NOS4A2(189)

She had transferred to the Denver office to assist in the ongoing McQueen investigation—a case in which no charges had been filed or ever would be filed. She had an apartment in Gunbarrel and usually ate with Lou and Wayne once a day, ostensibly to talk about what Lou knew. Mostly, though, they talked about Game of Thrones. Lou had finished reading the first book right before he went in for his angioplasty and his gastric bypass, which were performed at the same time. Tabitha Hutter was there when Lou woke up, the day after the surgery. She said she wanted to make sure he lived to read the rest of the series.

“Hey, kids,” Tabitha said. “You sneaking out on me?”

“There’s a job needs doing,” Lou said.

“On Sunday morning?”

“People f*ck up their cars then, too.”

She yawned into the back of her hand, a small, frizzy-haired woman in a faded Wonder Woman T-shirt and blue jeans, no jewelry, no accessories whatsoever. Aside from the nine-millimeter strapped to her hip. “Okay. Make me a cup of coffee before we go?”

Lou half smiled at this but said, “You don’t have to come. This could take a while.”

She shrugged. “What else am I going to do with myself? Outlaws like to sleep in. I’ve been FBI for eight years, and I’ve never once had cause to shoot anyone before eleven in the morning. Not as long as I get my coffee anyway.”


LOU GOT A DARK ROAST BREWING AND WENT TO START THE TRUCK, Tabitha following him out the door. Wayne was alone in the hall, pulling on his sneakers, when the phone rang.

He looked at it sitting in its black plastic cradle on an end table just to his right. It was a few minutes past seven, early for a call—but maybe it was about the job they were getting ready to go off on. Maybe whoever had ditched his car was being helped by someone else. It happened.

Wayne answered.

The phone hissed: loud roar of white noise.

“Wayne,” said a breathy girl with a Russian accent. “When are you coming back? When are you coming back to play?”

Wayne couldn’t answer, his tongue sealed to the roof of his mouth, his pulse ticking in his throat. It wasn’t the first time they had called.

“We need you. You can rebuild Christmasland. You can think it all back. All the rides. All the shops. All the games. There’s nothing to play with here. You have to help us. With Mr. Manx gone, there’s only you.”

Wayne heard the front door open. He hit END. As Tabitha Hutter stepped into the hallway, he was setting the phone back in its cradle.

“Someone call?” she asked, a kind of calm innocence in her gray-green eyes.

“Wrong number,” Wayne said. “I bet the coffee is done.”


WAYNE WASN’T OKAY, AND HE KNEW IT. KIDS WHO WERE OKAY DID NOT answer phone calls from children who had to be dead. Kids who were okay didn’t dream dreams like his. But neither of these things—not the phone calls or the dreams—was the clearest indicator that he was Not Okay. No. What really marked him out as Not Okay was the way he felt when he saw a photo of a plane crash: charged, jolted by excitement and guilt, as if he were looking at pornography.

He had been out driving with his father the week before and had seen a chipmunk run in front of a car and get squashed, and he had barked with sudden surprised laughter. His father had snapped his head around and looked at Wayne with hollow-eyed wonder, had pursed his lips to speak but then said nothing—silenced perhaps by the ill look of shock and unhappiness on Wayne’s face. Wayne didn’t want to think it was funny, a little chipmunk zigging when it should’ve zagged, getting wiped out by someone’s Goodyear. That was the kind of thing that made Charlie Manx laugh. He just couldn’t help himself.

There was the time he saw a thing about genocide in the Sudan on YouTube and had discovered a smile on his own face.

There was a story about a little girl being kidnapped in Salt Lake City, a pretty twelve-year-old blond girl with a shy smile. Wayne had watched the news report in a state of rapt excitement, envying her.

There was his recurring sense that he had three extra sets of teeth, hidden somewhere behind the roof of his mouth. He ran his tongue around and around his mouth and imagined he could feel them, a series of little ridges right under the flesh. He knew now that he had only imagined losing his ordinary boy teeth, had hallucinated this under the influence of the sevoflurane, just as he had hallucinated Christmasland (lies!). But his memory of those other teeth was more real, more vivid, than the stuff of his everyday life: school, trips to the therapist, meals with his dad and Tabitha Hutter.

He felt sometimes that he was a dinner plate that had cracked down the middle and then been glued back together, and the two parts did not quite line up. One side—the part of the plate that marked his life before Charlie Manx—was microscopically out of true with the other part of the plate. When he stood back and looked at that crooked plate, he could not imagine why anyone would want to keep it. It was no good now. Wayne did not think this with any despair—and that was part of the problem. It had been a long time since he’d felt anything like despair. At his mother’s funeral, he had very much enjoyed the hymns.

The last time he saw his mother alive, they were rolling her on a gurney toward the back of an ambulance. The paramedics were in a hurry. She had lost a great deal of blood. They would eventually pump three liters into her, enough to keep her alive for the night, but they were too slow to deal with the perforated kidney and intestine, not aware that her system was boiling with her body’s own poisons.