Seize the Night

“We needed some Tupperware,” Bobby said.

“Where were you all night?”

“Studying Tupperware catalogs,” I said.

“You disappoint me, Chris.”

“You think I’m more the Rubbermaid type?”

Manuel said, “I never knew you to be a smartass.”

“I’m a man of countless facets.”

A subdued response to his questioning would be interpreted as fear, and any show of fear would invite harsher treatment. We both knew that the perverse martial law in force during this emergency had never been legally declared, and though it was unlikely that any authority would ever hold Manuel or his men accountable for high crimes or misdemeanors, he couldn’t be certain there would be no consequences for his illegal acts. Besides, he’d once been a by-the-book lawman, and beneath all his self-justification, he still had a conscience. Wiseass remarks were my way — and Bobby’s way — of reminding Manuel that we knew as well as he did that his authority was now mostly illegitimate and that pushed too hard, we would resist it.

“Don’t I disappoint you, too?” Bobby asked.

“I’ve always known what you are,” Manuel said, dropping the pistol magazine into one of his pockets.

“Likewise. You should change brands of face makeup. Shouldn’t he change brands of makeup, Chris?”

“Something that covers better,” I said.

“Yeah,” Bobby said to Manuel, “I can still see the three sixes on your forehead.”

Without responding, Manuel tucked my Glock under his belt.

“Did you check out the license number?” I asked him.

“Useless. The Suburban was stolen earlier in the evening. We found it abandoned this afternoon, near the marina.”

“Any leads?”

“None of this is your business. I’ve got two things to say to you, Chris. Two reasons I’m here. Stay out of this.”

“Is that number one?”

“What?”

“Is that number one of the two? Or is that bonus advice?”

“Two things we can remember,” Bobby said. “But if there’s a lot of bonus advice, we’ll have to take notes.”

“Stay out of this,” Manuel repeated, speaking to me and ignoring Bobby. There was no unnatural luminosity in his eyes, but the hard edge in his voice was as chilling as animal eyeshine. “You’ve used up all the get-out-of- jail-free cards you had any right to expect from me. I mean it, Chris.”

A crash came from upstairs. A heavy piece of furniture had been tipped over.

I started toward the hall door.

Manuel stopped me by drawing his billy club and slamming it hard against the table. The rap was as loud as a gunshot. He said, “You heard me tell Frank not to trash the place too much. Just relax.”

“There aren’t any more guns,” I said angrily.

“Poetry lover like you might have a whole arsenal. For public safety, we have to be sure.”

Bobby was leaning against the counter near the cooktop, arms crossed on his chest. He appeared to be entirely resigned to our powerlessness, willing to ride out this episode, so totally chilled that he might as well have had lumps of coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose. This pose no doubt deceived Manuel, but I knew Bobby so well that I could see he was like a dry-ice bomb about to achieve blast pressure. The drawer immediately to his right contained a set of knives, and I was sure that he had chosen his position with the cutlery in mind.

We couldn’t win a fight here, now, and the important thing was to remain free to find Orson and the missing kids.

When the sound of shattering glass came from upstairs, I ignored it, reined in my anger, and said tightly to Manuel, “Lilly lost her husband. Now, maybe, her only child. Doesn’t that reach you? You of all people?”

“I’m sorry for her.”

“That’s all?”

“If I could bring her boy back, I would.”

His choice of words chilled me. “That sounds like he’s already dead — or somewhere you can’t go to get him.”

With none of the compassion that once had been the essence of Manuel, he said, “I told you — stay out of it.”

Sixteen years ago, Manuel’s wife, Carmelita, died giving birth to their second child. She had been only twenty-four. Manuel, who never remarried, raised a daughter and son with much love and wisdom. His boy, Toby, has Down’s syndrome. As much as anyone and more than some people, Manuel knows suffering; he understands what it means to live with hard responsibilities and limitations. Nevertheless, though I searched his eyes, I couldn’t see the compassion that had made him a first-rate father and policeman.

“What about the Stuart twins?” I asked.

His round face, designed more for laughter than for anger, usually a summer face, was now full of winter and as hard as ice.

I said, “What about Wendy Dulcinea?”

The extent of my knowledge angered him.

His voice remained soft, but he tapped the end of the billy club against his right palm: “You listen to me, Chris. Those of us who know what’s happened — we either swallow it or we choke on it. So just relax and swallow it. Because if you choke on it, then no one is going to be there to apply the Heimlich maneuver. You understand?”

“Sure. Hey, I’m a bright guy. I understand. That was a death threat.”

“Nicely delivered,” Bobby noted. “Creative, oblique, no jarring histrionics — although the bit of business with the club is a cliche. Psychotic-Gestapo-torturer shtick from a hundred old movies. You’ll be a more credible fascist without it.”

“Screw you.”

Bobby smiled. “I know you dream about it.”

Manuel appeared to be one more exchange away from wading into Bobby with the club.

Stepping in front of Bobby so that the two of them wouldn’t be face-to-face, and hoping miraculously to raise guilt from Manuel’s graveyard conscience, I said, “If I try to go public, try to mess where I’m not supposed to mess, who puts the bullet in the back of my head, Manuel? You?”

A look of genuine hurt passed across his features, but it only briefly softened his expression. “I couldn’t.”

“Very broly of you.” Broly is surfer lingo for brotherly. “I’ll be so much less dead if it’s one of your deputies who pulls the trigger instead of you.”

“This isn’t easy for either of us.”

“Seems easier for you than me.”

“You’ve been protected because of who your mother was, what she achieved. And because you were…once a friend of mine. But don’t push your luck, Chris.”

“Four kids snatched in twelve hours, Manuel. Is that the going exchange rate? Four other kids for one Toby?”

Admittedly, I was cruel to accuse him of sacrificing the lives of other children for his son, but there was truth in this cruelty.

His face darkened like settled coals, and in his eyes was the livid fire of hatred. “Yeah. I have a son that I’m responsible for. And a daughter. My mother. A family I’m responsible for. It’s not as easy for me as it is for a smartass loner like you.”

I was sickened that, once friends, we had come to this.

The entire police department of Moonlight Bay had been co-opted by those higher authorities responsible for concealing the terrors spawned at Wyvern. The cops’ reasons for cooperating were numerous: fear foremost;