- lips, nose, eyebrows. They did not beckon with intelligence.
"Gregory," Professor Mitchell sighed. "Not now."
Gregory pushed his way farther into the office. He balanced his mail bin on his belly and stared at me expectantly. "You have my essay?"
"Gregory, this isn't the time," Mitchell insisted.
Gregory grunted. "I told Brandon, I said, 'Man, some people are really late with the grading but you take the cake. You ever want your mail again you get me my essay back.' That's what I told him. You got it graded yet?"
I smiled.
Gregory didn't smile back. His eyes seemed out of focus. Maybe he wasn't talking to me at all. Maybe he was talking to the pothos plants.
"I don't have your essay," I said.
"Its the one on the werewolf," he insisted. The mail bin sagged against his side. I'd disappointed him. "The Marie de France dit."
"Bisclavret," I guessed.
"Yeah." Unfocused light twinkled in his eyes. Had I read the essay after all? Had the pothos read it?
"Bisclavret's a lai," I said. "A long narrative poem. Dits are shorter, like fables. The essay's not graded and I may not be the one grading it, Gregory."
He frowned. "It's a dit."
Professor Mitchell sighed through his nose. "Gregory, we're having a conference..."
DeLeon took off her gray blazer and folded it over the top of her chair. Her bone-colored silk blouse was sleeveless, her arms the color of French roast and smoothly muscled. Her side arm was visible now - a tiny black Glock 23 in a leather Sam Browne holster. When Gregory saw the gun, his mouth closed fully for the first time in the conversation, maybe the first time in his life.
DeLeon said, "Dr. Navarre told you it was a lai, Gregory. Were there any other questions?"
Gregory kept his mouth closed. He shifted his mail bin around, looked at Professor Mitchell like he was expecting protection, then at me. "Maybe I could check back tomorrow?"
"Good idea," I said. "And the mail?"
Gregory thought about it, checked out DeLeon's Glock one more time, then dipped a beefy hand into the bin. He brought out a rubber-banded stack of letters that probably represented two weeks of withheld mail. He threw it on the desk and knocked over the silver-framed photo of Brandon's family.
"Fine," Gregory said. "Package, too."
The package hit the table with a muffled clunk. It was a manila bubble-wrap mailer, eleven by seventeen, dinged up and glistening at both ends with scotch tape. It had a large red stamp along the side that read INTRACAMPUS DELIVERIES ONLY.
While Professor Mitchell shooed Gregory out the door, DeLeon and I were staring at the same thing - the plain white address label on the mailing envelope, AARON BRANDON, HSS 3,11. No street address or zip. No return. A computer-printed label, Chicago 12-point.
I remember locking eyes with DeLeon for maybe half a second. After that it happened fast.
DeLeon put a hand on Professor Mitchell's shoulder and calmly started to say, "Why don't we go - " when something inside the package made a plasticky crick-crick-crick sound like a soda bottle cap being twisted off.
DeLeon was smaller than Mitchell by maybe a hundred pounds, but she had him wrestled to the floor on the count of two. I should have followed her example.
Instead, I swept the package off the desk and into the metal trash can. Nice plan if I'd been able to get to the floor myself. But the trash can started toppling. First toward my face. Then toward the window. Then it went off like a cannon.
In the first millisecond, even before the sound registered, the force of the blast frosted a huge ragged oval in the glass, then melted it in a cone of metal shards and yellow ribbon and flames, ripping through the wall and the mesquite outside and shredding the new leaves and branches into ticker tape.
I was on my butt in the opposite corner of the office. My ankle was twisted in the walnut armrest of Aaron Brandon's overturned chair and my ribs had slammed against a filing cabinet. There was an upside-down pothos plant in my lap. Someone was pressing a very large A-flat tuning fork to the base of my skull and my left cheek felt wet and cold. I dabbed at the cheek with my fingers, felt nothing, brought my fingers away, and saw that they glistened red.
Except for the tuning fork, the room was silent. Leaves and pigeon feathers and pages from essays were twirling aimlessly in the air, curlicuing in