Fifty Mice: A Novel (17 page)

Jay says, “What?”

“Fucking hot weird shit out there today.”

Jay nods.

“Santa Anas. Earthquake weather.”

“Mmm.”

Dunn puts his hands flat on the counter. “Okay, look, here’s the pitch: I can see what you’re up against. That’s all this is. You gotta do something or you’re gonna go broke. This stuff, you’d be surprised. People get into it? Can’t get enough. And these are titles you can’t find anywhere else. Hell, I know a guy, we’ll make a website, you can do online rentals like Netflix, only specialized, I guarantee there are a herd of film nuts out there who will jump on this.”

Jay says, “I don’t know.”

•   •   •

H
e’s been casing Dunn for a couple of weeks, double-checking the regularity of that mid-afternoon Cessna out from the Airport in the Sky but unable to pin down Dunn’s return after dusk. Sometimes Jay suspects the pilot stays on the mainland, but then
there are mornings Jay will open the shop and look out into the bay to the patchwork old teak cabin cruiser Dunn calls home, moored beyond the short-timers, laundry on the rigging, hull partly painted, windows dim-glowing with a smoldering glaze of dawning sun and Dunn in a stern hammock, faint firefly glow of a fatty that ebbs and wanes as he smokes it down to nothing. Some nights the cabin windows stay dark, but other times they glow and soft shadows form and flutter inside and the sound of a woman’s laughter comes jittering across the harbor like seabirds’ calling, light, high, strange. And some mornings the rear deck stays empty, Dunn’s dented aluminum skiff tucked and tied up under the pier, but the Cessna is waiting mid-afternoon for its run, flies out, as if Dunn is only an occasional passenger, unnecessary for the task. But always, the cruiser is lifeless on weekends, making it difficult for Jay to find a way to cross paths.

“Fine, you take sixty, no, seventy percent.” Dunn is twitchy, he keeps angling his eyes to the street, running his hand through his hair, restless. “All your highbrow French flicks are just sitting there getting slowly degaussed, my friend. Or whatever happens to discs. Nobody’s watching them. This is a win-win sitch.”

Jay only vaguely understands what Dunn is offering, but the video business is a sham, so, fuck it, let Public sort this out; he nods and agrees, “Sure. Okay. Great.”

Now it’s Dunn who demurs, backing off, as if this went too smoothly. “What? You sure?”

Jay was half hoping Dunn would show up at the barbecue, but no; and yet, now, here he is, walks right into the shop, just like that, with a harebrained business proposal, and so Jay quickly tries to figure the odds of this being coincidence as opposed to some twisty federal ruse, but then just as quickly decides it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Ginger’s admonition to run thrums through his every calculation.
If it’s Doe or Public pulling strings, setting him up, the worst that can happen is they catch him, and his situation remains exactly the same.

But if it’s not? If Dunn is legit? He’s looking at an exit plan that may not present itself again.

Jay asks him, knowing the answer, “So do you fly to the mainland every day?”

“Yeah. Do you really think—?” Dunn stops short, looks from the pile of DVDs to Jay, and elaborates: “Weekdays. Mail run. USPS budget cuts have cut out weekend delivery, in case you hadn’t noticed. I used to skywrite for walking-around money, but the whole spelling thing was a big problem for me.” He cocks his head. “Hey, you really, you really want these—do you really think it’s a decent idea?”

“Yeah.”

“Awesome.” Dunn’s grin is childlike. “Epic.”

Jay tries to make the next thing he asks sound as natural as possible. “Hey . . . Sam . . . do you think, could you give me a ride to L.A.?”

Nodding, Dunn: “When?”

AT TEN MINUTES TO TWO
that same afternoon, a couple sweat-soaked delivery guys will have a protective-plastic shrouded cerise chaise strapped end-up on a dolly truck when Ginger answers the door.

The men could complain about the hill before they say anything. They’ll have forgotten how steep it is. They’ll catch their breath and ask for Helen Warren. They’ll say they’ve got her lounger, using the accepted American mispronunciation.

Ginger will be completely confused by this. Why would Helen be getting a delivery, much less furniture? She might frown. She will ask to see the invoice.

•   •   •

T
he men will trade looks, and the senior one will take from his pocket and unfold a printout to show to her. The address of the bungalow, Helen’s name, Jay’s signature. Even sideways the chaise will look to Ginger like something out of a New Orleans whorehouse.

The sweaty men will wait, patient. They have more deliveries to make, and the longer this one takes, the fewer of the remainder they’ll have time to do.

Ginger will scan the invoice, beginning to understand what it means, then perhaps step farther out on the front steps and stare down the hill, to the rooftops of the Avalon shops facing the harbor, not so much surprised by this development as (perhaps) regretful that it happened so soon.

But the gesture of the chaise longue itself will stump her.

Finally, she’ll nod, distracted, step out of the way of the men, and open the door wide for Helen’s long chair.

•   •   •

A
t half past two, Magonis will be sitting motionless in his chair, smoking his disagreeable electric cigarette, listening to the Chimes Tower ring and staring irritably at the half-open office door and sweating in the unseasonable heat, because the air-conditioning is being repaired.

He will check his watch. He will check the clock on the wall. Both will, more or less, give or take five minutes, announce two-thirty. But the tower is never wrong. Smoking, his irritability morphing into a kind of disquiet, he’ll listen for the sound of someone coming up the hallway to suite 204.

Jay has never been late to their appointment.

At some point, before the hour is up, Magonis will dig in his pocket for his cell phone.

•   •   •

A
t quarter to three, as the tower chimes on the fifteen again, Public will come walking briskly down Crescent, and cross the street to the window of the video shop where Jay has posted the plastic sign with a clock that once had moveable hands someone long ago ripped off their pivot point, leaving the BE BACK AT: forever inconclusive.

Public might screw his mouth up the way Jay has noticed he will when he gets agitated, step back into the street and find himself unable to choose his next destination: looking first to the empty ferry landing, then north to the big casino on the point.

In the absence of any facts or real knowledge, Jay has convinced himself that nobody knows how many protected witnesses are on the island. He believes that different marshals are each in charge of their own small group of assets, scattered among the four thousand permanent residents, ninety percent of whom live in Avalon, the rest in a few tiny unincorporated settlements bounded by the vacant sprawl of protected Conservancy land covering most of the seventy-four square miles of long, thin, craggy Catalina Schist rising out of the Pacific, southernmost part of the Channel Island archipelago.

This would ensure that any breach of the protection program would be limited. Unless a full list of witnesses was to become exposed.

It also means that each lead marshal is the ruler of his own tiny kingdom.

Susceptible to the vagaries of such license.

Accountable, like any king might think, only to his legacy.

•   •   •

W
ilting in the blast of heat mid-island, Sam Dunn bangs out of the back of the Buffalo Springs Station terminal building lugging two big locked canvas mail sacks to his Cessna, waiting on the apron of the runway. He opens the cargo door, throws the bags in, goes back to the terminal, and rolls a four-wheel dolly piled high with UPS and FedEx packages out to the Cessna, where he quickly stacks them around the mailbags and some other L.A.-bound cargo. A short, fat man waddles out to retrieve the dolly, grunts something at Dunn, and disappears into the air-conditioned terminal, slamming the door shut.

Dunn is sweating.

Big half-moons bloom on his shirt under his arms, his hair dank, he drops his Revos onto his nose and climbs into the cockpit, where Jay is all folded up low, in the passenger’s seat, so that nobody can see him. He hasn’t been waiting for long.

“Hi,” Jay says. “Go.”

•   •   •

F
or weeks Jay has been perfecting this plan to slip out of Avalon without anyone (Feds) noticing. Even as they began to back off their watchful surveillance after the incident with the marshal everyone called Tripod, taking a golf cart, Jay decided, was infelicitous due to the probability someone (probably a Fed) might quickly notice it missing and the certainty he’d be spotted (by Feds) on the long snaking road to the airport. All those jogging circuits that took him along the ridge road suggested that the airport was probably too far to run to; not to mention there were a series of brutal ascents after the initial one; today the heat made this option even doubly difficult, had he chosen to take it. No, getting to the airport seemed impossible until he noticed the Catalina Conservancy truck bringing fresh water to several tin troughs for the buffalo and mule deer on the mesa. It made its circuit twice a week, mid-afternoon, driving up from the staging yard and the back of the canyon, past the golf course, on roads Jay had run, and proceeded to the farthest watering station first, a spot half a mile south of the airport, then snaked back through the wild rye and rattleweed and coastal sagebrush. He had actually practiced hopping on as the truck rumbled past him jogging, and then rode for a while tucked between the water tank and the back bumper, where nobody could readily see him.

Knowing that this was potentially the most vulnerable moment of exposure, he had learned the best place to catch his ride was a
hairpin turn thick with fennel and scrub oak just before the old burn area near the canyon’s lip. He knew that Monday and Thursday were water days, and this day was a Monday, and so Jay had decided, driven by Ginger’s warning, to make his break.

No one saw him go, he kept looking back as he ran, the roads were empty; he was fairly certain they hadn’t seen him. But when he leapt off the truck he’d stumbled and rolled his ankle, felt the sickening pop and the rubbery fold of foot underneath him. Pain came, slow-building, visceral; first the tingling rush of adrenaline from the shock, then a touch of nausea, and it made the half-mile trip uphill to the airport just that much more difficult. A shuttle bus from Avalon rumbled past on the gravel road; he stayed low in the seams of the rolling terrain, climbing, the side of his shoe cutting into the puffy flesh where his ankle was already swelling. Heat rose off the island clay. He circled wide around the head of the runway, then simply emerged from the brush into the baked, treeless, graded flats, and limped straight-line to Dunn’s waiting Cessna. An employee of DC-3 Gifts & Grill stood in the shade of the terminal, smoking, staring at him, but not seeing him.

He climbed into the plane and hunkered down behind the seats and waited, sweating in the stifling oven of the cockpit for Dunn’s arrival.

•   •   •

T
hree o’clock sharp, the Cessna shudders as the propellers find speed. Dunn releases the brake and eases out onto the runway. Cool air leaks into the cockpit from circulation vents. He catches the bubble lights of a couple of Avalon sheriff’s station SUVs juddering through the scrub oak, fishtailing up the airport road. At the runway’s end, Dunn sharply pivots the plane, pushes the throttle forward, and hurtles toward the open sky at the tarmac’s opposite end.

Dunn glances, insouciant, at the arriving sheriff’s vehicles as he whips past them. They’ve gone past the terminal, to skirt the runway, their sirens Doppler for a moment in the plane’s wake and—

“What was that?” Jay asks, staying low.

“Nothing,” Dunn says after a beat.

—a man in a federal suit tumbles out of the back of one of the Avalon station SUVs to watch helplessly as the mail-run Cessna floats off the headland cliff, dipping, then catching the ocean updraft effortlessly for a power-climb into a torrid day’s poor excuse for a sky.

“
DOUBLE FATTINESS
IS ANOTHER GOOD ONE.”

Blue sky and the laboring whine of the Cessna climbing fast.

“Dreaming the Reality.”

“What?”

Blue sky. Smear of whitecapped water, a sliver of firmament. Blue sky.

Hurtling through empty space on a diagonal, gravity’s drag—what do they call it?—g-force, makes Jay’s eyes ache in their sockets, and his fingers tremble.

“Guy in a maze,” Dunn explains, no stress in his voice. No sign that he’s mid-loop of some inexplicable aerobatic maneuver involving roll, pitch,
and
yaw; he could be sitting on the seawall by the Tuna Club, sucking on a warmish microbrew and watching the sun set over East Peak. “Guy in a maze confronts kickboxing killers, prostitutes who can crush watermelons with their thighs.”

Jay’s muscles tighten and his stomach flips.

“Everybody’s lying,” Dunn says.

Blue sky. And the angry whinge of the plane:

“There’s a warlock with an army of female zombies brought to life by pounding spikes through their skulls—”

A sense of spinning, but with no horizon to reference, it’s like a crushing onset of vertigo until an upside-down cockeyed world slides into Jay’s field of vision and hangs there, sky, ocean, and the litter of civilization with which Los Angeles tumbles off the continent—but in reverse order—

“—all these nests of worms and centipedes that grow under the skin—”

—and Jay, eyes closing, cheeks sheet-white—

“—a magician,” Dunn revels, “who drinks human milk to keep from aging—”

—the plane twists, flips, and swan-dives earthward, toward blue-black whitecapped swirls of sea, gaining speed, a death dive, and—

“—not to mention all the usual exploding bodies, love potions, amnesia, hysterical blindness—”

—through a gathering gossamer fume that seems to be spun out of nothing, a pillow of dreams—

“—crocodiles slit open to release snow-white doves, fireballs, and this really confounding subplot involving—”

—g-forces blading Jay’s cheeks like rubber—

“—a lost little boy who rebels against his well-meaning but slutty mom.”

At the last minute, Dunn pulls back on the yoke, the Cessna arcs up and strafes low across opaque sine waves of indigo water that foam and fall away.

“Epic.”

They rocket into white blindness.

Dunn chortles: “Marine inversion from the Santa Ana situation.
Hodeeho.” He eases back on the throttle and pops his sunglasses up onto his head, squinting into the impenetrable fog.

“Soup,” he says. “Technical flying from here on, ladies and gentlemen.”

Jay shifts in his seat, swallowing the acid regurge that rose to high tide in his throat.

“Skywriting, sometimes you’d go through a fat letter you just laid down and get somesuch like this. Only for the moment, though. Like you forgot something. Then it’d . . . clear.”

Jay feels delivered into abeyance. No sense of movement, or direction, just the steady hum of the twin engines and the thwop of the propeller blades in the moist air.

“Can’t we just climb up out of it?” Jay asks, whereupon a jumbo jet breaks through the brume, its belly huge, jet turbines roaring. Dunn’s prop plane pinwheels and barely avoids crashing into it.

“Whoa, Nelly!”

The noise is astonishing.

The jet vanishes almost instantly, it happens so fast Jay doesn’t even feel the panic until it’s already gone, leaving a whirlpool of turbulence and wind shear that has Dunn fighting with his throttle just to stay aloft.

“—I don’t think so, no,” he says to Jay. “We’re kinda splitting hairs between LAX and John Wayne flight grids here.”

Jay thinks:
No shit.

They’re in the fog for a long time. As if someone painted the cockpit canopy opaque white. For a long time they don’t speak. Jay wants Dunn to concentrate.

“It’s like we’ve been erased,” Dunn announces finally. Fluttering shadow geometries glide past. Buildings?

Erased. Dunn has no idea how that resonates for Jay.

A Milky White Maze, Jay thinks.

“A what?” Dunn asks.

Jay’s surprised he said it aloud. “My friend runs experiments with mice in mazes,” he explains. “I used to work with him. There’s one, it’s made of translucent plastic, sometimes it’s even suspended in water, lit from all sides. The rats have no visual points of reference. The world is a blur.”

A canyon of huge buildings looms dead ahead. Massing from nothing. The Cessna, jacked sideways by Dunn’s sharp reflex, banks gracefully and slips through unscathed, swallowed again by the stubborn marine layer.

“What’s the point?” Dunn asks, meaning the maze. He turns to look at Jay, his face lit cold and white and surreal and edged green by the dull glow of the instrument panel.

“I don’t know,” Jay says, sorry he brought it up.

“Maybe,” Dunn suggests, “it’s so they won’t remember how to get back to where they started. So the rats gotta, you know, always go forward.”

“Mice, but yeah.” But Jay’s mind goes elsewhere. Back to where this journey started. Vaughn and the lab: experimental neurosis. “To the doors.” Consuming themselves, in their choler and confusion.

“The what?”

“Doors,” Jay repeats. “Forward to and through the doors.”

“Oh.” Dunn, nodding as if he understands.

Crackle of static on the radio, some airport control tower, comprehensible only to Sam. Dunn asks why Jay quit that job with Vaughn. Jay recalls the day he was tasked with shaving two dozen rats’ heads, placing them in a clamp-like restraint, using a glorified drill press to puncture tiny holes just behind the ears into which thin wires were cemented and soldered to solid-state microprocessors the rats wore like football helmets, chin-strapped on, blinking teal LEDs and a whip antennae, and then Vaughn’s project leader, a sun-starved
psycho-behavioral post-doc goth goddess with violet-tinted contact lenses and a tangle of ginger hair and a filthy lab coat, tapping steadily on a wireless tablet keyboard sending messages to the rats that had them gyrate tilt-a-wheel until their eyes bled and they convulsed into comas.

“I got let go,” Jay says. “Funding issues.”

A dreamworld flickers in and out of existence as the squawk of air traffic control harmonizes with the drone of the plane. Parallel rows of halogen lights beckon them forward, skewed in the cockpit windshield.

“Jeez. We’re cockeyed,” Dunn says, and fusses with the wings to straighten their orientation to the runway guides as the Cessna gently falls to its impending landing.

Then: a muddle of flashing red lights: another phalanx of patrol cars, this time police, racing along on either side of the runway to keep pace with the plane.

Unnerved, Dunn says, “Shit—what are—FUCK. Cops.” Jay, of course, assumes it’s Public’s guys, Feds, waiting to re-collect him, and starts to mentally resign himself to it, but Dunn throws the throttle forward, and the engine complains because: “Oh, man, and I got twelve kilos of pot in the luggage bay. SHIT. SHIT.”

Twelve kilos of—what?

Landing gear toes the tarmac, the tires skid and the plane bounces. Directly ahead of them, at the far end of the runway, are more cop cars and emergency vehicles and lights flashing spectral through the fog. The Cessna, powering up, accelerates toward the blockade, landing gear touching twice more before leaving the tarmac for good and barely clearing the hardware below, men in fire suits and uniform frozen, watching as the plane careens over them, one strut clipping something with a sickening metal shriek of a wheel torn loose, and the plane is tugged violently sideways, Sam Dunn screaming as he
tries to hold his plane from nose-diving left: “LOSE THE WEED! LOSE THE WEED!”

The Cessna lifts wildly, knifes into the fog, and the police dragnet vanishes behind them. Muffled cry of the engines peaking and then simply cutting out. Stalled.

Silence.

“Initiating plan B,” Dunn mumbles, numb.

Jay is afraid to move. Waiting for the impact of a crash . . . that doesn’t happen.
Plan B?

Dunn is fighting with switches, trying to will the engines to restart, and yelling at Jay: “THERE’S A—I’M—DUDE, helpmeout . . . LUGGAGE HATCH! IN THE BACK! IN THE BACK! THROW—THE WEED—OUT the DOOR—BEFORE I PUT THIS FUCKER DOWN! I’LL . . .” Dunn doesn’t finish the thought.

Scrambling back through the cockpit only because maybe then Dunn will shut up and concentrate, losing his balance, catching himself on the bulkhead, Jay gropes at the prominent handle he finds on the floor in the back of the cabin, twists and yanks the compartment hatch open, revealing: nothing. No dope. Just the mailbags. He braces himself to turn, confused, frowning, and say something to Dunn, but Dunn is no longer at the Cessna’s controls and as Jay’s brain struggles to process all these incoming contradictions his world explodes because the plane finds ground.

The noise of the impact is so deafening Jay registers only the change of pressure in his ears. He’s thrown violently forward, feetfirst, but somehow catches and braces himself between the backs of two seats while the fuselage fishtails and carves like the bow of a boat through turf and mud that sprays helter-skelter into the cockpit behind a bright curtain of shattered windshield glass as the plane finally impales itself on the low branches of a huge tree, bark and greenwood erupting scattershot, the smell of burnt wood and jet fuel and a gray
darkness that grows a muffled silence, fingers of fire reaching upward, smoke gathering, the sound of Jay’s breathing, coughing, his own heartbeat, the sound of his shoes banging on metal, the searing pain that shoots through his ankle and then a perfect oval punches out of the darkness as the Cessna’s door falls away and a shadow passes. Chalky light spills in on Jay, the weblike fractured branches of the tree crowd the cabin, but he’s been sheltered by the seats.

The Cessna’s torn and buckled metal tick tick ticks with stress points released. Hacking up the acrid smoke, Jay tumbles out of the plane, onto the cold, wet grass of a small city park. Fog hangs curtained across a bright green field bordered by trees that seem to be holding the formless drapery aloft.

He rises onto his hands and knees, looks back at the plane. Tangled fingers of oak have punctured the cockpit like an iron maiden where Sam was sitting. Tongues of flame lick the broken cockpit glass still held in the windshield’s warped frame. Reflection of tree, sky, fire, and the exquisitely fractured safety glass prevent Jay from seeing inside.

Sirens, distant, mournful. Growing louder.

Jay gets up, his ankle fat, aching. And he runs. Like Ginger told him to.