irritable, anyway?”
Gus got up from the couch and stalked to the refrigerator. He opened the freezer and put his head next to the ice tray, trying to cool down.
“I don’t know,” Gus said. “Maybe it’s that we’ve promised a dangerous man we’d find his client, and now we realize that the client was actually trying to get away from him, and our client only wants us to find him because he wants to kill him.”
“And you think that puts us in an awkward position morally?” Shawn managed to excavate himself from the sofa cushion he’d sunk into and walked over to the refrigerator. Gently he pulled Gus back from the freezer and closed the door.
“I think it could make us accessories to murder,” Gus said.
Shawn opened the freezer again, then reached in and pulled out an unopened box of grape Popsicles. He tore open the box and offered it to Gus, who accepted one. Shawn unwrapped a Popsicle for himself, then put the box back in the freezer.
“You can relax,” Shawn said. “P’tontius P’kilate isn’t running away from Benny Fleck.”
“P’tol P’kah,” Gus said, more out of reflex than any hope that Shawn would ever get the name right.
“Yeah, right, that guy,” Shawn said.
Gus waited for an explanation. Shawn sucked on the Popsicle, his lips turning purple.
“How do you know that P’tol P’kah isn’t running away from Fleck?” Gus said finally.
“Because,” Shawn said, “he doesn’t exist.”
Chapter Eleven
“ Yes,” Gus said.“I think we’ve already determined that he’s not a real Martian.”
“It’s not that he’s not a real Martian,” Shawn said between sucks on the Popsicle. “It’s that he’s not a real person.”
“We’re standing in his apartment.”
“Are we?”
Although Gus was pretty sure he knew the answer, he took one long look around the luxury suite just to confirm that the walls hadn’t melted away to reveal that he was actually in his own bed, having an insanely elaborate dream. “I can’t speak for you,” he said, “but my feet are definitely on the thirty-ninth floor of the Outer Space Hotel and Casino in an area that’s been turned into an apartment for the exclusive use of P’tol P’kah.”
“Then why hasn’t he used it?” Shawn said. “Look how clean this place is.”
“So Martians are better housekeepers than you,” Gus said. “Besides, the hotel has an entire staff of chambermaids.”
“Okay,” Shawn said. “So when he wants to watch Wheel of Fortune, do the chambermaids come up and act it out for him?”
Gus stared at him blankly. Shawn gestured with his Popsicle at the enormous flat panel on the wall. “That TV isn’t hooked up to anything,” he said.
“Maybe it’s wired into the wall,” Gus said.
Shawn went over to the TV and fished around in the space between its bottom edge and the top of a long credenza. He came up with a sheaf of loose cables. “It’s not wired into anything.”
Gus tried to apply part of his mind to the idea that this had some significance. But mostly he was staring at the bright purple Popsicle that Shawn was holding over the white, white carpet.
Shawn walked over to the closet and pulled one of the mammoth sport coats off its hanger. “He’s got all these clothes, and he hasn’t worn any of them,” Shawn said. “The pockets are all sewn shut; the shirts are all folded and still pinned.” He pulled a shirt off the shelf and tossed it to Gus. When he caught it, Gus could feel the crackle of the manufacturer’s tissue between the layers of cotton.
“So maybe he’s decided the codpiece look works for him,” Gus said, remembering how the Martian was dressed-or, rather, not dressed-at the Fortress of Magic.
But Shawn wasn’t listening. He’d found a small door set into the back wall of the closet. “Cool,” he said.
“What’s cool?” Gus chided himself for letting Shawn change the subject, but he couldn’t help responding to the interest in his friend’s voice.
“Laundry chute,” Shawn said. “Looks like it goes all the way down. Want to see?”
Gus felt a new wave of vertigo just thinking about peering down a thirty-nine-story shaft. “You can describe it to me.”
“Well, it’s a chute,” Shawn said. “And it looks like they’ve thought of everything. They’ve even got rungs built into the sides so you can retrieve your shirt if you decide it’s not really dirty.”
“That’s not a laundry chute. It’s an emergency exit,” Gus said.
“Well, that explains why no one ever sees him leaving the hotel. But still, once he’s out, you’ve got a seven- foot-tall green man walking down the Strip essentially naked, and no one has ever noticed?” Shawn said, pounding his point home by waving the Popsicle. “There’s never been a single photo of him out in public.”
Gus tried to imagine a reason for that, but his mind was mostly occupied by the sight of Shawn’s Popsicle. And particularly by a small corner at the top, where the tip of the stick was showing through. There was a small crack in the purple ice, and it was growing every time Shawn employed the frozen treat as a pointing device.
“All this can only mean one thing,” Shawn said, using the Popsicle the way an orchestra conductor wields his baton. “And that’s-”
“No!” Gus cried out, but it was too late. The top corner of the Popsicle had broken off and a one-inch chunk of frozen water, high fructose corn syrup, artificial Concord grape flavoring, and-most crucially-indelible purple food coloring was hurtling through the air on a trajectory that, no matter its initial velocity, would result in a collision with the brilliant white carpet within seconds.
Gus didn’t hesitate. He ran the length of the room after the artificially sweetened projectile. But he wasn’t fast enough; the frozen treat was already breaking up as it spun through the air, sending drops of purple to land in a Pollock-worthy pattern on the carpet. And the main piece was only inches from the ground. Gus launched himself at the missile, flying through the air, twisting his body around, and stretching out his arm to snag the ice chunk before it could land.
But Gus’ hand closed on air as his face skidded across the carpet. Out of the eye that wasn’t embedded in the short shag, he saw the purple ice explode as it made contact with the floor, turning several square feet of white into a brightly colored Rorschach blotch. A shift of the eyeball revealed Shawn staring at him quizzically.
“Okay, maybe it can mean more than one thing,” Shawn said. “But that seems like a pretty dramatic way to make an objection.”
Gus climbed back up to his feet and immediately wished he hadn’t. From above, the stain was even uglier.
“Look at that,” Gus said, pointing down at the purple blotch. “We’ve got to find a way to clean it up.”
“I believe it was you who mentioned just moments ago that the hotel has an entire staff of housekeepers,” Shawn said.
“And if P’tol P’kah comes back before the maid does?”
“Then we’re the greatest detectives in the history of the world, and who cares that we made a little mess?” Shawn said, sucking on what was left of the Popsicle.
“Benny Fleck doesn’t want his client to know we were in his apartment,” Gus said. He picked the folded shirt up from the ground where he’d dropped it and marched it back to the closet, sliding it onto its correct shelf. “That means not pulling his clothes out of the closet, not leaving the TV cables hanging in the air, and definitely not leaving giant purple stains on the white carpet.”
“Maybe that’s how they like their carpets back on Mars,” Shawn said. “He’ll think Fleck was so concerned about his well-being that he had the rug painted.”
Gus closed the closet and went back to the kitchen area. Ducking behind the island, he started opening
