Jamie Winters was nine when he attended the ’Round Here concert at the Mac with his mother. Only a few subteen boys were there that night; the group was one of those dismissed by most boys his age as girly stuff. Jamie, however, liked girly stuff. At nine he hadn’t yet been sure that he was gay (wasn’t even sure he knew what that meant). All he knew was that when he saw Cam Knowles, ’Round Here’s lead singer, he felt funny in the pit of his stomach.
Now he’s pushing sixteen and knows exactly what he is. With certain boys at school, he prefers to leave off the last letter of his first name because with those boys he likes to be Jami. His father knows what he is, as well, and treats him like some kind of freak. Lenny Winters—a man’s man if ever there was one—owns a successful building company, but today all four of Winters Construction’s current jobs are shut down because of the impending storm. Lenny is in his home office instead, up to his ears in paperwork and stewing over the spreadsheets covering his computer screen.
“Dad!”
“What do you want?” Lenny growls without looking up. “And why aren’t you in school? Was it canceled?”
“Dad!”
This time Lenny looks around at the boy he sometimes refers to (when he thinks Jamie isn’t in earshot) as “the family queer.” The first thing he’s aware of is that his son is wearing lipstick, rouge, and eye shadow. The second thing is the dress. Lenny recognizes it as one of his wife’s. The kid is too tall for it, and it stops halfway down his thighs.
“What the fuck!”
Jamie is smiling. Jubilant. “It’s how I want to be buried!”
“What are you—” Lenny gets up so fast his chair tumbles over. That’s when he sees the gun the boy is holding. He must have taken it from Lenny’s side of the closet in the master bedroom.
“Watch this, Dad!” Still smiling. As if about to demonstrate a really cool magic trick. He raises the gun and places the muzzle against his right temple. His finger is curled around the trigger. The nail has been carefully coated with sparkle polish.
“Put that down, Son! Put it—”
Jamie—or Jami, which is how he has signed his brief suicide note—pulls the trigger. The gun is a .357, and the report is deafening. Blood and brains fly in a fan and decorate the doorframe with gaud. The boy in his mother’s dress and makeup falls forward, the left side of his face pushed out like a balloon.
Lenny Winters gives voice to a series of high, wavering screams. He screams like a girl.
13
Brady disconnects from Jamie Winters just as the boy puts the gun to his head, afraid—terrified, actually—of what may happen if he’s still in there when the bullet enters the head he’s been messing with. Would he be spit out like a seed, as he was when he was inside the half-hypnotized dumbo mopping the floor in 217, or would he die along with the kid?
For a moment he thinks he’s left it until too late, and the steady chiming he hears is what everyone hears when they exit this life. Then he’s back in the main room of Heads and Skins with the Zappit console in his sagging hand and Babineau’s laptop in front of him. That’s where the chiming is coming from. He looks at the screen and sees two messages. The first reads 248 FOUND. That’s the good news. The second is the bad news:
REPEATER NOW OFFLINE
Freddi, he thinks. I didn’t believe you had the guts. I really didn’t.
You bitch.
His left hand gropes along the desk and closes on a ceramic skull filled with pens and pencils. He brings it up, meaning to smash it into the screen and destroy that infuriating message. What stops him is an idea. A horribly plausible idea.
Maybe she didn’t have the guts. Maybe somebody else killed the repeater. And who could that someone else be? Hodges, of course. The old Det.-Ret. His fucking nemesis.
Brady knows he isn’t exactly right in the head, has known that for years now, and understands this could be nothing but paranoia. Yet it makes a degree of sense. Hodges stopped his gloating visits to Room 217 almost a year and a half ago, but he was sniffing around the hospital just yesterday, according to Babineau.
And he always knew I was faking, Brady thinks. He said so, time and time again: I know you’re in there, Brady. Some of the suits from the DA’s office had said the same thing, but with them it had only been wishful thinking; they wanted to put him on trial and have done with him. Hodges, though . . .
“He said it with conviction,” Brady says.
And maybe this isn’t such terrible news, after all. Half of the Zappits Freddi loaded up and Babineau sent out are now active, which means most of those people will be as open to invasion as the little fag he just dealt with. Plus, there’s the website. Once the Zappit people start killing themselves—with a little help from Brady Wilson Hartsfield, granted—the website will push others over the edge: monkey see, monkey do. At first it will be just the ones who were closest to doing it anyway, but they will lead by example and there will be many more. They’ll march off the edge of life like stampeding buffalo going over a cliff.
But still.
Hodges.