His wife Rebekah had come running into the room with her hands over her head and her half-wit sister Bathsheba right behind her shouting, “It’s the Rapture! Prepare yourself for the Lord!”
Charlie almost might have believed it himself, except that the sound from on high reminded him so much of a helicopter. Out the window, he could see spotlights whisking back and forth across the backyard and the garage, where he kept his specially equipped and modified minivan.
Whipping around from the Skype camera on his computer, he’d wheeled his chair out of the meeting room and onto the back deck, just in time to see this huge friggin’ chopper moving like a giant dragonfly over his land. It was no more than fifty feet off the ground and looked to him like it was on some kind of close-surveillance mission. For a moment, he wondered if the federal government was sending a black-ops team to take him out; he’d certainly been known to say some inflammatory things about those bastards in Washington. The lighted cross on top of his roof, it suddenly occurred to him, might as well have been a bull’s-eye.
But the chopper moved on, skimming the treetops, then disappearing over the ridge and heading in the general direction of the community center. He listened as its roar gradually decreased, then grabbed his cell phone out of the pocket of his cardigan and called Harley. First he got the automated message, but he called back immediately, and this time Harley, sounding groggy, picked up.
“How the hell did you sleep through that?” Charlie demanded.
“Sleep through what?”
“That helicopter that just about knocked my chimney off.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the military chopper that’s scoping out the town. I bet it’s got something to do with you and that coffin.”
“Charlie, next time you decide to flip out, call somebody else.”
“Don’t you dare hang up,” he warned. “Now get up and get your ass down to the Yardarm and find out what’s going on.” The Yardarm Bar and Grill was the local equivalent of a switchboard.
“Why don’t you go?”
“ ’Cause I’m in the middle of my broadcast.”
Harley laughed. “To who? You really think anybody’s listening out there?”
Charlie did sometimes wonder how many there were, but envelopes containing small checks and five-dollar bills did occasionally show up in his mailbox, so there had to be some. Not to mention the fact that he had two women in his house who had found him over the Web.
“I’m not gonna argue about this,” Charlie said, with the authority that always carried the day. “Get going.”
When he hung up and turned around on the cold deck, Rebekah was standing in the doorway with her hands in the pockets of one of her long dresses. Bathsheba was lurking right behind her, apparently persuaded that the Rapture had been postponed. Their white faces and beaked noses put him in mind of seagulls.
“We lost the connection online,” Rebekah said. “I told you we don’t have enough bandwidth.”
Harley dropped the phone on the mattress and lay there for a while. Why did Charlie always get to call the shots? It couldn’t be because he was in a wheelchair; it had been like this his whole life. Angie had told Harley he should just leave Port Orlov and start over someplace where his brother couldn’t boss him around. And he was starting to think that, dumb as she was, she was right about that much. If this graveyard gig worked out, and the coffins did contain valuable stuff, then that just might be his ticket to the good life in the Lower 48.
He wouldn’t even give his brother his phone number.
Getting up, he stumbled around the trailer, looking for some clean clothes—or clothes that would pass for clean—and ran his fingers through his hair in lieu of a proper brush. The floor was ankle deep in detritus—beer cans, cereal boxes, martial-arts magazines—and all of it was bathed in a faint violet glow from the snake cage on the counter next to the microwave. Glancing in, he saw Fergie curled on the rock, and he said, “You hungry?” He couldn’t remember when he had last fed her, so he opened the freezer and took out a frozen mouse—it was curled up like a question mark in a plastic baggie—and nuked it for about a minute. Once he had left one in too long and the stench had made the trailer unlivable for a week. He’d had to move back home with Charlie and the witches, and that was so creepy he couldn’t wait to get out of there. Bathsheba, in particular, kept turning up outside his door on one dumb pretext or another.