'Learn?' I said.
And so it went for another few moments, until Sam, who I hadn't see enter the room, but who nonetheless was standing in the entry hall between the kitchen and the living room holding a band of copper wiring, cleared his throat. When I turned and saw him, I also saw Cricket, who by this time looked even more stricken than usual and was standing beside Sam.
'I'm sorry,' I said to Cricket. 'Family.'
'I know,' she said. 'I'm not upset about that. I'm upset that I don't have that anymore. You two arguing reminds me of my son and his father. You two have a real shorthand, even when you're angry or frustrated. You only find that with people who love each other. I guess I should have recognized that sooner.'
I understood and said so. 'Nate,' I said, 'I don't think you've been properly introduced. This is Cricket O'Connor. She's the person we're helping here. Cricket, this is my brother, Nate Westen. He's kindly found us some furniture to use for the day.'
Nate wiped his hands off on his pants, then apologized for wiping his hands off on his pants, and then finally just walked up and shook Cricket's hand. 'I'm sorry for your loss,' he said, as if he were at a funeral for someone he didn't know, which, in a way, he was. We all were.
'Of what?' Cricket said.
'Of everything,' Nate said.
Cricket smiled wanly at Nate. 'I appreciate your help,' she said. 'It's not for me, though.'
Nate looked at her quizzically, so I stepped in before he could speak any more. 'I haven't explained everything to Nate,' I said. I ran down the basics.
'Why haven't you just found this asshole and shot him?' Nate asked when I finished.
'What good would it do for those families Cricket is supporting if I kill him, Nate? How does that make me any better than he is? This is about getting back what's been taken and using it for the right reasons.'
'I get it,' Nate said, 'though you have to admit it would be awfully satisfying to shoot him.'
Everyone agreed that was true, including, much to my surprise, Cricket. That, too, would pass. If everything went according to plan, or even if it didn't, Cricket would still have her own heartache to deal with. The difference between love and hate isn't so severe when you're in the thick of either emotion and I did realize by then one important thing: Though Cricket had been bamboozled, had lost everything, really, she still felt something for the man who swept her off her feet, even if it was a lie. I thought about the photos Fiona and I saw of them at that benefit. Thought about how happy Cricket looked. How as she and Eddie Champagne walked into that party they looked like real people, like people you'd see in a magazine and imagine had the most perfect life, people you'd wish you were.
Your life is never as rich as what other people presume it is or, often, what you believe it is. It happened to Cricket with her first husband, too, which made it all the worse. But I guess it happens to all of us, eventually: We lose track of what it was we thought we were doing with ourselves, and one day, we wake up, and we are in a fix beyond our control.
Cricket O'Connor got her own burn notice.
I'd try to make it right for one of us.
Bullies never take on anyone they can't beat. That's what makes them predictable. You want to find a coward? Remove all forms of inevitability. Change circumstances. Introduce unusual danger.
Or, barring that, know how to make tear gas.
Everything you need can be found at Home Depot or Lowe's, or, if you live in a city that has a Super Wal- Mart, you can get all your tear gas ingredients at the same time you purchase a rifle, the entire first season of The Love Boat on DVD and clothes made by Malaysians. And since 9/11, they even carry gas masks now, too. Bulk shopping at its best: entertainment, fashion, terrorism and safety all in one place.
Guns are easy until you have to use one. In the history of combat, before we started desensitizing our soldiers and happily allowed them to return home mentally neutered, traditionally only 15 percent of the people tasked with shooting another person were actually able to do it. There's a reason why firing squads were used for decades-most of the shooters will miss out of simple human nature. But if you aren't sure you're the person who provided the kill shot, it's much easier to go through life without putting another bullet in your own head.
Tear gas, on the other hand, has no moral component.
Nor does Fiona when it comes to making weapons.
'If you gave me a bit more time,' Fiona said, 'I could make a batch of mustard gas.'
'That's all right,' I said. 'No reason to take down the whole island.' Fiona and I were in Cricket's garage mixing up a usable sum of tear gas to use for personal consumption. And by personal, I mean I was going to take great personal glee in using it on the people shaking Cricket down, who, I was beginning to suspect, were far from real bad guys. Real bad guys don't just keep coming back for more money like their mark is an ATM machine or the newest fish in a pyramid scheme.
Real bad guys would expect someone like Cricket to go to the police. Real bad guys would have killed Cricket. Real bad guys didn't give a shit about people like Eddie Champagne, because a real bad guy would know a guy as sloppy and stupid as I was beginning to see Eddie was could never be someone like Dixon Woods. Dixon Woods wasn't stupid. Dixon Woods wasn't sloppy. Dixon Woods might be a bad guy, he might be a good guy, but what he wasn't was a fool.
Tomorrow, I'd see if I could work around that.
'Too bad,' Fiona said. She'd set up a workstation in Cricket's garage and was now running a length of rubber tubing outside to a hose spigot. 'Clamp this,' she said when she returned and handed me one end of the tube and what looked like a jam jar. She moved around behind me, her hand sliding across my back, and stood beside me again, and started measuring out the sodium bisulfate. She worked delicately with the compound, cutting and sizing while I fixed together a series of tubes and ad hoc beakers, using mostly things we'd cleaned out of Cricket's cabinets and refrigerator.
The problem with using things like peanut butter and jelly jars instead of sanitized lab equipment is that you can never be sure what's been left behind. A little peanut oil can mean a lot of fire. And when you're making tear gas, a lot of fire is not, patently, a good thing.
'Careful,' I said. Fiona was about to mix the sodium bisulfate with glycerin soap-not the perfect recipe for tear gas, but one that will do in a pinch, or when you can't find a craft store that has the purest stuff. Fortunately, Cricket had plenty of very good soap, and very good soap is what you need if you want to make tear gas in the garage of your mansion.
'Careful, yourself,' Fiona said. 'You should stand back. I'm going to heat this now.'
I moved closer to her.
A weird thing happens between Fiona and me when we make weapons.
It's not sexual in the physical sense, but it certainly is mentally. There is a quality of excitement when you know you're working on something lethal with someone who understands what lethal really means. It's more than shared experience, of course, because if it were, I'd find Sam equally attractive. You spend your life feinting from things that can hurt you or you dive headlong, there is no middle ground, and so when you find someone who shares a chemical disposition toward immersion… and if she happens to casually roll against you in ways that make you think of the sex you imagined before you ever had sex… even when you're wearing gas masks, which, at the moment, we were… well, you keep them in your life, even if it's ultimately bad for your health.
'If we are both permanently disfigured,' I said, 'we'll still have each other.'
'Enticing,' Fiona said and then she mixed the sodium bisulfate and soap together without incident. We spent the next several minutes hip to hip, finger to finger, breath to breath (albeit in gas masks), capturing gas into rubber-stopped glass vials.
It was the best date I'd been on in a long, long time.
When we were done, we washed off using the hose on the side of the yard so we wouldn't bring any residual chemicals into the house. Even I couldn't disregard how bizarre things sometimes were between us.
'What are you smiling about?' Fi asked.
'This,' I said. 'You and me. Giving each other a hose shower after making tear gas.'
'It's not the strangest thing.'
'No,' I said. 'No, it's not.'
'It could be a lot worse, Michael. You could be searching for women on the Internet.'
