AT TEN MINUTES TO TWO that same afternoon, a couple sweat-soaked delivery guys will have a protective-plastic shrouded cerise chaise strapped end-up on a dolly truck when Ginger answers the door.
The men could complain about the hill before they say anything. They’ll have forgotten how steep it is. They’ll catch their breath and ask for Helen Warren. They’ll say they’ve got her lounger, using the accepted American mispronunciation.
Ginger will be completely confused by this. Why would Helen be getting a delivery, much less furniture? She might frown. She will ask to see the invoice.
• • •
The men will trade looks, and the senior one will take from his pocket and unfold a printout to show to her. The address of the bungalow, Helen’s name, Jay’s signature. Even sideways the chaise will look to Ginger like something out of a New Orleans whorehouse.
The sweaty men will wait, patient. They have more deliveries to make, and the longer this one takes, the fewer of the remainder they’ll have time to do.
Ginger will scan the invoice, beginning to understand what it means, then perhaps step farther out on the front steps and stare down the hill, to the rooftops of the Avalon shops facing the harbor, not so much surprised by this development as (perhaps) regretful that it happened so soon.
But the gesture of the chaise longue itself will stump her.
Finally, she’ll nod, distracted, step out of the way of the men, and open the door wide for Helen’s long chair.
• • •
At half past two, Magonis will be sitting motionless in his chair, smoking his disagreeable electric cigarette, listening to the Chimes Tower ring and staring irritably at the half-open office door and sweating in the unseasonable heat, because the air-conditioning is being repaired.
He will check his watch. He will check the clock on the wall. Both will, more or less, give or take five minutes, announce two-thirty. But the tower is never wrong. Smoking, his irritability morphing into a kind of disquiet, he’ll listen for the sound of someone coming up the hallway to suite 204.
Jay has never been late to their appointment.
At some point, before the hour is up, Magonis will dig in his pocket for his cell phone.
• • •
At quarter to three, as the tower chimes on the fifteen again, Public will come walking briskly down Crescent, and cross the street to the window of the video shop where Jay has posted the plastic sign with a clock that once had moveable hands someone long ago ripped off their pivot point, leaving the BE BACK AT: forever inconclusive.
Public might screw his mouth up the way Jay has noticed he will when he gets agitated, step back into the street and find himself unable to choose his next destination: looking first to the empty ferry landing, then north to the big casino on the point.
In the absence of any facts or real knowledge, Jay has convinced himself that nobody knows how many protected witnesses are on the island. He believes that different marshals are each in charge of their own small group of assets, scattered among the four thousand permanent residents, ninety percent of whom live in Avalon, the rest in a few tiny unincorporated settlements bounded by the vacant sprawl of protected Conservancy land covering most of the seventy-four square miles of long, thin, craggy Catalina Schist rising out of the Pacific, southernmost part of the Channel Island archipelago.
This would ensure that any breach of the protection program would be limited. Unless a full list of witnesses was to become exposed.
It also means that each lead marshal is the ruler of his own tiny kingdom.
Susceptible to the vagaries of such license.
Accountable, like any king might think, only to his legacy.
• • •
Wilting in the blast of heat mid-island, Sam Dunn bangs out of the back of the Buffalo Springs Station terminal building lugging two big locked canvas mail sacks to his Cessna, waiting on the apron of the runway. He opens the cargo door, throws the bags in, goes back to the terminal, and rolls a four-wheel dolly piled high with UPS and FedEx packages out to the Cessna, where he quickly stacks them around the mailbags and some other L.A.-bound cargo. A short, fat man waddles out to retrieve the dolly, grunts something at Dunn, and disappears into the air-conditioned terminal, slamming the door shut.
Big half-moons bloom on his shirt under his arms, his hair dank, he drops his Revos onto his nose and climbs into the cockpit, where Jay is all folded up low, in the passenger’s seat, so that nobody can see him. He hasn’t been waiting for long.
“Hi,” Jay says. “Go.”
• • •
For weeks Jay has been perfecting this plan to slip out of Avalon without anyone (Feds) noticing. Even as they began to back off their watchful surveillance after the incident with the marshal everyone called Tripod, taking a golf cart, Jay decided, was infelicitous due to the probability someone (probably a Fed) might quickly notice it missing and the certainty he’d be spotted (by Feds) on the long snaking road to the airport. All those jogging circuits that took him along the ridge road suggested that the airport was probably too far to run to; not to mention there were a series of brutal ascents after the initial one; today the heat made this option even doubly difficult, had he chosen to take it. No, getting to the airport seemed impossible until he noticed the Catalina Conservancy truck bringing fresh water to several tin troughs for the buffalo and mule deer on the mesa. It made its circuit twice a week, mid-afternoon, driving up from the staging yard and the back of the canyon, past the golf course, on roads Jay had run, and proceeded to the farthest watering station first, a spot half a mile south of the airport, then snaked back through the wild rye and rattleweed and coastal sagebrush. He had actually practiced hopping on as the truck rumbled past him jogging, and then rode for a while tucked between the water tank and the back bumper, where nobody could readily see him.
Knowing that this was potentially the most vulnerable moment of exposure, he had learned the best place to catch his ride was a hairpin turn thick with fennel and scrub oak just before the old burn area near the canyon’s lip. He knew that Monday and Thursday were water days, and this day was a Monday, and so Jay had decided, driven by Ginger’s warning, to make his break.
No one saw him go, he kept looking back as he ran, the roads were empty; he was fairly certain they hadn’t seen him. But when he leapt off the truck he’d stumbled and rolled his ankle, felt the sickening pop and the rubbery fold of foot underneath him. Pain came, slow-building, visceral; first the tingling rush of adrenaline from the shock, then a touch of nausea, and it made the half-mile trip uphill to the airport just that much more difficult. A shuttle bus from Avalon rumbled past on the gravel road; he stayed low in the seams of the rolling terrain, climbing, the side of his shoe cutting into the puffy flesh where his ankle was already swelling. Heat rose off the island clay. He circled wide around the head of the runway, then simply emerged from the brush into the baked, treeless, graded flats, and limped straight-line to Dunn’s waiting Cessna. An employee of DC-3 Gifts & Grill stood in the shade of the terminal, smoking, staring at him, but not seeing him.
He climbed into the plane and hunkered down behind the seats and waited, sweating in the stifling oven of the cockpit for Dunn’s arrival.
• • •
Three o’clock sharp, the Cessna shudders as the propellers find speed. Dunn releases the brake and eases out onto the runway. Cool air leaks into the cockpit from circulation vents. He catches the bubble lights of a couple of Avalon sheriff’s station SUVs juddering through the scrub oak, fishtailing up the airport road. At the runway’s end, Dunn sharply pivots the plane, pushes the throttle forward, and hurtles toward the open sky at the tarmac’s opposite end.
Dunn glances, insouciant, at the arriving sheriff’s vehicles as he whips past them. They’ve gone past the terminal, to skirt the runway, their sirens Doppler for a moment in the plane’s wake and—
“What was that?” Jay asks, staying low.
“Nothing,” Dunn says after a beat.
—a man in a federal suit tumbles out of the back of one of the Avalon station SUVs to watch helplessly as the mail-run Cessna floats off the headland cliff, dipping, then catching the ocean updraft effortlessly for a power-climb into a torrid day’s poor excuse for a sky.