Shots rang again as he stood at the mouth of the lot. The house. The wondering face of the girl. Involuntarily his body ducked. He looked around in the cold air — one split of dying orange in the dulling sky in the direction he’d come to know as south. A small car sat glowing its parking lights near the barn like a resting hog.
The shots weren’t right — they didn’t sound the same way. They lacked the knock a gunshot had. A tump, a different bang — he didn’t know how to describe it. No houses like in The Boxes to echo off. But the same rhythm, the exchanges of fire, he could hear that — the conversation. The old music of his streets.
A target range? But there were shouts from inside too, and scrambling. An occasional yelp.
Somebody burning their ammo up, he told himself.
He slipped closer to the barn, finding a place to listen.
—
After he’d seen half a dozen men come in or out, singly or in pairs, carrying loads in heavy canvas bags like athletes used, or hunters, he got the nerve to open the door. Slaughterrange. An electronic beep announced him, but a noisy bouquet of Christmas bells rang too, duct-taped to the back of the door.
Long tube lights hung from the rafters hissed and flickered. Maybe the building had once been a garage: the floor was concrete and dipped slightly toward two long, steel-grated drains. The front half was given to two carpets, ratty and colorless, each of which anchored a sofa, a chair, a skid-marked coffee table, and a boxy TV. The back was a counter, antique with glass windows. Over the counter hung a range of weaponry, and a young man stood behind it.
“Hello,” said the man, standing very still. He had a strong gaze and a weak nose, a nose that glistened and twitched like a rabbit’s snout. It was a U’s nose, East recognized.
East said nothing. He studied the guns over the man’s head. Large and gripped out, sniper guns. He’d never seen guns like this in plastic bags before, like hairbrushes at the drugstore. They were not real guns, but he did not know what they were. Some of them looked like fantasy, outer-space guns, colored green and orange like children’s toys.
“Can I help you?” said the man, looking East over. East recognized the small, secret fidgets of his face. He was, maybe, thirty. Behind the counter he would have a real gun.
“What sort of place is this?”
“Best paintball range north of the Ohio River,” the man said automatically, as if it was a phrase he’d been paid to remember.
“Paintball?” said East.
The man reached and drew out a pearl of orange. He tossed it to East. “That’s a stale one,” he said. “That one will hurt when it hits.”
East looked at the faintly luminescent nugget in his hand.
“What are you here for?” said the man. “The job?”
East shrugged.
“Perry’s not here tonight. You might catch him in the morning. He’s in charge; he’ll see you about it.”
“What is the job?”
“It’s, like, assistant. Like a watchman.”
East detected the accent, the harsh sound inside the words. Like a movie spy.
“I can do that,” East said.
“This is a job for a grown man. You have to stay late.”
East said, “I can do a man’s job. I can stay late.”
“What are you,” the man said politely, “thirteen? Fourteen? In school?”
“I’m a man,” East said. “I don’t go to school no more.”
“Ha. Good,” said the man. He had a telltale wetness in his nose, a bubbling. Then two men came in with canvas bags, and East watched them pay and take the tubs of colored balls the man gave them and transfer them into their guns and their own containers with funnel-shaped loaders, perched on the edge of the sofas, mumbling profanely. At last they returned the tubs and moved up a stairway beside the counter and out a door that went to the back of the building, the berm side.
“Can I look?” East said.
“Not tonight,” said the counterman. “Come back tomorrow.” At first he’d seemed friendly, but now he’d seemed to have changed his mind.
In the parking lot East sat far apart from the other men’s cars and trucks and listened to the shooting music fill the air. Dull night. No stars. He found himself starved for sleep. The strange hours.
He awoke with a gasp, leaning against the building. He had been dreaming of the van, someone terrible peppering it with bullets: Michael Wilson, somehow, but with Sidney’s face, firing out the mouth of the cabin in Wisconsin where the daughter was the dead Jackson girl aiming at them from beneath the suitcase. There was no shaking this. There was no far enough to settle his mind at sleep.
Leaned up against the wall was a roll of pink insulation. The wall type, fiberglass. He checked it, shook it — dry, no mice or vermin.
He found the largest truck in the yard, a jacked-up Ford with a work bed. He fed ten feet of insulation in between the huge back tires. Then he crawled in on top of it and fetched the rest of the roll around him, like a blanket, like a wrapper, sheltering under the huge round differential with its burnt-syrup smell. The cold and the lights muffled down, and he slept to the knocking of the shots in the yard beyond.
At one point in the night he woke and saw, through the hole in the end of his pink swaddling, the sky. The truck above him had gone. But he was still there.
18
The morning light startled East, and he struggled to unbundle himself, unwrap, to find his feet and stumble free. Pink strands in his mouth, drying at his lips. Pink fleece in his hair. All his skin crawled.
Then his head cleared. He went back, picked up the insulation, and rolled it carefully, tightly. Leaned it back up where it had been.
He walked down the highway, furtive in the cold air, and revisited the doughnut shop, for its bathroom as much as the food. He washed in the sink with the palms of his hands. A spill of salt at the corners of his mouth, streaks of wet on his sweater. The black eye slowly reshaping itself. His muscles lank and dog-tired under his skin. He could not bear to look in the mirror at what was left.
Purchased two doughnuts but could not bring himself to sit in the warm little shop, among other people. He went instead down the street, to brood by himself outside the little closed motel.
—
When East opened the door again, there was one person sitting in the big white building of Slaughterrange: an old man, pink like a ham, larger than the bar stool he occupied. Sandpaper bristle of ginger hair. He was holding a small piece of machinery in his left hand and rendering it with the screwdriver in his right.
“You the one Shandor said was looking for a job?” he bellowed without looking up.
East sized the man up, and he stopped short. Six foot five, three hundred pounds, maybe. The sort of man who was used to moving things. He lay down the tool and the chunk of beaten metal, and he brushed his hands on his Carhartt overalls.
“Was that you lying in the yard last night, son?”
East did not lie. “I fell asleep.”
“Cold,” said the white man, “to be falling asleep, under Tim Crane’s truck. Where you staying?”
East said nothing.
“You the one, then, that wants the job?”
East nodded. Kept his eyes on the old man’s eyes. There was something wrong with them. Sticky. Not high, but lagging a bit.
“I got to ask you a few questions.”
East said, “I know.”
“Name?”
“Antoine.”
“You had a job before?”
“I did security. Two years.”