Lunar Interval

Dolores had been sitting in her parked car outside the planetarium for twenty minutes, which she knew because she kept checking the clock on the dash every time her phone buzzed, and her phone buzzed a lot. Bail bondsman work did not respect evenings, weekends, or lunar eclipses, whatever those were exactly, and she had missed her last two date nights with Rebecca because somebody's cousin decided to run from a court date in Las Cruces.

She was thirty-three years old, she drove a white Impala with a cracked taillight she kept meaning to fix, and she had a duffel bag of gym clothes in the trunk that had not seen a gym since March. Her girlfriend Rebecca had worked at the planetarium for five years, running the projector, and Dolores had met her two years ago at a karaoke bar called The Singing Orbit, which sat right across the gravel parking lot from the dome like it had been placed there by a zoning board with a sense of humor. Rebecca was trans, had been out since she was twenty-two and had her surgery at twenty-seven, and had told Dolores so on their second date in about six words, and Dolores had said "okay, and?" and ordered more fries.

Her phone buzzed again. She looked at it out of habit and it was her sister sending a photo of a casserole, so she put the phone face down on the passenger seat and just sat there for a second, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.

The thing was, she and Rebecca had not had a real night out since, what, August? It was November now. They had gone to the state fair in August and Rebecca had won a stuffed armadillo playing the ring toss and then Dolores had gotten a call before the sun even set, some guy named Cho had skipped on a four-thousand-dollar bond, and they had driven home early with the armadillo riding in the back seat like a small pink passenger. That was the last one. Since then it had been takeout containers and half-watched shows and Rebecca falling asleep on the couch at ten while Dolores answered calls from skip traces and court clerks.

She did not want to quit the job. She was good at it, mostly, she knew the county like the back of her hand and she knew which court clerks answered on the third ring and which ones you had to call twice. But there was a stretch of her chest, someplace under the sternum, that got tight every time the phone rang during dinner, and that stretch had been working overtime for months.

She looked up at the planetarium. It was one of those old vintage domes, white concrete, built back in the sixties, with a kind of retro-futuristic confidence that modern buildings did not have anymore. Somebody had strung orange lights along the walkway for the eclipse event tonight. The parking lot was filling up with cars from three counties over, families and teenagers and old men with telescopes in their trunks, and Dolores felt a small pang of something she did not want to name, because tonight was not her night, tonight was Rebecca's work night.

Then her phone buzzed again and it was Rebecca this time, and the message said, come in early. I got bumped up. Ask me when you get here.

* * *

Rebecca was standing in the lobby in her work polo, which was navy blue with a little embroidered moon on the chest, and she was holding a clipboard the way she held clipboards, which was too tightly and against her hip. She was thirty-one, tall, with her hair up in a clip and reading glasses she did not actually need pushed up on top of her head, and when she saw Dolores come through the glass doors she did that thing where she smiled with her whole face and her shoulders dropped at the same time.

"Okay, so," she said, before Dolores even got all the way in, "Clay called in sick. Food poisoning, he says, though I saw his Instagram from last night and there was a margarita the size of a birdbath involved. Anyway. The dome show tonight is mine. I'm running the eclipse program. All of it."

"That's great," Dolores said, and meant it, and also felt the evening rearranging itself in her head, from date night to watching your girlfriend work, which was not the same thing but was not nothing either.

"I know you were hoping for the date," Rebecca said, reading her exactly the way she always did, "but here is the point. After the public show ends, around ten thirty, the dome is empty and the telescope's still pointed and the moon is going to be doing its thing for another couple hours. I thought you and me could go up into the projection gallery and watch it, just us. Nobody else allowed. I have keys."

Dolores felt that tight place under her sternum loosen a little. "Just us."

"Just us. I'll bring the leftover tacos from the Orbit, Hector said he'd set a bag aside if I picked them up before nine." Rebecca was already walking her toward the theater doors, talking with her hands since the clipboard was apparently not enough. "There's this moment during a total eclipse, and most people never notice it because they're looking outside, but in the dome with the lights down it's like the whole building holds its breath. I've watched every show from that booth alone for five years and I always thought, I wish I had somebody to elbow."

"Five years," Dolores said. "You've been here five years and you never watched it with anybody."

"I watched it with two hundred folding chairs, technically." Rebecca pushed open the theater door and the dome opened up in front of them, huge and dim and smelling faintly of old carpet, the kind of smell Dolores associated with elementary school field trips and did not hate. "So? You'll stay? I know your phone is probably going to go off, it always goes off, but just, for tonight, could it maybe not?"

Dolores thought about Cho. She thought about the casserole photo. She thought about the way the Impala's taillight had been cracked since June.

"I'll stay," she said. "Phone goes on the coat. If the county burns down, it burns down."

"That's the spirit," Rebecca said, and kissed her on the cheek, quick, like she was stamping the agreement.

* * *

The boss call came at six forty, while Dolores was sitting in the back row of the empty dome eating a bag of popcorn Rebecca had requisitioned from the concession stand through what she described as aggressive friendliness with the teenager working the register.

"Dolores." It was Vance, her boss, who talked like every sentence was a memo. "You working tonight?"

"I'm off tonight," she said, which was true, which she had made true on purpose.

"Well, enjoy it while it lasts, because we got a situation. Samson. Big fella, skipped his bond hearing Tuesday, thirty thousand dollar bond, our paper. Word from his brother-in-law is he's holed up out your way, county side. Somebody saw his truck at the gas station off Route 9 this morning."

Dolores sat up a little in the folding seat. "Out my way doing what? There's nothing out here but the planetarium and a karaoke bar."

There was a pause on the line, the specific pause of a man consulting a note. "As a matter of fact," Vance said, "his sister works nights at The Singing Orbit. Tends bar. So he might be sleeping it off in her back room, or he might be anywhere in that little strip out there, including, I don't know, wherever you are. You see him, you call it in and you take him. That's a thirty thousand dollar exposure for us."

"Samson," Dolores repeated, committing it. She did not know a Samson. She had not heard the name before tonight, which was somehow worse, because the ones you knew were the ones you could find. "What's he look like?"

"Forty-five, big shoulders, bad knee, walks like he's carrying a suitcase on one side. Tattoo of a bulldog on his right forearm, badly done. Probably wearing a flannel. They always wear a flannel." Vance cleared his throat. "You see him, it's a lawful arrest, you've got the authority, badge and all that. But don't be a hero, call it in first if you can."

"Okay," Dolores said. "I'll keep an eye out."

She hung up and sat there in the dark dome with the popcorn going cold in her lap, and she looked up at the ceiling where the stars would go later, and she thought about the empty after-show hour Rebecca had promised her, the telescope and the leftover tacos and nobody else allowed. Then she looked at her phone, which was supposed to be on the coat, and was in fact in her hand.

"Everything okay?" Rebecca's voice came from up by the projector booth, echoing oddly in the dome, and then her footsteps on the metal stairs, and then her face leaning over the seat back. "You've got your working face on."

"Boss called," Dolores said. "Some guy skipped bond. They think he might be around here tonight, of all nights."

"Here? Like, at the planetarium?"

"Like, in the general area. Karaoke bar, gas station, whatever." Dolores put the phone away for real this time. "Look, it's probably nothing. He's got a bad knee and a bad bulldog tattoo, he's not hiding in a planetarium."

Rebecca laughed, but it came out a little thin. "That's a weirdly specific thing to say right before it happens in a story."

"Come on," Dolores said, standing up and dusting popcorn salt off her jeans. "Tell me about your show. Walk me through it. I want to hear what two hundred folding chairs sounds like from up in the booth."

Rebecca grinned and led her up the stairs, talking the whole way about cue sheets and the star projector she called Old Bertha, and Dolores listened and did not mention that the backstage door on the east side of the building had been standing open when they walked in, propped with a rubber brick, letting the cold desert air wander down the corridor toward the dome.

She had noticed it on the way in. She had filed it under probably nothing, along with the phone in her hand and the name Samson and the flannel.

Probably nothing, she told herself again, and followed her girlfriend up into the dark.

The show went off without a hitch, mostly. Old Bertha hummed and threw the sky up onto the dome, and Dolores sat in the back row next to a man who fell asleep nine minutes in, and she watched Rebecca's silhouette move at the base of the projector like a conductor who never raised her hands. The eclipse part got a small ooh from the crowd, and Dolores found herself oohing too, which she would not admit to.

Around ten thirty the chairs started emptying, the folding seats clattering up in batches as families filed out toward the gravel lot and the orange lights strung along the walkway. Rebecca found her by the exit with her navy polo untucked and her reading glasses pushed up on her head, which she did not need, and said, "Okay. Twenty minutes to reset the gallery and then it's ours. You want to see where the magic actually happens, or do you want tacos first?"

"Show me the magic," Dolores said. "Hector can keep the tacos warm. That's what Hector is for."

Rebecca led her down a corridor behind the dome, past a men's room with a sign so old the paint had flaked off the O, past a rack of folding chairs strapped together with bungee cords, until they came to a door that was supposed to lead to the projection gallery stairs. Rebecca tried the handle, frowned, and pushed it anyway, because half the doors in this building were like that, she said, they stuck and then they gave.

What they got instead was not the gallery. It was a long narrow room that smelled like dust and old plywood, lit by a single orange bulb on a pull chain, and it was stuffed to the walls with props. There was a papier-mâché Saturn with a dent in one ring, a rack of constellation banners rolled up like rugs, a foam asteroid the size of a doghouse, and, sitting in the middle of the floor like it had been delivered by crane, a huge wooden trunk with brass corners and painted stars on the lid.

"This isn't the gallery," Rebecca said, standing in the doorway.

"I noticed."

"This is the storage room. The traveling magician guy keeps his stuff in here between bookings. I've never actually been in." She stepped inside anyway, brushing her hand along the wall until she found a light switch that did nothing, and then she pulled the pull chain on the bulb and the room jumped into better focus. "Huh. Look at this trunk."

The trunk was big. Big enough that Dolores, who had spent four years as a bondsman and two before that as a process server, looked at it and did not think magician, she thought container, she thought if I were a big man with a bad knee who needed to be somewhere small and dark and unlikely, this is where I would be. She did not say any of that. She walked over, because Rebecca was already there, running her fingers over the painted stars.

"Some of these props are older than the building," Rebecca was saying, cheerful, oblivious, reading a tag on the Saturn. "There's a comet made of chicken wire. Dolores, there's a comet made of actual chicken wire."

"That's great," Dolores said, and then the trunk made a noise.

It was not a big noise. It was the noise of a knee shifting, of a man who had been still too long moving a fraction of an inch, a soft wooden creak that could have been the trunk settling except that Dolores had spent years listening to rooms and that noise had a body in it. She put her hand out flat toward Rebecca without looking, the way you'd quiet a dog.

"Rebecca. Get behind me."

"What? Why, what's"

The trunk lid banged up from the inside and hit its own hinge with a clang, and a man came up out of it like a jack-in-the-box built for a factory, and the room got very loud and very small all at once. He was big, broad