—
After he’d seen half a dozen men come in or out, singly or in pairs, carrying loads in heavy canvas bags like athletes used, or hunters, he got the nerve to open the door. Slaughterrange. An electronic beep announced him, but a noisy bouquet of Christmas bells rang too, duct-taped to the back of the door.
Long tube lights hung from the rafters hissed and flickered. Maybe the building had once been a garage: the floor was concrete and dipped slightly toward two long, steel-grated drains. The front half was given to two carpets, ratty and colorless, each of which anchored a sofa, a chair, a skid-marked coffee table, and a boxy TV. The back was a counter, antique with glass windows. Over the counter hung a range of weaponry, and a young man stood behind it.
“Hello,” said the man, standing very still. He had a strong gaze and a weak nose, a nose that glistened and twitched like a rabbit’s snout. It was a U’s nose, East recognized.
East said nothing. He studied the guns over the man’s head. Large and gripped out, sniper guns. He’d never seen guns like this in plastic bags before, like hairbrushes at the drugstore. They were not real guns, but he did not know what they were. Some of them looked like fantasy, outer-space guns, colored green and orange like children’s toys.
“Can I help you?” said the man, looking East over. East recognized the small, secret fidgets of his face. He was, maybe, thirty. Behind the counter he would have a real gun.
“What sort of place is this?”
“Best paintball range north of the Ohio River,” the man said automatically, as if it was a phrase he’d been paid to remember.
“Paintball?” said East.
The man reached and drew out a pearl of orange. He tossed it to East. “That’s a stale one,” he said. “That one will hurt when it hits.”
East looked at the faintly luminescent nugget in his hand.
“What are you here for?” said the man. “The job?”
East shrugged.
“Perry’s not here tonight. You might catch him in the morning. He’s in charge; he’ll see you about it.”
“What is the job?”
“It’s, like, assistant. Like a watchman.”
East detected the accent, the harsh sound inside the words. Like a movie spy.
“I can do that,” East said.
“This is a job for a grown man. You have to stay late.”
East said, “I can do a man’s job. I can stay late.”
“What are you,” the man said politely, “thirteen? Fourteen? In school?”
“I’m a man,” East said. “I don’t go to school no more.”
“Ha. Good,” said the man. He had a telltale wetness in his nose, a bubbling. Then two men came in with canvas bags, and East watched them pay and take the tubs of colored balls the man gave them and transfer them into their guns and their own containers with funnel-shaped loaders, perched on the edge of the sofas, mumbling profanely. At last they returned the tubs and moved up a stairway beside the counter and out a door that went to the back of the building, the berm side.
“Can I look?” East said.
“Not tonight,” said the counterman. “Come back tomorrow.” At first he’d seemed friendly, but now he’d seemed to have changed his mind.
In the parking lot East sat far apart from the other men’s cars and trucks and listened to the shooting music fill the air. Dull night. No stars. He found himself starved for sleep. The strange hours.
He awoke with a gasp, leaning against the building. He had been dreaming of the van, someone terrible peppering it with bullets: Michael Wilson, somehow, but with Sidney’s face, firing out the mouth of the cabin in Wisconsin where the daughter was the dead Jackson girl aiming at them from beneath the suitcase. There was no shaking this. There was no far enough to settle his mind at sleep.
Leaned up against the wall was a roll of pink insulation. The wall type, fiberglass. He checked it, shook it—dry, no mice or vermin.
He found the largest truck in the yard, a jacked-up Ford with a work bed. He fed ten feet of insulation in between the huge back tires. Then he crawled in on top of it and fetched the rest of the roll around him, like a blanket, like a wrapper, sheltering under the huge round differential with its burnt-syrup smell. The cold and the lights muffled down, and he slept to the knocking of the shots in the yard beyond.
At one point in the night he woke and saw, through the hole in the end of his pink swaddling, the sky. The truck above him had gone. But he was still there.
18.
The morning light startled East, and he struggled to unbundle himself, unwrap, to find his feet and stumble free. Pink strands in his mouth, drying at his lips. Pink fleece in his hair. All his skin crawled.