“Good. Okay, then let them find the bodies and bang their heads against
the wall trying to solve it. None of our business. Somebody else can
haul away the garbage.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll be back to you soon.”
“I’m counting on it,” Oslett said.
After disconnecting, while he waited for a response from the home
office, he was filled with uneasiness at the prospect of passing more
than a hundred black and empty miles with no company but himself and
Clocker. Fortunately, he was prepared with noisy and involving
entertainment. From the floor behind the driver’s seat, he retrieved a
Game Boy and slipped the headset over his ears. Soon he was happily
distracted from the unnerving rural landscape by the challenges of a
rapidly paced computer game.
Suburban lights speckled the night when Oslett next looked up from the
miniature screen in response to a tap on the shoulder from Clocker. On
the floor between his feet, the cellular phone was ringing.
The New York contact sounded as somber as if he had just come from his
own mother’s funeral. “How soon can you get to the airport in Oklahoma
City?”
Oslett relayed the question to Clocker.
Clocker’s impassive face didn’t change expressions as he said, “Half an
hour, forty minutes–assuming the fabric of reality doesn’t warp between
here and there.”
Oslett relayed to New York only the estimated traveling time and left
out the science fiction.
“Get there quick as you can,” New York said. “You’re going to
California.”
“Where in California?”
“John Wayne Airport, Orange County.”
“You have a lead on Alfie?”
“We don’t know what the fuck we’ve got.”
“Please don’t make your answers so darn technical,” Oslett said.
“You’re losing me.”
“When you get to the airport in Oklahoma City, find a news stand. Buy
the latest issue of People magazine. Look on pages sixty six,
sixty-seven, sixty-eight. Then you’ll know as much as we do.”
“Is this a joke?”
“We just found out about it.”
“About what?” Oslett asked. “Look, I don’t care about the latest
scandal in the British royal family or what diet Julia Roberts follows
to keep her figure.”
“Pages sixty-six, sixty-seven, and sixty-eight. When you’ve seen it,
call me. Looks as if we might be standing hip-deep in gasoline, and
someone just struck a match.”
New York disconnected before Oslett could respond.
“We’re going to California,” he told Clocker.
“Why?”
“People magazine thinks we’ll like the place,” he said, deciding to give
the big man a taste of his own cryptic dialogue.
“We probably will,” Clocker replied, as if what Oslett had said made
perfect sense to him.
As they drove through the outskirts of Oklahoma City, Oslett was
relieved to find himself surrounded by signs of civilization–though he
would have blown his brains out rather than live there. Even at its
busiest hour, Oklahoma City didn’t assault all five senses the way
Manhattan did. He didn’t merely thrive on sensory overload, he found it
almost as essential to life as food and water, and more important than
sex.
Seattle had been better than Oklahoma City, although it still hadn’t
measured up to Manhattan. Really, it had far too much sky for a city,
too little crowding. The streets were so comparatively quiet, and the
people seemed so inexplicably . . . relaxed. You would think they
didn’t know that they, like everyone else, would die sooner or later.
He and Clocker had been waiting at Seattle International at two o’clock
yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when Alfie had been scheduled to arrive on
a flight from Kansas City, Missouri. The 747 touched down eighteen
minutes late, and Alfie wasn’t on it.
In the nearly fourteen months that Oslett had been handling Alfie, which
was the entire time that Alfie had been in service, nothing like that
had ever happened. Alfie faithfully showed up where he was supposed to,
traveled wherever he was sent, performed whatever task was assigned to
him, and was as punctual as a Japanese train conductor.
Until yesterday.
They had not panicked right away. It was possible that a snafu perhaps
a traffic accident–had delayed Alfie on his way to the air port,
causing him to miss his flight.
Of course, the moment he went off schedule, a “cellar command,”