The Bright Spot Page 14

  My right pant leg had torn from knee to cuff when I vaulted the second fence. There was a matching tear in my flesh, wrapped tight in what remained of the blood-soaked pant leg. The bleeding had mostly stopped, but I was still discovering lesser cuts and bruises. My shirt was filthy, soaked with sweat, torn in several places. The sole of my left shoe had developed a terminal flop.

  I’d pissed myself too. I’m not sure when that happened. Early on, certainly. It was cold by the time I noticed it on the bus ride home. The stench of urine must’ve added just that extra touch of authenticity to my wino—might’ve saved my life.

  The cops would’ve shot me for sure, just another fleeing suspect. We were all fleeing suspects. Can’t have good people thinking the workers laying their roads or wiping their butts for them might get it in their heads to kill them. Might seriously hurt the economy.

  But if the cops had known the truth, that I was no innocent bystander, but the cause of all this trouble, things would’ve gone worse. Any fool can get himself shot. They would’ve arrested me. Questioned me. I was obviously a high-level operative. They’d want some answers. Since I didn’t have any except that twenty or thirty strangers had just died for no reason because someone, somewhere wanted me dead, they’d have to script a confession for me, and in the end, I’d believe it. I could make one now: I killed all those people—me, the Bright Spot.

  I steadied myself on the kitchen counter, fighting another wave of nausea, remembering the tall woman’s shattered body raining out of the sky. The man heaving his way along the pavement on his elbows, his eyes inalterably fixed on me ...

  I needed a drink. I focused.

  There was an empty champagne bottle on the counter. Another bottle on the table, about three-quarters empty. The bong sat beside it. Some clippings from Kennemeyer’s shoe box were laid out in front of the photo of old Dumfries, propped up against a bottle of Jamaican rum, also empty. Blender mess filled the sink. Something pink and clinging that really should soak. The air smelled like strawberries, pot, patchouli, and alcohol.

  And me. Even I could smell me.

  The bridegroom returns—not exactly the way I’d expected the scene to play. I’d assumed I was too late for any celebration, but one had started without me, and still seemed to be going on. Voices, music, and laughter were coming from the front room. Lu and ... No, couldn’t be.

  Another cop copter roared overhead, and I ducked instinctively. The alley briefly flooded with light. They were everywhere. I should be grateful. It wasn’t the cops trying to kill me, not these cops anyway. As long as they were around, I was guessing, whoever it was would lay low. Mr. Lester probably still had the reporters queued up in his front lawn, lit up like a work site.

  I remembered the boom of his shotgun, not a single face turning back to see their comrade fall dead, the back of his head blown off. No comrades here, Boss, just us workers.

  I must’ve made a sound, stumbled, sobbed perhaps, setting off the dog alarm. Buck burst into the kitchen, completely off his rocker, slipping and sliding and colliding with my bloody leg, snorting and snuffling and yelping. I scooped him up into my arms and discovered several new pains. He gleefully licked my salty neck and face.

  Then I saw what had him all excited. I was speechless.

  There, in the doorway to the front room, stood Dee and Lu, side by side, very happy and a bit glassy-eyed, on the decaying side of an exceedingly high orbit. Sheryl Crow singing “If It Makes You Happy”—a Lu favorite from Bea’s old tunes—was cranked behind them.

  “Nick, guess what?” Lu said. “Dee and I’ve figured out where James Dumfries is in that picture!”

  Dee and I? Picture? Is? “That ... That’s swell.”

  “Congratulations,” Dee slurred, hoisting her champagne mug. “Lu tole me you guys just got engaged.” The soft g was almost too much for her. She was wearing my clothes, an old sweater and khakis. My mukluks. This was beginning to feel a little too David Lynch for me. Put Buck in a tux, and he could play the dwarf. He kept lapping the rich salt vein of my throat, grunting softly.

  “Buck,” Lu said, “give it a rest.” Then she focused on me clearly for the first time. “Oh my God, Nick, what happened to you?” She grabbed Buck out of my arms, thrust him into Dee’s, took me into hers, and held me tight. Everyone seemed happy with that arrangement—I certainly was—but it didn’t last long. Lu caught sight of the bloody leg, or maybe she smelled the piss and vomit, and the next thing I knew, the two women dragged me into the bathroom, stripped me, scrubbed me, and tortured me until I told them everything I knew, lying in the tub, drinking the rest of the champagne from the bottle.

  Lu sat on the side of the tub with my wounded leg in her lap and her feet in the tub. She was quite the seamstress, a skill her mother had taught her—anything to avoid a trip to the emergency room. People died waiting down there. Why wait? Lu’s mom, I was told, did gunshot wounds as well, a store of knowledge I hoped to leave untapped. Since there weren’t any bullets to bite, Lu gave me a joint to work on while she picked tiny shards of glass and gravel out of my wound with tweezers.

  Dee sat on the toilet seat, leaning back against the tank, her right arm draped over the sink. Her legs, propped up on the radiator, took up the rest of the room like a khaki pretzel. It struck me we were posed about the same, only she was roughly two feet higher than me and was wearing my clothes. She did what she could to help—holding the first-aid kit open in her lap without sliding to the floor. The effort of getting me in here and into the tub had nudged her into an alternate reality. Her eyes gazed on other worlds. She’d been into Lu’s pills, I was guessing. Lu was a generous hostess.

  If Lu herself had indulged, it certainly didn’t show. She was like that. Sober and competent in a crisis, by all accounts her mother’s daughter. “I’m glad you leveled with Murphy,” she said. “He must’ve shit. He had you figured completely different.”

  “Yeah, me too. He said I reminded him of your mother. Ouch, watch it, will you?”

  “Bea? He said that?” She laughed. “I can see it. She used to give Murph shit all the time.” She bit the tip of her tongue as she tweezed a sliver of metal. I yelped again. “ ‘Don’t be such a baby’—that’s what Bea would say if she was doing this. ‘Don’t be such a baby.’ To me anyway. You’d probably be her sweet darlin’.”

  She shone a flashlight on my wound, looking for anything else that wasn’t me. She did this several times, and I quickly ran out of flashlight jokes, tweezers jokes, any kind of jokes. It’s amazing what an open wound will pick up when you roll around in an alley. She tweezed and searched, while I tried to follow Bea’s advice.

  When the tweezing was done, Lu held up a bottle of antiseptic and spoke prophetically: “This will sting like ungodly hell at first.”

  In the long first moments of hell, my leg bathed in liquid fire, I gazed up tearfully at Dee to distract myself from my leg, which I never wanted anything to do with ever again. She was rounding up the pixies on the ceiling for a dance around the Maypole, and I finally thought to ask the obvious, though I didn’t get around to it until we were past the stinging and into sticking and hurting territory.

  “Dee, I’ve got to ask—what are you doing here?” I didn’t mean it to sound rude, but needle and thread were passing through my flesh at the time.

  She started like she’d just fallen out of bed, rolled her head toward the sound of my voice, and eventually her gaze fell on me. Her pupils were twin black holes; her irises, green, mere crescents. It took her a moment to sort out whether I was real or chemical and how she should react.

  “Yeah,” she laughed. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” She rubbed her eyes and sat up a few degrees. She turned on the faucet at her elbow and unceremoniously splashed her face with cold water, rubbing vigorously. Then slapped herself a couple of times for good measure. I had a feeling she’d done this before. She gave her head one final shake, and there she was, almost all there. She started telling her story in fits and starts.
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  “The cop? The black one? Not the weaselly one. He said nobody on ’ware for a while. But I didn’t think. I never think.” She roughly wiped her face dry with the sleeves of my sweater. The eye treatment was permanent. Her makeup never smeared, never went away. Her complexion never chafed, chapped, cracked, or reddened, no matter how many miles she ran, tears she cried, bottles she killed. So even now, her life falling apart and barely conscious, she still looked marvelous—one of the perks of marrying a rich man willing to invest in his assets. Must make the undertaker’s job a breeze. I wondered how old she was, but it would be rude to ask.

  Her gaze fell on the thread Lu was pulling taut, and froze there. She plucked the joint from my hand, took a hit, and handed it back. She grimaced, but watched, as the needle slid into me again, exhaled as the thread emerged from my flesh. “After the cops just all of a sudden cleared out, I called the guys to fix the security—all scared somebody was going to get me—then just let them walk right in like an idiot. They had, the what— the dispatcher guy—who wasn’t on ’ware, but they killed him first. He was lying by the front door with his neck broke when I came running downstairs. They snuck up on me after I’d been running an hour. Maybe they thought I’d be tired or something. God knows. I saw them in my mirror and kicked a couple of them pretty good. High kicks.” Her right leg kicked impressively at the ceiling, nearly taking out the light fixture. She lowered it slowly. “Then I ran downstairs, jumped in the car, and got my ass out of there. The car went to its last destination, and the nice guys on the corner brought me here. This nice old man gave me a rum and Coke. Lu was totally sweet—let me take a shower and everything. I never been so scared in my whole life.”

  “Let me make sure I get this straight,” I said. “You showed up at Murphy’s naked?”

  She shrugged. “I was running. I always run naked. It’s a discipline.”

  “A discipline?”

  “A practice. A thing you do. I read about it in a magazine once, got the virtuals, did the course. There are special exercises and stuff. If you don’t do it right, it hurts like hell. It improves my stamina—my respiration. I could only find a little towel in the car. Usually I got stuff in there, but I’d just cleaned up. I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything I didn’t want the cops to find. I hope you don’t mind me borrowing your clothes. I couldn’t fit into Lu’s.”

  “It’s fine, really. And what—you asked for me, Nicholas Bainbridge?”

  “Yeah, was that okay?”

  “Okay?” Lu said dryly. “He’s loving what this will do for his standing among the males in the neighborhood.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind. And who brought you down here?”

  Lu answered for her. “Vincente and Dell’s boy.”

  Too perfect. “What time was that, Dee?”

  “What was that, Lu, nine o’clock?” Telling her story had sobered her a bit, or maybe it was watching Lu work. She couldn’t take her eyes off the wound, the needle, the thread.

  “Around then,” Lu agreed, biting off the thread with her teeth.

  “Murphy dropped me off around nine-thirty,” I said. “So probably whoever set the security workers onto Dee came here and set the street workers onto me. Weren’t you guys worried about me when I didn’t show up?”

  “You were with Murph,” Lu said. “I figured you were okay. You didn’t say when you’d be home.”

  “You didn’t hear shotgun fire? Dogs going crazy?”

  “Sure, we heard—and didn’t go rushing out the door. I called down to Mr. Lester, who said somebody’d been messing with his dogs, and the dogs tore them up pretty good. He shot one going over the fence, he said. Killed him. I sure didn’t want a look at anything like that. And I certainly didn’t connect it with you—you’d be the last person to go messing with somebody’s dogs. Right after, there were cops shooting up on the road, and they did a flyover, telling people to stay inside. They’ve been flying around ever since. The news is saying they flushed a sleeper cell. There’s talk Mr. Lester might be this week’s Hero of the Homeland.”

  “Jesus. Sleeper cell. I did all that,” I said, tapping my chest. “Me. I killed all those people—set dogs on them, ran them into traffic, shot them. I’m the fucking Hero of the Homeland!” My voice rang from the tile. I realized I’d been shouting. There wasn’t enough champagne in the bottle.

  Lu’s voice was measured and reasonable. “Nick, they were trying to kill you.”

  “No, they weren’t. Somebody was using them to kill me. They were just along for the ride. A handy blunt instrument. It was just their tough luck to get too close to me.”

  “Why would anyone want to kill you?”

  “How the fuck should I know? I just know I have to stay clear of anyone on ’ware.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “I have a car,” Dee said. “We could go somewhere— in the country or something.”

  “We have jobs,” I reminded her.

  To be honest, that’s all I really wanted to do—go back to work and forget I’d ever heard of James Dumfries and Galatea Ritsa. But now all these people had died. I was supposed to want to do something, to save the day, to be the Hero of the Homeland, to atone. Not my usual role. I just wanted to run and hide. Preferably someplace imaginary. I always felt more at home with make-believe. That’s why I was in the business.

  Lu, who was wrapping my leg in gauze, suddenly broke into a smile. “ We have jobs. That’s it,” she said. “Sometimes I’m so brilliant I can’t stand myself. We not only take our jobs with us, our jobs pay the way. We talk Wally and Gary into going on location.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Nothing could be easier: Dee and I talk to Wally and sell him on a new story line.”

  I tried to imagine such a thing. He wouldn’t stand a chance. “Dee?”

  “We were going to talk to him anyway. He asked me if I knew anybody for the role of Galatea Ritsa. He thinks Brenda’s too short. Dee would be perfect. She’s a regular Amazon. Wally’s got tall on the brain for this part. What do you think?”

  I started to point out Dee couldn’t act a lick, but didn’t want to go into how I knew that. It wasn’t a deal breaker anyway. “What about Gary? He hates to spend a nickel.”

  “He’ll go for it. An old-fashioned location shoot in a small town, just the thing that BBG needs to get a little notice and break into the big time. We’re poised, haven’t you heard? That’s what Gary’s been saying for weeks— poised. We rah-rah enough, he’ll go for it. Besides, he does whatever Wally wants.”

  “But what kind of location do we need for a cop story? We’ve got mean streets enough around here.”

  “He only switched to cops because he talked to Murph. We get him to change it back to war—the Revolutionary War—and we all go to Colonial Williamsburg.”

  “Virginia? You’re fucking kidding me. You’ve been working with Wally too long. Why in the hell would we want to go down there?”

  “You don’t sound very patriotic. No ’ware, for one thing, but that’s not why. Why is because that’s where James Dumfries is.” The two women traded a smug look. I’d almost forgotten their claims of tracking him down. In the process, they seemed to have really talked, really bonded. I wasn’t so sure how I felt about that.

  “And how do you know this?” I asked, the question they’d been waiting for.

  “I’ll get it,” Dee said, unfolding herself and loping to the kitchen, surprisingly steady on her feet. Must’ve been all that discipline. She returned with the photo, one of the clippings, and a magnifying glass. The clipping concerned the gazillionth performance of some patriotism-on-a-platter virtual they put on at Colonial Williamsburg rain or shine every day the planet turns. Before that, according to the article, there was a cheesy movie that’d finally been put out of its misery after its ten-gazillionth showing. Cheese endures. It might stink up the place, but it endures. There was a cast reunion shot for the virtual in a theater lobby
. A fortyish Kennemeyer was there. Dumfries wasn’t.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Look at the photos on the wall with the magnifying glass,” Lu directed. “They show up in several of the clippings. This one’s the clearest. Dee noticed it.”

  They were stills from the interminably running virtual. And there it was, the photo Salvador had given us—old man Dumfries in his rocker. Only it wasn’t really the old man—couldn’t be, Lu pointed out—but the young man made up to look old and frail. He played Grandpa Somebody-or-Other, the dying patriarch in a new land on the eve of war, never getting to cross over into the promised land of freedom, or some such drivel, and when Salvador wanted to give us broken-down wretch, he pulled this out of his files. Dumfries, apparently, was one of those guys like Walter Brennan who played old guys when they were young. We all play old when we’re old if we’ve got any sense. The woman’s mysterious headgear was exactly what it looked like, an out-of-focus rag hat, standard colonial attire.

  “Kennemeyer must be saying Dumfries would go there, to where this theater is. Maybe he still owns a place in town or something. Dee and I checked. Dumfries and his wife lived in Williamsburg during the war. They were married there. And there won’t be anyone on ’ware inside the colonial section—it’s part of their authentic shtick. They don’t even allow cars.”

  “Just what we need—another authentic phony past. But slow down, will you? Why is it we want to find Dumfries instead of running the other way?”

  “So he can tell us who’s trying to kill us and why. This doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you can run and hide from.”

  “What if he’s already dead?”

  “Then we won’t find him, and we’ll still be out of here.”

  “What if he’s the one trying to kill us?” I wasn’t sure why he was my leading suspect. I guess because he invented ’ware. Whenever Frankenstein’s monster walked again, Victor always topped the list of suspects, unless he was already dead.