The Sting
It took some forty-five minutes to drive to the shop. Amy Girl looked out the window; Gary played Bruce Springsteen, his Born to Run work, a repetitive paean to a young rebel on his motorbike and his last ditch offer to his love to jump on the bike and flee. The intended effect was there: both elation and a sense of the monumentality of those seconds and minutes. At the same time, he was tired and more than a little hungry, and his penis actually throbbed from unaccustomed excitement and inattention. His body, it seemed to him, ached a general feeling of indifference in the face of the experiential quantum mechanics, in which the mundane coexists with terror, that was swallowing him whole.
They came into the shop slowly, but the professor called to them. Amy Girl stopped Gary from turning on the overhead light, then she was gone from beside him, and a few moments later he saw her silhouette at the edge of the cone of the professor’s flashlight. The professor had embraced her, and she was whispering to him. But from his movements, the professor seemed only now to comprehend something, and stepped back from her. Gary surmised: she hadn’t been frank about the danger he was in. The professor leaned against the table with Scotty’s bowl and spiral. Gary heard her repeat, “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.”
A minute later, Gary joined them at the edge of the flashlight cone. “I’ll see if Scotty will come back.” He leaned over the table and clicked the battery on and off, waited, then on and off. Then he waited and clicked it on. He turned to see Amy Girl looking pensively at him; he smiled his meek smile. “Like turning an engine over, I think. You’ve got to prime it.”
She seemed unimpressed with his platitude, but had a flash of insight. She took the phone from her purse and examined it.
He took the opportunity to look at his watch. There wasn’t much time; he and Scotty had agreed on posing an hour deadline to Alice, an hour to resolve this, one way or the other. This, after Scotty had pried — through silence — the truth from him; this, after Scotty had shown the flaws in every scenario that Gary painted to him. All right, Gary had said, what do you suggest? Scotty was silent on that point, but Gary found himself constructing the current plan in the ensuing silence. At the center, presuming all the pieces fell as anticipated, was Alice’s choice: her chance to decide who sacrificed for her and who was willing to sacrifice her.
The story they provided was that Alice was to send Reggie to get the device before Gary put them all at risk; she had just gotten the address from the device itself. Then Reggie was to get rid of it. Right now. The key was right now. It would be gone within an hour.
Amy Girl was trying to turn the phone on and off, but nothing happened. Then she turned it over, and pulled the battery. The spark told her — it had been on, the whole time.
There was a back way out the storefront. When Reggie came in the front door, there was a chance that Gary could get out that way; he had left just the doorknob lock on so he would barely have to break his stride. And Reggie had three minutes to get there.
“Oh my God,” said a voice — could have been Amy Girl’s, but Gary realized slowly that it was the professor’s. There, in the center of the spiral, a green cloud had formed and was expanding, in a way that Gary had never seen before. With a sudden yellow and black-tinged flash, a beam caught the surface of the goo in the bowl and started raising a lump.
Gary looked back to Amy Girl, who was not looking at the bowl at all. She was weighing this moment, perhaps weighing whether this last deception merited a bullet in the brain. Or probably she had already decided and just waited until he was watching her to turn to the professor and put her arm around his shoulder. The prof was impervious to all this in his state of marveling. Gary filled in the message from Amy Girl: ‘it’s not worth trashing this moment to kill you, and most likely I’ll be able to watch you squirm and die before I do — or don’t.’ She must have thought she had immunity — as Gary did — but each for their own reasons. Gary brought the watch to his eyes.
The seconds pulsed slowly away, their progression marked by the slow growth and evolution of the lump that the beam was creating from the silvery liquid chaos. A square, an undeniable geometric shape, formed, then was refined by smaller echoes of the same shape of which each in turn took on noticeable function: here a small screen, there a lens, over there an antenna for audio reception. Weak flashes passed over the screen until finally a defined image formed: the professor himself, crudely drawn, with Amy Girl embracing him from behind. The tears in the professor’s eyes were not visible, nor were those in Amy Girl’s. Gary had no tears, but his eyes were welling, as he sang Bruce Springsteen to himself, repeating the words and a few notes until they had slowed the thoughts in his mind.
The seconds were painful, even as he got to see Scotty one last time, hear that metallic sham of a voice, see the letters flash across the screen. He looked away to the darkness in the back of the shop, where a curtain hid a doorway and ten feet behind that a way out into the alley. But he had to wait for Reggie, who was taking his damn time.
The last few minutes finally just meshed together in the darkness. There were barely fifteen seconds left when he knew he could not hope any longer. He felt something akin to anger: Scotty had been silent during the planning, but he knew how to play silence quite well. Was there something about this plan that wasn’t Gary’s own? Thirteen. He knew the risks of what he had undertaken — a hundred reasons why it could fail. Alice could — oh my God! — already be dead. Ten. Scotty would have told him if that were true. Everything was still on track. Eight. Reggie could have refused; he could be suspicious, beat it out of Alice. Six. Or she could lose her nerve; Gary knew he would forgive her. Five! Or maybe he wouldn’t be able to, at the last moment. Four! Time was up — his life was ebbing away. Three! Maybe — Two! this was the inevitable — One! outcome.
Gary was silent. Scotty saw the moment pass, and would shortly, out of deference, retreat into the nether from which he had come. But for the time being, he attended to the condemned.