Some form of unremarkable weather, profoundly commonplace for meteorologists but somehow relevant to the overall color of the scene, was taking place. Let us say soft rain and sunshine; let us say lightningless, borborygmic thunder.
The amber Vega roared through dirt roads, spraying waves of high-definition gravel.
It wasn’t necessary to follow any scrap metal harvester; Kerri knew where to go. After the Blyton Hills gold mine was abandoned in the early 1960s, following a brief grace period during which tin had become the main product, the same California company that owned the mines converted the smelting furnace south of town into a chemical plant. This new works extended the life span of the town’s industrial economy and gave rise to a small residential neighborhood for qualified employees, about a mile southeast of the town proper. In the 1980s the plant was shut down too, and the residential area around it was quickly abandoned, its population of retired workers yielding their housing to the increasing demand of shelter for the homeless and privacy for the troubled youth.
South of this area, the bad neighborhood began.
To get rid of the vast amount of toxic waste and scrap metal the plant had generated, a junkyard had to be laid and a new furnace set up to burn the residue. The incinerator had worked at full capacity for two years—enough to dye the sky the color of iron rust—and then it was shut down as well. The junkyard was still open, its business merely consisting in hoping for all the incombustible trash to just evaporate so that planetary exploitation could resume. A long-retired employee was posted in a watchtower atop four steel columns, waiting for that to happen.
That is where Kerri parked: a few yards short of the watchtower, at the foot of which, basking in a flimsy shaft of winter sun in a frayed hammock, wrapped in a wool blanket with a baseball cap over his eyes and an unlabeled bottle of twelve-year-old battery acid by his side, lay the old man they were looking for.
Two pairs of sneakers and some suede boots trod the yellow dirt, car doors clacking behind.
The man’s dusty lips quivered to produce a sentence.
“Fuck off.”
No more steps were heard.
Except for paw pads, and some panting, and the brush of a wet snout against the man’s fingertips, which finally made him look. A microquake shook a fly off his cap as he faced the Weimaraner licking the dirt off his knuckles.
“I know this dog.”
The man sat up, removed his cap and his blanket, and stared at the color festival—swirling orange and amber and black. The slits of his eyes squinted further to identify the long-legged woman before him.
“Kerri.”
A smile dawned like a postwar sun.
“Holy shit, Nate! And Andy! Oh, shit!” he chuckled, then pulled up some seriousness and asked, “It’s okay to swear in front of you now, right?”
“Fuck yeah,” Kerri assured him, still insecure herself.
They hugged. Kerri was startled to feel the minimal body under the Salvation Army clothes.
“Come upstairs!” he said after hugging everyone, waving at the dog. “I’m out of lemonade, but I’ll find you something.”
They followed him up a long flight of rotten iron stairs that threatened to infect them with tetanus by skin contact, Kerri watching Al’s back all the way up. There were very few things he had not lost in thirteen years; his wide frame was one.
The single room on top of the tower was warm, by virtue of a single gas heater in a corner near a mattress on the floor. A table turned workbench sat in the middle of the room; an airplane engine lay where other people would have chosen to place a bowl of wax fruit. Tim, smelling the mattress on the floor, decided it was some other animal’s bed and left it alone. Al searched a cabinet in the area that had inexplicably landed the role of a kitchen.
“What can I offer you? I have instant coffee…Damn, but no milk.”
“We’re fine,” Kerri said.
“No, wait, I just remembered, you’re twenty-one already, right?” He produced and laid on the table a bottle of whiskey and four glasses that had definitely never seen one another before. “Sit down, sit down, put that anywhere and take that chair. Shit, look at that. The Blyton Summer Detective Club knocking on my door!” The kids could feel his eyes feeding off their youth. “And where’s Peter? Don’t tell me that big jock has let you come all the way here without him watching your back; where is he?”
And there, of all places, he actually stopped for an answer.
In a matter of seconds, Kerri’s brain had produced a thousand plausible stories. Some of them were even good. Peter got married and he’s tied up with the twins. He’s shooting in Paris with Juliette Binoche. He’s on his last year in the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. But no sooner had the fiction department in her head spread out all these stories for her to choose from than she discarded them all. She would have to tell Al the truth. For one reason, she argued to her flustered imagination: because the Captain Al we need right now is one who can take the truth, not one who must be fed lies.
“Cap, I’m sorry,” she said. “Peter’s dead.”
Andy and Nate watched the smile on Captain Al transition to incomprehension, then to incredulity, then to sadness. As smoothly as flowers closing up at night, almost too slow for the naked eye, Captain Al’s smile withered and died.
“No.” His voice quivered. “No no no no no. Why did he die?”
“Don’t tell him the truth,” Peter begged, startling Nate by his side. “Please. Nate. Don’t tell him the truth.”
Nate didn’t even flinch. He stood still, barely registering Peter through the corner of his eye, measuring the opportunity window before him. He spoke before anyone else could phrase an answer.
“Car crash.” He noted the girls’ stare, but neither disagreed. “Wasn’t his fault. I’m sorry, Al.”
Al took a seat. He was the first to sit down, after all.
Distant mountains of metal against a yellow sky mourned behind the dirty windows.
“Man, it’s wrong,” he stammered from the ruins. “It’s all so wrong.”
“Captain,” Andy called, “we need your help.”
Al refocused on her like he stood far, far away. His hand poured some whiskey into one of the glasses and he drank it up.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. It was not a courtesy formula; it was actually a baffled question.
“We’re on a case, Al.”
“Are you now?” he tragichuckled. The guests waited as he poured himself another glass and gulped it down. “Villains of Blyton Hills beware, the Blyton Summer Detective Club is back in business. What is it this time? Ghost train on the old railway? Stolen goods from the history museum?” Each new example came to him with more difficulty. “A…ciphered message dropped by a dark-coated man on the run?”
“Al, what happened to you?” Kerri begged. “What…I mean, your house?”
“They took my house, Kerri,” he said, a couple decibels too loud. “Couldn’t keep it on my vet pension. The money I put on the sheep at the co-op, I lost. They killed them.”
“But…” Kerri searched for a grown-up’s word to dispel disaster. “What about insurance?”