They sat in the Fairlane, Brody poking at the touch screen and keying through the personal settings menu.
Thorp looked around the haggard interior. “Whose car is this again?”
“It belongs to an asshole named Seb,” Brody answered distractedly.
“Seb? What kind of name is Seb?”
“I think it’s short for Sebastian.” Brody tapped onto the security menu and swiped his finger down the monitor, scrolling the list of options. With all the smudges and grime and overlapping fingerprints, it was hard to see the small, white text. He cupped his hand over the monitor to cut the dome light’s glare and found the setting that he was looking for. He smiled, elbowed Thorp in the ribs to get his attention off the junk heaped in the backseat.
“What?” Thorp said, squinting at the dashboard monitor. “I can’t read that.”
“Okay, so here’s the thing. This car has a security feature. If it’s ever stolen, the owner can track the car with their phone.”
“Well, don’t turn it on,” Thorp cried, slapping Brody’s hand away. “Any guy that has someone’s nuts hanging from his mirror, I sure as hell don’t want him here. Besides, you stole his car. You don’t exactly want him to find where you’re keeping it, do you?”
“It’s not me I want him to find. I want to find him.”
“Why? You have a car now. Fuck the guy. Let him take the bus.”
“Listen to me, would you? I don’t know any criminal types out here. I need a card-carrying member of the Chicago underbelly. And Seb is all I’ve got. I’m positive a shithead like Seb and Titian Shandorf have at least crossed paths or Seb can lead us to someone who has.”
“And you think letting him find you with his stolen car is the way to do that? Imagine you take the car back to Chicago and turn that thing on. Okay? Imagine you’re hiding in the backseat ready to jump the guy when he gets into his car. Now imagine that it’s not just him but every one of his goddamn friends piling in and they rip you limb from limb right there in the McDonald’s parking lot and throw your pieces to the seagulls.”
Brody stared at Thorp, completely stunned at the degree to which his morbid imagination could plunge. But he had to admit that Thorp had a point. What if Seb came to fetch his car and he wasn’t alone? It was a possibility that he was glad Thorp had explored, since it hadn’t crossed his mind.
Brody looked at the slider on the car-finder feature waiting to be moved from Off to On. He took a deep breath and patted Thorp on the shoulder. “I suppose I’m going to need to visit that stockpile you have in the basement, then.” He got out.
Thorp stood, talking over the battered roof of the Fairlane. “I meant I should go with you.”
“Out of the question. You on a crowded street with a gun? No offense but I don’t think that’s a stellar idea.”
“Fuck you, man. Do you recall how our scorecards compared from the practice range? I can shoot. Besides, when was the last time you picked up a gun?”
Brody rolled his eyes. “Ten years ago.”
“When do you suppose was the last time I picked up a gun?” Thorp asked, thumbing his chest.
“I give up. Yesterday while I was sleeping you had one to my head?”
Thorp’s expression hardened. “Not funny.”
“Sorry, sorry. I don’t know. Tell me. When was the last time you held a gun?”
“Once a week without fail, I go down to the bog and set up a row of bottles and take them out, all down the line. Fifty yards out. And I do not go back inside until I have them all down.” He mimed firing, even providing the imaginary gun’s kick, scanning left to right, ending with pointing the invisible rifle at Brody. “I was in the top of our class. And not to dig up the past or anything, but I did pull the trigger in one incident when it really counted.”
Brody felt jarred by being forced to recall that alleyway, the bear trap, the prosthetic limb, the kid at the end of the alley, the look on the kid’s face—terror accompanying his softening determination. Brody’s rifle butt to his shoulder, ready to fire, but his trigger finger: frozen. The three-round burst directly next to his ear—everything ringing now—turning slightly and seeing the snaking twist of gray escaping the gun in Thorp’s hand. Thorp’s face tight and shiny with sweat, his eyes bulbous, mouth hanging open. A thousand things happening at once.
“Fine,” Brody said and headed toward the house. “We’ll leave in an hour.”
They didn’t speak for a majority of that time.
Brody made himself a ham sandwich and cut up an apple and, on his way to the back porch with his plate, took another cigar from the countertop humidor. He watched the sun dissolve into the horizon. The farthest clouds vibrantly purple surrounded by an otherwise gray sky.
He savored the sandwich and ate each quadrant of the fuji slowly. He was doing so because he considered Thorp’s suggestion about Seb having friends. And in doing so, he couldn’t eat without taking into account that this could very well be his final meal.
00:59:59.
He’d enjoy seeing the moon, when it could be glimpsed, while it lasted. He’d recharge the lenses as soon as they died out, and once they were recharged, they’d depart for the city.
Abigail Schwartz. Brody tried drawing a line between her and Nectar, imagining them as friends, having a night out on the town. Perhaps they were lovers. After tiring themselves out with a protest, their arms sore from holding up hand-painted placards all day, maybe they would sit and stare at the sky like he was doing now. He wondered if they spent time together at Mother Nature’s Womb for any other reason besides planning their next protest. He whispered their mantra aloud again, and at the end of the third recitation, he tugged the collar of his shirt. They needed to visit the gardening shop, if merely to cross it off the list of possibilities.
Brody bit off the end of the cigar and spat it away. He watched the chewed nub sail over the railing into the yard, and that was when he noticed again the dangling wires looping in inverse arches from one tower to the next across the width of the land. He studied the three wires running in parallel from one derrick to the next, heavily contrasted in their thick black housing against the sky beyond. He stared and pondered.
The connection between Nectar, the Probitas letter, and Titian just wasn’t fitting together. He had the different tectonic plates of clues and people, but no matter which arrangement he put them in, nothing comprehensible could be distilled—no clear Pangaea could be found.
The sliding glass door opened, and Thorp emerged with a small leather pouch and a gathered tangle of clothing in his hand. He sat down in the Adirondack chair next to Brody, the old wood creaking under his weight. He unzipped the leather pouch and spread it out on the small table between them.
Brody glanced over and saw a few spools of thread and needles arranged in their individual holders. He recognized the wad of filthy clothing as the pants he had been wearing earlier that day. They were stained with pink patches of commingled blood and drywall dust.
Thorp untangled the pants, handling the garment gummy with dried blood bare-handed as if it were fresh from the dryer.
“Never figured you for much of a tailor,” Brody commented, taking a puff from the cigar.
“When you live alone and work a field without a wife, it’s a skill you pick up pretty quick so you don’t have to run to town for a new pair of pants every week,” Thorp said with a grin and threaded the sewing needle with one eye closed.
“Thanks,” Brody said after a moment. He finished the cigar and ground it out on the heel of his boot. He set the cigar butt on the table next to Thorp’s sewing kit. “About before. I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Thorp looked up, harpooning the thread at the edge of the ragged gap and then pulling it out, up, and away. His expression was quizzical; the question wasn’t meant to be sarcastic in the least.
“For saying that shit to you. It wasn’t good. About the crowded street and not trusting you with firearms. I know you’re a crack shot. And the whole thing in that alleyway. I’ve been meaning for a very long time to call you and thank you for that.”
Silence for a moment. Then, “It’s all right. But for curiosity’s sake, why didn’t you?” Thorp asked without looking up from his sewing this time. “I mean, I’d do it again if I had to. Wouldn’t bat an eye. But I could’ve called you too. Never mind. That was a dick thing to ask.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t call. I suppose there was a kind of … hesitation to connect with anyone after I went on to Alexandria. I wanted to push it back as quickly as I could and just move on to the next thing in life, and … I never considered that you were stateside probably looking for someone to talk shit over with.”
“I coped,” Thorp said, nearly finished mending the pants. “I pretty much did what you did. Put it behind me, got out of Chicago. Started over with a clean slate, tried to stay busy. Little did I know that only a few months later I’d start buying these things off the Internet.” He nodded at the military crafts congregated on the lawn. “When you’re done with the past, that’s when it’s finally buried, but until you are you keep building monuments to it whether you want to or not.”
Brody stared at one of the decommissioned Darters. The gentle angular shape of it, the cluster in its abdomen where supplies were housed, the thorax where the passengers sat—where the two of them had sat, strapped in, on several occasions in a different Darter.
“I’ll get rid of all this stuff someday. When I’m ready. I’m going to bury all the guns in the field or melt them down and make horseshoes out of them. Maybe I’ll donate these rust buckets to a museum. I don’t know. Check it out,” Thorp said, holding up the mended pants and giving the sutures in the material a tug to test its integrity. “Good as new.”
Brody dropped his feet off the railing. “If picking up the gun and going through this shit will disturb the peace you’ve carved out for yourself, I can go it alone. I just want a gun to use as a threat, anyway. I don’t even want it loaded.”
Thorp skirted the question. “Do you really think that if we get this Seb guy to come and get his car that he’ll be able to lead us to Titian Shandorf?”
“If not directly to him, to someone who knows him.”
“And you’re sure of that?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Do you think Titian was involved with Nectar disappearing?”
“I can’t be certain until we get closer and ask some questions. But there might be a connection with the similarities in records that Abigail Schwartz and your sister had, plus they were in the same activist group. Nectar has an outstanding tab to Titian’s nightclub—she’s been in his orbit at one point or another.”
Thorp looked at the Darter, the snow-capped Fairlane, the barn, then finally Brody. “In your honest opinion, do you think Nectar’s alive?” He raised a finger. “Wait. Don’t answer right away. Don’t give me the half-cocked positivity that you do. Give me your honest-to-God gut feeling on this. Give it a second, think it over, and then tell me what you really think.”
Brody considered The Mothers, Abigail’s headless body, Nectar’s debt to The Glower, every other piece of information, foggy trace, and weak clue he had collected over the last set of days. He closed his eyes, letting the answer come to him and roll over his tongue. “Yes.”
“I told you to tell me honestly.”
“I have no reason to believe she’s dead.”
“Then where is she?” Thorp snapped. “Where the fuck is she?”
“She might be hiding out, waiting for it to cool down. You don’t know.”
“No, you don’t know. I’ve taken a life; you haven’t. That kid is gone, and I robbed him of possibly getting straightened out, living a normal life free of the terrorist cell crap and—”
“What does that have to do with finding Nectar?”
“I’ve killed. I know how easy it is. And if I can say it’s easy, someone like me who never had any interest in killing nobody, someone like this Titian motherfucker, who probably looks forward to the next neck he can get his hands round—I can’t imagine what kind of state Nectar is in, wherever she is.”
Even in the failing light and Brody’s vision at the very beginning of dissolve, he could see a thick tear rolling down over the cusp of Thorp’s cheekbone, hang for a second, then drip onto the mended fabric where it soaked in and vanished.
Brody took a deep breath and placed a hand on Thorp’s shoulder. “We’ll find her.”