He was talking about the kind of wisdom that is expressed in clichés, so I gave one to him. “We have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”
“We must break millions!” he agreed. “Millions and millions!”
The storage building had a steel frame and corrugated walls. Erskine instructed us to wait outside with his “nephew,” while he went inside to fetch our purchase. He let himself in through a man-size entrance next to a big garage door.
Instead of turning to me, Bridget stretched her arms high and rolled her head as if working a stiffness out of her neck.
When I cleared my throat again, she didn’t react to me, but Wallace Beebs said, “The spray will fix that in a jiffy. Just aim three squirts at the back of your throat. Give me the aerosol can, Bill, and I’ll do it for you. What have you got to lose by trying it? Jeez, don’t tell me you’re some natural-remedy fanatic, you think everything can be cured with green tea. Gimme the can.”
Even if Beebs wasn’t a monster, but merely a bloody-minded psychopath, I didn’t want the guy medicating me. Call me squeamish. To prevent his frustration with me escalating into suspicion, I opened my mouth and directed three squirts at my throat. The stuff tasted as vile as Satan’s bathwater. I gagged on the second squirt and again on the third, which gave me the idea to gag a few more times to get Bridget’s attention.
Just then the segmented door began to clatter upward in its tracks, and Bridget stopped rolling her head to focus intently on the imminent appearance of the Mercury Mountaineer.
In response to my strenuous gagging, Wallace Beebs seemed about to perform the Heimlich maneuver, so I stopped. “Hey, man, I’m sorry about that, but this stuff tastes as vile as . . .” Lest he might be an admirer of Satan, I edited my original simile to avoid causing offense. “As vile as possum piss. Not that I would know what possum piss tastes like. I’m only supposing it must be vile.”
Puzzled by my reaction, Beebs said, “I’ve always thought the spray is kind of sour strawberry but minty,” and I was then spared from further conversation by the arrival of the Mercury Mountaineer.
It was agreed that we would leave the key in the ignition of the Explorer. Later Wallace and Erskine would abandon the vehicle elsewhere in the county, far from their autonomous zone.
Bridget drove out of the Republic of Beebs, and I rode in the front passenger seat, where I said, “Did you realize, did you see, Erskine is a Nihilim.”
“His masquerade is well maintained,” she said. “I didn’t see through it until he spouted that crap about what we love being defined by what we hate and how much we hate it.”
“Oh,” I said, somewhat deflated. “I didn’t see him for what he was until we closed the deal and gave the money to Wallace. And then I only got a brief glimpse of his . . . of his hand-tentacle thing. I didn’t know if you’d seen the truth of him. I was trying to get your attention and warn you.”
“Yes, dear,” she said. “I knew that you weren’t just doing an imitation of a man choking on a fish bone.”
“You kept touching Erskine. How could you know what he was and still touch him?”
“At first I wanted to distract him from your meaningful throat clearing. But each touch brought me a vision.”
“You mean a presentiment?”
“No. Little visions, brief but frightfully vivid.”
“Visions of what?”
“I’ll tell you after we’ve loaded this baby.”
On the blacktop lane, she turned right and drove past the Explorer, in which Sparky Rainking waited behind the wheel.
At a back-seat window, in the care of Panthea, Winston watched us drift toward a stop. He looked surprised that we’d survived. For an instant, as our stares locked, I saw myself through his eyes—saw the Mercury Mountaineer, my face pale in the light of the instrument panel—and I felt what he was feeling, the powerful delight and the love of an innocent canine heart. The connection lasted maybe two seconds, but the impact of it left me breathless for half a minute.
Bridget pulled onto the shoulder, stopped, and reversed until the liftgates of the vehicles were aligned.
When I could breathe, I said, “Something just happened. I’m developing your animal psychic-telepathic-whatever thing. I saw myself through Winston’s eyes. I felt what he was feeling.”
“I’ve never seen through an animal’s eyes. You’re ahead of me in that department, Quinn.”
“What next?” I wondered.