The Color of Night Read Free Page A

still smelled of rot. Snake skins he’d found were tacked to the rafters, shivering slightly, if there was a draft. Come up here, Mae, my brother said. I want to show you something.

I got my rifle from a friend … more of an acquaintance, really. Fuck buddy, the kids call it nowadays. I could call him Pauley. We met when I was dealing at the Showboat, which was quite a long time ago.
    Pauley lives in Vegas, as much as he lives anywhere. He spends a lot of time hopping back and forth to both coasts. He finds people; that’s his gig. Apparently he’s really good at finding people who don’t want to be found, and often it’s the last time that they ever do get found. Or the next to last time, in a lot of cases. Then some cases aren’t so serious, I think, but I don’t really know. I don’t talk to Pauley much about his work.
    The rifle was a used one, then. I knew that, and I knew that Pauley had taken a bit of a risk in letting me have it. It touched me that he trusted my discretion.
    It was all over guns where I lived as a kid and by the time I was twelve I could knock a beer can off a fence post with Daddy’s Smith & Wesson .38, do it any time I tried. Terrell and I would sneak out with the pistol, but I was a better shot than Terrell, come to think. That old .38 was just an average throw-down but Pauley’s rifle, the one he gave me, was perfect all over, beautifully balanced and sighted to the last micron. We went out in the desert one night on the theory he was going to show me how to use this gun. I set an eight-ounce water bottle on his head and shot it off at thirty yards. It seemed risky to go for fifty yards by moonlight, even though the moon was full.
    I’ll hand it to Pauley, he didn’t balk at this idea. I think we both had done some coke beforehand. Afterward, we went back to my trailer and fucked like panthers. In the dark, as I have said.
    The water bottle lay on the pale sand with the water bleeding out through the hole I’d drilled through it. It was summer, and the sand was still hot even though it was nighttime, and in less than a minute the water stain around the bottle had leached away and the bottle itself was dry as a bone.

    The clip of Laurel on her knees was 22.4 seconds long and after I had spent about a hundred hours watching it I thought once, thought twice, and called up Pauley. I told him as much as I could about Laurel without telling him the one thing that would have stopped even his heart. That was a tricky procedure, in fact. Pauley had his sentimental side, which maybe wasn’t so surprising, and he seemed to think it was sweet that I wanted to look up a long-lost friend I’d seen on a 9/11 video. There was a certain amount of that kind of thing going on at the time, along with all the women suddenly falling in love with firemen.
    It must have been a novelty for Pauley too, to be sent out to find somebody he wasn’t expected to frighten or harm. And he was good, extremely good, at finding.
    It turned out that Laurel was living under what used to be O——’s government name. I had to wonder what she was thinking, when she came up with that one.

Not so very long after it started, I began to realize that my brother was hardening me for something. I understood it better later, but even then I had the thought. And maybe even he knew too, or had some inkling. Whenever he’d sink me in another burning pool of pain, he was tempering me for what I’d later have to bear. Preparing me to meet my destiny.
    Of course he was a mortal himself, and Thetis wasn’t. But my brother died like a god! He took all his retainers with him—all. Except for me.

I still had all of O——’s old records, though probably most of them were scratched. His pictures on the jackets wrinkled with old spills. In the fold of a double album I found a couple of thirty-year-old pot seeds.
    It had all come out on CD, of course, the instant they invented them. You could, I could, download them to your iPod