“Oh, use your fucking head,” Rafferty says. “He can make a lot of trouble if he thinks I’m not writing the book he wants. This is going to be hard enough without that.” There is nothing under the counter either.
“Just a minute,” the man on the other end says. Rafferty can hear a palm cover the mouthpiece and a muffled conversation, both voices male. “Okay,” the man says. “You can stay in touch with Pan. But don’t get fancy again, because you’re all out of warnings.”
“One more thing,” Rafferty says, “and then you can hang up and high-five each other on scaring a little girl half to death. That skinny old guy, Porthip. The one who sells the steel. He won’t talk to me until someone calls to tell him he should. I thought you assholes were on top of details.”
“He’ll get a call tomorrow.”
“
He closes the phone and looks at Rose and Miaow. More bad news to deliver. He puts his finger to his lips, then uses the same finger to make a circle that indicates the room in general, and then he touches his ear. He says, “I’ll clean this up. Miaow, go to bed.” He gestures her not toward her bedroom but toward the room he shares with Rose.
She says, “I’m frightened.”
Rafferty is checking the underside of his desk, but he turns and goes to Miaow. Kneeling, he wraps his arms around her. She fidgets, but then she puts an arm around his neck and presses her forehead against his chest.
Rafferty says, “So am I.”
At 12:42 A.M., Captain Teeth says, “They’ve got cops.”
“I’d imagine so,” says the man who had sat next to Rafferty in the car. “He fired that thing four or five times.” He gets up from the soft black leather couch, turning back to center his drink, straw-colored liquid over ice, on a thick coaster. In this house, rings on the tables are strongly discouraged. When he is satisfied with the placement of the glass, the man noiselessly pads across the carpet to the console, where he grabs the second set of headphones. The console, just a cheap black table with the receiver on it, has been shoved up against a wall, displacing an ornate teak-and-suede sofa that is now jammed haphazardly into a corner, where it disrupts the meticulous feng shui of the room.
The room is a home office, all dark wood-and-leather furniture and the half-hidden glint of gold on the spines of unread books. The walls are the color of strong coffee, a deeply grained mahogany that’s been varnished to a reflective luster. Three flat-screen televisions are hung on one wall in a perfect vertical, and two computer screens flicker on the console behind the desk. The desk is empty but for a small thicket of expensively framed photographs, each one showing a handsome, richly dressed man standing with other richly dressed men, mostly less handsome, who face the camera with the air of having been interrupted in the middle of something important. There is one photograph of a thickset woman in her forties, her wrinkles retouched but her disappointment intact. She is flanked by two younger women and a teenage girl, forcing the requisite smiles, who are clearly her daughters.
The room is completely silent. The entire house has been soundproofed because its mistress does not sleep well. The men at the console press their headphones to their ears, one standing and one sitting, for several moments. The man who had spoken to Rafferty in the car drops his phones onto the console for a moment and returns to the couch, moving in and out of bright areas beneath the recessed pin spots in the ceiling. He grabs the drink and totes it over to the console, sits in the wheeled black leather office chair beside Captain Teeth, and slaps the phones back on.
“Pretty dumb story, even if they’re telling it to cops,” he says, listening. “Wonder where they put the snake.”
“Probably the refrigerator,” says Captain Teeth. A new bandage, pristine white, is neatly wrapped around his left thumb.
“She’d never let him do that. Listen to her. She’s not going to have any cobras in her refrigerator.”
“She’s extremely fine,” Captain Teeth says. “You didn’t see her.”
“If you’re a good boy,” the other man says, “you can have her when this is over.”
Captain Teeth shakes a cigarette out of a pack, holds it beneath his nose, and inhales the fragrance. He knows better than to light it. Only one person is allowed to smoke in this house. “I’ll never be that lucky. But I’ll tell you, if she’d be nice to me, I’d spend my life keeping snakes out of her refrigerator.”
“I can fix it. Give you a few hours with her before we put her away.”
“Better-looking than Eve. You didn’t get to see Eve either.”
“I saw her on TV.”
“Yeah?” Captain Teeth squints against a burst of static, puts down the unlit cigarette, and fiddles with the volume knob. “You see me? I was right up front. Till I had to leave, anyway.”
