“Gunn.”
“Charles, I’m in condition two-one-zero-one. Do you understand?”
“GODDAMN YOU!”
“I’m in the plane, for God’s sake. It was Glass. Glass let a situation get away from her.”
“Glass. Glass doesn’t matter anymore. Glass is a liability and so are any other support personnel.”
“I realize that, Charles.”
“Well, act accordingly.”
Mike replaced the phone. He stared, thinking. The grays were not sitting still, they understood that there was a threat, and the direction it was coming from.
Okay, first things first. Do the support personnel. Andy was a good man and that would be hard, but Lauren—pretty as she was, he was going to enjoy putting her down.
FOURTEEN
DAN HAD COME HOME REEKING of booze, of all the incredible things, and gone in the living room and begun playing the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth over and over again at blasting volume. He lay there now in front of the stereo in the dark, splayed out on the floor like a great, gangling rag doll. She’d wanted to put her arms around him and mother him a little. His mother had been mostly indifferent to her little boy, and she felt that he needed the reassuring support of his woman right now.
She knew, of course, what had happened: Marcie Cotton had ditched his tenure. She was scared, too, she had to admit, because they could not remain here on just her salary. So what was going to happen to them was that they were going to fall off the academic cliff into the stew of little, tiny colleges and junior colleges and spend the rest of their lives scrimping and scraping.
She looked at the clock. Eight-twenty. She went into the living room, turned on a lamp.
“Please.”
“Dan, you’ve been in here for hours.”
“Please leave me be!”
“Dan, no.”
He did not respond.
She went on. “It’s about time for Conner to get home and I want you to come down out of the tree and face this together.” She had to bellow over the music. “Let’s turn that off, now.” She went to the stereo, flipped the switch. “Enough is enough.”
He rose off the floor, then went to the bar. “What’s in here? God.” He came up with an ancient bottle of creme de menthe, left over from some distant summer party when they’d poured it over ice cream. Earlier, she’d removed the rest of the booze to the garage.
“You already stink of bourbon. I hope you didn’t do this at the Peep?” The Peep Inn was the campus dive, where a professor most certainly did not need to get drunk.
“I did indeed. I consumed alcohol there, in the absurd hope that I could drink myself unconscious before the fall of night.”
“Dan, we’ll get by. Something good will happen.”
Staring at her as if she was insane, he slowly shook his head. Then he bared his teeth and rocked back in silent, agonized laughter.
“I got promised tenure by Marcie Cotton.”
She thrust her hands at him, connected with his chest. “Go
He nodded.
“And you won’t be getting drunk again, so it’s forgiven. Now, Marcie told you? She actually told you this?”
He nodded.
“You’re going to get a yes on
He stared at her, his eyes hollow, his lips hanging slightly open—an expression that said that this wasn’t the whole story.
“If I needed punishment, how would you go about it?”
What an extremely strange question. “Excuse me?”
“If I’d… done something wrong?”
“What have you done? You’ve gotten tenure, that’s hardly a matter for punishment. Is she sure?”
“Oh, yes.” He closed his eyes, shook his head.
She realized, then, that he was trying to say that he had done something with Marcie Cotton. Or no, it couldn’t be possible. You didn’t go to
“Dan, are you telling me—what? I’m not getting it.”
“You’re getting it.”
“Damn you!”
The front door opened and Conner called, “I’m home, people,” and Dan said, “I’m so damn sorry, baby. I’m so damn sorry!”
Conner breezed in. “Hi, Mom, hi, Dad. I have just been at an amazing editing session. The Keltons have an awesome video and they’re bringing it over, and Paulie and his parents are coming, and there’s a chance that—” He stopped, looked from one of them to the other. “Hello?”
Katelyn drew breath, drew it hard, trying mightily to contain the rage, the hurt that shuddered through her.
“Mom?”
She went to him. “I want you to go downstairs for just a little while.”
“They got video of the UFO. Everybody’s coming over to watch it on the big-screen TV.”
She did not exactly want a convention just now, but obviously she couldn’t prevent it. “You go down, and we’ll make popcorn when they come.”
“You sound strange.”
She took him to the stairs and closed the door behind him. Then she went back to Dan, who was now slumped on the couch with his face in his hands. “You asshole,” she said quietly.
“Hit me.”
“Dan, I’m not physical. But what I would very much like is for you to go upstairs and gather your belongings and take them with you, and get the hell out of my house.” She curtsied. “If you would be so kind.”
“I don’t know what happened! I don’t know how to explain it.”
“You screwed her for your tenure.”
“I did no such thing!”
“And I find that grotesque. And equally grotesque that you confessed it. What happened to you, you’re not this drunk blubbering jerk I see here! I sure as hell didn’t marry
“Look, I want to ask forgiveness.”
“It’s that easy, you get drunk and you cry and what happens, I kick you around and yell a little and this violation of your sacred trust is forgotten? And if you go to go creeping off to sleep with her in the forenoon from now on, then what do I do? Just bear everyone in this miserable fishbowl knowing my—what’s the word—shame, I suppose. My shame.”
“It left me… vulnerable. Somehow, it affected me.”
“What did?”
“That incident!”
“Something weird happens and therefore you go make love to Marcie Cotton?”
He shook his head, waved his hand at her. “I—it made me… want her. I don’t know why, but it did. I relate the two things.”
“What in hell are you saying?”
