Fifty Mice: A Novel (21 page)

Vaughn’s face is twisted toward Jay, one hand pressed to the back window glass, frightened eyes, mouth open and yelling something as the German sedan peels out. Then he’s jerked back into the shadow of the interior and the sun’s reflection wipes even the memory of him away.

Oh shit.

A PAY PHONE AT A VALERO SERVICE STATION.

Out of breath.

Tuneless keytones. 411: government listings: U.S. Marshals office: Los Angeles: main switchboard: the helpful operator: Jay impatient, says hi, needs to talk to Deputy U.S. Marshal Public. First name John. Yes, John Q. Public, Jay says, voice thin, hoarse, words coming in breathless bursts, please don’t hang up, he knows what it sounds like, it’s the name he was given, the name of the agent, or connect him with Jane Doe. Stupid, yes, but—who’s calling? Jay tells them. Johnson. Jay. He tells the operator at the U.S. Marshals office that he’s a protected witness, he’s in the program, and she hangs up.

The receiver drops from his grasp, dangles on its metal leash. Hands on his knees, coughing, bent double, he closes his eyes. His heart pounds in his ears. He tries to fill his lungs with air.

After he watched Vaughn stolen away, he sprinted back through the diner, into the kitchen, past blank stares of startled fry cooks to the rear exit and burst out into the alley and ran pointlessly after the Mercedes just merging into traffic, as if by will alone he could catch it, down the long, shadowed alley, his legs hitting the pavement so hard
he began stumbling forward into heavy traffic on the next city street, cars swerving, honking, as Jay, sidestepping a slow-moving gridlock caused by roadwork at the next intersection, looking for the sliver of dark gray maybe, possibly, just disappearing around the corner—feet pounding, running, running, as if all the running he did on Catalina was training for this one feat—saving Vaughn—which he knew was impossible, knows is impossible, you can save only yourself and, sometimes, even if you do, what’s the point?—although this time he’s not running away—running, stumbling reckless forward desperate around another corner where finally he saw the charcoal S-Class picking up speed (was that it?) three blocks ahead of him (was it the same car?) and make a merging swerve onto a main thoroughfare, disappearing, Glendale Avenue or San Fernando Road, Jay didn’t know, he was all turned around.

But there was this gas station across the street.

Receiver in hand. Dial tone. Tuneless keytones, he tries it all again.

Same result. Institutional politeness followed by exasperated skepticism, impatience, threats of legal consequences for tying up a federal phone line, for making a nuisance, and Jay says fine, fine, send somebody to get me.

And she hangs up on him.

Dial tone tuneless keytones; this time he taps out 9-1-1.

Johnson, he tells the operator. J as in . . . Johnson.

Yes, it’s an emergency, Jay says, he’s a Federal witness, he’s left protected custody, he’s exposed, vulnerable, he’s out, he’s whatayacallit—compromised—and the emergency operator asks him to repeat his name and he does. Johnson, J. B. Jay. Johnson.

A soft voice behind him suggests trying “Jimmy Warren.”

Jay spins.

Jane Doe is standing outside the pay phone kiosk, at a respectful distance, not too close, casual; he forgot how tall and striking she is. A
navy blue Prius with government plates has stolen up, silent except for the faint bite of gravel under the tires, with waiting doors open, beneath the service station awning.

Tripod is behind the wheel. He grins out at Jay mirthlessly. Lifeless eyes lumped in his face like two rubber stoppers, opaque.

Doe asks, all droll and friendly: “Where you been, James?”

•   •   •

I
saw him,” Jay insists, although, as he says it, he’s aware that he’s not completely confident he’s right.

Through some ugly ramble of lower Glendale the government plug-in hybrid floats silky, tinted windows set at half-mast. A smog-mantled cityscape roiling and wheezing past like rear projection, the Library Tower and a posse of flattop skyscrapers loom over the palm-stuck hills of Angelino Heights. Jay’s thoughts scatter, regroup, flailing for coherence. Piecing together a story he doesn’t even know the plot of.

“Dunn?” Doe, in the front seat, with her head barely turned. Tripod driving, unusually silent.

“The pilot, yeah. My ride. After the plane crashed and burned . . . I didn’t see him get out, but—” Still laboring to get his breath, though now he’s not winded. It’s more like there’s simply not enough air. Anywhere.

The back of Doe’s head angles, wordless, pensive.

“If he got out,” Jay says, words knotting up on him. “What, or why, is he . . . ?” Then, frowning at an old thought he needs confirmed and changing subjects: “You let me go.” It’s a question made statement; Doe is unresponsive and won’t confirm or deny. “Was he—” But Jay’s not sure what to ask next. “Dunn. I mean—was that why—do you guys know who he is—was—or if he’s part of—?”

“We don’t know him,” Jane Doe cuts in, even-tempered. “The
Cessna he crashed belongs to one of those well-connected private paramilitary government contracting outfits that sprung up in the fertile fields of 9/11, like genetically altered weeds, and now you can’t get rid of them.”

“Why would they—he, Dunn—or anyone—want Vaughn, when it’s me, or at least according to you, I mean . . . isn’t it—?”

“Take a breath,” Doe says. “You saw something, Jay. This morning. Yesterday. Something you’re not sure of,” gently, almost solicitous, “if you think about it.”

Jay hesitates, knows she’s right. “Lately,” he confesses, “since I left, since before I left, okay sure: I’m finding it’s like, yeah . . . I’m just not so sure of things. Anymore. Which is not to say fucking blind,” Jay adds, defensive. “And, yeah, it worries me, because we, I, all of us. We’re so easily erased. And you guys—”

“Where does your friend live?” Tripod asks.

“Vaughn’s not part of this.”

“He is now.”

“What do they want? The list? Is this all about the goddamn list? Oh, and Vaughn thinks I was in a psych ward, so does Stacy, thank you very much—”

“Calm down.”

“—You told everybody I went crazy? What the fuck is that? I mean. Fuck. It’s just, everything, is completely—”

“Jay?”

“—just completely—”

She turns to face him around the headrest. “Jay . . . step by step. Where does Vaughn—”

“—and then he was right there,” Jay says, still agitated.

“Calm down.”

“Right there. In the window. Outside the diner. Like a ghost.”

“Jay.”

“And Vaughn—”

Doe’s arm swipes over the seat and the back of her hand delivers a moment of fireworks and darkness. “I said—”

Jay’s head snaps into the seat, he slumps back, hands going up, bleeding from the nose. “OwJesus.”

“—Doucement,”
Doe declaims softly. “We know where he lives, we were just being conversational.”

“What?”

“Doucement,”
Doe says.

Tripod: “It’s French for shut the fuck up.”

“No, it’s not.”

Jay, glaring, is adrift, a flare of rage only serving to choke him wordless. Wet red threads leaking out of his nose, monsterlike; he can see them in Tripod’s rearview mirror.

“You need to get ahold of your emotions,” Doe tells him. She hands him a tissue and looks at her hand. Her knuckles are red. She flexes her fingers and frowns, as if disappointed in herself.

The tinted windows hum upward.

•   •   •

T
hey veer north on the Hollywood Freeway, the dour silence of the preternaturally mute hybrid car broken by the thump of the concrete seams, low-fluttering: fffmmmphhh fffmmmphhh fffmmmphhh fffmmmphhh.

“This is not a maze,” Jay says finally. His face aches, and his nose is numb. Thoughts untwisting: “This particular zigzag gang of angles. This . . . thing you’ve made for me. Has no outlet. At all. Which means it’s not even, at the heart of it, a riddle to solve. Is it?”

Doe and Tripod have no reaction.

“A
true
riddle, or test, has something akin to a door,” Jay says. “This, instead. It’s like, what, I don’t know . . . a zero-sum game. Or a
watery grave. Without any hope of exit, unless, well, unless there’s a looking glass up ahead.”

He watches traffic fall away on either side of them and wonders if Feds can drive as fast as they want. “Is there? I mean. Is there a looking glass?”

“I don’t even know what that means,” Doe says at length.

“A way to just opt out of this whole thing,” Jay explains.

Tripod makes a low guttural noise that is either mockery or disgust.

Jay closes his eyes. “And I wish I could say there was some . . . satisfaction in seeing . . . feeling all this, but there’s not, but . . .” His thread unravels. He’s beaten. He’s got no fight left. He knows it. “You thought I’d lead you somewhere.” Nothing from Doe. He no longer cares to know what they want. “Or you’d see where Dunn would take me.” Tripod’s head moves slightly, as if he’s looking for some signal from Doe. And what Jay wants?

Doe’s eyes stay aimed straight ahead, “Whatever you say, Jay. Have a party.”

Jay lays the side of his head she hit against the window and feels the heat on his skin. “Okay.” It does not escape his notice that she’s called him Jay.

The Prius slips down an off-ramp, decelerating, and outside Jay sees streamers: plastic triangle flaglets of red white blue flap and rattle like little tropical fish sucking air, as, underneath them: the federal car fragments through the intersection, leaving rubber as it arcs around the used-car lot and merges with local traffic.

•   •   •

V
aughn?”

It’s the white door at the very end of the corridor, 440E, and the E is missing; fourth floor of a Deco Irving Gill knockoff
residential apartment building just off Las Palmas. Jay pounds with the heel of his hand.

“Vaughnie? You home?”

No answer. An uneasy deadness in the stale air. He looks at Doe, and Tripod. “If they took him,” Jay says. “Why would he be here?”

“If they took him.” Tripod puts a fat hand on him and draws him aside to let Jane Doe expertly kick the door inward without splintering the jam.

It doesn’t smell right. There’s lots of Vaughn in the place, but also something else. Not Vaughn.

Doe has her gun out, but at her side; she leads them through the quaint, pointless quasi-foyer with the small, round antique table Vaughn got from his grandmother and a fishbowl of tetras suspended in still water like a handful of small promises. Vaughn’s bachelor apartment is usually tidy, bright, sunny, with a postcard view of the Hollywood sign. But right now everything’s been tossed like a salad and the Venetian blinds are rent and splayed and the mermaid Jay pulled warm and vibrant from a strip-club sea just last night dangles dead as anything in the middle of the main room, hung from blue-black duct-taped hands on a ceiling fan slowly turning with an angry hum.

Somebody has shot her in the head.

Even Doe is caught by surprise, and she exhales a soft, sad lament.

Jay turns away, light-headed. He twists and buckles to his knees. His forehead touches to the floor like a penitent praying, and Tripod arcs around him, no big deal, as if to suggest this sort of thing happens in his, their, world every day (which it couldn’t) and in so doing establish his, their, professional distance from it (which he can’t), cracking wise: “Well, now, okay, maybe he’ll believe us. Maybe he’ll finally understand the serious, serious shit he’s all up in.” But Doe just touches the mermaid lightly, tenderly, sorrowfully, and the body
sways. “Oh, girl,” she says to it softly. “I’m sorry.” Then, to Jay, absent of judgment, asks, “Do you know her?”

There’s no response from Jay, who has further upset himself with his unchecked, spontaneous, and callous relief that it isn’t Vaughn hanging from the fan.

Fuck. Fucking coldhearted shit.

“Jay?” Tripod, impatient. He’s pulled latex gloves from his pocket and put them on.
Does he always carry them?

Shit. Shit.

Did he know her?

Doe looks absently to the doorway, still gaping, but she’s talking to Tripod. “Call it in, Miles. Don’t touch anything. We’re not staying.”

Did he, does Jay, know anything?

Finally, Jay finds his voice: “Yes,” he answers. “Yes.” And then, truthfully: “No.”

Twenty-six miles across the sea

Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me

Santa Catalina, the island of

romance, romance, romance, romance

Water all around it everywhere

Tropical trees and the salty air

But for me the thing that’s a-waitin’ there—romance

It seems so distant, twenty-six miles away

Restin’ in the water serene

I’d work for anyone, even the Navy

Who would float me to my island dream

Twenty-six miles, so near yet far

I’d swim with just some water-wings and my guitar

I could leave the wings but I’ll need the guitar for

romance, romance, romance, romance

—“26 MILES (SANTA CATALINA),” THE FOUR PREPS (1958)

Music and lyrics by Bruce Belland and Glen
Larson

CHASING DUSK,
skimming the surface, Long Beach forgotten, the Catalina jet cruiser runs through sawtooth dark water, roiling, rolling, shoved high by one wave, dropping hard into the trough of the next, trailing in its wake a foaming scar of white.

It may be that more than fifty million mice die in U.S. laboratories every year. Jay found the data incomplete, and murky. Laboratory mice succumb to everything from toxicology tests (in which they are slowly poisoned) to burn studies to psychological experiments designed to induce terror, anxiety, depression, and helplessness.

Even C. C. Little’s eugenic mice are still mammals with nervous systems much like a man’s; they feel pain, fear, loneliness, joy. They become emotionally attached to one another, love their families, and bond with human guardians.

Baby mice giggle when tickled.

Some adult mice have been known to show empathy when another mouse—or human with whom they’ve bonded—is in distress, and exhibit altruism, will even put themselves in harm’s way, rather than allow another living creature to suffer.

Vaughn says this is horseshit, but you can look it up.

They are, however, Jay discovered, categorically not included in the federal Animal Welfare Act provisions that extend at least some hope of dignity to other experimental subjects. While rabbits and guinea pigs, for example, must be provided with pain relief, and labs must prove there are no modern alternatives to the use of these species, scientists are not even required to count the number of mice who perish in the course of their research.

Off and on for more than two hours, from Vaughn’s apartment to San Pedro and now on the fast boat, Jane Doe has been murmuring to him, perhaps debriefing him, but Jay can’t seem to hold on to what she’s been saying. He can’t shake the dead girl from his head. They are the only passengers making this crossing; Tripod remained behind in San Pedro. The forward cabin is vacant, Jay is pretty sure there are support marshals with them on the boat, from the way Doe is all relaxed and easy, and sometimes he can feel their eyes on him, but hasn’t seen them, and he doesn’t care; the Feds think they erased him from Los Angeles, but in truth he was never there.

The dead girl has also discomposed the implacable Jane Doe. Jay can see it in the marshal’s face: the tightness around her mouth, a fitful preoccupation in her gaze, even though, once she confirms how little Jay knows about the stripper, she stops talking about it and moves on to other subjects.

Are they worried about Vaughn? Doe wants to know more about him and, like in his sessions with Magonis, Jay is quick to become discouraged by how little he can detail once he gets past a wooly, ballpark résumé and wiki of his putative best friend: valley kid, original Pokémon survivor, North Hollywood High gifted program, biochemistry at Berkeley, fondness for mussels, no interest in team sports, two siblings he talks about, one that he doesn’t. Jay keeps telling her, just like he told Public, that Vaughn is collateral to whatever this is, but Doe seems skeptical and the image of the dead mermaid
stripper keeps cycling back on them, bleak, final, a reminder that there is a deadly game being played.

By someone.

And Ginger told him that Catalina wasn’t safe.

It’s not surprising that the more they talk about it, the less certain Jay is that a sanctuary is even possible for him anymore. His nerves are raw, his ambition guarded. After a while he pleads fatigue, leaves the cabin and Jane Doe and her questions, and stands on the forward deck, letting the raw, briny mist soak him, thicken his hair, sting his eyes.

He wonders what’s going on with those cardboard clouds.

The dark bump of Mount Orizaba seems to draw no closer for the longest time. It is a peculiarity of Catalina that some days it is a low smear barely visible on the horizon, and some days it rises like the broad back of a leviathan above the livid sea.

He doesn’t look back at the mainland.

A canopy of stars drops like a bad scrim, and the cruiser’s motors cut, the bow levels, and finally Avalon lights accordion out from the darkness, close. Jay smells the faint rancid backwash of fish, gasoline, and pollution that plagues the sheltered harbor. Water laps at the hull chines. Music rattles out of a bar somewhere. The town seems to have shrunk in his absence. Tired and windblown and wanting paint.

Public is waiting for them, on the Casino Mole boat landing, in a pool of light, hands jammed in the pockets of his coat. He looks lonely, Jay thinks. Small and lost. Public watches the ferry come in and does not change expression when Jay comes down the pier to join him.

He says nothing. His hard gimlet eyes are empty.

•   •   •

T
he bungalow is dark. Dead quiet when Jay gets the door closed and the sound of the Catalina night is squeezed away. He sags, eyes half-mast, against the front wall. Then opens his eyes wider,
surfacing, and . . . becomes suddenly acutely aware of the utter absence of—

—everything—

—everything too spare, in the kitchen dark. The overhead light flickers on at his touch. Spotless. No, empty. Barren. Jay looks across at the blank window of Barry’s house and—

—his heart sinks—

—in the bedroom, the bed made up but abandoned, hospital corners and stiff white institutional pillows. Nobody in it: vacant: and nobody expected. All of the odd little-girl toys are missing, along with her drawings, picture books, collected golf-course curios, her tumbled-out shoes, an utter absence of any of Ginger’s personal effects on the bureau: the scant jewelry, the cut-glass bottles of perfume, the bulletlike cylinders of lipstick: the closet absent of clothing—

—the one thing he hadn’t factored in and now, numb and emptied out, chastises himself for not seeing it, the most obvious thing, right in front of him the whole time—

—they’re gone.

Jay’s been away a little more than twenty-eight hours.

Ginger and Helen are gone.