Felix limps as he walks down the hallway, angry and brooding, a cut on his jaw, one eye swollen half shut. Injuries from the beating he took in the graveyard, from cops who didn’t know who he was, and didn’t care. The OPD lieutenant he’s paying off told him it was “just the cost of doing business.”
In the background he hears a police scanner jumping from call to call, the TV is turned up for Wheel of Fortune. A helicopter clatters over the project.
When Tyree comes up the hall, Felix gestures to him, and they both go into the bunker. Felix closes the heavy, steel-clad door and it’s absolutely quiet, deathly quiet.
Felix sits on the sofa. “You know,” he begins, then stands in the middle of the bombproof, fireproof, windowless room, studying the recessed light fixture in the ceiling above him. Tyree starts to say something, but Felix silences him with a raised hand, shaking his head. Not now.
He seems to be listening to the silent room as he slowly turns, looking at the molding between the wall and ceiling. In a moment he walks to the bookcase, stands there, pulls a book partly out, and another, looks behind them, pushes them back into place. He picks up a telephone that’s on the desk by the bookcase and holds it to his ear, listens, puts it back down, still looking at it. He picks it up again, jerks the cord out, and holds it to his ear, listens, then carefully puts it back and sits down on the sofa again. The swelling under his eye is worse than it appeared at first, the white of his eye bloodshot when he looks at the reading lamp next to him.
He turns it on, then off, looks up beneath the lampshade, pats the leather cushion next to him, studying the lamp while Tyree walks over. He pats the cushion again, impatiently, until Tyree sits next to him. He points up into the lamp and nods, looks at Tyree, and screws the bulb out of the lamp.
“Listen,” he whispers, cutting his eyes toward Tyree, turning the light bulb next to his ear, one way, then the other. “They…”
He touches his swollen eye with the bulb, swallows, gets his breath back. He raises his other hand to the silent room, shakes his head. They’re everywhere.