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?