Memory Man

  not. That might be why they had left the information about the site with Clyde Evers, just in case Decker made the connection and went to visit the old man. This was all a puzzle, and every piece fit in somewhere.

  Thirty minutes went by. Then an hour. Then two hours. Decker just sat there, the color gray chief in his mind. Though he’d lived with this new mind for twenty years now, it still felt like he was existing in someone else’s body. And that any minute, or after an odd synaptic fire, he would be back to his old self and his quite ordinary brain.

  His phone buzzed again. It was Jamison. He didn’t answer it.

  At the three-hour mark the message popped up in his new account.

  You finally got there, bro. Congratulations.

  Decker also knew what the “bro” reference was to now. It was simple, really. They were all brothers, weren’t they? All lumped together by Wyatt. By Leopold. It was unfair, of course. It was unjust, but still, he could understand it.

  He typed in a request and sent it off. And waited.

  Finally, the response came. Why should we?

  He had not expected them to simply agree to what he had proposed. He typed in his answer. He hoped it was good enough. He doubted he would get another chance like this.

  This needs to end sometime. Why not now? I’m the only one left.

  Unless he was missing something really big, he was the only one left. And he didn’t think he was missing anything. Not anymore. In fact, he might have discovered something that everyone else had missed. And he meant everyone, the two people on the other end of this digital line included.

  They would suspect a trap, of course. They couldn’t even know it was him. He was expecting a test. And it came with the next missive.

  The number of Dwayne LeCroix’s jersey.

  They had definitely done their homework, or maybe Wyatt had heard something about him at the institute and dug that up.

  The query said he had five seconds to answer. No looking up anything online. Google or YouTube was not going to be an option here. But he didn’t need it. Even without his special talent he would forevermore remember those two digits, even if he hadn’t seen them before the hit occurred.

  He instantly typed in the answer and sent it off: 24.

  The response was immediate.

  Instructions to follow in five minutes. Stand by.

  He waited, his internal clock ticking away in his head. When three hundred and six seconds had passed, it came. He studied it.

  It was smart, calculated. They were taking no chances. It was like traveling by stagecoach with way stations along the journey, allowing them ample opportunity to see if Decker was truly alone. He would get to one station and there would be a communication telling him where to go next.

  They had obviously planned this out previously, as though they knew exactly how all of this was going to play out. And that, Decker had to concede, was more than a little unnerving.

  He rose and left. He was back at his room in thirty minutes. It took him all of three minutes to pack up pretty much all he had.

  It fit into a bag two feet square with room to spare.

  * * *

  As he hit the doorway he looked back. His home. The only one he had now, a rental, one room. Not really much of a home. So he felt absolutely nothing at leaving it.

  If this turned out badly for him he would miss Lancaster, Miller, and Jamison. And maybe even Agent Bogart. But that was about it.

  He closed the door and dropped the key off in the office slot.

  He knew he would not be coming back.

  That was just the way it had to be.

  For a lot of reasons.

  Chapter

  62

  THE BUS TOOK him to Crewe, three towns over from Burlington. The snow was picking up and the lights on the interstate illuminated a fat, wet precipitation that would add tonnage to this part of the country until it finally stopped falling. And then the highway department would spend days cleaning it up, only to see Mother Nature do it all over again.

  He looked out the window of the bus, his phone in his hand. They hadn’t told him how the next communication would come, but he wanted to be ready.

  He alighted at Crewe along with only three others. Their possessions were nearly as meager as his, although one woman had a full suitcase and a pillow, and a small, sleepy child in tow.

  He looked up and down the snowy underhang of the bus station platform. There were few people out and about, and all of them clearly of limited resources.

  A man approached him. He was black, in his sixties, with a big belly, snow-caked boots, and a coat with rips down both sides. A flapped hat hung low over his head. His glasses were fogged. He stopped in front of Decker and said, “Amos?”

  Decker looked at him and nodded. “Who are you?”

  “I’m nobody. But somebody gave me a hundred dollars to give you this, and so I am.” He handed Decker a slip of paper.

  “Who was it?”

  “Didn’t see ’em.”

  “How’d you know to look for me?”

  “They said a really tall, fat, scary-lookin’ white dude with a beard. You it.”

  The man lumbered off and Decker looked down at the instructions on the note.

  He went in and bought another bus ticket. He had two hours to kill. He bought a coffee from the machine in the station. It was more warm than hot, but he didn’t care. He spent his time looking at everyone in the waiting room. It was more crowded than he would have thought. Then he realized something.

  Thanksgiving was nearly here. These folks were probably heading out to see family and carve up a big turkey.

  He and Cassie had never celebrated Thanksgiving together, chiefly because one or the other had always been working the holiday shift. Decker had spent more than one turkey day chowing down at a diner or a fast-food place. Cassie had spent her share in the hospital dining hall. Whoever had Molly in a given year would eat out. They had enjoyed it and had never felt like they were missing much.

  But looking around at these folks, Decker concluded that he had missed more than he had thought.

  * * *

  The next bus dropped him off at the Indiana border.

  There was a compact car waiting in the station parking lot, its engine running. The note had said to walk toward it and tap on the driver’s window. He knew this was also a test.

  He went to the car and rapped on the window.

  The woman inside rolled down the window and said, “Get in the back.”

  He did so. If the FBI had been tailing him, now would be the time to surround the vehicle. They didn’t. Because they weren’t tailing him.

  He got in the back. The car was small so his knees were wedged behind the seat.

  “You know my friends?” he asked.

  “I don’t have friends,” she replied. Her hair was stringy and gray, her body odor strong and unpleasant, especially in the hot car—she had the heater on max and her craggy voice and the hazy cigarette smoke that hung in the air foretold a painful death from lung cancer.

  “That’s too bad,” he said.

  “Not from where I’m sitting.”

  “How much did they pay you to do this?”

  “Enough.”

  “You meet them?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know what this is about?”

  “This is about six hundred bucks to yours truly. That’s all I need to know.”

  She put the stick in gear and they sped off. They drove for so long that Decker found himself dozing off. That was remarkable when he woke and thought about it, since he was traveling to his death.

  Or, more accurately, my murder.

  They crossed over Interstate 74, reached nearly to Seymour, and then got onto Interstate 65 heading north toward Indianapolis. But they exited well before then. They sped west, passing Nashville, Indiana. Decker saw a sign for Bloomington to the south, but they didn’t take it. He was thinking they might be driving all the way to
Terre Haute near the Illinois border when the woman pulled off onto the shoulder at an exit a few miles before Interstate 70, running east to west, could be picked up.

  She said, “Walk up this exit ramp. There’s a rest stop. There’ll be somebody there.”

  As Decker exited the car he thought again that all of this had been arranged well before he had contacted them through the website. They had clearly expected him to do this. Or at least hoped that he would.

  And he had. Which meant they had read him right.

  He hoped to have done the same for them.

  He trudged through the snow to the rest stop with his bag slung over his shoulder. The snowfall had slowed but his feet were soaked through. His belly was rumbling and his nose was running.

  The white panel van was backed into the first parking space. The headlights blinked twice as Decker approached. The driver’s window came down. It was another woman, with hollowed-out cheekbones. She looked like a druggie slipping in and out of withdrawal.

  “You want me to drive?” said Decker, running his gaze up and down her skinny frame. “I want to get there in one piece.”

  She shook her head and jerked her thumb toward the back of the van.

  “You sure you’re good to go?”

  In answer she put the van in drive and stared out the windshield.

  Decker clambered into the back and slid the side door closed.

  The woman drove off as Decker settled into the seat.

  The gun placed against his right temple didn’t unduly surprise him. After all, how many people could they engage to get him to this point? He had figured two max, and he’d been right.

  His bag was taken from him and thrown out the back door. He was searched and he could tell the searcher was surprised that Decker was not armed. His phone was taken from him and hurled out the back as well.

  The man tugged on his sleeve and tossed an orange jumper over the seat and into Decker’s lap. He held it up. “It looks a little small.”

  Neither of them spoke.

  “Do you go by Billy now, Belinda?” Decker said to the driver. “Or was that just for the 7-Eleven gig?”

  He watched as the wig came off. The eyes that flashed at him in the rearview were the same ones he’d seen at the convenience store. But they were very different from the eyes that he had remembered seeing at the institute, the pair that had belonged to the devastated teenage girl named Belinda Wyatt. She apparently was gone for good.

  He said, “The disguise was good, but I have your hands memorized. Hard to change them unless you wear gloves.”

  She just kept staring at him, and in those eyes Decker could see the cumulative hatred of twenty years that was about to be unleashed.

  On me.

  Decker held up the jumper. “A little privacy, please?”

  The eyes looked away.

  He started undressing, which was difficult in the confined space for someone so large. The person with the gun took his clothes and shoes and threw them out the back. Decker struggled into the jumper but could not zip it up in front because of his large gut.

  He slumped back in the seat and turned to the man holding the gun and squatting in the back of the van.

  “Hello, Sebastian.”

  He eyed the gun. It was an S&W .45 caliber. The .45. The weapon used to kill his wife and half the people at Mansfield. This gun had been the last thing his wife had seen before her life ended. Maybe it had been used to kill Giles Evers too, he didn’t know for sure. Maybe a quick bullet wasn’t in the cards for the cop turned rapist. But then again, he didn’t give a damn about Giles Evers.

  Leopold pressed the barrel tighter against Decker’s cheekbone.

  “I didn’t know your situation, Belinda,” said Decker. “When I stood up in the group session and said I wanted to go into law enforcement, that I wanted to be a cop. I didn’t know that a bad cop had lured you into a gang rape and almost killed you.”

  The eyes flashed once more at him, but the driver said nothing.

  Decker’s mind whirred back to that day at the institute. His twenty-years-younger self stood in the middle of the group and proclaimed that his ambition now was to go into law enforcement, to be a good cop. That he wanted to protect others, keep them from harm. He had looked around at all the people, folks like him, with new and sometimes scary minds and personalities. His words had been met with admiring smiles by some and indifference by others. But one pair of eyes had been staring at him with something more than all the others combined. He could see that clearly now. Apparently his perfect mind had flaws, because this memory, while always there, had not made an impression on him. He had glossed right over it until he hadn’t glossed right over it. It had struck him while he’d been rubbing his old badge through the plastic back at the Burlington police station.

  My genie. My wish come true. Death.

  Plastic badge, he had thought right before the epiphany had struck him. A plastic cop. Not a real cop. A cop who hurt you. Giles Evers.

  And from my words, you lumped me right in with him. And maybe I can understand that, because right at that moment you probably were the most vulnerable you would ever be.

  He recalled those eyes as the deepest, most shocked pair he had ever seen. But he hadn’t registered it, because he had been very nervous standing up in front of strangers to talk about his future.

  His mind stopped whirring and he returned to the present. He said to Wyatt, “That’s why you singled me out, right? ‘Bro’? Brotherhood of cops. Brotherhood of football players, because I was one of them too? Everyone at the institute knew about that. But not your bro, their bro. Giles Evers and his bunch? But I came here to tell you that I didn’t know what had happened to you. If I had I wouldn’t have said what I did. I’m sorry. I wanted to be a cop because I wanted to help people. Not hurt them like Evers did you.”

  They drove on. Neither one of them had spoken and Decker began to wonder why. He figured he would keep going until something he said drew a response. They might be working up the nerve to do what they needed to do to him. But then again, the pair had killed so many people that he doubted they needed much preparation to put a bullet in him.

  “I met Clyde Evers. He told me all about what happened at the high school in Utah. So now I know why you did what you did at Mansfield. But maybe you have something you want to add?” He looked at her expectantly.

  The eyes flashed once more. But they weren’t looking at him. They were looking at Leopold.

  In his peripheral Decker saw the gun muzzle bob up and down ever so slightly. When you nod your head your hand sometimes moved in the same direction. So Leopold was calling the shots. That was telling. And maybe helpful for what Decker had come here to do.

  Because these two weren’t the only ones on a mission. So was Amos Decker. He hadn’t come here to simply die, although that was a very real possibility.

  Wyatt said, “I think it speaks for itself, don’t you?”

  Her voice was deeper than when she was a woman, and deeper than when she had spoken to him in the role of Billy the mop boy. It was amazing how she was able to modulate it. But the tone was far less important than the words. She didn’t care. There was no remorse. There was nothing behind the eyes. She was thirty-six now. And he doubted she had had an easy, normal day in the last thirty of them. That couldn’t help but change you. How could you respect or appreciate or care about a world and the people in that world when they loathed the fact that you shared their planet?

  “Did you kill the people who raped you? I mean other than Giles Evers?”

  “Well, that would have been a little obvious,” said Wyatt. “So