the Pikers together with the Lombardi gangs?”

“Would any of them be here — would we be talking about any of them — if it were not for that WHORE, that FILTHY MONEY-GRUBBING SLUT, the Turnpike Witch?”

“While you folks have the cameras rolling,” Stradivarius Washington said, through clenched teeth, “I will take this moment to announce that notwithstanding his considerable charisma, Mr. Crilly is at this moment relieved of his duties at the Turnpike Authority.”

“YOU CAN’T DO THAT,” Crilly snapped back. “YOU’RE NOT MY BOSS.”

“Resist if you will, Mr. Crilly, but I have some clout in this building, and in the State House, too. We work for the State of New Jersey. The state seal is stenciled on our stationery, and carried in our spoken word. We don’t go around calling people whores and sluts.”

Crilly opened his mouth as if to scream, then composed himsel. “You’re a coward, Washington. You strut around these offices in the trappings of your exalted position. You laugh and joke and spout platitudes to the masses through these —” he gestured at the reporters — “instruments of yours. But one day you’ll get your come-uppance. See if I’m not the man who gives it to you.” And Crilly stalked off, leaving the Chairman’s head hovering over a bouquet of microphones poised to receive his response.

“Well,” Washington said. “That’s all for me today. Gotta get home to the wife.”

As he turned to walk away, Joe Wiggins’s voice rang out behind him over all the others: “MR. WASHINGTON! WILL YOU BE ADDING A SECURITY DETAIL TO YOUR STAFF IN LIGHT OF MR. CRILLY’S THREAT AGAINST YOU JUST NOW?”

Washington turned around. “Joe — if that Cheeto couldn’t kill me, do I really need to worry about David Crilly?”

That entire sequence ran unedited on the 11:00 news and dominated the papers over the next two days, consigning to back pages the Witch’s surprise July Fourth fireworks display over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which she herself introduced in Uncle Sam costume, with top hat and beard stapled to her ski mask. In the weeks that followed, it became standard practice for the media to run point-counterpoint with Strad Washington and “former civil-servant and anti-Witch activist David Crilly.” If Washington gave a press statement, the reporters dialed up Crilly for a response quote. When Crilly staged a man-and-megaphone protest on the sidewalk outside Washington’s building, the news crews gave equal time to Strad.

By all accounts Washington, with his measured tone and reasonable rhetoric, was losing the debate. 30% of respondents to a mid-July Gallup poll approved Washington’s performance as Chairman of the Special Committee. An abysmal 9% supported his handling of the crisis at the Vince Lombardi, and 77% of those polled agreed with David Crilly that the Witch was in some attenuated way responsible for the upsurge in criminal gang activity at Turnpike Service Areas. The 4 a.m. stabbing of a female vacationer at the Walt Whitman, of all places, did not help matters. None of the acknowledged Pikers at the Whitman were implicated in the incident. The prime suspect was in fact the woman’s husband — but Crilly jumped all over it:

“This government tells us that they have the danger contained at the Vince Lombardi. But they’re LYING. Defenseless women are being stabbed at the Walt Whitman Service Area, in the heart of the Turnpike Witch’s territory. If Strad Washington wants to sit idly by while these terrorists take aim at our way of life, then it will be up to US to protect ourselves.”

As the situation deteriorated, as fights — call them brawls now — continued to break out at the Lombardi, and as truckers adopted David Crilly’s worldview and started to throw elbows at Pikers in front of fast-food counters Downstate, Barney began to romanticize Virgil Ayres. He remembered Virgil Silvertongue as a man with a gift for smoothing things over. He left message after desperate message on Virgil’s mobile phone, which he never returned. Indeed, after a while he didn’t even get Virgil’s recorded greeting — just the Verizon robot-woman, interceding to inform him in that brusque manner of hers: “This mailbox is full.”

Virgil got back to Barney a week later, with a return message. “Barney, it’s Virgil. I’m off-Pike right now due to family matters. Can’t say for sure when I’ll be back. Sorry.”

Barney called Strad Washington: “I got a message from the Piker representative, Virgil Ayres. He won’t be helping us.”

“Wonderful,” Strad grunted. “Come to my office, Barney, and we’ll talk next steps.”

Barney was off his shift, so he felt free to kill the cop colloquy on his way over, in favor of the FM band. Some brave investigative reporter from National Public Radio had been embedded with Crips or Bloods at the Vince Lombardi. They were playing back recorded interview segments: some gang rep saying all the right things. We got the same right to be here as the Pikers down the road. What makes them OK with the cops and not us? They say they’re here to see the Turnpike Witch? Ah-ight: we’re here for the Witch, too.

•

They met up north, around mile marker 85. The rendez-vous was made to look like a pickup. Alice pulled a Common Car from the Fenwick, took it northbound. She was to sail by Barney’s squad car around 3 a.m. at 85 mph. He’d pull her over; they would talk through the car window. If they needed more time, he would ask her out of the car for a drunk walk.

It all went swimmingly in the execution. The craft and deception of it overcame Alice as she powered down her window to address the State Trooper. She started to giggle.

“Have you been drinking, Miss?” Officer Lopatt asked her, leaning into the window.

“Whatcha gonna do about it?” Alice challenged back, green eyes twinkling.

“License and registration, please.”

Alice handed him her driver’s license, pantomimed a nervous search of the glove box.

“Where’s Virgil?” Barney asked.

“He’s on bereavement leave.”

“Bereavement leave? What, you guys have a benefits plan?”

“His father died, Barney.” Alice unbuckled her belt and felt around under the seats for the “lost” registration. “Jesus, could you be a little more sensitive?”

“It’s just that things are getting out of control at the Lombardi. I’m holding it together up here with masking tape and prayers.”

“So sweep the place. You’re happy enough busting the rest of us every other week.”

“You all come peacefully, and you’re not armed to the teeth. We’re concerned we’ll have a full-blown siege on our hands if we move on the place.”

“So what do you want us to do?” Alice asked, lifting her head to look Barney in the eye.

“I want everybody at the other Service Areas to chill out. I don’t want residents kicking around refugees from the Lombardi. I don’t want to see anybody carrying a pistol or a knife, and I don’t want reason to believe anyone’s concealing them, either. We need to focus on securing the Lombardi, and you need to differentiate yourselves from these gangsters.”

Alice snapped the glove box closed. “You’re worried about that Crilly character?”

“None of this would be happening if it weren’t for the Turnpike Witch. All he has to do is keep hammering away at that message, and people will start to believe it. The Witch is lovable, but still a criminal. Once public opinion swings against her, she’s done.”

“Barney, I don’t see what you want us to do here.”

“There’s a certain person you and I know. She has a bit of influence around here. More than Strad Washington or David Crilly, more than Virgil Ayres, and certainly more than I have. It could help if that person gave a strong position statement about the Vince Lombardi.”

Alice thought for a second. “And the police aren’t going to move on the Lombardi?”

“We have no desire to do it. And you don’t want us to have to do it.”

Alice took ten seconds this time. She had a very strong notion that someone was playing her. And she didn’t think it was Barney Lopatt. “Who put you up to this? Was it Washington? He knows you have back channels to the Turnpike Witch?”

Barney stiffened. “Ma’am,” he said, “are you having any luck finding that registration?”

“What does Washington know, Barney? Does he know who —”

Barney reached in through the window and landed his hand on Alice’s shoulder. He whispered: “Washington doesn’t know anything you would not want him to know.”

Alice took a deep breath and exhaled. She opened the glove box a second time, pulled out a copy of the Common Car’s registration. She folded the pink sheet of paper in half and handed it to Barney along with her license.

“Think about what I said while I pretend to call in your registration.”

Barney Lopatt went back to the squad car.

Alice thought about it for something like twenty seconds. It’s not my goddam problem, she decided. She put the car into drive and took off, leaving Barney’s flashing blue lights back behind her. Strad Washington can do his own job.

Chapter 21

2009-12-17T07:14:00.000-05:00

September 23, 2004.

Jan Larsen has spent eleven days in the trunk of a stranger’s car. He is running out of groceries and has filled all his empty containers with shit and piss. His phone battery is almost dead, there is some wicked Indian summer going on outside, causing the trunk temperature to rise to something like 95 degrees, and a strange mold that smells tantalizingly like Emmenthaler Swiss is growing in his underarms. He figures he can take at most ten more days of this.

He has deviated from the plan that Anne Saint James had drawn up. Jan’s initial instructions — left in the customary newspaper box at the Denny’s on Route 18 — had been to rent a car, drive to a specific address in Lawrenceville, and surveil the single white male who lived there. Anne fronted him $5000 for the first four weeks of this undertaking, which would continue indefinitely. More money would be left to Jan as necessary in the newspaper box, so long as his requirements did not exceed a per diem rate of $200 in expenses. Jan phoned in his assent to these terms, rented a no-frills subcompact at the Newark Airport, refused insurance, then promptly turned left out of the lot into one-way traffic. Avis billed him 4800 bucks for the totaled car.

At this point Jan gathered that some revision of Anne’s plan was required. He couldn’t go back to her for more money for another car. He would have to find another way to do the work she required, with just $200 left to get him through at least three weeks. She had trusted him to get this job done. He doesn’t know her, has never seen her, but she pulled him out unconscious of a cheesy grease pit two years ago and saved his life. He couldn’t fail her now, and going over budget would be failure. So he hitched a ride to a shopping center, spent the rest of his money on bottled water, beef jerky, Ziploc bags, vitamin supplements, a flashlight, toilet paper, and a lat/long GPS device. The $25 he had left went to T-Dog, his friend from the Vince Lombardi, who came with him to jimmy the trunk open and close him in. Whatever Anne and Virgil Ayres think of the Lombardi folk, they can be indispensable at times. Filling the trunk’s keyhole with epoxy, for example, was a master stroke. More than once Jan’s Surveilee — whoever he is — has gone round back to put something in the trunk, only to find it stuck closed. He then walks away muttering about teenage pranks.

Whenever Surveillee starts the car, Jan switches on the GPS and at ten-minute intervals he types the current latitude and longitude reading into his cell phone and texts them to Anne Saint James. Jan’s first time sending messages of this type elicited a return message of HUH??? from Anne. He had credited her with a bit more acuity than this. GPS COORDS, he typed, as a preamble to his next wave of readings. AM IN TRUNK.

WHAT!!!??? was Anne’s reply to that.

TALK LATER, Jan wrote back. He continued to send his readings until the car returned to its starting-point coordinates. The car door opened and closed; he heard footsteps tail away from the car. Anne had done her homework in the meantime: she had gathered from the last coordinate set that Surveillee had returned home, and she felt emboldened to call Jan after a short grace period, when she was satisfied Surveillee was no longer in the car.

“JAN. What are you DOING?” she shouted at him.

He explained.

“JAN. You could have come back for MORE MONEY. This is crazy. They make GPS devices that send out tracking signals by themselves. We’re coming to get you. Sit tight. I’m sending somebody.”

In the time since, someone has approached the rear of the car and fiddled with the trunk lock several times. On each occasion the would-be rescuer, distinguishable from the routine Jersey car thief by (1) his attention to the trunk of the car, (2) his whispered words of assurance to Jan, and (3) his utter lack of competence, is put to flight by the sounding of the car alarm, and Surveillee comes out muttering to bleep-blip it quiet. The agent Anne has assigned to Jan’s rescue effort — probably Virgil Ayres, whom Jan last saw wearing a toupee and padded pants — is not, by any measure, a hired professional. T-Dog had managed to pop the trunk, load Jan and his groceries inside, then close and seal it without setting off this same alarm.

Anyone else with Jan’s amount of down time might have wondered by now what Anne does with the coordinates he continues to send her, who Surveillee is, and what his significance is to Anne. But Jan utterly lacks this curiosity. Sometimes the Surveillee puts on music in the car, some Hildegard von Bingen recording he’s got in his tape deck. Jan knows Hildegard von Bingen: he spent time in a monastery at one point, after other therapies had failed him. The monks used to perform this music live in the chapel; Surveillee whistles along as if familiar with it. Now and again he tries to picture a man who would listen to Hildegard von Bingen while he drives around town, but this marks the limit of his personal interest in Surveillee.

The music rings in Jan’s ears between drives and provides an appropriate soundtrack to this monastic life, in which he only sleeps, eats, shits in the baggies, drinks, pisses in his water bottles, sends texts to Anne, and tries not to register his growing discomfort: his body odor, the heat, the bedsores, the kinks in his back. The charley horses come and go. You learn to deal with them.

Right now it’s 2 a.m. Surveillee has just opened the car door and seated himself. Door slam, turn of key, ignition, car in reverse and turning — backing out of the driveway. Jan waits ten minutes, takes a GPS reading, and conveys coordinates to Anne. He waits ten more, sends off another reading not substantially removed, for the ten minutes of driving, from the first. Surveillee is making a lot of twists and turns. Jan texts off six more readings before Surveillee stops the car, pulls keys from the ignition, and gets out. The back door opens, and there follows some fumbling and thunking around in the car’s back seat. Jan doesn’t dare move. Surveillee’s ears are a single far-from-soundproof panel away. The fumbling and thunking is muted in its own right: Surveillee seems to have his own need for stealth, as he roots around in the back seat for whatever he is after. In fact, this may be why he is taking so long.

From nowhere, and without warning, Jan’s mobile phone BEEPs in his hand. Jan’s hair stands on end: he thought he had brought this phone to silence. He had disabled the ringer, muted the dial beeps. So what the hell just happened? Jan slowly lifts the phone over his head so he can review the display. LOW BATTERY. The rustling in the back seat has stopped dead. Surveillee has not moved a muscle since that BEEP. Jan considers powering down the phone. That will stop the beeping, but the power-burn of turning it off and on again will probably kill off the battery completely. Meaning Anne will have been given her last set of coordinates, and Jan will have lost contact completely with the world outside this trunk.

BEEP.

He leaves the phone on, tries to muffle its outside speaker in his palm. It might have one call left in it, if he does not turn it off. Jan waits through three more cycles of BEEP, and for reasons known only to him, Surveillee lets down his pricked antennae and resumes his rummaging in his back seat. He gets hold of an object with a lot of moving parts that bang together, clanking and jangling. The car sinks on its suspension as Surveillee sits down in the back seat. Jan thinks he hears Surveillee kicking his shoes off onto the pavement. Two shoomfs hint that he is pulling on boots, and the tiny clinks that follow suggest the manipulation of clasps or buckles. Ten seconds more of jangle and clank follow, and the car’s back door closes. When he is convinced Surveillee is far enough away from the car, he looks down at his phone.

Its display has gone dark and blank. Dead in his hand.

Right now, for the first time in eleven days, Jan feels the narrow confines of the trunk beginning to fold in on him. His imagination starts suddenly to run wild. He squeezes his eyes closed and tries to calm himself. Don’t panic, is the pointless instruction he gives himself, about as meaningful or effectual as Don’t lock yourself in a stranger’s car trunk to die might have been, coming from his mother after his high school graduation. Jan panics.

The piss-bottles and shit-baggies at his feet are now multiplying around him — first mitotically, yellow bottles and bags of mush budding out duplicates of themselves, then meiotically, as bag and bottle find and fertilize one another, generating monstrous offspring containers loaded with orange reeking paste. In a matter of minutes, Jan will be quietly smothered in his own grandwaste. Not even Surveillee can get him out, without a crowbar. Due to his own appalling lack of foresight, Jan is going to die here over a drained phone battery. He could have bought himself a spare. But he mis-budgeted, and so he has probably thirty more days’ worth of beef jerky in the bag next to him, a full can of vitamins he keeps forgetting to take, and all these Ziploc bags, when he could have swiped a roll of produce bags and twist-ties from the grocery store for free.

Jan’s legs begin to tremble, then they kick, sending bottles of urine exploding into the corners of the trunk, smearing his bagged fecal matter into the floor. The GPS device gets caught under foot and shatters, and as his arms get in on the action, Jan’s wristwatch suffers a cruel blow as well. Pummeled into the trunk lid, the watch’s crystal breaks loose, and the hands underneath bend and break off. Jan and his supporting devices simultaneously lose their abilities to register time and place, leaving his body to thrash around in the pitch-black confines of a carpeted metal box parked in the middle of nowhere, for eternity. Lost, desperate, making himself bloody. Howling. Suffocating. Failing Anne Saint James.

After maybe an hour, maybe a week of screaming, choking, and dying, there is an explosion. A small explosion — and the trunk lid pops up. Jan smells burning sulfur. A cold light floods down on him, and a swarthy face, leering and mean, leans in through wisps of smoke. It is the face of the Devil. With crossed eyebrows.

“With M-80s, it’s just like real estate,” the Devil says. “Location, location, location.”

Jan has died and gone to Hell. And the Devil himself, perhaps lured away from more important appointments with world leaders by the smell emanating from the trunk of this car, has cleared his calendar to greet him personally. Jan gags and spits, curls up in the fetal position.

Another figure steps into the light, pushes the Devil aside. “Damn it, Djinn, you could have blown the gas tank with those.” Jan rolls over, cracks apart the fingers of hands over his face. A woman, backlit. An angel. Light explodes off her body, crackling.

“Jan. Jan, it’s Anne.”

From the margins, the Devil again: “There was never any danger of the tank going up.”

“Go back to Batchelder’s and get the fucking first aid kit, will you?” Anne Saint James instructs. She spits into a Kleenex and goes to work wiping Jan’s bloodied nose. “Jan you did it!” she whispers, excitedly. “We nailed him. You were PERFECT, and we NAILED him.”

Jan smiles, closes his eyes and abandons consciousness with an angel’s imprint burned into his mind’s eye. It’s like his retinas are dusted with snow and Anne herself has flopped down on her back and swept out the shape with her arms and legs. He still has not seen her face.

•

David Crilly is in jail. Some kind of holding cell. Half the Lombardi Piker population is here with him — the result of some parking-lot gang rumble that carried over into the bullpen here, after thoughtless officers cut zip-cuffs off the combatants and sent them to the same cell to resume hostilities. It took some guard intervention, but the fisticuffs were quelled, the limbs untangled, and the parties (“Dawgs” and “Lions,” Crilly has gathered) sorted into different cells. An uneasy janitor has since come by with broom and mop to clear the floor of blood and teeth. The Lombardi Boys still in his cell are spent of energy. None of them has recognized him yet. It’s Crilly’s scraggly beard, forlorn appearance, and the Lombardi’s signature disengagement from pan-Piker affairs that keep the half-dozen Dawgs still conscious from identifying him as The Man, and therefore a suitable object of a renewed, rechanneled assault and battery.

David Crilly is sharing overnight lodgings with North Jersey’s animal peasantry because, two hours ago, police caught him in a room at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital up in Morris Plains, standing darkly over the bed of one of the Special Committee’s green-eyed female detainees, holding a noose in his left hand. On the way out the door, knifing through a clot of yawning SpeshCom Beat reporters, the snarky lieutenant — not High Road Lopatt, but the other one — said, “Get a good look, Crilly. You may be living here in a couple days.” The reporters asked no questions. Only a wave of raised eyebrows, keeping pace alongside him as he ran the gauntlet of journalists, registered his passage.

There are men in the world who have a knack for explaining. They actively seek to put themselves in the worst imaginable predicaments, the most compromising positions, so that they may rise to the occasion and against all odds, excuse their conduct. The phenomenon is a by-product of capitalism, and on the strength of their singular ability to excuse themselves, in America these men become Presidents and Cabinet members and CEOs. And yet even to this class of men, the situation in which police found David Crilly tonight would have been a poser. But Crilly belongs to a different class, from a bygone feudal era: the born Lords, who have no reason to justify their actions to anybody. A Lord entirely lacks the part of the brain that asks, What will you say if you’re caught (1) alone, (2) in a dark room, (3) with a young woman, (4), (5), (6) not your wife or daughter or lover, (7) wholly uninvited, (8), (9) wearing a chain-mail vest and buckskin chaps, (10), (11) swinging a noose in your hand and claptrapping about your imminent vengeance?

As a Lord, then, it never occurred to David Crilly, while he plotted and planned this act of Inquisition and Justice, to try to prefab an explanation to recite in the event he was caught. But he did understand that this modern world was not quite so hospitable to the whim of Lords as twelfth-century Europe — so while it was an indignity that he should be judged by the rabble, it was reasonable to expect it. The pragmatist in him therefore set out six weeks in advance to cover his tracks, so he would not have to explain himself. And he had been careful.

For starters, he had waited. A long painful stretch of time had to pass after his suspension from the Committee, before the public could forget David Crilly and the scandal with Bert McCluskey. But in time the crowd of reporters outside his house peeled away in search of some other personality to confront and destroy. His name lapsed from the papers. A crick settled into the public neck and it turned its eye elsewhere — in this instance, to some scratch-golfer bond salesman in California who had doinked his Laker Girl wife with a two-iron. Crilly was history. Investigation suspended, no indictment handed down for the disappearance of Bert McCluskey — Crilly suspected that the Beat had confirmed what he knew, that there was no Bert McCluskey, but rather than publish that fact and eat their crow of unwarranted outrage, they just let the story drop.

While he bided his time, Crilly made a great show of indulging in all those classic behaviors that, by suburbia’s standards, describe a broken man. He allowed his lawn to overgrow. He didn’t retrieve his mail. He left his television on at all hours, and any observer in the street would see him asleep on the sofa in front of it, bathed in blue light. That sleeping figure was in fact a crash-test dummy —bought years ago along with a hanging frame to furnish a target for broadsword exercises with his wooden practice blade. Filled out around its waist with strips of bubble wrap and wrapped in blankets, the dummy was the spitting image of a middle-aged bachelor gone to seed, liquored up and laid out for the night.

He allowed his hygiene to lapse. He grew out a beard — a scraggly growth, tangled and uneven, a repository for bits of food that had eluded his mouth — and he grew out his fingernails. And while he occupied himself with these gestures of grotesque self-presentation, Crilly continued to wait. And he would wait and wait and wait, as long as he could stand it, until he was convinced that the public’s interest was so well clear of his neighborhood that he could make a run at Greystone Hospital. Crilly was certain that she, the Witch, lingered among the green-eyed detainees at Greystone — perhaps in restraints, perhaps in a locked ward, but in any event unable to get free to do her whorish dances on the Turnpike. The stakes were high. He had to get in undetected, find where these women were lodged, and interrogate each and every one until he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he had The One.

While he bided his time, Crilly devised interview protocols in his mind, drafted schemes of cross examination, drew up and baited elaborate verbal traps that would ensnare the Witch in her web of lies. This was just a way for him to while away the meantime, as Crilly was sure he would know the Witch the instant he entered her room. He would need no proof other than the smell of her, and what he felt in his bones — the same grip that took over his body when he first looked into her animal green eyes. Their lives were linked. They were marked for one another. Each bore a mark that could not be seen or described or even registered, except in the way the other’s body tingled or recoiled when in the presence of it.

Modernity has written asterisks into the historical record beside the convictions of Witches — the accusers lacked hard evidence; they cultivated a hysteria. What Modernity does not understand (in addition to the prerogatives of Lords) is that the ordinary rules of proof do not apply when the suspect is a Witch. You don’t need evidence. You just know her. Crilly continued to wait. Summer lapsed into fall, bringing a reasonable, credible end to the story of David Crilly/Lord Rottingham: man retreats into his house, lets himself go, becomes the object of teenage pranks. The end was cliché, and a cliché is a threat to nobody; it’s just the Crazy Old Man down the street whose driveway receives unwanted manure deliveries dialed in to the local home and garden store by high-fiving eleventh-grade boys.

By early October the neighborhood kids had indeed set their sights on him. It started with the Krazy-Glue in his trunk lock. Not one he was familiar with, but he had to tip his hat to the perpetrators. Neither the dealership mechanics nor the kickback body shop specialist they recommended had any expertise at fixing this, and Crilly’s lack of trunk access became an ongoing nuisance. He noticed a drag on the car’s mileage — and slower pickup — shortly thereafter. The pranksters were shrewder than first appeared: they had ballasted his trunk before gluing it shut. Now and again a wicked smell wafted up from the rear of the car. They had eschewed sandbags in favor of something that would decompose. Did he have a trunk full of ground beef? Probably not: the smell was noisome, but not unbearable.

The bit with his trunk was only the kickoff, if the regularity with which Crilly’s car alarm went off at night was any indication. Playing to his role, Crilly would leap out of bed each time, draw his broadsword, throw open his front door shouting Have at you, foul imps! and other such nonsense as tires squealed and the perps jetted off to safety. Dogs would bark, one or more porch lights would flick on and off before neighbors rubbed their eyes and ho-hummed away the incident. Just Old Man Crilly again. The focus on Crilly’s car was interesting, given the array of targets in his house and its curtilage. There were garden gnomes to steal; the untended, unharvested tomato plants were heavy with rotting, explode-on-impact fruit perfect for discoloring his white aluminum siding. But these obvious alternatives went unexplored in favor of arcane tampering with his car, some result of which Crilly anticipated every time he started it. He expected chocolate milk in the wiper fluid, piss in the gas tank, something.

When his car alarm went off yesterday, Crilly made his obligatory pantless crazy-man run out the front door. But this time, nobody’s porch light had come on. Nobody had bothered to investigate. This was the final test. He smiled: he was free, now, to make his move.

Crilly went to his bedroom armoir. He unlocked it, flung open its double doors, revealing a stone head, a buffed-to-faceless garden-store bust of Caesar. On that head, an orange balaclava — a replica bearing the Turnpike Witch’s unauthenticated autograph, bought from the Unofficial Website last year. A $3 mask marked up nineteen times over on the strength of a signature by black Sharpie any warehouse worker could have made. On top of everything else, she was a rip-off artist. The rope tied around the Witch’s stone-hewn neck was genuine. Crilly could vouch for that, because he had taken it off the neck of the Turnpike Witch twenty-eight months ago, on the night she pretended to hang herself. For an absentminded moment he fingered it, then he folded his right hand into a fist and thrust it through the loop of the hangman’s noose. A yank of his left hand pulled it taut around his forearm, ensnaring hairs in the weave of the rope, searing the skin as it jerked down his arm toward his wrist.

Two hours later he had everything prepared, and an hour after that he had three security guards and a nurse down and drooling in Greystone Hospital Reception. Chloroformed. To this point it had all gone without a hitch. No one had tailed him. He had kept one eye trained on the rear-view the entire way up. He had run a few circles and double-backs just to cover up. He had the car ditched off in the sticks three or four miles away, on Mountain Road. From there he had walked. Rottingham stealth: hooded leather overcoat sashed tight over his chain mail vest to suppress the jingling as he walked. No one had seen him or registered his passage into town, to Central Avenue, to the front doors of the hospital.

And after breaching the fortifications, disabling the overnight guard, on he went into the castle to find his several damsels-in-distress and deal them — well, a bit more distress, until he found his Witch. He had a checklist of names from SpeshCom: last round’s green-eyed detainees. He used the floored nurse’s computer to match names with room numbers, then he went trotting upstairs to “interview” the first suspected Witch. Claudia Keeley of Scranton. DOB 4/14/79. Room 314. He tiptoed into her room, fingered the noose in his coat pocket. Ms. Keeley was asleep. He bent down over her, brought his gloved left hand over her mouth. Green eyes flashed open. He withdrew the noose and showed it to the woman. Scream, and you die by strangling right here.

Ms. Keeley did not scream.

But then suddenly there were hard footsteps in the corridor. “CRILLY!” David Crilly’s heart hit his throat. “CRILLY, IT’S THE POLICE. STEP INTO THE HALLWAY. DROP ANY WEAPONS YOU HAVE ON THE FLOOR. WE HAVE GUNS DRAWN.”

This could not be happening. He had taken all precautions. It took Ms. Keeley a moment, but she understood finally that help was on the way, and she cut loose like some kind of banshee. Crilly turned and delivered a backhand slap to Ms. Keeley. She fell back against her pillow. The police arrived and flung open the door. He would get to test just one Green-Eyed Woman today. He needed to know whether he had found the right one. He needed just to see. He took a deep breath through his nose, leaned over her, and peered into her eyes.

Claudia Keeley was not the Turnpike Witch. And now Crilly is in jail, wondering how in hell the police caught him. Wondering how, after he circled the building four times to look for security, they managed to spring a trap on him, how they came to know there was an intruder in the building, and how they knew, storming the hallway, that the intruder was David Crilly.

•

Alice peels back the foil from two Pop Tarts, bites down through the both of them. Raspberry. She takes long strides around the parking lot as she eats, dealing glares to the yawning Pikers on the far side of the divider. Alice hates these people more every day. It has nothing to do with their heckling, the way they single her out for abuse, among all the workers and thugs who play a far greater role in their alienation from their beloved Walt Whitman. Nor is it their cowardice, that they are so able and inclined to shout curses at her from a crowd, but when she saunters over to see if they want to make something of it, they retreat — this even with a poled-in-concrete fence to protect them.

She is just now starting to put her finger on how and why she hates these Pikers. She needs to come up with a satisfactory explanation for why she has gone in with these Attorneys, who are simply bad people, opportunistic and cruel. Her best answer fo far: Alice hates the Pikers for the depths of pathetic they plumb every day, for their blind, unqualified adoration for the Turnpike Witch. For all their mock appropriations of refinement, they are no more whole unto themselves than the leafleting evangelical freaks who were always approaching her that first year in college, as if they sensed some weakness in her that made her a target.

The God analogy seems most appropriate, given the lack of regard that the Turnpike Witch gives her roadside congregation. They will themselves into a false intimacy with someone they know nothing about — someone who cannot be bothered to share with them information as basic as who she is. So clueless are they, so woefully misled, that they cannot recognize humble Alice Merkel for the God she is. In fact, right now they would have her crucified, if only they could find a suitably testicled Roman who would not shrink from the business.

When God shits, Alice wonders, does He laugh like I do? Does He say to Himself, “If they could only see Me now?” Or does He just laugh and say, “LOOK OUT BELOW?”

The Pikers are often a subject of discussion between Alice and Sarah Ann Rapp. Sarah’s opinions reinforce Alice’s — she faults the Pikers for their lack of perspective, manifest generally in their leaving careers and families behind to go sit somewhere and wait for the Turnpike Witch to show herself once a month (if they’re lucky), and more specifically in, say, the hunger strikes members of the Piker community have undertaken “to raise public awareness” about the Attorneys’ incursions in the Service Areas. Like it’s some grave humanitarian crisis. Sarah has a thesis about how certain “agencies of control” — she doesn’t say who — have stripped modern living so completely of meaning that people are incapable of forming communities, except through their own shared desperate attempts to attach a greater meaning to accidents. The Pikers are a symptom of that. What happens, Sarah wants to know, when the Witch quits or is caught? What happens to their community? Does it simply dissolve?

For the time being, anyway, the Pikers are going nowhere. They eat, sleep, piss and shit just outside this chain-link fence. And periodically Virgil Ayres — their priest, in that he is somehow simultaneously a true believer and a knowing perpetrator of the ongoing fraud — arrives with a folding step-stool, climbs it and promises that the Witch will come back to save them, to save the Walt Whitman. This rhetoric actually moves these people — Cuthbert Chang, for one — to tears. My God, the way these people NEED.

The Pop Tarts are eaten, and she pockets the wrapper. Not that it would even count as litter here, with cylinder cuts of PVC piping lying everywhere, and wood splinters tufted with torn-off wisps of Pink Panther insulation, like pink spore-stage dandelions peppering a blacktop field. She checks her watch. It’s 7 a.m.: time for her opening act, which involves stomping out chunks of asphalt from the backhoe-cracked lot and throwing them into the divider fence, to bust the knuckles of Piker fingers threading the chain link loops. The wounded howl like the bitches they are. Somebody calls her horrible names under his breath. She walks up to the fence with a fourteen-inch length of pipe in her hand. Who said that? Nobody owns up.

Cuthbert Chang is here. Just standing here, in a black suit, biting his lip while another phantom whisper, sourced on the wind, asks Alice how many Attorneys she blew that morning. She sneaks another look at her watch — 7:10 — walks right up to Cuthbert, picks him out of a crowd. “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?” she challenges. Cuthbert says nothing.

Sarah Ann Rapp watches all this from her trailer, where she fell asleep working on her book. Through the window she watches an elderly man try to climb the fence to get at Alice from behind. Sarah looks on with skin crawling, not so much at the man himself, who is snarling and promising the foulest consequences to Alice while he climbs, as at the chasmic disjunct between the measure of Alice’s provocation and his response. She turns to her laptop:

As I write these lines, I am watching a 70-year-old man impale himself on barbed wire, in pursuit of a woman I know who is reputed to have betrayed the Turnpike Witch.

This is Sarah’s instinct — to take notes while the rabid Piker kicks over a fence to do God-knows-what to a woman who could well regard her as a friend. Thankfully, two men from the Attorney Security Force run over and intercept the old man, by this time dangling from his ankles, with his bloodied trousers caught on the barbed wire. Wrinkle-free cotton tears into strips as they bring him down to the ground and unnecessarily dislocate both shoulders. They take him rag doll-armed to the parking lot gate and throw him out.

•

Barney Lopatt pulls up at 7:30, claims to be responding to a call. This throws Attorneys and Pikers alike for a loop, as up to now the police have taken no interest in the Pikers’ quiet siege of the construction site. Does the Lieutenant’s arrival signal some new state policy toward this conflict? Murmurs from both sides of the fence attend Lopatt’s disembarkation from the squad car. He approaches the gate, asks to speak with Alice Merkel. The smartly-dressed sentinel there has a neck twelve inches in diameter. He tightens a tie, calling its abbreviated extension up above the cleavage of his double-breasted jacket. The guard protests that this is private property, and what happens here is none of Lopatt’s business.

“And I can’t walk into a house to bust up a domestic disturbance?” Barney snaps back. “I thought you guys were Attorneys.”

Moments later the Lieutenant is leading Alice Merkel, uncuffed, to her car. Alice slips into the familiar back seat and closes the door. Free at last. Certain of the Pikers are bold enough now to hoot and holler at her in triumph. The jeering faces lose their features, then disappear entirely behind the fog that collects on her side of the window glass.

“I got you breakfast,” Barney says as they pull out of the parking lot. Alice finds a white paper bag on the floor. Inside it is a cinnamon roll the size of a boxing glove. Still warm, too. Had she known this was coming, she would have triggered up her Pop Tarts to make room. She nibbles at it nonetheless. Barney whips the car around northbound, through a cutout.

“Mm,” Alice says, in commemoration of a particularly luscious swath of cinnamon roll. She swallows. “Thanks for agreeing to come get me. I’d been inside that fence for too long.”

“There ought to be a newspaper back there. Check out the front page.”

SUSPENDED SPESHCOM CHAIR ARRESTED IN HOSPITAL BREAK-IN. “Wow,” is Alice’s assessment. She brings the roll to her lips, takes an apple-bite as she begins to read the smaller print. “What do you know about this?”

“More than they know,” Barney replies. “When I write my memoirs, the first line will be, I arrested Special Committeeman Crilly and the Turnpike Witch on the same day.”

“Mm.” Alice has never considered that Barney might someday publish his memoirs. There could be good money in that for him. “So you were there? You took a call?”

“I had a tip. From Anne.” And he tells Alice the whole story, from the minute Anne rang his cell phone through Crilly’s booking and formal entry into police custody, pending arraignment on charges of burglary, aggravated assault, and possibly attempted murder.

“How did Anne know he was at the hospital?”

“You can ask her when you see her.”

“I don’t plan to see any of them anytime soon.”

“You’re not making any sense, Alice. You’re walking away from your friends, you have nowhere to go, and you’ve gone and got yourself involved in that mess down at the Whitman. It doesn’t make any DAMN SENSE.” Alice tries to recall if she has ever heard Barney curse.

“I don’t want to do this anymore, Barney. I just want to be left alone.”

“Like you left that boy alone who crashed his car?”

“Look: if you’re going to lecture me, Barney, you can let me out right here.”

“You’re forgetting, girl, that I arrested you fifteen minutes ago.”

“Barney, LET ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING CAR RIGHT NOW.” She reaches instinctively for the door handle, grabs and jerks it, knowing full well that mechanics disabled it years ago, just after they installed the cage, and before they screwed the blue flashers into the roof. “TRAITOR!” she screams at him. “COCKSUCKING FUCKING TRAITOR!”

“Alice Delphine Merkel, I am not a traitor,” Barney answers, firmly. “You’ve just forgotten who your friends are.”

“NIGGER!” she yells. “MONKEY-FUCKING NIGGER TRAITOR!”

Barney pulls the car off into the Joyce Kilmer Service Area. Alice bangs her arms into the cage, calls her abductor a few more non-racial names before she finally winds down. None of these last epithets is racial — she knows she crossed the line just now, and it’s possible that Barney Lopatt will never look at her the same way again. And he is, as he said, a friend. She has gone and said these hurtful and stupid things to her friend.

The car winds its way behind the Kilmer complex into a back lot, unoccupied except for a cargo truck that reads BATCHELDER & SON CUSTOM WOODWORKING. TWO GENERATIONS OF SPLINTER SAFE BANISTERS. They have redone the truck. Barney parks the car. Familiar figures jump out of the truck bay. Barney steps outside, shakes hands with Virgil Ayres, nods coldly to Djinn Makhmud.

“She got upset, said some things, but she’s calming down now.”

Djinn’s voice: “Maybe we should stun-gun her or something. Just for the exchange. So we can get her into the truck.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary. I think she is ready to listen.”