“Tell it to someone who gives a fuck, Bobby. Just sign the papers or it’s Jackson. We can keep this polite. No one has to lose a job or go to prison. No one has to know a thing. We’re just giving some rich souls back their rightfully unearned money.”

Arrowsmith signed his admission of guilt and the papers were passed to Rabun who appeared, oddly, quite bored with the proceedings. Feingold had assured him that his life-style and research could continue unhampered. He signed.

“You’re fired,” he muttered to Warlock.

“No shit, Tonto. Right now the Traverse City police are taking an ounce of cocaine out of your glove compartment. You’ll never see daylight again.” Warlock gestured to the window and then everyone in the room stumbled for a view of the parking lot. “Just joking,” he said; there was a definite sense that he had denigrated the solemnity of the meeting.

On the way home, for he had nowhere else to go, he stopped for a takeout pizza at Little Richard’s, Diana’s infantile favorite dish. He pretended he didn’t like pizza unless it was homemade, but it took an entire afternoon of work to come up with an inferior product. Perhaps he could use this dish to win back her favor. Rare, indeed, is a woman or man so sullied that they can’t be rebaptized with a few drinks, a pizza, and a shower.

Chapter 45

The marriage didn’t immediately return to the Camelot of yore, but then it had never been the Camelot of yore in the first place; and even that lordly kingdom, suspended in the mist between myth and history, had been rife with adultery and violence, albeit of a more courtly quality. And he couldn’t admit that he had been merely sent away to facilitate their adultery.

Diana’s afternoon had not become less tough after her encounter with the violent paranoia of her husband. (Even if Warlock’s suspicions were correct, was it correct to fire a gun in anger, or was it a better idea to reserve a passionless judgment until he had his nose rubbed more directly in the unholy coupling? Is it paranoid to turn a corner when a midget approaches, swinging a sword? Do you leave a bar when some crazed hick cranks up a chainsaw, or do you wait for an imaginary tree to grow up through the floor?) The gale had felled a number of large tree branches in the area, and two different yokels had suffered heart attacks cutting up the branches before the storm had even abated. Once again he was led to envision her straddling their hirsute chests, and thumping with her palms to bring them back into a kingdom of chainsaws, unemployment, snowmobiles, ragged children, yards full of abandoned cars; but back to life, after all.