Out into one of those oppressive wintry afternoons, the sky over New Jersey a pale battle flag of the ancient nation of winter, divided horizontally, hex thistle above, buttermilk yellow below, over to Broadway to look for a cab, which this time of day is likely heading back off shift to Long Island City and unwilling to pick up fares. So it turns out. By the time she can finally wave one down, city lights are coming on and darkness is falling.
Down at the “safe house,” she hits the buzzer, waits, waits, no reply, the door’s locked, but she can see light around the edges. She peers in to check out the lock situation and notices that only the latch is on, no bolt. After years of experimenting with different store and credit cards, she’s found the ideal combination of strength and flexibility in the plastic game cards the boys keep bringing home from ESPN Zone. Taking one of these now, down briefly on one knee, she has ’loided her way in before she can let herself wonder if it’s such a good idea.
Rodent life, quick shadows flickering across her path. Echoing in the stairwells, screamers on other floors, nonhuman noises she can’t identify. Corner shadows thick as grease, that can’t be seen into no matter how bright your bulb. Hallways lighted fitfully and heat, if any, only through selected radiators, so that there are cold patches, indicating the presence of malevolent spirit forces, according to ex–New Agers of Maxine’s acquaintance. Down some corridor a fire alarm with a dying battery repeats a shrill, desolate chirp. She remembers Windust saying that sundown is when the dogs come out.
The door of the apartment is open. She brings out the PPK, hits the laser, flips up the safety, eases inside. The dogs are there, three, four of them surrounding something lying between here and the kitchen. There’s a smell you don’t have to be a dog to pick up. Maxine slides away from the door in case any of them want to leave in a hurry. Her voice firm enough so far, “All right, Toto—freeze!”
Their heads come up, their muzzles are darker-colored than they need to be. She edges in, along the wall. The object hasn’t moved. It announces itself, the center of attention, even if it’s dead, it’s still trying to manage the story.
One dog goes running out the door, two move up snarling to confront her, another stands by Windust’s corpse and waits for the intruder to be dealt with. Gazing at Maxine with—not a canine look really, Shawn if he were here certainly could confirm—the face before the face. “Don’t I remember you from Westminster last year, Best in Category?”
The nearest dog is a mix of rottweiler plus you name it, and the little red dot has moved to the center of its forehead, encouragingly not jittering around but steady as a rock. The wingdog pauses, as if to see what will happen.
“Come on,” she whispers, “you know what it is, pal, it’s drilling right into your third eye… come on… we don’t need to have this happen…” The snarling stops, the dogs, attentively, step toward the exit, the alpha in the kitchen backs away finally from the corpse and—is it nodding at her? joins them. They wait out in the hallway.
The dogs have done some damage she tries not to look at, and there’s the smell. Reciting to herself a rhyme from long-ago girlhood,
She stumbles to the toilet, hits the exhaust fan, and kneels on the cold tiles beneath the racket of the fan. The contents of the bowl give a slight but unmistakable surge upward, as if trying to communicate. She vomits, seized in a vision of all the exhaust ducts from every dismal office and forgotten transient space of the city, all feeding by way of a gigantic manifold into a single pipe and roaring away in a constant wind of anal gas, bad breath, and decaying tissue, venting as you’d expect someplace over in New Jersey… as meantime, inside the gratings over each one of these million vents, grease goes on collecting forever in the slots and louvers, and the dust rising and falling is held there, accumulating over the years in a blackened, browned, secret fur… merciless powder-blue light, black-and-white floral wallpaper, her own unstable reflection in the mirror… There’s vomit on the sleeve of her coat, she tries to wash it out with cold water, nothing works.
She rejoins the silent stiff in the other room. Over in the corner, the Lady with the Alligator Purse watches, silent, no highlights off her eyes, only the curve of a smile faintly visible in the shadows, the purse slung over one shoulder, its contents forever unrevealed because you always wake up before you see them.
“Time’s a-wastin,” the Lady whispers, not unkindly.
Despite which Maxine takes a minute to observe the former Nick Windust. He was a torturer, a murderer many times over, his cock has been inside her, and at the moment she’s not sure what she feels, all she can focus on are the bespoke chukka boots, in this light a soiled pale brown. What is she doing here? What the blessed fuck, did she run over here thinking she could do to stop this?… These poor, stupid shoes…
She takes a rapid tour of his pockets—no wallet, no money, folding or otherwise, no keys, no Filofax, no cellular phone, no smokes or matches or lighters, no meds or eyewear, just the collection of empty pockets. Talk about going out clean. At least he’s consistent. He was never in this for the money. Neolib mischief must have held some different and now-unknowable appeal for him. All he had at the end, with the other world drawing near, was his rap sheet, and his dispatchers have left him to its mercy. The full length of it, the years, the weight.
So who was she talking to, back there in the DeepArcher oasis? If Windust, judging by the smell, was already long dead by then, it gives her a couple of problematic choices—either he was speaking to her from the other side or it was an impostor and the link could have been embedded by anybody, not necessarily a well-wisher, spooks, Gabriel Ice… Some random twelve-year-old in California. Why believe any of it?
The phone rings. She jumps a little. The dogs come to the doorway, curious. Pick up? she thinks not. After five rings an answering machine on the kitchen counter comes on, with the volume set on high so there’s no avoiding the incoming. It’s no voice she recognizes, a high harsh whisper. “We know you’re there. You don’t have to pick up. This is just a reminder that it’s a school night, and you never know when your kids might need you with them.”
Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.
On the way out, she passes a mirror, takes an automatic look, sees a blurred moving figure, maybe herself, likely something else, the Lady again, all in shadow except for a single highlight off her wedding band, whose color, if you could taste light, which for a moment she imagines she can, you’d have to call faintly bitter.
NO COPS OUTSIDE ANYPLACE, no cabs, early-midwinter darkness. Cold, a wind picking up. The glow of inhabited city streets too far away. She has stepped out into a different night, a different town altogether, one of those first-person-shooter towns that you can drive around in seemingly forever, but never away from. The only humanity visible are virtual extras in the distance, none offering any of the help she needs. She gropes through her bag, finds her cellular phone, and of course can’t get a signal this far away from civilization, and even if she could, the batteries are almost dead.
Maybe the phone call was only a warning, maybe that’s all, maybe the boys are safe. Maybe this is a fool’s assumption she can’t make anymore. Vyrva was supposed to be picking up Otis at school, Ziggy should be down at krav maga with Nigel, but so what. Every place in her day she’s taken for granted is no longer safe, because the only question it’s come down to is, where will Ziggy and Otis be protected from harm? Who of all those on her network really is trustworthy anymore?