Stone Junction

Eddie assumed he hadn’t heard the question and yelled it again.

Daniel leaned closer and shouted, ‘No problems. I got by the alarms.’

‘Fuckin’ A-Okay!’ Eddie bellowed, pounding him on the shoulder.

Daniel leaned back smiling, his hands on the pouch. He could feel the Diamond’s warmth through the velvet. He remembered then that he hadn’t checked the inside of the vault for a camera. But he figured he would have noticed one, and recalled that the checkpoint monitoring screens had shown only the outside of the vault. ‘Clean,’ he murmured to himself, then turned his attention to the fading stars. A few minutes later Low-Riding Eddie set him down along a county road and was gone again, it seemed to Daniel, before his feet touched the ground.

The Chevy pickup with camper was where it was supposed to be, keys taped under the dash, a small toolbox on the front seat. The sight cleared Daniel’s head. There was work to do in the logical world. He opened the toolbox and found, on top, already snapped together, a ratchet, extension, and a half-inch socket.

The bolts on the front differential were loose. Lying on his side, he spun them off, then lifted the cover. The empty differential had been lined with mink. Daniel stared, then started to laugh. He couldn’t stop. Finally, choking, he had to crawl out from under the truck and get up on his hands and knees. It took a minute to catch his breath, and when he shimmied back under the truck with the pouch he tried to ignore the mink lining and concentrate on the task at hand. He took the Diamond from the pouch, marveling again at its light, noticing that the spiral flame wasn’t visible. Now he felt certain he could only see the spiral flame in his vanished state, and was tempted to check his theory. Instead he lifted the Diamond gently into the differential casing. It fit perfectly. He replaced the cover and cinched the bolts down tight. He returned the ratchet to the toolbox and picked up his harness-vest from where he’d left it on the floorboard.

The white flag was exactly where Volta had diagrammed it, forty yards down a shallow drainage gully to the right of the road. The buried disposal drum was directly below it. He lifted the sand-covered lid without difficulty. The drum was half full of a clear, odorless liquid. He set the harness-vest on the ground, then stripped down to his gloves, dropping each piece of apparel into the vat. Shivering in the chill dawn air, he picked up the harness-vest, gave the attached suction cup an impulsive kiss, held it over the dark maw of the drum. He was about to let go when he remembered that the unused plastique and nerve gas were still in the vest’s special pockets. The disposal plan assumed he would have used them. He was deeply unsure about how they’d react with the chemicals in the drum, another product of Aunt Charmaine’s bunker industry. He removed the gas and plastique from their pockets and dropped the harness-vest into the solution. He buried the gas and plastique farther down the gully, threw his gloves and the white flag into the drum, and then repositioned the lid, smoothing sand over it till it was well concealed. Bent over, bare ass pointed at the rising sun, he shuffled backward toward the road, erasing his tracks as best he could.

Back at the truck, he climbed inside the camper. Most of the camper was piled with cardboard boxes of God Shots religious tracts. The small makeup table was just to the left of the door near the bed, the wardrobe on hangers suspended from a ceiling hook, the makeup case under the bench. Jean had been easy on him; the face was essentially Daniel’s own, with the addition of five more years and a scar on his neck. In ten minutes Daniel was Isaiah Kharome.

The only thing he didn’t like about Isaiah Kharome was his sense of sartorial style. He assumed it was Jean’s idea of an April Fools’ joke. The florid Hawaiian shirt, a tangle of scarlet and lime, fought the blue-and-white- checkered polyester slacks, and the wild-plum blazer clashed with them both, though he was forced to concede a subtle coordination between the white socks and white embossed lettering – MIGHTY SPIRIT TOUCHDOWN CLUB – that encircled his hand-tooled belt, the buckle of which was a large single star. He did approve of Isaiah’s wallet, chocked with credit cards and crisp twenty-dollar bills. He checked the briefcase of emergency funds stashed in the camper’s false top. He didn’t have time to count it but if it wasn’t the twenty-five thousand dollars Volta had promised, it was close enough.

The sun had cleared the horizon when Daniel reached the highway. He stopped and tried to make sense of the cluster of road signs: Denver, Phoenix, Kansas City, El Paso. An early morning thermal lifted a dust devil off to his right. ‘Dust to dust,’ Daniel said in Isaiah’s voice, ‘ashes to ashes.’

Phoenix sounded good. Daniel pulled out slowly and headed west.

Volta had difficulty adding the hours he’d gone without sleep. Forty? The last eighteen, waiting for Daniel’s call, should count double, he decided. Or triple. He took another sip of coffee, then reached for the blue phone.

Smiling Jack answered immediately.

‘Anything?’ Volta said.

‘Nothing you haven’t heard four times already.’

‘No sign of pursuit?’

‘Nada. The guard changed at six o’clock like another day at the office. Either that gas erases memory, or he didn’t use it. No alarms. No nothing. You want my opinion?’

‘Of course,’ Volta said.

‘Daniel didn’t get it. He caught the changes and canceled out.’

‘And he hasn’t called in because he saw the changes and thought we might be setting him up. Is that it?’

‘He should know better, but yeah, that’s how it looks to me, too.’

Volta said, ‘Don’t include me in that claim; I believe he got it. He told Eddie he did, and he had something the size and shape of the Diamond in the pouch. It wasn’t his lunch.’

‘It might have been sand. Eddie said he just pointed at it and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Eddie was flying balls-to-the-wall. He admits he just glanced at the pouch. I mean, maybe Daniel can’t admit that he missed, that he––’ Smiling Jack stopped. ‘Hang on, Volt, I got something on the red line.’

Volta waited, certain what it would be.

Smiling Jack returned. ‘Well goddamn, good thing we didn’t get to betting on it. There’s a shit-storm of commotion around the tunnel, and some jets just got off at the air base.’

‘They discovered it’s gone,’ Volta said.

After a long pause, Smiling Jack asked almost angrily, ‘So how the fuck did he do it? No gas, no charge – I mean, where was it, on a silver platter in front of the tunnel?’