The Darkest Evening of the Year

wallet?”
    “That’s what I call the client. I call a client the wallet.”
    “I call him the client.”
    “Doesn’t surprise me, Vern. What do you call the subject of a surveillance, like this woman?”
    “I call her the subject,” said Vern, “the mark, the bird.”
    “That’s all so old,” Bobby said disdainfully. “These days, the mark is called the monkey.”
    “Why?” Vern wondered.
    “Because it’s not the Jurassic Period anymore, Vern.”
    “You’re twenty-four. I’m only thirty-nine.”
    “Fifteen years, Vern. These days, that’s an Ice Age. Times change fast. You still want to meet at two-thirty before we go see the wallet?”
    “Yeah. Two-thirty.”
    “Same rally you said before?”
    “Rally?”
    “Rallying point, Vern, meeting place. Get it?”
    “Yeah. Same rally as before. Two-thirty. Hey, Bobby.”
    “Yeah?”
    “If some guy’s an asshole, what do people call him these days?”
    “Far as I know, that’s what they call him.”
    “I guess asshole is a kind of timeless word. See you at two-thirty.”
    Vern terminated the call and looked around the cheerful yellow-and-white kitchen. He wished he didn’t have to leave. Amy Cogland, alias Amy Redwing, had a sweet life here.
    After locking the bungalow behind him, Vern walked back to his rustbucket Chevy, carrying the white trash bag of items that he had confiscated during the search. He felt old and dumpy, and melancholy.
    As he drove away from Redwing’s neighborhood, he thought about Von Longwood and the flying sports car in Second Life, and his mood began to improve.

 
    Chapter
25
    A half dozen sea gulls drop out of the sky, shriek to perches on the higher branches of the Montezuma pine, fall silent in the same instant, seem simultaneously to detect a danger, and as one burst into flight, with a violent drumming of wings.
    Either disturbed by the gulls or coming loose by coincidence, a ten-inch pine cone rattles down through the branches and lands on the blanket beside Moongirl.
    She does not react to the sudden shrill cries of the gulls or to the thunder of their wings, or to the fall of the heavy cone. With the manicurist’s brush, she smoothly spreads purple polish across a toenail.
    After a while, she says, “I hate the gulls.”
    “We’ll go to the desert soon,” Harrow promises.
    “Someplace very hot.”
    “Palm Desert or Rancho Mirage.”
    “No waves breaking.”
    “No gulls,” he says.
    “Just hot silent sun.”
    “And moonlit sand at night,” he says.
    “I hope the sky is white.”
    “You mean the desert sky.”
    “Sometimes it’s almost white.”
    “That’s more like August,” he says.
    “Bone-white around the sun. I’ve seen it.”
    “At high altitudes like Santa Fe.”
    “Bone-white.”
    “If you want it, then it will be.”
    “We’ll go from fire to fire.”
    He doesn’t understand, so he waits.
    She finishes painting the last toenail. She returns the brush to the bottle of purple polish.
    She tosses her head to cast her long hair behind her shoulders, and her bare breasts sway.
    Far out on the scaly sea, a ship is northbound. Another sails south.
    When one profile passes behind the other, perhaps the ships will cancel each other, and cease to exist.
    This is not a thought he would have had before hooking up with Moongirl.
    Eventually all ships sink or they are disassembled for scrap. In time, anything that was something becomes nothing. Existence has no ultimate purpose except cessation.
    So why shouldn’t the existence of any one thing—ship or person—terminate at any moment, without cause or reason?
    “We’ll burn them all,” she says.
    “If that’s what you want.”
    “Tomorrow night.”
    “If they get here by then.”
    “They will. Burn them down to bones.”
    “All right.”
    “Burn them, then to the desert. From fire to fire.”
    Harrow says, “When you say burn them all …”
    “Yeah. Her, too.”
    “I thought it might be time.”
    “It’s ten years overdue.”
    He says, “When the burning’s done…”
    Moongirl meets his eyes.
    “…who leaves here and how?” he finishes.
    “Me,” she says. “And you. Together.”
    He thinks she means it. He will be wary nonetheless.
    “White sky pressing down on flat white sand,” she says. “All that heat.”
    He watches her for a while as she blows on her wet nails. Then he asks, “Have you fed her?”
    “It’s a waste of food now.”
    “We may need her in good shape.”
    “Why?”
    “Show and