Fifty Mice: A Novel (24 page)

“A long way from the bar. And so I didn’t believe it had happened. I had no proof . . . that it ever happened.” Jay thinks about this, then adds, “I didn’t look for any proof, either, I know. But.”

“You carried her out of the bar,” Magonis says. “Your actions were . . . unusual.” He grips the arms of his chair and pushes himself more upright. “And as we watched you, on various surveillance cameras in the parking lot and buildings in the area, watched you carry her across the street, into the building where she lived, we thought: it’s a hide-and-seek thing. And then we watched you some more. Patient. I mean, it’s not like memories are dead. They—”

“They’re dead all right. And corpses keep their secrets. Forcing you into,” Jay smiles bitterly, “communication with ghosts. That’s the only evidence you got that means anything, as far as I can see.”

Magonis stares at him. His question unanswered.

“Sam Dunn,” Jay says finally.

“What?”

“The charter pilot who flew me out of here. The chop-socky film nut. Dunn.” He gestures nebulously. “In the bar. Among all those faces, his—”

“His.”

“Yeah. A distorted reflection of him in the glass. I can still see it.” Jay could. He made himself see it. “I didn’t make the connection until I saw him here, on the island, and even then . . .” Jay lets whoever’s listening in try to complete the thought, because he doesn’t have anything left.

“So what are you saying? That Dunn was the shooter? Dunn?”

Jay shakes his head and shrugs. “I’m saying whatever comes into my mind. Isn’t that what you want?”

“If Dunn was the shooter, Dunn would have the list. People on it would already be,” Magonis, catching himself, editing himself, “well, compromised—and he wouldn’t be bothering with you or your friend.” The federal shrink stares at him, one eye fixed, one wandering, and Jay can’t tell which is the one struggling to see through him, or if it even matters now.

“You didn’t see anything,” Magonis says with an edge.

“Yeah, I’ve been saying that all along, but the fact is? I saw plenty,” Jay tells him. “Just not what interests you.” Then asks, “Is that it? Are we finished?”

“You tell me.”

“We’re done,” Jay says. And in the chilled darkness of the makeshift surveillance room that Jay imagines is probably right downstairs, John Public and Jane Doe will stare blankly at four monitors on which four Jays walk out of office 204.

PIANO PRELUDE,
faintly out of tune, and awkward; the deliberate jauntiness of a primary-school music teacher aspiring to something like Sondheim, but never making it there.

Jay can’t get it out of his head.

He’s walking with purpose down Crescent Avenue, in the silt light of dusk, onto the Green Pleasure Pier, where the new Pacific Boats rental kiosk guy, Valario, is lowering the wing flap shutters that secure the counter windows, done for the day.

Jay’s come more or less directly from his session with Magonis. As his plan unfolds, resolute, inescapable, he starts to think it’s so dumb it might even work. Everything is stacked against his succeeding, and he knows that even in success everything is stacked against what he wants to happen afterward ever working out.

But Jay has chosen his door: he’s going through it: tonight.

He’s made a couple of stops on the way to the pier, creating his own admittedly improvised, abbreviated, but nevertheless adult-size milky white maze in the hope that it will help obfuscate the obvious and buy him more time: first, beer at the Nautilus, a bar he’s never been in before, where a couple of locals who rented
Blue Valentine
for the sex scenes and were disappointed sat at a corner table, playing
rummy. Locals. He didn’t think they were marshals, or in the program. Then, at the tiny grocery store, he bought bottled water and snacks and three thermal blankets that he threw away in a dumpster a couple blocks later, making sure that no one saw him do it.

He asked Floria about the weather, and she told him it was going to be a quiet night.
No habrá viento.
Calm.

“Yow, Mister-mister,” Valario says in his Eurotrash hip-hop way, before Jay even reaches him. He’s not exactly in the program, just some collateral damage of a garden-variety drug case that went postal and now the government feels responsible for his safety. He wants to be a deejay. He wants Jay to be a record company R&D guy the marshals have taken into custody, and has half convinced himself that Jay is stowed away here because of testimony he’s going to give that will bring down the record business and make it possible for aspiring musicians—or mash-up artists—like Valario to thrive in the feeding frenzy that surely follows. Jay knows that Valario is part of the loose network of part-time amateur spies that have helped Doe and Public keep a rein on him.

He’s counting on it, actually.

“I need a boat overnight.”

“You can see with your eyes I am closed.”

“I promised the kid I’d take her to see the flying fish.”

Valario shrugs, looks at Jay with no expression, no judgment. “Better weather tomorrow, my friend.”

“C’mon.”

Valario shrugs again. Stares out across the sea. Then back at Jay. “Five hundred dollars.”

“That’s ridiculous.” Jay will haggle a bit just for form. Valario expects it. “Your day rate is one hundred.”

Downturn of mouth, Valario cracks his neck, and flips the latches on the window shutters with a kind of finality.

Jay looks away, south, and sees, hurrying to the Cabrillo Mole ferry landing, Magonis, going as fast as his old legs and cane will allow him, handle of a small rolling suitcase in his free hand, a collection of books bungee-corded awkwardly to the top. The shrink is boarding the day’s last boat, which is idling, impatient, at the passenger pier, preparing to head back to L.A.

They know it’s the endgame,
Jay thinks.

Even from a distance Magonis looks glad to be going. But then, unaccountably, stops. Turning at a shout to a burst of bright red silk coming at him on strap heels: the old actress, a whirling of pale arms and legs that furls into the bigger man and nearly disappears in his unlikely embrace.

“Two-fifty,” Jay offers Valario.

“Four.”

“Three.”

“And you will bring it back first thing in the morning, clean and spanking, no bilge water I have to bail, full can of gas.”

Magonis and the old actress, heads touching, her scarf sailing, her face canted back under his like in the movies, the old ones, before love got deconstructed.

“Deal.”

A final ferry horn calls. The odd couple separates, Magonis hustling off, doesn’t look back.

The glass-rippling water of the bay judders with the twilight. Los Angeles glisters on the eastern horizon, like an expensive piece of jewelry that someone has stepped on and ruined.

At which, as if cued, the engagement ring, Stacy’s rock, comes out of Jay’s pocket, worth considerably more than three hundred dollars, but Jay doesn’t care.

After the ring has changed hands, operating and safety instructions given, and three life vests produced from a bin at the back of the
kiosk, Jay knows that Valario will be in the darkness of his shop, dialing his cell phone to report to the
Federales
what has happened, while, out on the end of the dock Jay yanks the cord of a faded fiberglass skiff’s outboard engine, kicking it to life.

•   •   •

A
nd he imagines:

Jane Doe is staring out a window and into the kitchen of Jay and Ginger’s bungalow, where Helen is fussing with Ginger’s hair, trying to put a ribbon in it that matches the one in hers.

The girl who won’t speak.

The ringtone—the first few bars of “Brick House”—causes Doe to get her phone from her bag: “Yeah?”

The house is vacant. Jay has looked into it, and has seen that a couple cardboard moving boxes are all that remain of the star-crossed fiction that was Barry and Sandy.

As his boat glides across the harbor toward the brightly lit casino façade, Jay imagines Doe listening to Valario’s soft reporting, tapping to end the call, and pushing her coat aside and adjusting the gun that he has never not seen strapped to her hip.

In the mirror on the mantel he imagines she looks back at herself and, perhaps, for a moment, because of darkness and irresolution, doesn’t recognize her own face.

•   •   •

J
ay trims the tiller of the outboard motor and weaves his Boston whaler through the crowded marina, zigzagging in and out of the moorings but advancing steadily toward the casino ballroom and the navigation light at the end of the narrow man-made breakwater that extends from it like an apostrophe.

He wants to be on the harbor side of the building to better access
the concrete walkway that encircles it, but because of the fuel docks and the harbor patrol headquarters he doesn’t dare row closer than the point of the jetty, so Jay secrets and secures his skiff in the shadows among and scrambles his way back to the casino along the tumbled curl of quarried quartz dividing Avalon Bay from the sea.

The harbor water is like dark glass.

Light skitters across it, nervous.

There’s only one part of Jay’s scheme that worries him:

Ginger doesn’t know about it.

•   •   •

Y
ou wouldn’t think that grade-school kids could do
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
justice.

Watching from the deep shadows of the casino’s vast hollows, Jay imagines it was Public’s mother’s favorite fairy tale, back in the day; how she might have loved the brutal justice of it, and passed this on to her son, and the romance: all those kids who never come back—but, now, here, as, in a spotlight, five children, stage-stiff, in furry rat suits and those weird German shorts with suspenders, begin to sweetly sing the penultimate song in a musical, Public wears the squared-off expression of a man who might grudgingly admit the performance was not as painful as he expected.

Auf wiedersehen

farewell

good-bye—

Upturned faces of the parents glow in the backwash of the stage lights; the old actress, front row, mascara tears streaming down her face. Behind them, Jane Doe slides through the twilight to where
Public stands, hands in pockets, his eyes ticking to the wings, to Ginger and Helen. Wary. Expectant.

The marshals’ heads overlap, they exchange words.

Ginger turns with a start when Jay touches her on the shoulder. Almost eclipsed by shadows, he puts his hands up, defensive, afraid she’s going to take a swing at him, that she knows some cop karate or something, but she just stares at him until he lets his hands come down on her shoulders lightly and walks her farther back into the gloaming; his pants reek of salt water, her body throws heat against his icy-cold skin.

“I can get us out of here,” he blurts out, more agitated than he intends to be. “But it has to be right now.”

Ginger seems unmoved. Her eyes follow his worried gaze, over her shoulder, to the dark smudges that are Public and Doe, motionless behind the audience. “What did you tell them?”

“Yes or no, Ginger.” Jay has a timetable in his head, an ever-narrowing window of opportunity, and he stays stubborn. “It’s pretty basic, you know? This door or that one.”

Ginger asks it again. “What did you tell them?”

And Jay says, “I made up a life.”

Ginger stares hard, as if trying to look into him, and the sudden ache of doubt that Jay feels in his heart is not an illusion. Her eyes are black, her mouth set hard.

“I made up a life, what do you say to that?” he tells her, then, not sure he wants to hear her answer.

But a small voice behind Ginger says, simply, “Yes.”

Helen. The rope for the clouds wrapped around her hand, her posture and expression intent, no nonsense.

Ginger’s slow turn. Her astonishment. Her disbelief.

Now Ginger’s the one who can’t speak.

Dropping to her knees, to Helen’s level, eye to eye, Ginger’s staggered look swerving to Jay, and back to Helen, who tells her gravely:

“Mommy, say yes.”

Ginger reaches out and touches the corners of her daughter’s lips with fingers made unsteady by all those emotions Jay has promised would rule. It’s as if she can’t begin to process everything she’s thinking and feeling. Blinking back tears. Fracking a crooked smile.

•   •   •

C
enter stage, spotlit, a solitary child in a fat rat costume stands, alone, dwarfed by the cavernous casino darkness, blasted by a spotlight, singing her refrain when Helen’s forsaken cardboard clouds drop and strike the floor end-up with a firecracker pop, and quiver for a moment indecisively. The audience gasps. The clouds gently tip and bow and flatten, and the little girl sings, high, softly, eyes closed, unsuspecting that her sky has fallen.

Auf wiedersehen . . .

When Doe and Public come bursting into the jumbled backstage area they will find, amid scattered props and children and stage parents and teachers vexing in baffled confusion, that the rope Helen was holding dangles in the darkness like a punctuation mark, limp, untended.
“Auf wiedersehen . . .”

•   •   •

N
imble in the darkness, Helen scrambles out along the jetty rocks, but Ginger has the wrong shoes, mommy-watching-musical shoes, and she’d take them off, but wherever they’re going,
she says, she may need them, so she and Jay stumble after Helen like three-legged race contestants to where the skiff rolls on gentle waves that lap Casino Point.

Helen tumbles in, excited, she can’t stop talking: “It’s just like Milo, except we have this boat instead of a car. Across the Sea of Knowledge to the Lands Beyond! Mommy, you’re Tock,” Helen explains, as Jay steadies the boat and Ginger clambers aboard, “and you”—Helen points at Jay, who has no idea what she’s talking about—“Humbug, because you can’t be King Azaz or the Magima—Magimathi—
Mathemagician
—and not Officer Shrift or Alec Bings, either . . .”

Jay shoulders the boat away from the rocks and then jackknifes himself up over the gunwale, getting his pants soaked again, barking his shins, the black, frigid water sloughing into the skiff as it lists wildly under his weight. Ginger, still dumbfounded, can’t take her eyes off her chattering Helen, but her hand finds Jay’s shoulder and stays, as if steadying herself on him against the turbulence of her upended world.

Or is she protecting him from it?

The sea heaves black and the lights of Long Beach wink insolently in eddies of thick air coursing above the sea, and light blinks from an opening casino side door and two figures emerge as the skiff clears the point and leaves their sight line, but there is still a drift of the music and the full cast singing its curtain call—

. . . hello again, guten tag, hello, hello . . .

•   •   •

J
ay’s design asks Public to presume that his fugitives are headed for the mainland. After gauging how long it will take to get helicopters up and over from San Pedro for the search and pursuit, Jay wants him to calculate that it might be smarter to wait for the skiff to cross
the channel and pick it up after the insistent current pushes them south to the serpentine, less populated beaches of the Big Orange.

But that’s not where they’ll be. Even if Public decides to send up the air support, and some fast boats with high beams, he won’t catch them. Because out on the open sea, beyond the reach of even the Descanso Beach surf lights now, Jay’s skiff changes course, jets northwest at full throttle, hugging the jigsaw Catalina coastline, planing sawtooth rollers that crash against the blunt stone shores and rebound back, whisking the water foamy where flying fish fling themselves, argent apparitions, toward the moon and stars, much to Helen’s delight.

The casino ballroom, quaint, golden, behind them, ringed with lights—a trophy somebody forgot—is slowly eclipsed by Lion Head Point and they are alone in the watery darkness, headed for Two Harbors.

“You’re bait,” Ginger says gravely, tenderly, and out of nowhere, as if she just figured out the last clue of a crossword. It jars and chills inexplicably.
What?

“Fish don’t eat people.” Helen giggles and rolls her eyes, head cradled in her mother’s lap.

But Ginger is looking only at Jay, fully eclipsed by the dark: he feels her gaze more than sees it. “What?”

“Bait. You know that, right?”

“No. I was bait before L.A. But this is . . .” He stares at her, lost again. “What are you talking about?”