All-Day Breakfast (17 page)

We climbed one story and hopped across onto an air-conditioning unit, then I used the shovel to smash a second-floor window.

“Watch for all this glass,” I whispered.

Climbing through the window frame took us onto a catwalk overlooking the cavernous factory, silhouettes of chains and conveyor belts standing out a little blacker than the rest of the blackness. The place felt frigid as a walk-in fridge, but even so, managed to smell of sawdust and cotton candy.

“We looking for more of the goo?” whispered Clint.

“Maybe,” I said. “For all I know they make four hundred kinds. Let's look for, I don't know, clues. Recipes. A phone number.”

I found a penlight in the pocket of my new yellow jacket.

“Didn't you talk to that tour guide guy? Didn't he tell you any of that stuff?”

We tiptoed downstairs to the bathrooms and a row of locked offices. The doors still said
supply manager
or
human resources
but the relevant employee names had been scraped off. Renovation to make our community better.

“I'll see if there's bacon in the fridge,” Clint whispered.

“Don't turn any lights on.”

The shovel pried the knob off the site manager's door and as it swung open I prepared myself for rifling filing cabinets and hacking launch codes or whatever a hero on
tv
would've done. The desk was bare and its drawers empty, as it turned out, but on the credenza I found a sheaf of letterhead emblazoned with Dockside's Velouria address on the top right corner, and Penzler
hq
's on the top left:

1616 Highway 91a

Preston, OH

43215-6108

Preston, Ohio: a city of gray-suited men, goo-filled syringes spilling from their pockets, while secretaries ran off red-toner photocopies of my kids' faces. My brain clattered as I imagined getting us there. Anywhere in Ohio was eight hundred–odd miles east via the interstate, though I'd have to get onto I-80 via Nebraska 33, which started back in Hoover. Then east on I-80, passing forty-seven short miles north of Pawnee.

But first I rifled filing cabinets just so I wouldn't regret
not
having rifled them, though all I found were team lineups for an August 2006 softball tournament.

Clint crept in empty-handed, so I set him to work in the other offices, but it was the same crap in all of them. Never saw the half-expected portraits in oils of these fabled hippie doctors. I'd been damn lucky that the letterhead had been left behind, but then as I scrutinized a bare whiteboard for microscopic clues it occurred to me that it would've been even luckier—at least faster—if I'd tried a reverse-411 on James Jones's fax number or called information from a pay phone, asking for Penzler. Things a person with an adequately functioning brain might've done.

Another thing it should've done: not left Hoover without Harv.

I crept across into the men's room and gazed for a full minute at the urinals, the last place I'd peed as a normal man. I shone the penlight on my face and spent a few minutes at the sink scrubbing the black layer with hand soap and paper towels, but then I figured out it wasn't grime but my own skin blackened by the exploding oxygen tank, so then I just had to find the edges and peel it away one strip at a time, trying to pull a bigger piece each time—Josie would've loved it—until only black pouches around my eyes were left. The new layer everywhere else looked pink as a piglet, and that image made my stomach rumble.

I found Clint in the hallway, holding a white page triumphantly over his head.

“What?”

“Muffin recipe.”

We tiptoed through the factory until we found a workbench and the classic red toolbox, crammed with a staple-gun, hammer and drill, pouches of nails and screws and boxes of staples—and I made sure they were the right width for the staple gun, too, because I'd been fooled by that when I'd built our rabbit hutch.

“Couple of staples?” Clint whispered. “Your finger healed right up?”

“And a good night's sleep, and half a pig of bacon.”

“Man, I'm going to staple my whole
neck
! Like for preventative medicine.”

We collected ten thousand from the drawers, to really do our ambulance justice.

I looked at my watch—8:45! I'd botched the operation by pulling that skin off my face and now Colleen was watching for the North Platte exit from Amber's back seat.

I parked the
ambulance in the alley behind the ice cream shop. But the rear entrance was locked, so I left Clint behind the wheel with the motor running, and I walked calmly around the block and peered in the front window. The place was still open, a dreadlocked kid strumming a guitar on a couch, but none of my girls were in sight. In my imagined role as coffee-breaking paramedic I pursed my lips and wondered whether I really wanted that latté after all. Jerked my head to gaze casually across the street, like maybe there'd be a taco stand over there. A gray cat appeared to be reading a newspaper but none of our cars were in the alley anymore.

I took deep breaths under the Velouria streetlight like a character in
On the Road
achieving a moment of grand catharsis, though really I was up to my top lip in steaming wet shit. I fumbled for my wallet, pulled out the picture and held it to my forehead without daring to look at it—maybe the kids she'd given birth to were in a safe place, or maybe not. The photo felt cool as a flower petal. The feed store beside the ice cream shop was still open, the pallets in front stacked with green-and-white fifty-pound bags showing grapes and watermelons spilling from a cornucopia.
calcium nitrate fertilizer
. It didn't say
retain appendages like never before!
or even
bacon substitute
, but even so, I wondered if we could make use of the stuff if things got bad enough.

A siren shrieked behind the ice cream shop, only for a second. Clint.

I rounded the corner into the alley in a spray of gravel on my Fast Willie Parker legs, and there was the good ol' ambulance creeping toward me, headlights off, but by the streetlight I could see silhouettes of two people in the front. Relief flooded up from my feet. The passenger window came down and Grace leaned out.

“They're all in back.” She held a striped straw in the gap between her teeth. “I'm the human peashooter, see?”

Colleen sat beside
me in the front, looking for bluegrass on the radio, and her hissing aversion to static somehow distracted me from the likelihood that we'd hit a roadblock as we turned, say, from Pine onto North Locust.

“One of the barista girls said, ‘Hey, is that anybody's car getting towed?' And we just had to sit their with our cones. I barely looked outside in case they knew what we looked like, and at one point all four of us went to the bathroom. The barista girl told us her uncle had worked at Dockside and for some reason they'd towed
his
car away. I'd just as soon go back to Hoover.”

“That son of a bitch from the gas station must've had something to do with it. Called in our plates or something.”

“And the worst?” Franny called through the little window from the back. “They were out of Curly Wurly bars!”

“Hazel Dickens,” Colleen said, still turning the dial. “I want to hear Hazel. Doug wanted Megan to be named Hazel after her, did you know that? I wouldn't let him.”

She found a song that sounded like a drum machine playing over a weed-whacker and an eight-year-old singing about her skateboard.

“Turn that up!” they hollered from the back.

Even by my standards it would've been stupid to have driven right through downtown Velouria, so I cut back to the side road to Fontaine so I'd be able to drop into Hoover from the north. I told Colleen the nine hundred things we'd found out and that we were bound for Ohio now via the interstate and Route 33, which meant driving back through the old hometown.

“Any reason to stop?” Colleen asked dully. “Franny said she tried calling every kid she could and got no answer.”

No matter what Colleen said, her voice wasn't entirely steady.

“Parents have them all at the hospital by now,” I said.

“Even all their cells phones, no answer.”

“That's weird. She try Harv Saunders?”

“Probably.”

“I'll check on him anyway.”

The moon was nearly full. Ten miles before Fontaine, the forest to my right fell away for a few acres of field, and something made me lift my foot off the gas: some guy staggering parallel to the road, twenty or thirty yards away, arms out in front of him, staggering. He fell down. I stopped the ambulance. He got a knee under him and lurched to his feet again, the greenish moonlight across his shoulders.

“Jesus Christ,” said Colleen.

Now he shambled forward with his arms swaying at his sides.

“What?” the kids called. “We only got windows out the back!”

He disappeared into the blackness of the trees, and I pulled back onto the road before a cop could stop and kindly ask if I was having any trouble.

Unwanted elements skulking in shadows. A guy could look right at these people, to paraphrase Dad, and never know the staples and scars they kept under their T-shirts.

Just north of
Hoover I bought fuel with the Pegasus gas card in the ambulance's ashtray. Apparently none of the kids needed to go in to pee, which I found odd.

“Is this almost Hoover?” Amber called. “We should stop at 7-Eleven!”

I immediately felt the guy's ear against my tongue again and a chill went up my spine. How many cops had come? Would they still be peering inside every vehicle? Were we the subject of a countywide
apb
out of Velouria? Would I be able to resist chewing off the
next
ear that got between my teeth? Because I'd been close.

“Oh!” said Colleen.

I lifted my foot off the gas. “What?”

“I thought that was Megan.”

We turned onto Clemons Street off Casement. I'd never been out in Hoover later than my kids' bedtime, but even so, I thought the streets and sidewalks looked
too
deserted. A heavy guy with a backpack seemed to watch us from under a streetlight.

“Seems to be a lot of lights on up the street,” said Colleen.

“One thing it better not be is fire engines.”

“Is there a fire?” they called from the back.

The Saunders' driveway was empty but every light in the house seemed to be burning, the birch tree's shadow stretching across the yard. I banged on the door.
Hello, Asshole,
I thought,
I'm here to kidnap your son
.

After ten seconds the door swung open and Harv's sister blinked up at me. She wore a bikini top and jeans.

“Sorry to bother you so late,” I said. “Not an emergency or anything.”

“So how come an ambulance's out there?”

“Is Harv here?”

She pursed her lips, a silver cell phone in her fist.

“He took the bus to Chicago. I told him forget it, but maybe, you know what Harv's like—you saw him, he was okay the other night, right? He just needs to stretch. High school can really stifle.”

“Your dad let him go to Chicago? What is he, sixteen?”

“Good night,” she said, and shut the door.

Which meant Jones had him, that the military had strapped him to a table somewhere. I stared at the brass knob.
I would've loved to have rescued you, Harv, but I was completely too late.

I hurried back toward the street, propelled by the wings on my ankles. Instead of spending the afternoon chewing ears at 7-Eleven I should've been disemboweling Dave Saunders. The verb suited the guy. I frowned at Colleen through the ambulance window—no Harv—but she smiled back like the place was a car lot and I'd just bargained the sales manager down to nothing.

In the shadows around on the driver side, Harv stood leaning a foot from the gas cap, his sky-blue Thunder cap in his hands.

“Mrs. Avery,” he said quietly, “told me I can come with you guys.”

“Oh,” I sighed, “shit. Mrs. Avery's right.”

I wrapped my arms around the kid, felt his brush cut against my ear. Might've been a bit much from his chemistry teacher, but the pink goo had made me unruly.

I made him
ride in the back, the three girls up on the gurney and the two boys on the jump seats alongside.

“Sure, Franny, yeah, plenty of room on here,” said Amber. “I sure love that skirt.” The veils had dropped from her sarcasm. “Are those turtles?”

“Is it Friday morning yet?” asked Franny. “I'm supposed to be selling chocolate almonds for church today! This is way better—I mean, c'mon, right?”

“Hold up, G,” said Grace. “Where we going next?”

“Hell, yes,” Clint hissed. “Good one!”

“You
said that there's a clinic for us outside Lincoln or something, that was for real?” asked Grace.

“I don't know much about it.” I folded my arms, couldn't help it. “I'll go and talk to them, but first I'm taking you guys where you'll actually be safe.”

“Hey, we're going to Ohio, yes, the bad-guy headquarters? Lincoln's totally on the way!” Grace drove her cupped hand along her forearm, but it stopped at her elbow to hop up and down. “We just stop to check it out—take in our drills, our staple guns, say, ‘What up, bitches?' ”

“I'm not taking you to Ohio,” I said.

“Why do you get to decide everything?” asked Clint, pulling latex gloves from the dispenser. “Why you treating us like dipshits?”

“Hey, you think I
want
to be hauling six other people around, like that's the most efficient way to do this? I didn't ask you guys to come with me!”

“Yeah, you did!”