If she could get to the gun, she could use it. Pax had taught her how to use it. She was ready to use it now. No more hesitations. Use it not merely to intimidate. Not as a bludgeon. Pull the trigger. Empty the magazine. Kill the bastard.
“So I’m a retired police detective enjoying a second career as head of hospital security. That’s logical. Sets me up as being maybe more skilled, more dangerous than your average rent-a-cop. Not bad. Not terribly clever, but credible.”
He continued to circle her as she painstakingly dragged herself, shuddering and uncoordinated, inch by inch across a floor shimmering like a frozen sea under the pot lights. At times, the plain of quartz seemed to tilt precariously, so that she feared sliding at increasing velocity until she pitched across some brink, into a melt-smoothed vent flume that would spin her down—she was already dizzy—down into deep and deeper ice caverns.
“From the get-go,” Coy said, “my job was to establish the air of conspiracy and paranoia that would thicken and become complicated event by event. But that’s about all I was given to do. Except, of course, to be a distraction, to pop up when perhaps your thinking leads you toward the thing you find unthinkable.”
The Sig Sauer lay inches away, frozen to the tilted ice field and thus resistant to the gravity that would have sent it spinning away from her. She reached for it with her right hand, which was coming under her control again.
Coy had clicked a third cartridge into the Taser, and he fired it into her back. The probes, which could bite through an inch of clothing, pierced her blazer and T-shirt with no difficulty, serpent fangs injecting a current similar to that of the human body. Techno mavens called it neuromuscular incapacitation, a solemn laboratory term for a total physical freak-out, the baffled brain no longer able to discern the difference between the body’s natural signals and the storm of meaningless static, but the effect was more visceral and more emotional than the dry term suggested. With each shock, Bibi was thrown into a cold rushing river of sensation at the same time that she was robbed of any ability to control her reaction to it, and she wondered if with the fourth cartridge or the fifth, she would soil her pants and have the last shreds of dignity stripped from her.
Coy kicked the pistol away from Bibi’s spasming fingers. The weapon spun beyond her blurred and salt-stung vision.
“Are you listening to me, woman?” Coy asked, booming at her as if he were a lowercase god of the elements, speaking in the language of thunder, and she were a groveling penitent. “Think about my name. Chubb is as frivolous as Bibi, don’t you think? Yeah, sure, I’m being used to distract you, but part of me, just like part of you, wants you to find the truth, to be freed by the truth.”
There was a metallic taste in Bibi’s mouth, not the familiar coppery flavor of blood—she hadn’t bitten her tongue—but more like sucking on rusted iron, and a bitter lump rose in her throat, either vomit or self-pity. Her flesh stiffened even as her bones seemed to have been reduced to jelly, quivering like aspic on a plate.
“I am restricted—you have restricted me—to only indirect means of breaking through the stubborn and resistant Bibi, to reach the other Bibi that wants to remember the full truth. And so I try to make you understand what I really am by speaking out of character. Are you listening to me, Gidget?”
She thought that she said yes.
“What did you say?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“I’m listening, yes.” She heard the susurrant syllables hissing from her lips and across the quartz. “Yes.”
He said, “I tried to make you understand by speaking out of character. Chubb Coy, former homicide detective, not known to have significant interest in the classics of American literature. Jack London, Thornton Wilder, Flannery O’Connor—they all just happen to be among your admired pantheon. Are you listening, Gidget?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Listening isn’t the same as hearing,” he declared, and with the cruel authority of a stone-temple god armed with modern technology, he slammed her with a fourth Taser cartridge.
She didn’t black out. She didn’t soil her pants, either. But she didn’t feel like searching for the lost gun or like doing anything other than lying on the bright griddle of quartz, melting like a pat of butter.
His voice remained stern, but softer than before. “I try to alert you to what I am. You sabotage me, sabotage yourself with the memory trick.”
She was looking at his shoes inches from her face. They were Gucci loafers. They should not be Gucci loafers. Too expensive for him. Too effete.
He walked a few circuits around her, saying nothing.
His socks were right. Not fancy designer socks with elaborate patterns. Plain black. A blend of man-made fabrics with just a little cotton. He could have bought them at Walmart, good working-cop socks.
He said, “Would you really rather die than learn the truth of what you are?”
“No.”
“What did you say?”
“No. I don’t want to die.”
“Say it like you mean it.”