There was no disputing that fact, as far as he was concerned. With the right papers and the right attitude you could be anyone. Hell, you could be six or seven people at once with the correct documents.
Wasn’t his life sterling proof of that? Indeed it was, and in every way.
Those ideas pleased Sunday as he pulled into the EuroMotorcars lot in Bethesda. He parked out front, noticed the subtle odor of azaleas on the breeze, and had no sooner turned off the ignition than a man with a scrubbed, boyish face hurried out the door of the dealership.
“Mr. Thierry Mulch!” he cried, fairly skipping toward the convertible. “What do you think of the Bentley?”
“Like a restaurant dedicated to lackluster cuisine,” Sunday said in that whining, nasal voice, and tossed the salesman the keys. “I’m going over to Porsche, see if the Germans are still better engineers than the Brits.”
He started to walk off the lot.
The salesman was first slack-jawed and then insulted. “You just can’t afford it!”
The writer looked over his shoulder, said, “Thierry Mulch is a man who can afford anything he wants and do anything he wants. Remember that.”
Sunday nodded with satisfaction as he strolled north toward the Landmark Theatres complex. It was true: money had not been an issue since he’d turned eighteen. Indeed, the writer rarely gave finances a thought. He just did what he wished and had accountants who paid for it all.
And yet the writer was not given to excess unless it was necessary. Excess—chic clothes, expensive cars, and the like—attracted attention, and attention, in his opinion, was only good if there was a purpose behind it, this morning being a case in point.
Sunday found the beige vacuum repair panel van right where he’d left it: behind the theater where the employees parked. He unlocked the van, slid back the side door, climbed in, closed it, and tossed the doggie bag in the front seat.
With great care, he stripped off the flaming-red wig, Abe Lincoln beard, and eyebrows, revealing close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Two quick movements and he’d popped out the colored contact lenses, turning his eyes from ice-blue back to light slate-gray. Out, too, came the nose rings.
He traded his outfit for jeans, a black polo shirt, and boat shoes. The purple sneakers and the rest went into a shopping bag. He traded the Mulch driver’s license for another identifying Howard Moon, residence Falls Church, Virginia.
Completing his transformation with Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and an ill-fitting Washington Nationals baseball cap, Sunday appraised himself in the rearview mirror. A sublime portrayal of a boring loser, the writer thought, nothing like the court jester who test-drove a Bentley and stunk up power breakfast at the Four Seasons.
Putting the van in gear, he drove back into the city.
It was nearly ten when Sunday parked down the street from Cross’s house. Turning on all-news radio, he listened with great interest to coverage of the Mad Man Francones murders. He was fascinated by tales of men killing other men, of women killing other women, and of every variation in between.
Murder was not only Sunday’s academic field, it was the story of his life, and the most sublime act of all in the human comedy, the snipping or slashing or squeezing away of existence, the end of the absurdity and meaninglessness of it all in an ecstatic fit of violence.
He’d heard of peaceful death, of course, but considered such tales fantasy and nonsense, wishful thinking of the most pitiful kind.
Sunday spotted Cross’s wife, Bree, exiting the house in a warm-up suit and running shoes. Through his binoculars he watched her walking down past the Dumpster. As he watched her jog off, he nodded to himself, thinking that death was never, ever peaceful. In the writer’s experience, death was always drama that rose to a wicked battle and a brutal, brutal end.
Chapter
12
Bree was getting ready for the department’s annual fitness test and left for the gym around ten. On the way downstairs, I peeked inside my daughter’s room. Jannie was two years younger than Ava but already the lanky adolescent, still sleeping because it was an in-service day for teachers.
My seven-year-old, Ali, was up, however, lying on the couch in the family room watching a DVD. A guy with a cowboy hat was running and shooting at…
“What are you watching?” I asked.
“The Walking Dead,” Ali replied. “It’s a TV show. Really good. There are, like, zombies everywhere and these are some of the last people left alive.”
“What happened to Cartoon Network?”
“It closed down after the zombies showed up,” Ali said, and gave me a grin that revealed the gap where he’d lost a tooth the week before.
Someone on the screen shot a zombie. Someone else put an axe blade in its head. “That’s the best way you can kill them,” Ali explained. “Destroy their brains.”
“I told him to turn that nonsense off,” Nana Mama chided as she walked into the room. “I don’t like him watching those zombie things.”
I wasn’t a big fan of the idea, either, but Ali groaned, “It’s good, Nana. It’s not about zombies, ’cause they don’t talk, you know? It’s more about the people who are fighting them.”