Dead and Gone

“I didn’t tell you I was going back to New York, miss.”

Gem’s expression didn’t change. But when she took the finished package from my hands and brought it over to the counter, there was an extra twitch to her hips.

I spent the next couple of days making charts. In my head. I knew where some of the wires ran. And I knew they intersected … somewhere. What I needed was the junction box.

The man I was searching for lived in the whisper-stream, but he was no myth. I’d known Lune since we were kids. And I knew what he’d be doing, guaranteed. I just didn’t know where. I kept drawing possibilities on my charts, waiting. One morning, Gem was gone by the time I got up. And she stayed gone until it was dark again.

“For you,” she said a couple of days later, handing me a box wrapped in brown paper. I knew what was inside. And that there wouldn’t be fingerprints on any of it.

Three cell phones. Different brands, one not a lot bigger than a pack of cigarettes.

The last time I’d seen Lune face to face, he was operating out of a waterfront warehouse in Cleveland, in a section called the Flats. Over the years, that neighborhood had gone from hardcore to downright trendoid. Lune had pulled up stakes and moved on a while ago. But maybe he left a few roots in the ground.

The first few numbers I tried were disconnected. Even some area codes had changed. All I wanted was to leave a message. Lune had told me how to do that: say that my name was Winston, that my father was sick, then give whatever phone number I had for him to reach me—after I converted it by adding one to the first digit, nine to the last, and so on, working toward the middle of the ten-digit number, which was to be left unchanged.

When I’d gone through all the numbers I had, it was time to start seeding the clouds, hoping for rain. I reached out to organizations, groups, clubs, crews, gangs, associations … especially the ones with only one member. UFO documenters, alien abductees, Elvis-spotters, Illuminati true believers, anyone monitoring Scientologists, investigating the Monarch Program investigators, tracking werewolves, alerting the world to Remote Telemetric Surveillance, searching for D. B. Cooper, hiding from black helicopters, waiting for the Ascension …

Anytime anyone asked me who I wanted to leave the message for, I knew I was in the wrong place.

Four … maybe it was five … long days went by. I kept working the phones into the night, too—time zones don’t mean much to the people I was contacting. Some of the conversations felt like an icepick to the eardrum.

“Drink this,” Gem said, startling me out of wherever my mind had been, handing me a small white china cup.

“What is it?”

“It is tea. A special blend. Very good for headaches.”

“I didn’t say I had a headache.”

“If you saw someone limping, would they have to tell you their foot was bothering them?”

“What’s your problem?”

“My problem? My problem is your problem. But you don’t see it as I do, yes?”

“Huh?”

“I can help you.”

“You are helping me. And you helped me plenty already.”

“So we are done?”

“Gem, this isn’t the time to—”

“Please don’t be a stupid man.”

“I thought that was a redundancy.”

She refused to giggle, but I did get a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth. “Maybe it is.”

“Little girl, just explain to me whatever you want me to know, okay? I’ve been doing nothing but talking to very strange people for days. Maybe some of it rubbed off.”

“You are looking for someone, yes?”

“Looking for him to get in contact with me, that’s right.”

“But you do not know where he is?”

“Right.”

“So you are leaving messages in random places, hoping one of the people you leave a message with actually knows this person. Or how to reach him, anyway.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Why is it that you do not ask me to help, then?”

“Honey …” I hesitated, trying to come up with a capsule description of a man who didn’t fit any description. “It would take me a long time to explain the guy I’m trying to get in touch with. He’s one of the smartest people I ever met in my life. But he’s not … like other people. I don’t think he’d recognize me—this isn’t the face I had when we last saw each other—but he’d know my voice. And we have a communication code, for just between us. For all I know, one out of all the maniacs I’ve been speaking with is connected. If that’s so, whatever I say is probably recorded. Maybe even voice-printed. It wouldn’t make sense for a woman to be leaving messages for me, understand?”

“Of course,” she said, biting at her lower lip impatiently. “But there are other ways to … leave a message, are there not?”

“Sure. I was going to try the personals columns of a few of the ‘alternative’ papers. One of the Capgras people might—”

“Capgras?”