“Keep going, sir. You can’t stop here.”
“OK.” I smiled, engagingly, I hoped. “What’s happening with the meeting there? I heard it’s quite a thing?”
The temperature went down perceptibly.
“ID,” said the cop.
I handed him my passport. He flicked to the picture page, glanced from it to me and back again.
“Your car?”
“Company car. I have the papers—” I went to open the glove compartment, then stopped myself. “Is it OK . . . ?”
He nodded. I showed him the papers and he waved them around a little. “Meeting’s closed tonight,” he said. “Weekend, too. Maybe longer. You need to stay away. Clear?”
“Has something happened here? What’s going on?”
“Drive straight through. Do not stop.” He handed me the papers, then said, “You want a diner, there’s Millie’s on the highway. Exit 21.”
He waved us off.
Angel said, “Meeting’s closed?”
We circled round towards the park. Now we could see it: cop cars everywhere. There can’t have been this many cops in the whole county, never mind the town. And there were no crowds. No onlookers, no congregation. Like they’d all just vanished into thin air.
I started to pull over.
Angel said, “Don’t do that!”
“I was only going to ask—”
“Guy told you not to stop, Chris. So don’t stop.”
I drove on.
Chapter 31
Options
Silverman, we left at his van.
It was the desk clerk at the Gemini who told us what was happening. She glanced quickly left and right, then, sotto voce, like a gossip spreading scandal, she said, “We got a outbreak.”
“Outbreak . . . ?”
“TB. What they used to call ‘consumption.’ Four or five of ’em, up at St. Luke’s, I hear. New guests gotta register with the Sheriff’s office.”
She was a small, round woman, and like any good gossip, she managed to sound thrilled and horrified, both at the same time.
“It’s all them crowds. That preacher feller . . .”
I looked at Angel.
The desk clerk said, “It was on the news. Local news. I always listen. You sneeze or blow your nose, you should always check the tissue. That’s what they said.” She opened her hand and stared at it. “See any flecks of blood—you get straight to that hospital, OK?” She eyed us warily. “You don’t got flecks of blood, do you?”
“Our tissues are just fine,” I told her. “Honestly.”
How do you shut down a whole town?
Eddie would say, simple: with money.
And maybe he was right.
Angel asked, “You going to phone him?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t either.”
“You think he did it? Or just knew about it, then claimed credit?”
“Either way,” she said, “this was coming, way before he offered us a deal. You don’t set stuff like this up in an hour or two.”
“Dead right.”
“And it means,” she said, “we get a crack at the pond.”
“It means we can . . . consider our options, anyway.”
She watched me. She kept watching me.
Then my phone rang.
It was Silverman. “I got a text from the Ballington kid. Do you want to hear it?”
“Yeah.”
“It says—” he cleared his throat. “‘Happy birthday, guys. Give it your best. I’ll see you soon.’”
“‘I’ll see you soon,’” I said.
That irked me, somehow.
It wasn’t an immediate thing. But the more I thought about it—that awful, egotistical self-confidence, that absolute belief that all he had to do was hold out a few bucks for everyone to fall in line—the more I thought: I want to do this. If I can. If it’s even possible. I want to make this retrieval just so I can drive away and leave the stupid bugger empty-handed. Fuck him, thinking he can boss the world around. Fuck him.
Then, out loud, I said, “Fuck him.” It sounded good, and so I rolled it round my mouth, said it again: “Fuck him.”
I can be childish, sometimes.
It’s one of my better qualities.
Chapter 32
Confession
We slept a while that afternoon. I had laid it all out, straight: it was my retrieval. She’d help, yes. But she’d do the jobs I asked her, and no more. I told her we’d see how it went. How safe it was.
We didn’t fight exactly. But it was close, too close.
“I can do this,” she said.
“I don’t even know that I can do it.”
I tried to tell her: I didn’t want the complication, I didn’t want the extra worry.
I didn’t want to sound like a patronizing oaf, either. But I probably did.
And that’s the subtle and insidious way that work and personal life intertwine. Retrievals require calm, and focus. No distractions. People get hurt when they can’t keep their minds on the job. One slip, an error they don’t catch in time, or just looking the wrong way at the wrong moment, and that’s it. Suddenly, it’s not a little problem anymore. Suddenly, it’s life or death.