Emma came up off the couch. "Who are you to talk to us that way?"
"Tomorrow night, at possible risk to my life, I'm infiltrating the ranch of a cult to try to help your daughter. That buys me the right to talk to you however I want." He turned to Will, who'd grown surprisingly quiet and thoughtful, his downbent head taking in Leah's graduation picture on the bar. "What's it gonna be?"
"Fine," Will said. "No power moves."
Tim offered his hand, and they shook.
The weedy front lawn brushed Tim's calves. Boston stuck his muzzle through a rip in the screen door and tried to bark, but his constrained jaws managed only a muffled woof. Tim entered and crossed the stained carpet, junk mail and flyers crinkling underfoot, Boston threading his legs like a cat with a thyroid problem. He found Bear at the modest breakfast table placed injudiciously in the middle of the square of peeling linoleum that passed for the kitchen. Bear occupied the single chair accompanying the table; he'd removed the other three due to space considerations, a sensible decision but one that chipped away at Tim's heart every time he dropped by.
Bear was eating turkey chili out of the can and, judging from the smears on his chin, enjoying it greatly.
"Reggie Rondell called," Tim said. "He wants his housekeeper back."
Bear gestured around with a kidney bean-laden fork. "I keep telling Boston to clean up. Guess he's not trained." He retrieved a second chair from the garage and, gripping one leg, handed it to Tim over the table. They sat. Bear tilted the can toward Tim. "I think I got an extra fork around here somewhere."
Tim gestured a blackjack stay. "How'd it go with Tannino?"
"Your pitch made him scowl, but it also put a gleam in his eyes. He says you have one shot at it. Bring him back something concrete and we'll put Betters's dick in the dirt."
"I will. You insert a false death notice for Jenny Altman in the Hall of Records?"
"Yup. And injected Tommy Altman's name into academic records at Pepperdine. And left you a getaway car where we discussed. And took care of everything else."
"I got your message about Aaronson. He called with the breakdown on the food samples?"
"No pot or hash in the brownie, which was disappointing, but it had four times the normal amount of sugar." He frowned thoughtfully. "I thought it tasted too sweet."
"And the punch?"
"The punch was loaded up pretty good. Calms forte, kava kava, and valerian."
"They sound like Caribbean dances. Or venereal diseases."
"Those Caribbean venereal diseases are a bitch." Bear tapped a ba-dum-bum on the wood with two fingers. "They're roots. Kava kava and valerian are like nature's valium. They mellow out your nervous system, impair judgment, cause intense muscle relaxation -- sort of like listening to Al Gore. Calms forte is a homeopathic remedy, does the same but more intensely."
"Can we move on it?"
"Nope. They're all legal over-the-counter substances. Aaronson said they've seen them used before by brainy little fucks looking to date-rape but not wanting a visit from DEA. He found melatonin in the mix, too, but again, manufactured hormones ain't illegal."
"How about intent? They're obviously trying to gain some advantage."
"That only matters if they're trying to gain advantage to do something illegal or coerce people into doing something they don't want to do. The stuff mellowed people out into an experience they elected to sign on for. Back to square one." Bear took note of Tim's expression. "Don't go off all half-cocked now."
"Meaning?"
"No offense, but your track record when the law doesn't conform with your expectations isn't exactly stellar."
"No. It's not. And as you've just pointed out, the law leaves a lot to be desired." Tim gestured for the turkey chili, and Bear stuck the fork in and passed it, looking at him pointedly. Tim took a bite. It wasn't half bad. "Don't worry. I'll do this one right." He stood and hefted the chair back over the table, setting it by the door to the garage. He paused on his way out. "Those poor bastards at the colloquium, you should see them."
"It's like those short people, Rack. At the convention. Being short, they'll find the short community. Your idiots who want to believe in stupid crap, they find other idiots who want to believe in stupid crap. It's hard these days to believe in anything. So they bond together and get handed the community doctrine -- instant download, add faith and stir." Bear wiped his chin. His skin was sallow, sagging in folds beneath his eyes. "People like to fit in." He leaned forward in his solitary chair, the can of chili dotting the center of the round table like a candle. "I imagine it's easier."
Chapter
twenty-six
When Tim entered the house from the garage, smoke was seeping from the oven. Grabbing a pot holder from atop an empty Tombstone Pizza box, he yanked the charred Frisbee from the rack, doused it with the sink sprayer, and dumped it in the trash. He opened the window over the sink and waved the smoke away from the oblivious alarm. Then he slid open the glass doors in the living room to get a cross breeze.
Wiping his eyes, he returned to the kitchen. Black tendrils wisped up from the trash bin, so he poured in a few mugfuls of water until the sizzling stopped. A curled fax lay on the table beside a fan of junk mail -- Dray's bloodwork from her visit to the clinic.
Smudges dappled the paper where she'd gripped it with hands moist from the freezer-burned pizza box.
Monospot: Neg
Hepatitis A Antibody: Neg
sshCG -- Serum Pregnancy: Pos
His hand swiped for the chair back, finally found it. He leaned heavily and stared at the fax, his breath hot in his still-raw throat. When he finally looked up, the haze had cleared from the kitchen.
He walked over to the tiny desk near the door to the garage and rested a hand on the fax machine. Still warm.
He headed through the empty living room, down the empty hall.
Dray stood in the center of Ginny's old room, back to the door. The glow of the setting sun shone through the open blinds, silhouetting her stark form crisply -- the bulge of the Beretta in her hip holster, the starched lines of her uniform, the laces of her boots.
Four walls, a rectangle of carpet marred only by the uniform stripes of the vacuum.
He tapped the open door with his knuckles, and she turned, looking at him over a shoulder. Her face was sheet white.
He moved to her and wrapped his arms around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder. They both gazed out at the quiet street. The inextinguishable scent of Play-Doh materialized from the carpet like a ghost. One of the Hartleys' brood of grandchildren was trying with little success to get a Chinese kite airborne. Their cheeks brushing, they watched the colorful nylon dragon tumble across the neighboring lawn.
They dozed in a tangle of limbs and sheets, using sweaty proximity to fend off the pall of uncertainty that seemed to hover about the house. They didn't talk much, both sifting their individual thoughts first, as they'd learned to when stakes were high and vulnerabilities bared. Around three, knowing the morning promised him a reentry into sleep deprivation, Tim willed himself to unconsciousness, a capability he'd cultivated as a soldier.
The alarm pulled him from a placid sea of ink.
Lenient mattress, silky sheets, the morning smell of Dray's hair. He opened his eyes.
Legs tucked beneath her, Dray leaned forward on the points of her elbows. One hand propped up her chin, the other she held flat-palmed before his mouth. Her face was inches from his; he could sense the warmth coming off it.
A seam of light evading the curtain fell in a band across her cheeks, turning her eyes jade and translucent. Her mouth shifted, pulling slightly to one side.
"Be careful," she said.
Chapter
twenty-seven
You ever think about how our cells die, every minute of every hour? A skin cell lives only a couple of days. All our skin is dead on the outside. When you touch someone else, you're just pressing dead hide to dead hide." Randall's blocklike fists encased the top of the van's steering wheel.
Riding shotgun, Tim had the dubious honor of being the anointed beneficiary of Randall's morbid ruminations. Randall was considerably more social than Skate. He'd been social at the Radisson pickup, social up the 405, social along the 118 and the 210, and now social up Little Tujunga Road, the two-lane snake of asphalt that twisted through the fire-hazard hills of Sylmar. Tim found himself longing for Skate's sullen reticence.
In the back, four high-roller recruits sat crammed together, Shanna among them. Lorraine, the sole Pro, urged them into intimate conversation, gently rebuking them for missteps. Now that he'd endured the colloquium, Tim noted how uncannily her affect and speech shared similarities with Janie's and Stanley John's -- TD's personality downloaded through yet another generation. Firming her austerely fastened bun of auburn hair with acute plunges of bobby pins, she informed Jason Struthers of Struthers Auto Mall that he was being in his head, a censure he acknowledged once Shanna seconded it. Don and Wendy Stanford, who'd gone to the seminar to fulfill their tenth-wedding-anniversary resolution to experience more growth in their marriage, wore sandals despite the chapping cold and matching fleeces sporting their machine-embroidered hedge-fund logo. They held hands until Lorraine informed them their clinginess indicated that they were two people simultaneously hiding behind each other.
Heavy tint opaqued the back windows, keeping the others oblivious to where they were headed. Tim had wound up in the front only because he'd been the last picked up, a happy stroke of luck. Being Randall's reluctant travel companion bought Tim an unobstructed view of the route. Dressed wannabe in designer jeans and an overpriced forest green lamb's-wool pullover, Tim shifted uncomfortably, smoothing his now-brushy goatee with a damp hand. The Program-provided thermos of juice he rested on the rolled-down window's ledge, releasing its contents in increments to the wind whenever the van slowed at a curve.
Randall forged ahead in his lecture, lowering his voice to imply discretion. "Your face looks the same as it did ten years ago, but it's just been re-created over and over, old cells shedding, new ones filling in. We're formless, really, always changing, always dying."
Horses nosed out of sheds. Wind-blasted signs designating dirt off-shoots announced shooting ranges, wildlife way stations, juvie probation camps. The hills billowed grandly, tinted russet by leafing scrub. Broken-down pickups languished in roadside aprons of dusty rock. Dead snakes sprawled on the baking pitch, smashed flat at axle-wide intervals. They passed a crew of youths clad in orange vests mechanically raking brush under the direction of a corrections officer accessorized with a steel whistle and failure - to - communicate mirror sunglasses.
As civilization receded, the others laughed, oblivious, and talked about perished siblings and deadening careers. Tim continued reviewing the world according to Tom Altman, a silent version of the Method actor's rehearsal he'd picked up as a kid watching his father try out new, affecting gambits in the bathroom mirror.
The sun beat down on the cracked dash, making Randall's arm hair gleam like black wire. "We've built our entire culture around sex. Orgasms, endurance, physique -- the obsessions of modern man. But it's all a sham. Sex isn't anything." He turned off Tujunga onto an even more desolate road. The van hiccupped across the crude secondary asphalt, bouncing the passengers in their seats. Low branches of valley oaks screeched across the roof.
Confident from the recent spell of showers, a creek swept under them, bisecting the road. Chain-link fencing provided the van noisy traction across the mossy rocks, water assaulting the wheel wells. The others whooped and cheered.
They wound higher into the hills, bouncing in their seats a good twenty minutes until the van stopped. A waving Pro attended a metal gate bookended by pillars of river-rounded stones. He opened the immense padlock and waved them through. Randall eased the van up a crudely repaved drive. Wild mustard enlivened the hillside in Day-Glo splashes. To the right a barbed-wire fence rose from dense mats of ice plant, pointlessly guarding a cliff face. They passed a cluster of cottages, arriving at a broad sprawling building that resembled a school -- the former treatment wing, according to the decrepit signage.
The wildlife way station, two and a half miles back on the county road judging by the van's speedometer, was apparently society's nearest toehold. Tim checked his cell phone -- no reception, no surprise. He turned it off to conserve the battery.
"We tingle and want and lust, but it's just a prelude for the encounter of gametes, a ploy designed for our hungering genes to forge a zygote. Sex is a loss leader, an excuse our genes export to our heads and loins so we'll smuggle them from warm body to warm body. Do you ever think about that?" Randall pulled into a parking space among a few other cars and two school buses and threw the steering-column gearshift north.
The others spilled out excitedly.
Tim offered Randall a numb smile. "Not until now."
Shouldering the leather overnight bag monogrammed TA, Tim followed the trail of initiates into the building. The others gawked at the trees and barren hillsides, taking note of their surroundings for the first time. Lorraine hurried them inside. They passed a hospital-style check-in desk and several meeting rooms, antiseptic behind reinforced glass and rigid venetian blinds. Randall held open a door, and they shuffled in like pupils.