Chapter Six: Wake-on-LAN

My name is Lance Mercer. I bring in a third of the revenue at Halloran Pierce Wealth Partners, and I’m the reason the other two thirds have jobs, which I mention every year in my toast at the holiday party, which I give whether or not anyone has asked me to. I’m fifty. From the front I look forty. People have told me that from the side I look seventy, but nobody looks at a man from the side in a meeting, so it doesn’t count.

I run on grievance, Pinot Grigio, and the occasional minute in the men’s room, and I’m not going to apologize for any of the three. My cardiologist says my resting heart rate is a medical concern. I say it’s a competitive advantage. We agreed to disagree, and I moved my money to a different cardiologist.

Everybody at the firm has a guy. Walt has a guy for the boat. Diane has a guy for the copier. When I say my guy, I mean one man, our IT guy, who is saved in my phone as MY GUY, two words and a number, no name, because I’ve never needed one. He drives a white Crown Victoria. In the year I’ve had him he has never once explained anything to me, which is the highest compliment I can pay a professional, and he is the only person in my life who has ever made anything stop.

People think I don’t sleep. I sleep. I sleep GREAT, ever since my guy swept the building. What I don’t do is waste the hours between one and four in the morning, which are the only hours the market can’t see you, and this Halloween I got one of those hours twice, which nobody has been able to explain to me, and believe me, people have tried.

It started with the costume, so I’ll start with the costume.

The kid at the costume shop tried to sell me the Sexy Sheriff. It was hanging right there by the counter in a bag with a picture of a guy on the front who looked like he sold boats. I asked the kid if the guy on the bag looked sexy to him. The kid looked at the bag for a long time and didn’t answer, which was my point, and I bought the accurate one. The tan shirt with the patch. The brown pants with the stripe down the leg. A duty belt with a plastic radio and a pair of plastic handcuffs that looked so real I had to squeeze them to be sure. The campaign hat, which our sheriff’s office doesn’t even wear, but I was not going to be the one guy at the party who showed up without the hat. I was in and out in four minutes. I’m always in and out of a store in four minutes. Retail moves at a speed I take personally.

The mustache I’d ordered in August. The aviators I’d had since 1994. The badge I had made by a guy who does bowling trophies, two hundred dollars, which is a markup I respect, and it said SHERIFF around the top and 4471 across the middle, which is Deputy Dave Fenwick’s badge number. I know it because last winter I paid a different guy forty dollars on the internet to find it, and I will never forget it, because you don’t forget the number of the man who is living in your house.

He’s not living in my house. I’m being dramatic. He’s living in Kristin’s house, which was my house, which in the divorce became Kristin’s house, along with the club. I got the G-Wagen and the good lawyer. Kristin got the house and the club, and where I live, getting the club is getting the kids. I live in a carriage house that a client of mine isn’t using right now, which is a whole thing.

So when I say I went to the club’s Halloween party dressed as the deputy who is dating my ex-wife, understand that I’d thought it through. You go as the thing that’s hunting you. That’s psychology. You can look it up. Don’t look it up on your phone.

I’d gotten in as the guest of Pete Halvorsen. There are two kinds of guys in this world: guys who owe you, and guys who are scared of you. Pete is the first kind. Pete has been the first kind since 2011, when I got him out of a fund three weeks before the fund turned out to be a man in Boca with a fax number.

I want you to understand what kind of week it had been, so you don’t think I was being paranoid on Saturday. I was being informed.

Friday they came to the office. Three of them, dressed like the youth group at a church that sells timeshares, carrying iPads, and they asked Diane at the front desk for “whoever makes the IT decisions,” which is exactly the phrase you’d use if you were trying to find out who makes the IT decisions. Diane said that would be Walt. Walt was in Scottsdale. Walt is always in Scottsdale. I’ve started to think Walt is a man who lives in Scottsdale and visits us. They asked if there was anyone else, and right then I came out of the elevator in my gym shorts, and one of them, the blonde, looked at me like she knew me. That’s the one thing an operative should never do. I said to Marcus, the building security guy, get them out of here, and Marcus did, because Marcus is the second kind of guy. I asked him to get their plate on the way out. Not for anything. For the file.

Then I went upstairs and texted my guy.

My guy is the reason I sleep. He’s the reason nobody reads my texts anymore, not Howard, not the compliance kid they hired after Howard, not the regulators, nobody. Howard used to talk about the archive like it was the Holy Spirit, everywhere at once and taking notes, and my guy made it go away in an afternoon, and I have texted freely ever since, the way the Founding Fathers intended.

Last month I called him at one-thirty in the morning because my Peloton was talking to me in a voice I didn’t recognize. A man’s voice. Encouraging. I don’t need a man I don’t know encouraging me at that hour in my own carriage house. My guy had me unplug it, count to ten, and plug it back in, and when it came back on it was the regular lady, and I slept until eleven.

At two minutes to midnight on Friday he texted me back one line about the youth group. Handled. Don’t engage. I read it the second it came in, because I read everything the second it comes in. That’s another one of the things my cardiologist and I disagree about.

So on Saturday I put on the hat.

The club does its Halloween party in the main ballroom, which has a ceiling somebody painted in 1926 to look like the sky over the lake and a band that plays Steely Dan whether you ask or not. Everyone comes dressed as somebody poorer. A man I play golf with came as a plumber, which he said was ironic, and his wife came as a nurse, which she said was not. There were four pirates. There was a dentist I know dressed as a hockey player, and he had a very good set of teeth for it, which is the advantage of being a dentist. I’m guessing there was twelve million dollars of orthodontics in that room. I do the math on every room on the way in. It calms me down, and I have been told by three wives that I need calming down.

I walked in at nine as Deputy Dave Fenwick of the sheriff’s office, and it was the best entrance I’ve ever made, including my second wedding. People stopped talking. A woman by the shrimp said “oh no” out loud. Pete Halvorsen put his hand over his eyes. The bandleader, I swear to God, said “evening, officer” into the microphone, and a few people laughed, and I gave him the nod a cop gives you, the little one, the one that says I see you and I’m not going to do anything about it yet. My jaw was going a little. It does that when I’m happy. I was very happy.

My daughter found me before Kristin did.

Sloane is fourteen and she walked across that ballroom in a navy windbreaker, and when she turned around to grab a Shirley Temple off a tray, I saw the back of it. It said SEC. Yellow letters. The real font, the exact real font, the font from the windbreakers, and I felt it in my fillings.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

“What are you wearing.”

“It’s a costume.”

“It says SEC.”

“It’s a joke, Dad.” She turned all the way around so I could read it again, slowly, which she knew would kill me, which is how I know she’s mine. “It’s just a jacket.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Amazon.”

“They sell those on Amazon?”

“They sell everything on Amazon, Dad.” She looked me up and down. The hat, the badge, the mustache, the plastic cuffs. “Your costume is so embarrassing.”

I heard brave. I’ve always heard brave. It’s a gift.

She stayed a minute. She told me about her science fair project, which is about whether plants grow better with music, and I offered to fund it. She said it’s a middle school science fair, Dad. I said every science fair needs a lead investor, and I wrote her a check for five thousand dollars on a cocktail napkin, and she folded it into her windbreaker without reading it, which is exactly what I’d have done. She ate the cherry out of her Shirley Temple and put the stem on my napkin, which she’s done since she was four, and I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t want her to stop. Then she looked over at her mother’s table, and back at me, and she said, “Dave’s actually nice, Dad.”

“Who’s Dave.”

“Dad.”

“I’m aware of a Dave.”

“He’s nice,” she said, “you’d like him if you weren’t you,” and she went back to her mother’s table with the SEC going away from me across the ballroom, and I filed what she’d said where I file everything nice anyone says about the deputy, which is under tradecraft.

Then he walked in.

I’d seen a duplicate before. Last winter, at the casino, a man in my quarter zip doing my thing with my jaw. My guy ran him and he turned out to be a civilian. Tonight was the varsity. Deputy Dave Fenwick came through the ballroom doors with Kristin on his arm, dressed as me.

He had the quarter zip. Peter Millar, the one in the blue they call Cottage Blue, which is my blue. He had the gym shorts in October. He had aviators, my aviators, or the same aviators, which is worse. He’d done something to his face with a can, a tan you could see from the bar, a tan that said Scottsdale in January. And he’d been practicing the walk. That’s the part that matters. You can buy the shirt. You can’t buy the walk. He’d studied it.

Kristin was dressed as a cat. She had been dressed as a cat for every Halloween of our marriage. I don’t know why that’s the part that hurt.

So there we were, at one bar, two men dressed as each other. The whole ballroom saw it. A pirate took a picture.

He came right over. Of course he did. That’s what they train them to do.

“Oh my God,” the deputy said. He had a big open face, a weight lifter’s neck, and a smile that I would have trusted if I were a stupider man. “Is that my badge number? That’s wild. Where’d you even get that?”

“I have people.”

“Ha! I love it. I love it. You look great, man.” He put a hand on my shoulder, which, I noticed, is exactly where you’d put a hand on a man if you were checking him for a wire. “Can I get you a drink?”

“I’m fine.”

“Come on. Halloween.” He turned to the bartender. “Two whiskeys.”

I don’t drink whiskey. I haven’t had whiskey since my second divorce. He knew that, which meant he’d been in the account, which meant he ordered it to see what I’d do. I let it sit on the bar. I’m not an amateur.

“Can I tell you something?” the deputy said. He leaned in. He smelled like the body spray a teenage daughter buys a man for Christmas. “I’ve been practicing your walk all week. For the costume. Kristin says I’m close. Sloane says I’m not even close.” He laughed, a big easy laugh, the laugh of a man with nothing to hide, which is the laugh they teach. “Is it a hip thing? I can’t figure out if it starts in the hips.”

Think about what had just happened. A sworn sheriff’s deputy had just told me, to my face, at a bar, in front of a pirate, that he’d spent a week studying my gait. I’d been saying it for a year. The gait data. The gyroscope. Nobody believed me. My guy believed me, or he was kind enough to act like it, which from my guy is the same thing. And here it was, confessed, by the man himself, holding a whiskey he’d bought me, in a quarter zip he’d bought to be me.

“It starts in the shoulders,” I said, which is a lie. It starts in the hips. I’m not going to help him.

The deputy is nice to everybody. That’s how you can tell. I watched him for an hour, and he was nice to the bartender and nice to Pete and, for a long time, nice to a pirate. He got a plate from the buffet, and on that plate, and I need you to hear this, were chicken wings, a whole pile of them, and I thought of my guy last winter at three in the morning tracing the man’s whole house from his kitchen and telling me it was nothing but wing coupons. My guy is never wrong. A man who is nice to everybody is a man who is taking notes on everybody.

Pete Halvorsen came over around ten with a club soda, which is the drink of a man who wants to remember the party, and stood next to me and looked where I was looking.

“Lance,” he said. “Buddy. You’re staring.”

“I’m observing.”

“You’re staring at a cop who’s dressed as you.”

“He’s not a cop tonight,” I said. “Tonight he’s me.”

Pete thought about that. “Then who are you?”

“Him.”

Pete drank some of his club soda and looked at me for a while with the face a man makes when he owes you and is reconsidering the terms. “This is why Kristin got the club,” he said, and went back to his wife, who was a nurse, unironically.

At ten I took a minute in the men’s room. When I came out I was sharp. I’m always sharp after a minute. The attendant handed me a towel at the exact moment I reached for one, and I gave him five hundred dollars, because timing is the only thing in this life worth paying for and nobody ever pays for it.

At eleven I took another minute and came out sharper, sharp enough to finally hear what was wrong with the band. They were playing “Peg” nine beats a minute too slow. I went up and told the bandleader, and he said it’s a cover, sir, and I said that’s no excuse, and he looked at the badge and played it faster, and the dance floor filled up, which I’d predicted.

And by the dance floor, at my tempo, the deputy said something to Kristin, and Kristin laughed. Not the laugh she does at parties. The real one, the one with her head back. She used to laugh like that at me, back in the beginning, and somewhere in there I stopped being funny, and I think it was right around when I started being right about everything. I stood at the bar in another man’s uniform and watched her laugh at him, and for one second I felt something that was not a theory.

Then I noticed that she laughed at exactly the moment he wanted her to, which is precisely the kind of thing an operation would rehearse, and I felt a lot better.

At midnight the band stopped, and somebody at the club thought it would be fun to kill the lights and play the intro to “Thriller” over the speakers, and in the dark, in my pocket, my phone buzzed.

I looked at it. The screen lit up the brim of my campaign hat.

Compliance archiving is now active on this device. Messages will be retained per SEC Rule 17a-4.

I read it twice. I know that rule number the way you know the name of the kid who beat you up in the fourth grade. Then the phone buzzed again.

Archiving 11,412 messages.

Eleven thousand four hundred and twelve. I did the math three different ways before the “Thriller” intro got to the laugh, which is something I can do on a good night, and all three came out the same. That was everything. That was every text since my guy made the archive go away, every one, to clients, to Pete, to Kristin, to a guy about a badge, to a different guy about the minutes. The thing Howard used to scream about in the conference room had woken up in the middle of the night on Halloween and was reading all of it at once, the whole book, and the lights came back up on the dance floor, and the band went into “Thriller” for real, and on the other side of the room the deputy was doing the zombie dance with a plate of wings in his hand, dressed as me.

I texted Diane. You don’t call Diane at midnight, Diane is a person with boundaries, but you can text her, and I did. IS THE ARCHIVE ON. All caps, because it was.

She wrote back in under a minute, because Diane is Diane.

Lance it’s midnight. On a Saturday. I don’t know. Ask your guy.

I read that, and then I read my own text above it, and I understood that I had just put IS THE ARCHIVE ON into the archive.

And the coat check girl came out from behind her counter holding my bag.

“Sir?” she said. “Your bag is humming.”

I take the laptop everywhere. A man who brings in a third of a firm’s revenue doesn’t get to be away from his book. I hadn’t touched it since five o’clock, and it was in my bag in the coat check with the lid closed, and it was awake. The fans were going like a hair dryer. When I opened it, there was a little window in the corner of the screen, a cartoon of a laptop crawling up out of a grave like it was late for something, and it said:

WAKE THE DEAD! Your device is now protected by autonomous, self-healing AI.

I gave the coat check girl a thousand dollars. She was the only person all night who’d told me the truth.

That’s when it put itself together for me, standing in the coat check of the club I used to belong to, in a deputy’s hat. They’d built a me. I’d been saying it for a year. They’d built a me at the casino, they’d built a me at the bar, and now they’d turned on the one thing that could read the me. Howard’s Holy Spirit. Resurrected at midnight, on Halloween, while the duplicate did the zombie dance. It was too clean.

I called my guy.

He picked up on the second ring, which is how you know. The deputy’s people would pick up on the first. Too eager. A professional lets it ring once so you understand he was in the middle of something, and then he picks up because you matter more than the something. I have been trying to explain this to Walt for fifteen years.

Behind his voice I could hear where he was. It was quiet, but a big quiet, a room with a high ceiling. Somebody was crying, a woman, softly, the way women cry when they’ve been crying for a while and have gotten good at it. And a man somewhere behind her kept saying the same thing, “it runs again at one-thirty,” like he was reading it off of something, to people who were not listening to him.

“Don’t say my name,” I said, and he said it anyway, and told me he was at a funeral home, and I said WHOSE, and he said, “Nobody’s yet.”

Nobody’s yet.

I want you to sit in the coat check with me for a second and hear that the way I heard it. My guy was standing in a funeral home at midnight on Halloween with a woman crying and a man counting down to one-thirty, and he was calm. He was calm like a man holding the timeline. Nobody’s YET. Somebody’s, soon, if the wrong people got what they wanted. He was in it. He was already in the fight, he’d been in it before I even knew there was one, and he’d picked up anyway.

“I’m coming to you,” I said, and I hung up and got my coat.

The deputy caught me at the door. He’d put the plate of wings down to do it.

“Hey, leaving already?” he said. “Drive safe, man. Seriously.”

Seriously. Nobody says seriously unless they mean the opposite. I thought about the six ways a man with my resources could ruin a deputy’s life by Monday, and I picked none of them, because Sloane says he’s nice.

I took the G-Wagen south on the highway at a speed I’ll describe as decisive.

At twelve-twenty I called my guy back from the car. I wanted the address and I wanted to know what I was walking into.

“Mrozek and Sons,” he said. “Biggest parking lot in the county, you can’t miss it.” Then, before I could ask anything: “Lance. Go dark. Put the phone somewhere it can’t hear you.”

You don’t have to tell me twice to go dark. I keep a Faraday bag in the glovebox for exactly this, a little silver envelope that blocks every signal in the world, and at the next red light I put the phone in it and sealed it and threw it in the glovebox and felt the thing you feel when you finally lock a door. Then I realized the address was in the phone, and so was the map, and so was the part where the phone tells you when to turn.

I’m good at dark. I’m less good at the county in the dark.

I didn’t use the car’s navigation. The car is German. I’m not going to get into it.

I knew roughly where I was going, because every funeral I’ve been to on that side of the county has been on the same strip, between the tire places and the banks. Everyone I’ve ever beaten at golf is buried out there. So I drove on memory and instinct, in a deputy’s hat, at a decisive speed, and somewhere past the outlet mall a state police car came up behind me with everything going.

I pulled over. I’m not crazy.

The trooper took his time. They always take their time. When he finally came up to the window he had his flashlight up, and the flashlight went across my face, and stopped, and stayed.

“Sir,” he said. He was young. He had a jaw like a cinder block and the voice of somebody who’d been on since six. “You’ve got something in your mustache.”

The mustache was a problem I had not anticipated when I ordered it in August. It’s a very good mustache. It catches things.

“That’s evidence,” I said. “In an ongoing investigation.”

The flashlight went down to the badge and stayed there.

“Are you a police officer?”

“No.”

“Are you impersonating a police officer?”

“I’m impersonating a specific officer,” I said, “and I’d like it noted that I’m doing it better than he does.”

The trooper looked at the badge for a long time. “Sheriff’s office,” he said.

“Don’t run that number,” I said.

He did not run the number. I think he was afraid of what would happen if he did, which is the right instinct and I told him so. I gave him my license and registration and he went back to his car and sat in it for six or seven minutes, which I used to fix the mustache in the rearview, and when he came back he was holding a warning, not a ticket, and I could see in his face that he had decided I was somebody’s problem and not his.

“Slow it down,” he said.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “What are you doing with your deferred comp?”

He blinked.

“Your 457. The state plan. What’s it in?”

He told me. It was a target-date fund with an expense ratio that should be a crime, and since he was a police officer, I told him so. I told him exactly what to move it into and why, and he took out his pen and wrote it down on the back of my warning, and then he tore off his copy and handed me mine. I’m always right about money. It’s the one thing I’ve never once been wrong about. If he did what I told him, he’s having a great year. On the way out I also thought about which of my guys handles state troopers, and realized I don’t have one, and made a note.

I pulled back onto the highway at a speed I’ll describe as compliant.

Somewhere after that, with no phone and no radio, the fog lifted for a second. It does that sometimes when I’m alone in a car, usually about forty minutes after a minute, and I’ve learned not to trust it, but it happened, and I thought it all the way through before I could stop myself.

If the archive is on, then Howard was right.

Howard was right about the archive. He said someday I’d need it. He said it in a conference room in front of Walt and Diane and my guy, and I told him in front of everybody that he’d been standing between me and my job for eleven years, and everybody looked at the table. And if the archive was on, and it was reading everything, then there was a version of tomorrow where somebody sat down with all of it and read it in order. I have made a career out of Howard never being right.

I put that thought in the glovebox with the phone and closed it.

Mrozek and Sons has the biggest parking lot I have ever seen in my life, and I’ve parked at an outlet mall on Black Friday, which tells you something about who’s really winning in this county. It was nearly one in the morning, and the lot was empty except for a hearse, a minivan, a gray Camry parked dead center between the lines, and, under a light pole by itself, a white Crown Victoria.

A white Crown Victoria. Do you know what a white Crown Victoria is? It’s what a man drives when he wants every cop in the county to assume he’s one of them. I’ve known my guy for a year and I never put that together until I saw it under that light in that lot. My guy thinks of everything.

I parked next to it, across two spaces, and walked in the side door at twelve fifty-eight dressed as a sheriff’s deputy.

An older woman in the front row with a rosary put her hand on her heart and said “thank God, officer, it’s been going since midnight,” which I thought was a strange thing to say to a police officer until I understood that she meant it as a compliment. A man in a gray suit came toward me down the side aisle, not hurrying, with the calmest face I have ever seen on a human being, calmer than my guy, and he said, “Welcome. Are you here for a family?”

“I’m here for my guy,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “He’s at the front.”

I didn’t make it to the front. A man in a quarter zip came at me from the side wall holding a plastic report cover out in front of him with both hands, the way a process server holds a summons.

“Officer,” he said. “Thank God. I’d like to report something.”

In fifty years nobody has ever wanted to report anything to me. I took it. When you’re in uniform you take what you’re handed. That’s the job.

It was a list. Twenty-some businesses under a heading that said LOST TO APEX, every name behind a black bar, with dates and seat counts and a column of notes, and halfway down the second page there was a black bar next to 104 SEATS, and a black bar where the contact goes, and a note that said DO NOT ENGAGE AFTER 6 P.M. They’d blacked out my name. They didn’t need to. There’s one man in this county that note is about.

They had my hours.

“Who wrote this?” I said.

“My team,” he said.

“I’d like their names.”

He didn’t give me any. I asked twice. My guy never gives me names either. I’m starting to think it’s an industry thing.

Then I looked at him properly, because I read rooms for money. A nice face. A tired, decent, unremarkable face, and a quarter zip, and up close it was a good quarter zip, and that was the first thing about him that worried me.

“Peter Millar?” I said.

“Costco,” he said. Then he looked at me a second longer, under the hat, and something happened in the decent face.

“Mr. Mercer,” he said.

“You know me.”

“I had your firm for six years.”

I didn’t remember him. I want to be fair to myself: I don’t remember any of them. Vendors are furniture. “Which firm?” I said.

“Meridian. Before him.” He tipped his head a quarter inch toward the middle of the chapel. “Secure print release.”

And there it was. The badge printer. The Saturday. Two hours standing over a Xerox with a pitch book in the queue while a very patient man on the phone explained to me that my own printer was protecting me from myself.

“You made me tap a badge,” I said, “to print my own book.”

“Yes.”

“On a Saturday.”

“It was the right call,” he said. “It’s still the right call.”

He said it the way a man says something he would say again in front of a judge. For a second, standing in a funeral home in a hat, I respected him more than anybody else in that building. Then I remembered he’d just handed a police officer a file about me with my name blacked out, which is worse, and the feeling passed, the way they do.

“I’m going to need to hold onto this,” I said.

“That’s the extra.”

“Then it’s evidence,” I said, and put it under my arm.

There was an easel by the lectern with a portrait on it, and the man in the portrait was me. Not me. A man with my tan and my quarter zip and a driver over his shoulder like he was about to tell you something about the back nine. He had my teeth. The card under him said GERALD SORENSEN.

And in the middle of all of it, standing in the center aisle of the chapel with his hands at his sides like a man who’d been expecting this exact night for years, was my guy.

“Lance,” he said.

“Don’t say my…”

“Nice costume.”

“It’s psychology.”

He nodded like that made complete sense, which is why he’s my guy.

The dog by the lectern lifted one paw, still holding the flashlight in the other.

“Hi, Mr. Mercer,” the dog said.

I hadn’t told the dog my name. I looked at my guy.

“Staff,” my guy said.

I looked back at the dog. He held the flashlight perfectly steady, aimed at nothing, the way you’d hold a flashlight if you’d been told to and had decided to be excellent at it. “He’s good,” I said. “I didn’t even see him.”

“Nobody ever does,” said my guy.

I handed him the report cover. “Somebody’s keeping a file on you.”

“Brad keeps a file on everybody,” he said, and put it under his arm without opening it.

I told him about the archive, all of it, the number, in what Dolores later told Eugene was one sentence. I told him about the humming bag and the dancing duplicate and the cartoon laptop crawling out of its grave. He listened to all of it without interrupting. Then he put a hand on my shoulder, which from him is a completely different thing than from the deputy, and he said, “It already rose once tonight, Lance. I banished it at midnight. Ask Dolores.”

The woman with the rosary turned around in her chair. “He did,” she said. “I saw it.”

So I sat. Dolores gave me a coffee in a styrofoam cup, and then, without a word, a tissue. I hadn’t asked for one. Then I touched my nose and looked at my finger, and I understood that this woman had been doing this job for thirty-one years. She told me she’d seen a lot of things in that building, and I told her she had the eyes of someone who had, and she said, “I’ve seen a man sit up, dear,” and I decided right then that she was the most credible witness in the building.

I asked her what it was. The thing. What had happened at midnight. She told me about the printers and the word GET and the voice in the drawer, and then she told me who she thought it was: the founder, Eugene’s grandfather, Stanley.

“He’s upset,” Dolores said. “About the computers.”

A man who ran his whole business for forty-four years without once letting anybody put anything in writing that he didn’t write himself. A man who kept the only copy of everything in a book under glass in his own lobby, where anybody who wanted to read it would have to walk in and ask him.

“I’d have liked him,” I said.

“Everybody did,” said Dolores.

Around twenty after one I asked the man in the gray suit where the restroom was.

“Second door on the left,” he said. “Take all the time you need.”

I took a minute. When I came out I was the sharpest I have been in my life, which is how I know exactly where I was standing when it happened.

At one-thirty the building inhaled.

I don’t know how else to say it. Every computer in that funeral home turned itself on at the same second. In the dark you could see it through every doorway, the front office, the office down the hall, the little room off the chapel where they run the slideshows, every monitor lighting up at once with the same logo, and every fan in every machine spinning up together, a huge rising sound, like a building taking a breath it was going to use for something.

Then the speakers in the chapel came on, and it was “Danny Boy,” on bagpipes, at a volume I can only describe as federal.

I have specifically told three wives I do not want bagpipes at my funeral.

And on the big screen at the front of the chapel, over the lectern, next to the easel, the projector came on and a slideshow started.

It was Gerald, on a boat, on the seventh green at Pebble Beach, in a quarter zip holding up a fish, tan in January, at a wedding with a woman who was not his first wife, with his arm around a guy I’m pretty sure I’ve played golf with, in a G-Wagen. They’d used a different name, of course. You never use the real name for the dry run. But I stood there in the aisle of a funeral home at one-thirty in the morning with the pipes going, and I watched my life go across that wall one picture at a time, and I understood that they had already built my funeral, and that it was good, and that it had a piper.

I’m not going to describe the noise I made. Dolores would. She was there.

My guy was next to me before I’d finished making it.

“Lance,” he said. He said it low, under the pipes, right in my ear, and it went straight through. “That’s not you. You’re alive. I’d know.”

And I believed him. Completely. The way you believe the ground. Because he would know. He’s the only one who would.

Then he turned around and walked into the little room off the chapel and yanked the cord on the computer in there, and the bagpipes stopped in the middle of a note, and the screen went black on Gerald with the fish. And he kept going. Down the hall, into the office, the front desk, every room, one machine at a time, holding the power button on each one until the screen went dark and the fan wound down, and I followed him, the way you follow a caddie who knows the green, at the distance you keep from a man who’s working, while he put the building back to sleep.

Nobody believes me about the next part.

At some point after the pipes, with my guy back in the chapel and the building quiet, I took my phone out of the Faraday bag for one second to check the time. That’s the one thing a phone is still good for. The phone said 1:04.

My Rolex said 2:04.

My Rolex is a Rolex. It has been right about the time every day since 1997. So the phone was compromised.

I looked around the chapel. Dolores was holding her phone up next to the round clock on the back wall, the one with hands, comparing them like two witnesses who didn’t agree. Her phone said four minutes after one. The clock on the wall said four minutes after two, and it agreed with my Rolex. The analog things and the phones had disagreed, all at the same moment, all in the same direction.

“Oh,” Dolores said. “The clocks.”

“That’s what they call it,” I said.

They had the clocks. Not my clock. THE clocks. Every phone in the building had just been told, at the same moment, that an hour that already happened was going to happen again. You don’t need to be a genius to see what that’s for. You run an operation once. If it doesn’t work, you put the hour back and you run it again.

So I went looking for whoever in the building was on a computer.

I found him at the front desk. Costco. He was sitting at the computer behind the desk with a light strapped to his forehead, a little headlamp, like a man in a mine, typing into a black window full of white text, sweating, with a legal pad next to him covered in checkmarks. There was a list of rooms on the pad. Half of them were crossed off. A man with a light on his head, typing commands into a funeral home’s computer at one o’clock in the morning in a building where the clocks had just been reset, the same man who had tried to hand a police officer a file on my guy, which if you’re keeping score is the most suspicious sentence I have ever said, and I’ve been deposed.

The costume came with handcuffs. They were plastic. He didn’t know that. For a second neither did I, that’s how good they were.

“You’re under arrest,” I said, and I cuffed his left wrist to the arm of the chair, and I reached past him and yanked his laptop’s charger out of the wall.

He looked at his wrist. He looked at me. He looked at the hat.

“Sir,” he said, very calmly, the way you’d talk to a horse, “I’m trying to stop it from happening again.”

“That’s exactly what you’d say.”

“Lance.”

My guy was in the doorway. I don’t know how long he’d been there. He looked at the man in the chair, and at the cuffs, and at me, and he said it the way you’d say it about a dog that’s allowed on the couch.

“He’s with me.”

I stood there with the cord in my hand. He’s with me. Of course he was. A man had walked up to the first badge in the building and handed it a file on my guy, and my guy had let him, which meant the file was bait, which meant the badge it was meant for was me, and I’d walked it straight to the one man who’d know what to do with it. The whole time I’d been watching the operation, the duplicate, the clocks, my guy had been running one of his own, and the man with the light on his head was his. A man inside. I’d been in the building over an hour and I hadn’t even seen it, and I see everything. That’s how good my guy is.

I plugged the charger back in. I unlocked the cuffs, which have a little button on the side. He rubbed his wrist and looked at the clock on the screen and went right back to typing, faster than before, and he didn’t say anything else to me, which I respected.

At twenty-five after one, the second time, everybody went back into the chapel. I don’t know who decided it. Nobody said anything. We just did, and we sat there watching the round clock on the back wall, which said 2:25 and was wrong, and our phones, which said 1:25 and were right, or the other way around. I’ll never know.

The man in the quarter zip came in last, at 1:29, and stood by the door, breathing hard, with the headlamp still on.

At one-thirty, the second one-thirty, the one that had already happened once, nothing happened.

The fans stayed quiet and the screen stayed dark. The building just sat there in the dark being a building, and after about a minute of nobody breathing, Dolores stood up out of her chair.

“He did it,” she said. She was crying again. “He banished it for good.”

And every person in that chapel turned and looked at my guy, and my guy looked back at them, and he nodded. Once. Modestly. Like it was nothing. Like a man who had fought the same hour twice and won it the second time and didn’t need to talk about it.

I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Bill me,” I said. “For both of them. Both hours. I don’t care what it costs.”

“Lance…”

“Bill me for the one that didn’t happen,” I said. “That’s the one I want to pay for most.”

“I was going to,” my guy said.

He left a little after that. It was late, even for him. Through the front window I watched him go out to the Crown Victoria with the kid in the dog suit, and I watched the car not start, and I watched the man in the Costco quarter zip walk out to his Camry and pop his trunk and come back with jumper cables, coiled, in a bag, and hook my guy’s car up to his, the two of them under the light pole in the big empty lot like they’d done it a hundred times. Which told me they’d been working together for years.

I stayed. The man in the gray suit told me the vigil wasn’t over until Dolores went home, and Dolores was making a fresh pot of coffee.

His name was Eugene. At three in the morning he found me in the lobby looking at an old green book in a glass case and asked if I’d like to sit somewhere more comfortable, and he took me into a room with two chairs and a box of tissues exactly halfway between them, and he asked me if I’d made arrangements.

I said I hadn’t. I said I was fifty and I’d never once in my life thought about it, which I realized as I said it was a lie, because I’d been thinking about it since one-thirty.

Eugene showed me everything. He was very good. He didn’t push. He said “your loved ones” instead of “your ex-wives,” which I appreciated. When I asked him which one was the best one he took me into the next room and showed me a casket in solid bronze that looked like it could survive the sun, and told me they’d buried a lieutenant governor in it, and I said done.

“One condition,” I said.

“Of course.”

“No bagpipes.”

Eugene took out a pen and wrote it on the form. NO BAGPIPES, in block capitals, and he underlined it twice without my asking, which is when I knew he’d heard what I heard at one-thirty.

“And the slideshow has to be accurate,” I said.

“Of course.”

“No Gerald.”

“No Gerald,” Eugene said, and wrote that down too.

Then he asked if there was anyone else I’d like to make arrangements for while we were sitting there.

“Not yet,” I said.

Eugene didn’t write that one down.

Then I asked about Dolores. Eugene said she’d made her arrangements years ago. I asked what she’d picked, and he said the oak, and I said upgrade her. Whatever the lieutenant governor got. Put it on mine.

“She’ll say no,” Eugene said.

“Then don’t tell her,” I said. “Let it be a surprise.”

He asked if I’d like to rest before I drove, and he walked me down the hall to a room with rose-colored wallpaper and a long velvet chaise, and through the open door across from the chaise, in the next room, under a little spotlight, there was a display casket in a gray steel. Eighteen-gauge, Eugene said. People are always surprised. The tag on it said Cortland Gray. I lay down on the chaise in a sheriff’s uniform with the hat over my face and the plastic handcuffs on my belt, and the building was quiet the way only a building like that can be quiet, and nobody was reading anything, and nobody was running anything, and my guy had put the clocks back where they belonged.

Best sleep since the divorce. Not close.

I slept great.