The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [102]
Ginny screamed and Rain Man told her to calm down and then James swerved into the desert, away from the road, bouncing over sand and brush. He cut the lights.
Wayne felt two hard blows on the side of his head. The following moments blurred—the pain, especially at his temple, stealing his attention from the assault in progress. James stopped the car. Hale dragged him into the dust, over some prickly grass and mesquite. He was curled in a ball, holding his blazer to his side, not sure how badly he was bleeding there. Strange hands in his pockets. “Sixty fucking bucks. Are you kidding?” Someone said, “What did you expect? He looks like a fucking hobo. And leave the change, goddammit. I’m not so low-class to be robbing nobody for pennies.”
He felt some coins drop on the ground next to him. Then he heard Rain Man: “He’s got a knife. And check it out, check it out. It’s a phone. One of those tricked-out phones with the e-mail and shit. Worth a couple hundred, right?”
“Drop it.” That was James.
“Why?”
“’Cause it’s got a goddamn GPS in it. They’ll fucking track you with a satellite.”
“Who?”
“Whoever it is that’s looking for him. Cops. Whatever. Just turn it off and drop it.”
The phone hit Wayne on the hip and bounced into the sand.
He listened as they walked back to the car. James started the engine, but then he heard Ginny say “Wait a minute,” and in an instant she was whispering in his ear, which, Wayne only realized now, was also bleeding from the blow in the car.
“Don’t worry. They’ll find you,” she said, and she picked up the phone and turned it back on and placed it next to Wayne’s head. She picked up the coins lying in the sand and stuffed them gently into his pocket. He felt her finger under his tongue and then he tasted something sweet she had left there. She covered him with his blazer and then she left him in the sandy soil. He heard the car speed away.
In a moment, Wayne could no longer feel the ground under him. He didn’t know if he was on his back or his front or his side. He was floating in space, his moon weight down to zero. When he opened his eyes, everything was warped, as if somebody had folded and twisted and painted the floor of the desert, as if the sky were close, descending on top of him, and he was certain, just as Ginny had said, that none of it was real.
“It’s got a goddamn GPS in it,” he heard James say again.
He reached up with one hand until he found his phone, and he turned the power off.
TETRAD
The world would perish were all men learned.
—Thomas Fuller, MD
35
NADA PASSED THEM on the way to her room, men carrying chairs, fine teak chairs with padded seats and backs and a thin piece of black Velcro around the perimeter of each for a drape to be attached. She pressed herself against the wall as half a dozen large men pushed by carrying three chairs each. None acknowledged they had even displaced her.
Dozens of workers on the Jameson estate had seen her emerge mid-morning from Jameson’s cavern of a garage wearing two hours’ sleep and last night’s clothes. No one even raised an eyebrow in her direction. She wondered how many of these landscapers and handymen and maids and laundresses even knew what she was doing there.
After last night, Nada was beginning to wonder herself.
She went to her room and shut the blinds from day to night and showered and scrubbed and dressed. The headache continued to slice through her brain. The ringing, when she wasn’t suppressing it with effort, still battered her eardrums from the inside. The blackout had affected the area all around Jameson’s house, but inside here everything was normal—somehow he still had power and lights and air-conditioning. God, she loved air-conditioning. Nada wanted to lie down, but she didn’t.
She walked back down the Woodward stairs and spent an hour in the re-created office with the tile Burning Patrick had presented her, trying to match it against the ones in Jameson’s collection and comparing its edges to the photos of tiles from other collections he had arranged for her in a binder.