Chapter 5 So Many Inconvenient Things #4
“Sorry,” he said, his voice small.
“No, no. You’re fine,” Ace said. “Okay, then.” He scooped up the dog and turned back to the tiny house on the edge of the freeway. They’d gone a lot farther than Brady had anticipated, because the porch light might as well have been a star, and the garage faded into the dark of the night shadows.
“Okay, then, what?” Brady asked.
“Well, for starters, you need to give me some specifics about that bomb you dropped on me. And then I’m going to give you a whole shitton of telephone numbers so you can call one of us—preferably me or Ernie—if you get a tickle up your spine.
” Ace stared at him, and then, stopping for a moment, stared all around them, and Brady felt it.
That terrible, terrible aloneness of being a tiny soul in the vast indifference under a desert sky.
“I’m all alone,” Brady said, getting it after a moment.
“Nope,” Ace said with decision. “See that tiny light?”
“Your house?”
“Yeah. Thems my people. There’s more’n you think. But we got your back. Come on in. You can have some ice cream and cookies. Sonny’s favorite part.”
brADY LEFT about an hour later, pleased with the ice cream and cookies—and by Sonny’s childish delight over them.
He and Sonny had engaged in a lively discussion over which German automobile Eric should like, versus which one he professed to like the most, and while they’d never fully convert Brady to an Audi, he had laughed a lot.
Ernie had devoured enough ice cream to support a man as big as… well, Jai, the giant Russian, who had seemed to delight in terrorizing Brady by subjecting him to his baleful glare. The third time Brady turned toward him and startled, Ace had called him out on it.
“Now come on, Jai—he ain’t done nothing yet that’d warrant all that. He gets the idea.”
Jai had rolled his eyes as though bored. “American police,” he said, as though that was an entire treatise on the species. “That Subaru better have a magic engine.”
Brady had smiled with only his teeth, knowing his eyes were a little bit terrified, and to his surprise it was Eric who burst into laughter.
In the end, though, Brady had done the dessert dishes, with Ernie as his copilot, before taking his leave.
“What’d Ace say?” Ernie asked.
“He said you all would have my back,” Brady told him, not sure what that would mean to everybody else.
Ernie—who was drying the dishes—reached up to grab his shoulder.
For a moment Brady was alone, under a black sky, with no moon, no light of any kind.
And suddenly he was surrounded by stars.
Them’s my people. There’s more’n you think.
He heard Ace’s words, clear as the diamond-edged light, and he found his way back to the little kitchen with the pale yellow paint and the battered tile.
He sucked in a startled breath and stared at Ernie. “What the—”
“We chose you, Brady,” Ernie said. “You’d better choose us.”
Brady didn’t know what that meant, but he remembered that relief, that joy, in finding his way to a place with light and warmth and kindness.
Brady nodded, wishing he knew more what Ernie had meant in that gesture, and soon he took his leave.
He lived in a small apartment complex in Victoriana proper, which nobody at his station house did. Too remote, they complained. Not enough good food places. Too far to drive.
Which were all good reasons why Brady had chosen it. He loved patrolling the desert. And he loved that nobody knew about Victoriana but people who lived there. His family had been horrified. “What about all the immigrants?”
“You mean my fellow citizens?” he’d asked, making his point as he always did. Once his parents had died, there’d been more than one reason he’d felt more comfortable moving far away.
Tonight he listened to the babble of his neighbors at the small pool in the quad—most of it was in Spanish, but he was wrapping up a year on Duolingo, and while he was sure he sounded stiff and awkward, he could understand a lot more than he spoke, and the talk today was happy.
Somebody was having a birthday, and as Brady gazed out of the bay window, the one that looked toward the freeway, he felt a little like it had been his birthday.
He’d had cookies and ice cream, and he’d made new friends.
It was as close to home as he’d felt since before his folks had passed.
So his mind was relaxed as he stared out over the lights of the small town to the highway in the distance.
The night was so clear he thought he could make out a line of cars, driving in concert, almost connected like beads.
As one entity they pulled onto the road, turning toward Las Vegas and driving for what was probably two or three miles, and then—he could swear it—they all made a left turn into the desert and disappeared.
He gasped, because it was almost a magic trick, and then he scowled and tried to make sense of what he’d seen.
There was probably a rise there, he thought. Often, because so much of the desert was flat, having a rise or a dip in the sand dunes or the hardpan acted like sorcery. Things appeared and disappeared because of a rise or a hill or a hole in the desert.
Those three cars—and he’d been sure there were three—had all turned off on one of those elusive side roads that were almost always forgotten about until they were passed.
And they had emerged—he was almost sure of it—from Ace and Sonny’s garage across from the one gas station with the Subway connected.
Them’s my people. There’s more’n you think.
Unbidden came Charlie’s—no, dammit, Eric’s—ice-blue eyes and the casually seductive way he’d come on to Brady.
Tempting, Brady thought—very tempting. And he’d already proved he had Brady’s back.
But these were people who walked out into the middle of the desert alone at night without worry.
While none of the people in that little house tonight had been law enforcement, he’d seen telltale signs in all of them—even the dreamy, discombobulated Ernie—that they knew how to handle themselves.
He hadn’t missed the folded and highly illegal knife in the sheath at Ace’s waist.
They’d have Brady’s back. But Brady was law enforcement—had promised his father he’d bleed blue, through and through. Could Brady feasibly have their backs?
For a moment he was spinning dizzily in a velvet sky with no light, and then he was surrounded by stars.
Yeah, he realized with a stark swallow. If it meant he wasn’t alone, he suspected he could.