“Looks like it. And I’m so glad you two are really hitting it off.”
“So? Are you? Gonna?”
“I don’t know.”
Fremont threw up his hands, got himself another beer, killed it in three gulps while standing at the cabinet, dropped the frosted corpse into a box, got himself another, and came back to his couch, visibly frustrated. He took another long pull in a sustained silence while Dalton and Naumann watched him, and then turned to Naumann — turned in Naumann’s direction anyway.
“How about you throw something in the kitty here, Mr. Naumann?”
“Me?” said Naumann, touching his chest.
“He’s listening,” said Dalton.
“Like what?” said Naumann.
“He says, ‘Like what?’”
“Like… like you promise to go away if Micah here promises to do whatever it is he’s supposed to do as soon as you’re gone.”
Naumann looked confused. So did Dalton, but it sounded like a fair deal to him. Fremont sat there, staring at a curved and vaguely green-tinted space in the air that was becoming more visible the drunker he got.
“Is this a deal?” said Dalton, looking at Naumann.
“You’ll go see Laura? If I disappear?”
“Damn straight.”
“You’ll make things right with her?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Your word?”
“My word.”
“How long do I have to disappear for?”
Dalton turned to Fremont. “He wants to know how long he has to disappear for.”
Fremont, who by some sort of cosmic triangulation of ectoplasmic vectors had become the sitting magistrate in this case, considered for a while, blinking slowly.
“Seven days,” he pronounced, after due deliberation.
Naumann looked dubious. “You’ll really do it, Micah. Go see her? Make it right?”
“I’ll go see her. Making it right is more your department.”
“When?”
“On the morning of the eighth day.”
Fremont savored the poetry in that.
It was… epic. Biblical.
Naumann looked wary, studying Dalton’s face as if he were looking for some intent to deceive, to play the coyote.
“He’s given you his solemn word, Mr. Naumann,” said Fremont, staring at this curved space in the air that was centered more or less around the third couch. There was no doubt in his mind now. It was definitely taking on a man-shaped outline. Apparently there was more to Lone Star beer than met the eye. Could it be that beer was actually a cosmic portal, a door into the spirit world? It occurred to him that this was why the wise old ancients in their wise old ancient wisdom had called alcohol a spirit since the very dawning of time.
He maintained his fixed regard on this curved green-tinted space even while managing to crack open another beer and take a very long pull. Dalton kept his eyes on Naumann as well.
Naumann, after a long and presumably introspective silence, took a pull of his scotch, set the glass down hard, wiped his dead lips, and stood up, brushing off his green pajamas. “Okay. Fair deal. See you on the eighth day.”
“The eighth day.”
“Carmel Highlands?”
“Carmel Highlands.”
“Dr. Cassel?”
“Dr. Cassel.”
“Word of honor?”
“Word of honor.”
“Because if you—”
“I know. I know. Bed knobs and broomsticks.”
“Damn straight. The fire and the fury. All right, then. I could use the break. Manifesting yourself all over the damned globe is harder than it looks. Willard, I tell you frankly, you’re a clever guy.”
“He’s talking to you now. Frankly. He says you’re a clever guy.”
“Yeah,” said Willard, rising to his feet, his rough-hewn face composed into a bleary solemnity. “Thank you, sir.”
“Willard, you’re a gem. Not many guys can broker a deal between a vapid cretin and the walking dead. You should have been a literary agent. Micah, as they say in the song, I’ll be seeing you.”
“You take care, Porter. And get those PJs dry-cleaned.”
Naumann smiled, snapped to attention, sliced off a military salute, and abruptly flicked out of existence.
Dalton blinked at the empty space for a while.
The fire had burned down low and red sparks were snapping and hissing in the ruins. The ice in his glass popped and turned slowly over, like an iceberg rolling in the deep southern oceans. The long silence ran out, a hymn with neither words nor music nor rhyme nor melody, a symphony of nothingness, of the void, of serene emptiness.
“I take it he’s gone,” said Fremont, after an indefinite period.
“Yes,” said Dalton, with deep relief. “He’s gone.”
“There you go,” said Fremont. “What’s for supper?”
The alarm beeper on his bedside table woke Dalton up out of a deep dream of peace: Cora had been sitting at a table in that large light-filled room in the Dorsoduro, nude, writing in a book of gold.
The remote, set on Vibrate, was buzzing around on the night table like a rattlesnake’s tail. By the clock on the dresser across the room it was a little past four in the morning. In one smooth motion he rolled out of the bed, plucking his big Colt off the table, and silencing the remote. He glanced at the bulletproof window.
Total darkness beyond it. The night pressed up against the window like the hide of a black bear. In jeans, shirtless and shoeless, he padded down the hall past the closed and locked door behind which Willard Fremont was having another one of the nightmares that had lately made his life a grinding misery that he heard nothing as Dalton passed swiftly down the hall and out into the living room.
His laptop was still open, sitting on the pine cabinet. The room smelled of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and the steaks Fremont had grilled, expertly and efficiently, in spite of his advanced state of drunkenness, at the end of the long, long evening.
The image in the laptop screen showed the house; there were two red man-shapes, one of them Fremont, moving restlessly in his bed, and the other of Dalton, here in the living room.
But there was another large formless shape, crossing the river, approaching the house. Dalton switched the screen over to the night-shot lens.
The image showed starlight flickering on the surface of the Clark, starlight shimmering on the leaves of the cottonwoods along the banks, a lightless void under them, and the same indistinct shape moving slowly up the nearer bank of the river, an oval shape, the surface of which seemed to shimmer with moving light, with a darker and much more solid shape contained inside it.
Not obviously a man.
But manlike enough to trigger the alarm.
Dalton stared at the image, at the way it was moving, puzzled. The object was alive, that much was clear, and something in the way it covered the ground suggested stealth, deliberate predatory stealth, but it had no discernible details at all, as if it were a wisp of fog or a marsh light. Dalton dialed up the resolution to maximum.
The stones of the riverbank leaped into vivid detail, each boulder sharp-cut, the surface of running river scintillating with pinpricks of starlight, the branches of the cottonwoods spidery and black under their moving cloak of silvery leaves.
While Dalton watched, the object moved away from the riverbank, crossed the broad sand shoals, floated over the boulders, and as it touched the deeper blackness under the cottonwoods, merged seamlessly with the shadows, as a separate drop of water will melt into a pool. Cloaked, thought Dalton, recalling the black fog that had drifted into the hallway of the Strega hostel in Cortona.
This was actually someone who was using an infrared cloaking device, a device capable of masking the outlines of an infrared or thermal image. Whoever this guy was, he had to be working for the U.S. government. No one else would have access to this kind of technology.