They came running from the hayride, the ballerina and Snow White and the baby tiger. Teenage Death strolled after them, being irritating, too cool to hurry.
Señor Death exhaled sharply and shook his head. The ballerina outpaced her little brother and sister and said breathlessly, “Uncle Frio! The man at the pumpkin patch says it’s going to rain. Will that short out Daddy’s lights?”
“No.” Señor Death crouched down by the grave and lifted the wire that connected the four little jack-o’-lanterns carved with the four names:
GILBERT, TINA, BRANDY, AGUSTIN
. “It’s outdoor grade wire, the microchip’s insulated. They’ll shine all night, no matter what the weather does.”
“Mommy, can I have an orange soda?” asked the baby tiger.
“Not in the car, mijo,” Señora Death said firmly. “When you get home.”; The baby tiger started to pout.
“Tricker-treat, tricker-treat, tricker-treat,” chanted Snow White, which distracted the baby tiger, and he took up the chant too. They bounced up and down in great excitement.
“You’re practically jumping on Daddy’s grave!” the ballerina fretted.
“I think he’d kind of like it,” Señor Death told her. “They’re little, Brandy. It’s okay.”
Teenage Death made his leisurely arrival and bent to lift the cooler over the tailgate for his mother. He fished inside and drew out a bottle of orange soda. Instantly the baby tiger stopped bouncing and pointed an accusatory finger. “How come
he
gets to have one?”he yelled.
“Because I won’t barf all over the inside of the truck, baby,” said his brother.
“Agustin, it won’t kill you to wait ten minutes until we get home. Put the soda back,” Señor Death ordered. Agustin gave him an insolent stare, so Señor Death added, “If you want to go to that party tonight—”
“Nazi,” muttered the boy, but he put the soda back.
“Come on, kids.” Señora Death was kneeling by the grave, making the sign of the cross. The younger children knelt beside her and crossed themselves too. Señor Death and Agustin stood to pray, reciting the Hail Mary and Our Father with them. When they finished, the children scrambled to their feet and climbed into the truck, crouching under the camper shell. Agustin closed the tailgate on them and stood beside Señor Death, waiting somberly as his mother bent to the gravestone and kissed it. Her white makeup left the print of her lips on the stone that read:
PHILIP BERNARD AGUILAR
LOVING HUSBAND AND FATHER
1990-2021
They got into the truck and drove away, following a road east through low rolling hills and scrub oaks, into a pleasant lakeside housing development shaded by sycamore trees. The storm clouds had advanced with breathtaking speed, bringing early darkness. Already people were putting out lighted pumpkins or turning on strings of Halloween lights. As they pulled into their driveway, a tiny devil and superheroine emerged from the house next door, clutching loot bags.
“Mommy, Robin and Maria are starting!” shrieked Snow White. “Uncle Frio, can’t we go now?”
Señor Death shut off the motor and scowled up at the sky. “Yes, go early, that’s a good idea. Agustin! Watch them like a hawk. If it starts to rain, go to the Circle K and call me. I’ll come drive you home.”
“Okay.” Agustin slid from the cab seat. “Drive me to Sasha’s later?”
Señor Death nodded. Brandy ran into the house and returned with their loot bags and a flashlight for each child. Waving them like light sabers, the children hastened down the street. Señor Death
watched them go. He could smell autumn leaves, candle-charring pumpkins, dinners cooking in a dozen kitchens; over all that, the heavy smell of the storm, very strong, worrisome.
He hefted the cooler out of the back and tilted it in the driveway, letting the melted ice drain out. As he bent there, something came through the twilight to him, some signal through the ether he couldn’t define. He stood up sharply and stared, turning his bone-white face this way and that, but he couldn’t locate it.
Shrugging, he carried the cooler into the house.
Señora Death was just sliding a covered dish into the oven. “You can go first,” she told him. “The cotton balls and the Noxema are all laid out.” There was a certain courteous reserve in her tone, a formality, respect and affection without intimacy.
“Thanks,” he said. He made his way through the darkening house, turning on lights as he went, not out of any need—he could see by infrared—but out of a mounting edginess. Near the door of the bathroom he nearly stepped on a UFO Abductee Barbie. Muttering to himself, he picked it up and went to the door of the girls’ room, where he turned on the light before tossing it on Tina’s bed. Nothing out of place, everything normal: Brandy’s side fussily neat, Tina’s a wreckage of toys and crayons. He heard a faint scrape and hiss, smelled something burning. Annette was lighting the jack-o’-lantern and setting it in the front window.
He went back to the bathroom and slipped off his black robe. Leaning forward over the sink, he began carefully removing the white from his face. It was an involved process, because he had to avoid removing the more subtle makeup that disguised him as a forty-five-year-old mortal man.
He was sponging the last of it out of his mustache when Annette was beside him suddenly, her alarm magnified by the black greasepaint around her eyes.
“Porfirio, I thought I saw a man in the backyard.”
I knew it
, he told himself. “Well, let’s see,” he said grimly. He
stepped into his bedroom and emerged with a shotgun. Cocking it, he stepped out on the back porch and looked into the deepening shadow.
“Luisa said the marshal shot two Freemen in Spicewood,” Annette hissed.
“Maybe,” he replied. It had been three years since the war, but now and then somebody came lurching out of the back country, desperate for supplies.
But there was no crazed survivalist in this suburban backyard, and nothing out of place either: Gilbert’s wading pool full of waterlogged oak leaves, bicycles, the tree house made of pallets, the rope swing over the edge of the lake. For a split second he thought he saw something wrong. An outline, a ghost, in the tree house? As he stared, it melted into nothing. Or nearly nothing. He snarled silently.
Miles away, there was a flicker on the horizon. A long moment later the faint thunder came.
“It’s okay,” he called to Annette. “Nobody out here stupid enough to trespass.”
He went back indoors.
They ate supper in the kitchen, interrupted occasionally by trickor-treaters. The storm held off. The children came home, and Annette fed the younger ones while Agustin got a change of clothes and his sleeping bag. Porfirio drove him to his party. On the way back the lightning flashes were nearer, the thunder following more closely. As he let himself in, the first drops began to fall, and as he crossed the threshold, a blue-white blaze lit the whole street.
Annette was sitting on the couch clutching his shotgun, her eyes enormous.
He locked the door behind him and shot the bolt. “Did you see somebody again?”
“No. I was getting Gilbert out of the tub, and Brandy came running in screaming she’d seen somebody in the kids’ tree house. We looked with the flashlight. I couldn’t see anybody, but—”
He came and put an arm around her. “Probably just a coyote.
Too many spooks this Halloween, huh? Don’t worry. It’s raining pretty hard now, listen. At least they can’t get into much trouble at that party. You go on to bed. I’ll sit up and watch the yard for a while. Nothing’s going to prowl for long if I get a clear shot at it.”
Boom! Blue light flared, and the windows rattled with the force of the thunder. She jumped and held him more tightly than she meant to.
“All right,” she said, deciding not to argue. In the time since he’d shown up on her doorstep the day after Philip’s funeral, she had learned not to ask him too many questions. It was a small price to pay for security, even if she had her suspicions that he was not really Philip’s long-lost cousin.
He walked her to her bedroom, turned on the light, checked the closets. Nothing out of place. He kissed her on the forehead and went off to check the locks. Lightning flashed. Thunder split the sky, and rain fell in torrents.
Porfirio went into the dark kitchen and stood looking out into the yard. He could see the man clearly now, huddled in the tree house, flinching at every blast of livid fire. Porfirio grinned. He went into the living room and tapped in a combination on the customized entertainment center. A soothing tone filled the air, inaudible to mortal ears. The children sank deeper into dreams, and Annette, who’d been staring tensely into darkness, suddenly relaxed and was blissfully unconscious.
Porfirio went back into the kitchen and opened the back door. Ozone was filling the air with an acrid electric smell. Between one flash and the next the man stood beside him on the porch, dripping and shivering.
“Goddam storm took forever to break,” he gasped. “I’ve been waiting out there for hours.”
“That’s a shame,” said Porfirio. “Not that you have any business in my yard. You want to tell me who you are and what you’re doing here?”
“Joseph, Facilitator Grade One,” the other said, jumping when
lightning struck close by. “Can we continue this conversation indoors?”
Porfirio stepped inside, and the other followed him readily. He went on:
“I know this is sort of unorthodox, but I needed to ask you something in private, about somebody you worked with once. I’m trying to find out what happened to her. I thought you might know.”
Porfirio looked at him in silence. His visitor was dressed, most improbably, in complete fly fisherman’s gear, including waders, utility vest, flannel plaid shirt, and shapeless hat. “And you had to wait for an electrical storm, so the data transmission would be knocked out? Smart guy. I just might report you anyway, pal.”
“Aw, don’t do that,” implored Joseph. He looked around the kitchen, hungrily inhaling the fragrances of Halloween night. “Nice place. How’d you get posted with a mortal family?”
“You don’t need to know,” Porfirio told him, opening the liquor cabinet and pouring a shot of bourbon. He offered it to Joseph, who was drifting wide-eyed toward the big bowl of candy on the kitchen counter.
“My God, those are Almond Joys! May I? Thanks.” He tossed back the bourbon in a gulp. “You’re right, I don’t need to know. Look, I’ll make this short: back in 1862 you worked with the Botanist Mendoza, yes?”
Porfirio started. Joseph, watching him, peeled the wrapper off a candy miniature and popped it in his mouth. “I thought so,” he said, chewing. “I was her case officer once myself. I’m trying to find out where she went. I’m not asking for your help, just for some information.”
Exhaling, Porfirio got down a couple of highball glasses and poured out more bourbon. He handed one to Joseph and took the other. “Let’s go sit. And leave the candy alone. The kids will kill me if it’s gone in the morning.”
Boom! All over the neighborhood, in other houses people were sitting huddled up, unable to sleep for the thunder, but Annette and
her children slept on. Porfirio lit the gas logs. Joseph relaxed on the couch, watching the firelight play on the ceiling, watching the jack-o’-lantern’s flame.
“I guess this is part of the Gradual Retirement Plan, huh?” he said. “Mendoza didn’t get gradually retired, though, did she? She was arrested. Something nasty happened.”
“Very nasty,” Porfirio agreed, sipping his bourbon.
“I think you tried to help her. I think you went on record as making some kind of formal protest about what they did to her.” Joseph gulped his bourbon and set the glass aside. “So tell me, friend: do you have any idea where she is?”
“Out of commission, as far as I know,” said Porfirio. “She got a raw deal. Still, she killed six mortals and went AWOL. You don’t get off with a slap on the wrist for something like that. I believe she had a lot of drug therapy, and in the end they transferred her to—” He dipped his finger in the bourbon and drew on the table a line of three little arrows pointing left.
Joseph might have gone pale; it was hard to tell in the wavering light. After a moment he asked, “Did you see her after she was arrested?”
“I tried. They wouldn’t let me.”
“Thank you,” Joseph said.
Porfirio looked at him thoughtfully and had another sip of bourbon. “What’s it to you, anyway?” he asked.
Joseph avoided his gaze, staring into the fire. “I recruited her,” he said.
“And? You must have recruited a lot of kids in your time. You’re old. Why follow up on what happened to this one?”
“Most of the time I ship them out, and I never see them after they’ve been augmented, but I saw Mendoza a lot after she came back. I was with her on her first field mission. She’s the closest thing I have to a daughter. I always felt kind of responsible for her.”
“Okay, that I can understand,” said Porfirio, nodding. His dark
stare intensified. “You must have known she was a Crome generator, then.”
Joseph winced. “Not really,” he lied. “I have this habit of ignoring things that might bother me. So. Was that how she got into trouble? Something to do with the Crome’s radiation?”
“No,” Porfirio said. “Although now that I come to think of it, maybe it did after all. She’d been throwing Crome’s like . . . that storm outside. Every damn night practically, mostly while she was asleep. It was never a problem, though, until one day when she went up into the Laurel Canyon anomaly.”
“I heard about that,” said Joseph uneasily.
“So you have a good idea why the Company doesn’t want anybody to find out what happened there. I’d like to know how
you
found out about it, actually.” Porfirio raised one eyebrow.
Joseph just shook his head grimly. Porfirio shrugged and continued:
“She got back okay, but in my opinion it was just a matter of time after that before Dr. Zeus found a reason to put her away. Pretty soon she gave them a reason, too, one in Technicolor.” He lifted his glass again and stopped, struck by a thought. “I wonder if that’s why they kept delaying her new posting.”
“I heard that they left her on layover indefinitely,” said Joseph, rubbing his temples. “You’re saying the Company
wanted
her to get into trouble so they could take her out?”