Speaking in Tongues

the peephole he’d made. She reached under the bed, sure she’d come up with a handful of rat. But no, she found only the manila file folder she’d been looking for. She returned to the bathroom and eased up to the window, pressed the folder against the glass. She drew back her fist and slugged the pane. The punch was hard but the glass held. She hit it again and this time a long crack spread from the top to the bottom of the window. Finally, another slug and the glass shattered. She pulled her fist back just as the sharp shards fell to the windowsill.
    She picked a triangular piece of glass about eight inches long, narrow as a knife. Taking her cue from patient Victoria Skelling’s sad end, Megan, using her teeth, ripped a strip off one of the mattress pads on the wall. She wound this around the base of the splinter to make a handle.
    Good, C.M. says with approval. Proud of her other self.
    No, better than good Megan reflected: great. Fuck you, Dr. Matthews. I feel great! It reminded her of how she’d felt when she’d written those letters to her parents in Dr. Hanson’s office. It was scary, it hurt, but it was completely honest.
    Great.
    Crazy Megan wonders, So what’s next?
    “Fuck the kid up with the knife,” Megan responded out loud. “Then get his keys and book on out of here.”
    Atta girl, C.M. offers. But what about the dogs?
    They’ve got claws, I’ve got claws. Megan dramatically held up the glass.
    Crazy Megan is impressed as hell.
    •   •   •
    “There’s a van.”
    “A van?” Bett asked.
    “Following us,” Tate continued, as they drove past the Ski Chalet in Chantilly.
    Bett started to turn.
    “No, don’t,” he said.
    She turned back. Looked at her hands, fingers tipped in faint purple polish. “Are you sure?”
    “Pretty sure. A white van.”
    Tate made a slow circle through the shopping center then exited on Route 50 and sped east. He pulled into the Greenbriar strip mall, stopped at the Starbucks and climbed out. He bought two teas topped with foamed milk and returned to the car.
    They sipped them for a moment and when a red Ford Explorer cut between his Lexus and the van he hit the gas and took off past a bookstore, streaking onto Majestic Lane and just catching the tail end of the light that put him back on Route 50, heading west this time.
    When he settled into the right lane he noticed the white van was still with him.
    “How’d he do that?” Tate wondered aloud.
    “He’s still there?”
    “Yep. Hell, he’s good.”
    They continued west, passing under Route 28, which was the dividing line between civilization here and the farmland that led eventually to the mountains.
    “What’re we going to do?”
    But Tate didn’t answer, hardly even heard the question. He was looking at a large sign that said, FUTURE HOME OF LIBERTY PARK  . . .
    He laughed out loud.
    This was one of those odd things, noticing the sign at the same time the van was following them. A high-grade coincidence, he would have said. Bett—well, the old Bett—would of course have attributed it to the stars or the spirits or past lives or something. Didn’t matter. He’d made the connection and at last he had a solid lead.
    “What?” she cried, alarmed, responding both to his outrageous U-turn, skidding 180 degrees over the grassy median and the harsh laugh coming from his throat.
    “I just figured something out. We’re going to my place for a minute. I have to get something.”
    “Oh. What?”
    “A gun.”
    Bett’s head turned toward him then away. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
    “Oh, yep. Very serious.”
    Some years ago, when Tate had been prosecuting the improbable case of the murder of a Jamaican drug dealer at a Wendy’s restaurant in suburban Burke, Konnie Konstantinatis had poked his head into Tate’s office.
    “Time you got yourself a piece.”
    “Of what?”
    “Ha. You’ll want a revolver ’cause all you do is point ’n’ shoot. You’re not a boy to mess with clips and safeties and stuff like that.”
    “What’s a clip?”
    Tate had been joking, of course—every commonwealth’s attorney in Virginia was well versed in the lore of firearms—but the fact was he really didn’t know guns well. The Judge didn’t hold with weapons, didn’t see any need for them and believed the countryside would be much more highly populated without weaponry.
    But Konnie wouldn’t take no for an answer and within a week Tate found himself the owner of a very