Fifty Mice: A Novel by Daniel Pyne Read Free Book Online

won’t be seeing them again—”
    Amid the mixing, shuffling cast of characters a small television screen in the far corner glows with Cartoon Network. A very small girl sits cross-legged in front of it, shoulders hunched, with her back to Jay, and on the sofa sits a tired and sulkier-looking version of the young woman with the crooked smile Jay recognizes from Public’s file snapshots, back in the hospital, in another life.
    “—and over there, that’s Ginger. Say hi, Ginger. And her little one’s Helen . . .”
    Ginger raises frank black eyes to Jay and doesn’t say anything, expressionless: no makeup, angry ink-black hair that could use some brushing out, an oversize pale green cardigan sweater pulled over her knees, as if she’s freezing in all this empty Santa Ana heat. The little girl, Helen, doesn’t turn, stays lost in her cartoons.
    Under Ginger’s steady gaze, Jay self-consciously touches the crosshatched scab on the side of his face, and Meyers puts a hand on his shoulder and slides into Jay’s line of sight, blocking mother and child.
    “So, hey. Listen, Jim. On behalf—”
    “It’s Jay.”
    “—
Jimmy
, on behalf of the entire U.S. Justice Department, I just want to say—”
    Jimmy?
    Public interjects, “—um, Mark, he’s not—”
    “—say that anything you need, you know, just holler, because we’re here for you on this one thousand percent—”
    “—not fully on board yet,” Public cautions.
    He means I’m uncooperative,
Jay thinks.
Not quite down with the program.
    Meyers fronts a frown. “What?” Jay watches the man’s eyes drift to Public, clouded with doubt. Public just shrugs.
    “I want to talk to a lawyer,” Jay says simply. He’s trying to be cool, cooperative, still holding out some thin Panglossian hope that they will come to their senses and realize their mistake. The room goes quiet, except for Helen’s cartoon show.
    Jay feels the woman named Ginger’s dark eyes shift to him again. He looks at her. She pushes the hair off her face, like she’s just now noticing he’s there.
    It occurs to him that she’s not beautiful, not like Stacy. But there’s something about her that makes it hard for him to look away. And when he does, she stays with him, indelible.
    “Please?” Jay adds, more subdued, and probably, he understands, unnecessarily.
    •   •   •
    F or a while, they leave him alone in a bedroom with crinkled Jay-Z posters taped to the wall and a NASCAR bedspread and high-school textbooks stacked haphazardly on an IKEA bookshelf. The desk is messy, but the carpet is new; there’s a faint smell of fresh latexpaint; it’s hard to say whether this is supposed to be a boy’s or a girl’s room, or, Jay thinks, maybe it’s neither, maybe it’s all for show. His reality turned inside out, Jay is no longer confident that he knows where the centerline is.
    Shadows crawl into the room and settle. The comings and goings and muted conversations in the house disarrange and offer him no answers to his increasingly anguished preoccupation with what the Feds could possibly want from him.
    His mind is sodden, his memory scrambled by disquiet. His recent past, as he thinks back on it, the weeks and the months, lurch and stall, rock forward, backward, an inconsequential blur, details pinwheeling into foreground and just as quickly spinning away: a breakfast at Platters in Glendale’s Frogtown (who was that with?), a few random lines from
The Breakfast Club
, the big storm that knocked the tree down across Franklin, Vaughn sick from mescal shooters (or was it Aaron Olson? Or that strange guy Vaughn calls Trey?), the White Stripes at the Wiltern playing an uninspired short set, Stacy’s loser Kappa sisters with the beach house at Dana Point (he can never remember their names), the six-hundred-pound drag queen in a tennis dress at WeHo Halloween. But then other years leak in and cause chaos, scraps of nothing: fourth grade, a trip to Mammoth, his dad sacked