Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

The insurance company put my mother and me in a hotel while they figured out what they were going to do about our burned-down house. The options were seemingly to have them pay to rebuild it or for them to just send us a stupid-huge check for the value so we could buy our own house. I wanted the latter, for receiving stupid-huge checks from insurance companies was becoming a pastime of mine.

Though I wasn’t a fan of losing the things important to me.

The hotel they put us in wasn’t a traditional hotel in the “bed and a bathroom” sense, it was one of those home-away-from-home places for traveling businessmen or families whose homes have burned down. All the rooms were suites with two bedrooms and two bathrooms, a living room, and a full kitchen. Downstairs in the lobby they served full meals buffet-style for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and inside the room there was a card we could fill out for what kind of groceries we wanted and some hotel lackey would run out and get it, charging it to the room. Insurance would be paying the room bill, whatever it ended up being, so we went a little nuts on the lackey groceries.

After one day, the insurance company sent an adjuster to examine the remains of the house; he determined that it was a total loss and cut us a rather large check for us to replace clothes and furniture until the even-more-gigantic check to replace the house itself showed up. He also noted that the garage had fallen onto my dad’s Cadillac and suggested we call our auto insurance for that.

My mom was still a mess, but I almost enjoyed it. It was unique and interesting, and nobody was shooting at me so I could remain myself through it all. It seemed that I wasn’t too attached to any of my stuff after all, at least not so attached that I couldn’t re-attach myself to something that insurance check would replace. Maybe I could get that larger bed I always wanted, or the more expensive clothes I had been thinking about; only this time using the new insurance money instead of the old. Tracking my windfalls was getting complicated, though, it seemed like I could make a new profession out of having insurance companies buy all my stuff.

Don’t be morbid, your dad died for some of that money, echoed a voice in my head. I began to think it was worth it, after all. My dad practically built me from scratch and unloaded me onto some mind-warped doctors to test some unethical mind-warping experiment, and then he tried to sell that information to, what, Russia? North Korea? That insurance policy was just so we wouldn’t be completely screwed if his plan failed and he was killed for his treason. Some consolation prize. Did he hope I wouldn’t find out? Or that the money would make me overlook the fact that my whole life was a lie and that he tried to sell that lie for a quick buck?

Whatever he did, it’s probably his fault that the house was destroyed. It’s probably his fault that people keep coming at me from all angles, trying to get their hands on the amazing hypno-killer boy.

Screw it, I’d take the money but I wouldn’t accept it as some kind of reparations for my bungled life. I’ll buy overpriced jeans, handguns, or a million candy bars if I want to. I’ll let that postmortem bribe buy me a new life, not forgiveness.

Amy, surprisingly, had opted to return to school on Monday. She must have been more worried about graduating than I, because at this point I couldn’t be bothered to consider school. I was living in a hotel; the only things I owned were a pair of pants and a handful of weapons. I slowly began to accept the fact that there is a killer inside my head, and that there’s little chance that my life will ever be normal. Ever since that phone call a month ago, my life took a running leap away from normal. School was practically off my radar.

It was Tuesday when the insurance adjuster came out and cut that initial check for clothes and furniture. We’d just gotten back to the hotel when my cell phone, for which I no longer had a charger, rang. I recognized the number as either Rubino or Bremer’s, didn’t really care either way which one it was, and answered accordingly.

The earpiece pumped out a reply. “Chris, it’s Special Agent Bremer.”

“Special. I know,” I said. I could tell it was Bremer from the first word, the coarseness of his weary old voice was more pronounced over the phone.

“We’d like to see you for a bit of a debrief, sit down with you so you can tell us exactly what you know so far and what Schumer told you.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about these FBI Agents — Special Agents — anymore. At first they had been a pretty decent, if unpredictable source of information. Now, it seemed that they only want information. Schumer said my dad was killed in a shootout at a botched FBI sting. For all I knew it could have been Bremer or Rubino who pulled the trigger, if that was supposed to be a bad thing. The thing that bothered me the most was that they seemed to want to know everything about Schumer and his blasted “program” as he called it. If the FBI’s only attachment to this is that they caught and stopped my dad from selling secrets abroad, why would they care about what those secrets were? If it was a black ops, black budget outfit, it seems that the FBI would want to keep its collective nose out of it, but here it seems that my two Bureau buddies are just as interested in getting their hands on the specifics as whomever my dad was trying to sell them to.

“Okay,” I said, knowing I didn’t have a choice, “when and where?”

“We can come to your hotel room tonight, around seven or eight.”

I looked around for a clock, found the one by the bed in the room that had become my own and saw that it was just after 2 PM.

“All right, I guess. Though, maybe somewhere outside the room, like the conference room down in the business center.”

“Why there?” Bremer asked.

I didn’t want them in my room because I didn’t want my mom hearing any of what they, or I, would have to say. I couldn’t say that, though, so I said, “There’s not a lot of room in here, it’s kind of cramped with the two of us. And, hey, I can have the conference room catered. Insurance company’s treat.”

“Fine, we’ll call you when we’re outside the hotel.” He hung up.

I tossed the phone onto my bed and went back out into the common area and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. My mom was at the kitchen table, looking through the paperwork the insurance evaluator gave her and idly tapped the check with her free hand.

“I should probably put this in the joint checking account so you can use your debit card to buy yourself some clothes or whatever you need for the short-term,” she said, watching me spin the cap to the water bottle.

“Or you could put it in the savings account with the rest of the money; let it earn some interest,” I said, leaning against the counter.

“Then you wouldn’t be able to spend it with your card,” she said, looking down at the paperwork again.

“I could withdraw cash from it at an ATM with my card,” I said.

“It’s not a good idea to walk around with a bunch of cash on you.”

I remembered being back at Dulles Airport and pulling a thousand dollars from an ATM, and consistently feeling like a band of ninjas would appear from nowhere and rob me until I’d spent most of the cash. I also remembered that I’d spent most of the cash on an Austrian Sparbuch account, and that the only things proving I owned that bank account had gone up in flames along with the house. That sucked; wasting however many real dollars that thing cost me. With the card and documentation destroyed, it meant that the account was going to sit idle, untouched, for years and years. That €100 balance was going to accrue interest until the global economy fails. In a thousand years, some account manager will notice that there’s an anonymous account, untouched since the 21st century, with a balance in the billions. Oh, my imagination.

I told my mom she could deposit it into the checking account and whatever we didn’t spend after a while could go into savings later, then went back to my room and shut the door. If Amy was still skipping her afternoon classes, she should be out by now. I sent a text message to her phone asking just that.

While I waited for a response I sat at the edge of my bed, opening and closing the bottom drawer of the dresser with my foot. Under a folded blanket were three pistols, the USP .45 and the two Beretta 92s I’d taken off Schumer’s impromptu bodyguards. I didn’t know what else to do with them, so I hid them in the drawer and feel compelled to check on them every few hours. I had three loaded magazines for the USP, and one apiece for the Berettas. The 92s use 9mm ammo, so I can’t use any of the .45 ammo I bought, though that doesn’t matter I left it all in the house. The one that burned down. Exploded.

Looking at the guns in the drawer, I did the mental arithmetic to determine that I had 69 rounds if all the mags were fully loaded. If the boogeyman came through the front door of the hotel suite, at three-round bursts fired twice per ten seconds, I could hold the boogeyman off for just over a minute and a half.

My phone beeped, distracting me from my wandering