Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  For almost a minute, nothing happened. Then, the twitching subsided. Her breathing was still ragged though.

  Babd’s legs and body began to jump, like dogs do when they are chasing something in a dream. Little muffled yips erupted from her at irregular intervals.

  Slowly, Gwen’s breathing began to normalize, syncing with that of the dog dreaming at her side.

  As I watched, I glanced down the hallway. I’d left the door to the apartment open. I realized that I had peed myself a little. Great. DNA, on the bathroom floor.

  That’s all I could think of.

  Gwen was catatonic. Babd was in her head trying to figure something out.

  I’d just come face to face with something so horrible that even dead things were scared of it. And after all of the overwhelming feelings I’d had during the last five minutes, it was like suddenly I didn’t have access to them anymore. All I could key on and think about was that I’d probably left some of my DNA on the bathroom floor for the cops to find because surely someone would have heard all of this and called the cops, right?

  Another minute passed. I think. Maybe it was five seconds. Things seemed to be going in slow motion.

  There was a sound at my feet. It was Gwen. Crying.

  I reached down and tried to gather her up to me. Her eyes shot open, and for a second she panicked, fighting my hands off. Then, she realized where she was and sat up. I held her.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It’s gone,” she said. “It’s gone.”

  Her voice was little more than a ragged whisper.

  “Yeah, it’s gone,” I said.

  “I’m done. I have to be done.”

  I held her, trying to think about something other than getting the bathroom cleaned, and the apartment door shut.

  “Babd pulled me out of…” and her voice trailed off.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, tightly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “She’s a good dog.”

  I looked down. Babd wasn’t moving.

  I was afraid to put my hand on her, but I did.

  Dead.

  I heard a voice say, “This can’t keep happening,” and it was probably mine.

  We have to get the body out of here and get cleaning supplies and pants.

  The dog just laid there, as dead things do.

  “We have to get the body out of here and get cleaning supplies and pants,” I made myself say.

  “What?” said Gwen. “Lincoln, I can’t understand you.”

  The dog was still dead. I still had my hand on her.

  There was a hand on my face. Another one shook my shoulder.

  “Hey,” said Gwen. “You’re mumbling. I need you back here. I need… help.”

  I looked at her. She was a wreck. Barely holding it together.

  I drew in a slow breath through my nose and forced it out through my mouth.

  I did it again.

  Things were clearer.

  “I said, we have to get the body out of here and get cleaning supplies and pants.”

  “Okay,” said Gwen. “We can do that.”

  I stood, cradling the dog in my arms.

  “Stairs or elevator?” I said.

  “I’m not going back down that hallway,” said Gwen.

  “Then stairs,” I said.

  Two more flights, and neither of us were in great shape right now.

  “You sure?” I said.

  Gwen looked down the hallway.

  “I’m not going down there.”

  “Okay.”

  We started climbing. I realized that the apartment door was still open.

  I also realized that there was no longer a body in the tub.

  This made me feel a little better.

  “I got the jacket,” I said.

  Gwen nodded.

  “Brigit’s gone,” I said. “The thing took her.”

  “Oh my God,” said Gwen. “At least she was already dead.”

  I saw Brigit’s dead face, warped with fear. I wanted nothing to do with that memory ever again.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good thing.”

  The dog’s body weighed maybe forty pounds. That’s a lot to carry up two full flights of stairs after the day I’d been having. Gwen wasn’t in the best shape at the moment. We had to stop twice on the way up.

  When we reached her apartment, she spread a garbage bag out on the floor for me to lay the body on, then changed her mind and got a plush bathroom towel. She grabbed me a pair of her sweatpants. Pretty embarrassing really, but given everything that had gone down she was pretty cool about it.

  I grabbed some cleaner and paper towels, and we agreed that she would stay in her apartment while I went to clean up.

  I took the elevator this time and realized that the smart thing to do before would have been to go down a flight of stairs, walk across the way and take the elevator. Obviously, our brains weren’t firing on all cylinders.

  What other stupid things had I done?

  I quickly entered the apartment and shut the door behind me.

  Fox was out and ready for anything that wanted to go bump in the night, but there was nothing.

  The bathroom was just a bathroom. With the exception of the vague smell of pee, you couldn’t tell that someone had been there. And on that note: bathroom. I spritzed the linoleum with the cleaner and wiped it down with the paper towels. For good measure, I hit the bathtub too. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I was scared and completely wigged out being back there. I was fully expecting that thing to tear open the fabric of space, sink its worm-fingers into my head and suck me into the Outer Forth.

  I was expecting it, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Brigit had obviously cut some kind of deal with it, and it had come to collect on its debt. I’d done no such thing.

  But the feeling was powerful. I cleaned thoroughly, but as quickly as I possibly could.

  I took a last glance around to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything or left any stupid evidence lying about.

  I hadn’t, so I backtracked through the living room, and out into the hallway. I shut and locked the door.

  And that was that.

  I put the key back into my coat pocket, took a deep breath and turned toward the elevator.

  Someday soon, someone would rent that apartment and have no idea.

  Hopefully.

  When I made it back to Gwen’s apartment, there was an empty beer on the counter.

  “I called the Vet Hospital. They’ll take the body for fifty dollars,” she said.

  That made sense. We weren’t going to just dump it somewhere.

  “Okay,” I said. I needed to get cleaned up and try to make it to Henri’s office before they closed. “Let’s split up then. I’m going to go get the phone logs, and you head to the vet.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Um, this is kind of important.”

  “Damn it, Lincoln. I am not okay. Don’t you get it? I’m not taking this dog’s body to the vet. I’m not going to the office. I’m going to stay right here, steal my roommate’s bottle of whisky and start drinking it until I forget any of this ever happened.”

  But it’s not safe.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s… I don’t know. Just don’t.”

  She shifted toward the kitchen counter and seemed to almost collapse against it.

  “Whatever happened down there,” she said, “it felt like… like someone lit me on fire from the inside, and it wouldn’t stop, and right now it’s all I can do to not throw up thinking about it. So, you get to go and do all the things because I’m done.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And I’ll drink whatever I want.”

  “Okay.”

  “Stop saying that. I don’t care if you’re okay with it or not. It’s like you’re giving me permission that I don’t need.”

  Okay.

  I nodded. I knelt on the floor and
bundled the dog’s body in the towel.

  I walked out.

  “Lincoln,” she said, before the door closed.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought this was going to be fun or exciting or something. But it’s not. I’m sorry I can’t help you anymore.”

  She looked at me like she was expecting something.

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” I said. “I have to get going. I can’t stand here like this all day.”

  “Of course not,” she said, and shut the door.

  Chapter 17

  It was lonely, stopping at the vet.

  It was lonely, getting a pair of khakis and a red polo shirt at Walmart, alone. No dog waited in the car. No Gwen told me I looked stupid with pleat-front pants.

  It was lonely driving to the South Side to the office complex where Henri’s credentials could get me the information I needed.

  I’d been alone for a long time, but I guess I hadn’t really felt lonely. I suppose that in objective terms, I was, but I hadn’t felt it. It was only now, after the last few weeks, that this was coming back for some reason.

  I vote nay to this development.

  I would prefer for this to recede and leave me how it found me several weeks prior.

  I had things to do, and it wasn’t like this was a permanent state anyway. Babd would come back around soon enough. I’d talk to Gwen after this was all over.

  Focus.

  I grabbed the jacket from the passenger seat. Fox wouldn’t be going inside with me. I was sure the jacket had its limits, and I didn’t feel like testing them on talking my way out of firearms violations at the metal detector I could see inside the front door.

  I put the jacket on and felt instantly fantastic. My momentary bout with introspection faded away like an inhibition after three shots of tequila.

  I strode through the doors.

  “Hey Lew,” I said to the security guard, instinctively. His nametag said, “Lewis,” and I don’t think that I even consciously registered that fact before the words were out of my mouth. Apparently, the jacket affected the wearer as much as it did everyone else.

  “Hey,” he said, like he’d known me forever. There was a basket beside the walk-through metal detector, so I dropped my keys, wallet and watch in. I passed through without a beep and he handed me the basket. “Have a good one,” he said.

  I collected my things and approached reception.

  A young woman sat behind the counter.

  “Hi,” I said, and found my elbows resting on the counter, arms intruding over it into her space.

  “Hi,” she said. She immediately straightened up, put her shoulders back and slightly parted her lips. “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure you can. I think I left my badge at home. Can you buzz me in?”

  She bit her lip.

  “I can’t. I mean, I would. But we don’t have a buzzer.”

  I heard the door click, past the counter and down the hall. Two men came out, one in a suit and the other in khakis and a red polo. Mine wasn’t an exact match to his, but it was close enough. While the door was open, I could see a coffee machine past them in the distance.

  Why not?

  “I’m thirsty,” I said to the receptionist. “Do you want to just walk me in, and we can go grab some coffee?”

  “Sure,” she said, and I didn’t think that a person could stand up that quickly.

  We walked back toward the door.

  “I’ve seen you before,” she said. “It’s Gerard, isn’t it?”

  And again, why not?

  “Got me,” I said. “You must see hundreds of people a day. That’s impressive.”

  She blushed.

  She actually blushed, said a sort of “Oh yeah well…” thing and made what was a kind of endearingly dorky shrug.

  This jacket.

  She badged us in, telling me how she and her cousin had gone to France last summer and met these really cute guys, and the one was named Gerard. She popped a pod into the coffee maker, seated a paper cup and hit the button.

  “But you’re cuter than him,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said, “and I’m made in the U.S. of A.”

  Good God. What was I saying?

  She looked like she was going to say something else, but then visibly stopped herself. It got awkward for a second. Well, awkward for her. I didn’t think I could feel awkward in this jacket. The coffee maker started to steam and delivered the drink with a relieved sort of gurgle.

  I took the cup and sipped it.

  “Look,” I said, motioning further back into the facility with my head, “I have to get back to work. You probably should too.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, not budging.

  “This was fun,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

  Even when I walked around the corner, she was still standing there, idly rubbing her fingers along the bottom edge of the coffee machine. As I passed into a large cube farm, I looked for an empty workstation with a computer. It seemed like no one had permanent desks, as everyone who was working had a laptop.

  Keep going until you find something you can use. I wound my way further into the complex.

  “Sorry. Becky’s kind of pathetic,” a woman said, right next to me. She’d slotted in beside me and matched my stride without me noticing.

  “She seems nice,” I said.

  The woman laughed, a derisive sound.

  “If you like that sort of thing,” she said.

  Wow.

  No wonder the Praecants were completely screwed up.

  I was trying to think of something witty to say to her– and even though I really didn’t want to, I felt compelled to–when I saw a man starting to get up from his desk. He was closing his laptop.

  “Hey,” I said, “uh, Bruce?”

  He looked up.

  “Juan,” he said.

  “Sorry man.”

  “No. It’s cool.”

  I looked at the woman who had been walking with me and was now standing a little too close.

  “So I need to talk to Juan here. I’ll catch you later, okay?”

  “Yeah you will,” she said and stalked off swinging her ass a good 50 percent past an HR-acceptable angle with each step.

  “What’s up, bud,” said Juan. “You’re…”

  “Gerard,” I said. Might as well keep it consistent.

  “Oh yeah,” he said.

  “You mind if I hop on your machine for a few minutes?”

  “Aw I’d let you, but I’m headed out to a client site.”

  He looked like he really wanted to help me. Let’s try pushing. Think like a sales person. Normally, that was foreign to me, but the jacket seemed to be sinking its fingers into my brain.

  “How about this?” I said. “I just need on for five minutes, and you’re leaving anyway. I’ll log out and close it up when I’m done.” I found myself doing a little Ali shuffle and shadow boxing at him. “Come on!”

  Did this shit really work for people?

  Without magical assistance?

  It couldn’t. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have gotten past the front door. And if I had, Juan probably would have just stared me down when I went past, then called security if I asked to use his machine.

  “Oh. All right,” said Juan. He cuffed me on the shoulder. “Want to grab some beers later?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. That’s a great idea. My username’s just ‘Gerard’ with a ‘G’. Ping me after you’re done at the client site.”

  “I will man,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “No, thank you.”

  Lincoln.

  Seriously.

  But it was working. This was simultaneously horrifying and, I suspected, addictive.

  Juan grabbed his backpack and what looked like a technical repair kit and left.

  “Catch you later!” he said.

  I sat at his desk. His computer was still on, unlocked and
logged in. He could easily be fired for this. He wouldn’t. Well, maybe he wouldn’t. I would try to do this surgically so as not to have a rain of shit land on his head tomorrow. If it would land on anyone’s head, it would be Henri’s.

  I glanced around and for an instant considered taking the jacket off. I was still drawing attention. In the span of the next twenty seconds as I scanned the place, I got two manly chin-nods from bros and three smiles that I knew for a fact I could convert into more than smiles from ladies if I’d wanted to.

  That kind of attention was probably bad. These people were going to remember me for sure, unless the jacket had additional roofie-like qualities of which I was unaware. But I’d be insane to actually take it off. I’d probably end up in handcuffs the second it was no longer charming everyone around me into being happy that a complete stranger with no ID was using an unauthorized computer in their midst.

  I was just going to have to let it ride and accept that tradeoff.

  The laptop was a Mac. I popped open a terminal and, using the memories Babd had shared with me I shelled into the proper system with Henri’s credentials. He did indeed have access. The dirty liar.

  I hadn’t anticipated the magnitude of the logs. These were the low level records of every call made through their wireless systems. The files themselves were massive, and a quick inspection from the command line led me to guess that there were millions of them covering just the last few days.

  I hadn’t been thinking far enough ahead. Of course this would be the case. The amounts of data were massive. Digging through the logs looking for Dan’s phone number would take forever using standard Unix commands. But that implied something else.

  If it would take me forever to do, it would also take employees forever to do it, which meant that they probably had a different, far more efficient way of doing it.

  I fired up a web browser on the laptop, and it defaulted to the internal corporate home page like I expected. There was a Search box. I typed location history and got an internal search result page.

  The results were generally crappy, and I had a hard time understanding how the first three results (New 5th floor bathroom policy, Eclipse JSP Corp1 Configuration, and a PDF entitled Open Enrollment 2012 Begins Now!) were considered relevant in any universe. But the fourth result was to an internal tool called ReMapper that required additional authentication.