“Can that piece.” Fuck-up Freddy was standing by my desk at work, in blowsy mode with The Front Page shirtsleeves from the classic forties newspaper movie, a caricature in the flesh. The only thing missing was the green eyeshade and a garter on his flabby biceps.
“The old dame is dead,” he said. “Pulled the plug on herself this morning. Cancelled the contract.”
Oddly enough, I was sorry to hear that. “Maybe her death, the reason for it, is a story.”
“Nah. The feature’s name is ‘Good Living After Death,’ not ‘Death After Death.’ I need someone downtown to do a stand-up for a Cub Scout camp-out in the main park.”
“That’s about as exciting as filming an anthill.”
“A good reporter can make a great story out of anything. Jeez, are you losing it, Street, or what?”
* * * *
I drove home from the station that night with a dopey new assignment sked riding shotgun on the passenger seat of the Caddy, just as Achilles’ “documents” had accompanied me away from the vet’s office.
It was beginning to feel like “loss” was my middle name. I had no other, anyway.
What more could go wrong?
I had not counted on the Revenge of the Weather Witch.
I had some trouble finding my bungalow on Moody Road. Because it wasn’t there anymore.
I got out of the car, slammed the heavy door shut, and stared at the empty, aching socket of dirt where my house had been. All that was left was my refrigerator, lying on its massive metal side, looking like a heavy-metal porcupine.
I approached it over the lumpy ground strewn with toothpicks splintered from the wood and spine of my rental bungalow. It wasn’t merely a rental. It was my first real home. It was a lost relative, and it was totally gone, sucked up into some passing tornado funnel.
Other houses of that era stood whole and sturdy on either side of it. My house was the only molar that had been pulled. Freak tornadoes, they were called. Unpredictable.
This one wasn’t.
When you piss off a weather witch, she can make her wrath known.
My refrigerator lay there like a beached steel whale. Barnacled to its side was my metal clothes cabinet crammed with vintage duds and every last freaking piece of sterling silver I had ever collected at an estate or garage sale. Victorian fork tines bristled like WWII underwater mine prongs. Mexican jewelry draped the handles. Nineteen-twenties marcasite batted its steel eyelashes in the clear sunlight. The sky was blue, like my eyes; the clouds were white, like my skin. No black thunderclouds, like my wild Irish hair, appeared.
This was a very specific tornado.
At that moment a Fed Ex truck pulled up, white and gleaming in the sunlight. The tiny woman behind the wheel hopped down.
“Street residence?” she asked.
“What’s left of it.”
“Too bad! Was this house a tear-down?”
“Kinda.”
“Sign here.”
I did. She handed me a box stamped “Smokerise Farm” and a padded envelop large enough to hold a videotape and a newsy letter about Nightwine Productions from Annie in Bismarck.
I stood there, on the wind-blown prairie, contemplating my losses.
The fact was, my cup was overturned, but I wasn’t. We were both half-full, and maybe the half-empty part wasn’t worth keeping.
I had Achilles’ ashes in a dragon vase and a lock of his hair in a silver Victorian locket. I had Dolly Parton, a running vintage car with 28,000 miles on it, mean-looking fins, and chrome bumper bullets the size of— Well, you know Dolly: talent, guts, and up-front plastic surgery. I had some money in the bank. I had a smattering of borrowed glitz and an empty refrigerator. And I had a shockingly large number of pretty, prickly Victorian sterling flatware sharp enough to function as martial arts throwing stars.
I was taking them all to Las Vegas, where they carved up way-too-familiar corpses on CSI and where a writer-producer named Hector Nightwine had a lot of explaining to do. Never trust a man with hyphenated job title. Or artificially extended fangs. Or both.
And I wasn’t leaving Sin City until I knew . . . who I am. Or who I am not.