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“Standing under a Ficus nitida, waiting for inspiration.”
“What’s a Ficus nitida?”
I looked up into the web of dark branches. “You probably call it an Indian laurel. Did you send someone out to the dam?”
“Sonny Wexler and Billy Mundy should be there by now.”
“Your two best. I’m glad you’re taking this seriously, sir.”
“I always take you seriously, son. Even when there’s a dwarf in a bear suit.”
“He’s a nice little person, by the way. He doesn’t have an edge like that guy in the reality-TV show.”
“There’s another thing happened,” Chief Porter said. “Just a few minutes ago. An alert came over the wire from Homeland Security. Three armed guards were transporting a truckload of C-4 between the manufacturer and a weapons depot at an Army base.”
“Plastic explosives.”
“That’s right. One of the guards killed the other two and hijacked the shipment.”
“How much C-4?”
“It might have been a thousand kilos.”
I shivered in the warm night. “Enough to blow up the dam.”
“Twice over,” the chief said.
“When did this happen?”
“About three hours ago, but we just got word on the wire.”
“Where did it happen?”
“They think about thirty miles from here. The feds say not to worry, they’re all over it. They just found the truck. The C-4 had been off-loaded into another vehicle.”
“What vehicle?”
“That seems to be anyone’s guess. When the feds say they’re all over it, that doesn’t mean they’re all over it.”
“I better get my mojo working,” I said.
“I sure hope you can, son. We need you on this. So why did you call it a Ficus didida?”
“Nitida. That’s the correct botanical name, sir. Ozzie Boone insists that even if a writer uses the common name of a tree or other plant, he ought to know the correct botanical name. He says that no matter what you’re writing about, you need to know a whole lot more on the subject than what you put on the page, or otherwise the work won’t have any depth.”
“So you’re still writing your memoirs.”
“Yes, sir. As I get the chance.”
“I guess you know a lot about Indian laurels, then.”
“I could go on for hours.”
“I just realized I don’t have your phone number.”
I gave it to him.
“Things are moving fast,” he said. “I’ll be back to you soon.”
I terminated the call.
A faint trace of cigarette smoke scented the still air. In the darkness of the porch, the smoker took a deep drag, and the end of his cigarette glowed hot orange.
Watching the man, I thought of a fuse on a stick of dynamite.
Plastic explosives were detonated with an electric current, not with a fuse, not with a flame, but I thought of a fuse anyway.
Twenty-five
Driving around, odd as I’ve always been, thinking: Jim. Bob. Jim. Bob. Jim, Bob. Jim, Bob. Jim Bob, Jim Bob, Jim Bob, Jim Bob …
Although neither of the executioners had spoken with a southern accent, I sounded to myself as though I must be trying to track down some good old boy with a red neck and a tattoo of the Confederate flag somewhere on his body, good old Jim Bob, with a juicy wad of chewin’ tobacco tucked up in his cheek and Merle Haggard playing on the radio of his pickup, while he drove around with a loaded rifle, looking for a possum to shoot so that he could bring it home to the little woman and have her make her mighty fine stew that she served over buttered grits with collard greens on the side.
Psychic magnetism doesn’t work if I’m distracted, and I was so distracted that the word distracted wasn’t strong enough to describe my state of mind. Spinning Jim and Bob into a fantasized good old boy wasn’t the only thing that kept me from focusing my paranormal gift for tracking people. I kept thinking about my dream, too, chewing it over like Jim Bob with his chaw. My mind also kept bouncing back to Ficus nitida versus Indian laurel, which had nothing to do with this crisis except that the chief happened to ask me about it. When it wasn’t Ficus nitida, it was the plump woman with the masses of curly auburn hair, giving me the admission ticket and assuring me that I would be a big winner at 11:45 if I remained on the midway. And when the plump cashier stayed out of my head for a minute, her place was taken by bear-suited Lou and mega-tattooed Ollie. Or by Gypsy Mummy spitting out blank cards. Or by the coyote that had stood in the street and stared boldly at me as I’d climbed onto the Big Dog bike early that morning, after leaving the abandoned mall to the bats and carnivorous beetles that now called it home.
I also began to feel that I was being tailed. I couldn’t stop glancing at the rearview mirror. Three times, when a vehicle behind struck me as suspicious, I turned at the first intersection, but none of them followed me.
Only fifteen minutes after terminating the phone call with Wyatt Porter, I realized that I was cruising the state route to Malo Suerte Lake, doing eighty miles per hour, twenty over the limit. Considering that my psychic magnetism currently functioned even less well than a ten-billion-dollar government computer system, I had no expectation of finding Bob and Jim at the dam. Either I was hurtling toward Malo Suerte out of desperation, hoping for a new lead now that those two men without faces and surnames had proved elusive, or my usually reliable intuition had kicked in once more.
Suddenly I remembered that although Jim and Bob were without faces, I had two—the one I was born with and the one Connie had given me at the carnival. The cops guarding the dam would be edgy already, on the lookout for armed-to-the-teeth cultists with over a ton of C-4. If I showed up painted like the most recent theatrical psychopath to terrorize Gotham City, a tragic mistake might be made. This was a
world, after all, of tragic mistakes.
I didn’t want to waste time driving back across town to the farther outskirts where the Bullocks maintained the safe house, just to scrub off my mask. If I stopped at a service station to use their facilities, I’d have to ask for the key, at which point there would probably be some tedious back-and-forth about my painted face, which would seem as bizarre outside the carnival as it had seemed ordinary on the midway.
Instead of going directly to the dam, I drove to the park on the north shore, where I’d had breakfast that morning with Ozzie Boone and Chief Porter. The park was closed for the night. I left the Explorer on the shoulder of the highway, scaled the gate, and walked about thirty yards through darkness to the buff-brick building that housed the public restrooms.
Two security lights, two doors. Both were locked.
Fortunately the desert-style landscaping around the premises offered cacti and succulents and mostly decorative rocks. Because Maravilla County wasn’t so prosperous that it could afford night patrols of gated parks, I picked up two rocks the size of oranges, hesitated because of a lifelong tendency toward good citizenship, and then pitched the first one through a window. After using the second rock to break out the jagged shards that remained around the edges of the frame, I boosted myself over the sill and into the building.
I had never before broken into a bathroom. It wasn’t one of those firsts that you include on a résumé.
Using the little flashlight that hadn’t been left on the dresser in the safe house, glass snapping and crunching underfoot, I went to the paper-towel dispenser and yanked several sheets from it. At the middle sink in a bank of five, I regarded myself in the mirror and confirmed the wisdom of a thorough face washing. When not in the context of the carnival, the harlequin mask and the black-and-white diamond pattern looked sinister in the extreme.
