All-Day Breakfast (33 page)

“I only ever let girls tie me up,” I said.

“You sent me a fax,” said Jones, getting up from the desk.

“Yeah!” I tried to keep my head upright, my eyes focused on him. “You're the douche who sniffed around my school. Probably pissed on my front door.”

“I'll read you the fax.” Jones sat up on his desk—he was pretty spry for a heavier guy. “The handwriting's awfully shaky but it appears to say, ‘Mr. James Jones. What the fuck do you want from me? Peter Giller.' ” He lifted the paper over his head like it was a winning ticket. “Classic, isn't it? That's going in a ‘Do Not Destroy'
file, definitely. It came in three days ago, Thursday, but I just got it this morning. I went sailing on Thursday.”

“No,” I said. “You faxed me back.”

“Good God, you're sharper than most! I've never sailed in my life, not one fathom or whatever those assholes would say. No, I only read you that because by now I bet you have a pretty good idea what it was that I wanted on Thursday. It's obvious, right? I wanted you and your family to disappear so we wouldn't have to deal with you the way we're dealing with you now. And it would've been for the best for you if you
had
disappeared, it certainly would. You could have dispersed with some dignity then. Messy either way—fatal!—but you could've at least had the dignity.”

“Sorry, Chief,” said my scar-lipped driver, tiptoeing past me. “These came.”

Jones took the thick yellow envelopes and ripped the first open with his thumb. As he read, he rubbed the cigarette's filter against his temple. The driver gave me a dimply smile as he went out, then my sluggish eyes lingered on the silent
tv
.
did u.s. pay lra $10 million to divert kinshasa supply-route attacks?
The screen showed dusty palm trees, and a jeep so crammed with men and rifles it looked like a porcupine.

Then
nebraska squatters: no survivors found
. It cut to a long building on fire, framed by shards of night sky, the wet ground in front reflecting such a brilliant orange that it must've been painted for Halloween. Nebraska. The building's silhouette could've been the PBF dormitory. It felt like all of my blood was moving into my face, and the cuffs stopped hurting.

4 am explosion. voice of lincoln, ne fd chief:

The shaky camera panned left to show a fire truck parked a couple of hundred feet away, just hosing down the ground—no effort made to save the building. Or anyone, my muddy brain calculated, who might've been inside. Firelight catching the airborne water looked like clouds of bugs.

bodies found in converted pig barn as well as nearby industrial building

I continued swallowing Jones's cigarette smoke, sludgy pulse throbbing in the tops of my ears, just staring. What else could I have done? All of those PBF faces blurred together in my mind into one small frightened person.

vehicles on site traced to burroughs county, ne

The camera panned right as an orange burst spilled out of the dormitory and across the horizon, then the person with the camera must've turned away into the blackness, giving us occasional glimpses of his running legs. Flickering orange shapes dropped across the screen, and after a second I realized they were burning shingles.

Guys smelling of sour coffee strolled around the room, and I chewed the inside of my mouth and forgot any plans, any ambition, or Lydia, bacon or even my kids. I only watched as the shingles dropped like poisoned birds.

The picture cut to a grave-looking newscaster in a red blouse. The graphic over her shoulder showed a smoking barn, with the title
lancaster co. disaster
.

When had Amber last sent us a text, three-thirty?

After I'd told her, “It's better you don't come.”

But at least you drove five of them away with you
, part of my brain whispered
. Get out of this room. They need you now
.

Strategy. Maybe if I got Jones mad it'd confuse him. My drugged neck had turned into a Slinky.

“You're
so
concerned with keeping secrets,” I announced.

“Hey?” Jones set his envelopes down. “What's that?”

“So.” I swallowed hard, trying to remember where I was and to not imagine the charred skin of Amber or Grace or even Arthur's stupid dog. “Why'd you let a lot of schoolkids into your top-secret facility?”

“My gosh,” smiled Jones, shifting his backside, “that does seem like a contradiction, hey? You're sharp as a…as, man, I don't know
what
!”

“
Shuriken
,” the Asian guy suggested. “Sharp as a
shuriken
.”

“Sure, that sounds just fine!” Jones rubbed his jaw. “What is that, a
shuriken
?”

“Throwing star.” With a flick of his wrist, he mimed launching one. “
Fwip
.”

“My gosh, Gary, you know a little bit of everything,” said Jones.

“Jack of all trades,” the Asian guy agreed.

The
tv
had already cut to a dreadlocked Red Sox batter striking out, then spitting.

“What're you doing to those people I was with?” I asked.

“Say, this is interesting for
you
, Giller—Gary here is the guy who burned your house down, isn't that something? Now here you are like bugs in a rug!”

Jones grinned as though my dad and Gary's had come over together on the
Mayflower
. Gary stretched his legs out and stared at his feet—he wore black Converse All Stars just like the high school kids. I forgot the dormitory burning down and remembered my own house.

“Gary,” I said. “Thanks for rigging them to go off when nobody was home.”

He glanced up at me a second, his mouth stiff as a slide rule.

“You're welcome,” he said.

“All right, a pair of kidders.” Jones slid off the desk and slowly circled my chair. “I haven't answered you, Giller. Why'd we let schoolkids into Dockside if the product was so volatile? Because when you
stop
letting schoolkids in,
that's
what a competitor notices—certainly
we
would notice if DuPont or 3M suddenly barred
their
gates—and
that
is when uninvited people start to poke their noses in.”

I was maintaining good posture but my eyelids felt heavy as sidewalks.

“But not people like me, supposedly. Like us.”

“Ah. You all must be the exception that proves the rule.”

“That expression's never made a lick of sense to me.”

“Me neither. And yet...” He brought his fingertips to his lips, then spread his hands dramatically. “Here you are!”

He could've been a French 12 teacher, he liked to talk so much. He lifted a wallet from his desk—it looked like mine. Was Lydia still squirreled away inside? Jones held the driver's license up, maybe comparing it to my present face.

“Taken just last March.” He grinned, which spread a roll of fat over his shirt collar. “Eighteen months ago you were a handsome man.” He dropped the wallet into a ziplock bag. “Yet three days ago you received my fax and promptly tried to bite off a gentleman's ear, and seventeen hours after that you torched our head office and murdered thirty-five people.”

“I didn't murder your head office.”

“I have footage of you at the scene. Helicopter cameras.”

“An hour
after
your place got murdered, I was still driving east across Indiana.”

“I really believe that with all of my heart.”

“You've got my ambulance, right?” I squirmed against the cuffs while I had a minute. That had to be the reason I was arguing. “Ashtray's full of gas receipts, look—”

“Barney Jordan died that day. Our head of marketing. Twenty years with the company, right from when Kirk Penzler came back from Kuwait. Every year we show the staff an exceptionally good time at our Christmas party, and do you know what Barney wanted to see, ever since the ‘Enhanced Personnel' project started sliding off the rails? He wanted to see one of you zombies fight a
shark
. Get a big tank of water, drop the two of 'em in, right there in the Ramada ballroom.
hr
never finished the paperwork but plenty of bets had already changed hands, so you know what? We're still going to do it, zombie versus shark, in memory of Barney.”

Guys in dark suits started to wander in from all sides, slim guys and heavy guys, crowding. Maybe they'd all established their offices at the Lamplighter.

“You've been nominated to represent your species,” said Jones.

If I peered through the crowd of potbellies and three-button jackets, I could still glimpse Gary on the couch, staring at the ceiling and moving his lips like he was trying to remember his state capitals.

“Another two-fifty on the shark,” someone called.

Maybe it was because Gary was the only other guy not wearing a flack jacket or a business suit, but I
liked
the fucker. Even so, I figured if I had a card to play I'd better go ahead. Jones and a bearded guy stood over me, corners of their mouths twitching as they fought between poor grieving Barney and grinning at the prospect of seeing me chewed apart. Maybe there'd still be a finger and thumb left for them to mail to my kids.

“I spoke with an officer at the scene yesterday,” I announced. “Your office was torched with a series of explosive devices set the night before, which is exactly what happened to
my
house. And to all the houses torched in Hoover. Maybe even this place that burned down on the
tv
.” I nodded in that direction, my spine feeling more solid by the minute. “I wasn't
here
to blow up your office and I wouldn't have known
how
, right? What am I, special ops? So maybe you ought to look closer to home.”

Jones lost any semblance of a grin. He and the bearded guy narrowed their eyes at each other, then at Gary. But Gary wasn't on the couch anymore. The Penzler guys who'd been on either side of him sat slumped against each other, sound asleep with their mouths hanging open.

“The fuck?” said Jones.

In a heartbeat the Christmas-party enthusiasts quit crowding me like a soft-serve dispenser. They backed toward the walls. The apes who'd dragged me in stood in a corner, pistols drawn.

“Remember?” whispered the bearded guy. “I said, ‘Don't meet him in person.' ”

Jones was staring up, an unlit cigarette between his lips, so we all looked up. The ceiling panel above the couch had been removed and the resulting black rectangle wasn't telling anybody what Gary was planning.

“Fucking contractors,” muttered Jones.

The overhead fluorescents blinked off and even though there was light through the curtains, the unnerved businessmen turned the air pretty blue, as my grandma used to say. Suddenly I was the one who couldn't stop grinning. My body had woken up. All my pointless talk had accomplished something.

“Open the door!” someone yelled from behind the desk.

But nobody wanted to see what would happen to the first guy through.

Then my eyes were streaming from the rotten-egg smell permeating everything. I wiped my nose on my shoulder while the suits coughed and gagged. And
then
the door got opened! I could barely see through my own eyes, and on their way out the businessmen stumbled against me.

“Keep a hold of Giller!” Jones barked from the corner.

I realized that my cuffs had somehow separated from each other. I leaned forward and my arms came free of the chair.

“They're in 28,” a quiet voice said in my ear. “Get up and walk out.”

I stumbled forward until I bumped into Jones's desk, groping around until I found the ziplock bag. Then as a couple of suits stumbled for the door I threw my arms around their shoulders like we'd been dragging each other out of bars for years.

Outside I squinted at the parked cars and the businessmen leaning over to gag, wiping their eyes on their shirttails. Room 28 had to be to my right so I lurched along the stucco wall, coughing my guts out, until I looked up and saw the brass number. I twisted the knob but it was solid as brick.

Every half-bald guy in sight was hunched over his cell phone or retching beside the bumper of a car. I coughed for another second, for show, then drove my elbow into the faceplate where the room key was supposed to go. An ache flared in my new shoulder. I tried the knob. It didn't turn but the door opened, the deadbolt swinging out from its splintered doorjamb.

I slid inside, nudging the door shut behind me. The room smelled like mildewy towels. At the foot of the bed my people lay blinking on the taupe carpet, duct tape over their mouths, all zip-tied together—Colleen's ankle zip-tied to Harv's, whose other ankle was zip-tied to Franny and so on—crammed together like a package of hot dogs. Their eyes followed me.

“Sorry,” I whispered. “I'm sorry.”

I got a steak knife out of the kitchenette drawer, cut through all their ties.

“Arms and leg still attached!” I whispered. “Must be a well-fed bunch!”

I let them rip off their own duct tape. I went to the curtain and saw apes peering under vehicles in the parking lot. Colleen got to her feet, swaying, and before Megan could reach her Mrs. Avery threw up on the bedspread.

Since when was she the least resilient?

“Oh my god,” said Franny, fingers to her scalp, “I want to go home so much.”

“We can get out the bathroom,” said Harv at my side. “I kind of kicked the window out when they brought us in.”

“Way to hop.”

I stood on the back of the toilet and lifted myself through the window frame—the lane was strewn with Yuengling beer cases but there were no apes to be seen, not yet. Nothing but pine trees across the lane. I dropped down to the asphalt and broken glass, gripped Colleen's foot and lowered her down, then she went limp again so I kept my arms around her shoulders while she butted her forehead into my collarbone. Her breath was all stomach acid. The kids dropped to the ground then stared at me, big-eyed, blue-lipped.