"Yeah. Somebody else offered a whole lot of money for it."

"Somebody who wanted to make the people on the list disappear," Jays says.

"Worst case."

"When is it ever anything but a worst case?"

"There was a meet. The deal going down. At the strip club with the mermaids. But our unhappy marshal got himself killed. We got there too late. And the list is unaccounted for." Ginger looks at him. "We-they, Public and Doe, and the people they answer to-think you saw who the shooter was."

"And the shooter will get them to the buyer."

Ginger doesnt appear to feel the need to respond.

Jay absorbs this. "Do you think thats right?"

Ginger says, "I think you should tell them the truth."

The silence that pa.s.ses between them is thick with a weight of sober understanding, a connection Jay has never had with anyone. He cant explain it. This is life, he thinks. It matters, its messy, its ugly, its an act of faith. A leap into the darkness.

Jay nods. "Yeah." He wants to kiss her. Its the craziest thing. Her eyes are dead and her hair is a tangle and needs washing. She looks wrung out, he realizes. Someone whos been running an ultramarathon, and theres still hours and miles to go. He asks her where they took her and Helen when they left the island.

"Vegas," she says. "So grim. h.e.l.lishly hot. Acres and acres of ambling ghost-town housing developments of foreclosed and repossessed properties weve been requisitioning for the program. Sketchy stucco split-levels with satellite dishes and three-car garages.

"All these displaced people, living lies," she says. And she admits, "I shouldnt be telling you that."

Jay says its okay, he can keep secrets. Ask Helen, he wants to add.

Ginger stares at him for a long time. "The unhappy marshal was my husband," Ginger says then, emptily, and walks down to the water, to Helen.

Jays mind reels. But he hears himself call after her, defiant, "I dont care."

She stops and turns and pulls her hair back again. Just holding on to it, this time. The sun unforgiving on her face as she looks back at him puzzled. "What?" she says. She heard him, though. Hes sure of it.

"I dont care," he tells her, meaning everything: the bad husband, the lie shes lived, the part shes played in this. "Its okay. Doesnt matter. It doesnt change anything."

She shakes her head and asks him something, but he cant hear her over the surf breaking on the rocks.

"Say again?"

"After everything. After all this," she says. "How can you trust me?"

This, he knows, is the question he should be asking himself. But hes not. And he wont.

Jay shrugs. "How can you trust anybody, Ginger?"

28

.

THIS IS WHAT HE REMEMBERS:.

A mermaid, roiling the pet.i.te sea of her giant barroom beaker with shimmering bubbles and fractured light, arms graceful, tail coiling. The flower girl; his flower girl. Loin-thrilling, wanton, siren-smiling, unreal. She arcs up, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rippling buoyant. Waves at him. Waves a goofy little girl wave- "Theres a lot of it I dont understand," he says.

In the stolid office, number 204, chairs facing, Jay and Magonis are staged for what Jay hopes will be the last time.

"n.o.body expects you to."

To say that Jay has a plan would be generous. He has an intention, a direction, a goal-or maybe just a destination. And an irrepressible, blind, obdurate determination to reach it, by whatever means necessary. "I didnt . . ."

"Just tell us what you saw, Jay. Thats all were asking."

Jay knows thats not true.

His eyes have found the four, small, wireless video cameras: mounted on the bookshelf (high and wide), between the pictures on the cabinet behind the desk (low and wide), in the air-conditioning duct (side view), and on the windowsill (tight over the shoulder) behind the chair where Magonis hunches, chewing a fingernail, his hat hair evidently an afterthought today, ill-combed and crooked.

Multiple angles. Discreet placement. Jays got an audience of more than one. Doe? Public? Someone they answer to? At Cate, junior year, he played Banquo in Macbeth, but forgot his lines during the dress rehearsal and was replaced opening night by Vaughn.

Jay closes his eyes.

"First off-"

He imagines: Vaughn, plunging awkwardly into the mermaid tank, fully clothed, lab coat trailing white filaments as if of chalky melt, and tangling around him as he churns his arms and curves upright and peers out at Jay, scared- "-Vaughn." Jay opens his eyes. "Hes not involved."

"So youve said."

"In any way. Hes an accident of intersect."

"Thats an interesting way of phrasing it."

"Pa.s.sing through," Jay says. "I just want everybody to be very, very clear about that, whatever happens, and leave him alone."

"Whatever happens?"

Jay worries hes said too much. "Maybe they think they can use him to get to me. Or theyve misinterpreted our friendship to imply collaboration. I dont know, but I just know, Im telling you, hes . . ."

Magonis nods. "Okay." But hes evidently not convinced. "Manchurian Global does a lot of government contract work, CIA stuff. You dont think-"

"No no, this isnt anything like that, its not spies, man. Jesus. How cheesy would that be?" Jay says.

"Oh."

Theres something in Magoniss tone when he says this; Jays eyes narrow. "I mean-or would it be?"

Magonis just waits.

"Spies?"

With his good eye, Magonis studies his bit-down nail.

"No . . ." Jay says, thinking it through aloud. "Its something stupid, isnt it? Like revenge or greed or-"

"Jay."

He remembers, in a dizzying rush: "-or love."

Liquid darkness of the strip club, thump of ba.s.s notes, smell of liquor and desperation, stray light striating across Jay as he drifted in, sifting through the beaded curtain just past the bouncer at the door. The flower girl, tight black T-shirt half-hiding her snake tattoo, looked out at him, amber-eyed, from behind the bar, where she poured out martinis from a shaker. The luminous tank threw its rippling glow across the room, across the lumpen hunched figures in cane chairs nursing drinks, eyes fixed on the show, and, yes, the flower-girl-now-turned-mermaid, naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed pale pink flat against the transparent swerve of the tank, and- boom The tank exploded. Water and gla.s.s.

Magonis, wondering: "Jay?"

Entropy.

Parking lot.

Static crush of cars glinting streetlight, the smell of smog and sea, the deafening hush of an L.A. night, a thin sheen of night dew on the asphalt and the harlequin neon of the strip bar slowly flickering-shorting out-dying as Jay ran from the doorway of the club, across the wet pavement, with a mermaid in his arms- Jay looks at his hands. Magonis clears his smokers throat and waits.

"I went hoping maybe I could take her out for coffee or something after, like the last time. Still, I dont know. The embarra.s.sment. It was a spin cycle: longing, l.u.s.t, the sweaty entanglement, the slow-dawning shame, then retreat. To Stacy. And repeat.

"That I couldnt get her out of my head, just finally gave way to, after a while, sure, I just wanted her." Jay goes quiet, with some thinking. He doesnt want to go too fast, but its iffy what hes got under control here and whats simply spilling out in confession.

"I wanted her. But. Strippers." He sighs. "Its not a game with them. You know? Or its the right game, which, I know, is kinda f.u.c.ked-up, unless you see it as a romantic thing. Old school. And foolish beyond belief.

"Save the lost girl, with your n.o.ble intentions, your roll of money, your fast car. Take her home, make her real. Suburbia. Babies. But, still, after, in the dark . . .

"Ba-boom."

Magonis notes that this sounds like something Jay read in Esquire, if its still in print, or Maxim. Jay allows that both are, and it might be, but argues that Magonis is of the generation that produced Hefner and Norman Mailer, so if it is some ba.n.a.l macho fantasy maybe its generationally immutable.

"Truth is. I was bored with my girlfriend," Jay admits.

Magonis just nods.

"p.i.s.sed off at her or maybe just at my life in general, which was, you gotta admit after all youve heard, really one long relentless pointless ch.o.r.e."

Magonis shifts in his chair, trying to find a comfortable position. On the exhale: "Okay. Thats interesting and everything, Jay, and we could spend a few years on the couch examining the roots of it, but-"

"-No, its relevant to this," Jay insists. "Because expectation goes to the heart of what you see, do you know what I mean? You see what you prepare yourself for seeing." He sits forward in his chair, intent on Magonis. "And what you dont expect, cant . . . doesnt . . . hold. We dont really see what were surprised by. It goes by too fast. Thats my theory."

"And?"

"That night the bar was filled to capacity, mostly men, the kind who say 't.i.tties. Vacant expressions, or hard, or lonely. A couple bachelor parties of frat brothers drunk as pigs. Laughing, reeling, shadowy smears in the dark recesses of the place, hustling the one waitress for a lap dance she wasnt for any amount of money going to do.

"The smell of chlorine from the tank, the pop and hissing of an air compressor, the dreamy unreality of night, and the naked, unedited l.u.s.t. As if you just-"

The air compressor, upstairs where the mermaids dressed and slipped into the tank, was totally inaudible in the bar below. So as not to break the illusion. Plus, all that f.u.c.king rave mix music- A white lie.

"-stepped off into another dimension," Jay finishes. He grins warily at Magonis, who seems, so far, engaged.

"So. Bad margaritas: not enough salt on the rim and I hate that-and Rob Roys-or was it Separators?-which my friend Otto once drank at a brunch, nine in a row, and got eighty-sixed, because you knock a few back, thinking, 'This is nothing, and two minutes later youre flat on your a.s.s, b.i.t.c.hing about the Lakers."

Jay gets up, to pace.

The air compressor hitched and sighed.

A s.h.i.tty bar band hes just thought of shuffles into this gathering decoupage of his memories and invention, a Jethro Tull cover thumping m.u.f.fled like a yearning.

"Retro night. Flute solo." Jay smiles. "Christ. Can you believe that?"

Alone at a table ringside to the mermaid tank, Jay drained another Rusty Nail, sloooop, no problem.

Jay takes a pause and concentrates. He cant afford to let this float away. "What Ive got, though, remember: its pieces," he warns. "Im just saying. And you cant trust that. You know-not completely."

After a moment, Magonis prods him. "Go on."

The shriek of bad music, loud, on blown speakers, the table of Korean businessmen laughing, the chime of gla.s.ses behind the bar and a mosaic: the painted nails, the slender arms, tail, swerve, bedroom eyes of the mermaid flower girl.

"Her eyes," Jay says.

The big tank glowing incandescent as she swam and stripped.

"As she swims and strips," he says.

She looked right out into the sea of chairs, into the colloquium of men, and found Jay-or did she?

"And then . . ."

Because, inside the tank, mermaid point of view-hes thought this through-wouldnt what she saw be the arc of aquarium gla.s.s reflecting her starkly downlit mirror image back at her? A water world in which shes the only inhabitant.

". . . Through the tank, past the swimming stripper, I could see shapes, kinda like shadows on the other side: these guys: suits, young, old, yearning, sitting, standing, staring, dark, sharp-featured faces suddenly caught in a strobe of light cast from above."

Magonis leans in, hooked.

"Shadows."

Magonis waits.

"Drifting along the singular, curving plane of the tank. Like vertical eels," Jay says. "Flip-book faces, one after the other, smeared and distorted, if only, like a camera, I could just push closer, you know? Zoom in, find focus-almost there, almost a revelation-then: flam flam flam flam-the shadows kicked off the edge of the tank where they became the bodies of men in black suits moving fast, around the corner."

"Running away?"

"Running away," Jay says. "You feel the gunshot, visceral; it never registers really, not like-"

Silence. No band, no compressor. Smoke pulsing with light.