“You can’t be too careful,” she says, stirring a packet of Sweet’n Low into her cup. The spoon clinks loudly against the china.
Is it true what they say about the night you were born?
“So, how was the trip up from Los Angeles?” she asks. “It’s been a long time since I went anywhere by train.”
“Forgive me, Ms. Sexton,” he says, and fishes the last cigarette from the crumpled pack of Camel Wides he bought at noon. “I’ve never been particularly good with chitchat. Nothing personal, it’s just—”
“Relax,” she says, and he could swear her voice drips honey. “We’re on the same side, aren’t we? United by a common cause?”
What big eyes you have.
“Comrades-in-arms?”
“That’s what they tell me,” he mutters around the filter as he lights his cigarette. The Signalman takes a deep drag and holds the smoke until his ears start to hum.
“Right, well, I brought everything we have on Standish,” she says, her demeanor changing entirely between one breath and the next, the strange creature that poured in off the cooling summer sidewalks of Winslow becoming suddenly businesslike and to the point, effortlessly shedding one mask and donning another. “We’ve had a million diligent monkeys with a million file cabinets hard at work ever since Barbican gave the thumbs-up last week. So, you go first. Show me yours, then I’ll show you mine.”
My, what big ears you have.
He hesitates only a few seconds before reaching into his suit jacket and taking out a brown kraft envelope, six inches by nine, stained with perspiration, creased down the middle, and bent at the edges. “Sorry,” he says, “if mine’s not quite as big as yours, but there’s a shortage of monkeys—”
“—in Hollywood?” She smirks. “You expect me to believe that?”
The Signalman surrenders a halfhearted smile and opens the envelope, spreading the contents out on the table between them. Ten glossy black-and-white photographs, a tarot card, a flash drive, and a very old gold coin. At first glance, the photos could be shots from any murder scene, snapped by any forensic shutterbug. But only at first glance. Immacolata looks at him, and then she crushes out her Marlboro in the ersatz ashtray and picks up one of the pictures. She turns it over and briefly examines the back, where a date, time, and case number have been scribbled in indelible red ink, along with several Enochian symbols, and then she exchanges it for the tarot card.
“The World,” she says. “The dancer is meant to signify the final attainment of man, a merging of the self-conscious with the unconscious and a blending of those two states with the superconscious. The World implies the ultimate state of cosmic awareness, the final goal to which all the other cards—of the Major Arcana, that is—have led. Der Übergeist.”
“I seriously fucking hope you’ve got something more for me than what we could pull off the Internet.”
“You’re an impatient man,” she tells him.
“We’re all on the clock with this one,” he replies. “New Horizons makes its closest approach to Pluto five days from now. So, you’ll excuse my sense of urgency, thank you and pretty please.”
Immacolata lays the card back on the table, facedown, and selects another of the photographs. It strikes him for the first time how long and delicate her fingers are; they seem almost frail enough to snap like twigs.
Maybe they would. Maybe one day I’ll get to find out.
“Jesus,” Immacolata whispers, and she licks her ashen lips.
What big teeth you have.
The Signalman picks up one of the photographs, the one with his shadow in frame, the one where some trick of the light makes a corpse appear to be smiling. Every time he looks at these, every time he touches them, he feels unclean. He went through decon with the rest of the response team, but he only has to revisit these souvenirs of a horror show to be reminded how some stains sink straight through to the soul and are never coming out.
“How tight is the lid on this?” Immacolata asks him, and she raises an eyebrow plucked straight and thin as a paper cut.
“It’s all right there on the suicide drive,” he tells her, and points at the contents of the envelope scattered across the Formica tabletop.
“No,” she says. “I’m not asking you to parrot back to me what they’ve put in the reports. I didn’t come here to play Polly Want a Cracker.”
The Signalman stares at the tip of his cigarette, wishing this were going down in a proper fucking bar, someplace he could get a shot of Johnnie Walker Black or J&B. His mouth is as dry as the arroyos and sage waiting out there just beyond the halogen glare of the streetlights.
“We got lucky, after a fashion,” he says. “We have geography on our side, the hot zone being situated where it is.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” she protests.
“You ever been to the Salton Sea, Ms. Sexton? The lid’s on fucking tight, okay? The CDC would get a hard-on, the lid’s so goddamn tight. Neiman Marcus would be proud of our fucking window dressing.”
He hears the annoyance in his voice, the aluminum-foil edge, and it pisses him off that she’s getting to him.
“Am I making you nervous?”
No way in hell he’s going to answer that question, not for a gold-plated penny.
“The Moonlight Ranch is about three miles north of Bombay Beach,” he says instead. “Off Route 111. The only way in or out is a dirt road, not much more than a cattle trace. Lockdown is solid.”
“The Moonlight Ranch? What, is that one of Watertown’s supersecret code names?” And there’s that smirk again, curling at the corners of her mouth and setting her eyes to glimmering.
I’d give a hundred bucks for a shot of rye whiskey, he thinks, and swallows hard. I’d give a million to blow her fucking brains out.
“No, that’s just what the locals call it, and what Standish’s followers called it.”
“Yes, well, I’m beginning to have Helter Skelter flashbacks to Charlie Manson,” she says. “Moonlight Ranch, the Spahn Movie Ranch, appropriate names for pens to hold all the thunderstruck little sheeple. We’ll run cross-references, see what pops. You know we’re expecting access to the quarantine zone, right?”
“Albany anticipated as much. You’ve got eyes-only clearance, and you’ve already been assigned a handler.”
Immacolata nods, then leans back in the booth and just stares at that one photo held in her alabaster fingers. He’s not even sure which one it is. The way she’s holding it, he can’t make out the number printed on the back.
“And you’ve got mycologists on the ground?” she asks, then takes a sip of her coffee.
Moses on a motorbike, but isn’t she cool enough to freeze brimstone in Hell? Wouldn’t winding up on her bad side make a death sentence seem charitable?
“Yeah, sure. We’ve brought in people from Duke and the University of Michigan, and we’ve given them a state-of-the-art lab on the premises. Right now, they’re talking about cutaneous and subcutaneous mycoses, hyperparasites, opportunistic pathogens, cryptococcosis, aspergillosis, entomopathogenic fungi, and fucking zombie ants,” he tells Immacolata Sexton, reeling off remembered bits from Wednesday morning’s briefings, not because he’s trying to impress Y’s asset, just because it’s something to say, all that geek chatter. And, right now, saying anything feels better than saying nothing. “Jesus, you ever even heard of fucking zombie ants?”