He returned to his armchair but no longer looked comfortable in it. “Who are you running from, Bridget?”
“The ISA. You know who that is?”
His expression of disgust was answer enough.
Cressie said, “The Gestapo Lite. Whoever thought anything like them would take root in America?”
Her husband’s gas-flame-blue eyes seemed like windows to a fire in his head. “Why are they after you?” He focused on me. “Something you wrote in that exclamation-point magazine?”
Bridget looked at me, and I shrugged.
She said, “No, sir, nothing Quinn wrote. He and I sent away to Getting to Know Me Dot Com, hoping to learn about our ancestry. The company alerted the ISA to something unusual in our DNA.”
Butch Hammer thumped a giant fist three times against his massive thigh. “People used to take that Orwell book, 1984, to be a warning. Now they see it as an inspiration. Your ancestry is your business, not the ISA’s.”
After a silence, Bridget said, “Do we have a deal?”
Getting up from her chair to take a cookie from the tray on the coffee table, Cressie said, “What about license plates, sweetie?”
“We’ll use the one on the Buick. It’s from a Porsche. Tomorrow we’ll swap plates with some other vehicle. We can keep doing that every few days, before any set we’re using is reported stolen.”
“Even considering the risk factor, seventy-five thousand is too much,” Butch said. “On the run like you are, you need all the money you can get. Let’s split it at thirty-seven five.”
Indicating the photographs of the Hammer kids, Bridget said, “All that education must have cost a fortune.”
“They all got scholarships,” Cressie said. “But there were a slew of other bills.”
“And one of them still in school,” Bridget said. “We can get money any time we need it, dirty money that we’ll make clean. Hard times might be coming for this country. Very hard. Take the seventy-five. It’s our final offer.”
Reluctantly, the Hammers accepted it.
When we said goodbye to Cressie and stepped outside with Butch Hammer, he said, “Time was that Tucson seemed far away from all the capitals of crazy in this world, but maybe nowhere’s far away anymore.”
He drove the Explorer into the Quonset hut, and we brought the Buick in after him. Out of sight of the street, we transferred the license plate to the Ford.
The enormous garage had a hydraulic lift and a full array of other equipment. It appeared to be almost as ordered and clean as the house next door.
When we were ready to roll, the big man said, “One more thing. When I rebuilt this girl, I filed the numbers off her engine block and then torched away the ghost of them. She can never be traced back to me, so don’t worry about that.”
Bridget said, “We’re not the first like us who’ve found their way to you, are we?”
“Been a few,” he acknowledged. “Do you see things, strange things, that other folks can’t?”
“We do,” I said.
Bridget asked him, “Do you?”
“No. I think I’m glad I don’t. How did you find me?”
“We’re drawn to what we need,” she said.
I added, “We call it psychic magnetism.”
“Question for question,” Bridget suggested.
Butch nodded.
She said, “People can’t lie to you, can they?”
“A lot of them try, but I always see the truth behind the lie. Cressida, too. It’s scary how much lying there is. What’s all this about that you’re caught up in?”
“We’re all caught up in it,” she said. “You as much as we are.”
“We’re on a quest,” I said.
“We’re not on anything as easy as a quest,” Bridget disagreed.
“That’s an issue we’re still debating,” I told Butch.
Bridget said, “We’re trying to figure it out. We’ll let you know if we ever do.”
Butch said, “Others before you—they were trying to figure it out, too. All anyone agrees about is that something bad is coming.”
“Something always is,” she said.
He frowned. “This time it’s going to be a bigger bad than maybe we’ve ever seen before. Be careful out there. Godspeed.”
When Butch and I shook hands, mine disappeared up to the wrist.
Bridget stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.
Just then Cressie arrived with a colorful Christmas-themed tin full of tiny cakes and cookies. “It’s always Christmas here,” she said, and it occurred to me that, with a full beard, Butch Hammer would make an impressive Santa Claus, though he might scare the pee out of some little kids. “Share them with whoever,” Cressie said. “There’s nothing so bad in life that a good little cake can’t make it better.”