Aurora(52)

“Rusty was just leaving.”

Brady turned and looked at Rusty, a flat-affect the-lady-says-you’re-leaving expression on his face.

Rusty laughed and looked Brady up and down. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be?”

“I’d answer that, but I heard you needed to go.”

“Oh, for the love of Christ,” Rusty said to Aubrey. “What is this guy, muscle? Jesus, look at this Mick. He’s like a ton of corned beef floating in beer.” Rusty scratched his neck again, compulsively.

Meth, Brady thought to himself. Everywhere, meth. His brother Terence, those kids in the desert, and now this guy. It felt like it haunted him, stalked him.

Aubrey looked back over her shoulder and saw Scott and Celeste were staring at them. She turned back to Rusty, trying to end the conversation. “He works with Thom. He’s here helping us out today.” The moment Thom’s name was out of her mouth, she wished she could snatch it back out of the air before it reached Rusty’s ears. That seemingly innocent and non-specific comment was the first of two calamitous mistakes Aubrey would make.

While Rusty and Aubrey were married, her husband and brother had never gotten along. Rusty was somehow deeply resentful of Thom’s attempts to help them financially yet also found his offers totally inadequate. And, of course, the fact that Aubrey continually turned her brother’s money down made Rusty crazy.

On dark nights when things were bad, she’d wondered if Rusty had ever loved her, or if it was just her brother’s money he’d been after all along.

In the clear light of day, she knew that it was. Mentioning Thom at all would mean only one thing to Rusty: money.

In her irritation, Aubrey turned away from Rusty, who was still on the other side of the screen. Her eyes, looking for anywhere else to land besides her ex-husband’s rotting teeth, fell on the living room, and on the blue duffel bag that was still sitting in the middle of the coffee table. Her gaze only rested there for a split second before she abruptly looked away, back to the conversation in the doorway.

It was her quick look away that Rusty noticed, and that involuntary reaction was her second, and more grievous, mistake. Rusty, no dummy, picked up the twitch of her head, the way she snapped it back at him, but not just to him, away from something. Looking into the living room, his eyes searched for whatever it was she hadn’t wanted him to see. The blue duffel bag was the obvious choice, sitting out on the coffee table as if on display.

Rusty’s mind, its wiring declining in quality and performance from years of chemical abuse, was still capable of some deductive thought. The bag was upright, brand new with package lines still in it, fully stuffed with something. Obviously, the bag was the new thing here, the variable, along with Brady, and they had come together, those two.

Why did hired security need to personally escort a small, overstuffed blue duffel bag, except for the obvious reason, and what kind of thing would a billionaire send clear across the country during a massive power outage, except for the obvious thing, and what possible contents of said duffel bag would make his ex-wife so blatantly desperate to conceal them from him, except for the fucking obvious?

Whole horizons opened up in Rusty’s mind, and he saw that a shift in tactics was advisable.

“I apologize,” he said to Aubrey, his voice smooth and placatory. “I won’t come again, unless you ask me to. I owe you that courtesy. Scott?” He called out to the kitchen in his best paternal manner. “Take care, son. If you need me, don’t hesitate. You know where to find me.”

He squinted, noticing the girl next to Scott. “Celeste, is that you? Your daddy’s looking for you, sweetie. Better run home.”

Celeste didn’t answer. She just turned away. Scott bristled, angling his body to block her from his father’s view, a gesture more symbolic than effective.

Rusty turned back to Brady. “Sorry about the wisecrack, buddy. Think I heard it in a song once. Stay safe.” And with that he headed back to his truck, slid behind the wheel, and drove off at a safe and responsible speed.



Three blocks away, Rusty pulled over at a stop sign and rubbed his face, thinking. This was going to be tricky. But holy shit was it going to be worth it. The money pi?ata was about to burst.



Aubrey closed the door, locked it, and looked at Brady. “My ex-husband.”

“I gathered.”

“Sorry about that.”

Brady shook his head. “I shouldn’t have interfered. You had it.”

The four of them ate dinner quietly, forgetting to finish their gratitudes.





20.





Outside Jericho

Things were going wrong, and Thom needed a nap. A nap would fix everything.

The cot was an almost exact replica of Thomas Edison’s. Not Edison’s nap cot in Florida, which Thom had seen as a child—that one had seemed dinky and uncomfortable even then—but the larger, more commodious cot Edison had kept in the book-lined nook of his library in West Orange, New Jersey. The New Jersey cot was more of a single bed, with sheets, a blanket, and two fluffy pillows awaiting the great man’s head at all times. Thom (not Edison) had gone to great trouble to have the whole of Edison’s library nook reconstructed in the alcove just off his small office in the main house at Sanctuary. Everything was identical, right down to the titles of the books on the shelves. The world may teeter near its end, but Thom still might get an idea and need to nap it out.