Tucker Case was ignoring her — well, except for inspecting her sweater cakes as he talked to Gabe and Theo. "Look, Constable, maybe we got off on the wrong foot —»

"Wrong foot?" Theo's voice almost broke. As upset as he appeared, he appeared to be talking to the woman in the red sweater's breasts, rather than to Tucker Case, who was only a foot beyond them. "You threatened me."

"He did?" said Gabe, angling for a better look down the red sweater. "That's harsh, buddy. Theo just got thrown out of the house."

"Can you believe guys our age can still fall so hard?" Tuck said to Theo, looking up from the cleavage to convey his sincerity. He felt bad about blackmailing Theo, but, much like helping Lena hide the body, sometimes certain unpleasantries needed to be done, and being a pilot and a man of action, he did them.

"What are you talking about?" Theo asked.

"Well, Lena and I have parted ways, Constable. Shortly after you and I spoke this morning."

"Really?" Now Theo looked up from the woolly mounds of intrigue.

"Really," Tuck said. "And I'm sorry things happened the way they did."

"That doesn't really change anything, does it?"

"Would it make a difference if I told you that I absolutely did not harm this alleged Dale Pearson, and neither did Lena?"

"I don't think he was alleged," said Gabe, slurring at the breasts. "I'm pretty sure he was confirmed Dale Pearson."

"Whatever," said Tuck. "Would that change anything? Would you believe that?"

Theo didn't speak right away but appeared to be waiting for an answer from the decolletage oracle. When he looked up at Tuck again he said, "Yeah, I believe you."

Tuck nearly aspirated the ginger ale he was drinking. When he stopped sputtering he said, "Wow, you suck as a lawman, Theo. You can't just believe a strange guy who tells you something in a bar." Tuck wasn't accustomed to being believed by anyone, so to have someone take him at face value…

"Hey, hey, hey," said Gabe. "That's uncalled for —»

"Well, fuck you guys!" said the woman in the red sweater. She jumped up from her stool and snatched her keys off the bar. "I am a person, too, you know? And these are not speakerphones," she said, grabbing her breasts underneath and shaking them at the offenders, her keys jingling cheerfully as she did, completely defusing the effect of her anger.

"Oh — my — God," said Gabe.

"You can't just ignore a person like that! Besides, you're all too old and you're losers and I'd rather be alone on Christmas than spend five minutes with any of you horn dogs!" And with that she threw some cash on the bar, turned, and stormed out of the bar.

Because they were men, Theo, Tuck, and Gabe watched her ass as she walked away.

"Too old?" Tuck said. "She was what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight?"

"Yeah," Theo said. "Late twenties, maybe early thirties. I didn't think we were ignoring her."

Mavis Sand took the money off the bar and shook her head. "You were all paying her proper attention. Woman's got some issues when she's jealous of her own parts."

"I was thinking about icebergs," said Gabe. "About how only ten percent of them show above the surface, yet below lies the really dangerous part. Oh, no, I got the blues on me again." His head hit the bar and bounced.

Tuck looked to Theo. "You want some help getting him to the car?"

"He's a very smart guy," said Theo. "He has a couple of Ph.D.s."

"Okay. Do you want some help getting the doctor to the car?"

Theo was trying to get a shoulder under Gabe's arm, but given that he was nearly a foot taller than his friend, things weren't working very well.

"Theo," Mavis barked. "Don't be such a friggin' wanker. Let the man help you."

After three unsuccessful attempts at hefting the bag of sand that was Gabe Fenton, Theo nodded to Tuck. They each took an arm and walked/dragged the biologist toward the back door.

"If he hurls I'm aiming him at you," Theo said.

"Lena loved these shoes," said Tuck. "But you do what you feel like you need to."

"I have no sex appeal, a rum-pa-pa-pum," sang Gabe Fenton, in spirit with the season. "My social skills are nil, a rum-pa-pa-pum."

"Did that actually rhyme?" asked Tuck.

"He's a bright guy," said Theo.

Mavis creaked ahead of them and held the door. "So, I'll see you pathetic losers at the Lonesome Christmas party, right?"

They stopped, looked at one another, felt camaraderie in their collective loserdom, and reluctantly nodded.

"My lunch is coming up, a rum-pa-pa-pum," sang Gabe.

Meanwhile, the girls were running around the Santa Rosa Chapel, putting up decorations and preparing the table settings for a Lonesome Christmas. Lena Marquez was making her third circumnavigation of the room with a stepladder, some masking tape, and rolls of green and red crepe paper the size of truck tires. (Price Club in San Junipero only sold one size, evidently so you could decorate your entire ocean liner without making two trips.) The act of serial festooning had taken Lena's mind off her troubles, but now the little chapel was starting to resemble nothing more than the nest of a color-blind Ewok. If someone didn't intervene soon the Lonesome Christmas guests would be in danger of being asphyxiated in a festive dungeon of holiday bondage. Fortunately, as Lena was moving the ladder to make her fourth round, Molly Michon snaked a foot inside and pulled the chapel's double doors open; the wind from the growing storm swept in and tore the paper from the walls.

"Well, fuck!" said Lena.

The crepe paper swam in a vortex around the middle of the room, then settled into a great wad under one of the buffet tables Molly had set up to one side.

"I told you a staple gun would work better than masking tape," Molly said. She was holding three stainless-steel pans of lasagna and still managed to get the oak double doors closed against the wind with her feet. She was agile that way.

"This is a historical landmark, Molly. You can't just go shooting staples into the walls."

"Right, like that matters after Armageddon. Take these downstairs to the fridge," Molly said, handing the pans to Lena. "I'll get you the staple gun out of my car."

"What does that mean?" Lena asked. "Do you mean our relationships?"

But Molly had bounded back out through the double doors into the wind. She'd been making more and more cryptic comments like that lately. Like she was talking to someone in the room besides Lena. It was strange. Lena shrugged and headed back to the little room behind the altar and the steps that led downstairs.

Lena didn't like going into the basement of the chapel. It wasn't really a basement; it was more of a cellar: sandstone walls that smelled of damp earth, a concrete floor that had been poured without a vapor barrier fifty years after the cellar had been dug and so seeped moisture and formed a fine slime on top in the winter. Even when the stove was cranked and an electric heater turned on, it was never warm. Besides, the old, empty pews stored down there cast shadows that made her feel as if people were watching her.

"Mmmm, lasagna," said Marty in the Morning, your drive-time dead guy in the a.m. "Dudes and dudettes, the little lady has certainly outdone herself this time. Get a whiff of that?"

The graveyard was abuzz with moldy anticipation of the Lonesome Christmas party.

"It's highly inappropriate, that's what it is," said Esther. "I suppose it's better than that horrible Mavis Sand woman barbecuing again. And how is it that she's still alive, anyway? She's older than I am."

"Than dirt, you mean?" said Jimmy Antalvo, whose faceprint was still embedded in a telephone pole on the Pacific Coast Highway, where he'd hit it at age nineteen.