Csongor then went down into a cabin, climbed into a bed, and arranged himself carefully, since he knew that he would fall asleep instantly and not move until awakened.
The thing that awakened him was a sudden heaving and heeling of the vessel. Csongor was unable to tell the time, but he sensed that he had been asleep for some time; his bladder was quite full and he actually felt rested. But daylight was still coming in through the porthole. He got up and staggered into the head and relieved himself, then pushed the cabin door open against the forces of the wind and (because the boat was listing) gravity. Something hit him in the face that was halfway between rain and mist. He could not see more than a few hundred meters in any direction.
The engine was still running. That was good.
He went up to the bridge where Marlon was planted exactly where Csongor had last seen him. According to the digital clock on the bulkhead, it was a little past three in the afternoon, which meant that Marlon had been running the ship alone for seven hours. He turned his face away from the screen of the GPS to look at Csongor, who was unnerved by the look on his face: haggard, wrecked by exhaustion and stress. “This is the worst video game of all time,” he said.
“Kind of a boring one,” Csongor allowed.
“Boring,” Marlon agreed, “and it doesn’t work. The user interface sucks ass.”
“What kinds of problems are you having?”
“It doesn’t shoot where you aim.”
It doesn’t shoot where you aim. What could that mean? Csongor drew closer and looked at the display on the GPS, showing the track they’d been following during the time he’d been asleep. He was expecting to see a straight line aimed directly at the Pescadores. Instead, he saw a track that gradually curved south, then jogged northward, then curved south again. Marlon, it seemed, had been trying to steer a straight line for their destination, but something had been pushing the boat inexorably southward. Once he had noticed this, he had tried to correct for it by aiming the boat back the other way. But the net result was that they were actually a little bit south of the Pescadores’ latitude at this point, perhaps ten kilometers away from the nearest of the islands, driving north-northeast in an effort to work their way back to it.
The mist had developed into rain, which was spattering the forward and port windows. “We are fighting the wind,” Csongor said.
“Now, yes.” Marlon said. “But that is new. Something else was bending us south.”
“There must be a current in the strait,” Csongor said.
“Current?”
“Like a river, a flow of water to the south.”
“Fuck!” Marlon said. “We would have been there by now, if I had known.”
“I thought it was like a car,” Csongor said. “It goes where you point it.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” Marlon said. “It goes where it wants.”
The vibration that they’d been feeling in their feet the entire time they’d been aboard devolved into a series of coughs and chugs, then reestablished itself for a few moments, and then ceased.
“Out of gas,” Csongor said.
“Game over,” Marlon said.
“No,” Csongor said. “Game continues. We just made it to the next level.”
THE HANDLE OF the sledgehammer was bright yellow plastic, a detail preposterous to Richard, who had paced up and down the length of the relevant aisle at Home Depot trying to find something less painfully embarrassing until the department manager had insisted that he make his choice and leave — it was closing time, nine o’clock.
Standing on the doorstep of Zula’s apartment at nine fifteen, gripping the ridiculous implement in brand-new, ergonomically designed work gloves (an impulse purchase, yanked from an aisleend display as the manager had harried him toward the checkout counters), he realized why he didn’t like it: the thing looked like a T’Rain sledgehammer. The realization struck him with such force that it queered his first blow, which caromed off Zula’s doorjamb and nearly took out his knee. Then he got a grip, not only on the yellow plastic handle, but on himself, and swung again, getting his hips into it and striking true. The door practically exploded. Supposing Zula turned up all right, he would have a talk with her about the virtues of physical security and devote an afternoon to beefing up her door.
Or her replacement door, to be precise, since there wasn’t much left of this one.
“You can turn down the stereo now,” he said to James and Nicholas, who were five steps below him, cowering as one. James and Nicholas, a gay couple, lived downstairs of Zula and, as it turned out, had taken an almost parental interest in her welfare. Earlier today, back in the — ha! — long-forgotten hours when Richard had attempted to do this through official channels, they had assured Richard that he should get in touch with them at any time of the day or night if there were anything they could conceivably do to help him get to the bottom of Zula’s disappearance. Three minutes ago, Richard had put their offer to the test on multiple levels, knocking them up late in the evening to see how they would feel about some really loud banging and splintering noises from upstairs. As it turned out they had been as good as their word and had even offered to turn up their stereo for a while in case that would help cover any noises that might disturb the nocturnal peace of neighboring properties. A foolish reverence for official cop procedures did not, apparently, go hand in hand with gayness.
And neither did having a missing niece.
“I’d really appreciate it if you could turn it down,” Richard said, and then James and Nicholas understood that he just wanted them gone for a minute or two. They turned their backs on him and padded down the carpeted stairs. They occupied the first two floors, and Zula the third, of a big old house on Capitol Hilclass="underline" Seattle’s most oddly named neighborhood, in that Seattle was not a capital and had never been graced with anything resembling a capitol.
This bit — walking into the apartment and turning on the lights — was by far the worst for him, just because of what he was afraid he might find. Growing up on a farm had exposed him to a few sudden and unpleasant sights that he had never been able to clear from his memory. But Zula stabbed or strangled on the floor of her apartment would, he knew, be the last thing that came into his mind’s eye at the moment of his death; and between now and then it would come to him unbidden at unforeseeable moments.
Instead all he found was a furious cat, yowling and stalking around an eviscerated cat food bag whose contents had spilled out onto the floor. A toilet drinker, by process of elimination. Other than that, all was orderly: no food left out, no lights left on. He checked her closet and noted that her winter coat wasn’t there, saw no skis or any of the other stuff she’d brought on the trip to the Schloss. All of which confirmed the suspicion, which had been pretty strong to begin with, that she had never come back to her apartment after that trip.
This didn’t mean she was alive, or even well. But it alleviated the most horrible of his fears. Whatever had happened to her couldn’t be as bad as what he had been bracing himself for ten seconds ago.
And it gave him something to write home about. Or whatever the Facebook-era equivalent of that was.
He pulled out his phone, ignored four new text messages from his brother John, and thumbed one out: IN Z’S APT. ALL NORMAL.
John, still in Iowa, seemed to think that Richard would forget the seriousness of the situation without frequent reminders. The cursed invention of text messaging had removed any inhibitions John might ever have felt about what he still denominated “long-distance” telephone calls. On the upside, it enabled Richard to fire off status reports like this one without having to make personal contact.