“—way to get through the business—”
“Yeah, circle up.”
“Spokes are made for wheels!”
“Let’s do it!”
“—in the little time we have,” Meg was saying, but people were already up and at it. The rubber report and metal clang of folding chairs being dragged across hardwood drowned out any prospect of imposed hierarchy.
Christopher returned Nora’s thumbs-up as they joined in rearranging the room. Very good, he thought. An auspicious start.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Brendan showed up at the ER an hour and a half behind the ambulance. Jonah sat between Zac and Allison at the far end of the waiting room, hunched and miserable.
“How’s he doing?” Brendan asked as he joined the others. “Have I mentioned that I hate hospitals?”
“Get in line,” Zac said. “Buzz’ll be fine if he quits trying to kill himself. They’re making sure he doesn’t go back into OD when the Narcan wears off.”
Allison stood to examine Brendan’s forearm through the slit Luke had opened in his jacket. “Is that okay?”
“Lucked out, it’s a clean cut.”
“Silver Star,” she said, her voice catching.
“C’mon, Al, you know it wasn’t like that. So they release him once the naloxone runs its course?”
“If his mom shows up,” Zac said.
“You should have the nurse take a look while you’re here,” Allison said.
“It’s nothing.”
“If it takes much longer to find Buzz’s mom they’re going to call in Child Protective Services,” Zac said.
“Have the cops been by?”
“No sign yet,” Zac said. “I bet the hospital’s going to call them in when his family shows up, so they can scare him straight. The city doesn’t have cell space for what they’ve got on Buzz.”
“He didn’t have anything on him when they carried him out of Luke’s place,” Allison explained. “Not even works.”
Zac winked. “Lord knows how that happened.”
“An immaculate overdose, eh? So what about reaching family?”
“Everybody’s trying,” Zac said. “Us, the hospital staff. The number Buzz gave gets an answering machine.”
“And now he’s not talking,” Allison said. “As if that’ll convince the hospital staff to let him go.”
Jonah couldn’t contain himself any longer. “What happened to Luke?”
Brendan pulled up a chair. “I think we did the best we could, Jonah. He jammed the front door like we talked about, and wouldn’t let the cops in. Then his dad got home.”
“Mr. Conners let the cops in?”
“No way. From the look of their place it wouldn’t surprise me if Luke’s folks have duffle bags of bud stashed in a closet. That would explain how pissed off he was, at Luke and at me both.”
“Why you?” Zac asked.
“Because I kicked his front door in, maybe? Didn’t Allison tell you?”
“Oh, we told him,” Jonah said.
“Right,” Zac said. “They also said something about a jujitsu move you pulled when Luke went ballistic.”
“Hardly.”
Allison smiled through deepening worry lines. “It looked pretty superhero to me.”
Embarrassed, Brendan just shook his head.
“So what happened?” Jonah pressed. “With Luke’s dad?”
“I guess we worked it out between us, me and Lucas the Elder. Basically, I’ll patch up the door frame.” Brendan glanced over to Allison, inquiring. He didn’t want to aggravate Jonah, but Allison nodded, encouraging him to continue. “That wasn’t enough at first,” he said. “I wasn’t telling tales on Luke, and his dad wasn’t getting how the whole thing went down. But when Luke ’fessed up about how I got cut, his dad broke out the first aid kit and rewrapped my arm. Then he grounded Luke for the rest of his natural life, and assigned him to be my apprentice fixing the door.”
“So he’s in trouble,” Jonah said, slumping deeper into his chair.
“Hell yes, he’s in trouble. Six ways from Sunday. But I did explain he was trying to head off a copfest in the house. At least Luke was aiming for damage control.”
Zac shook his head sadly. “Mr. Conners must have been proud.”
“How come?” Jonah asked. His lip trembled, caught between outrage and tears.
“There was a certain awkwardness to it, Jonah,” Brendan said. “It’s hard to get around the fact Luke invited kids over to shoot heroin in the Conners’ living room. And that he held you hostage with a lethal weapon.”
“Just one kid ever shot heroin.”
“Be that as it may.” Allison placed a hand on Jonah’s leg.
Zac cleared his throat. “We need to figure out about Buzz’s mom,” he said. “Allison got the address, when Buzz gave his info to the paramedics. I think we ought to go over. Maybe the phone’s turned off.”
“Maybe,” Allison said. “Or maybe she’s not home. Or maybe there’s something more complicated going on.”
“Jonah, you know nothing about his family?” Brendan asked.
“Not really.” Jonah shifted uneasily.
“Have you heard stuff from other kids, from anybody?”
“A guy from school said his mom’s boyfriend used to be in prison. The boyfriend’s name is Vince.”
They all mulled over what that might mean.
“Okay,” Brendan said. “I was in prison too. Did this guy say anything else?”
“I don’t think it was the same thing,” Jonah said, without a trace of irony. “He said Vince is a bully. When the guy joked about Buzz getting beat up and stuff, he went crazy.”
“Buzz hit the guy, you mean?”
Jonah nodded. “He was really mad.”
“Do you remember what the other kid said, exactly?”
Jonah shrugged. The adults exchanged glances.
“Maybe we’ve had enough heroic saves for one day,” Allison suggested quietly.
Zac looked up sharply. “That boy is not going to the Youth Authority.”
Jonah hid head in hands. Nobody spoke.
“How deep are we prepared to get into this?” Brendan asked after a long pause. “Tuesday’s awfully close.”
Bursting out of his seat, Jonah shouted him down. “Who cares about a stupid protest?” he wailed. “Buzz almost died!”
Allison pulled Jonah into her lap. “It’s not an either-or,” she said, stroking his back. “We’re going to help Buzz, the only question is what’s the best way.”
On the other end of the room, a Latino family was gathered around a grandmotherly woman in a dark blue dress. Somebody turned up the sound on a television set mounted in the corner.
“Jonah’s right,” Brendan said, under cover of a blaring promo for ¿Quién Quiere Ser Millonario? “I can ride over.” Buzz’s backstory was about to come clear. Brendan dreaded the prospect of having his nose rubbed in ugliness that would drive a seventh grader to mainline, but Zac was right too: letting Buzz get caught up in Child Protective Services, the Youth Authority, any of that—they couldn’t sit it out on the sidelines.
Allison looked up, her face drawn. “Don’t go by yourself,” she said.
Zac stood slowly. “Guess that puts me in harm’s way. We’ll take it easier than the ride to Luke’s, right?”
“Um, sure. What did Allison tell you?”
“Seriously,” she said. “Let’s keep this low key.”
—
Brendan came to a full stop at every signed intersection as they puttered west into the Mission, then up into the neighborhoods behind Civic Center. He was in no rush, and Zac wasn’t urging him on. The streets in Buzz’s neighborhood were named for trees—Hickory, Linden, Birch—but broken glass littered the barren sidewalks: pebbled car windows and shattered forties. Brendan edged the motorcycle to the curb and Zac climbed off.
“What are the chances of unqualified success here?” Brendan yanked the bike onto its kickstand.
“Nil,”
Zac said, peering dubiously into the parking lot at the heart of Buzz’s U-shaped apartment complex. “But I always see the bright side.”
The slab stairs shook on spindly steel-pipe columns. Lit by bare bulbs, the exterior walkways were strewn with baby carriages, plastic trikes, and a ripe abundance of leaking garbage bags. Edging along a balcony, Brendan and Zac hugged metal railings that quivered at their footfalls.
“I thought our back stairs were in bad shape.”
“No shit. Like walking on a trampoline.”
An elderly man trudged back from the dumpster to his apartment across the way, carefully oblivious.
“This is not a happy place.”
“Check,” Brendan said. Tlaxitlán was a happier place than Buzz’s home turf. No wonder he’d never invited Jonah to visit.
At the interior end of the complex, apartment 3F faced the street. A wire milk crate, upended, had been set beside the door. On its makeshift tabletop, a tin can brimmed with cigarette butts. A television squawked at high volume inside.
Brendan knocked.
No one answered. Blue light played across a flannel sheet that stood in for a curtain.
Brendan knocked again.
“Go ’way!” barked a voice from inside.
“That would be the boyfriend.”
Brendan knocked a third time, louder and more decisively. “It’s important,” he called through the door.
The barker mumbled something and the television went quiet. Then the door jerked open. “What the fuck!?” Vince towered over the two younger men, fists clenched, tattooed biceps swelling out of his shirtsleeves like melons.
Zac stepped back.
“It’s about Buzz,” Brendan said, holding his ground against all better judgment. “There’s a problem.”
“What problem? Who the fuck are you?”
“Name’s Brendan. This is Zac. We live with a friend of Buzz’s from school, a kid named Jonah—maybe Buzz has talked about him.” The hulk in the doorway let Brendan’s pause hang. “Anyway, Buzz is in the hospital. We’ve been trying to call. If his mom doesn’t show up they’re going to put him in juvie and send the cops out to find her.”
“She cain’t leave the house. What’d he do?”
“OD. Smack. They took him to General in an ambulance.”
Vince stared balefully, weighing the news. “Wait,” he commanded before stepping back and slamming the door.
They couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like Vince was talking to a woman. Zac spoke softly into Brendan’s ear. “No cozy homecomings here.”
“I’m thinking Buzz’d be better off in foster care.”
“Or staying with us,” Zac said.
“Best if the boyfriend stays home, right? That leaves the most wiggle room.”
“Yeah, but how do we—”
Vince yanked the door open again, filling the space, a lamp’s light shadowing his coarse features. “Who says the cops’ll come lookin’?”
“He almost died of a heroin overdose,” Zac said.
“Shut up! I’m talkin’ to him.”
“My friend is right. Buzz was clean when he got to the hospital. No points, no dope. But they can’t just let a kid his age walk after pumping him full of Narcan. If it’s not the cops, it’ll be a social worker with cops at her back.”
“You’re the one did time in Mexico,” Vince said.
Brendan let a long moment pass. “Maybe I am.”
Vince gestured vaguely behind him. “She’s messed up. Fell down taking out trash, a few drinks to kill the pain. And I ain’t about to walk into shit for that punk.”
Brendan heard an ex-con’s evasive whine beneath Vince’s belligerence. His abdomen tightened. “It’s your call,” he said. “We came by so you’d have a chance to give Buzz a break—and keep the heat off. If she can clean up we’ll take her to the hospital. Might want to make sure there’s nothing lying around the apartment, you know? In case the police come by anyway.”
Vince crossed his bulging arms. “So what’s your angle?”
“We’re helping Jonah’s friend. And the Youth Authority’s a shithole I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
“Fuckin’ right.” Vince stood in the doorway, thinking it through. “Wait here,” he said, and went back inside.
“Was that a kinder, gentler slam?”
“She’s going to be a sight,” Brendan said.
“He beat the shit out of her.”
“I’m guessing. Can you get her over to General in a cab? I’ll follow on the bike.”
“Not a lot of options. The question is what happens after. Can we get her into a shelter, or what?”
Brendan shook his head. “I got a bad feeling.”
—
At the hospital, Cheryl wouldn’t take off her sunglasses, but that didn’t keep anybody from noticing the bruises. Nora arrived soon after they returned with Buzz’s mother, and Christopher soon after that. None of them could talk Cheryl out of returning home. In a flurry of whispered side conversations, they agreed to take Buzz in, but that got nixed too. “Vince wouldn’t like it,” Cheryl insisted. The social worker allowed herself to be persuaded that extended family could put things right.
At four the next morning, not six hours out of the hospital, Buzz showed up on the landing outside Jonah’s room. Brendan and Allison were both roused from sleep. By the time Brendan got to the third floor, Jonah was sitting up, groggily entangled in his blankets.
Allison opened the back door. Buzz stood with his head hung down, as if ashamed. His left eye was swollen shut, and a gash on his forehead was seeping blood. “Come inside,” she said after a short, shocked moment.
“God damn him,” Brendan swore. “Vince did that?”
Buzz didn’t answer.
“Leave it be,” Allison said quietly. “Buzz, come into the kitchen. Let’s get you fixed up.”
Brendan swallowed his rage and dug a tray of ice cubes out of the freezer. Even sitting down, Buzz looked as if he might collapse any moment. Brendan rolled up the cubes in a dishtowel and pounded them with a rolling pin. The stir drew Nora upstairs, in her bathrobe and slippers. “What—oh, God. Oh, Buzz.”
Jonah watched from the bedroom doorway as Allison set the ice pack against his friend’s bruised eye. Nora fetched first-aid supplies from the second floor, returning with hydrogen peroxide and a supply of bandages left over from dressing Marty’s head wound. “This is going to sting,” she warned, then gingerly touched a peroxide-soaked pad to Buzz’s forehead.
“Ow!” He flinched, but submitted stoically to the women’s care. “They were fighting,” Buzz said.
“You don’t need to talk about it unless you want to.” Allison guided his hand to the icepack. “Hold it gently. Don’t press too hard.”
“Yeah,” Buzz said, then looked to Brendan. “You saw him.”
“I did. Allison’s right, tell us what you want to, but you don’t owe anybody an explanation. We get it about Vince. Al, Nora—where can we set up a place for Buzz to sleep?”
“We can put a futon in my room,” Jonah said. “There’s that foam one in the hall closet.”
TWENTY-NINE
Chagall tugs an access panel into place over his head, lowering himself flat against the cold concrete. Parallel runs of PVC and copper tubing dig into his ribcage on either side. He’s closeted in a pitch black, steel-skinned plenum beneath third-story laboratory space at the University of Nebraska’s Center for Agricultural Genomics. He and Romulus have pushed their target date to its limit: since his last visit, the formal name of the AgBio complex has been carved into a stone marker erected at the gate. Construction is nearly complete. The corridors are lined with wooden pallets bearing costly electronic instruments.
Switching on a headlamp, Chagall plays its beam over the field of battle.
He is flanked by rows of pedestals supporting the laboratory’s raised floor. The concrete underfloor is also the auditorium ceiling. A single beam supports the massiv
e, heavily reinforced slab on which he lies. Eighteen inches of meaty, A36 carbon steel, according to the engineering diagrams. Ventilation ducts breach the structural floor where bolts attach the beam to supporting columns. The girder is isolated from the plenum by a scrim of sheet metal.
Moving slowly and carefully in the constricted space, Chagall pats himself down, confirming his gear is correctly pocketed and secured. It’s zero-one-forty by his 24-hour watch. He underestimated how long it would take to snip through ductwork under a lab on the opposite end of the I-beam. Still, there’s plenty of time. No reason to rush.
Chagall infiltrated the AgBio complex through a service door at the west end of the loading dock. He never intended to break in through the entrance Romulus used a few nights before. The cable spliced by the hacker is irrelevant, the camera in question of no importance. Romulus broke, entered, and performed as instructed; all Chagall needed was to see evidence of a physical crime.
It’s easy enough to slip in and out of the complex. At this stage of work, inner stairwells and doors are left unlocked for construction crews. Chagall’s target is a prairie state research facility, not a Las Vegas casino. Drug addicts, high school dropouts, the weak-willed, and the poorly conditioned break into buildings every day and night, commercial and residential structures alike, all across the continent. Never mind what locksmiths would have one believe. There’s not much to it.
Like Romulus, Chagall has come to augment the building’s inventory. The thermite he’ll leave behind is stable at normal temperatures, but throws off hellish quantities of heat when ignited, heat well above the critical temperature of carbon steel. The powdery stuff is easy to make. The simplest binding agents allow it to be formed into bricks, cylinders, or coins. Thermite contains its own source of oxygen. It will happily blaze away in a vacuum.
A seasoned autodidact of the pyrotechnic arts, Chagall has refined recipes for thermite suited to ignite overbuilt homes in exurban subdivisions; to burn through the engines of heavy machinery; to cut locks, fences, and cages; and, germane to the occasion at hand, thermite to weaken construction-grade beams. In initial experiments he tested a variant used in the Allied invasion of Normandy. What’s good for fouling artillery, he had reasoned, might prove first-rate for compromising structural steel. In practice this was not the case. Thermate-TH3 failed to cut deeply into Chagall’s sample girder. The customized material cooked up in its stead, packed in open, flanged ceramic coffins, is a simpler mixture of aluminum and iron oxide. The loads placed tonight will burn fiercely for about a minute and a half, reaching maximum heat some twenty seconds after ignition. They are more than sufficient to prime the building for collapse.
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