“Yeah.”
“How’d you know it was there?”
“I know a few things.”
He nodded. “I guess so,” he said.
Time passed and passed, and then it was two in the morning. I drank three Cokes and felt brittle and jittery and wide awake. The man in the red suit let loose an elaborate string of swear words, beaded with shrieks and gasps, and the mother covered the ears of her sleeping son with the palms of her hands. Two young white junkies walked in — a boy and girl, impossibly skinny, wrapped in blankets, the visible swatches of their pale skin festooned with sores and scabs — and asked the receptionist about a friend of theirs named Buster. A doctor came out and informed the man whose mother had taken illegal insulin that she’d be all right. After the doctor left, he sat down, put his head in his hands, and was wracked by three or four dry, heaving sobs. Then he looked up at his wife and children, and his face was perfectly calm.
The doors to the ER hissed open, and the same cops walked up to us. “Did you think we’d forgotten about you?” the mean one said. He was gray-faced and smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. He held out his hand, and I thought the gesture was curiously graceful, almost chivalrous, until he gripped my wrist, hard.
“You’re coming with us,” he said, jerking me to my feet.
“What?” I said. The other cop was talking to Wylie, who was telling him that we hadn’t heard about Irina and the baby yet and had to stay at the hospital.
“Hey, lady, focus on me,” my cop said. “You and I are talking here.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“We need to ask you a few questions about that car of yours.”
“Gerald’s car?” I said. “Is this about taking Gerald’s car?”
“Are you telling me the car’s stolen?”
“Well, he can have it back now,” I said.
The man in the red suit yelled, “That’s right, motherfucker!” and I glanced at him, grateful for his support. Everybody was watching. Wylie and his cop were undergoing the same talk and the same dance, face to face. The next thing I knew, we were being marched outside to the patrol car, my cop gripping my elbow and reciting my rights, his posture again almost chivalrous. The night air blew a current of exhaust from somewhere in the invisible city. In the intersection below us a cop had set up a spotlight and was directing traffic, his white gloves lit eerily in its glow. Without electricity the darkness took on new gradations of gray, navy, and mauve.
At the police station they led us into different rooms for questioning. My cop kept talking about “materials” in the trunk, which I didn’t know anything about and couldn’t get them to explain. He wanted to know what we’d been doing all night, and I didn’t want to say. Keeping my mouth shut was remarkably easy, and the cop became incensed, yelling at me and pounding his fist on the table. I didn’t think that anyone who smoked as much as he evidently did could stand to be that angry without risking a heart attack. I looked down at the ground, feeling like a kid in high-school detention.
“All right,” he finally said. “I’ll let you stew in a cell for a while. That should change your mind.”
The cell was jam-packed, with hardly enough room for me to squeeze in, but everyone ignored me except a prostitute with long red nails and a purple leather miniskirt. She offered me a cigarette, which I accepted, and told me that her friend had OD’d in a motel room on Central but was going to pull through, maybe.
“Tonight’s gone all crazy,” she said. In her high-heeled boots and teased-up hair she towered over me. “The whole city got no lights, and I’m like, what the fuck is this?”
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“I mean, what the fuck is this?”
A woman in the cell gave a high-pitched moan, and Psyche’s face flashed in front of me then, red and twisted. I hoped desperately that she was all right.
Still muttering, the hooker flicked her cigarette across the floor, where it skipped over the concrete like a stone on a lake. Then she stamped her high-heeled foot in a fit of petulance and said, “Fucking Albuquerque. City can’t do anything right.”
The cell stank of urine and body odor and smoke. As the sugar high from my Cokes wore off, crashing me into exhaustion, I started to reconsider my high-minded position. So what if the police found out where Wylie and Irina and I had been? We’d left before the main event anyway. But saying anything about this would amount to turning in Stan and Berto— and Angus. I couldn’t do it. Gerald, maybe, but not the others.
Another cop came into the holding area and called my name. Tall and thin, he had a neatly trimmed mustache and carried himself with an air of gravitas.
“I’m Lieutenant Duran,” he said.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said.
“You’re in a lot of trouble, missy.”
I looked at him, not believing that anybody still used the word “missy.” It was one more element of the evening that I couldn’t believe. It was three in the morning, and my patience for everything was wearing thin.
He guided me by the elbow and led me upstairs to a plain, windowless room. On the table were clear plastic Ziploc bags filled with wrenches, cutters, and handsaws, all the usual apparatus of vandalism. The whole world was swimming into the surreal. I wondered where Wylie was, how they were treating him and what he was saying, when we could leave.
“Explain,” the lieutenant said.
“Explain what?”
“What you were planning on doing with all these items.”
“What, the stuff in the bags?” I said. “That’s not mine. I have no idea what those things are.”
“We found these items in the vehicle you were driving, so you’d better start explaining.”
“Right, but what I’m trying to tell you is that those things aren’t mine. Whatever they are. Just like the car, right? The car isn’t mine, and neither is this stuff.”
The lieutenant pulled me over to the table, roughly, and I tried to focus on the items in the bags. I felt like I was looking at some child’s science experiment, a carefully designed project whose point was nonetheless obscure. I could see blueprints showing what looked like pipes and tubes and valves, everything that controlled the heating and circulation. A switch flicked in my head. Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning: HVAC. That, not “ache back,” was what Angus had said to Gerald. Near the top of the blueprints I saw the name Sunrise Casino. There was also a brochure for the Shangri-la golf course, the site I’d passed so many times on my drives to and from Santa Fe. Feeling Lieutenant Duran watching me, I closed my eyes and contemplated a number of possibilities that made me feel light-headed.
“I think I’d better call a lawyer,” I said.
There was only one lawyer I knew in Albuquerque. From a pay phone in the hallway I called my mother’s condo. On the fourth ring she answered, her voice groggy and slurred.
“Mom,” I said, “is David there?”
They came and got me from the holding cell an hour later. Practically delirious with fatigue, I’d had to struggle to keep myself from falling asleep with my head against the hooker’s shoulder, not that she seemed to mind. I was brought to another windowless room, where David Michaelson and my mother were sitting in two folding chairs behind a table. She looked as tired as I’d ever seen her, and I wanted to take her away from this place immediately. David, on the other hand, was spry and alert, erect in his chair. He was wearing a plaid shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots and eating a Milky Way bar, snapping off pieces cleanly with his teeth.
Wylie was led in, his arm gripped by a grim-faced cop. My mother wouldn’t meet our eyes; she just kept looking at David as if she hoped that he’d step in and fix the whole situation. I was looking at him the same way. Wylie was staring at either the floor or his duct-taped shoes.