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“He’s Tactical, then,” Ables said. “You’re the mouth, he’s the trigger boy. Right? Sitting out there in the trees somewhere right now. Watching for me. He’s the one, then. He wants me in his crosshairs. He wants me dead so bad he can taste it.”

“Mr. Ables, no one out here, no one, wants you or your family harmed in any way. I am personally assuring you of that. Now, if you will be reasonable, we can continue talking realistically about meeting your immediate needs—”

“Does Banish have a family?”

Banish glanced away. He frowned slightly and looked back. “I wouldn’t know,” he said.

“You, then. If you knew, Watson, that something was going to happen to you in the very near future, if you knew that, wouldn’t you want to arrange things for your family in advance? Isn’t that your responsibility? Wouldn’t you want them to have their house to live in, a house they helped to build, and be allowed to stay together and not be bothered by any shits from the government once you’re good and gone?”

Banish closed his eyes. “Mr. Ables,” he said, “that does sound reasonable.”

A third pause. Banish waited patiently through it. It went on.

Banish opened his eyes. “Mr. Ables,” he said. “Mr. Ables.”

There was a click. Banish looked over at the sound man. The sound man shook his head. There were footsteps in the cabin, walking away.

Banish switched off the microphone. He sat there awhile, staring at the controls. His head was swimming. Then he stood. “Fine,” he said distractedly, without turning, feeling he had to say something before he left. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

Office

He paced in his office. The noise in the command tent outside did not intrude upon the swirling inside his head. Each time he passed his desk he looked at the telephone upon it. He was troubled. Fatigue, an unsettled feeling. A sense of moving frantically in slow motion. His face itched now, where the powder blast shadow remained, but rubbing his cheek and jaw with his dry hands only further aggravated it.

He was thinking about Molly and Nicole. He was looking at the telephone each time he passed it and he was entertaining possible approaches. He was casting off scenarios. Just friendly congratulations to start with. He could say that he heard about Nicole’s engagement from a friend of a friend. Just calling to wish her the best. That would leave the ball in their court. Nothing would happen very quickly, if at all. A few courteous phone conversations over a matter of months. An engagement gift sent by him. An invitation to the wedding. A dance. An embrace.

He quickly walked away from his desk, chastising himself bitterly. Romantic fantasies. They would never take him back. He remembered enough of it to know that. He shook his head. He had terrorized them. He had made them afraid to live in their own house, to sleep in their own beds. He had inspired fear in them. He had wanted them to fear him, to fear everything, that had been his mania. He had never physically abused them. He was nearly certain of that. It was the living environment he had created after his failure at the World Financial Center, after watching that woman and her daughter die. The guilt he felt, manifested in drunken, raving tirades alternating between open threats and manic bouts of over protectiveness He had worked to keep them off-balance. To make them ready for whatever danger might come. To make them see what he had seen and learn from what he had learned so that nothing like that, no death or random act of terror, no pain would ever touch them. Witnessing the end of that family, and bearing responsibility for it, lit off something in him that was impossible to contain. He remembered the last weekend, when he tore up the house: every appliance, fixture, wall hanging, door, room. Nothing was safe and nothing was permanent, he had decreed. That had been demonstrated to him at WFC and he was proving it to them now. He was showing them that anybody and anything — anything — could be destroyed.

And he had. And it was. The next day they left him for her mother’s and never returned. In the restraining order, Nicole had repeated to a judge the various warnings that her father, in his fits of despair, had issued to her. That she could be strangled in her sleep. That she could become anybody’s hostage. That she could be raped and killed. That her mother could be murdered. That people die suddenly and for no reason at all. That life had absolutely no meaning or purpose. That the bad received no punishment, and the good no reward.

The warnings were meant to snap her out of her everyday slumber, to make her vigilant. In reality, they were the ramblings of a diseased drunk, and of course came to be interpreted as threats. He had laid their home to waste. He had defiled something there that was sacred. There was no forgiving that. He did not even ask for forgiveness. For wrecking the house, for months of torment — he could not paper over that. Yet still he wanted them back. He was a changed man. He had served two years of penance in Skull Valley and he was better now yet it was all still not enough. At the bottom of his heart, he knew that it was simply too late.

He went to his desk and sat, wanting what he could not have. That which was once his to keep safe. He looked again at the telephone. It mocked him. He thought about calling out to the switchboard and having them open up an outside line so that he could further punish himself with pathetic dreams of reconciliation. Then Coyle pushed open the door flap and came inside. She had the itemized expenditures list from the previous day. He had to review it, checking and initialing each individual sum, then sign off on the total day’s cost. She stood watching over him as he did.

Sound Truck

The man in the headphones signaled and Banish sat up in the chair facing the panel of controls. Blood stayed where he was, again watching from the corner. It was now suppertime and neither he nor Banish had eaten lunch, but there was an urgency in the van, fully realized whenever Ables’s voice came through, that precluded the satisfying of everyday human appetites.

“Watson.”

When it came, they went into motion. Small lights came on in the electrical works and tape recorder wheels started to turn. Ables’s voice was like a fuse switch thrown on, jerking the van to life. The speakers made it sound as though he were right inside there with them.

Banish worked his microphone. “Right here, Mr. Ables,” he said into it. He kept his eyes trained ahead and down as he talked.

Ables said, “Is he there now?”

“Who, Mr. Ables?”

“Banish.”

Banish sat up a bit, resettling himself. This sort of talk clearly made him uncomfortable. “No,” he said, “he is not.”

“Even after I called for him?”

“I explained to you, Mr. Ables, that is not even an issue. I am here for you. It is just you and me talking.”

“What did he say about me?”

Banish rubbed his face. “He didn’t say anything, Mr. Ables. I have not spoken with him. What do you mean?”

“I want to know how it’s going to come.”

“Mr. Ables — I am assuring you, unless you want to try something foolish again—”

“What about your family, Watson?”

“We are not talking about my family, Mr. Ables.”

“I want to know.”

Banish said, “Have you reached any decision regarding your coming out?”

“I can guess,” said Ables. “Three boys is what I see. Close in age. Real popular boys, strong boys, all-American all-stars. Real friendly at school with their Jew professors.”

Banish said, “Mr. Ables—”

“I see a wife everybody in the neighborhood likes, who fake-kisses on the cheek all her Jewess friends. I see her in a red apron waving from a white picket fence.”