“I hope you’ll forgive me,” Erskine said, “if it seemed that I threatened you, which was not my intention.”
Bridget matched his smile better than I could when she said, “Not at all, Erskine. We understand the difference between a threat and a helpful explanation of the circumstances.”
“Lovely,” he said, and he seemed to cast a blessing on us by making something like the sign of the cross in our direction. “Now to business.”
Bridget said, “We need a vehicle. We’ll pay a lot more than it’s worth. You wait two weeks and then report it stolen.”
“Are the police after you?” Erskine asked.
“We’re fugitives from a corrupt, oppressive system,” she said, which I thought struck the right note. God knows what I might have said if I’d opened my mouth.
“What have you done?” Erskine asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Bridget said. “If you sell us a vehicle, you’ll need to drive our Explorer miles from here and abandon it.”
“You need guns?”
“No. We have a friend waiting in the Explorer with guns.”
“You need drugs?”
“Thank you, no.”
“It’s perfectly safe to deal with us for anything, anything at all,” said Wallace Beebs. “How about ID in new names?”
“We don’t have time for that. So it’s just the wheels.”
Wallace regarded his uncle with the bright-faced excitement of a boy hoping to be taken on an adventure, and the older man regarded us with analytic intensity.
After a silence, Erskine said, “We believe that what little we love is defined by what all that we hate and how much we hate it. What do you think?”
“Hate makes the world go around,” Bridget said, and it was clear the sentiment was well received in the Republic of Beebs.
I had a lot to learn about deception from this splendid woman.
Erskine’s voice was as gentle as that of a truly caring grief counselor, his expression as kindly as that of a fairy godmother in a Disney cartoon. “Wallace and I believe that if you want to build something better, you must first burn down everything that exists.”
My fiancée smiled with tender malice. “Just give me the matches.”
Putting us through the perverse equivalent of an ethics exam, Erskine said, “History is the enemy of the future.”
Bridget called him and raised him one: “The past is a cancer that kills all dreams of progress.”
“Power is beauty, beauty power.”
Lifting her chin and thrusting her chest forward as if she took overweening pride in her beauty, she said, “Keats was such an idiot, confusing truth for power.”
We were all silent as Wallace turned his grin on his uncle, on Bridget, on me, and then on each of us again, clearly waiting for Erskine’s decision.
No doubt about it—we were across the border from eccentricity, in the mad kingdom of the Red Queen.
When Erskine finally spoke, he said, “We have now and then assisted others like yourselves, who needed a vehicle to get them safely into Mexico or Canada, something with no history and with what appears to be a genuine DMV registration. I can offer you a sixteen-year-old Mercury Mountaineer with no GPS, with legitimate plates. If you email me photographs of yourselves and your associate in the Explorer, I can in three days send perfectly forged passports to any mail drop you wish.”
“Not necessary,” I said. “We won’t be leaving the country.” Then I realized my presumption and turned to Bridget. “We won’t be leaving the country, will we?”
“We won’t,” Bridget agreed.
Erskine said, “The Mountaineer has a secret compartment for the transport of weapons and ammunition. If you want a backup arsenal, I can make you a package deal—the Mountaineer and guns.”
“We have a lot of great guns,” Wallace assured us.
Bridget put her hands together as you do when you’re praying, and she nodded at Erskine. “Thank you so much, padrino. But the Mountaineer is all we need.”
“Very well, then. Thirty-five thousand.”
“Sold,” I quickly declared.
“Forty thousand,” he said.
“Wait a second. We had a deal at thirty-five.”
Erskine smiled sadly at me and then with amusement at Bridget. “Mrs. Torgenwald, I recommend that you prevent your husband from playing poker.”
“Forty thousand,” Bridget agreed. “Give him twenty, darling, and I’ll give him the other twenty.”