Bad Glass (38 page)

Taylor dropped my hand and looked down the length of the street, in the direction of the courthouse. For a moment, I thought she was going to sprint off without me.

“Your friends in the military have been driving, pell-mell, up and down the street.” She pointed along the cross street, first toward the hospital, then toward the courthouse. “Their fucking Hummers—they almost ran me over. They don’t know what’s going on. They have no fucking clue. They think we’re under attack. They think that
that—
” She waited for a handful of heartbeats until a fresh
crack
rang out in the sky. “—is artillery fire. They think somebody’s lobbing shells at us.”

“It’s got to be atmospheric,” Hershel said. For someone so old, his voice was surprisingly strong. “Vapor in the air. Colliding fronts. The red—it’s got to be refracted light bouncing off of something in the atmosphere.”

“Red sky at night,” Mama Cass recited, nodding, but the smile on her lips suggested that she thought Hershel’s explanation was complete bullshit. “Sailor’s delight.” She raised her beer bottle to the sky, toasting the chaos, and took a long swallow.

Taylor looked back down the street.

“They’re not going to help you,” Mama Cass said, not even looking in Taylor’s direction. “They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t have any fucking idea. You might as well just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

She gestured toward my backpack. “And you … you might want to take some pictures,” she said. “I’m sure your Internet fans would love to see what’s going on.”

I spent a moment staring up at the bloodred sky, that violent, roiling sea above our heads. Then I shrugged off my backpack and followed her suggestion.

A piece of paper torn from a lined notebook. Undated. Hand-printed words:

The sky stayed red for about twenty minutes.

I had a hard time taking pictures of that sky. Without anything in the foreground, it looked like nothing but a red, fluid pattern, an abstract collage of crimson and pink and electric blood. Finally, I went wide-angle and focused on the eastern skyline, down the length of the street. It was a view of the city from the floor of a concrete valley, with the walls on either side reaching up (and bending out) before opening onto the wide red sky. I set the camera to burst mode and shot five frames a second until I caught a couple of frames with the lightning—or the artillery fire or whatever it was—above the left-hand line of buildings.

After I captured that shot, I sat down on the asphalt and pretended to stare up at the sky, taking my place alongside Taylor, Mama Cass, and Hershel. But really, I had the camera down in my lap, angled up at Mama Cass as she watched the heavens. There was a childlike wonder spread across her face, and I tried to capture that expression, that joyful, rapturous euphoria, with the bright sky shining behind her. I was shooting blind, though, so I couldn’t be sure if the autofocus was locked on her or on the buildings in the background. I didn’t bother to check on the LCD screen, and after a minute, I just shut down the camera and tucked it back into my backpack.

The street was still eerily quiet. I knew that there were people on the sidewalk behind us—I’d seen them as Taylor and I had approached—but they didn’t make a single sound.

I reached out and took Taylor’s hand, gently, trying not to startle her. She looked down from the sky, first glancing at our joined hands and then looking up at my face. She was perplexed and overwhelmed; I could see that in her glazed eyes. I gave her a reassuring smile, and she turned back toward the heavens.

She didn’t drop my hand, at least. For that I was grateful.

The sky turned back to gray. The change from red to gray was slower than the change from gray to red. There was no earth-rending roar, no quick unnatural movement up in the atmosphere. The red just darkened gradually, and a new cloud front blew in from up north. It took a couple of minutes for the last of the red to disappear. Then it was just your typical overcast early-winter sky.

The reaction to this event, this return to normality, was surprisingly subdued. Mama Cass stood up and stretched lazily. She handed her empty beer bottle to Hershel, then folded up the lawn chair and tucked it under her arm. Back on the sidewalk, people looked down from the sky. They exchanged muted words and then walked away. I even saw one man yawn as if just getting up from a midafternoon nap.

It was over. Life—this parody of life here inside the city—could resume.

“Come back to the restaurant with me,” Mama Cass said, using her free hand to gesture toward the open storefront. She was smiling, relaxed. “I’m thinking you two can help me out with something. A delivery.”

“What?”
Taylor asked. She sounded genuinely offended. How could Mama Cass confuse their relationship so thoroughly? Why would she for one second think that Taylor would do anything to help her out?

“Don’t play it that way, girl,” Mama Cass said. “We’re in this
together, right?” She smiled. It was a staged, artificial smile, and it put the lie to her words. “Besides,” she continued, “if it bugs you so much, you can think of it as giving Terry a hand.”

“Terry?”

“Yeah … Terry. Your mentor. I’m running some errands for him. I’m doing him a favor.” She spit out this last word—
favor
—giving it barbs. Suddenly, her drugged euphoria was gone, and she was wielding nothing but venom. “I’m acting like an adult here, Taylor, and if you can’t do the same, if you can’t ditch that holier-than-thou bullshit, maybe you should just keep on running. Maybe you should get out of the way and leave the adult interactions to people who aren’t complete fucking pussies.”

Taylor’s eyes widened with surprise, and her mouth fell open in a wordless gape. She didn’t have a reply.

After a moment of silence, Mama Cass turned back toward me and smiled, once again picking up that relaxed, mellow attitude. “C’mon, Dean,” she said. “I’ll show you what I was thinking.” Then she headed toward her restaurant.

It was as if the red sky hadn’t even happened.

There was laughter in Mama Cass’s dining room. People had drifted back to their tables; they’d picked up their abandoned forks and resumed their interrupted meals. The laughter, the mindless chatter—it made me think that perhaps they’d picked up the same conversations, too. Hershel went on ahead, disappearing into the kitchen, while Mama Cass paused at a couple of tables to chat with her customers. Taylor and I stayed a couple of paces back. Taylor was stewing. Her arms were crossed, and her head was turned, refusing to even look in Mama Cass’s direction.

After a couple of minutes, Mama Cass waved us toward the back of the dining room. She escorted us through the kitchen and into her office.

“How’s the hand?” she asked. She leaned back against the edge of her desk and gestured for me to raise my palm up into the air.
I showed it to her, and she nodded. “It’s healing up all right? It isn’t hurting?”

“It’s getting better,” I said, “but it still hurts a bit.” This wasn’t exactly true. In fact, it didn’t hurt at all, but I was running low on Vicodin. Mama Cass nodded her head in understanding.

Taylor shot me a perplexed look. I hadn’t told her about my hand or Mama Cass’s help, so this was all news to her. I caught her eye, and after a second, her confusion turned to anger. I couldn’t help feeling a bit guilty. Like I was conspiring with an enemy, like I was sneaking around behind her back and plotting against her.

“What do you want us to deliver?” Taylor asked brusquely, turning away from me.

“A package. Something Terry wanted me to find.”

“What is it?” Taylor asked again, crossing her arms.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” Mama Cass said. “It’s Terry’s business, not yours.” She turned toward me. “Can I trust you, Dean?” she asked. “Can I trust you to be careful and discreet? Can I trust you to keep this out of her hands?”

I nodded, then glanced at Taylor. Her arms were still crossed, and she was staring angrily at the wall. “It’s for Terry,” I explained, trying to win her over. She just shrugged.

Perhaps Taylor would have preferred that I just let it go right there. But I was curious. I wanted to know what Mama Cass and Terry were working on, and I was pretty sure that that was what Taylor wanted, too. Despite her feelings for this mercenary businesswoman, despite her obvious loathing.

Mama Cass circled to the far side of her desk and bent low over its open drawers. There was the sound of rummaging—the crinkle of paper and change, the rattle of loose items—and when she came back up, she had a brown-wrapped parcel in her hand. It was a book; I recognized that as soon as she handed it over. A hardback book. I could feel the solid edges beneath the layer of butcher paper, the sheaf of recessed leaves.

“Be careful with it,” she said. “It wasn’t easy to find. My contacts had to scour all of Seattle.”

I tucked the book into my backpack, and we turned to leave. Taylor stepped out of the room ahead of me.

“Dean!” Mama Cass hissed as soon as Taylor disappeared through the door. She rounded her desk and, with a huge dose of melodrama, slipped a pill bottle into my hand. I glanced at the label: Vicodin. “For the pain,” she said with an ingratiating wink. The wink made me feel dirty, slimy. I slipped the bottle into my pocket and quickly followed Taylor out into the restaurant.

“I hate her,” Taylor said as soon as we were alone out on the street. “I really fucking hate her. She’s a game player. It gets her off. My father worked with people like that at the university. They’re the ones who got all of the promotions, on the backs of their lies and their power plays.”

She got quiet right then, and I knew that she was thinking about her father, remembering what had passed between them, what she thought she’d done.
Her voice, raised in anger, as he fell through the floor. His rolling eyes and searching hands
. And then her mother, doting on that floor-bound body, her hidden heart filled with blame, or love, or both, or neither.

We walked a block in silence. When we reached Monroe Street and turned to head up north, Taylor pulled to a stop. I turned to face her and found her forehead wrinkled in confusion.

“What’s wrong with you, Dean?” she asked.

I shook my head, not understanding the question.

“Why are you trying so hard? With me? What attracts you?”

I stared at her for a moment, still perplexed. “You do, Taylor. You attract me.”

She looked at me skeptically. “No, Dean, that’s not it. That’s not good enough. Not anymore.” A bitter, contemptuous smile surfaced on her lips. “There’s something wrong with you, Dean, something genuinely wrong. I’m sure of it now. You’re not quite right in the head. You’re not quite … sane. Not if you want to be with me.” With this, she turned and resumed walking.

I let her get ahead of me. Then I dug out my new bottle of Vicodin and bolted down a couple of pills.

There was no one guarding the Homestead’s entrance. No Mickey with a baseball bat. No figure hiding in the shadows. Taylor was confused.

“They should be here. They were here yesterday.” There was a note of panic rising in her voice.

We stepped into the sketchy business center, and she cocked her head, listening for sounds of life inside the building. I could hear wind rattling paper out on the street, but the building itself was still and silent. After a moment, Taylor barreled forward, making her way down the dim bottom-floor corridor—past the insurance office, the office supply place, the acupuncture clinic—then up the stairs to the second floor. I followed, not wanting to fall behind.