The Extinction Event (30 page)

“They used an accelerant,” Jack said.

“Whatever,” Kipp said. “The red-white-and-blue sitting, bawling, the smoke just drifts down his back. Looked like Batman. Like he was wearing a big, black, glossy cape. The Dark Knight defending the homeland from us aliens! You see that movie? A real psycho protecting real Americans. You go to any movie today, the go-to guys for villains—that'd be me. My brothers. My cousins. Maybe a slinky Asian chick to keep you watching when you get bored with the explosions and the blood.”

“That's when they arrested you?” Jack asked.

“You bet'cha,” Kipp said. “Real gentle, too.”

“Resisting?” Jack guessed. “Assaulting an police officer?”

“For starters,” Kipp said. “Dipshit charges compared to murder, but I bet you're out of here before me.”

“So I guess you won't be enrolling in a prelaw course at Columbia Community,” Jack said.

“You want to tell me about Hussein and his girlfriend and what you been up to?” Kipp asked.

“No,” Jack said.

A guard unlocked the cell door.

“Slidell,” the guard said.

“Norman,” Jack said, recognizing him. “Where you been keeping yourself?”

“The wife decided I was spending too much time at Mama's,” the guard said. “So I bought a flat-screen TV and watch junk all night. Wife says,
You don't get AIDS from a porn movie
. She watches with me. Likes to talk about the guys' equipment.
Trying to make me feel inadequate
, I ask her.
No, hon
, she says.
I'm satisfied. But it's like looking at travel ads. Sometimes you want to dream about a place you never been.
What the fuck you step into this time, Jack? Playing tag on the Ferris wheel with some guy who can't keep his balance.…”

“That's what they're saying?” Jack asked. “He fell?”

“That's the story, Morning Glory,” the guard said. “Sciortino's waiting to drive you home.”

“Knew you'd be out of here before me,” Kipp called after Jack, who called back over his shoulder, “I'll see what I can do.”

“You do that,” Kipp said. “Surprise me with justice.”

Sciortino handed Jack a nine-by-twelve manila envelope containing his effects: watch, wallet, change, belt, shoelaces.…

“You're letting me slide?” Jack asked. “How'd you arrange that?”

“I don't catch your drift, Jack,” Sciortino said.

“A man's dead,” Jack said.

“A guy stupid enough to climb out of his seat in the Ferris wheel slips and falls,” Sciortino shrugged. “What business is that of yours?”

“Uh-huh,” Jack said. “Someone called from DC?”

“Why, Jack,” Sciortino said. “Whatever do you mean?”

“You ID the Cowboy?” Jack said.

“Who?” Sciortino said, this time authentically puzzled.

“That's what I've been calling him,” Jack said. “My dance partner. The one who forgot he couldn't fly.”

“You mean Rumpelstiltskin,” Sciotino said.

“I can find my way home on my own,” Jack said.

“You leave a trail of bread crumbs?” Sciortino asked. “This is where I look around to see who's listening and lower my voice. We used to play hide-and-seek, Jack. Now, you're playing it with some ghost. I knew you were out of your league on this one. But, man, I didn't know how far. We send the dead man's prints in. Whatever else we can to get a fix on this mook. We get back an official
No such person exists
. And some black suits come to collect the body. Sorry, what body? Remember that song?
I Ain't Got No Body
? You live a charmed life, my friend. You can't kill a man that never was.”

“What are you going to do with all those witnesses who saw me fighting with him?” Jack asked.

“Stay close, Jack,” Sciortino said. “In a week, two, you and me, we have a big
mange
, okay?”

2

As Jack left the police station, he turned on his cell phone, glancing at it as he came down the front steps.

Caroline and Dixie were waiting outside the jail.

The cell's screen lit up and, in the dark, cast a blue light on the underside of Jack's chin.

Like the yellow reflection a buttercup casts on a summer day, Caroline thought, looking at Jack's battered face.

Every day
, Caroline thought,
another scar
.

“No messages,” Jack said. “Time was, if my phone was turned off for three, four hours, I'd have thirty messages.”

“They wouldn't let us in,” Caroline said.

“They said you'd be right out,” Dixie said.

“They first said you weren't there,” Caroline said. “I said I knew you were there. I saw them take you.”

“Where's Bix?” Jack asked.

“He had to go to work,” Caroline said. “He said to tell you he's okay. He said if you weren't out by the time his shift was over, he'd reach out to some people he knows.”

“I used to be better connected than Bix,” Jack said. “Before people stopped taking my calls.”

Jack held Caroline a bit longer than he meant to.

“What did you go after that man for?” Dixie asked.

Jack glanced at Caroline, who gave a slight shake of her head.

“He was after me,” Jack said.

“He lured Jack into attacking him,” Caroline explained. “That way he could seem innocent.”

“That way,” Jack said, “he could get close enough to me to kill me.”

“But,” Dixie said, “why would he want to kill you?”

“Dixie,” Jack said, “I'm still trying to figure that out.”

Dixie gave Jack a steady look.

Uncomfortable with his half lie, Jack said, “I got some ideas.”

“Watching you scramble on the big wheel,” Dixie said, “I always said you had pep! If you need any help…”

“What I need,” Jack said, “is a ride home—”

“I'll draw you a bath,” Caroline said, “and see what I can do about your new cuts.”

“My home,” Jack said. “By way of a motel. Or where a motel used to be.”

All that was left of the motel where Kipp and his family and friends had lived was rubble. Jack got out of the car, followed by Caroline and Dixie. The site smelled of damp ashes—
tasted
of damp ashes—melted plastic, and scorched wires.

“Poor ghost'll have nowhere to roller skate,” Jack said.

The rain had temporarily stopped. Above, clouds rolled like breakers. On the other side of the road, the wind moaned out of the woods and stirred rubbish in the ruins of the motel. In the night sky, Mars burned, a reddish pinprick, to the upper right of an orange moon. Close to Earth.

“You got a prayer, Dixie?” Jack said.

“For the dead?” Dixie asked.

“For the living,” Jack said.

“Be kind,” Dixie said.

3

Jack's cell phone rang. He answered as he, Caroline, and Dixie returned to the car.

After talking for a bit, he pocketed the phone and told Caroline, “Mama Lucky got lucky. One of her gals knows the Cowboy.”

Mama Lucky's hooker—Sunny Diefenbach aka Tiffany No Last Name aka Kalifornia Kutie—saw the Cowboy five times in the past couple of weeks, which meant he would have been around when Frank and Jean were killed.

The next morning, Jack and Caroline drove, according to Mama Lucky's directions, north of Mycenae.

The previous night's storm had uprooted trees, split trunks, revealing wood as white as flesh. Jack steered around broken branches on the roads. The neon sign of Barney's Grill lay, shattered, a quarter of a mile away from the restaurant.

Jack headed up Route 203 through Valatie, north toward Albany. On one hill, every tree had blown over. Like a great game of pick-up sticks. The road curved around the hill. Jack passed a Hannaford's Supermarket; fewer than a dozen cars were parked in the vast lot. At a car dealership, two men were putting plywood over cracked showroom windows. The food shack—Hotte Dawgs—was doing a booming business.

At the edge of the woods in which Sunny and her boyfriend, Tu, lived, Jack parked on the grass. On foot, he and Caroline followed a path through the trees until they came to a clearing, where they found a miniature cathedral, thirty feet tall, built out of flattened soda and beer cans, stolen railroad ties, a wrought-iron gate, six different kinds of shingles, planks scavenged from a dozen or more sites, used bedsprings, all sorts of junk.

In the intermittent sunlight, the cathedral glinted, its tin cans looking like tiles.

Carved monkeys and toads, imps with old women's faces, a camel, snakes, and gnomes decorated the door frame—demons that couldn't enter.

The wind shook the treetops and spun a few early fallen leaves in spirals.

Two mutts bounded, barking, towards them.

Caroline bicycled back.

“It's okay,” Jack said. “They're wagging their tails on the right; they're friendly.”

Caroline stopped backing up, but didn't move forward.

“If their tails lean left,” Jack said, “that's when you got to worry.”

The irregularly shaped door opened. Sunny stepped out as if she were making an entrance onto a stage.

She knew she was sexy, knew she had an effect on men, who tended to like her, and on women, who didn't.

“Mama Lucky said to expect you,” Sunny said, reaching down and scratching first one dog, then the other, behind the ears. Quieting them.

She stood aside so Jack and Caroline could enter the soda-can cathedral.

“We found the place empty,” Sunny said, “and moved in.”

Sunny had freckled apple cheeks, which made her look like a cheerful chipmunk. Her eyes were green—not hazel, but true green—and the iris looked like the cross section of a kiwifruit. Her black hair, cut short in an ebony helmet, made her—Jack thought—into a warrior goddess, Athena.

But the black hair had blond roots.

Jack thought,
A beauty-parlor Athena
.

Sunny's mouth was wide. Her teeth, square, like Chiclets.

Athena—Olympian or beauty-parlor—was not the image that came to Caroline, who thought Sunny looked like a goth Betty Boop—all innocence and piercings. Gold rings in her eyebrow, nose, her lip, her tongue, a row of studs along her right ear.

Sunny wore a white sports bra, not the cleanest, damp in spots.

“I was jogging,” she said. She tilted up each bra cup and plucked off nipple guards. “So it don't chafe,” she added.

The pajama pants she had run in were decorated with Tinkerbells. Each Tink in a skimpy green outfit barely covering her pixie ass.

Sunny put her weight on her left leg, raised her right hip, going up on her right toe, and plucked at the seat, which was caught in her ass crease.

It was obvious she wasn't wearing any panties.

Sunny kicked off her running shoes and peeled off her thick white socks. Her feet were dirty. With chipped black toenail polish.

“Aurora Love is my porn-movie name,” Sunny said. “I was a background player in the orgy scene in
The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttocks
and
I Like to Watchmen
.”

The floor was crawling with millipedes, the dead ones curled like toenail clippings. They crunched underfoot.

“This is nothing,” Sunny said. “You should see them in spring.”

Her boyfriend, Tu, dapped fists with Jack, then Caroline. “What'sup.”

Tu was at least twenty years older than Sunny. His face was weathered, flushed. On his chin, his soul patch was not centered, too far to the left. His right eye was milky.

“Quite a home you've got,” Caroline said, gazing around at the miniature cathedral.

“We were looking for a spot to plant weed,” Tu said, “and found it.”

“Figured whoever built it must have of left,” Sunny said. “In a hurry.”

Jack noticed a 1960s-era Smith Corona manual typewriter with a yellowing piece of paper in the carriage. Nothing had been typed on it.

When Jack rolled up the page, the paper crumbled.

Tu said, “We found a half-empty cup of coffee—”

“Tea,” Sunny corrected.

“—on the table,” Tu said. “We figured we'd keep the place up for whoever it was. Good citizens that we are.”

Tu laughed gently.

“That was last spring,” Sunny said.

“April,” Tu said.

Tu was also barefoot. When Jack first saw him, he thought Tu was wearing a multicolored knit sweater tucked into boxers with a rocket-ship pattern.

But the sweater was tattoos—hence his name; not the French familiar for
you
—which covered every inch of skin from his wrists to his neck to his waist. Vines and flowers spiraled along his arms. Leaves and stalks and roots. Petals and stamens. Spathe and spadix. Spike and raceme and panicle. Spur and corolla.

“Lady's slipper and butter-and-eggs,” Tu said, pointing the flowers out. “Nodding pogonia and false dragonhead. Grape hyacinth and Jacob's ladder. It's my way of showing respect for Gaia.”

Every inch of his body was covered. It looked as if Tu were made out of plants.

Like the Green Man in English folklore, Caroline thought.

To himself, Jack sang a snatch of the Groucho Marx song, “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady.”

Tu offered no last name.

Sunny said, “His
mother name
is Jacob Ten Brock.”

The single large room was bathed in red and blue, green and gold light from the stained glass windows, which displayed not Christian scenes, but Celtic, Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology.

Ogmios, the Celtic Hercules, bald, old, dressed in a lion's skin. Hermes, naked, with winged helmet and heels, and Dionysus, his erect cock as large as Ogmios' club. Prometheus and Loki, both bound and punished. Thor, the Thunderer, his hammer raised, filaments radiating from his body—halo? aura? sound waves?—like Sunny's irises.