A Billion Ways to Die (33 page)

“Okay,” I said. “Why?”

He laughed again, though more of a whinny.

“I wanted to prove a point. If I’d meant to kill you, you’d be dead by now. But I didn’t. I just wanted to steal your meds.”

“You’re still worryin’ about that?”

“Not worrying, obsessing. I’m a moral animal. I’m not a thief. It troubles me deeply that you’d think so.”

“I forgot about it long ago,” I said.

“I didn’t. So there you go. Now you can kill me if you want to.”

“When did you do this?”

“My clients have a prototyping business here in New Haven. I just had to hack into the CAD-CAM and download designs I pulled off the web. Ran it remotely over the weekend and broke through a window Sunday night to retrieve the goods. Easy peasy.”

I put the lids back on the boxes and put them in my backpack.

“Have you noticed our world has become exceedingly strange?” I asked him.

“Are you kidding me? I’m legally insane. Who knows better?”

I slept that night with both the ceramic gun and switchblade under my pillow. Though not so soundly.

I
SPENT
a good part of the next day in the tougher parts of New Haven scoring a handful of .32-caliber bullets, which I loaded in the ceramic gun and test-fired in a state park about an hour by bus north of the city. My hand and the gun came through intact, and true to Davis’s word, it wasn’t a straight shooter, but would put a hole in anything less than four feet away.

Easy peasy.

S
INCE
I could think of no reason not to, I had both the knife and gun in my pocket the next time I went to the study room at Yale to work on the computer. Traffic through the building was always light, so it wasn’t that big an accomplishment to notice two sturdy-looking white guys with short hair in khakis and polo shirts hanging around the front door engaged in a nearly theatrically phony semblance of a conversation.

As I approached, one of them opened the door and welcomed me in Spanish. I acted befuddled and said, “Yes, of course. Whatever you say.”

I headed through the building and down the stairs to the study room, daring a few looks over my shoulder, but saw no one following. I went into the sterile study room and shut the door. I noticed for the first time there was no lock. I thought about that for a moment, and after examining the tiny window up near the ceiling, I left the room, just in time to hear the sound of footsteps descending the stairway at the end of the echoing basement corridor. I moved quickly in the opposite direction.

I’d never been in that part of the building, a lapse I mentally kicked myself for making. It was quite a warren of study rooms and comfortable seating areas, kitchenettes and open areas often filled with folding chairs set in a circle. But no exits, as far as I could see.

The footfalls I’d heard on the stairs started coming down the hall. I picked up the pace, though shy of a full run. The hallway was filled with angles, seemingly endless and utterly devoid of escape routes. I kept moving and looking.

The footsteps grew loud enough for me to steal another glance behind, but it was clear. I started to run in earnest, though that made it harder to try for unlocked doors, so I went back to a fast walk.

I found a stairwell and bounded up to the next floor. When I pushed open the door leading to the hallway I nearly bowled over a young woman who had her face stuck in a book as she walked. She pulled back, alarmed, and I apologized as I rushed by. Other students were moving down the hallway, through which I moved quickly until I came to a lounge where at least a half dozen of them were nestled into comfortable sofas and chairs, plugged into earphones, smartphones, laptops and tablets. I sat on a sofa, put my hands in my lap and waited.

The two men I’d seen in front of the building stopped at the door, looked in the room, then moved on. The girl sitting next to me pulled her white earphones from her ears and looked at me curiously. As a bald man in his forties with no devices, I’m sure I presented a profound oddity. I smiled at her and left the room. More students were filling the hall. I went back outside and looked up and down the street, but my pursuers were nowhere in sight.

I headed back toward Second Chance. Before I got there, I saw a young man speaking on a smartphone. I stood there until he ended his call and offered him two hundred dollars if he let me use it.

“I’ll only be a couple minutes. You can stand there and watch me.”

“You’re shittin’ me, right?”

I handed him the two hundred dollar bills and he shrugged and gave me his phone. I used the browser to go into a website where I left a message for Strider:

“Keep looking. It’s there for sure.”

I
FOUND
Cary McNichol in his office. He seemed happy to see me.

“Stan the Man. Have a seat.”

I held my backpack in my lap when I sat down.

“Can you tell if a person’s insane, even if they don’t know themselves?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he said. “It depends.”

“I had a serious traumatic brain injury.”

“I know. From the scars, I’m guessing a bullet. I did my residency at Yale New Haven in psychiatric emergency. We had a lot of that kind of thing.”

“Went straight through,” I said. “Skimmed the frontal and took out a piece of the parietal and somatosensory cortex.”

“You’ve retained considerable function.”

“Some of it rewiring. Most of it, I think. I’ve had a lot to keep my brain busy.”

“You’re to be commended,” he said.

“Not so sure. Is there a guy named Davis in the bunk next to me?”

He cocked his head and looked at me more closely.

“Davis Anderson. The man with two last names. Why do you ask?”

“I’m wondering about delusions.”

“You’re not bipolar, are you.”

“No,” I said. “But I did have a bad brain injury. I’m wondering how things might evolve after general recovery. That is, after you think you’re okay, can things start to go wrong?”

“Without diagnostic equipment and a rigorous workup, I’d be guessing, too.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I won’t hold you to anything.”

“Then I guess scar tissue,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Not the brain itself, but the skull and related material. It can harden and push down on the grey matter. Shows up over time. It can cause a cascade of mental abnormalities, though nobody exactly knows the process. It’s too rare to get much research attention, but back in the psych ER we saw it enough.”

“The symptoms come on gradually, as the pressure builds,” I suggested.

“Something like that. That scar in front looks very close to important executive functions. That’s where I’d start to look.”

“Personality?” I asked.

“That’s part of it.”

“Paranoid delusion?”

“Sometimes, sure.”

I thanked him and gave him two thousand dollars that I’d extracted from the money belt around my waist when I was in the bathroom a few moments before.

“Wow. Nice surprise,” he said.

“It’s to help out around here. Just don’t give any to The People Project,” I told him. “They’re fine.”

“You should know.”

“I should.”

I walked to the New Haven train station and caught Metro North into Grand Central. From there, I found another shelter specializing in homeless, anonymous men and crawled into another bunk with clean, white, stiff sheets and fell into a paranoia-free sleep for the next twelve hours.

I
GOT
hold of Strider from a computer in the cathedral that is the New York Public Library. I was in a room with soaring, coffered ceilings, walls lined with real books and desks lit by brass lamps. There were a lot of people surrounding me, but the voices rarely rose above a murmur, even from the tourists passing through, their faces behind clicking smartphones.

“I found it,” she wrote.

“In plain sight,” I wrote back.

“Pretty much. You knew?”

“I had a theory.”

“You could have shared.”

“I needed you to get there on your own,” I wrote. “Did you document?”

“Of course.”

“Can you bar access?”

“Already done. I just had to change a single string of code. Incredibly elegant, but ultimately a little sloppy, if you ask me.”

“Any luck on the IP address of that e-mail string I sent you?”

“Haven’t really been concentrating on that.”

“Could you?”

“Come back in a half hour.”

I logged off and used the time to walk around the stacks and read book spines. I opened a few and enjoyed the typeset pages and aroma of aging paper. I recalled little of the subject matter, probably because I wasn’t really reading, just wandering aimlessly, the working part of my mind preoccupied with other things.

I gave Strider another forty-five minutes before logging back on.

“Didn’t you say you’re from Connecticut?” she wrote.

“I am. Stamford.”

“Greenwich is next door, right?”

“Yup.”

“That’s where the IP is. The e-mail came from somewhere in Downtown Greenwich.”

She gave me a physical address. It was a law firm—Calle, Cowles and Espinoza.

“What’s he doing there?” I asked.

“That’s where the e-mail came from. Don’t know if it’s a him, a her, or an it. To get any closer I’d have to hack their firewall, which is doable, but probably won’t give you a name.”

“That’s okay. Close enough. And nice work.”

“It wasn’t easy,” she wrote. “I’m half dead from lack of sleep and Red Bull overdose. And I had to call in a lot of favors. Exposed myself.”

“Secure the data, pack everything up and take a seriously offline vacation. On me.”

“You’re scary,” she wrote.

“I’m grateful,” I said.

“Is there an end to this?”

“Wait for my signal,” I wrote and signed off.