“I know who he is. I just can’t prove it. I can almost see him in my mind.”
“I think you’re slipping your mooring,” she said.
“I’m a detail or two away.”
“If you knew who our guy was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I didn’t answer. She looked into my eyes. “Don’t you dare, Dave.”
“Clete feels the same way.”
“I don’t care what you feel. Neither one of you is an executioner.”
I left her standing there and walked out of my own office.
“You hear me?” she called down the hallway.
I kept walking, down the stairs, through the foyer, and out the rear exit and into the brightness and the cold of the day and the tannic odor of late autumn on the wind.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, ALAFAIR came in late. I was reading under a lamp in the living room. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon were curled up with each other on the rug.
“I called you a couple of times,” I said. “Where were you?”
“With Desmond and some of the crew,” she replied. “We have to go back to Arizona and reshoot a couple of scenes.”
“Now is not a good time to be around Desmond.”
“I work for him.”
“Smiley Wimple is in the vicinity. He’s badly wounded. I think he’s going to paint the walls before he goes out.”
“What does that have to do with Desmond?”
“Everything.”
“You’re fixated, Dave. You don’t see it.”
“Fixated on what?”
“The destruction of the world you grew up in.”
“I’m supposed to ignore it?”
“You’re also fixated on Bailey Ribbons,” she said.
“She has nothing to do with this.”
“You got yourself into a relationship that you feel is wrong. You see her as a symbol rather than as a woman. You feel guilty about loving all the things you love. How fucked up is that?”
“Don’t use that language in our house.”
“Sorry, I’ll go across the street and send you semaphores through the window.”
I put down the book I was reading and went into the kitchen. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon followed me, probably thinking they would get a snack.
“I didn’t mean it, Dave,” Alafair said from the doorway.
“What was that about semaphores?”