The Blue Light Project (13 page)

Rabbit told him the short version: socket wrench slipped, racked his hand.

“Doing what is the question but don’t tell me. Don’t jeopardize yourself.”

Rabbit reached across the table and took Beyer’s glass. He took a smell of it, then put it back down. “I used to drink this stuff. Copious amounts.”

“Out there in Oregon, all messed up. Poor little Rabbit. What were you doing before you went nuts? Must have been good but I forget this part of the story.”

Rabbit smiled. “I’ve never told you that part of the story.”

“So here’s my guess,” Beyer said. “You’re not here today because I wanted to talk to you. You’re broke. You need money. And of course you can’t ask Comrade Jabez so you’re here to ask me, who you treat as if I weren’t a friend at all.”

“I’m not broke,” Rabbit lied. “I have a job.”

“I know you have a job because I got it for you by introducing you to my wife. So you have a job
and
you’re broke.” Beyer leaned into the table, hand working in the pocket of his thigh-length baggies. He produced a money clip, a big brass dollar sign, and rolled out four twenties onto the table. “A gift. Okay, my friend?”

Rabbit stared at the money, then palmed the bills into his pocket. “Thank you,” he said. “I admit it. I’m short.”

“Like I’m stupid,” Beyer said. “But the seven grand I advanced you a year ago on the WaferFone gig? Not a gift. Plus you took that whole box of phones. I still can’t believe you did that. Those are actually worth something.”

“Beyer, listen.”

“No, you listen, Rabbit. Seven grand isn’t chump change. After a year, it’s reputation money. I don’t get it back, my reputation suffers. I can’t have that. So here’s what I needed to tell you. You are going to pay me back. And I’m going to help you do that. As of next week, you’re not working for Angela, you’re working for me, full time.”

“What?” Rabbit said. “Angela hasn’t said anything about this.”

“Angela will do as I tell her,” Beyer said. “You stop by the Slopes location and there’ll be some severance money waiting for you. I’m being generous here, Rabbit. I’m making this easy for you. And I don’t have to.”

“But Beyer, Jesus,” Rabbit said. “I’m working on something. It’s Shock Beauty.”

“You think the client cares a year later?” Beyer said. Then he laughed loudly. “They’ve long gone and hired someone else. I paid them back their advance out of my own pocket, you dopehead. How do you remember where you live? How do you remember your middle name?”

“I quit smoke almost a year ago, you know that. My memory came back zing.”

“Oh right, all super straight now. Parkour straight-edge superman. That’s our Rabbit.”

“Not Parkour. Freesteal.”

Beyer made a face of ultimate weariness. “Whatever,” he said. “You’re my crew until we’re square. Make it seventy-five hundred with interest. You work that off.”

And even though Rabbit had not agreed, Beyer then chose not to press any further for a commitment. It was his way of persuasion, Rabbit knew, having watched Beyer play people like fish. Reel a bit, then let them run. Rabbit knew he was running now, while Beyer leaned back in his seat and drank down his drink, and then a second. Talking shit. Talking shop. Because they had a chance to really move this thing forward together, didn’t they? They were going to wrap street art back around on top of itself like a goddamn Möbius strip. And when it came time that Rabbit knew he had to be out of that room, Beyer begged him to stay a little longer.

Truth. Word.

And then they were apart, Rabbit in familiar streets, down the far east side. Eighty dollars in his pocket. An hour walking, sirens all around, lights flashing past him going the other way. Police cars and vans. A truck painted green with soldiers inside. He felt the city contorting, a mood spiraling out of control.

Alto, Alto.
He thought of that name, painted in that hidden tunnel, his hand folded over Beyer’s bills. He made a general request for peace to the saint of this holy darkness, these Alto’s own streets, his own secret night. And it didn’t seem eccentric at all that he should make this
request. Let Beyer and Jabez war. Let them commerce and revolution each other to death. Rabbit would quietly pay his respects to Alto. A new way.

No traffic where he was just then. Upturned shopping carts, mattresses, dead tires, major appliances rusting through. Railway transformer twelve feet high that someone had freshly postered over entirely to look like an enormous clock. Dialed in to 9 p.m. The beginning of the night. This night. The final night. The inauguration of designated time.

He was running now. All the way out to the hardware store at a steady sidewalk canter. All the way out to that big place the size of a bus station on a huge parking lot next to a huge furniture store next to a huge place that sold nothing but gas fireplaces. They called it 24/7 City, because it was always open. And there you could find the hardware store to end all hardware stores. Rabbit walked from the darkness into the brilliance of its parking lot lights, in through doors that sighed and parted, into air that was fridge cool. Rabbit walked between shelves the height of cathedral walls. That wood and fertilizer smell, the paint agitated into the atmosphere by a machine that wobbled at blinding speed.

A whole section devoted to lights. Here, look at this. There was a banner hanging from the ceiling so high overhead it looked like sky writing and it stopped Rabbit every time.

It read:
Illuminate Your World.

THURSDAY TO FIRST LIGHT

OCTOBER 24

IN THE PLAZA EAST OF MEME MEDIA, the police laid down a cordon of concrete median dividers, about half a ton each. They arranged these in a long line, end to end, locked to one another with hook-and-eye loops made of rebar. Then they strung long spools of barbed wire over the top. They blocked the alley mouths too and began herding the gathering crowds down to the southeast corner of the plaza, down past the band riser and towards the fountains and waterfalls. The protesters in black resisted, chanting. Others who’d arrived since the story broke stayed in their quiet groups, perplexed and watching, as if they’d come there at someone else’s bidding and were now waiting for instructions.

Someone yelled: “Information! What we want is honest information!”

The police arrested a man who’d been seen tipping over a mailbox. A woman blowing soap bubbles nearby was also held but then released.

A bulldozer roared and chattered and scraped. Men in combats stood on street corners. One of the bars on the side of the plaza had
a lawn-bowling green on the rooftop patio, league games normally in progress at that hour under the lights. The police had shut it down and commandeered the greens as an assembly area. Men and women with pint glasses stood on the sidewalk outside a side door facing away from the plaza. They didn’t seem to have any idea what was happening.

“Why have regular police SWAT units been replaced with military units?” asked a reporter from a local channel at the first news conference. But there was no answer, or no possible answer. There was an appeal for understanding instead.

“Guys,” the police spokesperson said. She waved her hands. Her name was Pam Pavich. “Guys, there isn’t much to report here. The situation is very fluid. I’m being told that there’s been no contact with the hostage taker. So we’re all totally in the dark.”

Pavich was local, raised out in the east end. Nice-looking lady in her fifties. Redhead. Maybe five foot three but not to mess with. By midnight she’d been replaced. The colonel who stepped in had to deal with everyone’s dismay that he wasn’t Pam Pavich, which is to say cute, gutsy, local and candid. He was dour and stammered and had hardly anything to say. Journalists took his presence as an indication that things were going poorly in some way hidden from them.

“Sir, I wonder if you can tell us what rules of engagement have been given to the troops arriving, and what units these soldiers have been taken from.”

No answer. Can’t answer. You have to understand the position here.

All of this at the same moment a fistfight started between two men at the end of the square, although nobody could agree on anything except that the fight started without warning. The men were watching the front of the studio one moment, then swinging punches at each other the next. It was maybe a political disagreement, or one of them had been blocking the other’s view. Nobody jumped in to stop it, in
any case, because right then there were shots from the top of the square and the world froze.

A policeman brought on this incident. One of the remaining local cops at the barricades, thirty years in the force. Several cameras caught him as he did what he did. As he lumbered to his feet and put his gun down on the hood of a squad car. As he squared his shoulders with resolve and began to walk towards the front steps of the Meme complex with his hands held high and wide, palms open to show he was unarmed. At the top of the steps, he cupped a hand over his eyes and peered inside. Then he yelled: “Come on out and talk. Let’s just talk this whole thing through.”

Thirty seconds passed. Maybe a minute. Then there was a quick movement behind the glass, far enough back into the darkness of the lobby that it barely registered on the broadcast footage later. A shifting shadow, then the crack of gunfire. A ragged flare of orange. And the whole sheet of glass in front of the officer exploded and he went onto his back and rolled down the steps. Two more shots came out over his head while he scrambled behind a barricade. Unhurt but shaken, although that was not the story told and retold afterwards. It was instead how in the silent seconds that followed, while the entire plaza, the entire watching city dropped a degree in temperature, broken glass in the front window, a ragged aperture, everything poised, a voice cut through clearly: “Don’t fire. Do not fire. Cease fire.”

Many people heard the words. But nobody could sort out who had spoken, who had called off the storm of violence formed and ready there, sharp and immediate in those quivering seconds. Everything locked up with the words and in a double bind. To act or not to act. Knowing either way innocent people would die.

Everything locked up tight for seconds, for a minute, while the cameras moved to better positions and glossy-haired anchors spun in their
chairs to face the lights, lips already moving around the lines they were about to say.

Five, four, three (two, one). Action.

The world listening, listening. Straining to understand.

 

EVE STAYED UP, exactly what Nick told her not to do. She stayed up and stayed in front of the television. She phoned her mother and got herself exercised. Nick was asleep, motionless on his back. He slept like a computer battery recharging, very sensible, very like his family, who were all brains and chess and classical music and eight hours a night. Nick had winter tires, he had photocopies of all his credit cards and his passport in the top drawer of his desk. He had a natural disaster kit stored for each of them under the stairs, individualized duffel bags with sleeping gear, extra clothes, water and emergency rations. (For that unexpected trip across town during complicated weather, he once said, which was an oddly poetic construction for Nick.) He ate slow carbs, no piece of meat larger than a deck of cards. These were the deliberate patterns he’d learned from his parents.