The Select (32 page)

"No. No chatter, Chief. But I've been
picking up strange noises all night long."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"Like all sorts of scrapes, squeaks,
scratches, and sounds like furniture being moved."

"Somebody's redecorating?"

"I don't think so. Especially since
I'm almost sure he was fooling with the ceiling
fixture."

Great, Verran thought. Just what we
need.

"The pick-up still
working?"

"Yeah. Perfectly."

"All right." Verran let out a deep
breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "So even if he was
fooling around with the light fixture for whatever reason, he
didn't find nothing."

"I can't say that for
sure," Elliot said. "All I can say is he didn't
touch
the pick-up. But I wish I
could say the same for his SLI."

Verran felt a sheen of cold sweat
break out between his shoulder blades and spread across his
back.

"Stop beating around the fucking bush,
Elliot. What's wrong?"

"It went dead about five minutes ago.
I'm not getting any feedback from it at all."

"You run the trouble-shooting
program?"

"Sure. First thing. But you can't do a
software troubleshoot on a dead unit."

"Shit!" Verran said. Was this how the
year was going to go? First Alston bitches about Cleary's unit when
nothing was wrong, and now they had a unit that was genuinely on
the fritz. "What do you think's wrong with it?"

Elliot gave him a sidelong glance.
"You really want to know?"

"Of course I want to know!"

"I think it's being tampered
with."

Verran reached for a chair and gently
lowered himself into it. He hadn't wanted to know that.

"You mean he's into the
headboard?"

Elliot nodded. "Not only into it, I
think he unplugged the unit."

"Who?" Verran said. "Who the fuck is
it?"

"Brown."

Brown.
Verran rubbed a trembling hand over his eyes. It was
happening again. Just like two years ago.

"I should've known. Where's
Kurt?"

Elliot glanced at his watch. "Not due
in for another hour yet."

"Call him. Get him down here right
away. Tell him we need him pronto."

"Take it easy, Chief. This could all
be a false alarm."

"False alarm, my ass! That Brown kid
has been trouble since the day he stepped onto this campus. We've
got to do something about him."

Brown has a roommate, he thought. Is
he in on this too? Christ, two of them at once. What was he going
to do?

As Elliot made the call, Verran
pressed a hand against the right side of his abdomen, trying to
ease the growing pain there. His ulcer was kicking up again. It had
started two years ago, now it was back full force, mostly because
of the Brown kid and his girlfriend Cleary.

Trouble. Nothing but
trouble.

And if Elliot was right about Brown
opening up the back of his headboard, the shit was really going to
hit the fan.

EIGHTEEN

All right, Tim thought as
he stared at the maze of wires running throughout the rear section
of his headboard, I've found it. But
what
have I found?

It hadn't been easy
getting into the base of the headboard. Steel bolts with recesses
in their heads had been used instead of conventional slotted or
Phillips-head wood screws; they'd been wound tightly into steel
bushings. Apparently these headboards had been custom made to take
a
lot
of
punishment. But Tim had found an Allen wrench in his tool box that
did the trick—not with ease, but after an hour of cursing and
earning a few fresh blisters, he'd managed to loosen the panel and
expose the innards.

He knew something about
electronics—he'd poked through his share of PCs, stereos, and
VCRs—but he'd never seen anything like what lay behind the panel.
Wires and circuit boards, okay, but what was that big, black, shiny
disk facing the bed? It reminded him of a giant
sub-woofer.

Whatever it was, he knew he was out of
his depth. Something big was going down here. He was too beat to
open up Kevin's headboard, and besides, he was sure he'd find the
same thing. The same damn science-fiction rig was probably inside
every damn headboard in the whole damn dorm.

Something clinked against the window
then and Tim jumped. He stared at the drawn curtains. Was someone
on the other side? His was a first-floor room. The window sill was
chin level to a man of average height. If someone wanted to check
out what he was up to in here, the first thing to do would be to
try to look in the window.

Steeling himself, Tim stepped to the
curtain and pulled it aside. Cold air trapped between the glass and
the curtain swirled around him, raising gooseflesh on his arms, but
thankfully there were no faces peering through the panes. Nothing
but darkness out there.

I'm getting
jumpy.

He closed the drapes and turned back
to the exposed workings within the headboard. Maybe he had good
reason to be jumpy. What if there was a trip switch of some sort
within that mess of wire in there that set off an alarm somewhere
when the headboard was tampered with?

Maybe he should get out of
here.

Tim was scared now. He felt himself
shivering and his hands shook as he pulled on a sweater. He wished
he'd never begun this search, wished he'd left well enough
alone.

But dammit, things hadn't been well at
all. Somebody had been tampering with his mind, skewing his values.
How could he have let that go on?

But now he had to tell Quinn. She had
to know what was going on, what they were doing to people's heads
here.

Funny thing about that, though...Quinn
seemed unaffected. She'd stayed the course...

...which might explain why Verran kept
returning to her room. Maybe the thing in her headboard wasn't
working.

He had to tell her. He glanced at his
watch. Late, but this couldn't wait. He snatched Quinn's room key
off his dresser and shoved it into his pocket. They'd traded keys
awhile back—he'd given her a set to his car and she'd given him one
to her room so he could use it anytime he wanted to be alone when
she was out.

But he couldn't talk to her there, or
anywhere else in the dorm. Where? He grabbed a scratch pad and a
pen as he left. He hoped he could figure out a safe place to talk
by the time he reached the second floor.

*

"Wha—?"

Abruptly, Quinn was awake and she
didn't know why. She lifted her head and looked around the darkened
room, listening. She felt extremely vulnerable in the dark,
especially since she was wearing only an oversized T-shirt and a
pair of panties. But nothing was moving, nothing—

She head the hall door click
closed.

Someone's here!

She reached for the phone beside
her.

"Who's there? Tim, is that
you?"

The light went on in the front room
and Tim's voice drifted through the open door.

"Just me, Quinn." His voice sounded
strange...strained.

She glanced at the radio alarm. The
red LED display read 2:34.

"Do you know what time it
is?"

He stepped through the door and
flicked on the light.

"I'm sorry it's so late, but I
couldn't sleep."

Quinn squinted in the sudden glare.
"Must you?"

"Yeah. I want to look at
you."

When her eyes adjusted, she stared at
him and gasped. He looked ghastly—pale, haggard,
and...frightened.

"Tim, what's wrong?"

"Nothing. I just had to see
you."

As he finished speaking he held his
index finger to his lips and thrust a note pad toward
her.

"What—?"

He tapped the finger against his lips
insistently and pointed to the pad. Quinn stared at the block
printing.

THE ROOM

IS BUGGED!!!!

"What?
You've got to be—"

He was frantically jamming his finger
against his lips now. She looked at him and shrugged, completely
bewildered. Was this one of his gags or had he gone off the deep
end completely?

He took the pad and scribbled
lengthwise on the next sheet.

MAKE SMALL TALK!

Quinn gaped at him. He appeared to be
in genuine distress. She fumbled for something to say.

"Uh...you ready for the anatomy
practical?"

He gave her the O-K sign and began
writing on a third sheet as he spoke.

"Sure. You know me. I'm a quick study.
Nothing to those practicals."

He held up the new note.

MEET ME IN THE

ANATOMY LAB

MY CAR AND I'LL

EXPLAIN EVERYTHING

"Yeah. I wish I had a memory like
yours," Quinn said as she grabbed the pen and pad from him and
jotted her own note.

ARE YOU FOR

REAL???

His slow, grim nod gave her a
chill.

He yawned loudly as he retrieved the
pad, scribbling as he spoke.

"Well, I've bothered you long enough.
I'll leave you alone and see if I can get some sleep."

He handed the pad back to
her.

I'LL WARM

UP THE CAR

She nodded. "Good idea. See you
soon."

Tim flashed her another O-K sign,
waved, and left her there in her bed, wondering what on earth had
come over him. She sat for a moment or two, staring at the pad he'd
left with her, flipping through the bizarre series of notes. She
decided the only way to find out what was going on was to meet him
in his car.

She jumped out of bed and began to get
dressed.

*

"Can you hear me,
Chief?"

It was Elliot's voice, transmitting
via the pick-up in room 125.

Louis Verran stood in the control room
with his face all but pressed against the fabric of the
speaker.

"You know damn well I'm listening," he
said irritably, though he knew just as damn well that Elliot
couldn't hear the reply.

"Listen, we're in the
bedroom of one-two-five. We couldn't see anything through the
window—he almost caught us doing the Peeping Tom thing—so we came
inside when he left. I was right, Chief. He's got the whole place
torn apart, including the headboard."

"Shit!" Verran said. "Shit, shit,
SHIT!"

"We don't know where he is
now, but we can guess. We're going to go looking for him.
Out."

"Yeah," Verran muttered.
"Out."

This was bad. Very bad. Kurt and
Elliot would have to find Brown and bring him in before he talked
to anyone.

And Louis Verran would have to pick up
the phone and call Dr. Arthur Tightass Alston and tell him that the
nightmare scenario from two years ago was starting a
rerun.

His intestines coiled into a Gordian
knot as he reached for the receiver.

*

Tim checked his pockets as he galloped
down the stairs, and realized he didn't have his car keys. He'd
have to stop off at his room.

When he opened his door, the room was
dark. Had he turned the lights out? He didn't remember. As he
reached for the switch someone grabbed his arm and yanked him
inside. The shock and sudden terror of it stole his voice. He heard
the door slam behind him and now he was in complete darkness. He
started to yell but someone rammed a fist into one of his kidneys
and all that escaped him was an agonized groan. As the pain drove
him to his knees, gasping, retching, his arms were pinned behind
his back.

Here it comes, he thought. A bullet
through the brain.

But then something—a rag
of some sort—was forced into his mouth. He heard the
scritch
of tape being
pulled from a roll and then a piece was pressed over his mouth. He
had to breath through his nose. Air whistled in and out of his
nostrils. He fought panic as he listened to another piece of tape
being torn from the roll. If they covered his nose he'd suffocate.
But this piece went across his eyes. And then he felt metal bands
tighten around his wrists.

Handcuffs. His panic ebbed toward mere
terror. They weren't going to kill him.

At least not yet.

*

Quinn knew something was wrong before
she reached the parking lot. As she hurried down the slope she
spotted Tim's car in its usual spot, but the motor wasn't running.
She approached Griffin cautiously and peered within.

Empty.