“Trying to decide if the batteries are dead?” Lacey asked.
Suzanna didn’t even look up from her inspection of the old CD player. “No.”
Lacey waited. Suzanna said nothing else.
Finally, Lacey said tentatively, “You know what, I’m a little puzzled. I mean, you had that cat a long time, too. Aren’t you . . . I don’t know. I mean, you always loved animals.”
Suzanna stood. Seemed to think for a moment, staring into the middle distance. Then she said, “I’m very sad about it. I guess I’m just, you know, at this point in my life, a little blasé about pets. And it looked like she died instantly. Would you like some instant coffee?”
“Um, sure.” Suzanna went to the door from the garage to the kitchen, and Lacey turned to follow her.
And then stopped, turned to listen, as once again she heard three screams.
It was from a street or two away, this time. But it was remarkably similar:
The scream of tires, the scream of a small animal, the scream of a child.
5
December 1, late afternoon
Adair walked home from the bus stop, carrying her backpack of books over one shoulder. It was making her shoulder ache.
Should
have left them in my locker.
She didn’t think she’d get herself to crack a book tonight.
It was already getting dark. She saw that the few remaining jack-o’-lanterns were even more sunken in, their grins loonily lop-sided now. She thought about her friend Danelle, who seemed sort of happy that her parents had said they were moving. At least she could’ve acted sad to be leaving her friends. But then Adair was her only friend, just about, and most everyone had treated her like shit at school, it was true.
A turkey vulture wheeled overhead and swept away; blackbirds trilled repetitively from a red-blossomed bottlebrush tree beside the sidewalk. It hadn’t rained for a while, and she’d heard newspeople worrying there wouldn’t be enough water in the snowpacks to replenish the reservoirs. Leaves that should have been pasted to the street rattled dryly ahead of her in the breeze, toward Waylon.
He was standing behind the bole of a liquidambar tree, a little ways down the street, waiting for her. Like he was hiding, but watching for her. Which was kind of weird.
“Yo, Mister Waylon,” she said, walking up. He was dressed just like he had been a couple weeks before, when the satellite had come down, she noticed. “Hardly seen you around school.”
“I haven’t been coming much. My mom’s been a basket case and . . . I just felt like keeping my head down, sorta.” He looked past her down the street, jamming his hands in his pockets.
“There some reason you’re acting like you’re hiding?”
He hesitated, looked at her, then back at the street. “You see those marine guys driving around?”
She felt a taut anger constrict her throat. “Those pricks. One of them killed my cat. Ran Silkie over.”
“Lot of people lost cats around here.”
“And he just mumbled and drove away. Fucking asshole.”
“I thought that—that they were following me, those guys. More than once. I think it was because I was spying on the satellite thing.”
She put just a shade of teasing mockery in her voice. “So now you’re all ‘it’s a satellite’ and not ‘it’s a UFO’?”
He shrugged a reluctant concession. “I think it was a satellite. It looked like it. But they’re up to some shit. It could totally have, like, reverse-engineered technology from Area 51 in it or something. They reverse-engineer shit from UFOs.”
“ ’Kay.”
“No, they do!”
“ ’Kay.”
He snorted. “Okay, fine. I’ve got a book I’ll show you about it.”
“ ’Kay. I’m getting cold.”
He looked at the street, then at her, then at the sky. “I could walk you home.”
She sighed. She’d hoped saying
I’m getting cold
might induce him to put an arm around her. “You could walk me home, yeah. But then I’d be home.”
“You don’t feel like going home, either?”
“No. My parents are just ‘whatever,’ no matter what happens lately. They don’t fucking care anymore. God, it was so lame on Thanksgiving last week. They just went through the motions. Lacey was so embarrassed for them. She moved out to a hotel. Mom kept hinting. She has so changed. It’s all fucked up.”
He looked at her curiously. “You didn’t used to cuss this much.”
“I didn’t used to feel like it so much.”
“Well. My mom makes a big deal about Thanksgiving. She kept it together pretty well. Cooked the turkey and we watched football. Which she likes. She gets off watching those linebackers. Like I care about football.”
“But that’s nice you watched it with her.”
He shrugged and fell silent. So they just walked for a while, passing the turn onto her block. At the corner they saw Mr. Garraty pushing his wife in her wheelchair up the walk to the ramp that led to the porch of their ramshackle ranch-style house. Mr. Garraty was limping. Mrs. Garraty was on the stout side, a round-faced old woman with bottle red hair, swelling ankles showing under her long woolen coat. Her husband was a stooped man in a heavy knit sweater, once tall and now getting humpbacked, his sagging cheeks pale, his eyes watery gray, his hair a wisp on his head. Both of them were in their eighties. Adair remembered her mom saying the Garratys should be in a retirement home or with children, someplace they could be taken care of.
They started up the ramp, and Mr. Garraty started to lose traction and the wheelchair slid back a little, his wife giving a little squeak of anxiety at this. Then Waylon surprised Adair by stepping up behind them.
“Lemme help you with that,” Waylon mumbled. Mr. Garraty was startled and looked at first like he was going to yell for the cops, but then realized this punky-looking kid was actually trying to be helpful. Adair followed them, pleased, as Waylon helped push the old woman onto the porch.
“Thank you,” Mr. Garraty said. “I’ve been meaning to fix that ramp. The tar paper on it came loose last year. It’s a mite too slick.”
Mrs. Garraty stared at Waylon and Adair for a moment through her coke-bottle glasses, frowning; then she smiled, making a great many lines in her face suddenly stand out. “Oh, that’s Adair, Suzanna’s girl, Benny,” she said.
“Well, for heaven’s sake, as if I don’t know that,” Mr. Garraty said. “I remember her when I was doing the electrics over at her grade school, she was always asking questions.” He smiled at the memory. “And this is her young man, who helped us up here, I expect.”
“Benny, good gosh, you have no reason to blather out your presumptions like that,” Mrs. Garraty said.
“Uh, well, anyway,” Waylon said, genuinely embarrassed. “I was just—we were just—so anyway, we’ve got to—”
“Why don’t you kids come in for some hot chocolate?” Mrs. Garraty asked. “It’s the least we can do.”
Mr. Garraty chuckled seeing the expressions on their faces. “Look at that, now, you’ve scared them, Judith. The thought of sitting around in our old kitchen with us. I’d be looking for an out myself if I was this boy here. What’s your name, son?”
“Um, Waylon?”
“You’re not sure?”
“Sure, I’m—yeah, it’s—”
Adair poked Waylon. “He’s teasing you, dumbass. We should go, Mr. Garraty, it’s nice to see you guys. We’ve got to go home.”
Mr. Garraty was already turning away, unlocking the front door, mumbling as he fumbled with the key. “Well, thank you, Waylon, Adair. You startled me, there, but I’m glad you came up, I might’ve— darn this key.”
Adair tugged at Waylon’s arm, and the two of them went on their way, Adair waving good-bye to Mrs. Garraty as her husband backed her wheelchair through the door. She vanished through the door, sitting down and backwards, waving.
Adair looked at Waylon. “That was really—”
“Shut
up
,” he said, wincing.
So she didn’t say it. But she thought,
He helped them without
thinking about it. That’s what he’s really like.
She kept hold of his arm.
December 2
Major Henri Stanner stood outside the Cruller on a cool morning, sipping from a Styrofoam cup and looking down what passed for the main drag in Quiebra. The Cruller’s house coffee tasted like some artificial-flavor designer’s idea of essence of almonds, and maybe vanilla.
He turned and glanced back into the coffee shop. The red-haired lady behind the counter smiled at him and turned a patient look of gentle inquiry to a little old lady whose greatest joy, probably, was deciding whether to have the almond-paste bearclaw or the apricot-jam filled. Maybe the coffee was second-rate, but the place was better than a Starbucks; it belonged here, had been here for years. It felt singular, and singular felt friendly.
It was an awkward little town, in some ways, he thought, with its attempt at drumming up business for the merchants by calling the little main drag Quiebra’s “Historic Old Town”; with its increasingly uneasy mix of ghetto-refugee black kids into Jay-Z and 50 Cent and low-slung sedans, and white kids into Kid Rock and four-by-fours.
He’d been looking the town over for a week, off and on, while supervising the site. He was beginning to like the place, warts and all. And he was worried about Quiebra.
He dropped the coffee half-finished into a trash can and started for the police department. He was wearing his Air Force officer’s uniform and getting curious stares from some of the passersby. A tall, gangly teenage boy looked at him speculatively.
“Yo, officer,” the boy said. He wore a Raiders jersey, a lot of pimple cream discoloring his face. He shifted a backpack from one shoulder to the other. “Can you get me into the paratroopers?”
“I’m not a recruiter, son. Sorry.” Stanner slowed enough to be polite, talking as he sidled by.
“Whatcha doing here then?”
Stanner snorted to himself. The generation of bluntness.
But he smiled and said, “I’m visiting a friend, is all.”
Going to have to ditch the uniform for sure. Get into some civvies after
today.
He waved and continued on his way. The police station was tucked into something called the Quiebra Department of Public Safety. You had to look close to see the word
Police
. The building was shiny-new, all red tile and stainless steel, part of an L-shaped complex that included city hall and the fire department.
A white-haired lady in a flowery, white-collared dress was on the other side of the counter’s check-in window. She glanced up when he came in, looked curiously at his uniform. She wanted to ask . . .
But instead she called the duty commander for him: a small Filipino guy, crisply uniformed, with brisk movements and bright black eyes; QPD COMMANDER K. CRUZON on the little plastic name tag under his badge.
“Yes, Major, can I help you?” Second generation, no accent.
They shook hands. “You’re the first guy got my rank right this week.”
“I was Air Force for ten years. An MP.”
“You’re doing all right here. Say—” Stanner flashed his NSA liaison ID below the level of the counter so that Cruzon could see it but the secretary couldn’t. “—could we talk in private?”
Cruzon frowned at the ID in its little case. Stanner could tell he was reading the whole title to himself:
National Security Agency:
Department of Defense Special Intelligence Liaison.
His eyebrows went up, and he nodded.
“We could talk,” Cruzon said, “but that ID doesn’t get you any special privileges around here.”
“Talk’s all I’m after.”
“Then right through here, Major Stanner. We’ll go to the conference room. Bettina? Buzz us through, please.”
On the way to the conference room they ran into Leonard Sprague, the deputy from the crash site. “What’s this?” Stanner said. “The sheriff ’s department crammed in here with the municipal cops, too?”
“We were just tradin’ some notes on narcotics,” Sprague said, shaking Stanner’s hand. The black deputy towered over Commander Cruzon. “You here about the crash still? I thought you guys were outta here and gone.”
“Could we go into the conference room? It’d be good if you could come along, too.”
“Sure, I’ve got a few minutes, Major. I’ve been wondering about some things myself.”
They sat around a rickety metal and plastic table, drinking even worse coffee than he’d gotten at the Cruller. The walls were painted concrete; there were some high windows, and an urban planning chart on a wooden tripod.
“You haven’t asked why I wanted to speak to you, Commander.”
“Call me Ken. I figured what it was about. It’s not every day we have a satellite crash around here. We were expecting a lot of press. I was surprised there wasn’t anything on the TV news.” He looked at Stanner with a combination of amusement and a kind of sharp attentiveness.
Something’s worrying him,
Stanner thought.
“Yeah, well,” Stanner said, as if it weren’t a big deal, “we were caught off guard. We didn’t know the thing was coming down till it was already on its way. I just happened to be in the area, so I was dispatched over here. It’s a project that I did have some—”
Shut up,
he told himself angrily.
“—some experience with. Anyway, there just wasn’t any time to warn people. There were some people at NASA who were a little embarrassed, so they didn’t want any publicity, either.”
Cruzon nodded but didn’t seem convinced by the explanation. He kept his eyes on Stanner’s face.
The little guy’s a human polygraph,
Stanner thought.
He knows I’m
lying. Good for him. But he won’t call me on it unless he has to.
“So, Major,” Sprague said. “You’re still here in town?”
“You guys do me a favor, call me Henri, or Henny if you prefer— some of my friends call me that.”
“Henri—like ornery?” Sprague asked, grinning.
“I hear that one now and then,” Stanner said, chuckling politely. More like almost every day.
“Henri, that’s French, huh?” Cruzon asked.
“My mother was French, name of DuMarche. I’m named after her dad. He died the day I was born. I should just get it over with and change Henri to Henry.”
The two men both nodded slowly, watching him, waiting. He’d stretched out the small talk as much as he could, and it wasn’t going to make them trust him any further.
Stanner said, “Okay, you noticed I’m still here in town. It’s just that we want to make sure there aren’t any
issues
, any side effects or problems with the satellite, ah, in any of the towns near the crash site. This town is the nearest.”
“ ‘Issues,’ ” Sprague said. “What issues exactly?”
“Plutonium?” Cruzon asked, leaning forward. “That it?”
Hearing that, Sprague sat up straighter in his chair.
Cruzon was just saying out loud, Stanner supposed, what had been worrying the little cop, ever since the crash. Certain high-performance military satellites were powered by plutonium; solar power wasn’t enough for some orbital spying operations.
“No plutonium,” he said. “Maybe another kind of toxin. What it is—okay, wait a second here. Fellas, you must realize that there may be national security issues involved, or I wouldn’t be here. I’m supposed to make you sign something where you guarantee that if you repeat any of this you give us your firstborn or your left testicle or something—but I’m going to skip all that if you’ll just tell me you won’t talk about this to anyone but me.”