بخش 04 - فصل 05

5

Finders Keepers shares the seventh-floor bathrooms with the travel agency, but right now Hodges has the men’s to himself, for which he is grateful. He’s bent over one of the sinks, right hand gripping the washbasin’s rim, left pressed to his side. His belt is still unbuckled, and his pants are sinking past his hips under the weight of the stuff in his pockets: change, keys, wallet, phone.

He came in here to take a shit, an ordinary excretory function he’s been performing all his life, but when he started to strain, the left half of his midsection went nuclear. It makes his previous pain seem like a bunch of warm-up notes before the full concert begins, and if it’s this bad now, he dreads to think what may lie ahead.

No, he thinks, dread is the wrong word. Terror is the right one. For the first time in my life, I’m terrified of the future, where I see everything that I am or ever was first submerged, then erased. If the pain itself doesn’t do it, the heavier drugs they give me to stifle it will.

Now he understands why pancreatic is called the stealth cancer, and why it’s almost always deadly. It lurks, building up its troops and sending out secret emissaries to the lungs, the lymph nodes, the bones, and the brain. Then it blitzkriegs, not understanding, in its stupid rapacity, that victory can only bring its own death.

Hodges thinks, Except maybe that’s what it wants. Maybe it’s self-hating, born with a desire not to murder the host but to kill itself. Which makes cancer the real suicide prince.

He brings up a long, resounding burp, and that makes him feel a little better, who knows why. It won’t last long, but he’ll take any measure of relief he can get. He shakes out three of his painkillers (already they make him think of shooting a popgun at a charging elephant) and swallows them with water from the tap. Then he splashes more cold water on his face, trying to bring up a little color. When that doesn’t work, he slaps himself briskly—two hard ones on each cheek. Holly and Jerome must not know how bad it’s gotten. He was promised this day and he means to take every minute of it. All the way to midnight, if necessary.

He’s leaving the bathroom, reminding himself to straighten up and stop pressing his side, when his phone buzzes. Pete wanting to resume his bitch-a-thon, he thinks, but it’s not. It’s Norma Wilmer.

“I found that file,” she says. “The one the late great Ruth Scapelli—”

“Yeah,” he says. “The visitors list. Who’s on it?”

“There is no list.”

He leans against the wall and closes his eyes. “Ah, sh—”

“But there is a single memo with Babineau’s letterhead on it. It says, and I quote, ‘Frederica Linklatter to be admitted both during and after visiting hours. She is aiding in B. Hartsfield’s recovery.’ Does that help?”

Some girl with a Marine haircut, Hodges thinks. A ratty chick with a bunch of tats.

It rang no bells at the time, but there was that faint vibration, and now he knows why. He met a skinny girl with buzz-cut hair at Discount Electronix back in 2010, when he, Jerome, and Holly were closing in on Brady. Even six years later he can remember what she said about her co-worker on the Cyber Patrol: It’s something with his mom, betcha anything. He’s freaky about her.

“Are you still there?” Norma sounds irritated.

“Yeah, but I have to go.”

“Didn’t you say there’d be some extra money if—”

“Yeah. I’ll take care of you, Norma.” He ends the call.

The pills are doing their work, and he’s able to manage a medium-fast walk back to the office. Holly and Jerome are at the window overlooking Lower Marlborough Street, and he can tell by their expressions when they turn to the sound of the opening door that they’ve been talking about him, but he has no time to think about that. Or brood on it. What he’s thinking about are those rigged Zappits. The question ever since they started to put things together was how Brady could have had anything to do with modifying them when he was stuck in a hospital room and barely able to walk. But he knew somebody who almost certainly had the skills to do it for him, didn’t he? Someone he used to work with. Somebody who came to visit him in the Bucket, with Babineau’s written approval. A punky chick with a lot of tats and a yard of attitude.

“Brady’s visitor—his only visitor—was a woman named Frederica Linklatter. She—”

“Cyber Patrol!” Holly nearly screams. “He worked with her!”

“Right. There was also a third guy—the boss, I think. Do either of you remember his name?”

Holly and Jerome look at each other, then shake their heads.

“That was a long time ago, Bill,” Jerome says. “And we were concentrating on Hartsfield by then.”

“Yeah. I only remember Linklatter because she was sort of unforgettable.”

“Can I use your computer?” Jerome asks. “Maybe I can find the guy while Holly looks for the girl’s addy.”

“Sure, go for it.”

Holly is at hers already, sitting bolt upright and clicking away. She’s also talking out loud as she often does when she’s deeply involved in something. “Frack. Whitepages doesn’t have a number or address. Long shot, anyway, a lot of single women don’t . . . wait, hold the fracking phone . . . here’s her Facebook page . . .”

“I’m not really interested in her summer vacation snaps or how many friends she’s got,” Hodges says.

“Are you sure about that? Because she’s only got six friends, and one of them is Anthony Frobisher. I’m pretty sure that was the name of the—”

“Frobisher!” Jerome yells from Hodges’s office. “Anthony Frobisher was the third Cyber Patrol guy!”

“Beat you, Jerome,” Holly says. She looks smug. “Again.”