The thing in the photo looked more like a flying saucer than a car.
“Ever drive one?” Darius said.
“So fast, bugs vaporize on the windshield.”
“Is that something you need?”
“What’s need got to do with it?” Carl turned the page and did a double take at a little red convertible. “Get your boy one of these,” he said. “Zero to pussy in three point one seconds.”
Darius’s coffee had grown cold. “Carjacked in three point two.”
At nine, Darius had his first break. He walked to the far side of the lobby, where he could have some privacy. He called Sylvia. She was already in bed.
“Thanks for doing the shopping,” she said. “Did you wash the sheets, too?”
“I spilled coffee,” he said. “Sorry.”
“They feel nice.”
Darius asked about the kids, about her day at work, about everything that crossed his mind, but none of it helped to distract him from what he’d done that morning, what he’d promised himself he’d never do again.
His voice nearly failed him when it was time to say goodbye. “I love you.”
She said, “I love you, too.”
Why wasn’t that enough?
By the time his break was over, the cleaning women had settled in on their floors and commenced their work. Darius began his rounds. It was exercise of sorts, and talking to the women while they cleaned made the time go a little faster. But then at midnight, when it was time for Carl’s break, Darius had to return to the booth and the quiet tedium of the security monitors.
By midnight, Darius knew, Sylvia was long asleep. Shawn and Nina, too. And then there was Michael Boni. What would he be doing? He probably never slept. Darius didn’t know where he lived, but he imagined him in a narrow room, on a bare mattress, a pile of books on an unsteady side table. There’d be no carpet or rugs. The paint would be yellowed and peeling. Windows? Maybe a small one. Michael Boni would be sitting on the bed with his back to the wall. No television. No radio. He’d be smoking. Did he smoke? Darius had never seen him smoke, but it seemed likely. Michael Boni would be staring at the peeling walls and plotting.
Some of the facts of Michael Boni’s life might still have been hazy, but what Darius knew for sure was that his new partner was a man of absolutes. Their chance meeting in the post office, their rendezvous downtown, their trip to the bookstore to see what they could learn — all of it confirmed his first impression, that once Michael Boni made up his mind, there was no going back. For Darius, there was something irresistible in Michael Boni’s clarity, and it pleased him that it had been his own idea that Michael Boni had latched on to. A clean slate. They could start over, fresh.
It was midnight, and Violet would be getting into bed. She slept in the nude, he imagined. Darius had no way of knowing for sure. They’d never spent a night together. Was there a good reason for sleeping with a girl just three years older than his daughter? There was not, though there were plenty of bad ones. Did Sylvia deserve better? She did. So who was he to be sitting here supervising the cleaning women, dusting and vacuuming and polishing, making sure they didn’t try to sneak home with a roll of stolen toilet paper?
He’d made a mess of things. With Sylvia, with Violet. He’d known this for months, since the first time he’d let Violet into his bed. And yet still the affair continued, because he’d been too weak to make it stop. But now he had Michael Boni to show him how to follow through.
No more weakness.
A clean slate.
Start over.
Four
In his dream, gray slippery smoke in the shape of a lamprey slid under the door of the bookstore. There were five people in the basement. The smoke asphyxiated them in their sleep. After its work was done, the smoke came home and curled up at Dobbs’s feet.
He awoke on the floor, bathed in sweat. He got up and went outside. The street was a well of darkness. To the north and east, there was more of the same. But to the west and south, the trees wore faint halos of light. He buttoned up his coat and bolted the door behind him.
After a couple of blocks, Dobbs had left the residential streets behind. The road led to a small bridge crossing over a grassy canal. Down the center of the canal ran parallel depressions that must once have held train tracks. On the other side of the bridge loomed a pair of water towers dipped in rust, held up by spider legs. The factory underneath looked as though it were being consumed from within by some sort of cancer.
He reached an intersection. There was no traffic, but across the street he saw a faintly illuminated shadow, tinted as the signal flashed from green to yellow to red. An elderly woman, slightly stooped. In her arms she held a small wooden crate she seemed to be struggling to keep from tipping over. In a moment, she reached the curb, stepping down into the crosswalk.
From somewhere up the street thundered a low, steady rumble. A boxy sedan emerged from the dark, trailing a bloom of incandescent smoke. As the car sped closer, the rumble doubled down, saturating the pavement with sound. The vibrations quivered their way up Dobbs’s legs and into his intestines, clenching hold of his chest. There was no way the old woman could have missed the noise herself, and yet she kept coming. As she crossed the double yellow line, Dobbs could see her and the car converging. He meant to yell, but there was no time. He got only as far as filling his lungs with air.
The tires squealed. Dobbs’s entire body flinched.
He opened his eyes just in time to see the car swerve into the other lane. The old woman looked up briefly, as if she thought she’d heard someone call her name.
“Are you okay?” Dobbs said when she reached the sidewalk. She looked startled by the sound of his voice.
“Fine,” she said. “How are you?” The old woman wore a purple floral housedress with nothing over it, but she seemed not to feel the cold. She was dark-skinned and even older than he’d thought, well into her seventies. There was a mole on her right lobe that looked like an earring, a black pearl. She was so calm, it seemed pointless to mention what had almost happened.
The crate in her arms was filled with what looked like tools, garden implements. Trowels, pruners, weeders, claws — the metal corroded with dirt and rust. “What are those for?” he said.
“What do you think?”
In their condition, they could have passed for weapons, slow death by tetanus. “Are you a gardener?”
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It’s late.”
“I’m looking for a place to eat.”
The old woman looked up and down the street. “You find it,” she said, “you let me know.”
She resumed walking, heading north, disappearing into the shadows of an old stone church.
Dobbs kept going, farther than he’d been before. Every once in a while there was a house, but more often there wasn’t anything at all. The streetlights worked in unpredictable patterns. Entire blocks might be completely dark, followed by blocks that hummed and glowed.
Without meaning to, he found himself circling back to the bookstore. Like everything else at this hour, it was closed.
He was getting nowhere, and he was wasting too much time.
He needed a car.
He remembered loading docks, fleets of paneled delivery trucks. Back where he’d started, the wholesalers and produce distributors.
But when he got there, he realized he’d forgotten the fortifications, the trucks corralled within razor-wire fences.
It took him two more nights to find what he needed.
It was a low, nondescript building of earth-colored block. Peering through one of the small, dirty windows around back, he saw the enormous garage inside.