65

Although Duke Pellafino towered over most people and had fists like the heads of sledgehammers and looked kind of mean even when he smiled, though he had used some unacceptably crude language back in Room 414, after he and Amity jumped there from Earth 1.77, and though he'd pulled some martial arts mojo on Daddy, the head of hotel security seemed to be one of the good guys when you got to know him better. Of course you could never be 100 percent sure who anyone was or what they might do, or when they might walk out on you. But Duke was smart enough to believe his own eyes, to grasp the concept of infinite parallel worlds and all, to understand the power and the danger and the potential evil uses of the key to everything. Smart was a good thing. Well, not always a good thing, because spooky old Ed was smart to the max, and look at the poopstorm he caused with his genius invention. Duke had been a policeman for years and years, which meant he was probably trustworthy. Not all policemen were good guys, but neither were all teachers or preachers. In the end, Amity would have liked Duke and given him the benefit of the doubt even if, in his office, discussing things with Daddy, he hadn't referred to her as Little Miss Kick-ass. That had been a bit crude but funny, too, and was meant to be praise because of how she didn't curl up in fear when the bug-form robot came after them.

Duke's office in the basement of Suavidad Hotel had a bank of eight TV screens on which you could watch various public spaces in the building at the same time. An American flag was framed on one wall, and on another were pictures of eight dogs, all of which had been his companions at one time or another, golden retrievers and German shepherds. He was between dogs now, he said, because he'd had to put his most recent one to sleep a month earlier—cancer—and he needed time to mend his heart before getting another. Amity slipped her wallet from a hip pocket and showed him the photos of Michelle and explained that she was between mothers, though with any luck the mother she found would be the same one she had lost, only from a parallel timeline. Duke seemed to understand about mothers and family. On his desk were photographs of his older brother and two younger sisters, as well as photos of his various nieces and nephews. He said he was "too much of an asshole" to have gotten married when he was younger and someone would have had him, and though that was crude, the way he said it made Amity like him even more than when he called her a kick-ass, especially when he saw that she hadn't put her wallet away and he asked to see her mom again.

Duke didn't know anyone named John Falkirk, and he wasn't aware that Suavidad Beach was crawling with agents of the shadow state. But having been to Earth 1.77, he did not have the slightest difficulty believing that Amity and her father were being hunted for the key and that they couldn't go home again. Neither could they go to the local police for help—or so they thought—because maybe the feds would quickly show up and take custody of them, and soon thereafter they would be sleeping with the fishes or being liquefied in a sewage-processing plant after hours.

"This is going to take some heavy thinking," Duke Pellafino said. "I'm not sure who we can call on for help, but there must be somebody. There's always somebody. The world—this world, at least—is full of more helpers than it is shit-for-brains bastards."

"Yeah, well, I've always thought so," Daddy said, "but lately I wonder."

What happened then was that Duke gave Amity's father the key to his Lincoln Navigator and the key to his house. He told them to hide out there, make themselves comfortable. After his replacement came on duty, Duke would walk home, and then they would scheme up a solution to this predicament over breakfast.

Deeply touched by this generosity, Daddy launched into a little speech that made Duke uncomfortable. So to put an end to that before it got maudlin, Amity pulled the hotelman's face down to hers and kissed him on the cheek, and said, "Thank you, Uncle Duke." Judging by his reaction, that was the right way to end it, even though he wasn't actually her uncle.