Bree never felt that the Bree who had been doing that stuff was another person, one who had died at those meetings to make way for the shiny new person who was now sitting in the car with Jones. That Bree had continued. In another life, one where Bree had spent a lot less time sitting in smoky, talky rooms on jittering plastic chairs comparing war stories, she was living on, still drinking. She’d be deathbound by now, living through blank, real spaces, passing hours and days into her blackouts like someone patiently feeding a furnace: there, but not there.
And she was here, but not here. She followed this Bree around with the tenacity of a shadow. She was long when the sun was low; almost invisible in the bright of the day. Bree could lose touch with her for just a second, by jumping – but then gravity intervened and Bree wasn’t a great one for jumping up and down these days, in any case.
Stupid analogy, Bree thought. Raindrops, an unexpected shower, gathered and ran on the windshield. They felt like another analogy, and she wondered what it was like to be Jones, who had shown no signs of making conversation since lunch, and for whom the slick of water running down the windshield would never be anything other than rain.
Bree thought about not-Bree, drinking Bree. It was as if she had acquired a twin. In that life, this Bree would be shadowing her. Sober Bree, in that world, would be not-Bree: would be just there, hanging around, waiting. The thing that was your deepest, darkest terror: the thing you longed for.
Snap. Cheers, sister.
Except in both these worlds, they had taken Cass away, and Bree wondered momentarily in which of these worlds she was living and why.
Chapter 15
It was the morning of the third day that they got a sure fix on Alex. It was pure good luck.
Red Queen remembered that the Directorate had a long-gone field agent by the name of Doc, living in the New Mexico desert near the Texas border. Doc was semi-retired on medical grounds after spearheading the Directorate’s intensive 2003 investigation into the effectiveness of ayahuasca trances as an intelligence-gathering technique.
The verdict of the investigation – reached not by Doc himself but by those observing his experiments with a clearer head – had been ‘not very’. Doc was loco in the brainpan, no two ways about it.
But Red Queen reached out to Doc anyway, and Doc – who did things, if he did them, for reasons of his own – agreed to drive his tangerine-coloured pickup to a bluff overlooking the I-40 and wait for ‘this cat with the magic ring’.
‘Magic ring?’ Red Queen had said.
‘A snake told me about it,’ Doc had said.
Red Queen had made a mental note. ‘And his licence plate. You have it?’
‘Wrote it down. In-scriibed it.’
‘With a pen?’
‘It’s cool,’ Doc had said. ‘I see auras. He’s going to be lit up like a Christmas tree on the Fourth of July. He’ll be haloed in rainbows. It’ll be like the Northern Lights. I’ll see him.’
‘The licence plate…’
‘It’s cool,’ Doc had repeated before ringing off. But true to his word he had perched above the highway and watched the westbound traffic with lizard eyes. And to Red Queen’s voluble astonishment, had not only got a tail on the boy but confirmed that the boy was himself being followed. ‘Couple of wolf-like cats. None too smart. Violent men. Big one and a small one. Keep losing him. And there’s something else. Somebody else. A very old man. He’s here and he’s not here. Like John Barleycorn or an old shaman I know. I’m moving in,’ he had added. ‘Do me good to get within a sniff of civilisation. Reckon I’ve got a fix.’
He had left Red Queen listening to the staticky burr of an open line, then Doc had rolled his old wagon down onto the highway, and followed them at a leisurely distance. And it was as that orange car, with its big, bald, white-sided tyres was lumbering onto the great artery heading west, that Alex had exclaimed, aloud and to himself: ‘Don’t forget your toothbrush.’
Doc said, also to himself, musingly: ‘Something about a toothbrush…’
And two hours later, Doc found a payphone and called Red Queen, who called Bree on her cellphone, and directed her to a superstore in a roadside mall on the east side of Albuquerque in the early afternoon.
‘He’s there,’ Doc said. ‘I’m just not sure when.’
Bree and Jones showed up, and did two circuits of the wide parking lot, and weren’t able to see the boy, or his car, or anything of that sort.
‘Had a feeling, this guy, apparently,’ said Bree, with a shrug. ‘Another hit for the Directorate. Still, best we’ve got. We proceed,’ she added philosophically, ‘through hints and accidents.’
Jones went to get some tobacco. Bree ambled in to check out the store. She walked the aisles, found nothing. No sign of the kid. Near the door there were a couple of girls with too much make-up, wearing long coats. They were chewing gum. With them was a middle-aged man in a cheap suit, pretending not to be watching her as she came in the door. He had something concealed in his palm. She saw his thumb work at it, and he turned his hand, looked surreptitiously down at it. It glinted. Bree didn’t like it.
She turned round and headed outside, intending to take up a position where she could watch the front entrance unobserved. She took a trolley. A trolley would be good. Make it look like she was shopping. Who was that guy? Where was the boy?
Alex ran his tongue around his teeth. His upper incisors were pleasantly slippery. He was worried about the lower set, though. They felt furry, clagged. He had a stark visual memory of his toothbrush, sitting red on the white sink at the last motel. He had left it there, hadn’t he?
It was about lunchtime anyway. He’d stop. Two birds with one stone.
‘Don’t forget your toothbrush,’ he said aloud to himself, before pulling into the supermarket car park. He slammed the car door, hopped out, and set off for the entrance to the shop.
The store dominated the parking lot: a wide glass frontage that could have done with being cleaned more recently, and big scrolls of paper yellowing in the windows advertising special offers, on beer and cleaning products, mostly. Next door were two smaller shops – a tobacconist and a pizza place.
A dirty great sign, hoisted above the entrance like a hat, announced simply: ‘SUPERSTORE’. The letters were picked out in broken light bulbs. A nondescript cartoon character – it looked like a smiling chocolate button – was giving the world an unwavering thumbs up from next door to the letter E.
MIC’s guns for hire had lost Alex’s trail again, and Sherman had morosely assented to Davidoff’s insistence that they stop driving and get some food. A roadside sign half a mile back had promised pizza. Davidoff used a hand on the roof to haul his big frame from the car and they stood there scanning the scene like children at the gates of Disneyland.
Sherman saw the kid before Davidoff did, and nudged the bigger man. He saw the recognition bloom and take hold in his face like a pilot light. Davidoff’s eyes scanned the parking lot, and Sherman knew what he was seeing. There was a hedge down the left-hand side. Maybe a hundred metres of asphalt between the kid and the entrance to the store, twenty metres between the two men and the boy they were chasing.
A fat woman in a T-shirt was pushing a shopping cart out of the store. Nobody seemed to be here other than that. A tall grey-haired guy, a couple of hundred metres away, was leaning up outside the door of the tobacco store next door, smoking. A handful of cars in the lot, empty. Sherman picked up pace. Davidoff broke right, out on a slight trot, as if he was someone jogging to get a parking ticket while his family waited in the car. Sherman closed slower.
Ninety metres, fifteen metres.
The boy was moving on a diagonal. Across the front entrance of the store there was a snake of trolleys – what had once been bright pink plastic faded to brittle white in the weather – shucked into each other. To reach the entrance, the boy would have to walk round the right-hand end of them and up the wheelchair ramp.