I know what I’m doing, he said aloud to the empty house. Everything’s under control.
He wished he could talk to Sergio directly, reassure him. I still have what it takes.
§
The door to the bookstore was propped open with a fat hardcover, the spine separated, the dust jacket mottled with rain: The Encyclopedia of Urban Architectural Design.
The place was a front for something, he’d figured, waiting at the house for night to return. A bookstore with nothing else around for miles? But a front for what?
Once inside, he was surprised to discover the place really was a bookstore after all. Along the baseboard, vertical stacks of faded books at staggered heights created a miniature skyline sprinkled evenly with dust. The case just inside the door was jammed floor to ceiling with history books. The light was poor and oddly brownish, as if it were rising up from the dirty floor. After a few steps, another tall, unsteady bookcase appeared on his right, and he had to inhale to squeeze through the narrow passage.
At the other end of the passage, the shop opened up slightly. Somewhere across the store Dobbs heard voices. Men’s voices. Neither one seemed to fit the group from the night before.
Soon several more long bookcases appeared on Dobbs’s right, leading off into the shadows. It was as if they’d been set up to make it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. He turned left for no other reason than that the aisle was the most passable. But the window turned out to be another dead end.
The voices had grown more audible, but Dobbs still wasn’t even sure where they were coming from. Above his head ran a length of pipe wearing a furry coat of cobwebs and dust. A security camera peered down at him from the corner. Cameras, for used books?
He’d just come to another dead end when he located the voices somewhere around the corner.
“Risky.” The man seemed to be straining to keep his voice down.
“What’d you expect?” the second man said.
“I don’t know,” said the first. “I just—”
The second man sighed. “We’ve talked about this a million times.”
Dobbs was sure now that neither man had been among the ones he’d seen the night before. They sounded older, too eager not to be overheard.
He started off in the other direction. Around the bend he came upon a wooden desk and chair. And there was a side table supporting a primitive cash register. Beside it, a tiny flower-patterned teacup in a matching saucer let off a steadily climbing twist of steam. He thought of the blonde and the girl with anime eyes, and he wondered which of them the cup belonged to. The china was delicate, like the blonde. But there was no trace of her dark lipstick on the rim.
The desk was cluttered with books and paper, a stack of blotchy flyers dangling over one edge: Bricoleur @ The Woodshed. No cover. All ages. Video premiere. Music + Revolution. And the same odd line drawing of a stapler that he’d seen on the van’s bumper sticker, no less obscure here.
Dobbs folded a copy of the flyer into his pocket. Then he turned to go. But that was the moment the two men appeared in front of him, each carrying an armful of books. They were both middle-aged. The black man wore some sort of uniform: dark blue pants and a matching shirt. The photo badge clipped to his pocket said his name was Darius. The Hispanic man was stocky, with long hair pulled back into a ponytail. His clothes were spotted with paint and stain, and his dry, coarse hands were nicked and scraped.
“You surprised me,” Dobbs said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
The Hispanic man looked around. “Do you work here?”
Dobbs lowered himself into the chair behind the desk. “Find everything you were looking for?”
The two men set their books down on top of the posters. As if he’d been doing it all his life, Dobbs folded back the covers. The prices were penciled in the top corner of the first page, as always. The two men watched in silence as he tried to add up the numbers.
Wiring. Farming. Home electronics. “You must be pretty handy,” Dobbs said.
Darius had a look on his face like he’d been caught with a stack of porn.
“How much?” the Hispanic guy said.
At the bottom of the pile, unrelated to any of the rest, was a guidebook to Mexico, ten years out of date. “Beautiful country,” Dobbs said.
The Hispanic man’s face grew taut.
“For you two,” Dobbs said, “an even twenty.”
Each man fished ten bucks from his pocket.
The Hispanic guy picked up the books and turned away in silence, taking a step in the direction of what Dobbs hoped was the exit. The black man started to do the same, but at the last moment he paused, catching a glimpse of something over his shoulder. “Do you play?”
Following Darius’s finger, Dobbs saw an old Fender propped up on a chair, its red finish crosshatched with scratches.
“I’m learning.”
“I played once,” the black man said. “I was pretty good.”
“Darius!” the other yelled.
Darius might have gone on, but he saw his partner’s jaw rocking in its socket. “I’ll see you,” he said.
Dobbs gave a broken wave. “Come again.”
As soon as they were out of sight, Dobbs put one of the tens on top of the register. The other, his commission, he put in his pocket.
In his dream that morning, the two men from the bookstore came to him dressed as generals, donning pointed hats and sabers. Even without a weapon of his own, Dobbs knocked them off their horses, before single-handedly taking on their armies. But then why, when he woke up in the middle of the afternoon, did he feel so afraid?
Two
Everything on the monitors was gray: the blacks were a dark charcoal gray; the whites were like newspaper pages. The walls of bookcases appeared as undifferentiated smudges of darkness. Because of its size, the china cup was only a blur against the dark desktop, but Myles knew it was there. He’d dropped the tea bag in just moments before the meeting started, and then he’d forgotten it. All the way up the stairs and across the store — there was no way for him to get it now. And anyway the tea would be too bitter. He liked two minutes of steeping, no more, no less, with water just shy of boiling.
“Myles,” McGee said. “Is there anything you want to add?”
Myles turned his head at the sound of her voice, finding himself once again in the world of color. Everyone at the table was staring at him, McGee straddling her ladder-backed school chair. To see her there, surrounded by pads of yellow paper and three eager friends, made Myles happy and hopeful. They’d been meeting almost every night this week to go over plans for the demonstration. Finally they were down to the last details.
“It all sounds great,” he said.
McGee frowned. “I said I’m worried no one’s going to show up. Again.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Myles said.
“You always say it’s going to be fine,” McGee said. “And then no one shows up.”
Across the table, Holmes and April watched the volleys in silence.
“It’ll be fine,” Myles said. “It’ll all work out.”
Myles could see by her expression that she wasn’t convinced, but when was she ever? She was too hard on herself. Lately she couldn’t see the good in anything they did. More than anything else, he wished he could show her.
He returned his gaze to the monitors, to his forgotten cup of tea. But something in that brief time had changed upstairs. Myles detected movement on one of the cameras. Two customers, men — one dark, the other a medium shade of gray — stood inside the doorway of the bookstore. The black man had pulled a book off the shelf and was leafing slowly through the pages. Arms folded across his chest, the other looked furtively up and down the aisle.