In the basement corridor I flick on the Eveready and shine it into the corners and everything is as it was: darkness and silence and cold. Concrete floor, concrete walls, weird chemical stink.
Kessler stumbles on something, sending pebbles scuttling and rolling. I turn and gesture for him to be silent, and he scowls and gestures for me to be silent—a pair of bedraggled law-enforcement professionals pulling rank on each other in a darkroom dumbshow.
I sniff the air. It’s the same, everything is the same down here, but it’s not the same; it feels different. The air has been unsettled somehow. The same darkness, with new shadows in it.
We move past the tiny furnace room and shine our flashlights over the three doors: ladies’ room, general store, and then the door with the graffiti.
“The bodies?” says Agent Kessler. “Palace?”
“One sec,” I murmur, my eyes fixed on the door of the general store, which is open, open at an angle of about twenty-five degrees. It’s propped open, as a matter of fact, held in place by an empty box of macaroni and cheese, folded over into a wedge. I step toward the door, my gun raised. Cortez told me his intentions in no uncertain terms: to stay in that room for six months after boomsday before creeping out to assay the outside world. And yet there’s the door, held purposefully ajar. The question is why, the question is always why.
“Cortez?” I say, letting my voice travel down toward the door. I step toward it. “Hey, Cortez?”
Kessler mouths something in the darkness. I lean closer and squint and he holds up his light and mouths it again, exaggerated: “Fuck him.”
Right. He’s right. Fuck him. I shine my light at the door marked LADIES, I nod to Kessler and he nods back and pushes in. I look back again at the general store, experiencing dark waves of anxiety, and then I walk in after Kessler.
“God,” says Kessler, full voice. “For God’s sake.”
I walk past him, into the grim waxwork tableau. I breathe slowly, not letting it get to me, the rotting air and the corpses like mannequins, slumped against each other like melting candles. Valentine and Tick with their hands linked, Delighted in his sparkling cape. Sailor/Alice under the table, legs daintily crossed. All of them with hooded eyes, their cheeks frozen and pale, their mouths falling open as if wanting more to drink. Jordan moves through the room as I did before, getting fractured pieces of the whole horrible vision, muttering “Jesus Christ” to himself and shaking his head uneasily. A technical services trainee. A kid.
He shakes it off, though—quickly, quicker than me. Kessler starts ID’ing bodies as he finds them, calling out the code names I already know—Delighted and Tick and Valentine and Sailor under the table—and adding some I hadn’t yet heard. “This is Athena,” he says of the round-cheeked girl with her back half turned away from Delighted. “A veterinary assistant. From Buffalo. Delighted’s name is Seymour Williams, by the way. He’s a paralegal from Evanston. His father owned a clothing store.”
The built blond guy with the scar on his face is Kingfisher. The other women are Atlantis, Permanent, and Firefly. The big man is Little Man, as I suspected.
“No Astronaut,” says Kessler, and I say, “he’s back over here,” and I move in the darkness to find him and I find Cortez instead. He’s rolled halfway over, his body hidden by the open door, his right arm awkwardly thrown over his torso, like he was rolled in here and dumped like an old carpet.
And his face—I shine the light—he’s been shot in the face.
“Palace?”
I find my feet as conclusions tumble into my mind, quickly, a rush of realizations, like keys turning in a series of locks: Cortez was killed recently, in the past twenty-four hours, that’s the first thing I think, so this is a new murder, so the killer is still alive—and Cortez blocked the stairs behind him so the killer is down here with us, the killer is close.
“Palace?”
I have my hand on Cortez’s neck to make sure that he’s dead, but he’s definitely dead because of his face: he has been shot in the face with some sort of expanding projectile, a hollow round, causing an explosive blast wound, cratering his mouth and nose. Poor Cortez with his face blown off, dead of a gunshot wound in a room full of people who drank poison. It’s like he was invited to the wrong party. It’s funny. Cortez would find it funny.
“Palace, goddamnit,” says Kessler, and I look up, startled.
“Kessler—”
“It’s not him.”
“What?”
“This. Here.” He’s a few feet away, in a squat like me, shining his light on a body, like me, the corpse of the man with the thick hair and the glasses. “This is the body you thought was Astronaut, is that correct?”
“It’s not him?”
“No.”
More realizations, tumbling into place. I pivot and look where Kessler is looking, where his light makes an eerie halo around the face.
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve seen the man,” says Kessler. “I’ve talked to him.”
“That’s not him? Dark brown eyes—”
“Those eyes aren’t dark brown.”
“Of course they’re not now, he’s dead—”
“They’re hazel.”
“Well, they’re not hazel.”
“Palace, it’s not him.”
We are whispering, intensely, and then a gunshot explodes somewhere in the silence of the basement, and then somebody is screaming—maybe more than one person—and we race toward the door, the two of us, trap ourselves briefly in a Three Stooges moment, two abreast in the entranceway, and then we burst free and scramble, me first and then Kessler, across the wide empty furnace room toward the origin of the noise.
It’s the men’s room, the one with the graffiti, except now that door has been shot open and there are lights in here, and I can see them both as soon as I get in there, frozen in place across from each other in the tiny space. Jean with a handgun clenched between two hands, held out directly in front of her small body and aimed at his stomach: Astronaut, a.k.a. Anthony Wayne DeCarlo, a.k.a. Big Pharma, in a flapping-open terry-cloth bathrobe and nothing else, unconcerned about his paunchy nakedness, unconcerned about the woman with the gun, seemingly unconcerned about anything.
The room is the size of an apartment kitchen, lit up like a barroom with neon lights, crammed with paraphernalia for cooking drugs: empty vials, long twists of tubing, one Bunsen burner active and bubbling with something foul, another burner shut off.
In one of the raised hands he’s got a gun of his own, the gun that killed Cortez—a big antique long-barrelled pistol that must be loaded with some sort of nasty homemade semijacketed rounds. The belt, I notice, is still on his pants, a pair of filthy Levi’s crumpled in the corner. Only the clawhammer is still on the belt.
I say, “Everyone lower your weapons.” Nobody lowers their weapons. I’m one step into the room, and Kessler is just behind me, breathing hard, holding his gun, trying to see around me into the room. Astronaut yawns, a long lazy lizard’s yawn. Jean’s body is twitching, shifting, oscillating. It’s like her atomic structure has been unsettled, like she’s a jet traveling too fast, breaking some sort of barrier, and we are watching her shake apart.
“Drop the guns.” I try it again. “Drop them.”
Jean keeps her eyes on Astronaut but responds to me, a murmured shush like we’re at the library and I’m talking too loud. Astronaut laughs and winks at me, quick and reptilian. For someone who has been holed up smoking crack or meth or whatever he’s cooking behind him on that elaborate works, he is cool as a cucumber, steady as she blows, hands still half raised as if by choice: I submit to your firearm’s implied threat but I’m not going to make a big fucking deal about it.