giving her a crash course in hostage psychology. As far as Paz could see, she was ignoring him entirely, eyes half closed, her left hand clutched around the little bag of powder. Then she seemed to snap awake. She caught Paz’s eye.
“Detective Paz, listen to me?I may not come out of there. If I don’t, I want you to promise me that you’ll get Luz to my family. She likes you. I don’t want her caught in the bureaucracy, foster homes … There’s a lawyer’s card in my bag. He’ll know what to do, but I want you to take her to Sionnet. Will you promise me that?”
Paz swallowed a large gob of spit and said that he would.
“Thank you. If I do come out, I want you to physically take me to an empty room, put me in, and lock the door. Don’t listen to anything I say, just do that. Oh, and there has to be a flame burning in the room, a candle, a gas burner, anything. It’s critical to have a fire. Can you do that?”
“Sure, no problem,” said Paz, and watched her pick up the tray of bread and wine and walk off down the hallway to the door of Chief Horton’s office. She paused, while the negotiators called Barlow and made sure that he knew that a woman was coming through the door with the delivery. The negotiator said, “Go!” Jane opened the door and walked through it. Paz pulled a fat plumber’s candle out of an emergency box and set it alight on a desk in an empty office. Then he rushed back to the monitors.
Jane was standing by the chief’s desk. She had obviously just put down her tray. Barlow was still ranting, pistol in hand. It was hard to see the expression on his face because of the camera angle. Only the top and back of Jane’s head were visible. Barlow was saying, “… and I will give power unto my two witnesses … power, and if any man, if any man hurt them fire proceedeth out of their mouths and devoureth their enemies …” Paz saw Jane toss some powder in the air and step close to Barlow, who snarled something unintelligible and pointed his pistol at Jane. Jane brushed by the gun and placed her hands on Barlow’s cheeks. Barlow staggered backward and stared up, directly at the camera, a look of surprise on his face. Then his head rolled back on his neck and he fell to the floor. They saw Jane stagger at that moment, cling to the desk for support, and then move shakily toward the door.
Paz moved, but not as fast as the SWAT team, who had already burst into the office. He snatched Jane from the grip of one of the black-clad men and hustled her along. She sagged against him, murmuring, “No no no no …”
Into the empty office with her. He closed the door and stood guard, shaking off the many people who came by and asked him what had really happened and who the woman was and what the flying fuck was going on. She was in there eighteen minutes, by his watch. Then the door opened and she was standing in the doorway, swaying, her face pale and sweaty. The office smelled of snuffed candle and vomit. There were smears of yellowish matter on the bosom of her shirt. She said, “I used the wastebasket. Oh, all your lovely meal! I’m so sorry.”
And pitched forward, into his arms.
Later, having scrubbed her, and scrounged a toothbrush for her, and rested her and distributed the requisite lies to the media, and having sneaked her out down an obscure fire exit, Paz was driving Jane Doe home in an unmarked police car. They had just passed Douglas on Dixie Highway when she said, “Go by Dinner Key, please, I want to check on something.”
He did so. When they got out of the car the sun had cleared Key Biscayne and it was another glowing Miami day. She led him down one of the wooden docks.
“There it is,” she said, looking up at the schooner Guitar. “Oh, good, it’s still for sale.”
“This one? It looks pretty old.”
“It is old. It’s a pinky schooner. Like the one I burned. I’m going to buy it.” She wrote down the phone number posted on the For Sale sign, scribbling on the web of her thumb with a ballpoint.
“You’re planning to stay in Miami?”
“Oh, no, I’m planning to sail away in it. I have to escape by water.”
“Water, uh-huh. This escape is after we nail the witch doctor, right? I hope.”
“The witch. A witch doctor is an entirely different profession. What will they do to your partner?” Changing the subject. He did not care to pursue it, either.
“Medical leave, most likely. He didn’t kill anyone, and he was clearly out of his gourd, along with half the cops in town and about a thousand other people. The death toll is over two hundred and climbing, eleven of them cops. You say it could get worse?”
“It could. I don’t know. Let’s go back, shall we?”
They walked. He took her arm when she stumbled once on a loose plank, and held on to it, enjoying the warmth of her through the thin wool.
“Say, Jane? Are you ever going to tell me what you did in there with Barlow? And the deal with the room and the candle?”
“How patient you’ve been!” she said, half laughing. “You’ve been dying to ask me all this time. And the secret answer is … I have no idea. Really. There was a grel in control, obviously, as the Olo believe is the case with nearly all crazy people. There’s a ritual, a mental and emotional preparation you do, augmented with drugs. I think I actually mentioned it in the journal. I invited the grel into me, locked it down, and blew it out when I was alone. The pros use a chicken, but I didn’t have one, so I used me. The candle … I don’t know exactly what the candle does. You toss a pinch of fanti, that’s that brown powder, into the candle, you chant a little, and the grel is out of you and off in grel — land. Sorry if that’s not very satisfying, but I’m pretty much a rote-knowledge sorcerer. Think of an Indian in a clearing in Amazonia somewhere with a portable TV and a satellite feed, watching the Super Bowl. It works, but does he know how? Does he understand what he’s seeing?” She paused. “What’s your name? I mean is it really James?”
“Iago. Which don’t work so good in the schoolyard. So, Jimmy.”
“Is that what your mother calls you?”
“When she’s feeling okay. If not, it’s Iago, or worse.”
“We sorcerers like to call things by their right name, so if I may, I’ll call you Paz. Luz and Paz, light and peace, my daughter and my … detective. And ally.”
“Is that a good omen?”
“It better be,” she said.
THIRTY-ONE
Igo out and sit on the landing, and I recall the night when Dolores came out into the garden in her T-shirt and heard the mockingbird and time stopped and she started to be me again. Now it is just that moment when, as the Arabs say, a white thread can just be distinguished from a black one. The garden is monochrome, the air utterly still, not a whisper, the air poised after the death of the sea breeze; the foliage is monumental, as if cast in metal, and at this, the lowest temperature of the day, all the water has been wrung from the humid air and plated out onto every smooth surface, like a glittery varnish. I reflect that this may be the last dawn of my life, and I find that I’m not afraid of death. I’m only afraid of being eaten, like my husband was.
The moment passes. In two eyeblinks, there is color again, Polly’s roof is red, the hibiscus is pink, and the sky is pale blue with the big clouds starting their usual tropical morning pileup overhead. The birds begin their morning flittings and twitterings, and the first zombie shuffles into the yard, like a meter inspector on a route, and walks back into the shadow of the croton hedge. I wave to it in a friendly way. Time to work.
I dress in my painter’s overalls and a T-shirt and walk up the stairs. Luz is still sleeping. I sit on the edge of her bed and look at her, as the day slowly drifts into the room. If Witt and I had conceived a child, she might have been a slight bisque-colored creature like this. If one believes, as I suppose I must, in the primacy of the psychic world, perhaps Luz is that child, spiritually, a brand snatched from the bonfire of my late marriage. The Olo believe that the guys up there in m’arun are pretty smart, and when they want something to happen, it happens, and never mind the molecules. I confess it: I tried, that last season in New York, to get pregnant anyway, but it never took. Yet here she is: ga’lilfanebi lilsefunite tet, as they say in Olo?soul love is stronger than blood. I have to believe it. She wakes, not with a start, the way I do, but slowly, like a flower; my eyes are the first thing she sees, supposedly a good omen too.
But the first thing she says, her eyes going to the Burdines shopping bag standing on her night table, is “Did
