The Bright Spot Read online

  He chuckled badly. Dryly? “I see. Have it your way. Perhaps you think you can double-cross him on your own. That’s been tried. It’s my understanding you once worked with Jesse Salvador? He was a highly skilled professional. Now he’s dead.”

  “I heard that. I’m sure he’ll be missed. No. This is ReCreation Productions. We’re highly skilled professionals ourselves. We do Billy and the Big Guy. You know—Billy, BG, the She-Creature. I play Victor Frankenstein. Buck here plays—”

  “No, Mr. Bainbridge. I’m not the least bit interested in your ridiculous virtual. We don’t have much time. If you’ll take us into your confidence, we might prove useful to you. You need protection. What is your purpose here?”

  “That’s a bit of a philosophical question, isn’t it? Entertain the audience? Express yourself? Enlighten somebody or other? Deceive them? All of the above? Certainly not get rich in this case, I can assure you. Though I must say it seems awfully rude to insult what a man does for a living. What is it you do, besides lurk in the dark, tossing out insults, knowing people’s names and dropping them? I missed yours, by the way.”

  I knew who it was now. It was the limo driver. He’d traded in the Moose Malloy routine in favor of it’s my understanding and take us into your confidence. Now he was Agent Limo, Mr. Casual’s cop brother, a post-doc from the gatekeeper academy, who might call himself an operative, agent, dominion, multinational man of intrigue, nothing so tacky as cop. But it was the same guy, all right. I never forget an oink.

  “My name doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “If you say so. It’s your name. I didn’t hear what it was I could do for you.”

  “You can tell us James Dumfries’ intentions.” He was losing his patience, his smooth. He’d blown the scene. He was a bumbling amateur.

  “Oh, I can? Wouldn’t that be nice of me? Why should I help you bozos? Aren’t you the guys who lost him? You had him safely stashed in a total living facility, and one of your own helped him get out. What was that helpful thing my mother used to tell me when I lost something of mine—‘Where do you last remember seeing it, Nicky?’ ”

  “Very funny. It was a meticulously planned operation, but Salvador turned. Dumfries killed him. We didn’t plan on that. We didn’t plan on Dumfries being criminally insane. But don’t worry. We know where he is.” A beat. “Don’t you?”

  Ouch. He could’ve been bluffing, but I didn’t think so. I finally got it. As a spy, I was the bumbling amateur. They weren’t after Dumfries. They were watching him, watching me, hoping to observe whatever clever thing he intended for me. Agent Limo and his pals were the jackals hoping to steal the carcass, the nature photographers who stake out a wounded goat to get some good predator shots. Dumfries probably knew they were watching and couldn’t make a move until they blinked. Mutual Assured Distraction. This is what I’d mistaken for safety.

  “Well, obviously, he’s wherever you are, watching you, watching me. Isn’t that how this thing works? Why don’t you just leave me out of it and watch each other? Why should I tell you anything? Is it supposed to make me feel safer? If you want to learn something, buy a ticket. Why, did you know they used to clean type down at the print shop with mule piss? It’s true. It’s a fact. Whatever meticulous plan you guys had, it clearly flopped, and lots of people are dead. Bust Dumfries if you know where he is. Leave me the fuck alone.”

  “Don’t underestimate us, Mr. Bainbridge.”

  I started to voice my doubts such a thing was possible when Buck launched into his victory dance, and I whirled around, instinctively whipping out my plastic bag, trying to spot where he’d done the deed. “Shit!” I exclaimed appropriately. This raised a disapproving mutter from the last of the passing tours. “Ye olde shitte,” I hissed softly, searching the ground in vain, hoping not to step in it trying to track it down.

  Too late.

  “I tell you what,” I said over my shoulder, trying to scuff my shoe clean in the dirt. “You tell me where Dumfries is, and I’ll tell you what he’s up to. Fair enough?” Most of the lanterns—excuse me, lanthorns— were past us now, swarming at the Palace gates like fireflies, filing en masse into the Palace to witness some sort of powdered-wig hoedown just tuning up.

  Limo didn’t answer me, so I turned around. He was on his feet. Something glittered and wagged back and forth in front of him. A half-dozen stragglers from the peripatetic classrooms were gathered around us. Then I realized what was going on. Agent Limo had a gun drawn and was trying to decide which truant to shoot first as they closed in on us. They looked old even in the dark. Probably some of the vets. With new orders.

  “Don’t!” I shouted at Limo. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “I could give a fuck,” he said, taking aim, as the one neither one of us had seen standing directly behind him wrapped an arm around his forehead and gave his head a quick, wrenching, final twist. The gun clattered on the brick walk. Agent Limo slid slowly to the ground. His killer’s white hair shone in the dark. Once a ’ware soldier, always a ’ware soldier, apparently.

  A wrinkled hand closed around my left arm, above the elbow. It belonged to an ordinary-looking tourist, seventyish, paunchy, frail. Only he was running ’ware. His grip was strong, like rope pulled tight, bringing back memories. Don’t struggle, boy. You’ll hurt yourself. Use the rage, I directed myself, and kneed the old guy hard in the crotch. He doubled over but didn’t loosen his grip in the least. By this time, another hand gripped my right arm, a woman forced open my mouth and shoved a heavily perfumed handkerchief inside, cradled my fragile head in her arms, and two others took hold of my legs. They started up their little jog-trot, headed north down the middle of the green, away from the Palace.

  Everyone seemed to have been sucked inside. Even as we crossed Duke of Gloucester, no one thought it odd to see an actor hauled bodily into the woods by a half-dozen old soldiers. Maybe they thought we were part of the show. Is this where they tar and feather that guy? Who would suspect this geriatric crew of foul play? Without the ’ware, half of them could barely walk, much less jog.

  Their movements were perfectly coordinated, so that my ride was unnaturally smooth, the ideal gait for crossing a battlefield with explosives. They didn’t want to kill me, I kept telling myself, or I’d already be dead. They were kidnapping me, taking me to meet my maker. I wasn’t so sure I was ready. There was a parking lot on the other side of these woods, or a trail down to the Colonial Parkway before that. I would be miles away from here in no time.

  So Dell was right all along: They say it shut down at the end of your shift, but it don’t. Not for these old soldiers anyway. It moved in and made itself at home, ready to be called up for active duty at any time. I could struggle, try to throw them off balance, but if we all took a bad fall, their old bones would crack, ’ware or no ’ware, and I’d have someone’s shattered hip on my conscience. I was fucked, and they were too. I should just let it happen, I told myself. Once he had me, maybe all the craziness would end.

  And then, behind us, as we started down the hill toward the woods, I heard the jingle of Buck’s tags as he trotted along after us. He hadn’t watched enough Lassie. He didn’t know he was supposed to run the other way and fetch some help, preferably the kind with a gun and a badge. But he finally did the next best thing. He started barking, nipping, making a nuisance of himself. I caught a glimpse of him leading Agent Limo’s assassin on a merry chase up and down and around the hill. My money was on Buck.

  Then I heard a woman’s voice, calling, “Daddy! What are you doing with that dog? Daddy! What’s wrong with you?”

  “Doggie!” a young voice declared from Duke of Gloucester as the next wave of lanthorn-led scholars approached the green.

  By this time we’d attracted the attention of other dogs and their walkers. I recognized the baying of Gulliver, a full-throated bassett of Buck’s acquaintance, who happened to be passing and joined in the alarm.

  “Bertie! Dammit! Where are you?” a querulous voic
e called sternly. It sounded like Bertie had wandered off a time or two before, and the caller had simply run out of patience.

  “Mother, you’re going to miss the Palace!” another voice cried out anxiously.

  The kidnapping was apparently abandoned as a botched job, as my abductors shut down as quickly as they’d ramped up, and let me go. I found myself airborne, landing on my back on the trail, the breath momentarily knocked out of me, but otherwise okay. In seconds, Buck was all over my face, licking furiously, with a growing crowd around us, tending to their relatives-turned-criminal and phoning up a storm. My abductors had fallen like sacks of potatoes, but they all looked like they were breathing, and the ground was thick with pine needles that’d served to soften our falls. I wondered whether that was mere chance or consideration.

  “Are you all right, young man?” Bertie’s daughter thought to ask me.

  “Fine, fine.”

  “An ambulance is on the way.”

  “No, really. I-I’m fine.” I sat up to prove it. “Who are you folks anyway?”

  “They,” she said—meaning my abductors, propping themselves up, looking around, wondering what in the fuck they were doing in these woods—“they’re the last surviving members of their outfit. They haven’t seen each other in over forty-five years. I can’t imagine what got into them.”

  “Nothing really. Just a little reenacting. Fascinating place, don’t you think? I never knew history could be so interesting.” I got to my feet and took Buck’s leash in hand. Bertie’s daughter was summoned by her mother, and Buck and I took off at a brisk walk back up the hill. No one tried to stop us. Gulliver, who had given his walker the slip, continued to orbit the growing crowd, baying furiously. The ambulances showed up and emergency personnel came racing down the hill past me. I’m sure everyone was in good hands.

  I borrowed a phone from one of the gawkers on Duke of Gloucester and called Lu to make sure she was all right. Stan picked up.

  “Hey, Nick. Lu was starting to worry about you. We’re all here talking about the show. You want to talk to her?” He sounded more depressed than scared. I could hear Wally and Dee talking in the background, Gary cursing about something. Everything was perfectly normal.

  “No need. Just tell her I’ll be right there. I just got hung up for a bit.”

  About the time I cleared the colonial section, I heard a woman screaming about a dead man and figured she must’ve fallen over Agent Limo in the dark. Those lanthorns weren’t worth a damn on a dark night. You needed night-vision equipment for work like this. That or lightning or the full moon.

  So much for my fantasy of simple, small-town living in the Enlightenment. I was back in the twenty-first century again, where clearly it wasn’t enough to avoid anyone running ’ware, but potentially anyone who ever had.

  All the way to the Liberty Lodge, I began to add it up. The night the road crew came after me, they were probably like these guys—trying to collect me, not kill me. And just me. I was the sought-after specimen.

  The only thing I’d done differently tonight was head out on my own, without Lu. I remembered Dumfries leaning across the table, intense, scared: She mustn’t know we’ve spoken. She must never know. Why? Why shouldn’t she know everything? Lu, Galatea, Lenore, whatever you wanted to call her, she was clearly in it up to her ears. Why didn’t Dumfries want her to know? Didn’t he trust her?

  JUST DOWN THE ROAD

  16

  “I swear to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that with the companion you bestow I will quit the neighbourhood of man and dwell, as it may chance, in the most savage of places. My evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy! My life will flow quietly away, and in my dying moments I shall not curse my maker.”

  —MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein

  BUCC AND I ARRIVED AT THE LIBERTY LODGE breathless. Mr. Henry, the patriarch of the place, was out front smoking a cigarette in the glow of the sign. Pictured there was slaveholder Patrick Henry, the embodiment of Liberty, the man from whom Mr. Henry had taken his last name when he bought the motel. He thought it essential, he explained to me once, to change his name to something American to prosper in his new home. “When I bought this place, I asked, ‘Who is that man on the sign?’ and the real estate man told me about ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death,’ and I decide to become Mr. Henry.”

  He blew his cigarette smoke into the air in huge clouds. This was Virginia. It was still legal here to smoke outside without trapping it—liberty and death as a twofer. He beckoned me over.

  I liked Mr. Henry, even though he mostly brooded, wandering the Liberty Lodge grounds while his daughters made the beds and his sons complained and his wife dealt with the guests. I always imagined he was looking for the path back to Egypt, but I only knew him from moments like this when he smoked and I walked the dog.

  “They are all meeting in your cottage,” he said in his precise voice. “Your friends. I have not told them. I wished to speak with you personally, Mr. Bainbridge. I have always found you a reasonable man.” Given the choices, I could see what he meant, but I had no idea what he was talking about. He reached in behind his cigarettes, took out a small plastic bag, zipped it open, pulled out a fly-size drone, and dropped it on his open palm to show me, then closed his fist around it. He zipped the bag shut and gave it a shake. It rustled like seeds. “I take precautions. I want no trouble. I detected some unusual activity near your cottage, so I cleaned the entire area this morning.”

  His eyes darted to the little satellite tower atop the office. Somewhere in that thicket was something illegal that brought down this little bag of spies with an unauthorized electromagnetic burst. The feds must’ve thought I did it, that I was on to them, Dumfries too, if I could believe the deceased Limo. I couldn’t mention any of this to Mr. Henry, so I tried a neutral smile.

  “I found many of these devices,” he continued. “They watch you and your friends. They like your cottage particularly. They follow you everywhere, even when you walk the little guy.”

  He smiled at Buck, who swished his tail. He and Mr. Henry had a thing going. I smiled at their moment, and Mr. Henry grew somber. He was afraid I wasn’t taking this seriously enough. I was past serious into deadly serious, but I had to stick with the smile.

  “You people do not understand how such things work. They watch you all. Then they watch the people you meet. Innocent people. But they are not innocent anymore because they know you. You think if you pretend they are not there, that it is just life as usual. No, my friend, this is the eye of your enemy—always.” He gave the bag a shake. “You say, ‘I have done nothing wrong,’ as if your enemy cares about that.” He held up his fist with the drone inside. “He doesn’t care.” He opened his palm and let the drone drop to the sidewalk, ground it with his heel. He bent over, crushed his cigarette on it, and straightened up. “It is easy to disrupt their flight. They still see everything, hear everything.” He kicked the butt into the rush of traffic, tossed the bag after it. He spat on the scorched spot on the sidewalk. “Such devices are very expensive. Someone goes to a great deal of trouble to watch you. I very much regret that I must ask you and your friends to leave, Mr. Bainbridge. I am not your enemy, but I can’t afford to be your friend. I hope you understand.”

  “I understand perfectly.”

  He smiled, surprised at my ready understanding. He appreciated it so much, he did something stupid and stuck out his hand. I did him a favor and didn’t take it. I probably shouldn’t have said anything, but I spoke quietly, hoping the traffic would muffle the sound. “They’re probably watching even harder now, Mr. Henry. Trust me.”

  They were probably watching just now when one of their own was murdered, watching when I was being kidnapped, watching when Ed drowned. They watch. They wait. They prey. Mr. Henry was right. They were my enemy.

  He froze there for a moment. He nodded almost imperceptibly, thanking me for the warning. He bent over and scratched Buck’s head. “Take
care of yourself, little guy,” he said.

  Buck snorted a reply in Ipso Facto. Something along the lines of, Talk to this idiot—I’ve already saved his sorry ass once tonight!

  “Good night, Mr. Bainbridge.”

  “Good night, Mr. Henry. Thanks.”

  Mr. Bainbridge, Mr. Henry—good strong American names, names you can trust.

  Everyone was crammed into our tiny cottage. I took my time getting out of my coat, greeting everybody, thinking how to break it to them that we had to move— tonight. The kidnapping, the murder, the spies—all that would have to wait until Lu and I were alone—if such a thing was possible anymore.

  Buck made a beeline for Wally, who put him on his lap. “Greetings, honorable canine companion,” Wally said in Patriot’s voice, which was, in honor of Buck’s Asian roots, a Mr. Moto/Charlie Chan article-dropping fortune-cookie-ese sure to insult more than half the world’s population. Wally had cultivated the annoying habit of speaking in it whenever Buck was in his lap, which he arranged as often as possible.

  Dee and Stan dwarfed the drop-leaf table in the kitchenette. Their four huge hands were laced together on the table like a big bunch of bananas. They looked even worse than Stan had sounded over the phone, like newlyweds whose honeymoon cruise just sank.

  They all looked unhappy—Lu stretched out on the bed, Gary scowling in the other chair. Even Brenda, sitting on the air conditioner, usually as emotive as Mount Rushmore, looked ... heartbroken? I remained standing, my mind racing. How to put this? Oh, by the way, we’ve been evicted. Only William was missing. Just as well. Somebody else could break it to him.