“I can’t—”
“Do you know the thing I’m talking about?”
“I think so, the…where you can’t hardly walk for all the palm fronds on the pavement, right? And you’ve got to crawl under low branches? Is the…thing still there?”
“I’ve never moved it.”
“But I can’t just walk away here, Sukie, I’d have to…God, go to Radiation Control and get a Whole Body Count, that takes twenty minutes right there, and for my paycheck—”
“Walk away, Pete! It’s just a job.”
“It’s the Arizona Public Service,” Sullivan told her evenly, “that's Edison-owned, just like all the utilities are—the east coast is all Con Ed, and the West Coast is California Edison, and even Niagara up there is on the Edison grid. It’s all Edison, coast to coast. I’d never work for any of the utilities again.”
“A.O.R, dude.”
“Sukie, maybe somebody did hit your car,” he began, then realized that he was talking to a dead phone. He hung it up and pushed it toward Morrie.
“Sukie?” the bartender said.
“My sister. Somebody ran into her car and she wants to make a federal case out of it.” Sullivan was remembering how awkwardly he’d played pool earlier in the evening, and he was annoyed to notice that his hands were trembling. He pushed away the Coke. “Give me a shot of Wild Turkey and a Coors chaser, would you?”
Morrie raised his eyebrows, but hiked up the bottle of bourbon without remarking on the fact that this would be the first real drink Sullivan had ever ordered in the place.
Sullivan sat down at one of the stools and slugged back the bourbon and then chased it with a long sip of cold beer. It made him feel closer to his sister, and he resented that almost enough to push the drinks away.
But not quite. He waved the emptied shot glass at Morrie and had another sip of the beer.
I’m looking Commander Hold-’Em in the eye right now, if you care.
Commander Hold-’Em was Sukie’s name for the Grim Reaper—Sullivan believed she’d derived it from the name of some poker game that she always lost at—and it was also what she had always called whatever gun she carried. For several years, in the old days in L.A., it had been a .45 Derringer with two hollow-point bullets in it. Commander Hold-’Em would certainly still be something as effective today. Sullivan wondered if she would kill herself before even going down to the front desk and making sure that the call had been a trap. Maybe she would. Maybe she had just been waiting, all these years, for a good enough excuse to blow her goddamned head off. And of course not neglect to call him first.
And you know what she wants us for, too, unless you’ve managed to forget everything.
For a moment Sullivan found himself remembering an enigmatic image from his recurrent adolescent nightmare: three cans of Hires Root Beer, sitting in beach sand, unopened forever…a man’s voice saying, You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer—
And he shuddered and thrust the thought away. He lifted his glass and took such a huge slug of beer that his throat ached sharply, and he had to sit rigid until the swallow had finally gone down. At last he could breathe again.
Now he could feel the sudden cold of the beer in his stomach. At least it had driven away the momentary memory. God, he thought, I’m turning into Sukie.
A.O.P, dude.
She’d been good at driving the L.A. freeways drunk—she always said that if you started to weave in your lane, you could cover it by accelerating as you corrected, and nobody would know you’d been out of control; it had become a motto of theirs—Accelerate Outta Problems.
Morrie finally refilled the shot glass; Sullivan nodded and took a cautious sip. I was never any good at shooting pool, he thought. Or else I’ve always been fairly good at it, but I was just jumpy when I was playing earlier tonight. I can’t accelerate out of this town, out of this job. Probably she made the whole thing up—giggling in a house somewhere right now, not in Delaware and not even owning a gun anymore—just to wreck my life one more time.
No way it’ll happen.
He took a moderate swallow of the beer. I could just resign from this job, he thought. If I turn in my resignation to the general foreman, it won’t be held against me. Tramp electricians are always getting “a case of red-ass” and moving on. I’d just have to sign out, and get a Whole Body Count, wearing paper pyjamas and lying in the aluminum coffin while the counter box inches over me, measuring the rems of radiation I’ve picked up this year; then drive to California and retrieve the…the mask, and move on, to Nevada or somewhere. There’s always utilities work for someone who’s still in good with Edison.
But if Sukie’s just jerking me around, why should I bother?
And if she’s not, he thought, then there’ll be people waiting for me to show up at the station, as she said. In fact, if bad guys were listening in on our call, at the front desk of her hypothetical hotel, then they’d have heard Morrie answer the phone here the way he always does, O’Hara’s in Roosevelt, Morrie speaking.
It’s a half-hour’s drive from the Roosevelt Nuclear Generating Station to O’Hara’s…if you’re not to a tearing hurry.
Sullivan bolted the rest of the bourbon and the beer and walked out of the bar. Morrie would add the cost of the drinks to the rent on the parking space in the back lot.
As he trudged across the obliquely lit gravel, the sight of the familiar, homely old van slowed his pace. He could just climb in, pull the doors shut behind him and lock them and get back into the fold-out bed, and tomorrow morning at eight be driving through the gate at the Roosevelt Station, waving his badge at the guard who knew him anyway, and then happily spend all morning tightening conduit bolts that would have to be ripped out and done again after the foreman noticed that the inspection date on all the torque wrenches had expired a week ago. Assured, meaningless, union work, at thirty dollars an hour. Where would he find another trade like it?
He jumped in surprise, and an instant later the Honda said “Warning—you are too close to the vehicle”. The breeze was suddenly cold on his forehead, and his heart was pounding. “Step back,” the thing went on. He stepped back. “Thank you.”
Bar-time. It had not just been clumsiness at the pool table. He was definitely on bar-time again.
I woke up on bar-time, Pete!
That’s what the Sullivan twins had called the phenomenon when they’d first noticed it, early in their years of working for Loretta deLarava in L.A.—Sukie had got the term from California bars that keep their clocks set about ten minutes fast, so as to be able to get all the drinks off the tables by the legal shut-down time of 2 A.M., and drinkers experience 2 A.M. a little while before it actually occurs. The twins had spent a lot of nights in bars, though Pete drank only Cokes and the occasional beer, and he could still vividly see Sukie, wearing dark glasses at some dark corner table, sucking a cigarette and asking someone, One-thirty? Is that real time or bar-time?