“You brought the money?”
“Of course.” Sounding impatient. The old geezer with whom she had commenced this nutty business had the same impatient way of speaking. He and Dr. Z looked nothing alike, but they sounded alike, enough to make her wonder if they weren’t brothers. Only they also sounded like that someone else, the old colleague she used to work with. The one who turned out to be Mr. Mercedes.
Freddi doesn’t want to think about that any more than she wants to think about the various hacks she’s done on Dr. Z’s behalf. She hits the buzzer beside the intercom.
She goes to her door to wait for him, taking a nip of Scotch to fortify herself. She tucks the flask into the breast pocket of her middle shirt, then reaches into the pocket of the one beneath, where she keeps her breath mints. She doesn’t believe Dr. Z would give Shit One if he smelled booze on her breath, but she always used to pop a mint after a nip when she was working at Discount Electronix, and old habits are strong habits. She takes her Marlboros from the pocket of her top shirt and lights one. It will further mask the smell of the booze, and calm her a little more, and if he doesn’t like her secondhand smoke, tough titty.
“This guy has set you up in a pretty nice apartment and paid you almost thirty thousand dollars over the last eighteen months or so,” Gloria had said. “Tall tickets for something any hacker worth her salt could do in her sleep, at least according to you. So why you? And why so much?”
More stuff Freddi doesn’t want to think about.
It all started with the picture of Brady and his mom. She found it in the junk room at Discount Electronix, shortly after the staff had been told the Birch Hill Mall store was closing. Their boss, Anthony “Tones” Frobisher, must have taken it out of Brady’s work cubby and tossed it back there after the world found out that Brady was the infamous Mercedes Killer. Freddi had no great love for Brady (although they did have a few meaningful conversations about gender identity, back in the day). Wrapping the picture and taking it to the hospital was pure impulse. And the few times she’d visited him afterwards had been pure curiosity, plus a little pride at the way Brady had reacted to her. He smiled.
“He responds to you,” the new head nurse—Scapelli—said after one of Freddi’s visits. “That’s very unusual.”
By the time Scapelli replaced Becky Helmington, Freddi knew that the mysterious Dr. Z who took over supplying her with cash was in reality Dr. Felix Babineau. She didn’t think about that, either. Or about the cartons that eventually began arriving from Terre Haute via UPS. Or the hacks. She became an expert in not thinking, because once you started doing that, certain connections became obvious. And all because of that damn picture. Freddi wishes now she’d resisted the impulse, but her mother had a saying: Too late always comes too early.
She hears his footsteps coming down the hall. She opens the door before he can ring the bell, and the question is out of her mouth before she knows she is going to ask it.
“Tell me the truth, Dr. Z—are you Brady?”
4
Hodges is barely inside his front door and still taking off his coat when his cell rings. “Hey, Holly.”
“Are you all right?”
He can see a lot of calls from her starting with this exact same greeting. Well, it’s better than Drop dead, motherfucker. “Yeah, I’m good.”
“One more day, and then you start treatments. And once you start, you don’t stop. Whatever the doctors say, you do.”
“Stop worrying. A deal is a deal.”
“I’ll stop worrying when you’re cancer free.”
Don’t, Holly, he thinks, and closes his eyes against the unexpected sting of tears. Don’t, don’t, don’t.
“Jerome is coming tonight. He called from his plane to ask about Barbara, and I told him everything she told me. He’ll be in at eleven o’clock. A good thing he left when he did, because a storm is coming. It’s supposed to be a bad one. I offered to rent him a car the way I do for you when you go out of town, it’s very easy now that we have the corporate account—”
“That you lobbied for until I gave in. Believe me, I know.”
“But he doesn’t need a car. His father is picking him up. They’ll go in to see Barbara at eight tomorrow, and bring her home if the doctor says she can go. Jerome said he can be at our office by ten, if that’s okay.”
“Sounds fine,” Hodges says, wiping his eyes. He doesn’t know how much Jerome can help, but he knows it will be very good to see him. “Anything more he can find out from her about that damn gadget—”
“I asked him to do that. Did you get Dinah’s?”
“Yeah. And tried it. There’s something up with the Fishin’ Hole demo screen, all right. It makes you sleepy if you look at it too long. Purely accidental, I think, and I don’t see how most kids would be affected, because they’d want to go right to the game.”