Cold Storage

Five

“Your Honor, I get it. I mean, you are looking at a man who gets it.”

Teacake hadn’t prepared anything, but for him words came whether he wanted them to or not, so even though he knew he wasn’t the best person to speak in his own defense at his sentencing hearing, he figured he was the most qualified to wing it.

“Okay, so the last time we met, here in Your Honor’s courtroom, a few years ago, you made a great suggestion. ‘Hey,’ you said, ‘what if instead of me sending you to Ellsworth, you join the military instead?’ That was a great idea, thank you for that, and I totally took Your Honor up on that one. Two years in the navy, submarine corps, and let me tell you, that pressure testing is no picnic. Great experience for me, though. Honorable discharge.”

The judge looked down at the sentencing report on the bench in front of him. “Says here ‘General Discharge, Honorable Conditions.’”

“Right, yeah. Exactly. So, similar thing there.”

The public defender assigned to Teacake gave him a look that said, You are not helping.

But Teacake pressed on. “Point is, I got it then, and I get it now. Victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, I mean, I know that’s not gonna cut it with you, but there are, like, super-mitigating circumstances here. I get talked into stuff, that’s my problem, but my personal feeling is I should never have to do time for this. Not for basically sitting in a car, basically. I mean, it’s no way to treat a veteran, for starters. But you probably took one look at me and were like, ‘You again,’ and I get that, I do.”

“Are you finished?”

“Yeah, I’m gonna wrap up. Long story short, if you have a buddy who goes by Hazy Davy and he ever asks you to stay with the car while he runs in to do this one quick thing super quick and you already know your name is sorta mud in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, you should for sure remember a previous commitment. That’s all I’m saying.”

He started to sit down, then stood up again.

“Sorry, one more thing, real quick. I also been sick with the modern disease known as white privilege, for which I am very sorry. Although, that one’s kinda not on me, I gotta say, I can’t help I’m white. Anyway, uh, thank you.”

Teacake sat down abruptly and didn’t dare glance at his lawyer. He could read a room. The judge put on his glasses, picked up the sentencing report, and said six words.

“Thank you, Mr. Meacham. Nineteen months.”

By the time he got out of prison, Teacake’s post–high school résumé had exactly two things on it: a mediocre service record and his stint in Ellsworth Correctional. So the job at Atchison Storage was the best thing that could have possibly happened to him, even at $8.35 an hour. Corporate didn’t like a lot of employees to chase around and look after, so everybody did twelve-hour shifts, six to six, four days a week. Teacake was the new man and got nights, Thursday through Sunday. Truth is, he didn’t much like the few friends he still had around here, and he wasn’t looking to make any new ones unless maybe one of them was Her, so saying he’d take the social graveyard shift was no big deal. It might have been the reason he got the job. That, and the fact that he had all his teeth, which meant he was reasonably clean. Around here a full toothy smile was the only character reference you needed to sit at a reception desk and look after 650 locked underground storage units in the middle of the night. It was not, as they say, the science of rocketry.

Teacake always tried to get to work early on Thursdays because he knew Griffin liked to get a jump on his weekend buzz and would beat ass out of there a few minutes before his shift was over. Griffin knew he could bail early because he could count on how badly Teacake needed the job and for nothing to go wrong. Sure enough, as Teacake came around the long curve at the base of the bluffs, he could see Griffin’s sweaty bald head glowing in the setting sun as the thickneck popped open a Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boy, two or three of which were kept in his Harley Fat Boy’s saddlebags for—well, they were kept in the saddlebags at all times.

Griffin drained the beer, tossed aside the empty can, kicked the bike to life, and raised a middle finger to Teacake as he blew gravel out of there.

The thing about Griffin, and everyone would agree on this, was that he was an asshole. Teacake flipped the bird back at him, a more or less friendly gesture at this point, and it was what passed for human contact in his day. As Teacake’s Honda Civic passed the motorcycle, he breathed a sigh of relief that his boss had given him a miss, that he wouldn’t have to have that same goddamn conversation with him again.

But no such luck. He could see in the rearview Griffin was looping back, bringing the Fat Boy around the hood of the Civic. He pulled up next to the driver’s door, idling as Teacake got out.

“Well?” Griffin asked.

So, it would be that conversation again. “Told you, I can’t help you.”

“Knew you were stupid didn’t think you were that stupid.” Griffin spoke in staccato bursts, some words so fast they slammed together, others with odd pauses in between them, as if punctuation hadn’t been invented yet.

“I’m not stupid,” Teacake said. “Like at all. Okay? I would love to help you if I could, but it’s fucked up for me vis-à-vis my, you know, personal situation, and I’m just not gonna do it.”

“Okay so you’ll think about it.”

“No! I wish I didn’t even know about it.”

The truth was he knew only a part of it, the part about the two dozen fifty-five-inch Samsung flat screens that Griffin was selling off one by one, but Teacake guessed that where there was hot-stolen-consumer-goods smoke, there was hot-stolen-consumer-goods fire, and it was the last thing he needed in his life.

Griffin wasn’t giving up. “I’m asking you to buzz the gate for a few friends of mine every once in a while and use your master key what’s the big fuckin’ deal.”

“They don’t have accounts with us. I can’t let in anybody who doesn’t have an account.”

“Who’s gonna know?”

“I have heard these words before,” Teacake said. “You do it.”

“I can’t.” Griffin shrugged.

“Why not?”

“Nobody’s gonna fuckin’ come in the daytime and I don’t work nights.” Case closed. “Just do it, so you and me don’t have a problem.”

“Why do we gotta have a problem?” Teacake asked.

“’Cause you know stuff and you’re not in and if you’re not in and you know then there’s a problem. You know that.”

There was no getting rid of him and he was never going to drop it, so Teacake did what he’d been doing for the past six weeks, which was to slow play it and hope it would go away. Was it a strategy that had shown even the slightest signs of working? No, but that was no reason to give up on it. “Yeah, well, you know, I don’t know about this thing, or these things,” Teacake said, “or what have you. I mean, just, whatever, right? Okay?”

There was no imaginable way a person could have made it any vaguer than that, not without a law degree and decades of experience testifying before Congress. Teacake hoped it would do. He turned and walked toward the building.

Griffin revved the bike and pulled his goggles down. He shouted something at Teacake as he dropped the bike in gear, just two words, but here’s where Griffin’s essential nature as an asshole came in again—he’d hooked up a noncompliant straight-pipe exhaust on his bike to make it extra loud and annoying to the rest of the world, so there was really no shot at all that his words would be understood over it. To Teacake it sounded like he yelled “Monday’s bleeding,” but in fact what his boss had shouted was “Something’s beeping.”

Teacake would find that out for himself soon enough.

THE FACT THAT GRIFFIN WAS PUT IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING WAS A JOKE, because not only was he dumb, racist, and violent, but he was a raging alcoholic to boot. Still, there are alcoholics and there are functioning alcoholics, and Griffin managed to be the latter by establishing a strict drinking regimen and sticking to it with the discipline of an Olympic athlete. He was dead sober for three and a half days of the week, Monday through Wednesday, when he worked the first three of his four twelve-hour shifts, and he didn’t start drinking until just before six P.M. on Thursday. That, however, was a drunk that he would build and maintain with fussy dedication, starting right now and continuing through his long weekend until he passed out on Sunday night. Really, the Monday hangover was the only hard part, but Griffin had been feeling them for so long now they just seemed like part of a normal Monday morning. Toast, coffee, bleeding from the eyeballs—must be a new workweek.

Griffin was born over in Council Bluffs and spent six years working in a McDonald’s in Salina, where he’d risen to the rank of swing manager. It was a tight little job, not least because of the tight little high school trim that he had the power to hire and fire and get high with in the parking lot after work. Griffin was an unattractive man—that was just an objective reality. He was thick as a fireplug, and his entire body, with the notable exception of his head, was covered with patchy, multicolored clumps of hair that made his back look like the floor of a barbershop at the end of a long day. But the power to grant somebody their first actual paying job and to provide the occasional joint got him far in life, at least with sixteen-year-olds, and when he was still in his not-quite-midtwenties. Soon enough the sixteen-year-olds would wise up and the last of his hair would go and his “solid build” would give way to what could only be called a “fat gut,” but for those few years, in that one place, Griffin was a king, pulling down $24,400 a year, headed for a sure spot at Hamburger U, the McDonald’s upper management training program. And nailing underage hotties at least every other week.

Then those little fuckers, those little wise-ass shitheads who didn’t really need the job, who just got the job because their parents wanted them to learn the Value of Work, those little douchebags from over in the flats—they ruined everything. They were working drive-through during a rush when it happened. Why Griffin had ever scheduled them in there together is beyond him to this day; he must have been nursing a wicked hangover to let those two clowns work within fifty feet of each other, but they started their smart-ass shit on the intercom. They’d take orders in made-up Spanish, pretend the speaker was cutting in and out, declare today “Lottery Day” and give away free meals—all that shit that’s so hilarious because real people’s jobs don’t mean anything, not when you’re going to Kansas State in the fall with every single expense paid by Mommy and Daddy, and the only reason this job will ever turn up on your résumé is to show what a hardworking man of the people you were in high school. There they are, your fast-food work dues, fully paid, just like your $10,000 community service trip to Guatemala, where you slowed down the building of a school by taking a thousand pictures of yourself to post on Instagram.

On that particular day there was a McDonald’s observer from regional in the parking lot, a guy taking times on the drive-through and copious notes on the unfunny shenanigans going on in there. The good-looking creep—the smarmy one, not the half-decent redheaded kid who just went along with the bullshit, but the handsome fucker, the one who was sleeping with the window girl in the docksiders whom Griffin himself could never get to even look at him—that kid knew the guy was out there. And he sat on that nugget of information for a good half hour, until he finally smirked past the office and said, “Oh, hey, there’s a McDonald’s secret agent man parked out by the dumpster.”

Griffin was demoted to grill the next day, and he quit before he ended up at the fry station. He had the job at Atchison Storage three weeks later, and when the current manager there moved to Leawood to get married, Griffin inherited the fourteen-dollar-an-hour job, which, if he never, ever took a week off, meant $34,000 a year and three free days a week to get wasted. He also figured he could pull in another $10K in cash for housing the Samsungs and other items of an inconvenient nature that showed up needing a temporary home from time to time. The previous manager had clued him in about the side gig, which Griffin understood was a common perk of the self-storage management community. Hang on to this stuff, let people pick it up, take a cut of whatever it sells for. Zero risk. All in all, it was a decent setup, but not half as good as what could have been. He could have had a career in management, real management. Sitting at a desk all day so you can help a parade of freaks and hillbillies get access to their useless shit is a hell of a lot different from presiding over a constant parade of job-seeking teenage sluts. But you takes what you can takes. Atchison, Kansas, was not a buffet of career opportunity.

Despite everything that happened, Griffin’s only regret in life so far was that he could never get anyone to agree to call him Griff. Or G-Dog. Or by his goddamn first name. All the man wanted was a nickname, but he was just Griffin.

TEACAKE PUNCHED IN BEHIND THE FRONT DESK. HE HEARD THE BEEP, but he didn’t hear the beep; it was one of those things. Whatever the part of your brain is that registers an extremely low-volume, high-pitched tone that comes once every ninety seconds, it was keeping the news to itself for the first half hour he was at the desk. The faint beep would come, it would register somewhere in the back of his mind, but then it would be crowded out by other, more pressing matters.

First, he had to check the monitors, of which there were a dozen, to make sure the place was clean and empty and as barren and depressing as always. Check. Then a quick glance over at the east entrance to see if She had shown up for work yet (she had) and to think for a second whether there was any plausible reason to orchestrate running into her (there wasn’t). There was also the stink. Griffin was never a big one for tidying up, and the trash can was half full of Subway wrappers, including a former twelve-inch tuna on wheat, from the smell of it, and the reception area reeked of old lunch. Somebody would have to do something about that—twelve hours with tuna stench would be a long-ass shift. And finally, there was a customer, Mrs. Rooney, coming through the glass front doors, all frazzled and testy and all of a sudden.

“Hey, Mrs. Rooney, what up, you staying cool?”

“I need to get into SB-211.”

Teacake was not so easily deterred. “It’s hot out, right? Like Africa hot. Weird for March, but I guess we gotta stop saying that, huh?”

“I need to get in there right quick.”

In unit SB-211 Mary Rooney had twenty-seven banker’s boxes filled with her children’s and grandchildren’s school reports, birthday cards, Mother’s Day cards, Father’s Day cards, Christmas cards, and all their random notes expressing overwhelming love and/or blinding rage, depending on their proximity to adolescence at the time of writing. She also had forty-two ceramic coffee mugs and pencil jars made at Pottery 4 Fun between 1995 and 2008, when her arthritis got bad and she couldn’t go anymore. That was in addition to seven nylon duffel bags stuffed with newspapers from major events in world history, such as coverage of the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and a vinyl Baywatch pencil case that was stuffed with $6,500 in cash she was saving for the day the banks crashed For Real. There were also four sealed moving boxes (contents long forgotten), so much old clothing that it was best measured by weight (311 pounds), and an electric metal coffeepot from 1979 that sat on top of the mountain of other crap like a crown.

At this moment Mrs. Rooney had two shoeboxes under her arm and that look on her face, so Teacake buzzed the gate that led to the storage units with no further attempt at pleasantries. Let the record show, though, that the heat that day was most certainly worthy of comment: it had been 86 degrees in the center of town at one point. But whatever, Mary Rooney needed to get into her unit right quick, and between her stuff and Mary Rooney you had best not get.

Teacake watched her on the monitors, first as she passed through the gate, then into the upper west hallway, her gray perm floating down the endless corridor lined with cream-colored garage doors, all the way to the far end, where she pushed the elevator button and waited, looking back over her shoulder twice—Yeah, like somebody’s gonna follow you and steal your shoeboxes filled with old socks, Mary—and he kept watching as she got into the elevator, rode down two levels to the sub-basement, stepped off, walked halfway down the subterranean hallway in that weird, shuffling, sideways-like-a-coyote stride of hers, and slung open the door on unit SB-211. She stepped inside, clicked on a light, and slammed the door shut behind her. She would be in there for hours.

When you find yourself staring glassy-eyed at a bank of video monitors, watching as a moderately old lady makes her slow and deliberate way through a drab, all-white underground storage facility so she can get to her completely uninteresting personal pile of shit—when you do this with no hope whatsoever that this lady will do anything even remotely interesting, that is the moment you’ll know you’ve bottomed out, entertainment-wise. Teacake was there.

And then everything changed.

His eyes had fallen on the upper right-hand screen, in the corner of the bank of monitors, the one that covered the other guard desk, on the eastern side of the facility.

Naomi was on the move.

The cave complex was enormous and cut right through the heart of the bluffs, so to save the trucks from Kansas City having to drive all the way around Highway 83 to Highway 18 to Highway E, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had cut in two entrances, one each on the eastern and western sides of the massive chunk of rock. As a result, Atchison had two reception areas and two people working the place at any given time, although they had different sections to monitor, so running into your co-worker almost never happened.

Unless you made it happen, which Teacake had been trying to do for two weeks now, since the day Naomi started. Her schedule was erratic—he could never put his finger on when she was going to be working and when she wasn’t—so he’d tried to just keep an eye on the monitors and engineer a run-in, but it hadn’t happened yet. There’d been a few times she was doing rounds when he almost took a shot at it, but when she was on the move he never knew where she was headed, so he hadn’t come up with a scenario that would have given him quite the right degree of natural. The place was so big that the only way to make it work would be to check her location and then go into a full-on sprint to get near her while she was still even remotely in the area. It would have been more hunting her down than running into her. There’s something about showing up breathless and sweaty for a “coincidental” bump-in with an attractive woman that is bound to come off as scary.

Now, however, opportunity was pounding on his door with both fists, because Naomi was walking down the long eastern main hallway with a full trash can under her arm, and that could mean only one destination: the loading dock, where the dumpsters were.

Teacake grabbed the brimming trash can from next to the reception desk—Thank you Griffin, you pig, you bet I’ll clean up your disgusting lunch—and he took off for the loading dock.

Six

Three things Naomi Williams knew about her mother—that she was smart, athletic, and had horrible taste in men. Worse, Naomi knew that she herself was exactly the same in all three respects. The difference was that Naomi had seen her mother’s mistakes, she’d watched them play out, one after another, as easily predictable slow-motion car wrecks. She was keenly aware of where each and every twist of the wheel and stomp of the brake had caused the careening momentum of her mother’s life to go into an unrecoverable spin. She knew from careful observation how to drive a life in order to crash it, and she was not about to make the same desperate moves with her own. She kept up her grades, she had decent extracurriculars, and she knew what she wanted. She had planned and rehearsed her post–high school escape route so many times she could drive it in her sleep.

But then the night of graduation she got pregnant, and all that shit was out the window. Because she had to have the baby. It wasn’t her family who were the religious freaks; she and her mom and whoever her current stepfather was went to church on Christmas and for funerals, like most people did around here. But Mike’s family—Jesus Christ, no pun intended, the Snyders banged the God drum hard. That wasn’t unusual; there were a lot of religious people in this part of the country, ever since the big wave of evangelism that spread around the South and Midwest in the late 1970s. But the Snyders were born-again chest beaters, not the haunted, reliably depressive old kind of Catholic, but the joyful new kind of Catholic. They loved everybody. I mean, they really, actually loved you.

The Snyders had five kids, and though each one of them started out fairly normal and willing to grab the occasional beer or take a hit off a joint, by the time they hit fourteen or fifteen their parents had roped them into the family spiritual racket. It wasn’t like it was a scam or anything—they really meant it. Naomi thought it was cool at first; it was a lot of love and attention, way more than she got at home, and when she and Tara Snyder became best friends in eighth grade, Naomi started sleeping at their house two or three nights a week. Her own mother, distracted by her decaying third marriage, seemed grateful that Naomi had a place to go.

As the God love spread throughout the Snyder family over the next couple of years, Naomi and Tara managed to skate around it. Everybody’s got their familial role to play, and Tara was happy to be the wild child. She and Naomi drank too much, partied too much, and hung out with the wrong kinds of guys. But it was all working. Admittedly, it worked better for Naomi than for Tara. Naomi got mostly A’s in school without trying very hard, she could still score in the teens at a basketball game even if she’d been up most of the night drinking, and she’d already gotten into Tennessee-Knoxville with a kickass grant-and-aid package. Yes, she would finish with sixty grand in debt, but UT had a great veterinary program, and she’d be done and licensed and making at least that much per year in five and a half. If anybody had a right to party and sleep around a little, it was Naomi Williams. The God-loving stuff was something she was happy to fake, or even mean it a little sometimes, in exchange for the Snyder embrace, which was warm and undeniable, even in its sappiest and most suffocating forms.

God wasn’t the problem.

Mike Snyder was the problem.

He was two years older than Naomi and started hitting on her when she was about fifteen. Mike was something of a mythical figure around town. He had a reputation so thoroughly unearned that it defied reason, but there is almost no limit to what a person can achieve early in life when he has the total and unwavering support of a large and uncritical family. It’s later that it all turns back on you. But in his early years and in the Snyder view, Mike was an artist and interpretive dancer and brilliant musician. He was an immensely gifted child of God who must be given space and respect and freedom and money. Plus blow jobs, in Mike’s opinion. Naomi held off for a while, but he was so earnest, so tortured and pleading and clearly screwed up beyond his family’s ability to see, that she took pity on him. She knew it wasn’t right, it wasn’t how things were supposed to be, and looking back, she can’t believe she was ever so passive. Why did she feel this weird obligation to him that she didn’t feel to herself?

But she did. They’d go through periods where things would heat up and cool down; there were times she thought she loved him, times she was pretty sure she hated him, but most times she just felt vaguely bad for him. The kid knew he was an imposter even if he couldn’t come out and say it, and she wanted to make him calm down and leave her alone.

Mike never wanted intercourse, even when Naomi did, probably because he was tortured by the holdovers of the family’s start in rigid Catholicism. Mike was the oldest, the only one who’d gone to Catholic grade school, and the talons of guilt were sunk into him but good. There was no sexual encounter with Mike that was not wholly shot through with his crippling sense of shame. Naomi, whose own feelings toward physical love were about a billion times less complicated, didn’t press the issue. The last thing she needed was a short, unsatisfying coupling on the floor in the Snyder basement, followed by an image of Mike seared onto her eyeballs: Mike, naked, sobbing in the corner of the half-lit, deep-pile-carpeted basement; Mike, curled up over there next to the Addams Family pinball machine, rocking on his haunches and apologizing to God.

But that’s exactly what she got on graduation night.

Mike had been desperate to find some cultural or chronological benchmark by which he could move fucking Naomi into the realm of the Spiritually Acceptable, and he’d seized on her high school graduation with the fervor of a horny zealot. He planned his seduction for months. When the moment finally came, she was half-drunk, he was half-erect, and the result was All-World fumbly, but at least it was quick and now it was done. Naomi stared at him, over there in the corner, just a sad, twisted little kid, really. She still felt sorry for him, but mostly she felt relieved that this, at least, would never come up again.

So of course she got pregnant.

At that point Naomi made three huge mistakes in quick succession that altered the trajectory of her life. First mistake: she told Mike. Mike, she told, the Uncritically Loved Artistic Genius who was now twenty years old, still living in his parents’ house with no job, no plans for school, and no real artistic talent, a message that the world was in the process of tattooing on his forehead in the unloving and inconsiderate way that the world has with guys like him. But who else was she going to tell?

Strategically, it was hard to see that move for the gigantic tactical error that it was until it played out. Because Mike was overjoyed. Mike loved her. Mike wanted to marry her. And Mike immediately told his parents. That really threw Naomi; she rarely miscalculated when it came to guessing human behavior, but she missed this one by a mile. She’d assumed Mike—sobbing-naked-after-bad-sex Mike—would be overcome by remorse and do anything to keep his filthy secret to himself, but she didn’t consider the full impact of the adoration he had received all his short life. That, coupled with a terrifying early exposure to the ecstasy of the Catholic guilt-and-confession wash-and-dry cycle, made him a real loose cannon. The way Mike saw it, he’d been given a rare gift, the chance to do the right thing, and by God he was going to do it. His parents were similarly overjoyed—they had a couple of sinners to forgive, and it was time to get busy forgiving. The fact that Naomi was one of only a few hundred African Americans in Atchison to boot only made it better. It made them better.

Plus they’d all have a baby to raise. Everybody wins.

Mistakes two and three for Naomi fell fast after that first one, and they were things she failed to do rather than things she did. She failed to drive immediately to CHC in Overland Park to get an abortion, and she failed to tell Tara Snyder, who would have driven her immediately to CHC in Overland Park to get an abortion. Instead, she allowed the Snyder parents to sit her down and paint a picture of such joyous, multigenerational familial love around the presence of this new young life that it carried her through her first trimester and most of her second in conspiratorial silence. It wasn’t until her well-conditioned eighteen-year-old body finally started to show in the fifth month that she knew, for sure and for real, that she had made a massive mistake. But by then it was too late to do anything about it.

Sarah turned four the other day, and Naomi would be the first to tell you that she thanked God she had the kid after all. It was impossible to look at that little face and think otherwise, but that didn’t mean Naomi’s life was any better because things turned out this way. It was just different. Mike had taken off to join the Peace Corps within a week after the baby was born, and in truth that was a relief; he’d turned into a real pain in the ass once it sank in that Naomi wasn’t going to marry him, or sleep with him ever again. He would have made a lousy father anyway.

The Snyders made good on their offers to help raise the kid, but Naomi’s hand to God, they were morons, and she ended up living with her sister in a half-decent two-bedroom in a new development called Pine Valley, which had nary a pine tree nor a valley within its borders. But the apartment was clean, and things were okay. Naomi had gotten used to radical changes in her domestic situation with her mom, so what she was most comfortable with was something that was safe, temporary, and had an uncertain future. Boxes checked on all that. She’d started a job and classes at the community college once Sarah was old enough for day care, and if she played it all just right, she could be done with veterinary school in another six and a half years.

The most painful part of all of it was the part she never told anyone. Naomi Williams didn’t like her child. Yes, she adored her. Yes, she felt a deep and uncompromising love for her. But in moments when Naomi was honest with herself, she would silently admit that she didn’t really like her kid. Sarah could be the most loving child you’d ever met in your entire life, and also the most hateful, angry, and debilitating. For two years after Naomi’s father died of a sudden heart attack at age fifty-three, Sarah, just picking up on the concept of death, had brought up the sensitive issue to her young, grieving mother with the painful consistency of an abscessed tooth. Someone would mention fathers and the kid would say, “But you can’t ever talk to your daddy again, right, Mama?”

Or the subject of parents in general would come up, and Sarah would look at Naomi and say, “You only have one parent now, and your other one won’t ever come back, right, Mama?”

Or, shit, people would just mention that they’d called somebody on the goddamn phone, and the kid would say, “Your daddy won’t ever call you again, will he?”

Everybody would wince and laugh and say, “She’s trying to make sense of death, the poor thing!” but Naomi knew vindictiveness when she saw it. Her own kid didn’t like her, and she guessed that was okay, because it cut both ways. Yeah, yeah, she loved her, but… she didn’t know. Maybe someday. Right now, she just wanted to keep her head down, grab night shifts at the storage place whenever she could, and put a little more money away. Vet school. That was the prize. Both eyes on it at all times.

NAOMI DUMPED THE TRASH IN THE BIG BIN IN THE FAR CORNER OF THE loading dock and was turning to head back inside when she almost physically bumped into Teacake, who’d just burst through the security door from the other side of the complex, feigning a casual demeanor.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “You work here?”

Naomi glanced down at her uniform shirt, then back up at him. “Doesn’t everybody wear these?”

He laughed. “I’m Teacake.”

“Teacake?”

“Nickname.”

“Clearly,” she said. “You must have loved that book.”

“What book?”

“Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, somebody named you after a famous character in it.”

“Nah, that’s not it,” he said.

“How’d you get the name?”

“Long story, fairly annoying.”

It wasn’t like Naomi didn’t have time, so she just looked at him, waiting. Her brown eyes, Jesus, he never knew, you couldn’t tell from the video, those brown eyes, they didn’t look away, and did she ever blink? Her eyes told him to keep going, so he did.

“I was, like, sixteen or thereabouts, or what have you, me and some of my boys are rolling around. We got the munchies, so we pull into the Kickapoo on 83. Gonna get some Twinkies. I’m last one in, though, they scoop up all the good Hostess stuff and whatnot, all’s they got left is Sno Balls, and coconut makes me gag, right?”

“If you say so.”

“I do,” he said. “For real. Like, it closes off my throat? What’s that one dessert? It’s got, like, chocolate powder on it, I had it at an Italian restaurant in Wichita, and if you breathe in wrong, you suck up all the powder and it closes up your throat and you choke and you can’t breathe?”

“I can’t say I’ve ever had that experience.”

“Well, it’s weird. Coconut’s like that for me, but chunkier. Hang on, where was I? I wander sometimes. Like, verbally.”

“All the Hostess was gone.”

“Right! So the only thing left is something called an Aunt Sarah’s Teacake. I buy it, I eat it, it’s pretty good, so, I don’t know, is that a crime? I say I want to go back and get another one, my boys, they think this is some kind of hysterical funny shit, ‘He wants a teacake, he wants a teacake, hey, Teacake, where’s your teacake?’—you know, like, crazy brilliant witty shit like that starts flying around.”

“Were there any of those marijuana cigarettes that I’ve heard about involved in this situation?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Anyway, that was it, I was Teacake, and I haven’t heard my given name since.”

“Your parents call you Teacake?”

“My dad thinks it’s a riot.”

“Your mom?”

He shrugged. “Even longer story.”

She held out her hand. “I’m Naomi.”

He took her hand, trying not to look at the way her beautiful brown skin folded gently over her knuckles, not all gross and shit the way some knuckle skin can be, those weird crackly semicircles that look like an evil knothole in a tree in that one cookie commercial or whatever, but that’s how his mind was, it grabbed hold of something and ran off with it, and now he was holding her hand too long, thinking about knuckles, for Christ’s sake.

She reclaimed her hand with a light tug.

He tried to extend the moment any way he could. “I know you haven’t been here long, so if there’s anything, you know, I don’t know, like, that you don’t know, or whatever, just hit me up, okay?”

“Nothing I can think of, but thanks. Guess I gotta go.”

“Yeah, me too, super busy. This place, man. Always something, except it’s never anything.”

She smiled at him. It was hard not to find Teacake moderately charming. She noticed the badly inked snake wrapped around his right biceps, but let it pass without comment. His ink was his business, and she’d seen enough to know where that kind of sloppy tattoo probably came from.

He noticed her noticing, and he saw the slight change in the way she looked at him. A tiny lowering of her shoulders, the minutest tilt of the head away from him. It was always the same. If women were smart enough to know him, they were smart enough to not get to know him any better.

Shit. Why did he bother?

“See you around.” She headed for the door to the dock. He started to follow, but she glanced at him and the half-full trash can he was holding.

“Didn’t you want to dump that?”

“Oh, right. Yeah. Duh. Right.”

She turned back to the door and, busted, Teacake had no choice but to head for the dumpster. He was almost there when she called out, “Oh, there might be one thing.”

He turned back.

“Over on your side.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you hear a beeping sound?”

He looked at her for a long moment, and the voice in the back of Teacake’s brain that had been trying to get a hold of his attention finally broke through. See?! the voice said. I told you there was a beep!

Teacake looked at Naomi, his eyes lighting up with the realization. “Your side too?”

Seven

Teacake and Naomi stood stock-still in the middle of the floor on his side of the complex for a good forty-five seconds before he couldn’t take it anymore and had to say something. He usually found it hard not to fill silences, but being around her made it worse.

“I swear it was there before, maybe if we—”

She held up a hand, stopping him. Naomi had patience. Another five seconds went by in silence, then ten, then five more, and then there it was, right down at the bottom of human hearing levels, maybe 0.5 dB, if that, but the numbers didn’t matter, what mattered was that it absolutely positively was there.

Beep.

Their faces lit up in smiles, kids who’d just found their Easter baskets.

“Aha!” she shouted.

“I knew it!” he said, and they took off in opposite directions, he toward the north wall and she for the south.

“What are you doing?” Naomi asked as they passed each other in the middle of the floor.

“It was over here.”

She shook her head vigorously. “It was definitely over here,” and she planted herself, still again, listening by the far wall.

He called from across the room. “Lady, I heard this thing for half an hour after I got in, it didn’t register but it did, you know how sometimes you know something but you don’t, like, know it all the way, and then it just sort of pops up and—”

“Will you please be quiet?”

“I’m saying. This wall.”

“You are very chatty.”

“I know. It’s a thing. I—”

“Shh.”

He shushed. They stood still again. They waited the full rest of the minute.

Beep.

There it was again, like a starter’s signal, and they took off, each to the other’s wall, passing in the middle of the floor again, looking at each other with incredulity.

“What are you doing now?” she wanted to know.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s over here, you were right!”

They reached each other’s former positions, grinning. It was kind of fun, or a hell of a lot better than sitting alone and staring at their monitors all night, anyway. They waited again, trying not to giggle, failing a bit, but knowing they had thirty seconds to spare. Their eyes caught, both their faces wide and childlike, and wouldn’t it have been nice if the beep never came again and this moment could just last and last and last and—

Beep.

This time nobody moved. Teacake laughed.

“What?”

“I’m afraid to say.”

“You think you were right the first time.”

He nodded. Naomi looked up at the vaulted cement ceiling above them. It was steepled, like a roof but a shallower angle. The rake of the cement was funneling the noise, scooting it along the surface of the stone before dropping it down on opposite sides of the room.

“We’re both right,” she said. She crept to the center point of the room, trying not to make any noise, and waited.

Beep.

Her head snapped in the direction from which the sound had come. Now she had a bead on it. She eased over to the reception desk, reached behind the counter, and buzzed herself through the gate. She went to the wall ten feet behind the desk, laid her ear against it, and waited.

BEEP.

The sound was most definitely coming from behind this wall, but the other side was just another corridor, running along the interior of the first row of storage units in the ground-level section. It wasn’t till you walked back through the doorway, into the reception area, and stopped to look at the wall in profile, so to speak, that you noticed the extra space. There was about eighteen inches more than there should have been between the wall in the reception area and the wall on the other side.

“Why would anybody do that? Leave empty space like that?” Teacake asked.

“Insulation?”

“Between two interior walls? That’s some fucked-up useless insulation.”

“What is this, drywall?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure?”

“I have hung my share of it.”

BEEP.

He looked at her. “You want to call Griffin?”

“Under no circumstances do I want to call Griffin.”

He caught the extra meaning in it and was disappointed. “He tried that shit already?”

She shrugged. “He’s a pig.”

“Could have told you that.”

BEEP.

She looked at him. “So what do you want to do?”

“Well, what I want to do is take that picture down,” he said, gesturing to a large framed aerial photograph of the caves, circa 1940s, that hung more or less over the exact spot that the beeping was coming from, “pick up that chair over there”—now he pointed at the uncomfortable-as-hell metal office stool that was parked behind the desk—“smash it through that cheap-ass three-eighths-inch gypsum Sheetrock, and see what the fuck is beeping back there.”

“I’m okay with that if you are.”

He laughed. “I said that’s what I want to do, not what I’m gonna do.”

“Oh.”

They looked at the wall for a while. It beeped again.

She couldn’t take it. “Oh, come on. We can hang the picture back up over the hole to cover it and bring in a piece of Sheetrock tomorrow. I’ll help you patch it up. Nobody’ll know the difference.”

“Why would we do that?” he asked.

“Curiosity. Boredom.”

“You get bored, it makes you want to smash through walls?”

“Apparently. Don’t you?”

He thought about it. Not particularly, but She was asking. Why did people always come to him with their shit, and why did he usually do it? He was going to get on top of that question real soon, but first he ran some quick numbers in his head.

“Four-by-eight piece of drywall is fifteen bucks,” he said. “Plus a roll of joint tape, that’s another eight or nine.”

“I will give you twelve dollars and we can use a sampler can of paint from the paint store. It’s easy.”

“All so we can see a smoke alarm with a dead battery.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe we see something else.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we don’t know. That’s the thing.”

“I need this job.”

“You’re not gonna lose it.”

“No, I have to have the job.”

“I get it,” she said.

He was getting heated. “No, you don’t. It’s, like, a condition.”

“I said I get it. I’ve lived here all my life, I know what a parole condition is, and I know where black-and-gray tattoos with shitty ballpoint ink get done. Ellsworth, right? I mean, I’m hoping it was Ellsworth.”

“It was.”

“Good. So you’re not violent. Now will you please pick up that chair and throw it through the wall for me? Please?”

She fixed her brown eyes on him, and he looked into them.

THE LEGS WERE SPINDLY METAL AND THEY WENT THROUGH THE DRYWALL easy enough, and the biggest chunk of gypsum came off when he pulled it back out. The real challenge was not to pull too much, so they wouldn’t have to replace more than one panel. They didn’t need the chair after that first blow; they used their hands, carefully tearing away a few larger pieces until there was a hole big enough for Teacake to get his head and shoulders through.

There was a space back here all right, about sixteen inches of gap between this wall and the far one, and it was dark except for a red flashing light at eye height, three feet to his left.

BEEP.

It was much louder now, and a tiny light strobed white in sync with the sound. Teacake and Naomi looked across the concealed interior wall, checking it out. It was covered with dials and gauges, long out of use and cut off from power. They were set in an industrial-looking corrugated metal framework of some kind, painted in the sickly institutional green used back in the ’70s because some study said it was supposed to be soothing. Or maybe the paint was just cheap.

BEEP.

Both their gazes turned back to the flashing light. There was writing etched into a panel underneath it, but they couldn’t quite read it from here.

“You got a flashlight on your phone?” he asked Naomi.

She dug her phone out of her pocket, turned on the flashlight feature, and shined the beam through the hole, but they still couldn’t read the words underneath the panel.

“Hang on to the thing,” Teacake said. He put one foot on the stool, grabbed the edges of the hole, and hoisted himself up and through without waiting for a response. The stool pitched and started to fall. Naomi caught it, but not before it had knocked Teacake off balance and dumped him, upside down, into the space between the walls.

“I said hang on to the thing!”

“Yeah, I didn’t say ‘okay.’ Traditionally, you want to wait for that.”

Teacake sneezed six times. When he recovered, he looked up from his semi-inverted position and saw Naomi’s hand holding out a Kleenex through the hole in the wall. He looked at it, impressed. Who has a Kleenex in this situation?

“Thank you.” He took it and blew his nose. He offered the soiled Kleenex back to her.

“You can go ahead and keep that one,” she said. “Can you get up?”

He shimmied himself into an upright position and scooted sideways down the wall through the tight space, moving toward the flashing panel.

“Shine the light over there,” he said.

She did, moving the beam onto the panel beneath the blinking light.

He read it. “‘NTC Thermistor Breach. Sub-basement Level Four.’”

From the hole, she turned her light on him.

He winced. “Could you get that out of my eyes?”

“Sorry. Thermistor what?”

“‘NTC Thermistor Breach.’ There’s a whole bunch of stuff back here.”

She moved the light back onto the board and he looked up and down it, where a number of other monitors and displays were stacked.

“‘Airtight Integrity,’ ‘Resolution’ with a plus sign that’s, like, underlined—”

“Plus or minus.”

“Okay, ‘plus or minus 0.1 degree Celsius.’” Naomi kept the light moving and he read the stamped letters under each of the deactivated gauges and displays. “‘Cold Chain Synchronicity,’ ‘Data Logger Validation,’ ‘Measurement Drift Ratio,’ ‘LG Internal,’ ‘LG Probe,’ ‘LE1 Probe,’ ‘LE2 Probe,’ ‘LD Internal,’ Jesus, there’s, like, twenty of ’em.” He turned back to the gauge right in front of him as it beeped and flashed again. “But this is the only one that’s flashing.”

“NTC Thermistor Breach.”

“Yeah. You know what that means?”

She thought a moment. “A thermistor is part of an electrical circuit. There’s two kinds, the positive kind, their resistance rises with temperature, and the negative kind, their resistance falls if the temperature goes up.”

“So it’s a thermometer?”

“No. It’s a circuit that’s reactive to temperature.”

“Like a thermometer.”

“It is not a thermometer.”

He turned and looked at her. “What are you, all science-y and shit?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘and shit,’ but I take a lot of science. Prerequisites for vet school.”

The alarm beeped again, and Teacake turned back to it. “This is thirty or forty years old. How come it’s still on?”

She shrugged. “Guess they wanted to keep an eye on temperature.”

BEEP.

“Why?” he asked.

“Good question. And what the hell is sub-basement four?” She shined her light in his eyes again. “I thought there was only one.”

Eight

Mooney had been driving around with the bodies in the trunk for two days and they were starting to reek. At first, he’d been able to pretend the smell wasn’t there, or that it was the brewery on the other side of the river, or maybe it was that weird syrupy smell that had been blowing in and out of the river valley for the past couple of years, or even that it was he himself, just smelling like a man during a heat wave, as one does in these complicated climatic times we live in. But he knew it wasn’t any of that.

Mooney never did well in the heat, which was what had made Uganda such an odd choice, but hey, you don’t always choose your path in life; sometimes it chooses you. Right now, life had selected him to be the custodian of the mortal remains of the two unlucky bastards in the trunk of his car, and so far, he was doing a shitty job of it. A final goddamn resting spot was harder to find than you’d think, once you ruled out all official channels (for obvious reasons), garbage dumps (out of respect for the dead), and anyplace that smacked of future housing or commercial development (for fear of eventual disinterment). That didn’t leave a hell of a lot of Pottawatomie County open to surreptitious burial, and Mooney was starting to wonder if the whole car wasn’t going to have to end up in the river when he saw the ad for the self-storage place on TV.

The first and most obvious thought that crossed his mind was that he’d buy some kind of airtight vault, seal them both up inside it, wheel the thing into the smallest possible unit they had, lock the door, toss the key, and never think about it again. But on his first scouting mission out to Atchison Storage, earlier this afternoon, the smell had really started to settle itself into the metal and fabric and fiber of the car, and he just didn’t see anything made by God or man that would hold that stench in forever and ever. Except for Mother Earth herself.

Plus there were the storage bills: $49.50 a month? To hell with that. He’d buy a couple gallons of gas and torch them in his parents’ backyard first.

He’d turned around in the driveway and was on his way out of the eastern side of the storage place when he saw the wooded glade, up on the hillside near the crest of the bluff. Immediately, he knew the two rotting corpses in the trunk had just found their personal Valhalla. He hiked up onto the bluff, took a look around at the trees and the view and the peacefulness under the whispering pines, and he hugged himself. It was something he did sometimes; he’d wrap both arms around himself and squeeze, sometimes making a little cooing noise, just something to let him know he was alive and he was loved, even if only by himself at times. But from tiny acorns great oak trees of love do grow, right?

This was the spot. He’d treat those poor dead souls properly, dig them a hole down under the frost line right here on this glorious, unbuildable bluff that overlooked the river on one side and a mountain of rock on the other. Those were two natural wonders that he could count on to stay exactly where they were, unchanged, for a good forty or fifty thousand years. The corpses would be undisturbed.

Yes. This place would do nicely.

So now he was back, under cover of darkness and with a shovel. He pulled off the driveway fifty yards short of the eastern entrance and killed the lights around ten P.M. There was just one car down below in the parking lot, probably the guard’s, and it looked kind of familiar. But nobody guards an unlit bluff on the wrong side of the Missouri River, so Mooney figured he was safe over here.

He got out of the car, went around to the trunk, and winced at the foul smell that was seeping out of the cracks along the edges of the metal. He turned his head away, took an enormous gulp of fresh air, turned back, opened the trunk in one swift motion, and got smacked in the face with the most assaultive stench he’d ever smelled in his entire life. It wasn’t just that it smelled bad—you couldn’t just say bad, that didn’t come anywhere close to covering it. It’s that the smell hurt, it was so powerful. It had a thickness to it, a body and form; the smell was all hands and they were all over him, grabbing him by the face and throat and nostrils and lungs and forcing their thick fingers into him.

Mooney snapped his head away as fast as he could, barely getting a glimpse of the rapidly decaying contents of the trunk. He fumbled around for the shovel. It should have been right on top, that was where he’d left it, how could it have moved, Jesus Christ, where was the goddamn shovel? Face still averted, he slapped his hand around the trunk a few times, an angry dad swatting at the kids in the back seat while trying to keep his eyes on the road, but every place his hand landed was worse than the place before—that part was wet, and this part was hot (not just warm, mind you, but hot)—but wait, here it was, hard and wooden and shovel! His fingers closed around the handle and he yanked it out of the trunk, slammed the lid, and practically collapsed, gasping for air.

This couldn’t be right. This smell could not be normal. Then again, what experience did he have? What did he know, maybe this was how it went down when you died. If it was, quick mental note: he definitely wanted to eat better and exercise four or five times a week from now on, because death was no party. Okay. When did he fire the last kill shot, what was that, two days ago? Less than that; he’d loaded both corpses into the car at two in the morning on Wednesday—that’s forty-four hours. How fast does a body decompose? He actually pulled out his phone and was about to google that very question when the essential insanity of that act somehow managed to announce itself through the fog of his stench-choked brain. He put the phone away and started the walk up the hill with the shovel to dig the grave.

He was ten steps away when he heard the first thump. He turned.

It had come from the trunk of the car.

Nine

Teacake knew from bitter experience that your head could get only so small. Everything else can squeeze, suck in, twist around; people can get pretty sideways when they want to or have to. But with your head there was no negotiation.

Teacake had direct knowledge of this from the fence that had run along the back of his high school. At the edge of the fence there was a pipe, set just a few inches too far off the brick facade, that left a nine-inch gap between the school building and freedom. Determined weed smokers used to be able to get off the bus in the morning, cruise through the front doors of the school, sign in for homeroom, and split out the rear fire doors before the handles got chained for the day (totally illegal, by the way). From there it was just a matter of a shoulder shimmy, a gut suck-in for Big Jim Schmittinger, and a willingness to scrape the shit out of both ears as you popped your head through to the other side. If you did all that, boom, you were loose in the open field behind the school building, where you could blaze away in peace. The size of his skull was the main reason Teacake, as toasty a burnout as you would ever find, actually managed to swing a 3.5 GPA in high school—his head was just too goddamn big to get through the fence. So Teacake never got high during the day. It does wonders for your concentration. Some of the math and science even stuck, and when he joined the navy he remembered just enough of it to qualify for duty on a ballistic missile sub. It was a plus. At least he had the same bunk every night.

Nothing he did manage to learn about Lord of the Flies, though, was of use in his present situation, where his great big fucked-up head had done him in again. Stuck, he called out to Naomi from the space between the walls.

“What about Vageline? You got any Vageline?”

“Do I have any what?”

“That greasy shit you put on your lips! Get me out of here!”

“Are you trying to say ‘Vaseline’?”

“Whatever the fuck it’s called, Naomi, get some lotion or grease or butter and get me out of here!”

She’d been trying like hell not to laugh for the better part of the last few minutes, and it was a battle she now lost.

“Oh, yeah, no, definitely, yes, do that,” Teacake sputtered. “Yeah, laugh, ’cause this shit is, like, hilarious.”

He was still in the gap in the walls, and he’d wedged himself in good, in the precisely nine-inch space between two I beams. He’d done well up to that point, sliding and twisting and pretzeling his body through the tiny open area toward what looked like an enormous map at the far end of the control panel wall. It was dark inside the gap and hard to tell, but it looked like a map, anyway, and he had been only a few feet from it when he’d gotten stuck between the beams, and the entirety of his high school experience came flooding back to him. Now he couldn’t move his goddamn head.

“Lube! You gotta have some lube, right? Throw me it!”

Naomi took a moment to make sure she’d understood him properly before she poked her head in through the hole in the wall.

“I’m sorry, did you just suggest that I carry lubricant around with me?”

“I didn’t— I wasn’t—”

“’Cause that’s some offensive shit, Teacake.”

“I’d like to apologize and start over.”

“I mean, I don’t know, you got any dental dams in your pocket?”

“Naomi. Um, ma’am. I’m kind of freaking out here.”

She took a step back, looked up and down the length of the wall, and thought.

“Are you good for another twelve bucks?” she asked. “Although we wouldn’t have to buy the roll of tape again.”

Teacake was in no position to negotiate. “Do what you gotta do, lady. Just promise me you’re not gonna pull on me, because at this point I think if the angle’s wrong my left ear is just gonna tear right the—”

The legs of the metal stool crashed through the drywall three feet in front of him and startled him so badly he wrenched his body backward, ripping himself free from the head vise. He fell again, on his ass, in the narrow space that he was now more than ready to evacuate. As he got to his feet, he saw Naomi, standing in the new opening (that repair was going to cost more than twelve bucks, by the way; she’d hit a seam right between two panels and they were gonna need three four-by-eights now, minimum). She was staring in amazement at the wall beyond.

“Holy shit.”

Teacake got to his feet, rubbing his ears in pain, and slid forward till he was alongside her. The broken panels had opened up a section directly in front of the maplike thing he’d been trying to move closer to, and it was bigger and more detailed than he’d been able to see by the light of Naomi’s phone’s flashlight. It was an enormous, hyperdetailed floor plan depicting every room, conduit, pipe, and piece of wiring in what must have been the old military storage complex. There were hundreds of LED lights painstakingly placed all over the map marking God knows what, but they were all long since deactivated or burned out.

Except for one, all the way down at the bottom right corner. Its tiny bulb strobed white, in sync with the light on the warning panel nearby.

Teacake came over to the schematic, kicked out the remnants of the broken drywall, and stepped out of the inner space, moving back into the reception area. He got a few feet away from the thing to get a better look. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Naomi. She looked at him.

“Your ear is bleeding.”

He reached up to his right ear, but she meant the left. She pulled another Kleenex from the pack she kept in her pocket, wiped his ear gently, folded it over and pressed it there. “Hold that.”

He did. He looked at her.

No one had put a bandage on one of Teacake’s wounds with their own hand since he was eleven years old. It almost moved him to tears. In fact, he thought he felt the first sting of a couple of them in the corners of his eyes. That was the last thing he needed, to bust out crying in front of her, what is the matter with me?

“What’s the matter?” she asked. She didn’t miss much.

“Huh?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Just—ouch. Whatever.”

She turned and looked at the map. “It’s a schematic.”

She leaned through the wall and ran her hands along it, starting at the top, which was the ground floor. “How many levels are there supposed to be in this place?”

“Three. Main floor and two belowground.”

“There used to be six. And they watched this stuff.”

“Yeah, it was military storage, since World War II. You know, weapons and what have you. They cleaned it out and sold it about twenty years ago.”

“And they must have sealed up everything below here.” She ran her hand down the schematic to the lower levels. “Which was the part they really cared about. See all the sensors? They’re all in bunches down here.”

She was right. By far the greatest concentration of LEDs was on the lower three levels, the additional sub-basements. SB-2 and SB-3 were apparently sealed off and all their monitor lights were dark. The single flashing white bulb was on the very bottom level, marked SB-4. But there was a large blank space, two feet of map at least, between SB-3 and SB-4. Tiny scribbles of rock shapes seemed to indicate it was earthen.

Teacake studied it, trying to figure it out. “Who builds a sub-basement a hundred feet below the other basements? You’d have to dig the whole thing out, build the bottom floor, then fill in again above it. That makes no sense.”

“You wanna go down and see it?”

He looked at her. “How? It’s sealed.”

“That.” She pointed to the far left side of the map, where a thin vertical column rose up from SB-4, through the earthen portion, and skirted along the edges of the other sub-basement levels. It was narrow, with hatch marks drawn evenly between the long parallel lines all the way up.

“What is it?”

“A tube ladder.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s shaped like a tube, and it looks like a ladder. How else would they get down there?” She pointed to the hatchings. “Look, these are the rungs.”

He was impressed. “You must go to college, right? It’s a waste if you don’t.”

“I go as much as I can, yeah.”

“Then you should be smart enough to not wanna go down there.”

“C’mon,” she said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in years. This is a night out for me.”

“Jesus. That’s depressing. You don’t go out?”

“Not really.”

“What about just, like, for a beer?”

“I don’t drink.”

He persisted. “Not even for one beer?”

“That would be drinking.”

“You never go out for one beer?”

“This is getting off the point.”

But he was determined. “What about a coffee?”

“I thought you were fun, Teacake. You started out fun.”

“Me? I’m totally fun. I’m huge fun. You’re the one who just said your best night out in years is vandalizing your workplace.”

“I have an inquisitive nature.” She held up her phone and snapped a picture of the schematic.

“Yeah, I can see that, and that’s cool, and I’m, like, cooperating. You look at me with those eyes you got and say, ‘Please throw your chair through the wall,’ and you know, I’m on board, I throw my chair through the wall, and then you say, ‘Go crawl into that weird space and check it out,’ still good, I’m into it, but then you come at me like, ‘Go climb down the tube ladder a couple hundred feet into the blocked-off part of the fucked-up government shit and see why the thermistor alarm is going off,’ and, you know, a man’s gonna take a second to think things through, you feel me?”

She waited a moment. “You like my eyes?”

“In fact, I do.”

“That’s very sweet.”

“My point is, I’m kinda easy to talk into things, that’s why I got the problems I got. People say shit like, ‘Wait in the car and keep it running, I just gotta run in and do something,’ or ‘I know this guy in Dousman needs a favor,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, sure, I just point the gun at my foot and pull the trigger, is that what I do?’ Bang! ‘Ow! What a surprise, I blew my toe off. Should I do it again? Okay!’ But I have spent a lot of time working on my personal self and talking to smart people and learning to ask what’s good for me and to not just dive into shit. Which is what I am doing right now, okay? I am taking a fucking moment.”

“I understand. I respect that.”

“It is very, very important to learn to tell everybody in the whole world to fuck off all the time. It took me forever to learn that.”

“I’m not sure that was the exact message you were supposed to—”

But he glared at her, so she stopped and recharted her course.

“I’m sorry. I get you had some bad stuff happen to you. I was not being cool.”

“Okay. Good. That’s more like it.” He took a deep breath and let it out again, then pulled a flashlight off a battery charger on the wall next to the desk and headed for the gate that led deeper into the building.

“You coming or what?”

Ten

Mooney must have stared at the trunk of his car for a solid five minutes. The thumps would come in bursts, just one or two, randomly, then a whole furious burst of them, till it sounded like half a dozen Dutchmen in there with wooden shoes were clogging on the inside of the metal trunk lid. The whole car would rock like crazy, then it’d stop again and everything would go still for ten or fifteen seconds while Mooney pondered the impossible nature of what was occurring. He’d use that moment to question his sanity, his judgment, his ability to correctly perceive reality, his past history with drug use and abuse, and then the dancing Dutchmen would start back up again.

Of course, it was not possible. Not in the slightest. Dead things don’t come back to life; decaying corpses don’t reanimate. But there was something alive in his trunk, two somethings, wedged in there with the spare tire and the toolbox and the gun case, and they weren’t having any fun. In the end, it was Mooney’s essential decency that made him open the trunk, his goodness and kindness as a human being. Because the level of suffering going on three feet away from him was intense, and what kind of person allows another living thing to endure that sort of agony? What kind of person stands by and does nothing? Mooney didn’t open the trunk because he was stupid, and he didn’t open the trunk because he was scared, and he didn’t open it so that he could kill them again. He opened the trunk because we are all God’s creatures.

Thing of it is, even God would have taken one look at the cat and said, “That shit is not mine.”

The trunk was only about six inches open when the first paw came out, claws flexed wide, slashing at the air like it wanted to rip the whole atmosphere a new one. Mooney fell back at that point and the cat did the rest. It leaped straight up, banging into the trunk lid and sending it swinging open the rest of the way. The cat landed on all fours, still in the trunk, and it snarled at him—a look of such profound, intense hatred that Mooney’s response came without thought of any kind, a purely synaptic reflex.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Yes, Mooney apologized to the cat, and it really was the only sensible response. The animal was a mess, and it was all his doing. He’d put the .22 slug through the side of the cat’s head, and even that small caliber was enough to blow off the other side of its face. Now the half cat would never wow the ladies again. Its fur was dark and matted with blood, its eyes a sickly bright yellow, and, unless Mooney was hallucinating (which he still imagined—hoped, really—was entirely possible), its midsection was expanding as he watched.

But the cat looked good compared to the deer it was standing on.

Tuesday night had started out substantially better than this for Mooney, just over forty-eight hours ago. In need of a little distraction, he’d taken himself to the movies, with a real quick stop at Turdyk’s Liquor & Cheese first, where he’d picked up a six-pack of Bartles & Jaymes Exotic Berry wine coolers. He didn’t love flavored booze, but they were the only wine coolers that were cold and came in plastic bottles. The plastic ones had screw-off tops and didn’t make a racket if you happened to drop, say, the fourth one on the floor of the movie theater. At his last Mooney’s Private Movie Night & Wine Party, a bottle had slipped through his popcorn-greased hands, and the excruciating clatter of it hitting the cement and rolling down the sloping theater floor felt like it had lasted half an hour. Just about every head in the place turned, and that kind of silent group disapproval was something he could have gotten at home for free.

So, he was no dummy. Plastics.

Wine coolers go down easy; the problem is the sugar headache, but if you bring five or six Advil, you’re fine. Mooney was a big fan of the A vitamin and never left the house without it, so by the time he drove away from the Regal 18 on Highway 16, he was more than fine. He had a nice buzz, and the movie wasn’t half-bad either: mindless enough that you could tune out for whole chunks and not get lost, but not so stupid that you felt bad about yourself afterward. He could have done without some of the language.

But the best part of all was he still had one wine cooler left for the drive home, and it wasn’t even completely warm. Life could be kind. He waited till he got through all three stoplights in town before he opened it. Mooney had a hard-and-fast rule: he never, ever drank while driving in the busy part of town, and he rarely texted or went online behind the wheel unless, you know, it was going to be super quick. He was a concerned citizen who cared about his fellow man, so he didn’t crack the plastic lid on his sixth wine cooler until he’d hit the long flat dark stretch of 16, where it started the big bend.

You’re going to want to, but you just can’t blame the accident on the Bartles & Jaymes. That wouldn’t be fair. Yes, Mooney’s blood alcohol was flirting with 0.15 and his reaction time was down, but 250 pounds of aggressively stupid animal that springs out of nowhere and stands frozen on the center stripe of a dark highway, right in the middle of an unlit curve, I mean, that asshole has to be factored into the equation too. Character is destiny, and that dumbass deer—sorry, that beautiful creature of God—that thing’s character was drawn within the limitations of a non-sentient brain. It stood there, unmoving, as the car closed the last fifty feet on it; it just hunched there, watching Death come hurtling at it, staring at the car like, well, like exactly what it was, there’s a goddamn good reason for that cliché, so maybe it was fitting that the first thing that hit the deer was the headlight.

The rest was a gruesome blur, and Mooney panicked and blacked out most of it, as he did sometimes when things got weird. Next thing he knew he was standing over the wounded animal on the shoulder, staring down at its broken, twitching form and holding his father’s .22 pistol. He kept it in the trunk for situations just like this, which, believe it or not, were not all that uncommon around here. Mooney knew what he had to do. It wasn’t hard; you point the thing and pull the trigger and put the beast out of its misery, that’s what any decent human being would do, and there was no law against it, neither God’s nor man’s. The animal was clearly suffering, its mouth opening and closing soundlessly, steam rising from its blood as it spilled out onto the asphalt, still hot from the exceptional heat of the day.

Just kill it already, but Mooney had never killed before, never knowingly; he didn’t even like swatting flies, it tended to send him off into flights of creepy reverie, reflections on his place in the universe. He’d always figured he was a Buddhist at heart—weren’t they the ones who were on about reincarnation all the time, or was that the Hindus? Whichever. The ones who cared, the ones who loved all living things. That was him. But now here he was, faced with the—

BANG. The gun went off while he was still midthought, and it hit the wounded animal in the gut. It screamed.

Oh, great, now I gutshot the fucking thing—how can this have happened? I am a warm and sensitive and humane person and— Oh my God, what is that horrible sound this disgusting animal is making at me now? I feel bad enough, what is it, hacking spit at me? And Mooney filled with some other feeling, not guilt, not tortured reflection, not the milk of human kindness, but a new one, for him.

Rage. Pure, undiluted rage at this senseless animal that had ruined his night, his mental state, and the front left end of his car. He raised the gun again, put it to the deer’s brain this time, and blasted away, more than once, way more than once. In spirit it was more of a murder than a mercy killing, if anybody was keeping karmic score.

The crying jag Mooney had afterward in the car lasted a good ten or fifteen minutes. Truth is, it felt pretty good as guilt flooded through his veins again; it was at least a familiar feeling, much better than the out-of-body experience he’d been having before that. Now, what to do? You can’t leave a dead deer by the side of the road with three broken legs, a bullet in its stomach, and four more in its head. That’s just, I mean, that’s sick. Mooney needed time to think, which meant that deer had to get off the shoulder of the road and into the trunk of his car.

The sight of Mooney, 180 pounds and half in the bag, trying to get a dead, gangly one-eighth-ton deer into the trunk of his car would have made for some pretty brilliant silent comedy. It may well have taken all night if not for Tommy Seipel, the driver of a 2015 Lexus. Tommy saw what was happening, pulled over immediately, asked one question—

“You loaded?”

—and, sensing Mooney’s answer would be in the affirmative, threw his own considerable bulk into helping hoist the mangled deer into the trunk. He slammed the lid on it, wiped his bloody hands on Mooney’s T-shirt, spoke a handful more words—

“I’d get the fuck outta here if I was you.”

—and went back on his way. Mooney occasionally knew good advice when he heard it, and this was the best advice he’d heard in years. He jumped behind the wheel, slammed his door, and did as told, driving off with the dead deer in his trunk.

As he drove—where to, exactly?—he started thinking about the deer in those last gutshot moments, when it seemed to be spitting at him, and he got enraged all over again. What exactly had gotten to him about that? Was it the temerity of the animal to accuse him of not being able to handle so simple an act as a mercy killing? Was that thing calling him inept, unable, telling him he couldn’t hold up his end of the deal? Something had triggered a rush of bad, inadequate memories, but he’d taken care of that, hadn’t he? He’d answered any questions quite definitively, with one or two or, okay, fine, four more squeezes of the trigger. No, I am capable. Quite capable, thank you. I settled that shit but good, and hey, what about my parents’ fucking cat while I’m at it?

Mr. Scroggins was fourteen years old and had been sick for the last, say, twelve of those. He was a diseased and expensive pet; the bills from the animal hospital were about $400 just since the beginning of this calendar year. Though his father would have taken out a second mortgage to keep that ugly cat in the world, Mooney knew the toll the financial strain was taking on his mother. Plus, c’mon, life couldn’t be any kind of fun for Mr. Scroggins either, all riddled with disease and shit. Mooney was headed home with a dead deer in the trunk, a loaded .22 that he knew how to use, and a head full of righteous killing fury.

He liked it.

Mr. Scroggins was executed down at the public lake access boat ramp, where the shot might not be heard. Mooney tossed him in the trunk with the mangled deer, and so began the forty-four-hour odyssey of manly pride and horrified remorse that eventually brought Mooney to the grassy knoll here at Atchison Storage. All he wanted to do was give these two innocent dead animals the Christian burial they deserved.

But now Mr. Scroggins was alive again, standing on top of the once-dead deer in the trunk of the car, and he seemed royally pissed off.

The deer, whose mortal injuries had been far worse, flailed all four legs at once, trying to stand up in the trunk, but its broken limbs collapsed underneath it. Mr. Scroggins staggered off him but caught himself on the rear lip of the trunk and clung there, hissing. It had probably been a long ride for these two, and they were sick of each other.

Motivated by something other than normal locomotive powers, the deer vaulted itself out of the trunk. It fell flat onto the gravel, its legs splaying outward, cracking again—there had to be a couple new breaks in there somewhere. Then it hauled itself up on all fours, bounded up the hill, and just kept running upward, disappearing into the night.

Mooney had staggered back when the trunk first flew open, and good thing he’d put six or seven feet between himself and the car, because Mr. Scroggins just missed him when he sprang off the rear bumper, claws extended, half jaw snarling and spitting.

Apparently, Mooney’s apology had not been accepted.

Mr. Scroggins landed on all four paws, turned as if in reaction to a sound, and ran up the hill in the same direction the deer had gone. But the cat stopped at the first tree he reached, a tall pine, and threw himself at it, catching hold of the bark and starting to climb. Mooney got up and walked closer, staring in amazement as the cat climbed the tree with incredible determination. There were no stops, no hesitation, no second thoughts, only upward movement. The branches thinned near the top, but still the dead cat climbed, swaying on this one, nearly breaking that one, but losing no speed and no sense of purpose. He reached the top of the tree, the trunk spindly up there, but still strong enough to hold an eight-pound cat. Possibly seven and a half after recent events.

Mr. Scroggins finally stopped at the top when there was nowhere else to go. He paused and took a look around, as if to make sure that this was it, there really were no new mountains to climb, not for him, anyway. Satisfied, he opened his mutilated jaws as wide as they would go. He turned back to the thinning central trunk of the tree, to its tippy-top, and snapped his head forward, impaling himself on the treetop. He squeezed, with a furious might and indignation, sinking his fangs into the bark as far as they’d go, clamping himself down there.

From below, Mooney watched, slack-jawed. You almost never see this kind of behavior from a common house cat.

Thus secured to the very top of the very tall tree by his embedded fangs and his commitment to his cause, Mr. Scroggins began to grow. His remaining cheek billowed, his legs swelled up like four-by-fours, his stomach ballooned out in both directions, and if you were close to him, which thank God you were not, you would have heard his tiny ribs snapping like matchsticks, one after the other, broken by the tremendous gastric pressure from within.

Mooney was unaware of even the existence of Cordyceps novus, much less how it had apparently come to penetrate the trunk of his car. He just stared, dumbfounded, at the swollen, once-dead cat at the top of the tree. “How in the name of Jesus—”

Mr. Scroggins burst.

Had Mooney not felt the need to express his understandable amazement in audible terms, his mouth would not have been open when the cat guts hit him in the face.

Eleven

The central hallway through the ground-floor level of Atchison Storage was two hundred feet long, with white louvered garage doors running the length of it, thirty per side. There was a pristine beauty to it, if you were into symmetry and the vanishing point, that optical illusion that makes a pair of infinite-seeming parallel lines appear to intersect, far on the horizon. If you had to walk that hallway and a few others like it a dozen times every night for your job, it was boring as shit.

But tonight, Teacake was walking it with Naomi. They were headed for the elevator at the other end, impossibly far away. Naomi had the picture she’d taken of the schematic up on her phone, and she scooched the image around, finding the elevator on the map and sliding it down to sub-basement 1, where the tube ladder’s top entrance point seemed to be.

Teacake was nervous-talking.

“Gets down to it, the whole thing is just a terrible idea. Don’t pay for storage. Don’t ever pay for storage. I’ve seen a half a mountain of shit come into this place, and almost none of it ever comes out, except for the super-short-term stuff. People pay anywhere from forty to five hundred dollars a month, depending on the space and the climate controls, and it’s all for garbage they one hundred percent do not need.”

“That’s a little judgmental, isn’t it?”

“Not really. These are sick people, man, most of ’em, and the storage place, they’re slick, you know, it’s sales, they know what they’re doing. They handle it like they’re slinging rock on the corner. Take for example, somebody’s gotta move, right? They get foreclosed on or whatever. This place gives ’em the first thirty days free. People figure, ‘Hey, cool, I don’t have to throw nothin’ out, I’ll just move some of my extra stuff in here, figure it out for a month, no rush, then I can eBay some of it and toss the rest without ever paying a dime.’ But that never, ever happens. Nobody moves outta here. So your ratty couch that you don’t even like anymore and your old Christmas decorations and your parents’ sheets that you kept after they died for some reason—now they’re all just exhibits in your sad museum. Oh, hey no, that don’t fly, fuck nugget.”

He’d stopped abruptly, seeing something on one of the white doors. He went to a storage closet, unlocked it, took out a heavy-duty bolt cutter, and returned to the third unit back on the left. There was a brass padlock hanging from the latch, sticking up at an angle—an extra lock put on there by the renter. Teacake snapped it off with one squeeze of the bolt cutters.

“They ain’t supposed to add their own locks. Ours are the onliest ones you gotta use, so we have access. Like in case there’s illegalness going on in there.”

“What kind of illegalness?”

By way of an answer, Teacake pulled his master key out from the retractable key chain reel on his hip, put the key into the main lock on the unit, flicked it open, and cranked up the door. He immediately regretted it and proved the wisdom of the adage “Don’t open a door unless you know what’s on the other side,” if any such adage existed.

Inside the unit, twenty-four fifty-five-inch Samsung flat-screen TVs, still in the factory packaging, were neatly stacked in rows, leaning against the walls.

“My mistake,” Teacake said. “Everything’s cool.”

He closed the door again and they continued down the hall. She looked at him.

He shrugged. “I don’t care what they got, they just can’t hide it from me. Rules is rules.”

She looked at him. “Why do you talk like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re from the hood.”

“This is how everybody I know talks.”

“You know me, and I don’t.”

“You got any other objections to how I am?”

She thought about it. “Not yet.”

They got to the end of the corridor and pushed the button for the elevator. He looked at her while they waited.

“You don’t talk much, do you?” he said.

“Not as much as you.”

“Nobody talks as much as me.”

She looked back down at her phone, moving the image down the ladder, through the earthen part, toward SB-4.

He had more questions. “So you got college, you do this sometimes, what else?”

“That’s not enough?”

“Not really. You don’t get many shifts.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “My job is to watch the monitors.”

“Yeah, I see you too.”

The elevator arrived, and she got in first. He followed. The doors closed.

“You get, what, maybe two nights a week?” he said.

“So far.”

“So, you got another job?”

“Sorta.”

“You got people?”

“Do I have ‘people’? Of course I have people. Teacake, you’re— What’s your real name?”

“Travis. Meacham.”

“Travis, you’re kind of sucking all the fun out of this.”

The truth was, he knew she had people, and he knew exactly which people she had, but there was no way to bring it up without seriously creeping her out. Her first night at work had been exactly two weeks ago, and he’d noticed her on the monitors immediately. She was taking a shift usually filled by Alfano Kalolo, an enormous Samoan who had to go three hundred pounds, easy.

The camera in the eastern reception area was placed close to the desk, and Alfano so dominated the screen that his absence one night fairly screamed at Teacake to take notice. Truth, who would not notice a thing like that? When Alfano sat on the little metal stool, he was a man-mountain who appeared to be eating a four-legged metal insect with his ass. When, that Thursday two weeks ago, Teacake looked up and saw Naomi there instead, a heavenly choir sang in his head.

He’d stared at her image that night with the intensity of a teenager monitoring his Facebook likes. She sat, she stood, she did her rounds, and always she walked in beauty, like the night. He’d memorized that poem in Ellsworth; they’d had to pick something and learn it by heart for Explorations in Poetry, and that was the shortest of the ones you could pick. He knew the poem, but he didn’t know the poem until he saw Naomi on the monitor.

When she showed up for work again two days later, he studied her on the monitors for hours, absorbing as much detail as one possibly could from a 540-pixel image. She had a book with her that night. He couldn’t quite get the title, but he loved her focus, the way her brow furrowed up at parts. He loved the way she turned the pages; he loved that she even read at all and didn’t just stare at her phone like everybody else. When she wasn’t back until the following Sunday, he realized that she was a fill-in, that she was grabbing shifts when and if she could get them, and that there was a very real possibility that she would never be back again.

So, he told himself, it wasn’t really that he followed her after work. Yes, he did leave five minutes early so he could zip around to the other side of the bluffs and be near her parking lot when she left. And yes, he did swing out onto the highway just after she did and keep his car a safe and unthreatening distance behind hers on the road at all times, and yes, he did speed up when she sped up and slow down when she slowed down and make the same turns that she made, until he eventually reached her place of residence. But he knew in his heart it wasn’t with weird intent—he was trying to engineer a casual run-in.

It just didn’t work out. Once Naomi left the Atchison parking lot, it was kind of hopeless, all country highways till he got to her apartment complex, and then how on earth could he pull up in the car next to her at her building and say, “Oh, hey! Don’t you work where I do? Didn’t I watch—I mean see you on the monitor a couple times, and man, isn’t it weird that you live here, twelve miles away, and I was going that exact same way but my car started making this weird sound so I had to stop right here, in the parking lot of the very same apartment building where you live? Isn’t that bizarre?”

He couldn’t say that. The smoothest motherfucker in human history (arguably Wilt Chamberlain) couldn’t have pulled that one off.

So, rather than scare her, Teacake had just sat in the car, waiting till she went in, pretending to be absorbed in his phone. It was a flip, by the way, so if she’d noticed him she might well have wondered what the hell he was staring at. He waited till she got inside, then he waited some more, just to see which light went on, then he waited a teensy bit more, just to see if, well, because he did, and before he knew it almost an hour had gone by, and he really honestly was about to go when the door of the place opened again, and he saw her come out with the little girl.

There was no question that the girl was her daughter. Some things you can just tell. They looked alike, for starters, but also it was the way Naomi held the little girl’s hand. Nobody holds your hand like that except your mama.

The little girl was cute as hell and dressed in clean, pressed clothes, a detail Teacake noticed because his own clothes when he was a kid had always been dirty as shit. He blushed, right there in his car, embarrassed, not because he was stalking this poor woman and, now, her kid, but because of all the times that he went to school in filthy clothes and with an unwashed face. But this little girl was what a kid was supposed to look like. She was clean and bright and her mom had given her a good breakfast, he just knew she had, even though she’d come off a twelve-hour shift and hadn’t slept since God knows when. Naomi had come home and made breakfast, and maybe even put some cinnamon sugar on the kid’s toast, the way she liked.

The little girl was talking a mile a minute, and Naomi was listening. Not “uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, cool” kind of listening, but trying to actually make sense of what the kid was saying, which had to be nonsense. I mean, how much can a four-year-old say that matters, anyway? He didn’t know, but from what he’d heard, the percentage was pretty low, mostly it was just “I want more frosting” or some shit.

They got to the car, the little girl got into a car seat in the back, and Naomi stood there, waiting, her hand on the door, as her daughter finished her pointless point.

Teacake rolled down his window, just a little. He was close enough, just barely, to make out a few words. Not the little girl’s—those were all faint and little-girly and coming too fast from inside the car—but he could hear what Naomi said in response, after waiting till her daughter stopped for a breath.

“I hear you, sweetie. That stinks.”

And then she closed the door.

That was what killed him. It wasn’t “Oh, come on, it’s not that bad,” or “Honey, please, we’re late,” or “That’s some stupid ridiculous bullshit, you gotta learn to shut up when you talk to people.” It was “I hear you, that stinks.” It was all he ever, ever wanted from people when he talked to them. To be heard. And this lady gave it to a four-year-old, after being up all night.

And all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.

So what Teacake wanted to say that night, while they rode down in the elevator, what he was dying to say was “You’re fucking awesome with your daughter,” but is there a good way to ease into that when you’re not even supposed to know she has a daughter?

So instead, he said nothing.

The elevator doors slid open.

Sub-basement 1 was supposed to be the only sub-basement, and it had never occurred to anybody to question the need for the number. SB-1 looked just fine on the elevator keypad, as good as any other number. The facility’s history as a government installation wasn’t a secret, so finding out there had once been other, lower levels wouldn’t have been much of a surprise, had anybody ever bothered to think about it. But to find out there were three of them, and they were connected by an elaborate series of sensors and alarms to a control panel that had since been walled up behind the reception desk, you know, that would have raised a few eyebrows.

According to the schematic, the top entrance to the tube ladder was located at the end of a short dead-end hallway about a hundred feet from the elevator bank. Naomi reached the end first, stopped, and turned around in the white-painted cinder block space. There was nothing there that suggested an entrance, in fact the opposite—everything about this space said, This is the end.

There were three larger storage units on each side of the hallway, the big two-hundred-square-foot jobs that were mostly used by factories storing overstocks. But there was no door or hatchway or obvious entrance of any kind, except for a small, narrow cabinet between two units marked STAFF ONLY.

Naomi looked from the map, to the hallway, to the map. “I don’t get it.”

“You’re sure it’s here?”

She held the map out to him. “Look for yourself.”

He took the phone, held the map one way, then the other, slid it around a bit. Naomi went to the far wall, the dead end, and smacked it a few times here and there with the flat of her hand. Solid. She knocked, tapped with a fist.

“Cinder block,” she said. “If it’s behind here, we’d need a sledgehammer. Or a jackhammer.”

“Yeah, I’m not down for that.”

Teacake turned the phone upside down, looking at the schematic again. He looked down at the floor. That’s interesting, man.

He zipped the keys out of his key ring again—had to admit, he loved the metallic zing that it made whenever he pulled them out, he’d never been a person who had more than one key before this job—and went to the narrow maintenance cabinet. He opened the cabinet, took a claw hammer off a tool rack, and went back to the same spot in the hallway where he’d been standing, about three feet from the cinder block dead end. He moved till his back was against the wall, got down on all fours, and tapped the hammer once on the floor. It made an unpromising chunk sound.

“That’s concrete,” she said.

“Yup.”

He crawled forward, brought the hammer down again. Same sound. He kept crawling, tapping the hammer every six inches or so, getting the same sound every time.

“It’s a concrete floor, Travis.”

“Weird to hear my real name.” He kept moving, kept tapping the hammer on the floor.

“Sorry,” she said. “It bothers you?”

“Can’t decide.” Yes, he could, and he already had. It didn’t bother him; he loved it. His heart skipped a beat every time she said his name. He couldn’t wait till she said it again. Please say it again, just one more time?

THWUNG. He’d nearly reached the center of the hallway, and when he brought the hammer down there it produced a hollow, metallic echo.

He looked up at Naomi. She grinned and squatted down on the floor next to him. He held up the phone, swiping to enlarge a certain portion of the screen. “Right there. That semicircle made of dashes, kinda shaded gray, can you see it?”

“Yeah, barely.”

“That’s the entrance. They just painted over it.”

Together, they looked down at the floor. He spun the hammer around in his hand a couple of times, thinking. He sat back.

“Okay, look. There’s no way we could hide this shit we’re about to do.”

“What are we about to do?”

“Wreck some more stuff,” he said. “But here’s how I see it. Part of our job is security, and there’s an alarm going off, a’ight? It’s too late to call Griffin, he’s wasted by now, and he wouldn’t know what the fuck it is anyway. He’d just call corporate, but there’s nobody at corporate either, it’s not like there are self-storage emergencies and they got operators standing by, see what I’m saying? The only other people I can think of to call are the cops.”

“To say there’s an old smoke alarm or something going off in the basement?”

“Exactly. Ridiculous. But here we are, and there’s an alarm going off, and this whole place is stuffed to the rafters with incredibly valuable personal belongings.”

“Right! This stuff is meaningful to people.”

“This is true, what you’re saying. I’ve always felt that way.” He was warming up to it now, feeling the creative buzz of getting your story straight with somebody. “There is an alarm going off, and we are guards. We are people of the security profession.”

“We’re more like clerks.”

“Stay with me. Yes, it is a shitty job, but it is our job.”

“It’s our responsibility.”

“Yes!”

“Plus we’re curious,” she added.

“Yeah, but we leave that part out.” She wasn’t a natural at lying. That’s all right, he knew enough about it for both of them. “A’ight? We in?”

“You know I am.”

“Watch your eyes.”

She raised a hand and turned away, and he spun the hammer around so it was claw-end down and swung it at the floor, hard. The hollow metallic boom was louder, there was definitely something down there, and it wasn’t cement floor. Chunks of dried paint flew. He swung again, two, three, four times in quick succession, and more paint flecked away. On the last blow a two-inch-square section flew off and gave them a good look at the unfinished surface beneath.

There, under several layers of long-dried oil-based semigloss gray floor paint, were the unmistakable metal dimples of a manhole cover.

Twelve

It had been five or six years since Roberto Diaz had gotten a call in the middle of the night. It was a fluke that the phone even rang on his bedside table; since retirement he’d gotten in the habit of turning the thing off around nine at night and not turning it back on again until he’d had at least one cup of coffee in the morning. He’d been much happier ever since. Mellower, anyway. Annie couldn’t quite get there with her devices; she always left her phone on in case one of the kids needed anything, but their youngest was twenty-eight, so chances of that were slim. Still, she liked to check the New York Times in bed first thing after she woke up to see if the world had improved in the last eight hours. Strangely, it never had, but Annie was not one to give up hope.

Tonight Roberto had forgotten, left his phone on by accident, and it’s funny how the old reflexes kicked in when the thing rang shortly after midnight. He was wide-awake before the echo of the first ring had even faded, had his hand on the phone by the time the second ring started, and was sitting up with both feet on the floor when he answered.

“Hell,” he croaked.

Whoops. No voice. Not quite the old reflexes. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Hello.”

“Roberto Diaz?” It was a woman’s voice.

“Speaking.”

“I’m calling about the 1978 Plymouth Duster for sale.”

He didn’t answer for a long moment.

“Mr. Diaz?”

“Give me five minutes.” He hung up and set the phone back down on the dresser. He just sat there for a few seconds, thinking. He regretted the second glass of wine at dinner, but other than that he didn’t feel much of anything at all. That’s how you knew you were good, when the call didn’t change anything, emotionally. He counted a few breaths, stayed cool, and let the Buddhist mantra he’d discovered in his early fifties float through his mind.

I’m here now.

He wanted a cup of tea before he called back.

Annie turned and looked at him over her shoulder, squinting into the dark. “Who was that?”

“My other wife.”

“How can you be funny right away in the middle of the night?”

“It’s a gift.”

She fumbled around on her night table, feeling for something and not finding it, knocking a few things around.

He looked at her. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for my glasses.”

“Why?”

She rolled over and looked at him. “I don’t know.”

She glanced around the room, as if to make sure everything was still in its place, then turned back to him. “One of the kids?”

“No. Don’t worry.”

She paused. “Oh God.”

If it wasn’t one of the kids and he hadn’t yet told her that somebody they knew was dead, then it could only be Them. It was more of a tired “oh God” that she let out than a fearful “oh God,” the kind of “oh God” you’d say if you found out the cable had gone out again.

“Yep.”

“Who?”

“New voice to me. Somebody’s having a panic attack.”

He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. He never had cheated on her, or even thought about flirting anymore, after the experience in Australia. He was grateful for that, and for her, every day. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ll make it quick.”

He got up and pulled on the clean shirt and pair of pants he kept hung over the chair so they’d be easy to find in the dark. Talk about old habits.

Annie rolled over and snuggled back into her pillow. “Don’t make it too quick. Wait till I’m asleep again, okay?”

“Wasn’t born yesterday, gorgeous.”

She muttered something sweet and inaudible and was back asleep by the time the door closed. The unexpected was still routine, even after all this time, and the calls had stopped seriously disrupting her sleep years ago.

Roberto loved being in the North Carolina house more than any other place he’d ever owned, rented, or visited. It wasn’t a great house, not by a long shot. It was late ’80s construction and the walls were too thin; you could hear water in the pipes no matter where you were. They probably should have torn the whole thing down and built a new one ten years ago when they bought it, but aside from the fact that it would have cost a fortune they didn’t have, a teardown seemed incredibly wasteful. Mean, almost. The house had behaved well in the world, it had done what was asked of it with minimal complaint for twenty years, and it deserved better than a bulldozer.

They bought it as is, recognizing its flaws, and made plans to repair and remodel in two stages. They fixed and painted the inside first, right after they bought it, and put off the decaying exterior for as long as possible, until the rotting porch and the leaking roof and the patchy siding, riddled with wasp nests, could no longer be ignored. Finally, they took a deep breath, got out the checkbook, and started the exterior work four years ago, just before they both retired. They ran out of cash with half the roof and none of the porches done.

They didn’t actually run out of money, not literally, but there were financial lines they had long ago said they’d never cross, loans they would not take out, T-bills that would not be sold, and dammit if they were about to break their own rules now, when they were so close to having enough to leave a decent college fund for each of the grandkids.

So Roberto learned roofing himself, and how to build a deck, and how to grin and put up with the manly condescension when he went back to the hardware store for the third time in the same day with more dumb questions. Just before Thanksgiving of last year, two and a half years after the last professional help had left the premises, almost four years after they’d started work on the outside, and a full decade after they’d bought the place, the house at 67 Figtree Road was done.

There was a chair on the back porch, a rocker that was good for Roberto’s bad back, just to the left of the screen door. It was his favorite spot in the world as he knew it, and he knew a fair amount of the world. That spot was where he sat now, waiting for the kettle to boil, wondering at the warm, misty March air that should have been neither warm nor misty.

Back in the kitchen, he got to the kettle before it had a chance for a full-throated scream. He poured the hot water into the strainer. He stared out the window while he let it steep—$6,200 to move the kitchen window from the driveway side to the backyard side, the most extravagant thing he had ever done, and he regretted it for not one minute since—and poured a few drops of milk into the tea after exactly three minutes. He’d picked up the milk habit while on the London detail. Turns out the milk cuts the tiny bit of acidity in the tea leaves. The things you learn.

He took a sip and went to the broom closet on the far side of the room. It was a funny angled one that wasn’t much good at holding anything, but it was the compromise solution to a thorny electrical problem he’d run into when he insisted on designing and building this one corner of the cabinetry himself. He’d allowed no help from anyone else, wouldn’t even let anybody in the room while he was working on it.

Now Roberto took the brooms and mops out of the closet, pulled out the tall vases from where they were stored in the back, and took out the small mixer that couldn’t seem to find a home anyplace else. He used a hidden key to unlock the lock on the angled panel inside, swung it open, and entered the combination into the safe.

He felt a tiny surge of adrenaline when he threw the safe handle and it made that solid, satisfying clunking sound. It wasn’t excitement, far from it, but something more like self-preservation, the old system gearing up in case it was needed. Fight or fight.

The safe was small. It didn’t need much in it, just a few currencies and passports that were probably expired by now. It wasn’t a proper run box anymore, just a place to put the secure phone and the snow globe, the one they’d bought at a gas station in Vermont, the slightly cheesy one they couldn’t resist because it had three kids sledding inside it, two girls and a boy, like theirs. He took out the emergency phone, turned it on, and the screen showed the dull red outline of a battery with a big red line through it. Roberto was surprised it even had that much juice in it. He grabbed the cord, plugged it in by the sink, and looked out the window, drinking his tea while he waited for it to charge up.

After a while, the phone binged and turned itself on. He looked at it for an extra moment, not thinking much but not grabbing it either. He wasn’t going to rush; it was just over five minutes now since he’d asked for that many, and the world wasn’t going to end if he took an extra thirty seconds. That was one of the nice things about being older, how comfortable you became with the idea of conservation of energy, of deliberateness of style. Youth was all wasted movement and noise production, thinking that the more you looked like you were doing something, the more you really were, when in fact the opposite was most often true. Do you have the patience to remain completely still until the dirty water settles and you can see clearly? Not if you’re under fifty, you don’t.

When he was ready, Roberto dialed. The phone rang once, and the same woman’s voice answered.

“Fenelon Imports.”

“Zero-four-seven-four blue indigo.”

“Thank you, Mr. Diaz.”

“What’s up?”

“We’re getting a temperature breach alert from a decommissioned facility in the Atchison mines in eastern Kansas.”

He paused. I’m here now.

“Mr. Diaz?”

“Yeah. I’d wondered about that. Given the weather changes.”

“Are you—”

“I wrote a memo in 1997 on that very subject,” he said.

“I don’t see it in the file.”

“And I called, about five years after that. And six or seven years after that.”

“So you are familiar with that situation?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it something we need to worry about?”

“Yes, it’s something you need to worry about.”

“We thought, as a decommissioned facility—”

“What time did the alert come in?” he asked.

He heard a pause and some keys clicking while she checked on a computer. “Three eleven P.M. central standard time.”

“And you’re just calling me now?”

“It took some time to figure out whom to call.”

“What if I didn’t answer?” he asked. “Who does it say you call next?”

“It doesn’t.”

Roberto took a breath and looked out the window. “Okay. I’m seventy-three miles from Seymour Johnson. I can be there in ninety minutes. I’ll need a plane from there and a car waiting on the other end. I’ll drive the car myself. Nobody else goes.”

“Is it your opinion that this qualifies as a Heightened Threat?”

“My opinion is it qualified as an Exceptional Threat at three eleven P.M.”

She paused. “I’ll see what I can do about transportation.”

“I’m not finished. I don’t have any equipment.”

“What do you need?”

“Everything on the list.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Diaz, I’m just not familiar with—”

“I wrote an ECI white paper in ’92. It’s compartmented and stored in the clean vault. It was twenty-five years ago, you’ll need different software to read it, but I archived the program along with it and a floppy drive to run it. Get Gordon Gray to clear you. Only Gordon Gray, you don’t need to call anybody else. Read the report and have everything listed in appendix A—I mean everything, every single thing—in the car in Kansas when I land. Understood?”

“I can’t do all that without multiple authorizations.”

“What’s your name?”

“You know we’re not—”

“Just your first one. Even a fake one. Something to call you.”

She hesitated. “Abigail.”

Definitely not her real name, the slight rise in her voice gave that away. She enjoyed the flight of fancy. Good for her, it’s probably why she got into this line of work and she didn’t get to use it much, handling dead-file outcalls at Fort Belvoir in the middle of the night.

“Okay, Abigail. Remember those good grades you got in high school? And the sports you trained your ass off for? The college you fought to get into. The number of times you said no when people wanted to go out and party and you knew you had to stay in and study. Remember the looks your family gave you when you told them what you wanted to do for a living, the abuse you put up with your first year in the department, and the personal life you’ve given up for the last, I don’t know, from your voice it sounds like maybe ten, twelve years now?”

“Eight.”

“Okay, so it’s getting to you quick. That happens. But all those sacrifices, all the shit you’ve had to eat just because you wanted to do what was right for your country? This is what it was for, Abigail.”

“Yes, sir.”

He could tell by the tiny quaver in her voice that he could still give a good we’re in the shit now speech when he needed it.

“Get the stuff on the list. I’ll be at Seymour at two fifteen A.M. EST.”

He hung up.

ANNIE WOKE UP, UNPROMPTED, ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER. FAST ASLEEP one second, wide-awake the next. She came out to the kitchen, where there was one light on, over the sink. She knew what she’d find in there even before she came in the room. Roberto would have washed and dried the mug from his tea and put it away, the same with the strainer. The kitchen would be unchanged from the way they’d left it when they went to bed, except for the snow globe. It would be sitting on the counter next to the coffee machine, on top of a single sheet of plain white paper, on which he would have drawn a heart with a red Sharpie.

That’s how it was.

Annie stared at the snow globe for a moment. She picked it up and gave it a shake. Snow fell on the kids and their sleds. On the one hand, it was kind of nice to see the thing again; it had been more than three years since it had been out of the safe.

On the other hand, she wished to hell they’d picked something else to use for the signal.