"They won't mess with me if they don't know who I am. And once they do their homework and figure it out, they really won't want to bother with me. I'm high-profile, and not a little politically connected. Dragging me-or my corpse-into this will only complicate whatever they're trying to get done."
"Still, why take the chance?"
"Fine." A silence, and then, convincing herself, "Fine. Put the picture in an envelope, tape it beneath the lid of the Dumpster at that corner mart by your place. I'll get it in a few hours. Let's meet at Starbucks at noon tomorrow. Free Internet."
"The one on Montana?"
"The other one on Montana."
After she hung up, I shut the phone and held it at my side. I closed my eyes but didn't like what I saw there either. Leaving aside the photograph and the slip with the pager number, I gathered together the items on my mattress, stuffing them back into Charlie's rucksack. It fit snugly into Evelyn's giant pasta pot in the kitchen cupboard.
I grabbed my keys, left, and walked the few blocks, stopping occasionally at windows and newspaper vending boxes to check behind me.
Homer was sleeping off a drunk, slumped against the convenience-store wall, one leg flung over a parking space's bumper block. A car pulled in right in front of him, headlights glaring into his face. He raised an arm against the light, wagging sluggishly. The driver hopped out, chatting on his cell phone, and scampered inside.
Homer was cursing and rearranging himself. He looked like a brown puddle. He got nasty when he boozed hard, not like the affable bums you see in movies. His eyes were bloodshot and sinister, his crow's-feet white lines in his dirt-caked face. I thought about what Kim Kendall had told me about his wife and kid, how he'd let his past run him into the ground. I seemed to be on a pretty good course for the same destination.
"Hey, Homer," I said. "Did you talk to anyone at the VA for me about tracking down those soldiers?"
"… ffffuckin' think you are…," he said, in a dry-throated mutter. "Leeme the hell alone."
I stepped past him into the shop. When I laid two more throwaway cell phones on the counter, Hacmed leered at me. "You start a telecommunications company, Nicolas?"
I set down some cash and went outside. Homer was out cold on his back, his mouth a ragged oval. His head was shoved up against the bumper block. I did my best to move him, but his girth and odor outmatched me. I finally managed to roll him onto his side, his forehead clunking to the asphalt. I wedged a folded piece of cardboard beneath his sweaty cheek and left him snoring prodigiously.
The corner mart's rear wall, papered with flyers for independent films and sex-caller lines, abutted a rank alley with a Dumpster. I taped the picture of Charlie and Frank beneath the lid, then studied the slip of paper with the pager number.
Ten digits on ripped paper. My sole channel to the Powers That Be.
I flipped open one of the cell phones I'd just purchased, dialed the pager number, then punched in the digits printed on the back of the cheap plastic earpiece. I hung up and waited. A half-peeled ad proclaimed, Have Sex With Locals Now!!!! I wondered how they decided to stop at four exclamation points. The breeze wafted a faint sewer smell from the grate, but faint was enough.
The shrill ring startled me. I answered in a low voice, "Hello?"
Silence. A whisper of static coming through the live line. A soft rustle, a puff of breath catching the receiver. And then nothing.
"Hello?" I said again, wanting back just a single word to match against my memory of Sever, the Voice, Charlie. But there was only a click and, eventually, a dial tone.
I smashed the phone on the ground, threw it in the Dumpster, and headed for home.
I came awake in terror, gasping for breath, shoving at my sheets. For a few wretched moments, I tumbled through scenarios, disassociated. Was I holding Frank on the blood-glistening floorboards? Hurtling back from the blast that consumed Charlie's head? Battling an intruder by the sliding glass door? The fabric between past and present had torn, and I was in free fall between them.
Finally I realized that I was in the grip of night terrors. I didn't have to check the clock to know what time it was. My witching hour.
I spoke the facts out loud to try to calm myself: "It's 2:18, and you're safe in your bed. It's 2:18, and you 're safe in your bed. "
But still I couldn't slow my breathing, my thoughts, my furious heartbeat.
The ghouls had fled their cages, and there was no herding them back.
