“There are other things we can do for my dad. Car, bow, hole—it’s a name, Doug. Carbajal. You and me can investigate that. We can do it together.”
“Oh, did your Mexican boyfriend translate for you?”
Liv drew a breath and held it. “What?”
“You think I don’t know? I know everything, Liv. It’s not hard. All I have to do is pay attention. To my friend. That’s what you said we are, right?”
“Bruno doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“He doesn’t? That’s pretty hard to believe, Liv. We find A, and for a couple weeks we’re good. And then suddenly you’re hanging out with this new guy no one knows, and you change your tune?” He switched to a shrill tone. “‘Don’t use my dog to scare it.’ ‘Where’d you get my Bears helmet?’” Doug’s knuckles were bone white against the wall. “It’s just a coincidence this guy shows up and you start acting this way? Like you prefer A to your own dad? Do I have everything exactly right?”
Liv pressed her skull between her hands. Doug wasn’t going to listen. She’d have to proceed alone with the police. He was humiliated and enraged; if she gave him the night to get his head together, maybe he would see the sense of it. She slapped her thigh to get John’s attention.
“C’mere, Johnny. Let’s go, boy.”
The dog stood. Liv took a single stride toward the door, halving the distance. When Doug spoke, his wry, sly tone was so unexpected it stopped her as solidly as would a piercing scream.
“You think I care what you do with Bruno? I don’t. Kind of makes me wonder, though. What would A do with sexual stimuli? I mean, we’ve done so many experiments, right? Seems like a missed opportunity not to test that, too. Maybe I should go over to the Pink Lady and, you know, rent a dancer for the night. Dress A up in Lee’s clothes and a hat so she thinks he’s a normal guy, and then have her wiggle around. See what happens. Take notes in my book. Worthy of study, don’t you think? Dancers are expensive, though. Maybe if we pooled our cash. Since we’re partners and everything. Since we’re friends.”
Liv stared in disbelief at his hunched form.
“Jesus, Doug,” she said.
Doug’s backbone hitched. Laughter and tears, all mixed.
The shrill mimicking returned. “‘Jesus, Doug.’” His arms shook. “Jesus, Doug.” His legs shook. “Jesus, Doug.” His whole body shook. “Jesus, Doug!”
Lee’s weapons had slept in shadows for so long that Liv had stopped seeing them, but this, she realized too late, had never been the case for Doug. In a single, smooth motion of breathtaking coordination, Doug’s left arm lashed up into the northeast corner of the shed—no, it was the Armory, forever the Armory—and snatched the battered handle of his old companion, the Aztec club Maquahuitl, swiping it from its hooks, and though he was older and stronger now, the wood was still thick and the thirteen sharpened stones still heavy, and it dipped low and lethal like a bladed pendulum, at which point Doug’s other hand joined the first, and now he had control, and the arc continued, missing the ground by inches and swooping back upward to smash into the southern wall.
“JESUS, DOUG!” he cried.
Weapons fractured upon impact. Wooden spears fired off their stone spearheads, flint arrowheads exploded into shrapnel. Liv hit the floor on instinct, covering her head, feeling nothing strike her but hearing a whole battlefield clatter across the concrete. She saw a gray blur—John scurrying aside—and taking the cue, she pistoned her legs away from the noise. Her spine hit a wall and she looked up, expecting to see Doug’s face a purple mask, Maquahuitl’s whole weight coming at her.
Instead, he was cradling the club like it was a broken arm.
“You ever think of me, Liv? Of me? At least if those kids were out there talking about what they saw here, it’d be something real, right? Something for me? It’s like all that stuff we used to do as kids. Visiting that monster made of animal parts. Trying to get into the grave robber’s apartment. Going to see the meteor in the fire station. I could be one of those things, Liv! Maybe it sounds like shit to you, because you’ll have college and jobs and husbands and kids. But that’s my future. That’s all I’ve got. People would come to see me. And not for fireworks. I could be proud.”
“You’re better than that,” she said, but it was a rasp.
“Stop lying to me,” he said. “If I lose A … I’ve got nothing left, Liv. Nothing.”
Doug Monk had never looked so lonely. The only sounds in the shed were the factory chugs of their inhales and exhales, John’s desolate whimper, and the skeleton rustle of the first crop of dead leaves mincing across the yard.
Concrete rumbled. It was Doug, dragging Maquahuitl along the floor, toward the door. Liv pushed herself to a sitting position. She watched Doug pass John, who sat with neck lowered, ears flattened, and eyes rolled up to Doug, his buddy since puppyhood. Pet him, Liv prayed. One pat on John’s head and she would believe that Doug might still be okay. Instead, she had a horrific vision that seemed every bit as plausible. Doug’s arm shooting out. Maquahuitl descending in an overhead crescent with the force of a dropped anvil. The stone blades passing through John so swiftly that his head took its time to fall from his body.
Doug did neither. He plodded through the destroyed shed, shoes sploshing through rain that twenty-some kids had tracked in. He paused at the threshold and looked about, as if considering trying to find A before being demoralized by the thickness of trees and shades of night. Just outside the door, Liv’s brutal vision came to life. Doug lifted Maquahuitl over his head and, with three shattering, shuddering blows, smashed the knob, the padlock, and all the connecting wood. Nothing would be kept safe inside the Armory ever again.
24.
For the next half hour, Liv became acquainted with the pulsing torture of paranoia. If this is how her father felt following his escape from abduction, no wonder he’d created the Armory, no wonder he’d built the traps. Liv stayed crouched in the shed long after she heard Doug drive off, her head tilted toward Custer Road for the gravel snap of his return. The rain dwindled, and she began to trust her hearing.
She couldn’t wait all night. A was out there where she’d left it, naked, coated with rain, and it was unseasonably cold. She pulled herself to a standing position, scooted John out the door, and gathered the blue tarp. Before she exited, she stepped over to the far wall and removed Mist—her old ally, the double-bladed antelope horns—from its hook. She felt better having it in her hand, hidden beneath the tarp.
There was no big secret to where she’d stashed A. Thirty feet off the path toward Amputator, she’d tucked the alien under a wild hedge. Carrying A had been no more difficult than a schoolbag. It’d been shivering then; now, ninety minutes later, it wasn’t shivering at all and dread flowed up Liv’s throat. She passed her hands over A’s body. It was shockingly cold. It was too dark to see much, so she wrapped A in the tarp, both for warmth and so that no one could see it—her mother, for instance, roused from a boozy bed—and lifted it once more.
Liv charged straight through the backyard, right through the swing-set tangle, straight up the back steps, where John waited. Before she could maneuver her hand from under the tarp, she paused to marvel at the soft, peach-hued kitchen light spilling from the back-door window. Never had she seen A under anything but the harshest of lights. A looked smaller, sadder.