Aurora(71)

Fuck the eyeglasses. He decided to leave them exactly where they were. He slammed the drawer of the nightstand, grabbed the big suitcase that contained as many of his things as he cared to pack up, and headed for the door.

Halfway down the short hallway to the elevator, he stopped in his tracks. There was someone else at the other end of the corridor, someone who’d just gotten off the elevator and was walking this way, also with a suitcase in hand.

Marques.

He looked like the mirror image of Thom, one of them coming and the other going, two men of about the same age, carrying their things in a bag, one moving out and the other—what, moving in?

Thom turned his head, like the RCA dog, trying to understand the strange image at the other end of the hallway.

“Shit,” Marques said.

“What the fuck?” Thom asked.

Marques sighed. He set his black canvas suitcase down gently and drew himself up to his full height.

“Awkward conversation we’re about to have, boss.”

“Awkward conver— What the fuck are you talking about, Marques? What are you doing? What is that next to you? What the fuck is going on?”

Thom had been proud of the fact that, other than a few days back when it had all started, he’d stopped tracking Ann-Sophie’s movements on the surveillance monitors in the communication room. Somehow, he had even convinced himself that he’d been wrong about it all, that she wasn’t sleeping with Marques, that she never had been, and the days and nights when she was gone had been mental health breaks, a case of her giving herself some needed space so that she could then devote time and energy to repair the marriage and oh, fuck her, she’s been screwing my pilot the whole goddamn time. That’s why she wanted his stuff out, to make room for Marques’s goddamn epaulets.

“Obviously, I was under the impression you weren’t here right now,” Marques said calmly.

“‘Obviously, I was under the impression you weren’t here,’” Thom said, automatically, in a pinched, high-pitched voice. His own ears couldn’t believe what had just come out of his mouth. He had imitated Marques in the exact manner of a fifth grader.

“I’ll come back later,” Marques said. He picked up his suitcase and turned.

“Don’t bother,” Thom said. “It’s all yours. She’s all yours. Good fucking luck.” He picked up his own suitcase and felt a tiny muscle in his back give way. That’s what fucking happens when you can’t do fucking yoga, he thought. It hurt a little but enraged him a lot, so with a roar of anger, he lifted his half-zipped suitcase with both hands and slammed it against the wall. Unsatisfied, he slammed it again, and again, and continued to do so until it sprayed clothes and books and toiletries in all directions. With a final scream of rage, he hurled the empty suitcase at Marques, who ducked it.

Thom turned on his heel and walked back the other way, into the house again and out the front door. His dentist, his pilot, his yoga teacher, and now his goddamn wife. Who the fuck else was going to disappoint him?

He didn’t know where he was going, but he sure as fuck was going somewhere, at least for a few hours. In front of the main building, he went to the untended guardhouse and banged through the unlocked door. The key box was hanging open like at a bad valet stand, and he ran his hands over the keys, looking for anything fast and loud. The key fobs were all basically identical, so he grabbed the first one his fingers closed around and stormed outside with it.

He walked down the row of cars just behind the fence line, pressing the button on the badass-looking black remote. He was hoping for one of the Jeep Wranglers or Toyota Landcruisers, but instead the lights flashed on a silver Volvo XC60 sport wagon. Jesus Christ, I’m not fucking storming off into the desert in a rage in a goddamn Volvo, he thought, and turned back to get a different set.

As he turned, though, he saw Ann-Sophie coming out of the main house, calling to him, Marques just behind her, and that was a scene he had no intention of playing anytime soon. His humiliation was complete enough already without her sympathy and under-fucking-standing. God in heaven, one fucking blowjob from my trainer, and I’ve been paying for it ever since. OK, not one, but whatever.

He got in the Volvo, started it up, and roared, to the best of the electric battery’s ability, the hell out of Sanctuary.





27.





Stolp Island, Aurora

Rusty screamed, his knuckle snapped, and his left pinkie finger pointed straight up into the air. He looked up in shock at Espinoza, whose clammy hand had made the break in one clean, sharp move. Espinoza winced in sympathy and took a step back from the table.

“Don’t look at me like that, Rusty. You know I hate this shit.”

“Through the nose,” Zielinski advised, sitting in the chair across from Rusty, legs crossed, fanning himself with his white straw summer hat. “Breathe through your nose, nice and slow. It’ll help.”

Zielinski, once dapper, was a dishwater-gray copy of his former self. Four months ago, he’d prided himself on the crisp, clean white of his shirts; now they were dingy and unpressed. It bothered him.

Rusty picked up his hand and looked at it, horrified, tears rolling down his cheek. His balls and throat still throbbed from where Zielinski’s bitch daughter had attacked him that afternoon, and now his finger was sticking up from his hand at a hideous, unnatural angle. If his stomach wasn’t already empty, he would have vomited.