Free Fifty Mice: A Novel by Daniel Pyne

Floria, the wizened Latina behind the counter, extends him—James Warren, of 333 Vieudelou Avenue, she knows he just moved onto the island with the
esposa melancólica
and the
niña reservada
—a kind of informal store credit when he realizes and tells her that he left Jimmy’s wallet back at the house.
    Because it isn’t his.
    “No se preocupe de el,”
she tells him, friendly. “You can pay next time you come in.”
    He spreads the Franko’s Guide Map he settled on across the flat of the seawall, and has to hold it with both hands to keep it from blowing away in the wind.
    All the private charter boats are off-limits, according to Hondo,the effervescent aspiring gigolo in the booking shack at the entrance to the Green Pleasure Pier. Hondo has teardrop tattoos under his eye that Jay has always assumed represented prison terms, but which Hondo cheerfully explains can mean number of years you did, yes, but also the number of people you whacked or the number of times you got done up the ass. Depending. But, prison, yeah, and, yes, he’s “in the program,” too, which is how he can say without qualification that there is no fucking way Jay would ever get access to a boat, not to mention they put a tracking device in their heads, did he know that? Hondo indicates a spot just under his ear that looks like a skin tag or a mole, and offers to palpate Jay’s neck skin to prove that something’s there, but Jay says he’ll take Hondo at his word, which Hondo much appreciates. “The bitch of it is,” Hondo says, his mood shifting, darkening, “you don’t know, you’re talking to some guy on the street, or in the Parrot, is he legit? or is he a Fed? or is he just another poor jerkoff like you and me? You don’t know. And after a while, man, that gets to you, I gotta say.”
    Now, a kayak, Hondo explains, you could steal, and will get Jay away from Avalon, sure, but Hondo doubts even he can paddle back to the mainland with the current and such, and Hondo’s been bulking up and taking supplements. And trying to find a hiding place in the rocky grottoes on the southern tip of the island is pointless, given the resources of the Feds.
    Not to mention the secret GPS tracking device implant in our heads, Jay points out.
    “To a T, man,” Hondo says gravely. “To a T.”
    Catalina is mostly uninhabited, and almost all of its permanent population lives in Avalon, a jumble of small houses and two- and three-story buildings with no cohesive architectural aesthetic. Nothing plumb, avenues coiling back on themselves, the perplexing street grid of the city is a pauper’s bowl of half-cooked spaghetti, a few straynoodles snaking up the hillsides and away to the highlands, north and south, providing access to the unpopulated interior of the island and an “airport in the sky” midway to Two Harbors, where rugged iconoclasts share with Boy Scouts and church camps and a marine science compound on the narrow isthmus of lowland that divides a deep and narrow rocky windward dent on the Pacific, from the more gracefully curved, leeward bay facing the Catalina Strait; hence: two harbors. According to Franko, there is ferry service from the mainland direct to this northern, unincorporated part of the island, and it occurs to Jay that perhaps he could find a way back to the city simply by hiking there.
    Of course, it subsequently occurs to him that this is so obvious as to be pointless in practice. Running to Two Harbors is the first contingency to which Public and the Feds would attend while securing the island, the first place they’d look when they found Jay had disappeared.
    But he’s convinced himself that this is what he should be thinking about, getting out.
    His reasoning: the shock of the abduction gave way to panicked delusions of escape by air shaft, too soon and too hastily improvised. Then the helpless interlude fueled by Kafkaesque conundrums fostered by strange marshals and blindfolds and legal limbo, followed by