He grabbed the phone and left Chapel alone in the kitchen.
When he was gone, Chapel rubbed at his eyes with his good hand.
Crap. If Wilkes was interviewing Top, that meant he was sure that Chapel was still alive. Which meant going on the run again, no question. Just when Chapel had started to like it in the house full of Top’s boys. It had begun to feel like he was back in the army again, living in barracks, something he never thought he would have missed.
Nothing for it, he supposed. He started making a mental plan about how he was going to steal another car.
On the screen Angel kicked open a wooden crate while Ralph laid down suppressing fire on a squadron of Nazi flamethrower troops. “Ammo,” Angel said, and they switched positions so fluidly they might have been practicing the maneuver for years. Ralph, who in the game was playing a British Tommy with a BAR rifle, ducked down to grab a new drum of ammunition. Meanwhile Angel, dressed like a member of the French resistance (the only female character in the game), threw a stick grenade into the midst of the Wehrmacht troops.
The Germans screamed “Schnell, schnell!” but it was too late for them. The grenade went off in a cloud of fire and smoke, and the fuel tanks on the Nazis’ backs popped off one after another, bathing them all in liquid fire and sending them screaming around a village square, their faces melting in exquisitely rendered detail as they died.
“Jesus,” Chapel said, wincing.
“That was — that was—” Julia couldn’t seem to find the word.
Ralph had it, though. “Nice,” he said, bouncing up and down on the couch.
His claw hand didn’t seem to be any kind of impediment to working the video-game controller. Chapel knew from experience how much you could achieve with one hand, if you had enough practice. What surprised him was just how good Angel was at the game.
Julia had a theory about that. “She’s been living in one trailer or another for the last ten years, never going out, living on delivered Chinese food. Her only connection to the outside world has been telling spies where to go and who to shoot. Why wouldn’t she be a natural at this?”
Chapel just shook his head. They needed to head out soon, but it was clear Angel was enjoying herself and he didn’t want to interrupt the game.
On the screen the Tommy and the resistance fighter dashed across the village square, hopping over the bodies of the still-smoldering Nazis. On the far side they took cover in a bombed-out café. As soon as they’d hunkered down, the television started growling with the noise of tank treads coming closer.
“You have any shaped charges?” Angel asked.
“Just one left. Glad I held on to it,” Ralph told her.
His on-screen avatar jumped through the door of the café and rolled along the street, a square lump of plastique in his hands. He slapped it onto the cobblestones and a little red light started blinking on its detonator. The tank was only a dozen yards away.
“Did they even have C4 in World War II?” Chapel asked.
“Shut up, Chapel!” Angel cried, anguish tinging her voice because just then the tank’s machine gun opened fire and Ralph’s character flopped down in the street, right next to his bomb. “Hold on,” she said, and her beret-clad character rushed out to his side, carrying a green box with a red cross on it. She injected something into his arm that was apparently a cure for machine-gun bullets, because suddenly Ralph was up and on his feet again and drawing a pistol.
It was too late for both of them, however. The panzer’s main gun fired with a cloud of smoke and debris, and the screen went red as both characters fell in slow motion to lie in heaps on the cobblestones.
“Dang,” Ralph said, tossing his controller onto the couch. “I can never get past that tank.”
“Why do you want to?” Julia asked. “Why do you even play this game?”
Ralph lifted one eyebrow. “Because it’s fun?”
“She’s got a point, though,” Chapel said. “Look, not to get all preachy here, but you’re a veteran with PTSD. We’ve all heard you screaming in the night. Why on earth would you want to traumatize yourself with a war game?”
“Therapy,” Ralph answered, without hesitation.
Julia looked intrigued. “How does that work?”
“The game isn’t real,” Ralph told them. “It’s nothing like real war. There’s no waiting around for weeks only to have an attack come when you’re just starting to relax. You can get shot, like, a dozen times in the game, and all you need is one medical kit to get back to full health.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Two people against an entire squad armed with flamethrowers? In real life, you’d be dead meat.”
Chapel had to admit that the game didn’t match his own experience of warfare.
“It helps with the dreams. Yeah, you’ve heard me wake up in the middle of the night thinking I’m back there, under fire. But when I play this game for like twelve hours straight, I’m not dreaming about Iraq. I’m dreaming about liberating Paris with a hot resistance fighter by my side.”
“You think she’s hot?” Angel asked. “I just thought she was an ass-kicker.”
“She can’t be both?” Ralph asked. “Anyway — sometimes the dreams get mixed up. I don’t know. It helps.”
Chapel had learned during his own rehabilitation not to turn up his nose at any treatment that actually worked. “Have at it, then. But I’m afraid your sexy partner there has to get going.”
Angel didn’t protest. She set her controller down on the couch and stood up. “What’s on the agenda?” she asked.
“We need to arrange transport,” Chapel said.
“What, like you need a car?” Ralph asked.
The place where Ralph worked had a clean and trim little storefront where it met the road. Four recently washed cars stood in the parking lot, all of them with prices listed on their windshields in greasepaint.
Beyond that lot, however, the place was pure junkyard. Behind a chain-link fence stood towering stacks of hubcaps and dented fenders, cars without wheels or doors or windshields, heaps of scrap metal, and, for some reason, an entire avenue lined with nothing but old washing machines. You could easily get lost wandering among the heaps of old decaying machinery back there — you could get lost, or you could just as easily get tetanus. The men and women working in the yard were all dressed in heavy corduroy jackets and wore thick, grease-stained gloves.
For a mechanical graveyard, though, it was anything but quiet. The noise of whining power tools and tracked vehicles filled the air, punctuated by the ring of actual hammers and mattocks where someone took out their frustrations by breaking down an old heap. They passed by a guy cutting a bulldozer down with an acetylene torch, sparks flying ten feet in the air. They walked past a kennel full of barking dogs. When they finally found Ralph’s boss, the man was hip deep in a pile of old hardware, hinges and flanges and nuts and bolts, sorting them by tossing them one by one into rusted fifty-gallon drums.
It took a while to get his attention. When Ralph called his name the fourth or fifth time, he finally looked up and glanced from Chapel to Angel to Julia as if he was sorting them into categories in his head.
“This is Art, he owns this place,” Ralph said. “Navy.”
Art clambered out of his pile, sending bits of metal cascading across their shoes, and reached out one massive hand to shake Chapel’s. He was a huge man, broad through both shoulders and belly, though his legs were crammed into heavy jeans that made them look like toothpicks holding up a jumbo-sized olive. He had hair the color of the old metal around him, and it cascaded down his shoulders and joined with his beard.
“Jim,” Chapel said, squeezing the massive gloved hand. “Army.”