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But I’m telling you: be careful out there. Not everyone’s as nice as me, you know? Helter Skelter coming. You can see it in everything, man. The weird shit on TV. All that crap on the Internet you hear about. You seen how weird the news is getting? Something’s coming, and ain’t everyone going to love a private eye when it all starts happening, you know what I’m saying? You guys want Departures, right?”
    Yellow cab redshift to Newark Airport.

Chapter 8

    T hrough the airport without any further “magnetism.” I figured maybe I’d used up my quota for the day.
    “I’ve never flown before,” said Trix, so I made sure she got the window seat. I bought business-class tickets to our first stop, Columbus, Ohio. I’d never been there, but I found myself savoring the normalcy of its name. Columbus, Ohio. It was somewhere from TV weather maps. It made Cleveland sound decadent.
    Lots of people in prettily decorated bird-flu masks moved in twitchy flocks around the airport, darting away in migration patterns from anything that coughed.
    We were greeted by the plastic grins of flight attendants as we mounted the plane, ushered to big comfortable seats, and given champagne. The grins widened as we finished the first glasses and reached greedily for seconds. Get the passengers smashed and they’ll slump quietly throughout the flight. We worked slowly through the second glasses during takeoff, which had Trix plastered to her window wide-eyed and squealing.
    The plane banked easy, stepped over the cloud deck, and leveled for Columbus, an hour’s run.
    An older guy in a short-sleeved shirt with bloodstains on the front sat in the aisle seat next to mine. He gave me a secret little smile. “You know,” he said. “You know. If you drink whiskey. And I don’t mean a lot of whiskey, just enough to keep the little engines in your head alive. If you drink a bunch of whiskey, you can piss in a cup before you go to sleep. And in the morning all the alcohol will have risen to the surface of the piss. And you can drink it off the top of the piss with a straw.”
    “I’ll, um, I’ll certainly bear that one in mind.”
    He made a happy noise and stuck out a big hand with caked blood all over the fingernails. “Excellent. I’m the pilot.”
    Trix went white.

Chapter 9

    T he Columbus airport was one of those places you forget everything about within five minutes of leaving it. We got a cab from there to the hotel I’d booked over the Internet, a place outside the city proper.
    Coming out of the airport, we saw a grimy road sign reading, WELCOME TO OHIO, THE BUCKEYE STATE .
    Our cabbie had three faded pictures of burly women pasted to the dashboard. Someone had used a marker pen to draw crude knives sticking into their heads and chests. He whispered to himself as he drove, his little fists clenching on the steering wheel.
    “What’s a buckeye?” Trix asked.
    “State symbol kinda thing,” the cabbie ground out.
    “Yeah, but what’s a buckeye?”
    He pinned us with red little eyes through the rearview mirror.
    “It’s a poison nut.”
    Trix gave me a wry little smile. “That makes sense.”
    The hotel was a concrete island. Surrounded by highways on all sides. You couldn’t walk anywhere from it. The cab dumped us at the front door. The driver was shivering with tension by this point, hissing constantly under his breath, getting close to explosion. I paid the guy a tip. He suddenly glared at Trix and lost it, yelling at the top of his lungs: “They bleed for a week and don’t fucking die!”
    The cab tore off. I looked at Trix, who just shrugged. “Can’t argue with that,” she said.
    Check-in was unremarkable, and within ten minutes we had our big apartment-style rooms four floors up, complete with exotic widescreen views of the parking lot.
    I flicked on the TV for noise while Trix settled in to her room. Some mumbling defective in a cowboy hat was doing a radio talkshow that was inexplicably being televised