“Telling you that would be illegal,” Ray Dean said. “You’re going to have to get a warrant and ask those questions yourself. But it’s true. I don’t know what kind of a connection Jig Tyler had with Drew Harrigan. I’ve met Tyler on a number of occasions, and I can’t imagine it. Tyler hates idiots. Harrigan was practically the definition of one. But there you are. Get the warrant. Ask the questions. Find out where Sherman Markey is and bring him back to me.”
“You think Jig Tyler has Sherman Markey, too?”
“I don’t know,” Ray Dean said. “I just know that he’s out there somewhere, dead or alive. He’s being used by people who should know better than to…I don’t know than to what. It’s freezing out there. He’s been gone for weeks. I want him back. I want him now.”
“I’ll do my best,” Gregor Demarkian said.
Ray Dean felt suddenly awkward—more shades of St. Paul’s, more memories from the kind of childhood he would never have wished on himself. He stood up a little stiffly and said good-bye in that oddly formal way he couldn’t help. He hadn’t noticed it before, but Fr. Tibor Kasparian hadn’t said a word. Ray Dean said it was nice meeting him, anyway, and then he heard his mother in his head, telling him that manners had to be glued on tight, especially in the most awkward situations.
A moment later, he was out on the street, looking up and down again. He would go to that Middle Eastern food store, he thought. He would buy loukoumia and halva. He wasn’t the kind of person who usually used sugar to make himself feel better, but he didn’t usually use liquor, either, and he didn’t usually use pills, and he thought that, the way things were going, he might as well try something.
2
It was one of those things, an accident at the end of a long string of accidents, an impossibility dressed up as a moment of revelation. Jig Tyler had been trained well enough to know that coincidences happen. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, or the paranormal, or fate. Still, he wasn’t usually out of bed and out in town this early in the morning. He liked to read late at night, because it was quiet, and nobody thought to call him. He’d been up until at least three, plowing his way through the latest piece of idiocy by Mona Charen. He didn’t know why he went on reading books like that. They were aimed at an audience with an IQ of under a hundred and average cultural literacy of even less than that, and it was just as bad in the books by the “liberals” on the playing field. He wished he could take all these people and sweep them off the board, the way angry women swept chess pieces off boards in melodramatic movies. He wished he had a melodramatic movie to go to. He wished he were still asleep, but the alarm clock had gone off for some reason probably having to do with the fact that it was very old and beginning to malfunction, and he hadn’t been able to get to sleep again once he’d finally managed to stop its buzzing.
He had gone out because he’d started feeling claustrophobic staying in, and he had gone into the drugstore because it had been handy and open when the wind started. He never wandered around in drugstores. He always headed straight for whatever it was he was looking for. He didn’t know what to make of the plastic toys and decks of cards and boxes of candy that drugstores had everywhere. He couldn’t imagine anybody paying the extra freight to pick up a three-ring binder here to get out of walking the few blocks to a regular stationery store. The people in drugstores made him nervous, because they always seemed to be confused about what it was they were supposed to do next. Now that he was out and awake and cold he was also fuzzy, the way he got when his sleep had been interrupted at the very worst time.
He went back to look at the magazines because they were there to look at, and because they at least constituted something to read, sort of. He looked over the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. He marveled at the sheer number of cooking magazines, all with glossy four color photo spreads of things that probably tasted terrible once you had them in front of you, but that looked so perfect on the page you wanted to have every one of them now. He looked at the car and motorcycle magazines. He looked at the women’s magazines, which all seemed to assume that women were spending their time at home all day the way they had in 1950. He was about to go back out into the cold when he saw the nuns.
Here was another accident—what were the odds that it would be the same nuns, all the way out here, miles from Hardscrabble Road and their convent? Monastery, Jig reminded himself, and then the younger of the two turned, looked around absently, saw him, and stopped. Jig was holding a copy of Women’s Wrestling Today, which he found to be one of the most remarkable examples of popular culture he’d ever encountered. The women must have been taking steroids. There was no possibility that they could have developed that kind of musculature without them. He put the magazine down very quickly. The women were all wearing very skimpy clothing, thongs and postage stamp bra tops, not the kind of thing that would suit a nun. The nun didn’t seem to notice. She was staring at his face. Then she tugged sharply at her companion’s sleeve and started to come over.