Oh Look, Something Happens

After a while a nurse came in to shoot Amy up with another dose of hydromorphone, which Amy described as feeling like being squished with a rolling pin from head to toe -- in a good way, before falling asleep again.

I figured I should get out of there before her dad came back, and that I'd probably be in trouble for sneaking away from the hotel anyway.

I was right. When I parked my car and walked past the officer sitting in his car he gave me a funny look and brought his radio to his face, and when I walked into the lobby I almost ran into Special Agents Bremer and Rubino coming around the corner from the elevator bank. They both looked annoyed.

"Where the hell have you been?" Bremer barked, his jowls flapping with each syllable.
"I had to get some clothes," I said, realizing I'd left everything I'd bought back in the trunk of my car. Rubino and Bremer eyed me suspiciously.
"We thought you might have been nabbed," Rubino cut in before Bremer could continue yelling.

I took a quick look around the lobby. A man in a suit was standing at the front desk, flanked on all sided by expensive luggage, probably checking out. Two people were reading newspapers on the couches set up around the front door. Across the lobby I could see a few people scooping hot food from the breakfast buffet, reminding me how very hungry I was.

"Alright, look," I said, breaking away from the two-man FBI huddle and heading toward the food, "if there's ever a situation where the options are that I'm either in mortal danger or just doing something reckless and self-serving, it'll be the second one."
"Noted," Bremer said, falling in step behind me.

Forgoing any fears that everything probably had strychnine in it, I grabbed a plate and shoveled a bunch of fruit on it, then opened one of the two waffle irons and dumped a carton ofpre-measured batter onto it, closed it, and set the timer.

"We need you to come with us," Rubino said while I waited for my waffle to manifest.
I looked at him, then at Bremer, then back at Rubino. "What, like, I'm under arrest?" I said.
"No, we have some photographs we'd like you to look at on the computer. People suspected of murder-for-hire in the States who come from Western Europe. Maybe one will jog your memory so we can ID your newest fan."
"Couldn't you have printed them and brought them here?" I asked.
"There's two hundred and thirty seven," Rubino said, crossing his arms.
"Huh," I said just as the waffle iron beeped behind me.

Seated at a table now, I jabbed at sliced strawberries with a fork while Bremer and Rubino sat opposite me and sipped water from plastic cups.
"Where is your office, anyway?" I asked. "Is there a field office in Fredericksburg or something?"
"No, we're in the FBI headquarters in DC," Bremer said.
"DC? That's over an hour away," I said. There goes my whole day.
Both Agents nodded.
"But you're always ten minutes away whenever I call," I said, trying to recall our past meetings. When I'd called Rubino from the hospital he was there in under five minutes.
"We're usually in the field during the day," Rubino said. "Investigating."
"That's what the I stands for," I said to myself before finishing off the waffle.

"So that's as far as you are with leads?" I asked. "Pictures from the computer?"
"You could say that, I guess," Bremer said. "Other departments are doing most of the legwork, we're mostly just liaisons between them and you."
"Fancy," I said, thinking. "Come to think of it, I think that guy's accent might have been Irish, not Scottish. Scotch. Scottish?" I hadn't thought of that before. Whiskey from Scotland is Scotch, the tape is Scotch, so are people Scotch or Scottish. Maybe Scottish is the language. No, that's stupid, they speak English. Well, they try to...
"Ok," Rubino said, "that doesn't really change anything."
"Absolutely nothing," I said for the second time in an hour.
"Though if he's Irish he might be ex-IRA. He might have fled to another country, so he could be working out of anywhere. If he's IRA, you or the Brits should have a file on him." Yes, perfectly normal thing for a seventeen year old to say.
Rubino and Bremer were both squinting at me, like I were casting blinding light.
"Y-yes," Bremer said, "hence, the pictures."
"I know, I know," I said. "I'm just trying to work this out from my end. If he expatriated from Ireland to somewhere else, he could possibly be from whatever country my dad was trying to sell Schumer's program to."

Rubino and Bremer blinked, almost in unison, looked at each other, back at me, and said, entirely in unison, "What?"
I looked up at each of them and shrugged. "What?"
Rubino squinted again. "What did you just say?" he asked, incredulous.
"That this Irish guy might not be from Ireland, he might be from whatever country my dad was trying to leak national secrets to. He could have picked up some heat for some IRA nonsense when he was in his twenties and moved abroad. Like a free agent. This could have nothing to do with Schumer, this killer guy might be trying to clean up the evidence or whatever around my dad's death."
"No," Rubino said, then shook his head slightly. "What are you talking about? Your dad wasn't selling anything to anybody."

My jaw went slack. "Huh?" I said.

Rubino's face almost matched my own, he turned to Bremer, who said, "Is that what Schumer told you?"

I said nothing for a few seconds, then managed to echo my previous, "Huh?"

"Kid, your dad wasn't selling anything to anybody. He realized that the work he was doing with Schumer was massively, massively illegal and he contacted us to see if the FBI could shut it down."

I had no muscles. Nothing worked.

Rubino said, "He was in the process of filtering out enough information for us to move on when he 'mysteriously' died. He told us, at the beginning, if Schumer found out what he was doing, he'd probably kill him." Both their faces were flat, slightly concerned.

My face felt flushed, my heart was pounding, my mind was racing in a thousand directions. I wiggled my fingers, just to make sure I was still alive. I put my hand to my forehead, felt a bit dizzy.

My dad was trying to sell Schumer's program, government black ops secrets, to a foreign country. He was killed. That's the information I'd been working with this whole time. Where did I get it? Was it Schumer? Why the hell did I believe him? My dad was the bad guy. He was selling secrets. The FBI was investigating him for that. That was the truth, it was written on the back of my mind in permanent ink, but it didn't make any sense whenever I thought about it.

I tried to put everything in line, from the beginning. The FBI knew about my dad because they were investigating him selling secrets. No, the FBI knew about him because he himself approached them to report on Schumer's secret program. My dad was killed in a failed sting operation while he was meeting with the foreign buyer. No, my dad was killed because Schumer found out that he'd gone to the Feds. My stomach twisted, I felt like throwing up.

Schumer had my dad killed? Or he did it himself? No, he would hire the job out like everything else. It could have been Dingan, or this Irish guy. The guy who killed Comstock, who almost killed Amy, who wants to kill me, could have been the one who killed my father! Was he shot? Poisoned with more strychnine, writhing on the floor, breaking his own bones with muscular convulsions? Schumer had Comstock killed, and wants me dead. He must be trying to shut the whole program down, clean up all the scattered pieces.

God, this is all about Schumer. Why hadn't I just assumed that from the beginning?

"Are you alright, Chris?" Rubino asked.
I looked up at him, my face red and my teeth grinding. "Do you realize that if you'd have told me all this two weeks ago, absolutely EVERYTHING would be different?"
Rubino frowned slightly. Bremer spoke up, "He told us not to tell you if you didn't already know."
"Who?"
"Your dad," he said. "And he told us that if he died, to watch out for you until we bring this whole thing down."
I closed my eyes, hoping no new information could come in. "A personal favor," I said.
"Why do you think we've stopped the police from tearing you apart three times now, deleted an Interpol request for your apprehension, and even got you a gun just in case?"
"Got me a gun?" I asked after opening my eyes.
"The guy at the gun store in Lorton, he's one of ours. He called us from the range, told us how well you were shooting. We told him to make sure you got a gun."
"You had people following me?" I asked.
"When we could," Rubino said.
I shook my head.

"Your dad was taking a big risk," Bremer said. "He knew what Schumer was capable of, knew that if Schumer found out your dad was 'betraying' him, he'd probably kill him. He said he wouldn't give us anything unless we could guarantee your safety. I told him if he was so worried, to increase his life insurance policy until it was all done with. That's what he did, so that if he failed, you would at least have enough money to protect yourself, to get away or move on."
I leaned back in my chair, tipped my head back, and groaned out loud. My world was imploding into itself.
"Had no idea Schumer told you that about your dad," Bremer said.
"Though it does explain some of the angst," Rubino chimed in.
"Ok," I said, still looking up at the ceiling, "I feel like I've asked this before, but can I go shoot Schumer now?"
"Maybe later," Bremer said. "Your dad was killed before he could get us enough evidence to convince our superiors to bring the hammer down on a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps. If you're willing, we'd like you to help us by getting close to Schumer somehow. If we put a wire on you and you had one more meeting with him, he'd probably say enough to hang himself."
"Meeting? He wants me dead!"
"Right. So, first things first, lets go to DC and take a look at some pictures."

We all got up, I left my plate and silverware on the table, and we walked to the front door of the lobby. I felt like I was walking through a fog, or there was sand in my shoes. Once again it seemed like everything I knew about everything had been wrong, and my brain was having trouble processing it all again. Hopefully I'd be able to clear my head during the ride to Washington DC, and hopefully I'd learn to stop dancing around questions from now on and just get right into it. I couldn't figure out why my dad, after working in this program for almost twenty years would only now decide to report it. Did something new happen? Did I not turn out the way they wanted?

The three of us went out the front lobby doors and I stopped to find the black, officious-looking car that Bremer and Rubino drove. I spotted it in the first row of cars and fell in line behind Rubino toward it. Bremer stopped at the police car in front and leaned into the front driver's side window to talk to the cop inside. Something felt weird, like it was a prisoner transport. Something else, though. Something nagging on me, which was surprising because there were a million things that should have been nagging on me, but there was just one little thing poking at my conscious like a sliver in my eye, but I couldn't figure out what it was.

I stopped for a second to look around, letting my brain filter out everything except movement. Bremer was still talking to that cop, Rubino was taking slow, steady strides toward their sedan, on the street a few cars drove past the hotel parking lot, there was nothing else. I turned to keep walking when a while streak caught my attention, the side door of a white panel van sliding open. I stopped again to focus in on what I thought I'd seen when I heard it.

A loud, resonant sound I'd heard before. It came and went in less than a second, and before I could even process the sound my right leg gave out, buckling completely, and my left leg pressed my foot against the pavement below just quickly enough so I'd fall sideways and onto my back. When I hit the ground I recognized the sound and heard it again, and again, and again. Gunshots, close, and a lot of them.

Behind me, the wall of the hotel was peppered with a line of small impacts that sent brick and mortar dust outward like tiny little land mines. Then a series of hits rocked and shattered the glass of the row of cars I was laying behind. I turned my head to the right, Rubino was ducked behind the hood of a car, pulling the sidearm from his shoulder holster. To my left, Bremer was bent over and making his way to the front of the police car, trying to put it between him and the shooting. Another quick round of shots trailed from the rear bumper of the police car, fragmenting the tail lights, straight up the trunk, piercing compact little holes through the metal, up the rear windshield, cracking then shattering the glass into a rain shower of glass particles, then cut sharply to the left to cut down the police officer as he tried to jump from inside the cruiser. The cop landed face-first on the pavement, unmoving. Bremer stared at him, wide-eyed, from where he knelt behind the car's front end.

I just lay on the ground, feeling bits of gravel poking into my back, and remembering how much I'd needed a massage.

Bedside

Not really knowing what to say, I simply asked, "Are you alright?"

Amy shut her eyes for a moment and grinned just slightly. "More or less," she said. Her voice was a bit froggy.
"They were talking about a tracheot--tracheon-- cutting a hole in your throat so you could breathe, before."
She slowly lifted her hand to her throat and rubbed it with two fingers. "Ouch. No, they just stuck a tube down my throat for a while; that sucked. After a while they said I was breathing on my own so they took the tube out; that also sucked."
"Breathing on your own, so the strychnine is all out of your system?"
"Yeah, I guess so. I'm not twitching anymore." She raised both arms a few inches and dropped them onto the bed.

I sighed in relief. "So you're going to be fine," I said.
"That's what they tell me. I just have to stay here until my muscles come back."
"Come back?" I asked.
"They say I tore up most of my skeletal muscles from that little dance back at Costco. You know that kinda-good-mostly-bad pain you get in your muscles after a workout?" She spun her right hand around at the wrist. "Everywhere."

"At least it would be," she continued, "if they didn't come by and shoot some morphine-stuff into this thing every hour." She moved her right elbow and nodded toward the IV line running into her forearm. A clear rubber tube ran from it, wound slightly around the back of the bed, through a complicated-looking machine, then up into a plastic bag hanging from a silver pole. A smaller plastic IV bag was hanging next to the larger one, a tube from it connected it to the main line with a kind of Y-connector.
"The big one is just saline, to keep me hydrated, the small one is some kind of protein. For the muscles."

I took another look around the room. There was a flat-screen TV mounted on the opposite wall from the bed, above a dresser and below some bland artwork. Aside from the hospital bed and linoleum floor, you might think it was a hotel room.

"That pain you get after a workout," I said, "is partly from the muscle rebuilding itself after being torn up. When it rebuilds it overcompensates, making the muscles bigger. You might be pretty beefy after all this."
Amy chuckled. "Upside to everything, I guess."

After a few seconds, I asked, "How much do you know? About what happened, I mean."
She licked her dry lips and took a few breaths. "Strychnine. Isn't that what they said Mr. Comstock might have gotten?"
I nodded.
"And it was in that tea from your hotel room."
I nodded again.
"So that Irish guy tried to kill you, and killed me instead."
"Almost," I said.
"Right. Because you knew exactly what to do."
I nodded, a bit slower. My eyes fell down to the tube in Amy's arm.
Amy swallowed. "Was that you, or the -- other you?"
I looked back up, into her eyes. "The killing me?" I asked, then paused. "I'm not sure. It could have been something I heard before, or it could be part of whatever Schumer and my dad did to my brain. I don't know why a program just designed to skip boot camp would include first aid for specific poisons."
She shrugged. "I've never heard of cutting a Brita filter open and pouring it down someone's throat."

"Do you remember everything from when it happened?" I asked.
She rolled her eyes upward slightly. "I remember your zombie theory, and a headache, then my jaw not working, but after that it all kind of blurs together."
"Like you were passed out, or not aware of what was happening?"
"I think I was aware; I remember being aware, but not what I was aware of."
"So how did you know about the Brita filter?"
She grinned. "My dad told me. He says some FBI agent told him about it, and about what happened at Comstock's house but none of the other stuff. Was that one of your FBI people?"
I nodded. "Rubino came here."
"What for? Just to tell my dad?"
"No, I needed a ride because my car was still at Costco."
"A ride where?"
I dropped my eyes again, turned around and moved one of the chairs closer to the bed so I could sit down.

"To go kill Schumer," I said after I'd seated.
Amy was silent for a few seconds, then said, "Oh. Did you?"
I shook my head. "I wanted to, but I guess it might have been a bit overboard."
"Possibly," she said.
"It was good that Rubino was here, though," I said. "When the doctors heard it was strychnine and that I magically knew exactly what to do for it they called the police on me. Rubino smoothed that over, and told your dad just enough of the truth for him to hate me forever."
Amy rolled her eyes.

"Where is he, anyway?" I asked.
"My dad? He went back home to get some of my clothes and stuff after they moved me in here. They cut up the shirt I was wearing."
"I know," I said, "I was there."
"Oh," Amy said, blushing slightly. "Well it was stupid, it was a button-up shirt. They could have just unbuttoned it."
"They've got those shirt-cutting scissors and they like to use them," I said.
"I liked that shirt."

The hospital gown she was wearing had rather short sleeves that were being scrunched up because of the position she was in. On her left arm, just below her shoulder, I could see the long, thin scars I'd seen before. It looked like there were four of them. She saw me looking and perhaps too-quickly drew her right hand upward and pulled the sleeve down. She winced from the movement.

"What?" I asked, carefully.
"I didn't want you to see those," she said. Her eyes seemed to be watering, perhaps from the pain in moving too quickly.

I'd seen scars like those before, mostly in pictures on the internet but a few times on girls in school. Depressed teenagers who wanted the rush of cutting themselves but couldn't bring themselves to cut at their wrists would often use straight razor blades to cut very thin lines just below the shoulder. Same rush, less risk. People who cut at their wrists were usually just trying to get attention, it would seem. Doing it below the shoulder means you're doing it just to feel something. Using a razor blade also made a very fine, almost invisible scar; another sign that it isn't so much a cry for help as in other forms of self-mutilation. People who do this to themselves are called cutters, and doing so is practically a cliché among "emo" and "goth" subcultures.

My silence seemed to frighten her. "Not because I think you'd judge me," she said, looking away. "I just don't like what it says about me. I think it tarnishes me."
"I don't care about it, Amy."
She looked back at me, her eyes heavy with tears, then she leaned back and pressed her head against the pillow.
"Do you still do it?" I asked.
"No," she replied after a few breaths. "When I was, like, fourteen."

I tried to remember when Amy had said her parents split up. I thought it was younger, but it seemed to affect her later. From what I could tell, she was just coming out of a punk phase. I felt a bit of empathy for her, though my parental drama was much more recent and not as deep-seated as hers. Parents split up all the time, driving millions of teens into depression. The thought of it somehow made Amy seem more real.

"It doesn't tarnish you," I said. "Not unless you let it."
She was silent.
I went on, "Earlier I was trying to figure out what defines a person; is it the mind, the body, the sum of his actions, and so on. I think it's more than that. I think it's how we take our experiences and our actions and move forward from them. A bum isn't a bum because he lost his house and all his money, he's a bum because he doesn't do anything about it; he gives up and begs for spare change. Whatever you did before, it's not who you are. What you learned from it, and did to move on from it, that's who you are. That's something between the mind and body."

She was silent for a few seconds more, then rolled over slightly to look at me with her head still on the pillow. "You were trying to figure that out because you said your mind and body weren't yours. If your dad and some team of geneticists designed your body, and some psychologists and drill instructors designed your mind, like Schumer says, what does that make you?"
I thought about it. "I wish I knew," I said.

"Keep fighting until the answers come?" she asked.
"Or until there's nobody left to fight."

I thought about this guy who's coming after me. If I, the police, or the FBI can stop him -- what will that solve? If I knew who had hired him, would that lead me to the end of this mystery or just up another dark alley? Will a few more words answer all my questions, or just raise further ones? How many more people would have to be hurt before I felt safe, or before I had the truth? How much more of myself would I have to lose just to find out who I am? My dad, Schumer, Rubino, Bremer, Pratt, dead Austrian guy, Comstock,Dingan, Scottish guy, how do they all fit together? Don't ask questions, don't ask questions.

"Wait," I said. "You said Irish guy, before. I thought he was Scottish."
Amy blinked twice. "Umm," she started, "the accent sounded like Irish to me."
"Not Scottish?"
"No, Scottish is more Scrooge McDuck. That guy was more Colin Farrell."
"Huh."
"Does that answer anything?" she asked.
"No," I said, truthfully. "Absolutely nothing."

More Waiting

I had a few hours of that uncomfortable, worthless, semi-waking sleep that most people settle for on airplanes or friends' couches. Bremer and a few FBI technicians were still in the suite, but the police had all left. I was annoyed that I had to put on the same clothes I'd been wearing, but by now it was too late to go shopping. My stomach was practically digesting itself as well. There was a picked-over tray of croissant sandwiches set up on the kitchen table that I eyeballed warily.

"Don't worry," Bremer said, "we had some police officers down in the kitchen watching them make these."
I couldn't tell if he was joking or not, but I didn't see anybody writhing on the floor from strychnine poisoning so I threw caution to the wind and ate a dry turkey sandwich, then roast beef, then another turkey.

The FBI techs seemed to be on their way out. All the gear they'd been using was packed up into metal locking cases and the bags of tainted food were nowhere to be seen. When one of them carried a case out and through the door I saw there were still two police officers standing in the hall and I felt a little bit better.

I looked around for my mom and didn't see her, but the door to her room was closed so I assumed she'd gone to sleep. Bremer pulled out a chair at the small kitchen table and sat across from me.

"You're wondering what you're supposed to be doing now," he said.
"You're going to tell me that we're waiting for him to try again," I said.
"That's what you're doing. We're hoping to find him first. Local PD is on it, and our people are looking too. It would help if you could give us any more of a description of the guy."
"I told you, I never got a good look at his face. He seemed average height, average build, and some kind of accent. Scottish, I think."
"Right. Well, you just described almost everybody in Scotland."
"There was some of his blood at the house. Can't you analyze that and get his DNA signature or something?"
Bremer scratched his almost-leathery cheek. "No, it doesn't really work like that. We could try to match his DNA against something, but we don't have anything to match it against."
"Prints from the gun?"
"Just yours."
"Security cameras from the hotel?"
"He looks away from every camera."
"But you have a shot of him, you know what he looks like?"
"Like almost everybody in Scotland."

I tried to recall any of the cop shows or detective movies I'd seen, tried to cull together a list of all the ways to catch a killer. It seems like in the stories they always left behind some kind of clue, and got in some kind of battle-of-wits with the lead detective. For lack of that, I didn't know how any real crimes are ever solved.

"What about grocery stores?" I asked.
Bremer's mouth tightened a bit. "What about them?"
"Can't you go to all the local stores and pull up receipt logs to look for transactions matching all the stuff he bought? That'd give you a timestamp, then you could check their security footage from that time and see if you can get a shot of his face. Or maybe he paid with a credit card."
Bremer tapped his middle finger against the surface of the table for a moment. "Ever considered a career in investigation?" he asked.
"I'll be done with mysteries as soon as this crap is sorted out," I said.
"We already put PD on grocery store duty. Most of the smaller stores don't have indexable logs so they have to be sifted through by hand. It could take a while."

I frowned, more upset that my genius idea wasn't very original than the fact that we were no closer to stopping the guy who wanted to kill me.

"Are you going to put me in a safe house or something? Protective custody? This guy clearly knows where I am."
"We can, at least we're going to be moving you to a different hotel and we'll leave some police on the place for a while until we can sort out some kind of legitimate security detail. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that these situations usually aren't like the movies."
"In what way?"
"Well, this guy isn't sitting around in a darkened room, staring at a photograph of you and sharpening a bowie knife. Professionals aren't the relentless at-all-costs arbiters of mayhem you'd imagine them to be. Right now the guy's probably got more on his plate than you, he's got covers and papers to deal with. You're just a job, and if was actually contracted to take out a teenager he probably expected little resistance. If anything, he's probably contacting his client and asking for more money."

I didn't say anything, just stared at the remaining sandwiches.

"All I mean," he continued, "is that this is a low-profile job. He's not going to blow up any buildings just hoping you'll be in it, and he's not going to take a thousand-yard shot at you from a clock tower. He might not even know how to work a gun. Maybe all he knows how to do is squirt strychnine into bottles of tea."
"If I happened to see this guy, and I happened to shoot him, where would I stand with the law there?" I asked.
"What, you going to go looking for him?"
"No, I need to buy some clothes and go back to the hospital. If he should jump around a corner and try to splash strychnine on me or something, I can shoot him, right?"
Bremer sighed and dropped his head into his palm.

The next morning, after some more worthless sleep, I put on the same damn outfit and grabbed my dead cell phone, wallet, knife, and the USP and headed out. Out in the hall were two police officers sitting in two chairs from the kitchen table from my suite. I hid the gun from view and told them, if they even cared, that I was going downstairs for some food. One of them nodded, the other said that there was another officer down in the parking lot.

The officer outside was easy enough to avoid.

I got in my car, pulled the gun from my pants, and slid it between the center console and the passenger seat. If I needed it, I could grab it and fire out the passenger window in one motion. For a moment I thought that was a weird thing for a person to think, but just added it to the pile of similar things I'd thought lately.

Across the street from the hotel was a shopping center with a few stores I could use. I'd thought about going to Old Navy, where I usually got my $18 jeans and $8 t-shirts, but opted instead for an outlet store of a more upscale department store. For some reason I felt like having some nicer clothes, maybe it was just because I could afford it. I left the gun in the car and did my shopping, consistently looking over my shoulder and trying to avoid blind corners. I bought some expensive pants and shirts that didn't have the brand's logo plastered all over the front for once. A few stores down was a Radio Shack, where I got a car and a wall charger for my phone. I looked at the fancy new phones and considered an upgrade, but really didn't feel like dealing with contracts and the fact that I wasn't 18 yet.

I changed into some of the new clothes in my car, somehow, plugged my phone in for the first time in nearly a week, and headed off toward the hospital.

At the front desk I asked where the ICU was and the lady said that only family members could visit people in the ICU. I told her I wanted to visit my sister, Amy Westborne. The lady typed into a computer for a bit, then announced that she'd been moved to a regular room that morning and gave me the number and directions.

I supposed that was a good thing.

After some tedious navigation of the poorly-laid-out hospital I found the right floor, wing, then room. I paused outside the door for a while, listening to hear if Amy's dad was in there and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. Everything inside of me said I should feel horrible, feel scared, feel guilty that I'd almost gotten Amy killed. Somehow, though, I felt nothing. I knew how I should feel, but I couldn't get myself to feel it. It was like the first time I'd seen Citizen Kane and everything said I should be blown away, but all I felt was that I'd just seen an overly-complicated movie about an old rich guy who wishes he were young and poor again.

It didn't feel like denial. I'd been in denial when I heard my dad had died. It wasn't shock, either. It was just a kind of mechanical lack of emotion. Like whatever I was turning into wasn't the kind of creature who cared whether friends lived or died. Maybe I was compartmentalizing, I thought. Putting away the things I should be feeling now so I can feel them later when I'm in less danger. Maybe I'm just a robot.

After a few minutes I took in a deep breath and stepped in.

There she was. In the middle of the small, tan-colored room was a fancy-looking hospital bed. In it, under a sheet and attached to more tubes than I could account for, was Amy. She was asleep, her skin looked pale and her hair drawn back awkwardly. She was asleep; I hadn't anticipated that.

I thought about what to do for a bit, then decided to it down in one of the visitor's chairs against the window. I sat for a few minutes, used the bathroom attached to the room, then sat some more.

I almost felt myself drift off to sleep when I heard a weak, distant voice.

"You're here," she said, roughly.
I stood up and crossed the room. She was awake, grinning almost stupidly. "I'm everywhere," I said.

No Rest, For the Wicked

It was like another life. Graduation day, the world coming together at last. Friends cheer when they call my name, Amy's waiting for me at my car after the meet and greets. We talk about what we'll do that night; everybody's throwing a party, or we could drive around. I tell her my dad is going to take me shopping for a new car the next day. I feel like my life is everything it ever could be. Amy and I drive around, we talk about anything that pops into mind. I smile at a joke she makes, pull a gun from my waist, and shoot her.

I woke up with a sore neck and hunger pangs beating at the sides of my stomach.

I'd stayed still and the hospital had moved around me. A whole new crowd of people were seated in the waiting room, I didn't see Rubino or Amy's dad anywhere. The trauma room where Amy had been was empty. I pulled my phone from my pocket to check the time but remembered it was dead. I tried looking around for a clock but found nothing. Everything seemed distant, out of reach. I wondered if I was still dreaming, but decided that if I were dreaming I wouldn't be able to wonder that. It must have been the tiredness and hunger.

Could I ask what happened to Amy? Is that one of the things they can't tell people? I stood in the middle of a hallway and closed my eyes, waiting for my thoughts to pull themselves together when I heard my name.

I opened my eyes and looked up to see Rubino, his little FBI badge hanging over the side of his belt. He looked tired and annoyed.

"What happened?" I asked when he was close enough.
"You fell asleep. It was cute."
"I mean with Amy," I said, pinching the bridge of my nose.
"Right. They moved her up to ICU for observation."
ICU. Intensive Care Unit. The 'I' stands for Information. I smiled for a second.
"So she's alright?" I asked.
"More or less. They said they have to leave the breathing tube in and that she's hypotensive, whatever that means."
"Was she still spasming?"
"I think she would be, they have her paralyzed from something."
"Ok, where is she?"

Rubino paused. "Uhh, I don't think you should go up there," he said.
"What? Why?"
"Because her dad said, 'Don't let that kid up here'."
"He's mad at me?"
"Yes."
"Why? What did you tell him?"
"That she got some food from your hotel room and that it had poison in it. I think all he heard was 'hotel room' and 'poison'."
"So you didn't mention the walking rampage of destruction I am or the pile of dead bodies I leave in my wake?"
"I did not."
"And he still doesn't like me?"
"Correct."
"Well I should still be able to see her," I protested.
"Not unless you want to get mauled. Besides, there's not much to see anyway, she's out cold and is riddled with tubes."
"So what am I supposed to do, wait?"
"Go back to your hotel, get some sleep and some unadulterated food."
"No, I want to go see Schumer and get some answers."
"No."
"What do you mean, no? What, 'we need him alive'?"
"No, we just have nothing connecting Schumer to any of this. Plus, if he does want you dead, which unlikely, but if that's the case -- you shouldn't just march onto his territory with no sleep and an empty stomach."
"So, get some food and sleep and then go kill him?"
"Nobody's killing anybody--"
"Everybody's killing everybody!" I said.
"Not anymore."
"Are you sure? Because I can't think of anybody I've met in the past month that hasn't been killed or tried to kill me. Except you, of course. I'm just here wondering whether you're going to be one of the ones getting killed or one of the ones trying to kill me."
Rubino smiled. "Killing you isn't really my job."
"And what is your job?" I asked. "I mean, I can't figure out what you or the FBI is even doing in all this. Shouldn't you guys be bugging mobsters houses or something?"
He held his grin. "I'm just doing a personal favor. Now lets go to wherever you left your car."

In an hour I was in my car and then back at the hotel.

At the front desk there was a uniformed police officer talking with some hotel staffer. Up in the hall of my floor there were two cops standing around, eyeballing me as soon as I got off the elevator. The door to the suite I was staying in was open and there was quite a commotion inside. When I approached the door, one of the two cops put a hand out to stop me. Just for fun I tried to imagine how many seconds it would take me to have both of these guys on the floor, but I decided to be polite and announce that I live in there.

Special Agent Bremer, Rubino's older partner, was just inside the door talking to somebody in the kitchen and he heard my voice, turned, and told the officers I was alright.

Inside the suite there were about four more cops and five FBI personnel. It was like a law enforcement cocktail party, but instead of lemon rickeys and gimlets people were mixing blue and clear chemicals in small glass bottles. My mother was sitting in one of the couches facing the TV talking to somebody with a notepad. When she saw me she got up and ran over to hug me and embarrass the life out of me.

"How's your friend?" she asked.
"Well enough, I think. She's in the ICU."
"You didn't have any of the food?"
"No, as can be seen by the fact that I'm alive."

The refrigerator door was open and everything from inside was either on the counter, the table, or being placed into large clear bags. Bremer saw me looking and came over.

"There's strychnine in pretty much everything," he said. "Heaviest concentrations are in the tea bottles, though. None in the water."
"The bottles were sealed, how'd he get the stuff inside?"
Bremer grabbed one of the bottles of green tea from the table and held it up to me, pointing at the plastic just under the rim and cap. There was a small raised bump in the plastic, like the bottle had a pimple. "Pierced the plastic with a needle and injected liquid strychnine, then sealed the hole over with some super-glue or by melting the plastic with a soldering iron."
"Diligent," I said.
"I'll say. We've been going over everything with the hotel management and staff. Nobody saw anybody come in with a carton of groceries and the guys who do that stuff say that there wasn't any food order form on your door last night."

I closed my eyes and tried to remember. When Amy and I left Comstock's house around eight, I came back here and sat around for a while, wrote out a grocery list for the hotel people and hung it on the doorknob like always, then tried to sleep. Whoever this guy is, he must have followed me from Comstock's, found out what room I'm in, saw the grocery list, and saw his opening. He bought all the food on the list himself, and laced all of it with strychnine. The thought of a killer with a knife wound in his leg at the grocery store, looking for green tea and cereal bars from a list seemed a bit absurd. That guy must have a whole vat of strychnine somewhere.

I told Bremer all of that, and he agreed. "Sounds about right, though for him to have followed you he would have had to have a car nearby your principal's house. It's possible that he didn't follow you and just knew where you were."
"If this was about revenge for last night, he wouldn't know who I was or where I was. If it was about revenge, he would have just kicked the door in and popped me in bed."
"Could be. Or he could just have a thing for strychnine. Some one's back at the office looking up all the strychnine poisonings in recent history."
"If this isn't revenge, though, then it means that whoever put a hit on Comstock also put a hit on me. That there's a guy out there with a paycheck riding on me being dead, and a guy willing to pay money to see me dead."
"Yeah. I really don't know why you'd be so popular," Bremer said, scratching his forehead with the top of his pen.

I tried to think, again, of all the people who would actually want me dead. It didn't make any sense for Schumer to put a price on my head; it made a little bit of sense for him to want to kill Comstock, him being a gigantic idiot and all, but is hiring a hitman really apt punishment for making the mistake of hiring a hitman? If not Schumer, who would want me dead? The Interpol guy, Pratt? He thought I was a hitman. Maybe it was the people my dad was supposed to be selling Schumer's program to. Maybe they thought that if they couldn't have it -- nobody should; so they kill anybody involved. Comstock, me, Schumer? My dad?

Considering Bremer and Rubino's odd interest in finding out exactly how the program works, I had been starting to wonder if it was them that my dad was in the middle of selling the secrets to. Maybe they'd turned on him, killed him, and now wanted to wipe the whole program off the books. Could Bremer, Rubino, or both of them be the ones behind all this. What does "a personal favor" mean? I was giving myself a headache.

If the FBI boys really did want me dead, they could have just pulled me around a corner and shot me in the face. They'd only be having a hitman do all this if they really, really wanted to insulate themselves.

At the beginning, I thought this was all about my money. Those seemed like simpler times now.

For all of that, in the back of my mind still was the thought of Amy. They had to paralyze her to stop her muscles from tearing themselves apart, but what if she woke up and was still paralyzed. Unable to move, with a tube down her throat, in pain. A mind trapped in a useless body. I told myself that couldn't happen.

The hotel suite was still stuffed with FBI and police and all I wanted to do was sleep. I also needed to eat, but I doubted I'd feel safe eating any food for a while.

How could eat when anything could have been poisoned? How could I sleep when I knew there was a guy out there who wanted to kill me?

Waiting

Hospitals. Most people begin and end their lives in the same building. Were it not so creepy, it would be slightly poetic.

With absolutely no sleep in me, everything going on around me kind of buzzed on the edge of my attention. I felt like a tree stuck in time while the world evolved and moved around me, sitting in a hard plastic chair while Special Agent Rubino talked into his cell phone, Amy was still in the ER, her dad on the way, and nothing making any sense. I watched Rubino across the waiting room, pacing back and forth in his cheap black suit. Even though I was pretty sure he was probably somehow involved in my father's death, I felt like he was one of the few people I could count on. All the acquaintances I had in school had fallen off the map after I'd become dead-dad kid. In the past few weeks the only people I'd been able to talk to were Amy and my two FBI stalkers.

The longer I sat still, the more the gravity of the situation sank in. I'd become rather comfortable with the idea that there are actuallyhitmen in the world, a fact I'd have argued as fiction a month or so ago, and it didn't seem to faze me that I'd killed one of them and another was trying to kill me. Strychnine in the tea, what is that? If he wanted to kill me, why didn't he just stand outside the hotel room door and shoot me in the face as soon as I came out? It was all illogical.

I wanted to be doing something. I wanted a weapon in my hand and bodies at my feet. I wanted to be prying the truth from dying lips. I wasn't, though; I was sitting in a hospital waiting room while Amy struggled for oxygen.

"They picked up all the food from your hotel room and are testing it now," Rubino said as he walked over and sat in a chair across from me. "If that's what was poisoned, there may be some latent prints on the packaging."
"Is that likely?" I asked, wondering what the handful of people seated around me were making of this conversation.
"No," Rubino said plainly.
"And my mom, she's alright?"
"Yeah, Bremer's there with some local police and some lab guys now. She says she went downstairs for breakfast."
I was glad to hear that, though I hated that she had to go through even more of this nonsense. I hadn't even really talked to her since I'd found out any of this, just a few fragmented conversations to pass the time. I didn't know what she thought of me, anymore. I don't know what I'd think of me.

"Any progress in finding out who's behind this?" I asked.
Rubino met the glances of the other people waiting, warning them away with his eyes. He finally turned to me and said, "Some. That, uh, profession isn't exactly my or Bremer's department so we've had to bring in some guys from DC. They're starting with Dingan and working backwards, trying to see if knowing his name and having his fingerprints solves anything. They're also trying to find out where he keeps his money."
"So nothing really useful right now," I said.
"Right. It seems that we both know Schumer's the man at the top of all this, though."

Right, Schumer. The guy my dad worked for. The guy with the idea to use infertile hopeful-parents to grow a crop of unwilling lab rats.

"Do you think this guy is coming after me for personal reasons or as part of his contract?" I asked, a bit quieter.
Rubino shook his head. "This is all uncharted waters for me, Chris."
"He could come right through that door," I said, "pop me between the eyes. Do you think I should have protection?"
"Do you think you need it?"
"What does that mean?"
He shrugged. "If this guy's a pro, he wouldn't do something like that unless he was desperate. The name of their game is untraceability. Anybody can walk into a room and pull a trigger. People hire these guys for more personalized service."
"Personalized like, 'I want them to suffer'?"
"Could be."

Lovely. Whoever wanted Comstock dead, be it Schumer or whoever, clearly wasn't a fan of his. He could have gotten a shot in the head with that .22 and not known what hit him, instead of a lethal poison that kills you by either making you break your own back, crush your own lungs, or die of exhaustion from the uncontrollable muscle spasms. That could have been Amy. Pangs of guilt shot through me once more. What she must be going through, I hated it. It should have been me. Maybe the death would stop with me. If I hadn't known about activated charcoal and diazepam, Amy would probably be dead. How could I live like that? And how did I know about activated charcoal and diazepam anyway?

It seemed like something I'd already known, second nature, just like how I'd been doing most of my harrowing activities lately. I didn't have to think about it, it just came to me. But why would that be up in my head? Why would most of the stuff I've magically known be up there? If the whole purpose of Schumer's program was for people to bypass boot camp or basic training with hypnotic training, all I should know how to do is shine my own boots and climb a rope. Where in standard Marine training does one learn how to bypass a security-bar lock on a door, or interrogate someone with a tape recorder, or con his way into a hotel room, or field-treat a strychnine poisoning? Schumer must have lied about something, but what?

"You know a bit about Schumer's program, right?" I asked Rubino, who'd taken to reading messages on his phone's screen.
"Some," he said. "We were hoping that sometime you could fill us in on the rest."
Right, because you killed my dad before he could sell you everything.
"Why would I know how to treat strychnine poisoning?" I asked.
"What?"
"When Amy went down and I realized it was probably strychnine, I knew exactly what to do. Activated charcoal and diazepam. Why would I need to know that?"
"I don't know what you..."
"The only reason I can think that I'd need to know how to treat a specific kind of poisoning is that I'd also know how to administer the poison. You don't teach someone how to arm a bomb without teaching him how to disarm it..."
"Ok, well..."
"So part of my program must include strychnine use. But why would I need to know anything like that?"
Rubino looked confused. "I thought you knew about all that."

I tried to figure out what that meant, but I heard the doors behind me slide open and a man's feet pounding against the floor. I turned and saw Amy's dad stop at the entrance for a moment and look around, then he spotted the desk and headed toward it.

"Man..." I said.
"What?" Rubino asked.
"What are we going to tell him?" I asked.
"Is that the girl's dad?"
"Yeah. How do I explain that she was poisoned by a guy who's upset that she stabbed him in the leg last night?"
"I'm not sure. Did you call him?"
"No, a nurse found her cell phone and dialed the 'home' number programmed in."
"Someone will tell him that you were with her. Does he know you?"
"Just as a guy who hangs around his daughter. He was in the Corps, we think he might have been Special Forces. He could kill me."
Rubino smirked, then ran his hand through his hair. "We'll see," he said before standing up and walking over to Mr. Westborne, still frantically trying to get information out of the nurse behind the front desk.

Alone again, I thought before I dozed off in that hard, plastic chair.

E.R.

Sirens slammed against my head in steady intervals as I bounced around the back of an ambulance. It was too bumpy to put in an IV, so they'd strapped Amy in tightly and shot something into her leg and pumped oxygen into her mouth with a clear, plastic... oxygen squeezy thing. I was trying not to notice that her shirt had been cut open.

Someone had tried to poison me. Amy had taken it instead. Her body was out of her control. Her mind locked in a convulsing prison.

I watched a heart monitor displayed on a screen mounted to the side of the vehicle, lines danced their merry dance. It was then that I realized this was my life now. As much as I tried to run from it, nothing was ever going to calm down. Something in the core of me seemed to summon havoc, manifest it all around me. I let go of any hope for a normal life then, and just hoped that my curse wouldn't spill onto any more of the people close to me. I did not want Amy to die, I couldn't let her take my bullet.

The ambulance screeched to a halt and the doors burst open, the chaos amplifying. White jackets and green scrubs yelled back and forth between blue coats. Everything was moving, everybody was making noise; I couldn't track any of it.

"This the poisoning?"

Out of the ambulance.

"Amy Westborne, 16. Suspected oral strychnine poisoning, muscular spasm, diffuse esophageal spasm."

Automatic doors.

"Pulse ox 88 and slipping."

Past a desk.

"Twenty-five of diazepam and unknown dosage activated carbon administered orally at scene. Ten-cc phenobarbital administered en route."

Around a corner.

"Trauma three is clear. Any idea how much strychnine was ingested?"

More people show up.

"Get me a line of saline with two milliliters of diazepam and seventy dantrolene."

Through double doors.

"We need to intubate."

Past a waiting room, people's heads drawn to the motion.

"No, not with DES. Keep bagging."

More doors. Curtains and beds everywhere.

"Who's he, a relative?"

Last set of doors. Even more people.

"Boyfriend, I think."

"Sir, do you know how she was poisoned?"
I figured the voice was talking to me so I answered without tracing the source, "She drank from a bottle of tea, said it was bitter. After ten minutes she complained of a headache, after another ten she went lockjaw and dropped."
"You recognized it as strychnine poisoning and gave her activated carbon and valium yourself?"

The rolling stretcher stopped beside a bed on wheels. Four of the people floating around her slid Amy from the stretcher to the bed.

I turned to look at who was talking to me, it was a doctor, female, forties. "Yeah," I said. "I mean, no. There was a guy there, a med student."
The woman nodded, then turned to a nurse and said what I thought was, "Get Petey down here." The nurse nodded and went out a set of doors behind her.

Another nurse was running an IV line into Amy's left arm, another standing over her head and squeezing the plastic bag pumping air into her mouth and nose. A few doctors shouted terse directions back and forth.
"Is she going to be alright?" I asked the doctor who'd been talking to me.
"Don't know yet," she said, "we're pushing anticonvulsants to keep the muscles from spasming, but her lungs aren't working properly so she's not getting as much oxygen as she should be. We can't run an orotracheal tube right now because her throat keeps opening and closing. If that doesn't stop we may have to perform a tracheotomy, cut a hole into her trachea so we can run air into the lungs."

The doctor stepped away from me and over to Amy, a flurry of hands moving all around her. Amy just lay there, motionless, like a CPR dummy. Something in my mind was telling me to get out of there, like something was wrong. I should call Amy's dad, I knew, and I should call my mom and make sure she doesn't touch any of the new food. It was something else, though. Who's Petey? Get Petey down here, it kept repeating in my head. Do I know a Petey? Or could she have said "PD," the police?

A girl was poisoned with some obscure chemical, and I just happened to be able to identify it and know how to treat it. That might look bad. Cops would want to talk to me. They'd want to know where the strychnine had come from, how it got into a bottle of tea that was technically mine. The fact that I was on the shitlist of a Scottish-accented killer who'd used the same poison to kill my principal the night before probably wouldn't go over too well. They might also wonder why I wasn't at school, if that made any difference.

I started to back out through the door we'd come in when I realized that I was clutching Amy's purse in my hand. I set it down on a small cart of supplies by the door, and slipped out the door into the hall. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, the screen was black. I tried to turn it on, but nothing happened. Shoot, I was supposed to get a new charger for the phone since the original one was in my house. The one that burned down. I headed toward the main waiting room for the ER and found the payphone. I slid my debit card through the phone's slot and dialed Rubino's cell number from the business card I was given last Sunday.

Four rings. "Rubino."
"It's Baker. You need to come pick me up at Mary Washington Hospital."
"I, uhh, why?"
"So you can take me to Quantico and so I can put three bullets in Schumer."
"Ok," he said, "any particular reason?"
"So he can tell me who the guy is that he hired to take out Comstock," I said.
"What, did he come after you?" Rubino asked with little concern.
"Someone put strychnine in food delivered to my room. Amy got some of it,---"
"Your little girl pal?"
"She's in the ER right now, they're talking about cutting a hole in her throat so she can breathe. Are you going to pick me up or not? I need to get out of here before the police find me and start asking why there was poison in my tea."
"I can deal with the police, for the hundredth time," he said. "I can also send Bremer over to your hotel with some uniforms to check on your mom and watch the place."
"Ok, good," I said. "He'll probably try to come after me again when he finds out I'm still walking."
"Alright," Rubino said, "I'll be there in a few minutes."
He hung up, I hung up.

I paced around the waiting room while I waited.

Strychnine. Damn it all, someone tried to poison me. Some crazy hitman. What is this? This isn't normal. A guy my dad worked for hired a hitman to take out my pretend school principal because he screwed up in hiring a hitman, and now the hitman is upset that Amy stabbed him, or upset because I'm the one who actually killed the first hitman? This, all because I'm the product of some insane program to build pre-programmed soldiers from scratch? I felt like my head was about to explode. I'd been awake for over 24 hours now and my brain felt like mush. Amy was laying on a slab in the ER unable to breathe for herself, my dad was dead, my ankle still kind of hurt from when I'd kicked out the back window of a stupid little European car in Austria, I hadn't eaten anything all day, and my house had recently exploded.

I wanted to go find Schumer, dragging the wrath of a holy hellstorm behind me. I wanted to make this all go away, make him tell me what's going on, make him call off the hitmen and put my life back together. I knew that wouldn't happen, but I'd be satisfied with a bit of revenge.

Rubino finally came in through the main ER entrance, spotted me, and walked toward me.
"Congratulations," he said, "it looks like you did manage to piss of a hitman."
"Looks like," I said with my arms crossed, trying to contain my roaring stomach and ignore the screaming madness in my head.
"I suppose it will be no surprise to you that the lab report came back on Nathan Comstock, and the cause of death was, in fact..."
"Strychnine," I said.
"You bet," Rubino said. He looked around for a moment, then asked, "how's the girl?"
"I don't know," I said, truthfully, "I'm afraid to go in there. Plus, the police will have questions I can't answer."
"Alright kiddo," he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. "Let's go face the music."

My dad used to call me "kiddo".

Activated

Through all of this, the one thing I'd never felt was helpless. I conned my way into bank records, broke a guy's arm without caring, slipped into a double-locked hotel door, and escaped a slow-moving car drifting through oncoming traffic; and through all of it, the only fear I felt was that it wouldn't be enough. I'd never feared that there was just nothing I could do. Never felt my heart beat echo in my own ears and my breathing stutter because something was just out of my hands.

My hands were gripped around the back of Amy's neck and her arm as she lay on the cold, cement floor of a Costco Warehouse. Her muscles twitched rhythmically as her eyes darted in all directions. A few feet away a man was half-screaming into his cell phone about a girl having a seizure, or something, in the middle of the store. The guy tried to repeat instructions and questions from the 911 operator, but he made a poor proxy and I couldn't concentrate on anything except the girl in my arms. The only language I could process was the, "No, no, no" playing on repeat throughout my skull and escaping as whispers from my lips.

What was going on? I had no idea. My mind raced in circles but couldn't stop on anything. Sixteen year olds don't have seizures. People don't die when you care enough about them.

A slight panic was spreading outward from my position like ripples on the surface of a sea of self-concerned shoppers. What's all the commotion? Is someone hurt? My god, she's just a kid. Is she on drugs? Is there a doctor? Does the coupon for applesauce apply if I buy the three-pack or is it just for single jars?

After the first concerto of dread finished in my mind and the encore was about to begin, a guy who didn't seem much older than myself filtered through the forming crowd and knelt on the floor across from me. He said some words I didn't hear, pulled up his sleeves, and put one hand on Amy's chest. What kind of pervert, I thought. I tried to focus my consciousness onto something nearby I could bludgeon him to death with. He repeated the same words, but they were again lost to the thick soup my brain had turned into. I had a knife. I could flick it open and swing it up into the base of his jaw. The blade wouldn't reach his brain, but it would get him the hell away.

"I said, is she a diabetic?" he said again, much louder this time.

The volume seemed to trump my hysteria. My thoughts pulled together slightly.

"Are you a doctor?" I asked in one quick breath.
"I'm a medical student," he said, dismissively. "Do you know this girl? Is she a diabetic?"
I tried to process the words. "Diabetic. I don't think so. Medical student?"
"I'm a third-year. I started my internship at the hospital a month ago," he said, leaning in and putting his ear near Amy's mouth. "This looks like hypoglycemia. Insulin shock. You don't know if she's diabetic? Has she eaten or drank anything yet today?"
Diabetic. Diabetic. The word hung for a moment before I remembered what it even meant. "I haven't seen her take insulin or anything before," I said.

I let go of her arm with one hand and grabbed a hand, looked at the tips of her fingers. I didn't see any puncture marks. I pulled the sleeves of her shirts up to look at her arms, saw no needle marks or scabs. There were a few long, very narrow scab-looking scars on her bicep in a neat row. Was she a cutter? Did she ever mention that?

"I said did she eat anything to drink? If she's hypoglycemic she has to get a certain amount of sugar. These spasms are severe."

I tried to remember. The only thing I remembered her having was that bottle of tea back at the hotel, but she didn't have much because she said it was bitter. Bitter. Something about that tickled on the back of my brain. Bitter. The groceries. What was it? My mind was trying to tell me something. Why is my mind trying to tell me something? That doesn't make sense. I am my mind. What does it know that I don't? Well, besides all those handy ways to kill people...

"Wait," I said, then let my mouth hang open. Amy had stopped spasming for a moment. They seemed to come and go.
"What?" the guy said.

Something was seeping into my mind, my real mind, but it was coming slow. Ways to kill people. How did they say Comstock died? Spasm something. Where did that tea come from? Somebody usually had to sign for the groceries when they were delivered. This morning they were just sitting there after I'd left the shopping-list on the doorknob the night before. Bitter tea. Plastic bottle. Comstock. What was all of it? The lady said Comstock may have been dosed with VX nerve gas or something else. Can you put nerve gas in tea? Is it bitter? Shouldn't nerve gas be a gas? What was the other thing? Damn it. It started with S.

"Strychnine," I said at last, in a low, somber voice.
"Strychnine?" the med student said, incredulously. "What about it?"
"She might have been poisoned. Do you know what strychnine is?"
"Yeah," he said, "it's poison. How could she have--"

Amy started spasming again. The muscles in her chest and back seemed to heave against each other. The medical examiner said most people die by breaking their own back.

"Oh god," the guy said, looking down at her.
"What?" I asked.
"This is going to be bad."
I swallowed.

He looked up, tried to pick out the guy in the crowd who had called 911. He was still on the phone, seemingly narrating the events.
"Is that still 911?" the med student asked the narrator.
The man said yes.
"Tell them to inform the ambulance dispatch that it's strychnine poisoning. They'll probably want to prep the ER for her arrival."
The man nodded slowly.

I looked back at Amy. Besides the twitching, she looked almost peaceful. Not yet, I thought.

"So it's poison," I said, "can't we just induce vomiting?"
The med student placed a hand on her throat. "No," he said, "I don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
"No, I mean. If the throat muscles are in spasm, reverse peristalsis is impossible. She would choke on the vomit." He sounded like he was reciting study notes from memory.
"What can we do, then?"
"Wait," he said. "And try to stop her from snapping her spine. Strychnine activates all the skeletal muscle tissue at the same time, her muscles are flexing against each other at once. If they ever get into a contrary rhythm, they could tear themselves apart or break her bones."

"There are couches over there," I said, "we could move her off the floor."
He thought about it, then said, "No, motion can make the spasms get worse." He turned around and asked the crowd, in general, to go fetch a pillow. A few people scampered away.

Wait? Wait. Amy was lying there on the floor, her body turning against her and we just wait?

The med student repositioned himself and pressed one hand against Amy's chest and the other against her stomach, like he was pushing her into the ground. he told me to hold her legs, but the words bounced right of me. I had an idea, but I didn't understand it. For a moment I wondered if I had slipped into the other me, but I didn't care.

"I'll be right back," I said as I stood up and ran through the circle of onlookers and down the aisles of the store.

I ran full speed, bobbing my head in all directions like a robin to look down the aisles as I passed them. Office supplies. Desk chairs. Clocks. Kitchen knives. Water filters. There. I stopped in my tracks and doubled back, cutting through the aisle and stopping in front of the home water filtering pitchers. I grabbed a box of replacement filters, and then started running again. Winter jackets. Toothbrushes. Shovels. Car batteries. Books. DVDs. Wine. Cakes. Raw meat. Fresh shrimp. Produce. Bottled water. I stopped again, pulled my knife out and cut away the plastic wrapping from a large case of bottled water. I grabbed two bottles, replaced my knife, and headed back to the pharmacy area. I slipped through the crowd and slid on my knees back to Amy's side. The two bottles I set on the floor, the box of replacement filters I tore open and produced a single plastic, tube-ish water filter.

The medical student, and everybody whose face I could see, looked at me like I was crazy. If I had the time, I would have smiled.

I pulled my knife back out, set the water filter on the floor, and stabbed into the side of it with the knife. Once through the thin plastic exterior the knife stopped against something dry and sandy. I used a sawing motion and twisted the filter with my other hand to cut the whole top off of the filter and tossed it aside, leaving a kind of makeshift plastic cup in my hand. Inside the cup, and overflowing onto the floor, was a black, slightly crystalline powder with a few plastic-looking, tiny rubbery balls mixed in. I had no idea what the balls were, but the black powder was pure carbon. Activated charcoal.

The med student was holding Amy's torso against the floor still, someone else was holding her legs down by the ankles. When the med student realized what I'd done, he let out a slight laugh.

I poured some of the charcoal onto the floor to make some room in the filter-cup and topped it off with water from one of the bottles. I covered the top and shook the filter to get the carbon particles all wet, then poured the sandy sludge right into Amy's mouth, followed by some water. She coughed a few times, but it went down.

"What the hell was that about?" the man holding Amy's legs down asked.
The med student turned his head toward him and said, "Activated charcoal. It absorbs the poison in the stomach so it isn't metabolized. Most people get it in tablets."
"I'm not most people," I said, standing back up and retreating again. I squeezed through the crowd and headed over to the small, white mini-building that acted as the store's pharmacy. I looked around for people in white coats, but the room was empty. I turned back around and saw that pharmacists were all in the midst of the crowd, standing out like grains of salt in a pile of pepper.

"I need Diazepam," I said from just outside the pharmacy window, loud enough for the pharmacists to hear me. "Or Valium."

The outer ring of the crowd turned toward me, pharmacists included. The oldest of them, a man with graying hair, walk-jogged over to me.
"You need what?" he asked.
"Diazepam," I repeated.
"For her?"
No, I just remembered I had a prescription to fill and thought this would be a cool time to fill it. "Yes, for her!"
He looked around, nervous and distraught. "I can't issue meds without a doctor's authorization--"
"This is an emergency!" I interrupted.
"Even still. Only a doctor can know what she needs."

I sighed, then turned around and slid the pharmacy window open a bit wider and jumped onto the counter and dropped into the pharmacy.
"Hey!" the guy said. What was he going to do?
I looked at the shelves, hundreds of white bottles perched at the edges of each shelf. I tried to make some kind of sense out of the ordering of the medications, incorrectly assuming it would all be alphabetical, and after about seventy seconds stumbled upon the Diazepam. I grabbed the whole bottle and hopped back over the counter and pushed past the protesting pharmacist, through the crowd, and back to Amy and the men keeping her down.

I held the bottle out to the med student, the label facing him, and said, "How much?"
He squinted to read the label, looked at Amy, then back at me. "What are you?" he asked.
"Unique," I said. "How many pills?"

Entry Number Fifty

I didn't sleep that night.

It wasn't insomnia, and it wasn't bad dreams from seeing a disgustingly dead guy or finding myself in yet another situation where I have to wait around for a more-prepared version of myself to take the reins of my body. It was more of a crisis of identity, a thing I couldn't stop thinking about. I brought Amy back to the hotel where she got her dad's car and went home, then I came up to the room and tried to inhabit every inch of the bed but couldn't find sleep. The TV helped pass the time, but through all the commercial breaks I sank right back into my brain and kept re-thinking the same things.

I wished I had a computer. I thought I might head to the store and just buy a computer, like I'd done before. Something about that made me feel impressive. Like those people who can just go into a store and buy whatever they want and not even consider the prices. Too bad, I thought again, that such things come at the price of death and destruction. More to think about, less to sleep for.

Dawn came eventually, light began to slowly blot out the darkness and brought sounds of morning; birds chirping about whatever they have to be happy about. Reruns of shows long-canceled and advertisements for hair removal cream were replaced by morning news shows and morning talk shows. First we banter about recent news events, then we have a fun little game, then someone comes to talk ever-candidly about the movie they happen to be in that happens to come out on Friday, then somebody shows us how to bake a pie with half the carbs , then someone comes to drone on about a book they just wrote. Somewhere in there, a band plays and somebody in the audience wins a trip to someplace depressing like Boston or Seattle, places millions of people live day by day and don't consider it a vacation. Betwixt all these segments are three minutes of advertisements for cars, coffees, and travel websites.

I got tired of telling myself that if I slept now I'd probably sleep until 2PM, then 3, and so on. I got out of bed, opened the window the rest of the way, and took a shower in the bathroom connected to my room. A few times I nearly nodded off with hot water hammering my neck, but I held on to my lucidity. I felt like I needed a massage, if not from the car crash at least from all the stress. When we first got to the hotel I made a point to see if they had a spa and they didn't. Maybe when I'm out buying computers by the armful I can stop for a day in a spa. Drape salad toppings over my eyes while some Dominican rubs sea-salt cream or ground up snapping turtle shell all over my body. Pish, it's only money.

When I was through the bathroom and into my other outfit, I got my knife out of the plastic FBI evidence bag and dumped it in the sink and ran some hot water on it, then wiped it dry with a towel and clipped it in my pocket. I went into the kitchen and opened the front door to get the newspaper and found a plastic bin with the groceries we'd asked for yesterday. Trying not to make too much noise since my mom was probably still asleep, I brought the bin inside and started putting the food away. Crackers and granola bars in the cupboards, bottled waters and green tea in the fridge. I probably should have specified a brand of green tea when I wrote it down, since they got the cheapest and most notoriously-awful brand. When I put the three bottles in the fridge I thought about having one then, for the caffeine, but figured I'd get something better down in the lobby later.

The room phone rang, loud and annoying. A quick wave of concern pulsed through my mind, but I scrambled over the phone and answered it as casually as I could manage.

"They won't give me your room number," Amy said through the handset.
She must have been at the front desk. "Well, you could be a crazy person," I said. I tried to get a handle on what time it was and why Amy would be here, but I could only manage one thought process at a time.
"When has my being crazy ever gotten in the way of our visits?"
"You're going to scare the person at the desk," I said before telling her the room number and hanging up.

It could have been a trick, or she could have been making the call under duress. I could never seem to figure out whether I was the one who was in danger or I just kept stumbling into danger. My only source of information on this matter, the Federal Bureau of "Information" was being tediously glib on the subject. I'd have to call one of those boys sometime in the day and find out if they know who hired Scrooge McDuck to kill Comstock or why, and whether I should be concerned.

I watched through the peep-hole until Amy finally appeared, alone. I opened the door before she could knock.
"Good morning, sunshine," she said. She was wearing khaki-colored cargo pants and a striped button-up shirt. No bands I'd never heard of.
"Do you know what time it is?" I asked, still in the doorway.
"Do you?" she asked.
"No," I admitted, dropping my arm from the door and letting her through.

She took a few steps in and looked around at the kitchen area, the couches, the tv, and the open door to my room.

"It's seven," she said, "the time you used to have to get to school every day."
"Huh," I said, rubbing my head. "Yeah, I used to go to school."
"So did I," she said, looking out the window by the couches down at the parking lot.
"Not anymore?"
"I don't know," she started, then turned around. "I woke up, got dressed, got in the car, and drove towards the school, but I just couldn't give myself any real reasons to go. I mean, after all this, it just seems like..."
"Another life."
"Right. How do I go back to that, seeing what I've seen? FBI, hitmen, it's all way above high school level stuff. I don't know how you went back, after your dad and all that."
"You made it easier," I said, leaning now against the refrigerator. "I didn't stay very long, anyway."
She nodded. "So, it was either home or here."
"Home away from home," I said to myself.
"So, is there any sleuthing for us to do, perhaps?"
"Not today," I said, "I'm going to leave that to the professionals. Maybe this afternoon I'll call Rubino or Bremer and see if they know anything, but I don't really feel like sticking my neck out anymore."
"Then what were you going to do today?" she asked.
"Was thinking about getting some of the shopping done with the home insurance money. I need clothes, a computer, maybe some food for here. Do you want to go shopping?"
"Well, they tell me I'm a girl," she said, "so I guess that means I like to go shopping. Where were you going to go?"
"I don't know," I said, "if I had a computer I'd probably just buy it all online."
"Do you have a Costco membership?"
"I... do not."
"I do," she said. "It'd be a good place to start. They have food and some cheap clothes. They have furniture, if you want to start decorating your new house."
"I think the decorating will be my mom's job, but we could go there."

"Do you have anything to drink?" Amy asked. I pulled the fridge door open and went back in my room to get my wallet, phone, and keys.
From the kitchen I heard Amy cough and say something to the tune of, "Eugh!"
I came back out and saw she was holding one of the bottles of green tea. "This stuff is nasty," she said.
"I know, I didn't tell them what brand to get," I said. "Did you shake it? I think you're supposed to shake it."
"I shook it," she said before taking another sip and wincing. "It's bitter," she said after forcing it down. She held the bottle out and said, "You try it."
"Well, with such a ringing endorsement..." I said, not moving.
She said, "Alright," and set the plastic bottle down in the sink, I could hear it running down the drain. "We going?" she asked.
"We going," I said, opening the front door and letting Amy through.

I held the door open for a second to make sure I had a card key, and the door to the other bedroom in the suite opened and my mom came out in a bathrobe.
"Hey," she said, "are you going to school?"
Amy was in the hallway, so my mom didn't see her. "No," I said, "I was going to go get myself some clothes and stuff."
"Ok, she said, sitting down at the kitchen table.
"Don't drink the tea they brought, it's nasty," I said as I pushed the door open and went through it.

Amy and I went down and got in my car, and she told me where the nearest Costco was. It was about 20 minutes away, so I opened and closed my eyes a few times to make sure I was awake enough to drive.

Once on the road, Amy asked, "Did you not sleep or something?"
"Why?" I asked.
"You look like you didn't sleep."
"Did you sleep?"
"Some," she said, "no worse than after the day in Lorton or after the siege whatever on your house."
"I didn't sleep," I said.
"Why? Afraid of--"
"No," I cut in. "Just, thinking."
"Thinking?"
"Thinking."
"About what?" she asked.
"It's complicated.
"Everything's complicated with you."

I sighed, realizing this conversation wasn't going to go away, and resolving not to bring up with a female something I don't want to talk about.

"It's just, when someone talks about their body, or their arm, it's 'my body' and 'my arm'."
"Right..." she said.
"And when they talk about their mind, it's 'my mind.' Like, your body and your mind are both something you own. But if you aren't your mind or your body, what are you?"
"You... what?"
"What makes you you, what makes me me? If your mind and body are just possessions of yours, what exactly is the 'you' in that scenario? There's that thing, 'I think, therefore I am,' like there's no real way to know that you even have a body because the only way we experience it is through our senses -- through our mind, and our senses can be tricked, so the only thing we can know for sure is that we're at least thinking. So, the only guarantee is that you have a mind."
"Alright."
"So if the you in 'you' is your mind, how can it be your mind if your mind is you?"
She thought for a minute. "I don't know. Your mind exists on a conceptual plane and your body exists in the physical plane. Maybe the only way to bind together something from both planes is with an abstract concept like the self."

I drove in silence for a while.

"Ok," Amy said, "maybe we are nothing but our minds. Maybe our bodies are just manifestations to serve the purpose of the mind, since our minds would be useless if they couldn't move around and interact with objects. Like, if the purpose of a knife is to cut things, then the physical knife is just a manifestation to allow for the knife's purpose."
After exactly five seconds I said, "I don't think I'm high enough for that to make sense."
Amy laughed her little laugh, then said, "So what's the point of all this? Are you considering a career in philosophy?"
"No," I said. "I'm just... I don't know. Most people are content with that they are because their minds and their bodies are all they have and they're both the products of chance and effort. But me, if I'm to believe Schumer, my body is the product of some genetic screw-turning and half of my mind was given to me like people get organ transplants. If I'm nothing more than my mind and my body, there's very little here that's me. The only thing I have that I made myself is the me that I am now, when there aren't any guns or badguys around. The body, not mine, and the part of my mind that keeps me from dying a few times a week, isn't mine."
"But Schumer also said that you can have all the hypnosis-garbage removed if you want, so it'd be all you up there."
"The problem is, though, that I like it. I like being able to do the things I can do. I like being able to protect myself, and you. I like the answers to all my questions popping into mind before I even ask them. I just don't know if I like it enough to always be wondering what's me and what's the other guy."
"Ok, I can imagine losing sleep over that."
"I'm glad," I said.
"Alright look, there's that other saying. That a man is nothing more than the sum of his actions. It's not your body or your gray matter that makes you Chris Baker, it's the things you do. Your cells are dying and regenerating a million times a day. You're not even the same physical person you were a few months ago, and your mind changes just as often. The only thing that makes you you is that through it all, you do what you do. If I told you to draw a picture of yourself you'd probably draw yourself in that shirt and those pants, but those are just as peripheral as your hair and your body. The you is what you want it to be, whether it's a high school kid with a dead dad or the pre-configured Marine running around inside your skull."
"You just put that together yourself?" I asked after a bit.
"Yes, but now I have a headache."

At Costco, Amy flashed her membership card to get us through the door. A quick gust of heat from an industrial heater mounted right above the door seemed to cook the top layer of my skin as we stepped into the giant warehouse. We were then standing surrounded by flat-screen HDTVs , delicious, reasonably-priced televisions. Suddenly I could feel the debit card attached to hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurance money burning a hole through my wallet.

"Come on," Amy said, "I need something for this headache, the pharmacy and stuff are over here."
"I thought you were joking about that," I said.
"The real joke is that we'll probably have to get a bottle of 400 pills when I only need one."

I followed her past the TVs, around a corner with a few laptop computers set up on display and told myself I'd be coming back here. As we approached the white, boxy pharmacy inside the store Amy stopped in an aisle covered in over-the-counter meds . While she looked through those for something for a headache, I looked around at the store, the shelves, the door, and the stuff they carried.

"You know something?" I said, still looking around.
"What?" Amy asked, looking at a box of some kind of medication.
"If there was ever a full-scale zombie outbreak, this would be the perfect place to come."
She set the pills down. "Zombie outbreak?"
"Yes. Zombie outbreak. Like, zombies everywhere so you'd have to hole up someplace safe."
"And you'd go to Costco?" she said, looking at another brand.
"Yes. Just look at it. Tall, brick walls. No windows, the only entrances are at the front, and there's two separate sets of locking steel shutters with a vestibule between the two. The store is laid out so you can see each corner wherever you're standing, whereas most stores are set up in sections so you can't see very far, so there'd be a lot of blind corners and places for a zombie to pop out. There's a ton of food here, a whole meat section in the back, bottled water, clothes, plenty of tools for makeshift weapons, they even have grills and stuff here. And generators. And there's a gas station out front. You could live in here for a year or more, I bet."

Amy turned around and looked with me. Her face seemed to show some of the pain from her head ache, and she rubbed the base of her neck with one hand.

"But there's no guns or ammo here," she said. "A Wal-Mart or something like that would have all this plus guns and ammo."
"Yeah, but they all have windows, and glass doors. Plus, like I said, the different departments are walled off and there's a whole warehouse in the back of those. It would be impossible to lock the place down, and it would take forever to clear the place out of any residual zombies."
"Residual zombies."
"Yeah, zombies already in the store," I said.
"But here...?"
"Since everything is so sparse, and you can see through all the shelves, there's very few places where you'd have to make a blind turn or anything."
"But how would you clear out the residual zombies if there's no guns here?"
"You'd need to start off with some guns first, to get here. That's the only downside, really."
"Uh huh."
"Oh, and look at those shelves where the food and stuff are. They go all the way to the ceiling, practically, and the top few levels are just storage. You could clear out the stuff off of those and use the top shelves for sleeping, and use ladders to get up there. If zombies did ever get in, they couldn't get you up there since they can't use ladders; so you could use the shelves as a fall-out spot."
"Zombies can't use ladders?"
"No, they don't have the coordination."
"I see," she said, going back to the painkillers.

After a few minutes of complaining about the headache, she grabbed a package of Excedrin and said, "Hrrr."
"What?" I asked, turning back to her.
She made the sound again, dropped the package onto the floor, and brought her hands up to her jaw. She said a few more garbled words without opening her mouth, then her eyes went wide and she started breathing faster. Her arms went stiff and she shot backwards a step and backed into the shelf. She kept breathing quickly, her eyes darting around, her arms at odd angles and her fingers half-taut.

It was a decent imitation of a zombie.

I half-laughed and said, "What are you doing?"
She didn't laugh. She kept trying to talk but her jaw wasn't moving. He breathing quickened more and she started to whimper. Tears began to flow from her wide eyes. I repeated the question, but she fell to the floor before I could finish.

I caught her as her legs gave out and she slid against the shelf, dragging allergy pills and decongestants down with her. Her arms and legs were flailing in quick bursts now, her chest heaving with each breath. Her eyes begged for something.

"Hey, is she alright?" came a voice from somewhere around me.
"I don't know!" I yelled.

I shook Amy slightly, called her name. She just looked at me, and kept twitching.

"I'll call an ambulance," said the same voice.
"Ok," I said, "I think she's having a seizure."

Crime Scene Crew

Before long the stinging had completely faded from my eyes, without the help of milk, even. There was still a distant ringing in my ears, but it wasn't that bad.

Amy had apparently had the presence of mind to duck when she saw what she thought was a grenade fall to the ground, so the only hit she took was to her ears.

The both of us were still sitting on Comstock's couch. I was looking out the window at the tree-filtered moonlight. I didn't know if those were actual woods behind the house, or just a patch of trees. That guy, Shamus O'Flashbang , could have fled away under the cover of the trees, or he could just be hiding out there waiting for another chance to strike. For perhaps the fifth time I realized I had his gun in my hand, and felt better about my odds for a moment.

Still, I found my phone and dialed Rubino's number and told him that I had to reschedule our meeting, and that Comstock was dead and the guy who killed him was probably about to kill him so this girl I know stabbed him with my knife and he jumped out the window under cover of flashbang . Rubino had me repeat the sentence a few times as if I were speaking too quickly or reading a physics equation, then said he would be over with a crime scene crew.

While we waited patiently in the unlit living room of a dead guy, who was just in the other room, I asked out loud, "What was that?"
"What was what?" Amy replied, leaning against the arm of the couch and looking uncomfortable.
"That. You grabbed my knife and stabbed the guy," I said, looking for somewhere prudent to set the gun down.
"Oh, that. You're welcome."
"You don't think it was a little, I don't know, dangerous?"
"And grabbing a gun with your hand isn't?"
"That's different, I'm..."
"A guy?"
"Capable. But you're..."
"A girl?"
"Not."
"Not?"
"You know what I mean," I said, setting the gun on the floor.
"Yeah, there's something wrong with your brain and when you're in danger you turn into Batman. That doesn't mean I can't help out."
"By stabbing someone?"
"What were you going to do?"
"I don't know. Ask him questions."
"So I should have done nothing?"
"I don't know. I don't like my danger spilling over onto other people."
"It's spilled. I'm covered in it. I was there in Lorton, I was there at your house. I'm in this thing too."
"I wish you weren't."
"I wish none of this was happening, but here it is. I stabbed a guy and our principal is lying dead by the front door."
"My principal."
"No, I was assigned to him too. I just never saw him because I was never sent to him."
"Because you waited until now to start stabbing people."
"Something to tell my grandkids, I guess."

I didn't say so, but I wasn't sure if I was going to live that long.

Special Agents Bremer and Rubino soon showed up, along with their "crime scene crew" which, I found, was practically a small army. FBI forensic agents milled around the house, some uniformed police officers showed up to watch the outside of the house, and some detectives came and mostly stood around and waited for somebody to tell them what to do. It seemed on their end like another jurisdictional pissing match. Once again, the FBI calls dibs on a crime that the cops would love nothing better but to occupy themselves with. Once again, I was in the middle of said crime.

We two youngsters stayed in the living room mostly, and after ten minutes or so Bremer and Rubino came over to again go over what had happened.

I told about how we'd come over to talk with Comstock, how we'd found the door slightly open and his body blocking it. I told about walking through the kitchen and around to the living room, talking out loud about Dingan and all that, when Angus McHitman stepped from the shadows and confronted me about my involvement with Dingan's death.

"He referred to Dingan by name?" Bremer asked, looking a bit tired.
"Yeah," I said. "He said he thought that the police had killed him, not me."
"He seemed interested in him? Like he knew him, and this was personal?"
"Yeah, like they were friends or partners or... partners."
Bremer made a slight face. "Nothing we know about Dingan indicates that he worked with others," he said.
"Well this guy didn't seem too happy about Dingan being dead. He gave up his position just to confront be about it."
"He might have been planning to kill you two anyway," Rubino said.
"That's nice to know," Amy said with a nod.
"He wouldn't have expected us," I said. "We hadn't made plans to come here, it was last minute."
"Did you talk about it over the phone?" Bremer asked.
I thought for a moment, then said, "No, we talked about it in person. Do you think my phone is tapped?"
Bremer and Rubino both shrugged. I decided I needed a new phone, and a new account.
"We'll be able to figure more out once forensics determines a time of death," Rubino said.
"How?" I asked.
"If Comstock was killed just before you arrived, maybe you caught the killer in the middle of his escape," Bremer started, "or if he died hours ago, maybe he was waiting for you; or waiting for someone. Or maybe he was looking around the house for something."
I nodded, about to reply when two uniforms came through the back sliding glass doors. They each had flashlights and were switching them off.

"We've finished checking the perimeter," one of them said to Bremer or Rubino. "We found a trail of blood leading into the woods, but it ends a hundred feet or so in like he patched himself up. We could bring in K-9 and continue a foot search, or call in some choppers from State."
Both FBI men seemed to consider it. I said, "Couldn't hurt," feeling good about contributing, then Bremer said, "It's been over half an hour. If he's a pro, he should have disappeared by now. You can try the dogs but a chopper would be a waste of time. This isn't a manhunt."

The two cops nodded and went about their business. Over by the fireplace, some forensics people were poking at the drops of blood on the floor with cotton swabs or something. One of them was dropping my knife into a plastic evidence bag.

"Ah," I said, loudly, "do you have to take that?"
Everybody in the room stopped and looked at me, decided who I was talking to, and everybody but the forensics people went back to what they were doing.
"It has his blood on it," the woman holding the bag said.
"There's blood all over the place," I said.
"What, is it your knife?"
"I... maybe," I said, not sure if I should have admitted it or not. I just didn't want my knife to get taken and absorbed into the system.
The woman, on her knees, shook her head and tossed the bag across the room over to Rubino. He held the bag up, looked at my knife through the clear plastic, then handed it over to me, saying, "Happy birthday."
I took the bag, looked at the knife through it, and decided to wait until I could clean the blood off of it before taking it out.

"So, why isn't this a manhunt?" Amy asked.
Bremer and Rubino turned toward her, then looked at me and saw that my expression matched hers.
"Some guy gets drunk and shoots his wife," Bremer started, annoyed, "you have a manhunt. Someone breaks out of prison by shanking a guard and scaling a fence, you have a manhunt. Both of those people are scared, sloppy, untrained, and predictable. If this guy is a real hitter, he spends hours each day planning how to evade a manhunt. Someone like this, you have to track down with your brain, not a bunch of yokels with bloodhounds."

Over by the door, examiners in blue FBI jackets had finished fluttering around Comstock and were loading him onto a stretcher. Forensics people were coming out of the kitchen loaded with evidence bags full of various items. One of the medical people, another woman, came over to our little circle and snapped off her latex gloves.

"Cause of death?" Bremer asked.
"Unsure at the moment," the woman replied.
"Time of death?" Bremer asked.
"Also unsure," she said, hesitant.
Bremer lowered his head slightly to look at her from the top of his eyes.
"The problem is, external indicators all say he died no more than an hour ago. But, just looking at the body, it looks like three to four hours. His body is in mid-stage rigor mortis, which takes three or so hours to even begin; but the musculature is locked into the position it was in at the moment of death, while usually the body will relax into a more natural posture before going stiff. It looks like cadaveric spasm, or instant rigor. That almost only happens in drowning, but nothing indicates he was drowned and dumped here."
"Is there anything else that can cause that?" Rubino asked.
"Nerve gases like VX will do it, and a few glycine-antagonist poisons like strychnine can do it. Both of those usually cause death by spasming the skeletal muscles until the spinotrapezius and latissimus dorsi muscles work against each other and break the spine, but it doesn't seem like this guy's back is broken. It could also cause the diaphragm to displace itself, which may have happened. We'll know more once we pump the stomach and analyze some of the foods it looks like he's eaten."
"You said VX nerve gas?" Rubino said, concerned.
"Yes," the woman said, "though if it were in the air right now we'd all be on the floor dead. It's possible he was given a quick dose of it. Again, we'll know for sure once he's on the table."

Bremer thanked her, and she headed out the door with the rest of the science brigade. "You didn't eat anything while you were hear, did you?" Bremer asked me.
"No," I said, "and I didn't sniff anything, either."
"Me either," Amy chimed in.
Bremer nodded, then noticed the gun on the floor by where I'd been sitting before. It was partially knocked under the couch.

"That yours or his?" Bremer asked. I turned and looked at the gun. It seemed like a nice gun, and I rather liked the idea of keeping it.
"His," I said, unfortunately.
"Then that, I'm sorry, we will have to take."
Bremer pointed to it, and Rubino stepped over and picked the gun up by sticking a pen through the trigger guard.
"A Walther," he said, "a .22, with an AAC silencer."
Bremer chuckled and said, "Well there you go."

I looked from him to the gun, then said, "What?"
"Two types of people use .22s," he said, "target shooters that are just beginning, women mostly, and hitmen. Add a silencer, and it's pretty obvious. A .22 bullet is so small, it can barely pierce bone. Sometimes they get caught up in the abdominal muscles and don't even get through the gut. They're only any good at point blank range, but they're so quiet -- especially with a silencer -- that it's like a housefly's fart. Takes two or three shots to do any damage, but the noise is what people like about them. That, and their velocity is so low that they rarely exit the body."
"So there's no mess," Rubino added.

"Wow," Amy said, dryly, "this is all very fascinating and I'm sure I'll one day use that information in a novel, but I think a more relevant topic would be what is going on to catch this guy, and when can we go home?"

Rubino stood for a moment, holding the gun from his pen in silence. He pulled an evidence bag from his suit jacket and dropped the gun into the bag.

"Finding the guy isn't likely," Bremer said, "more feasible would be finding who hired him. If this was supposed to be retribution for something to do with you, or for screwing up by hiring Dingan, then there are few suspects."
"What, Schumer?"
"Probably."

I sighed, wishing I had some kind of clue as to what was going on.

"So there's nothing stopping this guy from coming after us now?" Amy asked.
"Coming after you? If he wasn't contracted to kill you, he's got no reason to bother," Bremer said.
"These types never go off-book, unless you really piss them off," Rubino then said.
"It's a good thing neither of us stabbed him in the leg, then," I said, looking at Amy.
She shrugged. "You grabbed his gun and hit him in the throat, I'm not the only one he'd be mad at."
Bremer looked at both of us, and asked, "Are you two in some kind of piss-off-hitmen contest or something?"
"We do have a knack for it," Amy said.
"Oh yeah," I said, "Dingan was supposed to be bringing me in, but I managed to coax him into wanting to kill me. How's that for off-book?"
"I don't understand this," Bremer said, "you want credit for annoying people into wanting to kill you?"
"I'm just saying, this new guy could still be a threat."
"I wouldn't worry about it," Bremer said.

"How about my house? Do you have any idea who came to my house and burned it down?"
"Blew it up," Rubino said.
"Huh?"
"It wasn't burned down, there was an explosion. If the house had just been set on fire, it would still be standing."
"Ok, so... wow. Um, do you know who blew up my house?"
"Nope," Bremer said.
"Awesome," I said, sarcastically. "Since I have little to no idea what the hell is happening in my life, could you perhaps provide some kind of list of people who might want to shoot me or blow me up?"
Bremer looked confused, "Well, it's a short list. It starts and ends with Schumer."

Why would Schumer want to kill me? If nothing else, it seems like he would want to strap me to a chair and have some hypnotist take a swan dive into my mind and undo his mistakes. I represent the last two decades of work for him, and probably millions of dollars were spent on the stupid program that produced me. There was no reason for him to want me dead, so why were my FBI stalkers saying he would?

I remembered something Schumer had said. "You won't know who to trust." At the time, I thought he was just trying to be mysterious. He implied it was the FBI who'd actually killed my dad, as little of a fan I was of him at the moment. Lately, it seemed as if all Bremer and Rubino cared about was using me to mole out as much information about the program as they wanted. Maybe the FBI cared more about the program than about me. Maybe the FBI is who my dad was trying to sell the program to, not a foreign government. Maybe the FBI double-crossed him, or he double-crossed the FBI, so they killed him, and are now pumping me for the information he couldn't get them. I supposed if that was their goal, they would want me to hate Schumer, wouldn't they?

My head was spinning and my stomach felt sick. I didn't like the thought of being used. I didn't like the thought of anything that was happening to me. I didn't like that my dad was dead, or that my house had exploded, or that I was wanted in Austria, or that for the last 17 years I'd been having my head screwed around with without knowing about it. I didn't like that I was still standing in my dead principal's living room, or even the fact that my principal was dead. I also didn't like the fact that wherever I went, I was putting my and Amy's life in danger. Once again, I was fed up. For all I know, Bremer and Rubino could have blasted Comstock with VX gas, or hired the .22-Caliber-Killer to "off" Comstock.

Wasn't VX gas the stuff in that movie, The Rock? The little, green, glass balls? Whatever.

I told Bremer and Rubino I'd call them later, grabbed Amy's hand, and left the building.