Doctor Sleep: A Novel

happy-face thing as a kid. She bet he had.
    “Chia, I think Abby wants to talk to you.”
    Lucy sighed and said, “Put her on.”
    David held out the phone to his daughter.
    2
    At 2 p.m. on that Sunday, Rose the Hat hung a sign reading DO NOT DISTURB ME UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY on the door of her plus-size RV. The coming hours had been carefully scheduled. She would eat no food today, and drink only water. Instead of mid-morning coffee, she had taken an emetic. When the time came to go after the girl’s mind, she would be as clear as an empty glass.
    With no bodily functions to distract her, Rose would be able to find out everything she needed: the girl’s name, her exact location, how much she knew, and—this was very important—who she might have talked to. Rose would lie still on her double bed in the EarthCruiser from four in the afternoon until ten in the evening, looking up at the ceiling and meditating. When her mind was as clear as her body, she would take steam from one of the canisters in the hidden compartment—just a whiff would be enough—and once again turn the world until she was in the girl and the girl was in her. At one in the morning Eastern Time, her quarry would be dead asleep and Rose could pick through the contents of her mind at will. It might even be possible to plant a suggestion: Some men will come. They will help you. Go with them .
    But as that old-school farmer-poet Bobbie Burns pointed out more than two hundred years before, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and she had barely begun to recite the beginning phrases of her relaxation mantra when an agley came hammering at her door.
    “Go away!” she shouted. “Can’t you read the sign?”
    “Rose, I’ve got Nut with me,” Crow called. “I think he’s got what you asked for, but he needs a go-ahead, and the timing on this thing is a bitch.”
    She lay there for a moment, then blew out an angry breath and got up, snatching a Sidewinder t-shirt (KISS ME AT THE ROOF O’ THE WORLD!) and pulling it over her head. It dropped to the tops of her thighs. She opened the door. “This better be good.”
    “We can come back,” Walnut said. He was a little man with a bald pate and Brillo pads of gray hair fluffing out above the tops of his ears. He held a sheet of paper in one hand.
    “No, just make it quick.”
    They sat at the table in the combined kitchen/living room. Rose snatched the paper from Nut’s hand and gave it a cursory glance. It was some sort of complicated chemical diagram filled with hexagons. It meant nothing to her. “What is it?”
    “A powerful sedative,” Nut said. “It’s new, and it’s clean. Jimmy got this chem sheet from one of our assets in the NSA. It’ll put her out with no chance of ODing her.”
    “It could be what we need, all right.” Rose knew she sounded grudging. “But couldn’t it have waited until tomorrow?”
    “Sorry, sorry,” Nut said meekly.
    “I’m not,” Crow said. “If you want to move fast on this girl and snatch her clean, I’ll not only have to make sure we can get some of this, I’ll have to arrange for it to be shipped to one of our mail drops.”
    The True had hundreds of these across America, most of them at Mail Boxes Etc. and various UPS stores. Using them meant planning days ahead, because they always traveled in their RVs. Members of the True would no more get on public transport than they would slit their own throats. Private air travel was possible but unpleasant; they suffered extreme altitude sickness. Walnut believed it had something to do with their nervous systems, which differed radically from those of the rubes. Rose’s concern was with a certain taxpayer-funded nervous system. Very nervous. Homeland Security had been monitoring even private flights very closely since 9/11, and the True Knot’s first rule of survival was never attract attention.
    Thanks to the interstate highway system, the RVs had always served their purposes, and would this time. A small raiding party, with new drivers taking the wheel every six hours, could get from Sidewinder to northern New England in less than thirty hours.
    “All right,” she said, mollified. “What have we got along I-90 in upstate New York or Massachusetts?”
    Crow didn’t hem and haw or tell her he’d have to get back to her on that. “EZ Mail Services, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.”
    She flapped her fingers at the edge of the sheet of incomprehensible chemistry Nut was