Three
HE'D FALLEN ASLEEP, couldn't help himself, so exhausted he might as well have been drugged, and when he woke the side of his face was pressed up against the window of the car and Dana was clinging to him like a spare set of clothes, the rhythm of her breathing synchronized with his own. There was a faint gray infusion of light. Nothing moved. The yellow lamp at the end of the lot was a blur, perched somewhere in intermediate space, the fog wiping away everything else. His left arm had gone numb where he'd slept on it, and his shirt felt damp and gummy, the price of sleeping in the car. Which smelled stale, as if they'd been living in it for months and not just overnight, and he wondered about that, about the odors of confinement, and for a moment he closed his eyes and the car was a bathyscaphe dangling over an abyss in the dark canyons of the sea, the twisting shapes of the deep fish, the wolf fish and coelacanth, passing in review. Then he opened them again on nothing, on a seep of grayness, and thought to check his watch.
Slowly, with exaggerated care-no reason to wake her yet-he extricated his dead arm and brought his wrist into view. He wasn't surprised particularly to see that it was just before six in the morning-a horrendous hour, an hour he encountered maybe two or three times a year when he lost his head partying with Deet-Deet or Pixel and fell into the old ineluctable videogame trance-but he did feel just the slightest tic of irritation with the fact that he wasn't in a bed in a motel sleeping till noon, noon at least. He'd been the one for giving it up the night before-they had the wrong condo; the guy had moved or died or been jettisoned into outer space-but Dana had been insistent. Even as he was wheeling out of the lot, bent on finding a place to eat and a motel with cable, she was brandishing her worn file folder, inside of which were the affidavit from the San Roque courthouse and the faxes with the thief's police record and photo. “This,” she said, spitting it out, “is all we need. Show this to the police and we've got him.”
“Right, but we have to find him first,” he'd said, exasperated, but still turning his face to her so she could see him form the words. “And when we find him, then what? Where are the cops? You think they'll just happen to be driving by?”
“I dial 911. As soon as I see him. I dial 911 and say there's a crime in progress, a-a burglary, okay? A crime in progress.”
“And then what?”
“Then I show them this”-the folder-“because isn't this a crime? In progress? Isn't it?”
They were out on the main road by then, the headlights of the oncoming cars illuminating her face in flashes, as if they were back under the strobe at Doge and he was seeing her for the first time. For a moment, he felt himself slipping into nostalgia, into tenderness-she'd never seemed more beautiful, her eyes struck with light, her lips parted with the onrush of her rhetoric, her face held aloft and glowing in the excelsior of her hair, like a gift in a box-but he resisted it. He was hungry, tired. He was looking for a place to eat, nothing fancy, a burger, anything. She was right, he knew it, but he wasn't ready to admit that yet, not until he had something in his stomach, anyway.
“What are you doing?” she demanded then. “Giving up?”
A fast-food place loomed up on the left and he flicked on the blinker and hit the gas to spin into the lot ahead of the oncoming traffic. All in one motion he nosed into a parking space, jammed the lever into park and swung round to face her. “No,” he said, “I'm not giving up. I'm just hungry, that's all. It's been a long day, don't you think? Can't we just sit here for half an hour and have a Big Mac and a Filet o' Fish-no, no, forget the calories, forget the cholesterol and trans fats, let's just gorge for once-and think things out? Because we're close, I know it, you're right, and we can nail this bastard, absolutely, but let's just take a minute to regroup, okay? And eat?”
He didn't know how much of that she got-he never did know with her, but he was always conscious of his lips and his tongue and he liked to think they were communicating. That was the case now. They sat there a moment under the yellow-and-red glare of the big M and he watched her flip the hair away from her face with a quick thrust of her chin. Her eyes narrowed. Her voice went low, so low it was as if she'd just been punched in the stomach. “She was lying, you know.”
And so here they were.
They'd stocked up on grease and nitrates and sugar, Dana so anxious she was lifting right out of her shoes while he ordered and paid and then she looked at him as if he were a pedophile when he told her he had to use the men's-“What if we miss him?” she signed. “What if he's coming in right now? Right this minute?” In the car, the brown bag in her lap, her fish sandwich as yet untouched, she kept saying, “You know he's in there, you know it-or wherever he is, he'll be back-and what we need to do is just sit there all night, all day tomorrow, all week if necessary, and keep the binoculars on those windows till we see him for sure. Positive identification, isn't that what they call it? And that's it. We see him, he's”-one of her favorite expressions-“dead meat.”
But they hadn't seen him. The curtains were closed when they got back-they hadn't been gone more than half an hour, forty-five minutes-and the curtains stayed closed all night long, though the lights had burned late, very late. So late they were the last thing Bridger remembered, seared into his consciousness like the afterimage of a whole raft of flashbulbs going off simultaneously. He glanced up now. The fog bellied, drifted, pressed and released. The cars were dark humps, the trees erased. Above and beyond him, cutting perfect rectangles out of the shadow of something larger, were the windows-Frank Calabrese's windows-still lit.
When finally the garage door became visible beneath the glow of the windows and finally-suddenly, abruptly-it began to rise in silent levitation to reveal the rear lights of the car glowing there like a visual affront, he thought he was dreaming. It was like a trompe l'oeil, the flat plane of the door there one minute and effaced the next. Was he seeing things? But no, there was the back end of the car, a Mercedes, dealer plates, the exhaust leaching from the tailpipe to vanish in the fog, and now the double punch of the brake lights-and the thing was moving, backing out. He shoved Dana, hard. Pushed her from him and took hold of her face in both his hands, working the swivel of her delicately jointed neck as if it were some instrument he'd found and calibrated, as if it were his: “Look,” he was saying, “look.”
Her hair, her eyes, the sourness of sleep on her breath-none of it mattered. She was there instantaneously, up out of the depths, with him. Her body tensed and she was sitting upright, staring into the mist, her mouth gone slack in concentration. And then, instinctively, she sank down in the seat-and her hands were on him, pulling him down too, her voice blunted and featureless, forced into use before she was ready: “It's him.”
The Mercedes had pulled out now, the rear wheels swinging to the left as the driver brought the car around, and there was a figure at the wheel, indistinct behind the windshield and the tatters of the fog, and was it a man? Was it him? Bridger was transfixed. He was sunk so low in the seat his chin was on a level with the armrest, adrenaline surging, hide-and-seek, and then the car righted its course and sliced up the drive in the silence of dreamtime and there he was-unmistakable-the thief, the son of a bitch, his chin cocked, eyes fixed on the road ahead, and the woman, the liar, beside him. For a moment Bridger was frozen there, watching the taillights lift and dip over the speed bumps, and then Dana's hand was on his wrist and her voice was hammering at him in all its weird unmodulated hyperventilating urgency: “Start-the-car-start-the-car!”