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

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 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 purposely left behind an esoteric clue, and got in some kind of battle of wits with the lead detective. Or there’s blood, hair, or saliva samples somewhere that glow blue under a black light and can be entered into a magical computer with every human’s DNA cataloged. For lack of that, I have no idea how actual 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 the stuff he bought? That’d give you a timestamp, and 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, which would have a name attached.”

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 mess is sorted out,” I said.

“We already put P.D. on grocery store duty. Most of the smaller stores don’t keep indexed 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 move you to a different hotel and we’ll leave some police on the place for a while until we can sort out a 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, more jobs, more legwork. They have to have to worry about cover identities, escape plans, avoiding detection, and keeping their finances in order; plus eating and sleeping like anybody else. You’re just a job, and if he 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 you make a low-profile target. He’s not going to blow up a building in hopes you’ll be inside, 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?” I asked.

“What, you’re 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 more worthless sleep, I put on the same damn outfit I was wearing before, the only clothes I had that didn’t smell like flashbang powder, 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 told me there was another officer in a squad car covering the entrance.

He 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. Another of the many concerning thoughts I’d produced 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 Tshirts, 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, or because dressing like a teenager had gotten old. 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 logo plastered all over the front for once. A few stores down was a Radio Shack, where I purchased a car and a wall charger for my phone. I looked at the fancy new phones and considered an upgrade, but didn’t feel like dealing with 2-year contracts and the fact that I’m under 18.

I changed into some of the new clothes in my car, which is quite a feat in a sports car, then 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 Westbourne. The lady typed into a computer, then announced that Amy had 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 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 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 sit 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.

Not really knowing what to say, I simply asked, “Are you all right?”

Amy shut her eyes for a moment and grinned just slightly. “More or less,” she said. Her voice was weak and 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?”

“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 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, indicating her whole body. “Everywhere.”

“At least it would be,” she continued, “if they didn’t come by and shoot morphine, or something like it, 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 was saline, the other was protein and vitamins.

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 the tea from your hotel room.”

I nodded again.

“Told you it was gross,” she said. “So that Irish guy tried to kill you, and killed me instead.”

“Nearly,” 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