You look like shit, Buck.”
I move through the living room in a daze, almost not there. If I look half as bad as I feel, Darby’s got me dead to rights. But he’s a fine one to talk.
Heh.
Dead to rights.
Sometimes I just slay me.
“Had to drive all night,” I tell him, almost laughing. “Need some sleep.”
“Yeah, right. Like you ever really go all the way under when you hit a mattress. You’re lucky if you can get, what? A half hour, fifteen minutes?”
“What are you, my shrink?”
“I’m the ghost of Christmas Past, come to tell you the future, Buck.”
He makes a dumb little scary noise when he says that. Really annoying. Like someone calling you sleepyhead in a singsong just after you wake up from a terrible dream. His voice sounds just like it did when he was still alive: deep and with a neutral accent, like most street hustlers from Austin. That’s a dumb little secret about this town. The indigenous criminals all sound like they’re from Anywhere Else, U.S.A.
“The future’s not what it used to be,” I say to him, still almost laughing.
“Profound wisdom. Gonna tell me again how Facebook is killing my generation?”
“How about I send you a text?”
“You don’t know how to text.”
“And video killed the radio star.”
“You’re a relic, Buck. Nobody else would get that joke. Ain’t you damn lucky to have a pal like me hangin’ around?”
“Roosevelt would get it.”
“The kid’s got some culture issues, just like you.”
“Thanks.”
“I do my best.”
He makes a sudden karate move—swings one arm around, like I showed him. Just playing, but he’s really speedy this morning. Darby Jones is the only man I know about, alive or dead, who can do that to me. I still block him, like Bruce Lee to his Brandon.
“You’re the fastest old fuck in Texas,” he says. “I’ll kick your ass one of these days.”
“Dream on, ghost dog.”
“My god, the scimitar wit. We’re just a bed of fuckin’ roses, ain’t we?”
“To what do I owe today’s pleasure, Darby?”
He narrows his beady little eyes at me, lowers his fist. Hates it when I call him by his real name. See, he was a gangbanger back in the world. They called him Crazy-D. That was years ago, just after my rep on the street in Austin turned mean and the gangs started wanting a piece of my action. I made them change their minds.
That’s why this guy is still hanging around.
There’s this funny thing that happens once in a blue moon. When a guy gets killed and he’s got one foot in his own grave already, when he’s full of conflict and he’s not ready to let go. He gets cut loose and walks the earth at level one, sometimes attached to the man or woman who killed him. Walkers are not common. Darby’s one of a small handful left, and you never see any new recruits these days.
Lucky fucking me.
“Your name’s been coming up a lot,” he says. “And it’s not the usual gossip. Some of the mean ones have been seeing the future, for real. They see something big about to go down. Thought I’d pop in to let you know.”
“Figures. I was offered a pretty heavy case last night. I don’t know if I should run or sit this one out.”
“I thought you’d say that.”
“Everything’s pulling me toward the same place again.”
“The train, huh?”
“Yep.”
I sit down in the Barcalounger, one of those old-style recliner chairs that nobody buys anymore, almost as ancient as this house. It sends up a poof of dust when my ass hits it, and the dust swirls in the gloom filtering through my dirty windows. It’s the only light in the place, like a beacon from some dull yellow morning on another planet. The image reminds me of unsettled business. Reminds me of Darby.
I’ve seen into his past more than once.
We actually have a lot in common.
He was kicked around a lot between foster homes before he hit the street, at nine years old. That was in Houston, where he first got popped for armed robbery. The murder beef came later, but it was a trumped-up charge. He fought the prison rapists hard for three years before they showed him the door. By then he was real bitter and ready for more shit. How do you like that? Outside, he’d been more or less innocent.
Darby had to go to prison to become a killer.
He was doing hits by the time he was twenty-one, traveled all over the country with some mean kids. Came back to Austin after that, working for the cowboys and the gangbangers. An equal opportunity white-trash muscle thug.
This guy could have been anything he wanted to be.
He was smart and resourceful.
Everybody falls, and that’s it.
But I guess it’s probably easier when you’re Generation Zero to begin with—one of those cell-phone-wagging Internet ghosts cut loose on the face of a recycled culture that doesn’t even know what it’s trying to mimic.
The funny thing is, Darby still has a Facebook page.
And he Tweets.
“I wish I knew how to take care of you,” I tell him. “I’d send you packing if I could.”
“You’d have to die.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
“It’s damn dead in this town, Buck. There aren’t as many of us as there used to be. They’ve been disappearing fast. And the voices…”
“Maybe I should do us both a favor. Might kill two birds with one stone.”
“You don’t have the balls.”
“It ain’t about balls. It’s about some light at the end. I’m starting to think that the only way to find what I’m looking for is to go the whole distance.”
He shakes his head at me. “Usually when you talk about killing yourself, you’re not so serious about it.”
“I’m tired, just like you are.”
“Don’t make me laugh. You’ve still got skin, man—what I do is hard work. You think I just drift around wherever I please?”
He starts bitching again about the life.
The world of slow molasses all Walkers deal with every day.
You can’t pass by an old house without getting sucked into it. You can’t truck near a troubled child and not hear every one of the worst secrets his parents make him keep. You struggle with your own substance and fall through the cracks every other second. It’s like sinking in quicksand that burns your feet. And if you can’t hang on, you descend into nothingness. The bottom level, where the Blacklight is blackest. A tar pit swimming with chummed remains, where you forfeit all identity, all purpose, every reason you ever had to go on existing. The Big Black.
I know all that because I went with him the first time he slipped.
I pulled him out, and lived inside the skin of his soul for just a quarter-second before I realized it was a life I couldn’t consume like the others. He wasn’t something I could pull and send to rest.
Because Walkers ain’t really ghosts and they ain’t really people.
They’re bad dreams trucking the earth, wearing phantom flesh made from ten-ton resentment.
The smart ones are like Darby.
They look for ways to resolve.
They know it’s probably the only way to avoid the pit.
Meanwhile, just about every story you’ve ever heard about a haunted house—pesky poltergeist action and all that creaky-floor business in the dead of night—that’s mostly guys like Darby doing what they do, trying to find a way back into the world. Sometimes they just do it to amuse themselves. He’s got six thousand virtual friends on the Internet, and not one of them believes he’s really a Walker.
It’s lonely out there, just like he said.
I remember the gun and take it out of my satchel.
It seems to vibrate under Darby’s stare, sending familiar rhythms coursing through my blood.
“What do you make of this?” I say, holding it out to him.
“It’s a revolver, a three-fifty-seven Magnum. Smith and Wesson. So what?”
“I found it in the house. When I saw it in the Blacklight, it was brand-new. Brought the thing out, and it was rusted and worthless. What do you see?”
He reaches over and takes the gun, holds it up in a practiced grip.
“Looks brand-new to me too.” He looks at the chamber. “And one bullet, ready to shoot.”
I can’t see that—all I see is the rusty antique.
I need a ghost inside me to fire that last shot.
I need to be in the Blacklight.
Darby feels the weight. “This is probably a late-sixties model. It has no trigger lock, and the spin chamber is smaller. They developed the three-fifty-seven in the mid-thirties. It was based on the design of the thirty-eight special, but they were always fucking around with it, coming up with new wrinkles.”
I wonder how many gangbangers know that much history about the guns they murder little old ladies with. Wikipedia—it’s a lovely time killer for the living dead.
“I think it belonged to my mother.”
He hands it back. “Kinda funny, don’t you think? The voices lead you to a gun that can only be fired in the Blacklight?”
“I thought it was pretty weird myself.”
“It could be something important.”
“Or someone might be setting me up.”
“Someone on the other side? Someone with a grudge?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
I take the gun from him, set it on the wasted coffee table. Lean back in the Barcalounger, staring at the ceiling. My next words come after a dull sigh. “Did you ever regret killing someone? When you were still alive, I mean.”
He thinks about it for a second. Then shakes his head. “No. I mean, you always think about it…but regret? It was all business. A way to make a score.”
“You don’t regret me?”
“I never killed you. Can’t regret something you never did, can ya?”
“They say that’s the worst kind of regret.”
I stare at his face.
The scar from four years ago splits his lip at a bizarre angle, giving him a permanent grin like a crooked, upside-down triangle with teeth. His skin is chalky and almost translucent. You can’t see through Walkers, they appear to you like normal people. Your average ghost is really strange-looking. Darby was twenty-four years old when my knife took him in the face. He’s still wearing the same clothes he had on that night, and the scar never went away, either. He would have blown my head off because his employers gave him two grand to do it. You couldn’t even buy a car with what my life was worth to those east-side shitkickers. They had no idea Darby would be so angry about the arrangement later. When Walkers are angry about something, they can do a lot more than make things float around or type angry blogs on a keyboard—they can kill the living and make it messy.
The gangs never fucked with me again after Darby was done with them.
And he doesn’t even regret it.
“What if it’s not really a sin after all,” he says, his voice high and thoughtful. “What if we’re just like all the other animals, cut loose and prowling for food in the world? What if God doesn’t care? What if it was just three wise men and the ghost of Elvis calling the shots all along? Man, I’d like that.”
I throw him a sideways glance. “God? You really believe in God after all this?”
“A man would be a fool not to. Someone’s gotta be responsible.”
“We’re responsible. Blame it on Elvis if you need to.”
Darby smiles in a weak sentimental way, shaking his head. “You were always the cynic, even back in the old days. You and me, we had a good run there for a while. I thought helping all those kids and families get their lives back would get me through the pearly gates for sure. I even read the manual.”
He means the Bible.
Whatever.
I listen to him ramble on for a few more minutes. It’s mostly stuff I’ve already heard. Old history, bad luck, downtown is for suckers. Like I need him to tell me all that.
I put a tape in the player, one of Raina’s old mixes.
She loves the eighties.
“Down Boys” comes through the shredded speakers of a plastic compartment stereo I bought for eighty dollars at Walmart back in 1993. Cheap music for a cheap moment in history. Overwrought pop-metal riffs swimming in reverb, fighting for attention behind a wind-tunnel backbeat smothered in glamour-boy lead vocals. This band was called Warrant. “Down Boys” has a happy chorus that sounds like hot chicks with big, embarrassing eighties dos playing volleyball on a beach in California circa 1986.
Down Boys.
Raina used to call the ghosts that.
She said my graveyard was where the Down Boys go, just like in the song. That makes me smile sometimes, just a little. But not today.
“I can always tell when you want me to leave,” Darby says. “You put on this turn-of-the-century fag rock.”
“Metallica depresses me.”
“Those guys saved American radio for the nineties, man.”
“Get thee behind me, Satan.”
He snorts, as if he can still breathe. Reflex actions of the living dead. “It wouldn’t hurt you to get your head into the future one of these days, Buck. At least get yourself a better computer.”
“It’s on my to-do list. Right behind a shiny new iPod.”
“Yeah, then you can retire your Walkman.”
He points at the slab of metal and plastic I have hooked to my belt. I turn one corner of my mouth up. Walkmans are what they used to call iPods back in the eighties, before they turned into MP3 players. I really do need an MP3 player. I could get the whole Mötley Crüe back catalog on my little fingernail. There’s nothing like loud music on a set of headphones to keep your senses distracted from all the bad noise nobody else can hear. New metal and emo punk and guys like the White Stripes make me very unhappy, but maybe that’s the point.
They can have it. I want my MTV.
I sit back down in the chair and Darby continues to lecture me about owning a better computer, but I barely hear his voice anymore. The ghosts of young musicians pretending to be joyful float through the room like the faux-happy remnants of former lives. The voices comfort me, crazy and stoned and jaded behind the scenes. The voices make me think my mother and father are still here. Here and smiling at me. Family photos that never fade. Pictures I could never see to begin with.
“The ghost of Elvis, man,” he says, getting thoughtful again. “That fat fuck. I’ll kick his ass real good when I meet him.”
I close my eyes and drift away while Darby is still talking. I know the rest won’t last long, it never does.
Peace is something you only find when you’re not looking for it.
I move in slow motion across a sun-ripped landscape, sinking in the sand just a little more with each step. I’m blinded by the light of the dead. My goggles are burned through, my eyes bleeding like tears down my face. The voices of an angry mob hiss and scream at me, just out of sight. The waves of sickness crash and roll in, leaving the remains of rotten things washed up in my throat. I fall farther into the dark, way down and then farther still, with the salty wind blowing through my hair like millions of tiny tentacles, stinging my face with acid…and I start screaming because it’s all so confusing and unfair and awful…and this is it…this is where it all ends…way down in the dark…where the Down Boys go…
They say Albert Einstein lived on two hours of sleep a day. I read somewhere that he took catnaps in his lab. He’d spend all day and all night finding solutions, jotting down numbers, all those things that geniuses do, and he hardly ever nodded off because he calculated that sleep was a waste of energy. He wore the same clothes every day, too. Had a closet full of dull gray sweaters and baggy pants, all of them identical. No time for fashion choices when you have atoms to split. Later, after the first atomic bomb went off in Hiroshima, old Albert said he wished he’d been a watchmaker all that time.
Funny, huh?
Most of the human race is asleep half their lives.
The rest of us split atoms.
Darby is gone when I wake up, and I’m thinking about Albert Einstein because it’s just twenty minutes later. Catnaps in the lab.
There was a dream, but it’s gone now.
Just the afterburn left, sizzling in my stomach.
Something about the fall. The desert out there. My shame and my fate, all wrapped up in the nexus.
I shake it off.
The room is silent, Raina’s mix tape jammed at the end of the first side.
The silence is almost deafening.
I get up from the Barcalounger and wander down the hall, into the master bedroom. I grab a shower. Throw on a change of clothes. It’s almost noon. Day’s half over for everyone but me.
The map of my journey through the desert is still scrawled on the wall, elaborate and detailed, like some demented trail to nowhere etched on the concrete slab of a prison cell. This room was my prison cell for years. I guess it still is.
The map points west, to the Blacklight Triangle.
Where the Down Boys go.
Everything’s pulling me back.
I don’t know what to do.
I see myself in the mirror on the closet door and I think of old Albert again. Black jeans and lace-up Dockers, Walkman at my waist, headphones around my neck, dark blue button-down shirt and black formal jacket with padded shoulders and dark gray pin stripes, the same one I always wear because I have ten on the rack just like it.
Atoms splitters are like superheroes, man. You can always see us coming because we always wear the same clothes.
I get the kid on the phone and tell him I need some information.
Some details on the Jaeger Laser.
Stuff only he would be able to dig up.
The kid appreciates a challenge.
Says to give him two hours.
So I pay my water bill at the grocery store, then stop in on Father Joe.
He’s happy to see me, standing at the edge of an empty stage, doing something to his pulpit with a hammer and nails. He’s young for a man of the cloth, his little hole-in-the-wall church located just inside town, in a cozy semi-rich neighborhood near a Baptist school full of cheering kids and anxious spirits. His full God-given is Father Joseph Angus Fay, but everyone calls him Father Joe, and he’s cool with it. His dad left him the house when he was thirty, he took his vows of poverty and chastity two years later, renovated the place six months after that. In the beginning, I never had the heart to call him on the carpet about all this Jesus stuff. These days I kind of enjoy the sparring matches.
I pay him for the last case of urns and he counts the money twice.
I don’t make a lot of small talk this time, and he can sense that I’m anxious.
We’re going to spar again today, I can feel it.
He says something about faith, about rest.
I tell him I need another case of urns by Saturday.
I’d buy them somewhere else, but Father Joe owes me, and he still gets a good deal from the outfit that supplies his God-scent candles and holy wafers. Silver-plated urns are damn pricey, even when you get them wholesale from a funeral-supply company. I always put it down under “expenses.”
Father Joe is thirty-three and looks like a teenager.
Maybe he’s the one who made a deal with the devil.
Never can tell about these things.
“I prayed for you last night,” he says, counting the cash a third time. “I see that it has brought fruit.”
“Fruit for whom?”
“I was expressing concern for your immortal soul, Buck.”
“Nice of you.”
He sighs like he gives up. But Father Joe never gives up. He’s right back at me. “I really wish you would reconsider your faith. You might find some peace. The Lord God is always ready to receive those who did not believe on the day before.”
“Day before what?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. What I know for sure is that I’ve got a head filled with other people’s bad business, and a lot of my own. I get to see little kids strung up by their own fathers. Nasty stuff. And I’m not talking about some bad daddy breaking down in the confessional. I’m talking about full-color pictures burned in my mind forever. What the hell did God ever do for those people?”
“He loves them. All His children are at rest when they leave this earth.”
“Says who? I pulled a mark once, right here in this room, and he didn’t go to heaven. He went into me. Does that make me God’s son? Or does that mean it’s all a little different than what the manual says?”
“If you don’t believe, why do you still come here, Buck? You must be searching for something.”
“I’m searching for a good deal on silverware.”
“The urns are blessed when I give them to you. You don’t think that helps?”
“No. They’re just cheap.”
He smiles. “You’re incorrigible, Buck. But God loves you. He has given you this gift so that you may walk the earth and cleanse it of evil.”
“I’m glad you believe that, Father.”
“Are you really?”
“Everyone has to believe in something, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“I believe in you, Buck. I know your burden is great, but your reward will be greater. You are touched by His hand.”
“I’m glad you believe that, Father. No bullshit.”
He smiles and tilts his head thoughtfully. “Where are you off to now?”
“Gotta see a man about a horse.”
“Try to stay out of trouble. I’ll have the new shipment in by Friday.”
He starts to walk back to his stage, the hammer resting on his shoulder. Gets another thought and turns on one heel. “Incidentally, Buck…why silver? I’ve always wondered.”
“Something do with the element. It reacts with the bile in a specific way that keeps it contained, kind of like a magnetic field. I’m not sure about the exact science, but it sure as hell works.”
“How did you learn about that?”
He’s trying to corner me. Wants to make it about God. The truth is, I don’t know how I know. It just came to me one night after a few months of doing it wrong. It’s the same way I know how to put them to rest in the graves. Maybe that was the good Lord shining a light on me, maybe it was my parents. Nobody’s talking.
“Trade secrets,” I tell him. “Call the head office, Father.”
“I will.”
I wink at him and he turns back to his pulpit again.
“My man Bucko—Buck Oblivion! Get the hell in here and have a toke of the smoke!”
Buck Oblivion.
A nickname a kid would come up with.
Or a guy like Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
His one-room apartment smells like marijuana and cheap sex, the kind you pay for by the hour. I can feel the remains of dead women in this room. They’ve been here for years. He can’t feel them because he’s always stoned.
“No, thanks,” I tell him, holding up a hand when he offers me the blunt. Normally I might partake, but I hate the way he rolls his, half the joint laced with mint tobacco, like those guys in France do it. He pays three hundred a quarter for that stuff, then cuts it with over-the-counter menthol sawdust that costs a buck and a half.
Guess we all have our illusions.
I step into his command center, where he has his monster computers wired up to a series of giant-screen plasma televisions, laptops and keyboards and sensor rigs, a bulletin board tacked all to hell with memos, notes, printouts, digital scans that look like ultrasounds from the bellies of pregnant women, but they’re really photos of infested houses.
“You’ve been busy,” I say. “I hear there’s been a run near campus, where they had that traffic accident at the Dobie Mall.”
“Turned out to be bogus. Nobody got killed, and there weren’t any latent projections, not on camera anyway. The big money’s been in the suburbs, man. Those guys are fucked up and they’ve got deep pockets.”
“Most of the time they just need a shrink.”
“You don’t have to tell ’em that, though.”
“You never learn, do you, kid?”
“I learn a little. I learned from the best.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure you don’t want a toke?”
He wags the reefer my way. I hold up my palm again. He shrugs.
“Suit yourself.”
The smell of tainted hydroponic skullfuckery floats across the room like a ruined dream. His skin is deep black, his voice ultramodern, like his well-honed body, which is draped in typical Austin stoner garb. Everyone on the south side of town dresses like Kurt Cobain. Don’t ask me why.
“Lots of new equipment,” I say, checking out the infrared camera squatting innocently on a low tripod in one corner.
“Yeah, I’ve been playing around with a real state-of-the-art system. What I’d give for a full-bore infestation—I mean, a real infestation. I’ve got a multicam surveillance rig that would kill it, man.”
He makes it sound like a termite problem, but that’s the point.
Marks can be worse than termites when they go deep into a house or a school or an office building. The kid pulls down more bread than I do hunting termites because he hustles harder, and he’s in the future, the way Darby says I should be, but Roosevelt can’t do what I do. He’s one of those mediums who’ll lie to the client when the rent is due. Once nearly got himself shot for doing that. I told him it was a bad idea to hire out to NRA guys.
And yeah, that’s his real name.
The hackers all call him the President.
I met this guy three years ago when I ran an ad in the Chronicle looking for an assistant on a job. Needed the session recorded on video—rich folks with a dead relative giving them shit. Roosevelt was the guy who showed me how to get a mark on tape and what to look for when you play it back. Later, tape became digital storage, which was more pure, he said. It’s all the same to me.
Roosevelt may be the smartest person I’ve ever met.
He was my main man when I first got obsessed with the Jaeger Laser.
He can dig up dirt on anyone, anywhere.
And he’s a walking textbook, plugged into everything.
“Have a seat, my man. Tell the President your life story.” He kicks a stack of nudie mags off the couch and leans back in his command chair, spinning from side to side.
I give him a look. “No, thanks. I might stick to something.”
“Pot kettle black, my man. I’ve seen your living room.”
“Funny.”
He takes another toke of the smoke and I see a million faces staring back at me through his eyes. The faces of his parents, overdosed and long gone. The many women he’s conquested, because it’s really easy when you know how to use your Gift. I see a lost child swimming in self-medication, hovering on the edge of jaded teenage manhood, brilliant beyond most people’s comprehension and screaming for a miracle to make him happy. But who am I to judge anyone’s manhood? I don’t even remember being a kid. I don’t think anyone can be a man unless they remember being a kid. A man like me, a man who can’t remember…well, most of us are just looking at ghosts on film.
He sees me reading him, smiles and turns back to his console, scrolls of blackware data rolling across his face.
“Okay, so let’s get down to business.”
Click. Click. Click.
The center screen flashes up someone familiar.
An old man with thick eyebrows and a face full of power.
Sidney Jaeger.
“Your old buddy’s been busy,” Roosevelt says, speed-reading from five online blogs, three secure hacker chats, and two fresh news items straight from the CNN feed. “He’s about to launch his train, and it looks like he’s got some major players in his pocket.”
“What players?”
“According to my sources, it’s gonna be a big event. They haven’t announced it officially yet, but we’re talking about ten or fifteen of the highest-profile celebs in the business. You know the routine: multibillionaire industrialist invites a bunch of famous people to ride his train on the inaugural run. They’ve even got Bethany Sin showing up to sing the national anthem.”
“Who’s Bethany Sin?”
“Big pop star. You really need to get out more, my man.”
“What’s so weird about all that? Sounds like your typical red carpet to me.”
“It’s way bigger, Buck. He’s got Bob Maxton.”
“The hell you say.”
“Straight up.”
He snatches the remote to one of his flat-screens—the forty-one-inch hanging above his bed. A news channel blips on, and he uses his DVR to displace time, rewinding it to the top of the hour, which was just a few minutes ago.
It’s the Carolyn Lewis show.
She’s a celebrity political pundit who looks like a supermodel, showing off short bleached-blond hair and a voice like a high school teacher with a wry sense of humor. She likes taking potshots at conservatives, and Sidney Jaeger’s been on her hit list for years, ever since he announced his bullet-train project.
But this morning’s press conference has everybody buzzing.
This shit is big.
Roosevelt thumbs the volume up, rattling in an excited falsetto. “Bob just went public with an on-the-record endorsement. A lot of people are screaming that he’s using it as leverage to back up his bill to legalize gambling in California. Check it out.”
The video window over Carolyn Lewis’s shoulder leaps out to fill the screen, showing footage from the press conference.
Maxton is young for such a popular guy in politics.
They say he’s the youngest guy ever to run for president.
He stands next to Sidney Jaeger with a face carved in granite sex appeal, the two of them mobbed by reporters on the front steps of the Lost Angels Plaza, a ritzy high-rise. The strobe of cameras flicker around both of them like paparazzi at a big premiere. Bob’s voice is filled with practiced vibrancy, more like a movie star than a senator:
“The Jaeger Laser is something never before seen in America. These are forward thinkers who have taken their cue from the Japanese in the efficiency and elegance of this project, which will help to create jobs, bolster the economy, and provide upscale travelers and tourists with something special for their vacations and family outings—but California and Nevada are just the beginning. I tell you one thing, people: this is the future calling, and we cannot turn away from it.”
Sidney smiles:
“I think the senator took the words right out of my mouth.”
More flashbulb frenzy.
A hailstorm of questions hurled at the two men.
It’s back to Carolyn, who is smiling and shaking her head:
“My goodness. You start to wonder who’s really wearing the pants at Jaeger Industries, don’t you?”
The kid thumbs off the television and gets back to clicking his data scrolls.
A series of articles about Bob Maxton glow across his face.
“The way I’ve got it figured, man, Bob’s gonna be one of the guests at the red-carpet premiere. The early buzz is huge. Those ads are running in prime time on every channel, and when they go public with everything, it’s gonna be like the voice of God coming down.”
“That’s one hell of a ballsy move for a politician.”
“He’s a fuckin’ rock star, man. Gonna be our next president. Won the nomination in a landslide.”
“He was running against Sarah Palin. It wasn’t a contest.”
“Maybe. But this is gonna put him right over. He’ll be Supreme Dictator for Life once he’s in, just like George W.”
“I heard he got caught in a hotel with some hot actress not long ago.”
“Natalya Ustinov. And he didn’t get caught with her. The guy announced it. Turned the whole thing into a photo op. He makes moves nobody else even thought of. Remember JFK? This guy’s the real deal.”
“How do you get away with that stuff in this day and age?”
“You’re out of touch. The youth vote is on, my man. Welcome to the future, where we all dance naked in the street.”
“The guy’s crazy.”
“Damn right. See the thing is, Maxton is single, and a Republican—a conservative. That’s the secret to being a rock star in politics and making it stick. You gotta have the best of both worlds. The girls faint over you and all the guys wanna be you, and meanwhile you’ve got the rich bitches in Washington eating out of your hand. The talk shows love this guy. They call him Maximum Bob.”
“Isn’t that the name of a TV series?”
“An old one, from the nineties. It’s a book by Elmore Leonard too. About a hardass Republican judge who deep-sixes convicts.”
“Does the nickname have anything to do with his platform?”
“No. I think it just stuck because someone thought it sounded cool.”
“So he’s riding the bullet. Interesting.”
“Word on the street is that Jaeger Industries has been greasing Bob’s campaign to get the public blow job, and they’re looking into expanding the railroad too. The guys at Amtrak have been screaming takeover for a year or so. I think the idea is to have a full continental bullet-train system within about ten years. The Jaeger guys are jumping through hoops right now just to make it all legal.”
“What street did you hear that on?”
“Fire Dog Lake.”
“What?”
“A political blog, man.”
“When do you figure they’re going public with the red-carpet launch?”
“Any minute now. The buzz about Bob is nuts. A couple of my guys are talking all kinds of conspiracy theories.”
“There’s always a conspiracy theory.”
“I dug up something else too. Check it out.”
He turns and clicks his keyboard, summoning up a clutch of icons that he separates and sorts through fast, finding an image that zooms out to fill an entire screen.
“Ever hear of this guy?”
It’s a blurry photo of a tall man dressed all in white and surrounded by bodyguards and paparazzi heading into the Royal Albert Hall in Houston. Some kind of cream-colored theatrical mask over the guy’s face, smooth and featureless—makes him look like a mutation of Michael Jackson and the Phantom of the Opera.
Weird.
“Who’s that?”
The kid gives me a fifty-watt grin, biting his lower lip. “David Brannigan. He’s Sidney Jaeger’s competition. He owns a couple of Fortune Five Hundred companies, makes a lot of Ted Turner moves. It’s come out recently that the rail system might have been his idea.”
“Jaeger stole his thunder?”
“Something like that. Sidney moved faster than this guy did. Got the contracts locked before Brannigan could. They were bitter rivals for years before that, then Brannigan went all Howard Hughes and pulled a disappearing act.”
“Looks like a freak to me.”
“Haven’t you heard? That kind of money makes people crazy. He went into seclusion. Rumor had it that he was into stuff like pulling marks, tripping the Blacklight—the things we do. His people were going head to head with Jaeger Industries for years…and then it just stopped.”
“And he turned into the Phantom of the Opera?”
“He’s always been like that. Nobody’s ever gotten a picture of the guy’s face. Walked around wearing costumes when he had to make public appearances. This was one of the last photos anyone got, and it was at a Jaeger function three years ago. Sidney went public with his rail announcement two weeks after that.”
“So his old shadow popped up and scared him into making his move.”
“There’s all kinds of speculation. A lot of people think Brannigan might actually be a silent partner in the Jaeger Laser. Maybe they did a deal.”
“One hell of a deal, if it’s true.”
“Everything’s true on the Internet, man.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Whatever went down, it lit a fire under Sidney’s ass, man. The Laser wasn’t scheduled to be finished until nine months from now. They stepped up everything to get this show on the road. I’ve got that right from the labor delegates who nearly killed Jaeger Industries on a nice class-action lawsuit.”
“Welcome to the union. We’re all expendable.”
He turns in his chair.
Looks me right in the eye.
“And speaking of expendable…I haven’t asked you yet because I figure you’ve got a damn good reason for looking into all this shit again. But the inevitable question remains, my man.”
“Yep.”
“We were right about where that train is running. I guess you know that.”
“Yep.”
“And you nearly got yourself killed the last time you went out there. It weighed pretty heavy on me back in the day.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Says who? I was the one who told you about the Laser when they first started building it. Drew you a map and everything.”
“I had my own maps.”
“You know what I mean, Bucko. You’re not thinking of going back, are you?”
“I was invited.”
He scrawls on a strange sideways look. “Get the fuck outta here.”
“No bullshit.”
“Christ, man…what are the odds, after all this time?”
“No coincidences.”
And I think about it hard.
When Jaeger first told the world he was building a high-speed rail system, he said it was a prototype. Now he’s got plans to take it nationwide. And he’s got one of the most powerful men in America backing his plays. Plus, the Phantom of the Opera shadowing him—maybe the man behind the man.
I sense plans within plans.
Something bigger than I could have imagined.
The nexus, tightening around me.
And a gun in my satchel, humming with messages from the Blacklight.
“What are you gonna do, Bucko?”
“People keep asking me that. And I still don’t know.”
“Keep me in the loop. If it comes down, I want in. For old times’ sake, you know. I think I owe you that.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“If these guys really invited you, Bucko, then they’re having problems. Just like we always knew they would. Ghost problems.”
“It could get sticky.”
“It could get worse than sticky. Pressurized cabins at high speed. Moving right through the Triangle.”
I remember the desert.
Dying out there, dying slow.
Turning my back in the terrible aftermath.
Years, trying to forget.
I would walk away again.
I would let it all go down without me.
But.
This is bigger than me.
They invited me.
I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the business card from last night, the one Tom slid over with such confidence.
JAEGER INDUSTRIES printed in red letters against silver.
Tom, you son of a bitch.
In the truck, I pull out my cell. It’s a Motorola, thick and dated, no frills. Looks like a garage-door opener. Smartphones happened when I wasn’t paying attention. Congress Avenue speeds by me through a cracked windshield. Everyone’s hitting the Continental Club downtown tonight, and the ghosts on the street are lonely. Neon shadows crying in dim corners, chased into nowhere by the scorching twilight. The bats are flying already, thousands of them—a black storm of screeching leather wings and sightless red eyes emerging from under the bridge just ahead of me and spiraling up into the dark blue like plumes of smoke from a burning skyline, shitting on everything and searching for food. Following radar instincts. Blind and starving.
I think I know how those goddamn bats feel.
The gun in my satchel hums.
And I finally say fuck it.
I dial the number, cruising across the bridge.
The bats scream.
I get a cool and measured voice on the third ring, an older man. He doesn’t even say hello. What he says is this:
“Hello, Mr. Carlsbad. I’ve been expecting your call. You’ve come highly recommended.”