The City of Mirrors
Page 116“I see your point.”
The truck with the bodies drove away.
“I don’t mean to press,” Greer said, “but have you decided about Lore?”
The question had preoccupied Michael for weeks. Always he came back to the same answer. “I think she’s the only one I trust enough to do this.”
“I agree.”
Michael turned toward Greer. “Are you sure you don’t want to be the one to run things around here? I think you’d be good at it.”
“That’s not my role. The Bergensfjord is yours. Don’t worry, I’ll keep the troops in line.”
They were quiet for a time. The only lights burning were the big spots on the dock. Michael’s men would be working through the night.
Greer cocked his head.
“In your vision, I know you couldn’t see who else was on the ship—”
“Just the island, the five stars.”
“I understand that.” He hesitated. “I’m not sure how to put this. Did it…feel like I was there?”
Greer seemed perplexed by the question. “I really couldn’t say. That wasn’t part of it.”
“You can be honest with me.”
“I know I can.”
“I guess that’s that,” said Greer.
Rand walked up to them. “Everybody’s assembled at the dock.”
Suddenly Michael felt the weight of it. Not ordering the deaths of so many; that had been easier than expected. He was in charge now—the isthmus was his. He checked the magazine on his sidearm, decocked the hammer, and slid the pistol back into its holster. From now on, he would never be apart from it.
“All right, that oil ships in thirty-six days. Let’s get this show on the road.”
* * *
30
IOWA FREESTATE
Pop. 12,139
Sheriff Gordon Eustace began the morning of March 24—as he did every March 24—by hanging his holstered revolver on the bedpost.
Because carrying a weapon wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be respectful. For the next few hours, he’d be just a man, like any man, standing in the cold on aching joints to think about the way things might have been.
He kept a room at the back of the jail. For ten years, since the night he couldn’t make himself return to the house, that was where he’d slept. He’d always considered himself the sort of man who could pick himself up and get on with things, and it wasn’t as if he was the first person whose luck had turned bad. But something had gone out of him and never come back, and so this was where he lived, in a cinder-block box with nothing but a bed and a sink and a chair to sit in and a toilet down the hall, nobody but drunks sleeping it off for company.
Outside the sun was rising in a halfhearted, March-in-Iowa way. He heated a kettle on the stove and carried it to the basin with his straight razor and soap. His face looked back in the old cracked mirror. Well, wasn’t that a pretty sight. Half his front teeth gone, left ear shot off to a pink nub, one eye clouded and useless: he looked like something in a children’s story, the mean old ogre under the bridge. He shaved, splashed water on his face and under his arms, and dried himself off. All he had on hand for breakfast were some leftover biscuits, hard as rocks. Sitting at the table, he worked them over with his back teeth and washed them down with a shot of corn liquor from the jug beneath the sink. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he liked one in the morning, especially this morning of all mornings, the morning of March 24.
He put on his hat and coat and stepped outside. The last of the snow had melted, turning the earth to mud. The jailhouse was one of the few buildings in the old downtown that anybody still used; most had been empty for years. Blowing on his hands, he made his way past the ruins of the Dome—nothing left of it now but a pile of rocks and a few charred timbers—and down the hill into the area that everybody still called the Flatland, though the old workers’ lodges had long since been dismantled and used as firewood. Some folks still lived down here, but not many; the memories were too bad. The ones who did were generally younger, born after the days of the redeyes, or else very old and unable to break the psychological chains of the old regime. It was a squalid dump of shacks without running water, miasmatic rivers of sewage running in the streets, and a roughly equivalent number of dirty children and skinny dogs picking through the trash. Eustace’s heart broke every time he saw it.