Quicksilver(15)

Sparky said, “They came so often, nearly every day. We gave them names. Comet and Cupid.”

She said, “Donner and Blitzen.”

He said, “We had squirrels that would eat out of your hand.”

She said, “Samson and Delilah.”

He said, “There was a fox so tame it would curl up in its own rocking chair on the porch, while we were rocking away in ours.”

She said, “Cary Grant. That’s what we called the fox, because he was so elegant. Movie stars aren’t elegant like that anymore.”

He said, “The cougar was a little scary at first.”

She disagreed. “Oh, she never was, Sparky. She was always just a big pussycat.” Bridget sighed. “The property outside Flagstaff was our little paradise.”

“Then the day before yesterday,” Sparky said, “Bridget and I were having breakfast when two black Suburbans pulled into our driveway, and eight men in black suits got out.”

Bridget said, “It was like a chorus line from some musical about funeral directors.”

“They knocked,” Sparky said, “and I told them to go away. They said they were ISA agents, needed to talk to us, and I told them to go away again.”

I glanced at the rearview mirror, in which Sparky was briefly revealed by the headlamps of a truck sweeping past in the westbound lane. The fleeting light seemed like a mask of a face that peeled up and away, revealing a half-formed shadowy countenance beneath.

I said, “Those people aren’t used to being told to go away. Things must have gotten ugly.”

“Not immediately,” Sparky said. “We just put down the automated window shades, so they couldn’t see into the house. They called our landline and told me they had a warrant. I said I wasn’t impressed with warrants when their kind have so many corrupt judges in their pocket. They were a little miffed at that, so I said maybe I’d open up for them if I knew what this was about, and the guy on the phone said they had some questions related to what Bridget ordered on the internet, which was when I knew we were in the soup.”

To Bridget, I said, “What did you order?”

“That’s the payoff. First, tell him how it went, Grandpa.”

As we cruised through a pass in the Hieroglyphic Mountains, the moon rose like a dot waiting for the stroke that would make it an exclamation point.

Sparky was silent for a long moment, and then he revealed that the Rainkings were not your typical family next door. “When I didn’t let those bad boys in, they started shouting through a bullhorn. They were rude. They threatened to break down the door if we didn’t disarm and come out. It would have been fun to watch them try. The front and back doors had a quarter-inch plate of steel sandwiched between layers of wood, and they were set in a steel frame with high and low deadbolts two inches long. So unless those fancy-dressed fascists could get a motorized battering ram, they were going to be a long time knocking it down. They might have been able to shoot out a window, but that would’ve taken a while, because the bulletproof glass would withstand everything but high-caliber armor-piercing rounds, not the kind of ammo in their sidearms. While they were jabbering their threats, Bridget and I went to the cellar, into the walk-in wine cooler, cycled open the secret door, and vamoosed into the escape tunnel.”

I thought my amazement gland had been previously squeezed dry for at least a week, but I was wrong. “Wow. If the Dirty Harry Clean Now delivery van hadn’t been in the alley behind the diner, I’d be locked up in a prison for the criminally unique. I got through on luck. But you had bulletproof glass, a secret door, and an escape tunnel. Are you survivalists or something?”

“No, no, no. Nothing silly like that,” Bridget said. “We stay as real as a stick in the eye. But Grandpa has something of a past. Don’t you, Grandpa?”

“Something of,” he acknowledged. “Here and there, this and that. You know how it is.”

“He was something, then something else, then another something that we don’t talk about. Then when he was thirty-six, twenty-three years ago—I wouldn’t be born for another five years—he became a contractor.”

“I built things,” Sparky clarified, perhaps so that I wouldn’t think he was a contract killer.

“By the time I was four,” Bridget said, “Grandpa realized we might need an escape tunnel. He had a construction company at the time, and he called on only his most trusted employees to work with him on our house without getting permits from the county.”

“When we finished,” Sparky said, “I gave the guys the company, so they had an incentive to keep their mouths shut.”

“That’s when he became Daphne Larkrise,” Bridget said. “So he could work from home and always be with me in case something wicked happened, which now it has.”

As I tried to track the history of Sparky Rainking, I became almost too dizzy to drive. “Daphne Larkrise. I’ve heard that name somewhere.”

“Of course you have,” Bridget said. “Everyone has. Daphne Larkrise is the most successful romance novelist of his time.”

“Her time,” Sparky corrected.

“Oops. Grandpa’s old friend, Daphne Larkrise, is the face of Daphne Larkrise and does all the interviews and publicity stuff for twenty-five percent of the action, but Grandpa writes the books. He is a brilliant writer.”