Quicksilver(37)

Butch Hammer thumped a giant fist three times against his massive thigh. “People used to take that Orwell book, 1984, to be a warning. Now they see it as an inspiration. Your ancestry is your business, not the ISA’s.”

After a silence, Bridget said, “Do we have a deal?”

Getting up from her chair to take a cookie from the tray on the coffee table, Cressie said, “What about license plates, sweetie?”

“We’ll use the one on the Buick. It’s from a Porsche. Tomorrow we’ll swap plates with some other vehicle. We can keep doing that every few days, before any set we’re using is reported stolen.”

“Even considering the risk factor, seventy-five thousand is too much,” Butch said. “On the run like you are, you need all the money you can get. Let’s split it at thirty-seven five.”

Indicating the photographs of the Hammer kids, Bridget said, “All that education must have cost a fortune.”

“They all got scholarships,” Cressie said. “But there were a slew of other bills.”

“And one of them still in school,” Bridget said. “We can get money any time we need it, dirty money that we’ll make clean. Hard times might be coming for this country. Very hard. Take the seventy-five. It’s our final offer.”

Reluctantly, the Hammers accepted it.

When we said goodbye to Cressie and stepped outside with Butch Hammer, he said, “Time was that Tucson seemed far away from all the capitals of crazy in this world, but maybe nowhere’s far away anymore.”

He drove the Explorer into the Quonset hut, and we brought the Buick in after him. Out of sight of the street, we transferred the license plate to the Ford.

The enormous garage had a hydraulic lift and a full array of other equipment. It appeared to be almost as ordered and clean as the house next door.

When we were ready to roll, the big man said, “One more thing. When I rebuilt this girl, I filed the numbers off her engine block and then torched away the ghost of them. She can never be traced back to me, so don’t worry about that.”

Bridget said, “We’re not the first like us who’ve found their way to you, are we?”

“Been a few,” he acknowledged. “Do you see things, strange things, that other folks can’t?”

“We do,” I said.

Bridget asked him, “Do you?”

“No. I think I’m glad I don’t. How did you find me?”

“We’re drawn to what we need,” she said.

I added, “We call it psychic magnetism.”

“Question for question,” Bridget suggested.

Butch nodded.

She said, “People can’t lie to you, can they?”

“A lot of them try, but I always see the truth behind the lie. Cressida, too. It’s scary how much lying there is. What’s all this about that you’re caught up in?”

“We’re all caught up in it,” she said. “You as much as we are.”

“We’re on a quest,” I said.

“We’re not on anything as easy as a quest,” Bridget disagreed.

“That’s an issue we’re still debating,” I told Butch.

Bridget said, “We’re trying to figure it out. We’ll let you know if we ever do.”

Butch said, “Others before you—they were trying to figure it out, too. All anyone agrees about is that something bad is coming.”

“Something always is,” she said.

He frowned. “This time it’s going to be a bigger bad than maybe we’ve ever seen before. Be careful out there. Godspeed.”

When Butch and I shook hands, mine disappeared up to the wrist.

Bridget stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

Just then Cressie arrived with a colorful Christmas-themed tin full of tiny cakes and cookies. “It’s always Christmas here,” she said, and it occurred to me that, with a full beard, Butch Hammer would make an impressive Santa Claus, though he might scare the pee out of some little kids. “Share them with whoever,” Cressie said. “There’s nothing so bad in life that a good little cake can’t make it better.”





|?18?|

When we returned to the motel shortly before midnight, Sparky Rainking was waiting for us in his granddaughter’s room, watching a cable program on TV. “They seem to be reporting news from another planet, ’cause they sure aren’t talking about the earth I know.”

Neither the cable channel nor a local station had carried any mention of the shooting at the truck stop. These days, any incident involving a mere two killings failed to be violent enough to qualify as news.

Sparky had finished counting the money. In addition to the seventy-five thousand that we’d left with Butch Hammer, the duffel bag had contained another hundred and ninety thousand, mostly in hundreds, but some in twenties.

“After I counted the last, I washed my hands for ten minutes. Still don’t feel entirely clean, considering the moral degenerates who handled those bills. Then I got in the shower with Winston and used some shampoo on him. He smells like lemons. We don’t need to have him groomed in the morning, though we should get his teeth cleaned before too long.”

We told him about the Ford Explorer as he sampled the baked goods in the Christmas tin. After he interrupted us twice to say that he would marry the woman who made those treats if she ever became available, we finished our account of the events at Butch Hammer’s American Auto Repair. Then we agreed to hit the road by eight o’clock in the morning and said goodnight.