Blvd. of Blood

Book 3, chapters 1–3

Continued from here. Table of contents for ease of navigation here.

(It is April, and time for Colin Lang to start putting his plan into action. Officer John Oberman (with his hacker buddy Sp!der) is still trying to figure out what that plan is, but the only weak link—Bernie Feldstein—has grown paranoid and is no longer dropping clues on Twitter. We are ten days away from it all going down.)

Book III: The Cruelest Month

“Time destroy’d
Is suicide, where more than blood is spilt.”
•Young, Night Thoughts (1742).

1.

He was impatient to make an early ask, just so that there were no delays, but he realized he’d have to wait another day, so it didn’t look like an April fool. On April second, Colin went to his boss and had a serious talk. Colin’s mother, who lived in Sunset Grove in Salton, was having problems with memory and with executive functioning. He was getting increasingly worried about her, and had even started weighing options about moving her closer—either to his own house, short-term, or to Ridgemont Rest right here in Cottinend.

But his mother was well established in Salton, and he was hesitant to remove her from both her care facility and her social support network, if they were actually good enough. And there was the delicate matter of breaking all of this to a mother who was having trouble remembering that there was even an issue here.

Therefore (Colin went on), as he had a significant amount of vacation time saved up, he would like to take a week or so off to spend the days at Sunset Grove; see on weekdays what he usually only saw on weekends; evaluate at greater length and in greater detail his mother’s decline.

“You’ve really been ‘cooking with gas’ recently,” Mr. Arnoux said with a sage nod. “Giving 110%. The least we can do is a little time off for personal matters.”

“Thank you,” said Colin.

“You want to decamp right away, I assume,” Arnoux said more than asked.

“Oh, no,” Colin said very quickly. “I have a few things I’d like to finish up here. I’d also have to contact Sunset Grove and make sure I can do what I’m looking to do. I don’t actually know their regulations yet.” Colin gave a few more reasons he had saved up, and the more he talked the more Arnoux’s eyes narrowed.

“Colin,” said Hunter Arnoux after a cautious pause, “you remember last November when you grew a beard for charity.” Once again it was not a question, the way he said it.

“Yes,” Colin nevertheless said.

“What did you do with the money you raised?” And that was a question.

Colin was aware he had said something wrong, or more precisely had said something in the wrong way. This should have been no surprise. He had never been an actor. It’s possible that he had made an error in allowing himself two anomalous activities—the Movember and the vacation days—in one six-month span. Or perhaps he had just been, as liars often are, too prepared.

This made no sense—Colin was always prepared. Sometimes he made a foolish error, such as leaving Feldstein’s address under those mixed nuts—completely unnecessary in retrospect, as the address was in the phone book—but it was hardly a question of not being prepared.

The only thing to do—and this was Colin’s instinct; there was no time to think it out right now—was establish a pattern. Show that he was always prepared. And at least this was a question with an easy answer.

“All donations were made directly to the Movember Foundation, so I didn’t see any of the money. I’m not sure if you participated, but you’d simply go to the website and search for my name. I was registered. Now, I did make a sizable donation myself, and of course I kept a record for tax purposes, but I’d have to check if the site keeps records of who else made a donation on that campaign.”

“No, no, never mind. Idle curiosity. I was just…”—Arnoux fumbled around—“…‘thinking outside the box.’ Now what day were you planning on starting this?” Whatever suspicion had been there evaporated in embarrassment. Colin had played it right.

When to start? Assuming all went well when he called Sunset Grove: Friday, April sixth. He’d take eight work days off and be back at work on the sixteenth.

2.

Samburn came in to the pizza place while Bernie was loitering between deliveries. Bernie thought this was a perfect chance to ask someone who wasn’t Randall about his tattoo. Bernie had meant to look up Samburn come April, after his mission, when Bernard Feldstein was to have became famous. For Samburn had his own notoriety: Two years before he had almost robbed a bank. He’d had the brilliant idea to create a disguise by rubbing his face with poison ivy the day before the robbery; unfortunately, the reaction was worse than he’d expected, and his eyes swelled shut, and he’d never gotten to the bank. It was’t even, technically, an attempted robbery; but he still had his bragging rights, for getting closer to such a crime than anyone else in town; and Bernie couldn’t wait to hold his own head high. Higher than Samburn.

The head held high was a full week away, though. For the moment all Samburn was there for was to get quizzed about a tattoo.

“Actually, I want a slice,” said Samburn. But Bernie said,

“Have you seen this?” and pulled up his shirt. The tattoo was on his shoulder blade. “Get it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Samburn. “It’s a little racist, though, isn’t it?”

Before Bernie could ask for more detail, Amber served Samburn his slice; and then after he left of course she wanted to see Bernie’s tattoo, too. Somewhat reluctantly, Bernie lifted the shirt over his protruding ribs and showed off his boney shoulder blade. “I don’t get it,” she said.

“I guess you’ll have to google it,” Bernie said. And then he could have kicked himself! Of course he could just google it! He started to laugh, just from relief, and that got Amber laughing too.

“You know,” she said, “a bunch of us are going out to the Munster after work today. You should come along.”

Bernie stopped laughing. He was getting smarter. “N–no,” he stammered, remembering Ilyana. “I’ve got some…thing to do.” There was only one explanation for a girl like Amber Meir wanting to sleep with him. He was too smart for that.

“Oh. Okay,” said Amber. She was looking at him strangely. Did she know he knew?

About her?

If he couldn’t trust Amber Meir, whom could he trust? Spies were everywhere and he was going to have to play this super smart and super cool.

“You can’t be too careful nowadays,” as his father always used to say.

3.

Oberman should have let it drop, but he was not someone to let it drop.

When the tweets dried up, whatever small interest he’d managed to coax out of the department dried up as well. The whole thing had been “exposed as a hoax,” they claimed, when it had been exposed as no such thing.

Sp!der wasn’t answering his phone which meant either that he was grounded or he had failed—the same result, really, those two.

“Don’t you dare grandstand,” Tabitha said.

Maybe, as the time since the last tweet grew longer, the grave reality of the situation should have lessened.

But that’s not how Oberman saw it. To Oberman, the time until April 10 was growing shorter every day.

(Continued here.)