The Signalman stops rubbing at his smarting eyes and wishes his Visine weren’t all the way across the room in his suitcase. He starts to ask Ellison if she’ll get it for him, then thinks better of it. He knows that look. Right now, she’s in the sweet spot and probably not up for the hike there and back again.
Ellison licks her dry lips and takes another pull on her cigarette.
“You dreamed you were drowning in a flood,” says the Signalman. “Not to sound dismissive, but, all things considered, that’s just about the least surprising thing I’ve heard all day.”
Ellison stops staring at the chalkboard and looks up at the ceiling.
“In my dream the water was the color of rust,” she says. “And I was running out of breath, trying to get back to the surface, only when I finally did, it was like hitting a pane of glass or plexi or something. You were on the other side, on your hands and knees, looking down at me. You had a claw hammer, and you kept hitting the surface of the water, but it wouldn’t break, no matter how hard you tried. The hammer just kept bouncing off. You looked afraid, and you were moving your lips, like you were trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear you. I just heard my heart, getting slower and slower.”
“Well, okay,” says the Signalman, “that’s pretty fucking god-awful,” and he lights a Camel and blows a couple of smoke rings at the cold Georgia night waiting on the other side of the tall, boarded-up windows. “Maybe we should talk about something else. What do you say?”
“Sure,” Ellison replies. “I was just thinking about it in the shower, that’s all. I was just thinking about the dream and wondering whether or not she’ll show.”
“Well, like I said, DIRD thinks so, and they’re more often right than not. We know how badly she wants the Syrian dingus. At this point, it’s pretty much Jehosheba’s holy goddamn grail, the one missing piece in her grand eschatological jigsaw puzzle, and this is the first time it’ll have seen the light of day since Albany got their mitts on that ugly hunk of rock back in the seventies. But hey, if she doesn’t show, well, it won’t be the first time I’ve been left holding my dick, now will it?” And he winks at her.
Ellison laughs. He hasn’t heard her laugh in days, so at least there’s that.
“But I think she’ll be there,” he says. “And we’ve got five crack sharpshooters are gonna be awfully disappointed if she isn’t. I mean, if you need them.”
“If I need them,” Ellison nods.
“I’m just saying, they’ll have your back, if it comes to that.”
Ellison Nicodemo makes a gun with her thumb and index finger and mimes shooting at him. Bang, bang, bang. Then she stubs out the butt of her cigarette against the safehouse wall, leaving a jagged black smear across the off-white paint. “Was it also the wonks behind the yellow door who decided Jehosheba’s actually inclined to worry about snipers and Mk 21 rifles?”
The Signalman frowns and sips his whiskey. “I ain’t yet seen any evidence put forth to indicate the bitch is invulnerable to having her brains blown out by a .338 Norma Magnum cartridge, so how about let’s not start in thinking that maybe she is. When all’s said and done, Jehosheba’s just another deluded patsy playing Stepin Fetchit for some prehistoric sonofabitch too lazy or conceited or—fortunately for us—hamstrung to do his own damn dirty work. But you get it in your head maybe she’s more than that, well, you know better, Ellison. You know that’s the worst and greatest power she’s got.”
“Then maybe you don’t even need the hound this time,” says Ellison, still staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling.
“Maybe not, but that’s how Albany says this thing’s gonna happen, so that’s how its gonna happen. If it amounts to swatting a fly with a bulldozer, then so be it. Just so long as the fly gets swatted, no one’s worrying about overkill.”
Ellison sighs and licks her lips again. She’s about to suggest that just possibly she and Jehosheba aren’t so different, not in the final analysis, not when push comes to shove. Different masters, that’s all. Same sorry puppet show. But she doesn’t, because what’s the fucking point. She looks over at the Signalman and squints at the lamplight.
“And what if we do kill her,” Ellison says, “but we’re too late, or it just doesn’t matter and killing her isn’t enough to stop what she’s set in motion? You think all the slide rules and pocket protectors have that covered, too?”
“I think you should try and get some sleep,” he tells her. “However this plays out, tomorrow’s gonna be a long day and I need you on the qui vive.”
Ellison nods, and then she goes away to find her own bed. There are three other agents just down the hall, in case she gets lost. And the Signalman sits on the edge of the squeaky mattress in the old schoolroom that smells like sex and sweat, mold and chalk dust and stale tobacco smoke, and he thinks about monsters and wonders exactly when it got so easy for him to play roulette with other people’s lives.
15.: Another Toe in the Ocean
(Providence, October 31, 2017)
Whatever Mackenzie Regan had expected of the Signalman, it wasn’t the man she now found sitting in the diner booth across from her. Her father, a second-generation Minnesota horse farmer, would say this was a man who looked like he’d been rode hard and put up wet. Mackenzie, never given to Midwestern barnyard idioms, would simply say that he looks spent, in just about every way that a man entering late middle age can look spent, from the bruised insomniac’s bags beneath his eyes to the beginnings of a proper drinker’s nose. His black suit is wrinkled and dingy. There’s
