“As a business?”
“As an ideology,” he said. “There’s also the fact that whatever solution it is he figured out came to him as a result of the Violet Path. So… you know. Technically, it’s our IP. So we should be the ones to say if other people get to see it. You understand? Problem is, it’s in his brain. So we’re going to need access to that brain.” He paused. “At the very least we need assurances from him that he won’t tell anyone else about it.”
“Your wife said you thought he was just putting on a good show.”
“A show? Have you seen the guy, Vivian?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen him.”
“You think he’s making all this up?”
She shrugged. “I guess not.”
“Okay then. So, Telos needs to know what he knows. It’s in his interests. And yours. And your mom’s. And if you can’t see that,” he said, suddenly abandoning all pretence of diplomacy, “you’re fucking stupid.”
“What?”
“She wants her retirement fund, doesn’t she? You want a nice inheritance? If your brother wants to compete with Telos, you can say goodbye to all that.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Your dad’s cut,” said Shiv.
“You know about Dad?”
“Yeah, I know about your dad. I know he kicked my ass for twenty years as senior partner. Do you know about your dad?”
“Yes. I mean, no, I didn’t. Not until I got here.”
“So you know that your family still gets an annuity from any profits Telos makes?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Telos goes under, you and your family go under. So while we’re on the subject, best not to mention the bodies either. Tends to be a brand-killer.” He winked. “Of course, the opposite is true, too. If your brother can give us the edge against our competitors – and, let me be quite honest, I want to see Rhonda Byrne dead and buried – figuratively – aha – then your family will do very well out of the whole thing.”
Vivian hadn’t considered that.
“Who’s Rhonda Byrne?” she asked.
“Seriously?”
“You could have told me all this in the Chinese restaurant.”
“Could I?” he said. “Right there, in front of everyone? No, no, Glenn was the man for that job. He’s better at getting answers, too. Usually. The paternal touch. But, well, you know what happened there. So here I am. Telling you. Asking you to save my family, and yours. Though I guess they’re kind of the same thing, aren’t they? One big happy family.”
Vivian tasted a slight saltiness in the back of her mouth, something that usually heralded a sustained period of vomiting.
“I can’t tell you anything,” she said, “and neither can Jesse.”
Shiv sighed and looked like he might hit her. He was wearing the kind of rings that could do a lot of damage.
“We were going looking for it,” she added quickly. “When you stopped us. I think I know where it is. The thing. It’s written down on a coaster.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“No. That’s what Jesse said.”
“And where is it?”
“I’ll show you. Someone took it.”
“Then someone else knows what the thing is?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think so, otherwise we would have seen him.”
“I hope you’re right. I really do.” He gestured to the Carters’ car with his chin. “Lead on, Ms Owens, lead on.”
26
THEY TOOK the Buick up to the end of Vista and turned onto the dirt road that led to Janek Blucas’s place. Officer Gallardo drove, while Vivian sat in the back with Glenn and Shiv either side of her. Jesse hadn’t budged from the passenger seat.
Glenn kept looking at her meaningfully. The only time she caught his bruised eye he shook his head and turned away again. She kept thinking of him with his hands around her neck, out on the barren prairie, spitting and swearing like a man possessed.
“Such a shame,” he said. “You were such a sweetheart, Vivian.”
“Should have known better, Glenn,” said Shiv. “She’s got her old man in her.”
The car rattled and protested all the way up the mountain until they reached the fork just above Blucas’s barn.
“Here,” said Vivian.
They stopped. The right-hand path was too steep to drive down. Everyone apart from Jesse got out of the car and looked down the ridge. There was the junkyard and the warehouse and Janek Blucas’s tricycle parked outside. Shiv was unconvinced. He rapped on Jesse’s window and Jesse wound it down.
“You fucking with me?” Shiv said.
No, said Jesse.
“I think you’re fucking with me.”
“We’re not,” said Vivian. “The guy that has it lives there.”
“I’ve seen that bike before. That’s the hobo’s bike. The one who’s always at the motel.”
“Mr Blucas. He’s the one that steals things from all the rooms. If anyone’s got the thing, he does.”
“The hobo?”
She nodded.
“Jesus Christ. I’ve got to go in there?”
“Do you want it or not?”
Shiv stared at her a moment and then turned to the officer.
“You stay up here and watch him,” he said, and nodded at Jesse.
Officer Gallardo fiddled with the crystal around his neck.
“I don’t know, Shiv. Just me? If he’s an Ascended Master, I can’t exactly—”
“Jesus Christ, just stay with him. Make sure he doesn’t wander off again. An Ascended Master will still take a bullet.”
“Excuse me?” said Vivian.
“Figure of speech.”
She looked at the police officer, who was still massaging his crystal between thumb and forefinger.
“Don’t hurt my brother,” she said.
He blinked. She didn’t think he would. She turned back to the car.
“Jesse?” she said. “Are you okay?”
I’m okay, he said. His voice cast a momentary silence over everyone.
“Jesus,” said Shiv. “For someone who’s found enlightenment, he’s not exactly selling it, is he?”
Shiv, Glenn and Vivian stumbled down into the gully. Shiv was in brogues made of snakeskin or armadillo hide and he slipped and slid all the way to the bottom. Vivian’s hiking boots served her well, although she was still cuffed and Glenn had to keep hauling her upright. He seemed to take a certain pleasure in this.
They made their way through the rusted shells of cars and trucks to the door of the barn. It was closed this time. Shiv tugged it open without knocking and went inside.
It seemed Janek Blucas was out. The place was quiet as a tomb, and had the same smell of putrefaction. Shiv spun on the spot and looked at the shelves of trash bags, the piles of books and videos and old electronics and parts of cars, a rich and varied garbage-scape that seemed divided into dozens of distinct biomes of ephemera.
“It’s here somewhere,” said Vivian. “Probably in one of these bags.”
Shiv spun and grabbed Vivian by the front of her coat. She heard and felt a seam rip somewhere behind her armpit.
“I’ve been quite clear on the whole not-fucking-with-me thing, Vivian.”
“I’m not fucking with you,” she said. “Everything Mr Blucas finds at the motel, he brings here. He’s the only person that could have it. Your wife doesn’t have it. That’s obvious. Jesse doesn’t have it. Mr Blucas is the only one who can get in and out of the rooms.”
Shiv turned to Glenn.
“Go get Jesse. Bring him down here. I don’t know what I’m meant to be looking for.”
“It’s on a coaster,” said Vivian.
“A coaster, sure, sure. Go get him.”
Glenn obeyed and went back out the way they’d come, leaving Vivian alone with Shiv, handcuffed. Shiv opened one of the bags and pulled out a fistful of brown and curling newspapers. He threw them to the floor and went
to the next one. Papers, magazines, takeaway menus.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He hurled the whole bag from the shelf, then did the same with two more, tore up a bundle of envelopes that had been tied together with garden twine. Pieces of Mr Blucas’s archive flew into the air and skittered through the dirt and under his feet.
He turned and glared at Vivian with his hands on his hips, as if expecting answers from her.
Vivian heard a click. A voice, thick with mucus.
“You pieces of garbage.”
Neither of them saw Mr Blucas before he unloaded both barrels of his shotgun. The sound of the explosion was immense. It echoed around the barn like artillery. Vivian threw herself to the ground and paper fragments showered her like confetti.
“Can’t you see I’m trying to do good work here?” said Mr Blucas. “How am I s’posed to figure all this out with you sons of bitches meddling?”
She still couldn’t see him, but she heard his sluggish footsteps. He reloaded, fired again. She felt the roar of the shotgun’s barrels, followed by the whine of shrapnel and a patter of paper flakes. She went down on her belly and began squirming her way towards the door.
“Been working on this for years! Getting everything just so! Getting everything in order so I can understand it and let you know what the point is and now you’re coming here mussin’ everything up!”
He came across the bundle of letters Shiv had disordered and let out a desperate moan. The gun cracked twice more. A piece of the shelves missed her by an inch and landed in the dust in front of her face. She crawled into a different aisle, past piles of The Violet Path, past Shiv, who was cowering behind them.
“Sir…” he was saying, “sir, we didn’t mean to intrude…”
She heard Officer Gallardo yelling something from outside. He appeared in the open door with his own gun. His radio was crackling. He let off two rounds into the barn. Mr Blucas replied in kind, blowing two holes clean through the timber of the warehouse. The next time she saw the police officer’s silhouette she managed to get to her knees, then her feet, and ran for the exit under his covering fire. She tripped on the threshold and fell onto her chin, her hands still cuffed behind her back. Another crack from Blucas’s shotgun blew apart the doorframe and covered her with splinters.
She took cover behind one of the old car wrecks, her back to the fender. She closed her eyes and heaved the air in and out of her. The firefight went on behind her. Gallardo was still frantically calling for backup, more cars, a helicopter, an ambulance, everything.
Some stray shot pinged off the bonnet and she ducked further down.
Who was the ambulance for? Was Shiv injured? She opened her eyes and looked up the slope to where the Carters’ car was parked. All four doors were open, and the front seats were both empty.
Two more police cars arrived in a storm of dust, sirens blaring. The same two that had stopped them back on Vista. She could see Jerome and Minnie sitting in the back. Their officers scrambled down into the gully and took up positions behind the pieces of junk metal. Vivian was back in her Western movie. A good old-fashioned shootout.
It felt as if it went on for hours, though it was probably only a matter of minutes before Blucas’s shotgun fell silent. Vivian’s ears rang. She was sick in the grass beside her but couldn’t hear her own retching. Then, after another few minutes, the hiss and bleep of Gallardo’s radio again.
“You alright?” said an officer who had taken cover behind the car with her. He glanced at her bracelets and seemed unsure as to how much sympathy she deserved. She nodded and tried to wipe her mouth with her shoulder. The officer went ahead.
Vivian turned and peered over the bonnet. Officer Gallardo had gone inside, but his partner was crouched in the weeds by the door of the warehouse. Just above his head were two ragged holes from Janek Blucas’s last stand. At his feet were two bodies, and when he looked down and checked their pulses his face reflected a rapidly dimming violet light.
* * *
The ambulance still hadn’t turned up after quarter of an hour, but Officer Gallardo was willing to take matters into his own hands for the sake of an Ascended Master. Vivian convinced him to undo her handcuffs, and he drove her and Jesse to the hospital in Lewiston, sirens on, the speedometer not dipping below 90mph once. Out past Wing’s, past the burned-out husk of the Telurian Mission, past the Telos Sanctuary, whose triangular window still hadn’t been replaced. The whole thing was nearly over before it started when they came across Forrest on the ramp to the freeway. She was performing some kind of ritual dance, right in the middle of the road, and she flapped her arms and shook her tambourine at the car as if trying to get them to stop. She knew. Somehow, she knew it was them. Gallardo had to hurl them halfway into the scrub, and for a few fearful moments it felt like they might lose a tyre on the passenger side. He hauled them back onto the asphalt, and Forrest diminished in the rear-view mirror, howling in despair like a wolf at the moon.
Vivian sat in the back of the car with Jesse’s head in her lap. He was breathing, but not moving, a piece of the police officer’s shirt bandaging his head. Above his left eyebrow it was completely red, with a satiny sheen that suggested the thing was already saturated. There was blood filling the channel between his cheek and his nose. Even with his head bound up, she couldn’t unsee the injury that was beneath the dressing – a hole in his skull not half an inch in diameter, but black at its centre, and so deep it seemed she could stick her pinky through it and touch whatever goo was inside.
“How is he?” said Gallardo over his shoulder. “He’s getting cold,” said Vivian. “His eye is doing this thing. Twitching, sort of.”
“How’s his aura?”
“I can’t see his aura,” she said shortly.
The glow of Jesse’s skin had almost completely gone. It was strange for Vivian to watch him – on the one hand slipping away, on the other coming back to the world, the old Jesse, unilluminated, with his moles and frown-lines and the sparse, furry moustache their mother had always disliked.
Officer Gallardo squeezed on the accelerator and the car bucked and wriggled its way through Lewiston’s rush-hour traffic, which seemed in no mood to get out of the way of another car, even a police car with its sirens on.
They pulled up outside the hospital at a wild angle and Officer Gallardo braked so violently that Jesse nearly rolled into the footwell. He and Vivian leapt out and were joined by two paramedics who had been lazing in the back of their ambulance. A stretcher was prepared and Jesse was wheeled along to the emergency room, joined by doctors of increasing stature and expertise as they went. The air in the hospital had a stringent antiseptic smell, but with something troubling underneath, as if the odours of death and disease had only been concealed rather than eradicated. It seemed altogether too noisy in here, too, Vivian thought. Then she remembered: this was just what the world was like outside Mount Hookey. Noise and smell and busy people.
At some point Jesse and his stretcher crashed through a pair of double doors and Vivian and Officer Gallardo weren’t allowed to go any further. They sat on rubbery chairs in the corridor. Gallardo played with his policeman’s cap. A nurse came out and asked them both questions. Gallardo told her, straight off the bat, that Jesse was an Ascended Master and required special kinds of treatment and specific all-natural foods. After that the nurse spoke mostly to Vivian.
Did he have health insurance, she asked? No, he was from the UK. Did he have travel insurance, then? Vivian didn’t know, but it wasn’t at all likely that Jesse had considered those kinds of minutiae. Was he covered by Vivian’s insurance? No, Vivian didn’t have any insurance herself. Could she see their passports? No, she couldn’t, Vivian said.
The nurse looked down and scribbled something on her a clipboard and got up and went back through the double doors.
“He’ll be okay,” said Gallardo. He retained a slight Mexican accent that Vivian hadn’t detected until now. “As long as they don’t pump
him with all their chemicals. Half the time you come out of these places sicker than when you went in.” He paused. “Or they put a microchip in you, so the government knows what you’re thinking.” He paused again. “We should really have taken him to a shaman.”
Vivian turned to face him, squeaking on the vinyl upholstery. Who would have thought, to look at him, that these were the things he carried round with him in his head? Who would have imagined that this was the way he viewed the world? A police officer! To protect and to serve! And he wanted to take a man with head trauma to a witch doctor. It terrified her, in moments like this, how little she knew – how little anyone knew – of the skull-sized universe that lay behind someone else’s eyes. When had anyone glimpsed even the tiniest fraction of Jesse’s interior life? When had anyone glimpsed hers?
“He’ll be fine here,” she said.
“I don’t know about that. Maybe we could at least get a shaman to visit him here?”
“No shamans.”
“I know a cheap one who helped my cousin’s baby. She had an indigo child. You know indigo children?”
“Are you all into this?” said Vivian, interrupting.
“What?”
“The whole police department. Are you all initiates?”
“Most of us,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “Enough of us.”
“So Shiv isn’t paying you to do all this. To keep out of town.”
“Shiv paying us? That’s crazy!”
“You know it’s all a setup, don’t you? You know none of it is real.”
He gave a condescending smile.
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