Quicksilver(66)

“What have you done?” Erskine asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Bridget said. “If you sell us a vehicle, you’ll need to drive our Explorer miles from here and abandon it.”

“You need guns?”

“No. We have a friend waiting in the Explorer with guns.”

“You need drugs?”

“Thank you, no.”

“It’s perfectly safe to deal with us for anything, anything at all,” said Wallace Beebs. “How about ID in new names?”

“We don’t have time for that. So it’s just the wheels.”

Wallace regarded his uncle with the bright-faced excitement of a boy hoping to be taken on an adventure, and the older man regarded us with analytic intensity.

After a silence, Erskine said, “We believe that what little we love is defined by what all that we hate and how much we hate it. What do you think?”

“Hate makes the world go around,” Bridget said, and it was clear the sentiment was well received in the Republic of Beebs.

I had a lot to learn about deception from this splendid woman.

Erskine’s voice was as gentle as that of a truly caring grief counselor, his expression as kindly as that of a fairy godmother in a Disney cartoon. “Wallace and I believe that if you want to build something better, you must first burn down everything that exists.”

My fiancée smiled with tender malice. “Just give me the matches.”

Putting us through the perverse equivalent of an ethics exam, Erskine said, “History is the enemy of the future.”

Bridget called him and raised him one: “The past is a cancer that kills all dreams of progress.”

“Power is beauty, beauty power.”

Lifting her chin and thrusting her chest forward as if she took overweening pride in her beauty, she said, “Keats was such an idiot, confusing truth for power.”

We were all silent as Wallace turned his grin on his uncle, on Bridget, on me, and then on each of us again, clearly waiting for Erskine’s decision.

No doubt about it—we were across the border from eccentricity, in the mad kingdom of the Red Queen.

When Erskine finally spoke, he said, “We have now and then assisted others like yourselves, who needed a vehicle to get them safely into Mexico or Canada, something with no history and with what appears to be a genuine DMV registration. I can offer you a sixteen-year-old Mercury Mountaineer with no GPS, with legitimate plates. If you email me photographs of yourselves and your associate in the Explorer, I can in three days send perfectly forged passports to any mail drop you wish.”

“Not necessary,” I said. “We won’t be leaving the country.” Then I realized my presumption and turned to Bridget. “We won’t be leaving the country, will we?”

“We won’t,” Bridget agreed.

Erskine said, “The Mountaineer has a secret compartment for the transport of weapons and ammunition. If you want a backup arsenal, I can make you a package deal—the Mountaineer and guns.”

“We have a lot of great guns,” Wallace assured us.

Bridget put her hands together as you do when you’re praying, and she nodded at Erskine. “Thank you so much, padrino. But the Mountaineer is all we need.”

“Very well, then. Thirty-five thousand.”

“Sold,” I quickly declared.

“Forty thousand,” he said.

“Wait a second. We had a deal at thirty-five.”

Erskine smiled sadly at me and then with amusement at Bridget. “Mrs. Torgenwald, I recommend that you prevent your husband from playing poker.”

“Forty thousand,” Bridget agreed. “Give him twenty, darling, and I’ll give him the other twenty.”

“Please pay Wallace,” Erskine said. “My nephew takes such delight in counting money.”

Bridget and I got to our feet and together handed eight rolls of hundred-dollar bills to Wallace Beebs.

Remaining in his armchair, Erskine combed one hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, which was when for a moment it ceased being a hand and became an utterly alien appendage of six tentacles, each tipped with a wickedly sharp talon.





|?28?|

When we got up from our armchairs in the library, explosives didn’t detonate under us. Neither did a score of poison-tipped four-inch-long spikes, driven by highly compressed air, pierce us from buttocks to brainpan. Neither did trapdoors open in the floor to dump the chairs and us into a pit seething with hungry crocodiles.

I didn’t know if Bridget had seen what I’d seen—Erskine’s hand briefly revealed as an arrangement of tentacles rather than fingers, the retractable talons deployed as if he would have liked to gut us with them. I was prepared to give her a pointed look, one that she might instantly interpret to mean: Erskine is a Nihilim, a Screamer, a wormhead monster, I’m not kidding, I really mean this. To my great frustration, my bride-to-be didn’t look at me as we four moved out of the library, not when I cleared my throat meaningfully, not when I cleared it again at greater length, and not even when I pretended to stumble on the threshold between the library and the downstairs hall.

Earlier in the day, when we arrived in Peptoe, Bridget had worried that her ability to see through the Screamers’ masquerades wasn’t reliable. She’d said, I have the disturbing feeling some of them are better shielded, better disguised, and I’m unaware of them.