Bobby closed his eyes and thought of Jackie. There was a sound, and he knew that he was making it. He reached down into himself, the sound still coming. and touched Jammer’s deck. Come! he screamed, inside himself, neither knowing nor caring what it was that he addressed Come now! He felt something give, a barrier of some kind, and the scratching sensation was gone. When he opened his eyes, there was something in the bed of dead flowers. He blinked. It seemed to be a cross of plain, white-painted wood; someone had fitted the sleeves of an ancient naval tunic over the horizontal arms, a kind of mold- spotted tailcoat with heavy, fringed epaulets of tarnished gold braid, rusting buttons, more braid at the cuffs . . A rusted cutlass was propped, hilt up, against the white upright, and beside it was a bottle half filled with clear fluid. The child spun, the little pistol blurring . . . And crum- pled, folded into himself like a deflating balloon, a balloon sucked away into nothing at all, the Browning clattering to the stone path like a forgotten toy. “My name,” a voice said, and Bobby wanted to scream when he realized that it came from his own mouth, “is Samedi, and you have slain my cousin’s horse And Virek was running, the big coat flapping out behind him, down the curving path with its serpentine benches, and Bobby saw that another of the white crosses waited there, just where the path curved to vanish. Then Virek must have seen it, too; he screamed, and Baron Samedi. Lord of Graveyards, the ba whose kingdom was death, leaned in across Barcelona like a cold dark rain.
“What the hell do you want? Who are you?” The voice was familiar, a woman’s. Not Jacki~’s “Bobby,” he said, waves of darkness pulsing through him. “Bobby . . “How did you get here?” “Jammer. He knew. His deck pegged you when you iced me before. He’d just seen something, something huge He couldn’t remember..” Turner sent me. Conroy. He said tell you Conroy did it. You want Conroy Hearing his own voice as though it were someone else’s. He’d been somewhere, and returned, and now he was here, in Jaylene Slide’s skeletal neon sketch. On the way back, he’d seen the big thing, the thing that had sucked them up, start to alter and shift, gargantuan blocks of its rotating, merging, taking on new alignments, the entire outline changing `Conroy,” she said. The sexy scrawl leaned by the video window, something in its line expressing a kind of exhaus- tion, even boredom. “I thought so.” The video image whited out, formed again as a shot of some ancient stone building. Park Avenue. He’s up there with all those Euros, clicking away at some new scam.” She sighed. “Thinks he’s safe, see? Wiped Ramirez like a fly, lied to my face, flew off to New York and his new job, and now he thinks he’s safe The figure moved, and the image changed again. Now the face of the white-haired man, the man Bobby had seen talking to the big guy, on Jammer’s phone, filled the screen. She’s tapped into his line, Bobby thought “Or not,” Conroy said, the audio cutting in. “Either way, we’ve got her. No problem.” The man looked tired, Bobby thought, but on top of it. Tough. Like Turner. “I’ve been watching you, Conroy,” Slide said softly. “My good friend Bunny, he’s been watching you for me. You ain’t the only one awake on Park Avenue tonight . “No,” Conroy was saying, “we can have her in Stock- holm for you tomorrow Absolutely.” He smiled into the camera. “Kill him, Bunny,” she said. “Kill `em all. Punch out the whole goddamn floor and the one under it. Now.” “That’s right,” Conroy said, and then something hap- pened, something that shook the camera, blurring his image. “What is that?” he asked, in a very different voice, and then the screen was blank. “Burn, motherfucker,’ she said. And Bobby was yanked back into the dark MARLY PASSED ThE hour adrift in the ~low storm, watching the boxmaker’s dance. Paco’s threat didn’t frighten her, although she had no doubt of his willingness to carry it out. He would carry it out, she was certain. She had no idea what would happen if the lock were breached. They would die. She would die, and Jones, and Wigan Ludgate. Perhaps the contents of the dome would spill out into space, a blossoming cloud of lace and tarnished sterling, marbles and bits of string, brown leaves of old books, to orbit the cores forever That had the right tone, somehow; the artist who had set the boxmaker in motion would be pleased. The new box gyrated through a round of foam-tipped claws. Discarded rectangular fragments of wood and glass tumbled from the focus of creation, to join the thousand things, and she was lost in it, enchanted, when Jones, wildeyed, his face filmed with sweat and dirt, heaved up into the dome, trailing the red suit on a lanyard. “I can’t get the Wig into a place I can seal,” he said, “so this is for you The suit spun up below him and he grabbed for it, frantic. “I don’t want it,” she said, watching the dance. “Get into it! Now! No time!” His mouth worked, but no sound came. He tried to take her arm. “No,” she said, evading his hand. “What about you?” “Put the goddamn suit on!” he roared, waking the deeper range of echo. “No.”