All-Day Breakfast (26 page)

I climbed the rise. Guys in polo shirts lay dazed on the grass, firefighters yelled through bullhorns and ran, hoses sprayed haphazard water, men in dark suits shouted into each other's ears, dressed-up women cried on their knees, men with flapping ties wiped their eyes at the edge of the lawn, a table stocked with water and mini-bagels. A plastic tarp swayed over an ad-hoc hospital where a red-haired doctor pressed the heel of his hand against a charred woman's chest.

“Just wait for your call on the radio, okay?” A woman with thick black glasses waved a clipboard at me, her hair escaping its ponytail. “Just go back up and wait, we can't have so many bodies running around down here.”

We watched as the red-haired doctor closed his patient's eyes. Blue body bags lay in a row on the lawn.

“Okay, bad choice of words,” the clipboard woman said.

I nodded meaningfully to the woman, started back up the driveway then darted around to the back of the hospital tent where I hoped she wouldn't notice me. The helicopter shuddered down onto the grass, its blades dispersing the smoke from our immediate vicinity, and only then did I finally get a good look at Penzler Corporate Headquarters, 1616 Highway 91a. It looked like our house had on the arson morning, only the back of the
hq
's foundation was too far away to even see and a team in yellow hazmat suits walked through the wreckage, holding flashing rods in front of them.

A cluster of guys in black-visored
swat
outfits held a conference beside the remains of the wide front steps. A man in a pinstripe suit and hard hat climbed out of the helicopter, then I realized that one of the
swat
guys was walking toward me, swinging what looked like a cattle prod. I took one step into the tent, found a clipboard on top of a cooler and immediately started checking boxes with a pencil. The
swat
guy stomped past, his whole face hidden behind the visor and gas mask, and, by God, did I want to kick him in his bullet-proof belly just to show him I was indestructible. According to the boxes I'd checked, my patient was female, of Asian descent, 64–69 years, suffering from arrhythmia and spinal damage.

I carried that information across the lawn to where Penzler staff,
id
tags flapping on lanyards, stood with their arms around each other.

“Excuse me!” I called to the cluster of dark-suited men—hopefully a powwow of the Penzler brain trust. “Are any of you in charge of this entire operation? Is there a Mr. Penzler here?”

“Penzler?” asked a heavyset guy with a white moustache. “He never comes
here
, thank God. If you've got a specific concern you can take it to his secretary—that's her over there, with the pearls on.”

The men who weren't yelling into each other's ears looked out at the wreckage and whistled sombrely. I consulted my clipboard and furrowed my brow.

“There's no way to get a hold of him directly?” I asked.

“Is this about insurance?” A tall woman with glasses leaned in.

“Uh, no, not exa—”

“We'll collect paperwork today, but we have to convene a meeting of shareholders before we can submit anything.”

“But this form says I should speak to someone affiliated with Dockside Synthetics—can you tell me who that might be?”

“Dockside? Nothing to do with us, I don't know it,” said the heavyset man.

“Well, does this Mr. Penzler live in the area?”

“Hell, that's why we built out here in the first place!” he said. “Values his family's privacy.”

“And what business are you
in
, exactly?” I asked. “These forms have to—”

“Plastics!” hissed the woman.

I wrote that down and trotted away before I caused any real alarm. I found the gray-haired secretary talking into her cell phone, but she snapped it shut as soon as she spotted me coming. Along with her pearls she wore a pristine yellow overcoat. The bigwigs were all too clean to have been on-site when it happened.

“Excuse me,” I said, “the gentleman across the way indicated that you'd be able to supply Mr. Penzler's home address. We need it for the forms.”

She just stared at me, big-eyed like a harp seal.

“I don't
know
Mr. Penzler's address,” she said. “The man likes to be left alone.”

“Fair enough,” I smiled. “Who might I ask about the contracts the company carried with the US military?”

“Hey!” The clipboard woman grabbed my arm. “They're
radioing
you! Get to your vehicle!”

“Oh. On what channel?” A bona fide question, I thought.

“Channel
nine
—how did you get called
in
if you weren't on nine?”

“Well, I
had
been on nine, but—”

Clipboard put her hands on her hips. The woman with pearls narrowed her eyes as she reopened her phone. I turned and jogged back up the driveway. What had my entire undercover operation uncovered? Penzler himself lived in the area, which might've meant “in Ohio.” And what would he know? Guy probably played tennis and signed the odd letter. I needed a research guy with a beaker in his hand, but he and the beaker had probably had their molecules combined. I should've asked for the mailing addresses of all secret labs.

Holmes, the freckled cop, stood beside my ambulance as I hurried up. The other vehicles had gone.
Who are all these people in the back?
she was going to ask.

“Don't worry about it,” she said. “Finn took your call.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay then. I was helping out down in the tent. Doctors were asking
me
what had happened here, as if
I
would know!”

“You must have that kind of face,” she said. “People always ask you for directions?”

“Yeah, they
do
!”

I bounded up into my seat. I hadn't been so enthusiastic about anything since the kids were babies, not even feigned enthusiasm, but I'd figured I needed a new tack. And Holmes was the cutest cop in the world if that wasn't too condescending an assessment. The ambulance was so quiet that I wondered whether they'd gone on a reconnaissance mission of their own. I grinned and lifted a handful of bacon out of the mixing bowl between the seats.

“You want some?” I asked.

“You have Nebraska plates,” said Holmes.

“Oh, of course!” I imagined I was Clint in mid-improvisation on the theater sports stage. “It's the driver exchange!”

“Who'd you exchange with, somebody here?”

“Oh, I don't know yet. I was just pulling in off 33 when I got this call!”

“But where are you staying?”

“They said to find the motel and they'd call me there. There aren't many motels, are there?”

“No,” said Holmes, “just the one.”

A gigantic fire engine purred up the exit driveway and out onto 91a. The driver nodded at me and patted the outside of his door, just like they'd done in Hoover.

“If you're done here,” I offered, “why don't I run you into town?”

Because maybe she'd feel like talking. She nodded, but then wandered around to the front of my ambulance and murmured into her radio while she looked down at my license plate. Then she holstered the walkie-talkie and climbed in.

“Seat belt,” I told her. “Such a treat to have a passenger who's not in shock.”

This last bit was to discourage my other passengers, if they were even back there, from staging
Oklahoma!

“This seat's so warm,” said Holmes.

“You must have got a cold bum, standing out in the cold!”

I turned right onto the road. Fifty yards ahead the fire truck had pulled over and the driver stood beside the ditch as he was interviewed by the
tv
-news people. He waved his arms as though miming large explosions.

“He'll catch hell from Penzler,” said Holmes.

“How's that?”

“Old Man Penzler put a gag order on everybody working the site. He throws his weight around this county like you wouldn't believe, but you'll see that by the end of your first shift.”

“Ah, he must be the one they were mentioning.” I lifted my eyebrows and swayed my head, peering at the ditches on either side of the road like the glorious act of
driving
was all that my mind really had room for. “Must not be a union shop, if he didn't even come down to lend a hand. Where's the guy live exactly?”

“Just out of town.”

“Probably some fancy neighborhood,” I muttered.

“No, that's the weird thing—he's out on McCauley.” She waved a hand vaguely over her shoulder, which meant east of town if I had my compass properly aligned. “I had the honor of driving his daughters home one night, even the one who can still walk. But I guess it wasn't too pretty when their mom died, that might be part of their problem.”

“Uh-huh. This morning he must've been making them breakfast,” I said. “What kind of house does a big executive like that live in? Just out of curiosity.”

“Rambling, I guess you'd call it. Seemed like there were a lot of little buildings.”

I figured that asking for the exact address would be too much.

“Pink marble or something?” I asked as I peered up the road, as if the conversation didn't have any relevance for me or the people riding in the back.

“No, no, just wooden. White. Why do you ask?”

“You have a lot of family in Preston?”

“Just my sister and her kids,” she said. “You have a suitcase and stuff in the back? How long you staying again?”

“Fourteen days.”

“That's not long.”

“It's a pilot project.”

Mobile home parks huddled on either side of the highway.

“I guess your sister's kids will want to know all about what happened out there.”

“No,” said Holmes, “it's their
mom
that'll want to know. She works the deli counter and she needs to know everything. I was just talking to the captain, but I can't pass a word of it along to Susan.”

I slowed down for a school zone even though it was Saturday.

“Pass what along?” I asked quietly.

“Well, they've confirmed arson.” She took off her cap to scratch above her ear. Her hair was in a French braid. “The jumpsuit guys found incendiary devices, something like twenty-five of them. Went off at seven-thirty when only the insane keeners were at their desks. Horrible.”

Incendiary devices
. No wonder it had reminded me of my own house—but why would Penzler do to themselves what they'd done to me?

“Poor suckers,” she said. “As if writing up one more memo about plastic couldn't have waited until Monday. Should've been home watching cartoons!”

You can guess which two people that got me thinking about.

“And that was all he said?” I murmured. “Your captain?”

“Some people aren't as forthcoming as we'd like.” She put her cap back on. “Here's your motel.”

“Nah, I'll drive you to your station.”

“Pull in, I want to see that you get checked in.”

“You don't have to.”

“Look, I'll happily do
anything
before I have to start knocking on doors to tell people their husbands and wives just died, all right? Humor me.”

She got out and walked across to the Lamplighter Motel's front door, its gold lettering faded from too much sun.

“Be right back, ambulance,” I said flatly. “See you in a minute.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw Clint's hand giving the A-OK sign—man, his thumb had reattached just seamlessly.

With Holmes I strode across the cramped lobby to the front desk, trying to make myself as attractive a prospective guest as possible, though I'd seen my reflection in the office door and realized I still had black patches around my eyes like a robber in a kindergarten play. I smiled up at the potted palms and the brass clock tacked to a piece of driftwood.

“Single room, please. Be staying fourteen nights to start. You have any kind of limit on length of stay?”

“No, sir!” The woman behind the counter left off watering a spider plant and slid the register in front of me. “Sign in, if you please.”

She was that long-nosed, eyebrowless sort of woman that winds up as either a drunk or a basket-weaver but seldom both. She stood picking lint off her cardigan. A lanky boy with braces, probably twelve years old, sat beside her with his feet propped on the edge of a drawer, drawing a fairly intricate Frankenstein on an Etch A Sketch—Frankenstein's
monster
, to be accurate. Everything his creator's fault. I wrote
Rory McAvoy, Hoover, Nebraska
in the register.

“You drive the ambulance?” the boy asked.

“Yes, son, I do.”

“Chad,” said the woman, “he's entitled to
some
privacy.”

“Cool,” he nodded, as though she hadn't said a word.

Holmes knocked me with her elbow. “Everything kosher with this guy, Ange?”

“Joanie!” the woman smiled. “Didn't see you step in!”

“You might get busy,” said Holmes. “Terrible business down at Penzler, terrible. Lot of out-of-towners'll come zooming in.”

“Oh, I didn't want to ask you.” Ange shook her head. “I reckoned I'd find out all about it on the CNN. They just called and booked three rooms.”

“My friend Hunter's dad works there,” said Chad, screwing the cap back on his orange juice. “But he
never
goes in Saturday—he says working weekends will lead you to the grave!”

“Sickening.” Ange offered me a key dangling on a cork. “Here you are, Mr. McAvoy, you're in 17.”

“Should I park it around the side?” I asked. “Sometimes there's a minor panic when people see an ambulance out front.”