Thirty minutes later, he was parking his bike a couple blocks down the street from his mom’s house. Maybe it was naive, his hoping Ware didn’t already know where his family lived, but why take the chance?
He didn’t like this feeling. He’d experienced plenty of paranoia in his old line of work, but back then it had come bundled up with adrenaline. It had been pleasurable, in a way, that fear of getting caught. But there was too much at stake now, way more than just his own skin.
He grabbed the LifeMap package out of his cargo box and walked up the road.
Vince left for work at six thirty, so the kitchen light was on, predictably. Casey knocked at the side door and Vince pulled it in, nodding a greeting.
“Morning, cocksucker. Ready to get swabbed?” Casey heard the TV droning in the den, and no surprise—his mom was up at five and asleep by nine, every goddamn day like a rule of physics. Kim must’ve still been in bed.
Vince eyed the box as Casey opened it and set three clear cups on the kitchen table. Kind of like extra-narrow prescription bottles, with a plastic-sealed, one-ended Q-tip-looking thing inside, and a label printed with a barcode and each of their first names—Casey, Vincent, Deirdre.
“What’s this going to entail, exactly?” Vince asked.
Casey pulled out the instructions and read them aloud. “Remove swab from sleeve. Rinse mouth with warm water before collecting sample. Swab the inside of one cheek with firm, up-and-down motions. Close swab inside provided cup immediately. One sample per cup only,” he read aggressively, the final step set in all caps.
“Easy enough,” Vince said, and the two of them swished their mouths out at the sink. The whole thing was done inside a minute.
“Cool. Now just sign this paper,” Casey said, finding the form with Vince’s name at the top.
He considered asking Vince to walk their mom through the paperwork and the swab, but he knew deep down that was cowardly, so he gathered the form and the cup and a glass of water and headed for the den.
Sure as the sun rising, she was awake, glued to an infomercial. Or to the glow of the screen, anyhow—only God knew if she was actually retaining any of what was flashing by.
“Morning, Mom. You sleep okay?”
Her gaze moved slowly to his face. Here was where things turned either heartwarming or heartbreaking—fifty-fifty chance, lately.
“Good morning,” she said slowly, and finally added, “Casey.”
A wave of relief rolled through him at that. More and more, she recognized him. It was progress you couldn’t discount, not when the first time she’d seen him after he’d come back to town, she’d shot him in the leg, thinking he was a burglar.
“Can you do me a favor, Mom? It’ll only take a minute.”
“Oh,” she said spacily, slowly, attention drifting back to the screen, “I suppose I could.”
“Great. Just take a drink from this,” he said, handing her the glass. He let her drain it in a half dozen lethargic swallows. “Great. Now I just need you to open your mouth real wide so I can rub this Q-tip on your cheek, okay?”
“Q-tip?”
“It’s for the dentist,” he lied. What was he supposed to say? You probably don’t realize it, but you’ve gone completely batshit and now I need to figure out if I’m doomed to follow in your footsteps. Open wide. “Won’t take a second.”
“If you say so.”
She opened her mouth and he held her cheek, her skin cool and papery, a little eerie. Man, she’d been beautiful when she’d still been lucid. Prettiest woman in town, everybody had agreed. Now she was just a ghost, floating through the days with her brain half-gone, the rest of it lost to whatever was on the TV or outside the window, her once-red hair faded almost completely to white. Casey checked his own head for grays at least once a week, thinking they were as good an indicator of his chances at insanity as any. So far, none.