“I have some questions about a client of yours.”
He stepped farther down the hallway, toward the sound of the blaring television. It sounded like the news, which was all bad these days.
A deadly virus rages out of control in China. Officials say it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to Europe and the United States. Are we prepared?
A puffy balding guy lay in a recliner, head tilted, mouth open in a snore that Bailey couldn’t hear over the television. He knocked again, this time on the door frame to the living room. It was a tidy little space, comfortable with a big sectional, a fireplace that was dark, family pictures on the mantel, some Staffordshire dogs on the hearth. The big-screen television mounted on the wall showed images of rows of patients in hospital beds, a woman weeping, people of indeterminate sex in hazmat suits spraying down a city street.
Bailey raised his voice. “Mr. Javits.”
Bailey recognized Rick Javits from his website, though the picture where he was impeccably coiffed, besuited, and unapologetically airbrushed bore little resemblance to the sleeping middle-aged schmo in the La-Z-Boy before him.
He thought he saw something move behind him, but when he turned to look, there was nothing but a dark doorway. People were armed these days, more than you’d think. You have to be careful, wouldn’t want the wife coming in terrified, with her revolver drawn shooting first and asking questions later.
He moved toward Rick Javits. As he grew closer, Bailey’s skin started to tingle. The angle of Javits’s neck wasn’t right. Drawing closer, Bailey realized it wasn’t a shadow he was seeing on the other man’s chest; his pajama top was soaked with blood. His eyes were not closed in sleep but wide open and glassy.
“Fuck,” whispered Bailey, reaching for his phone.
“Mr. Kirk.”
Bailey spun to see a tall, dark man dressed all in black seem to leak out from the darkness of the doorway. He knew him right away from the pictures he’d seen online.
He’d wondered what all those beautiful women had seen in the frankly kind of ugly guy he saw in pictures with the big nose, and the wide mouth, the hulking frame. He saw it now. There was a kind of power, a raw virility to him.
“You just can’t let this go, can you?”
Bailey had been chasing this man for so long that he didn’t even seem real. He wore a long black coat and held a gun with a silencer.
“Let’s talk,” said Bailey, lifting one palm and moving his other hand toward the gun in his shoulder holster. He could tick off at least three mistakes he’d made in the last hour that had led him to this moment that practically sizzled with bad possibilities.
“Let’s not.”
Bailey Kirk didn’t even hear the gun go off, just saw the muzzle-flash, and then nothing.
thirty-nine
Firewood. The smell of leaves on the ground. A black crow feather glinting in the sunlight. The sound of bees on wildflowers. Fireflies luminescent, languid, on summer nights. Robin’s tinkling laughter.
I’m back there as I drive away from town, taking the back roads you have in your directions, seeming to weave further and further away from my life, from the city, from Dear Birdie.
For the first time in a long time, I am aware of the call back to that place, to that kind of life—its peace and quietude, its simplicity. Just you and the day, only the tasks of survival, of living—cooking and cleaning, gardening and hunting. No television to suck away the hours, to invade with the misery of the world news. No ringing, beeping devices; no noise pollution.
There are all kinds of words to define people like my father—prepper, hoarder, recluse, survivalist. To those of us dwelling in the modern world, with every convenience, all the abundance of the first world taken for granted, hyperconnected to each other and to the consumer machine that is our society, they seem strange. These people that want to go live out in the woods, return to subsistence living, working to grow and kill their own food. Why would anyone want to live that way? But maybe they’re not the ones that have it wrong.
But really I think he was just trying to quiet all the chatter—the ceaseless demands, the soulless selling and buying, the constant messages of who he should want to be. He was tortured by what he’d seen overseas, what he’d done. I think he wanted to go back, to the last safe, happy place he knew, to the person he was there.
But I brought the world back to him. And it destroyed us all.
What are we doing?
Robin sits small and faint in the passenger seat, looking out at the darkness.
Where are we going?