“No.”
More realizations, tumbling into place. I pivot and look where Kessler is looking, where his light makes an eerie halo around the face.
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve seen the man,” says Kessler. “I’ve talked to him.”
“That’s not him? Dark brown eyes—”
“Those eyes aren’t dark brown.”
“Of course they’re not now, he’s dead—”
“They’re hazel.”
“Well, they’re not hazel.”
“Palace, it’s not him.”
We are whispering, intensely, and then a gunshot explodes somewhere in the silence of the basement, and then somebody is screaming—maybe more than one person—and we race toward the door, the two of us, trap ourselves briefly in a Three Stooges moment, two abreast in the entranceway, and then we burst free and scramble, me first and then Kessler, across the wide empty furnace room toward the origin of the noise.
It’s the men’s room, the one with the graffiti, except now that door has been shot open and there are lights in here, and I can see them both as soon as I get in there, frozen in place across from each other in the tiny space. Jean with a handgun clenched between two hands, held out directly in front of her small body and aimed at his stomach: Astronaut, a.k.a. Anthony Wayne DeCarlo, a.k.a. Big Pharma, in a flapping-open terry-cloth bathrobe and nothing else, unconcerned about his paunchy nakedness, unconcerned about the woman with the gun, seemingly unconcerned about anything.
The room is the size of an apartment kitchen, lit up like a barroom with neon lights, crammed with paraphernalia for cooking drugs: empty vials, long twists of tubing, one Bunsen burner active and bubbling with something foul, another burner shut off.
In one of the raised hands he’s got a gun of his own, the gun that killed Cortez—a big antique long-barrelled pistol that must be loaded with some sort of nasty homemade semijacketed rounds. The belt, I notice, is still on his pants, a pair of filthy Levi’s crumpled in the corner. Only the clawhammer is still on the belt.
I say, “Everyone lower your weapons.” Nobody lowers their weapons. I’m one step into the room, and Kessler is just behind me, breathing hard, holding his gun, trying to see around me into the room. Astronaut yawns, a long lazy lizard’s yawn. Jean’s body is twitching, shifting, oscillating. It’s like her atomic structure has been unsettled, like she’s a jet traveling too fast, breaking some sort of barrier, and we are watching her shake apart.
“Drop the guns.” I try it again. “Drop them.”
Jean keeps her eyes on Astronaut but responds to me, a murmured shush like we’re at the library and I’m talking too loud. Astronaut laughs and winks at me, quick and reptilian. For someone who has been holed up smoking crack or meth or whatever he’s cooking behind him on that elaborate works, he is cool as a cucumber, steady as she blows, hands still half raised as if by choice: I submit to your firearm’s implied threat but I’m not going to make a big fucking deal about it.
The room reeks: hydrochlorides, ammonia, burnt salt. There is a background noise, a low chug-chug of the gas generator keeping the room alive with neon: beer-brand signs, a gaudy colored-glass Captain Morgan figurine, strings of Christmas lights. The armchair that Cortez saw, plus a piece of a sectional sofa and an ugly lamp, all crammed in here. It’s like the man has re-created his natural habitat below the world, a scumbag terrarium.
I am jerking my head back and forth between the two of them, doing rapid calculations, understanding things in reverse order as they happened, unspooling the film backward. Cortez peeked in this room yesterday and saw a man with his eyes aced out and his legs kicked up and assumed that he was dead. But Astronaut wasn’t dead, he was just riding the waves of whatever substance or combination of substances he’s been riding the waves of for the past week. Cooking and consuming, steeping himself in fumes, happy as a clam in this one-room infuser of hot chemical smoke. At some point, though, he came back to life, took a turn around his subterranean dominions and found Cortez squatting among his mac and cheese and shot him in the face.
I have to keep my eyes in the present—the story is proceeding in front of me—the parts are still moving—Jean is stepping forward with her gun leveled, ready to kill DeCarlo—just as she wanted to do yesterday when she asked if she could come with us.
“You monster,” she whispers, and he ignores her, replies cheerily: “You did it!” Like he’s proud of her. Like she just bowled a perfect game. “You’re back! I’m so proud of you, baby.”
“No, you’re not,” she says to him.
“Sure I am, little sister.”
“Stop.”
“Okay, I’ll stop,” he says, and he smiles at her and licks his lips. “I’m stopping. But I’m so proud of you.”