In the scuffle, the powdered wig slid across the dome of Myles’s head. Freed from his legs, the lectern pirouetted once in the wind, then shot across the plaza like a luge. The speech swirled in some invisible vortex.
As the guard pulled him away, Myles pointed to Holmes and shouted, “Bailiff! Take away the prisoner.”
Despite the quiver in his fingers, Holmes managed to remove a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. And with the guard distracted, he strode over to the entrance and locked his own wrist to the handle of the nearest door.
§
McGee was calling it a party. But what the hell was the occasion? As best Holmes could tell, they had nothing to celebrate. A couple clips of their arrest on the evening news? Snarky, pompadoured anchors who couldn’t even be bothered to mention what the protest had been about? From what Holmes had heard in the hour he’d been out of jail, the local stations had been playing Myles’s performance for comic relief, a fuzzy cell phone video shot by someone passing by. It was hard to imagine McGee impressed by such cheap notoriety. But here she was, throwing a party.
Maybe Myles had gotten what he wanted after all.
Fitch had delivered the invitation when he came to bail them out. But he didn’t seem to know anything either.
“All I heard was ‘party,’ ” Fitch said, scrawling his name on the clerk’s forms and returning them unread. “But something tells me there’s not going to be a lot of dancing.”
Fitch’s response to the situation was vodka. It was his response to everything. He’d been medicating himself with the stuff almost nonstop since his own charade a few days before with the woman Holmes had seen in the plaza. The encounter had left Fitch unnerved.
“I still don’t know how she did it,” he said as he drove Holmes and Myles from lockup to the loft. “Some kind of Jedi mind tricks.”
Fitch had been insisting he’d done everything he was supposed to do, asked the woman every question McGee had written down for him. And still Ruth Freeman had revealed nothing.
“I told you I wasn’t cut out for this stuff,” he said to Myles in the rearview mirror. “I told McGee. I barely even know what this shit is about.”
Holmes was having a hard time feigning sympathy. “We’ve only had like a thousand meetings to talk about it.”
In the backseat, Myles sat silently.
“It’s complicated,” Fitch said. “There’s too much shit to keep track of.”
“Especially if you’re asleep.” Holmes looked to Myles for agreement, but he was looking out the window, not even paying attention.
“I’ve got a lot going on,” Fitch said. “That new demo …”
“Have you even started recording?”
Fitch glared back. “I don’t remember you leaping to volunteer for Myles’s little … Shakespeare-in-the-park.”
Myles turned his head briefly at the sound of his name, then drifted back to wherever he’d been.
“I still did it,” Holmes said.
“So did I.”
“Yeah,” Holmes said, “but yours isn’t going on your criminal record.”
“Stop!” Myles shot forward, hovering over the center console.
“I spent the night in jail,” Holmes said. “I’m not done complaining.”
“Stop the car.” Myles was pointing to a store at the corner. “I want to get some cookies.”
Fitch elbowed Myles softly in the head, nudging him back into his seat. “Grown men in a van don’t stop for cookies.”
“For McGee,” Myles said. “They sell her favorite kind.”
“Jail’s not enough?” Holmes said. “We have to buy her cookies?”
“For the party.”
“Should we get balloons, too?” Fitch said. “Is someone turning seven?”
“Don’t be a dick,” Myles said. “Pull over.”
The next logical stop after cookies was the liquor store. Fitch’s supply had run out.
The bottle he picked was squatting alone and dusty in the bottom corner of a buckled aluminum shelf, no brand name, just the word VODKA printed in bold block type across a coat of arms dominated by an eagle wearing a sarcastic smirk. The bottle was the size of a bullhorn. Holmes didn’t drink and never had, but as they drove the rest of the way to McGee and Myles’s loft, he started to feel attached to the weight of the brown paper bag in his lap, and he could imagine clinging to the bottle for the rest of the night.
But he never got the chance. The moment they arrived, Fitch ripped the vodka from Holmes’s hands. The paper bag fell to the floor, and that was where Fitch left it. Still standing in the doorway, Holmes stared at the crumpled sack, debating whether to pick it up, feeling his mood grow even darker.
“We brought you something,” Myles said, handing McGee his latest offering.
She took the package, looked at it sideways. “Cookies?”
“Lemon!” Stepping over the dropped bag, Myles put his arm around her shoulders, and she turned her cheek into his kiss.
No How was jail. No You must be tired. Not to mention hungry. McGee just walked toward the kitchen, and everyone followed. April was already inside.
Holmes had always hated coming here. Two steps past the threshold was all it took to remind him. The place, when McGee and Myles found it, had been an industrial graveyard haunted by the ghosts of sad machines. It had fallen to Holmes to try to make the space livable. His reputation as a handyman had been built around a very limited repertoire, but it was more than any of the rest of them had. He’d never understood how Myles and McGee could possess so much energy and so few actual skills.
Holmes had picked up what little he knew from his father, a locksmith and drunk and general tinkerer. And his uncle, a halfhearted slumlord. Also a drunk. But their work was and had been mostly just fixing whatever was broken. They’d never built entire new rooms or routed new plumbing. So Holmes hadn’t either. He’d tried to tell Myles and McGee that he knew exactly as little about that stuff as they did, but McGee had said, “I have faith in you,” as if that and a tool belt were all he needed.
They got what they paid for: a shower stall squatting awkwardly almost in the middle of the room, surrounded by crooked walls. It looked like an outhouse. Every time Holmes walked in the front door, this depressing sight was waiting to greet him.
It wasn’t as if the city had run out of vacancies. McGee and Myles could have bought a whole house with the change in Fitch’s ashtray, but they enjoyed living like this. Or they wanted to enjoy living like this. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Holmes sensed they liked imagining themselves storm chasers dashing into the eye of a tornado everyone else was fleeing. That Holmes himself had fled two years ago, when Fitch offered to let him freeload. Fitch’s parents had bought him a condo in Grosse Pointe Woods, and Holmes had packed up his stuff and moved into the spare bedroom, not giving a shit if anyone called him a sellout. If he wanted to, Holmes had a whole childhood full of shitty, derelict apartments in the city to feel nostalgic about. But why the hell would he? Of course, Myles did, too. They’d grown up down the street from each other. But Myles had McGee, and they seemed to feel some imperative to stay. So did April and Inez, though at least they had an actual apartment, with actual rooms and actual doors.
In the kitchen Holmes poured himself a coffee cup full of cranberry juice. Above his head, the fluorescent lights hummed.
“The men’s room was empty,” Fitch was saying, as Holmes took a seat next to him on the sofa.