53

On Prime, the draperies were open, and the ambient light of nighttime Suavidad Beach relieved the darkness enough to reveal a neatly made bed, a hotel room that wasn't occupied.

Jubilant, Jeffy let out a bark of laughter, but then realized an instant later that Amity wasn't with him, whereupon celebration pivoted to desperation. Anxiety and anguish contested to disable him. He staggered backward, collided with the straight-backed chair, knocking it into the full-length mirror on the closet door. He cried out as the mirror shattered. He almost fell, dropped his pistol, almost dropped the precious key to everything, the hateful key to everything.

Of course this had to happen. He should have known it had to happen, because it was the stuff of stories, and real life was the biggest craziest story ever told, so big and so crazy that no writer in the history of the world had been able to convey even 1 percent of its bigness and craziness, so they had to shrink it down, squeeze the tiniest essence of it onto the page in the hope of finding some coherent meaning in it. If there was any meaning in an eleven-year-old girl being left alone on a world of death and horror, it escaped Jeffy and pissed him off and made him want to scream. It was nothing but a cruel and stupid and meaningless event, because real life was plotted like Tolkien on methamphetamine, an endless cascade of events events events. Something always had to be happening, and a lot of what happened was tragic, which was what most obsessed writers who wanted to understand life: Why all the loss and suffering and death, what sense could possibly be made of it?

All that and more raced through Jeffy's mind, manic torrents of frantic thought, as he regained his balance and pressed the home circle on the key to everything and waited four seconds for the damn gray light to appear. "I'm on my way, Amity. I'll be there, I'll be there." After four seconds that seemed like an eternity, the gray light filled the screen, and he was waiting for the three buttons when someone pounded on the room door and said, "Security."