Rusty’s mind, its wiring declining in quality and performance from years of chemical abuse, was still capable of some deductive thought. The bag was upright, brand new with package lines still in it, fully stuffed with something. Obviously, the bag was the new thing here, the variable, along with Brady, and they had come together, those two.
Why did hired security need to personally escort a small, overstuffed blue duffel bag, except for the obvious reason, and what kind of thing would a billionaire send clear across the country during a massive power outage, except for the obvious thing, and what possible contents of said duffel bag would make his ex-wife so blatantly desperate to conceal them from him, except for the fucking obvious?
Whole horizons opened up in Rusty’s mind, and he saw that a shift in tactics was advisable.
“I apologize,” he said to Aubrey, his voice smooth and placatory. “I won’t come again, unless you ask me to. I owe you that courtesy. Scott?” He called out to the kitchen in his best paternal manner. “Take care, son. If you need me, don’t hesitate. You know where to find me.”
He squinted, noticing the girl next to Scott. “Celeste, is that you? Your daddy’s looking for you, sweetie. Better run home.”
Celeste didn’t answer. She just turned away. Scott bristled, angling his body to block her from his father’s view, a gesture more symbolic than effective.
Rusty turned back to Brady. “Sorry about the wisecrack, buddy. Think I heard it in a song once. Stay safe.” And with that he headed back to his truck, slid behind the wheel, and drove off at a safe and responsible speed.
Three blocks away, Rusty pulled over at a stop sign and rubbed his face, thinking. This was going to be tricky. But holy shit was it going to be worth it. The money pi?ata was about to burst.
Aubrey closed the door, locked it, and looked at Brady. “My ex-husband.”
“I gathered.”
“Sorry about that.”
Brady shook his head. “I shouldn’t have interfered. You had it.”
The four of them ate dinner quietly, forgetting to finish their gratitudes.
20.
Outside Jericho
Things were going wrong, and Thom needed a nap. A nap would fix everything.
The cot was an almost exact replica of Thomas Edison’s. Not Edison’s nap cot in Florida, which Thom had seen as a child—that one had seemed dinky and uncomfortable even then—but the larger, more commodious cot Edison had kept in the book-lined nook of his library in West Orange, New Jersey. The New Jersey cot was more of a single bed, with sheets, a blanket, and two fluffy pillows awaiting the great man’s head at all times. Thom （not Edison） had gone to great trouble to have the whole of Edison’s library nook reconstructed in the alcove just off his small office in the main house at Sanctuary. Everything was identical, right down to the titles of the books on the shelves. The world may teeter near its end, but Thom still might get an idea and need to nap it out.
Thom settled himself in the nook, arranging the accoutrements of his nap just so. He had two white-noise generators that he used—one near the office door, to block out distractions from the living areas of the house, and the other on a table beside him, in case any sounds in the room should seek to disrupt his dreamy inspiration. Thom liked four pillows on the bed, two for his head and two longer, king-size pillows he used to form a tent over his face. The pillow bases were kept close to his ears, and the apex of the triangle had to be close enough to block out light but not oxygen. He’d tried a sleep mask earlier in his napping career but found they worked too well, sending him deep into the dark waters of slumber rather than skimming along on the surface. It was there, just over wave top, where Thom’s moments of genius fluttered.
He’d taken to the cot today because he knew when a situation was in the early stages of spiraling out of control. Like the Chandler wobble—the unpredictable, irregular rotation of the earth due to its nonspherical nature—the imbalance Thom had detected in his meticulously planned disaster community was difficult to observe and maddening to anticipate. But if anybody could predict the unpredictable, he felt, it was him. He just needed to get himself in the right, deeply concentrated mental state.
He laid back on the cot, sound machines batting away all atmospheric distractions, pillow tent over his face, and he closed his eyes. The first moments of quasi-sleep were the most valuable, and the yellow legal pad was always on the cot beside him, lest he awaken and lose his thoughts in the time it would take him to get out of the nook and over to the desk.