Tom actually laughed in her face.
Then he got off the couch with a sigh, went into the bathroom and slammed the door.
*
The flight back to Irving was a bumpy one. Tom tried not to grip the armrests but by the time they landed, on what felt like wagon wheels, he was queasy and already drained by his second trip to Texas in a week.
32
NICHOLAS NICHOLAS WAS a hero, but he didn’t feel like one. The memory of finding that girl – that poor girl – had leached every ounce of pleasure out of the high regard in which he was suddenly held at home and at work.
He’d been offered a month off with counselling – more for insurance purposes than sympathy, he was sure – but he’d turned both down because if his mother ever found out he was seeing a shrink she’d consider that bringing up six children alone, steering them around crime and into worthwhile employment, plus helping to raise eleven grandkids so far would all have been a terrible waste: one of them had turned out crazy anyway.
Nicholas grinned at the thought, then sighed. People at work knew him now. He was no longer just a uniform in a booth as they passed. People said hello. Smiled. Gave him cheerful waves. That was good in one way, of course, but in another every hello, every smile, every wave was a reminder of why he was suddenly somebody. And he didn’t want reminders: all he wanted was to do his job and forget Annette Lim’s face, caved in like an empty rubber mask; Chuck Zhong’s vomit-flecked lips under his; the boyfriend howling like a giant toddler in the parking lot …
Nicholas shook himself out of that night and back into this one.
The new guy seemed okay: Raoul Estanza, ‘but you can call me Rollo’. Nicholas didn’t know whether this was because Estanza liked the name Rollo or because he’d had ‘Raoul’ mispronounced so often that he’d given up on his own identity.
Nicholas liked his own name. It had something about it. A bald man in a bow tie had once told him it was a ‘slave name’ but Nicholas had no truck with that, and he’d like to see the emphatic little man try that line on his mother and see how far he got.
Jeff came back from the can, wiping his hands on his pants.
Nicholas didn’t like Jeff. He didn’t know why, but he suspected something was going on. He’d occasionally watched Chuck make the rounds on the monitors – only because it was mildly more interesting than watching dark, empty rooms – and there had never been anything too weird about them. Once he’d seen Chuck take something off a desk in the engineering office and throw it in the trash.
Then, a week after Nicholas had started, Jeff had started making the rounds too. Nicholas hadn’t been at WAE long enough to know whether that was usual. But what he did know was that one night, when Chuck and Jeff were both making the rounds (although they’d left at different times), he’d idly hit the button for the engineering-office camera and found it blocked. Not dead, but blocked by something not 100 per cent opaque; light filtered through, but nothing as defined as even blurred shapes was visible. Nicholas had slapped the monitor and run through other cameras on it. Everything else seemed to be working fine: it wasn’t the monitor. And when he rolled back round to the engineering-office camera again, there it was, gloomy and dark without light enough now to filter through a fishing net, let alone anything else.
So someone had been in there, and someone had covered the camera.
Why, Nicholas Nicholas could not even hazard a guess. But he did notice that while Jeff carried on being his usual domineering dickwad self, Chuck Zhong – who made dim sum to die for – started to look wary, fretful and thin.
He didn’t know either of them that well, and did make one clumsy move with a poorly judged crack about AIDS that almost had Chuck snapping his head off. It was only then that Nicholas really considered whether Chuck and Jeff were … What would you call it? Lovers? That sounded far too normal and okay-by-God to be right, but that was the word he settled on.
And immediately shied away from and tried never to think of again.
After that, whenever he was alone in the booth, he switched off the camera in Engineering. If that kind of thing was going on in there, he didn’t want to know about it.
Which was why there was no recording of Chuck Zhong killing Annette Lim, for which Nicholas was grateful, even though the cops had been incandescent with frustrated rage.
Nicholas mused for the millionth time since that night about the fleeting nature of existence, then discovered he hadn’t eaten a doughnut he’d bought as a special pick-me-up. As he crammed it into his breakfast-hungry mouth he mused instead on how something so simple could give so much pleasure.
*
Texas enjoyed the perfect climate for about forty-five minutes after sun-up and it was in this warm, fresh brilliance that Nicholas Nicholas said goodbye to Rollo and to the day guys, Vern and David, and walked across the parking lot.
Two men watched him from a nondescript rental parked in the long shadows of a line of conifers that WAE had established to shield the plant from aesthetically offended commuters.
Nicholas unlocked the rusty door to his Civic.
In the moment between the lock clicking open and him withdrawing the key, he heard a tiny scuff on the asphalt behind him and felt his neck prickle in ancient warning.
He swung round, heart racing.
But the low sun in his eyes meant he never saw their faces.
*
Ronaldo Suarez was watching Tom Patrick throw up barely digested airline food in the airport parking lot when he got a call from Toby Uncle, the youngest, cheapest and – it was turning out – dumbest cop he’d been able to find for the surveillance detail.
‘Uh-huh,’ he said.
Tom straightened and leaned against Suarez’s police-issue Chevrolet. He felt something press against his arm and took the towel Suarez was offering; it was thin and old and smelt of dogs. He spat on the ground a few times then wiped his mouth, only vaguely aware of Suarez’s half of the conversation.
‘How long ago? … Okay … Where are you now? … How could you fucking lose them? … Okay. Okay … Go back there. I’ll be fifteen minutes.
‘We gotta go,’ he told Tom, pressing his own gut down so he could squeeze behind the wheel.
‘You want this?’ Tom said, holding up the towel as he slumped into the passenger seat.
‘You keep it.’
Tom dropped it out of the window as they pulled away. ‘Goddamn planes.’
*
The men who took Nicholas Nicholas from the lot only made him suffer ten minutes of abject terror before dumping him back at his car and driving away, but as he sat beside his little beige compact he thought he’d never feel safe again. Even the death of Annette Lim had not shaken him like this. Annette Lim was not supposed to be able to protect herself. She was not a man. She was not him. But, in less than a quarter of an hour, Nicholas had had his idea of personal security turned upside down.
He tried to stand and found his legs were jellied with fear, so instead he leaned against the door of the Civic, feeling the warming metal comfort his back and one cheek.
