I had to give a urine sample one time? I’m walking across the hall, careful not to spill my cup, this asshole comes tearing out the door…
>>>>>>>>>>>>
TUESDAY JUNE 19, 11:45 p.m.
THE JUMP
Casual stroll past the front of the Executive Center. All glass, lit from within—no problem seeing the two people in the lobby. A woman in a baby blue uniform was mopping the floor near the front door. A security guard was sitting at the information desk, reading the paper and earnestly picking his nose. He was doing some major excavation on his nostrils. Stay busy, my friend.
The side street led into the alley that ran along the building’s back. Dark, narrow, lined with dumpsters. Did Jen troll here? I made my midnight creep—or my 15-minutes-before creep—to the rear door. Even with no light I could see the slight tremble in my hands. I was really going through with this, right? I took five slow breaths and looked up. My estimation: There were 9,000 stars in the sky and at the moment they all seemed to be revolving around this building.
Fuck the sky.
I dipped into the backpack and took out my pick gun. The back door lock was a dead bolt, usually a pain in the ass to open, but I already knew the make and model from my afternoon trip. I’d already stuck the right pick in the gun.
The thin metal rod slipped nicely into the lock. I triggered the gun and wrapped my hand around it as it vibrated, trying to muffle the noise. Few seconds of this, turning the gun as it vibed, I could feel the pins inside the lock push up past the shear line.
I tried the door, felt the bolt slide, then stepped inside and softly closed the door. For the count of two seconds I stood and listened. Nothing. I wasn’t in the sight lines of the security guard or the cleaning woman, which was good because I had exactly 13 seconds to work. There’s usually a 15-second gap between the time a security current is broken and the time the alarm goes off. This gives you a few moments to reset the system, assuming you belong here, or in the case of this building it gives the guards a few moments to make a quick check of the alley.
I pulled out a fine little thing called an electric jump. It looks like a cell phone with a pair of electrodes. Once you attach the electrodes to the wiring of a security system, like I was doing right now, the thing creates an electromagnetic field that keeps the current flowing. It jumps over the break you’ve made in the system. Emergency response teams use it a lot.
The only downside: It doesn’t last long. It can only fool the system for about 20 minutes. I say about because the amount of jump time varies from system to system, and I had no idea what this system could hold. I checked my watch. All I knew was, I had to be out of here by 12:05 the latest.
I started moving into the lobby. First impression: It was warm. They’d turned the a.c. way down for the night. Sticking close to the walls, I edged into a full view of the lobby. The cleaning woman was wringing her mop out in her rolling pail. The guard was dozing at the desk, knocked out, evidently, by all his finger work. I headed for the stairs, walking in a slow semi-crouch and making no noise whatsoever
The stairwell was stifling. There was zero a.c. pumping through here. Cheap bastards. I took the steps with care, conscious of each time my feet patted the cement.
No problem until the third landing. I heard a noise below—a door opening, somebody talking, metal wheels. The cleaning woman was parking her pail in the stairwell. She must’ve been saying something to the guard, telling him yeah, yeah. Her words echoed up the cement walls. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like the fucking Beatles.
The door closed. Silence. As I kept climbing, I realized I was already wet with sweat.
Half minute later I was on the fifth floor. I headed down the hall, feeling some small drafts of air, remembering that this was where I’d walked with Monte Slater, watched him slapping himself and saying there are ALWAYS obligations that have to be paid.
I went past his door and the doctors’ offices. I needed to check the street outside, make sure I hadn’t fucked up and set off a silent alarm. I walked to the glass wall at the end of the hall and looked down. Nothing. No cop cars pulling up, no security vehicles rushing to the curb.
Just a guy standing across the street.
Five stories up in the night I couldn’t get a clear look at him. His clothes were dark, that I could see, but I couldn’t make his face out. Was he wearing a ski mask? He was standing in a spill of light, glancing over at the building and pacing, then standing still, then pacing again like he was waiting for something or like he couldn’t make up his mind. Now he was pulling a cell out of his pocket and staring at the building while he made a call.
My hands went cold, and the shaking ran from a spot deep in my brain to the bottom of my feet.
The fuck was going on? Had somebody followed me here? What Third Man shit was this?
I checked my watch. No time to find answers now. I’d already lost a minute I’d never get back.
I bent down at the doctors’ door. The lock, shit, it was a tubular lock—the pins inside were positioned all the way around the circumference of the cylinder plug. Not a piece of cake. My heart was beating so hard I was sure the sound was echoing in the stairwell and tumbling down to the lobby.
I tried different picks, turning the gun, turning the gun, doing my best to stifle the electric vibration. Two minutes into it I saw something move down the other end of the hall. I saw something skitter along the ground. My hand was already on the Glock when I realized it was a dust bunny, blown along the floor by the minimal a.c. drafts.
Two more picks and a whole minute later, I felt a tiny click in the lock. When I stood up, the sweat was rolling down my face like I’d been walking in rain.
The door opened. Inside, I fumbled for the keypad I’d seen that morning and I clipped it with the electrodes from another jump. The waiting room was all dark lumps, shapes edged in silver by the streetlights.
I made my way to the windows. What was the guy doing now? Hard to say—he was gone. I scanned the street. Nothing to see. Was this good news or bad? Had he left or was he coming in after me?
Fuck. I felt out a path through the waiting room and into the dark offices, following Wooly’s directions, fighting the panic urges while ticking off the seconds in my head.
It took a total of 73 of them to get to the file cabinets. Flashlight, on low. I kept the light in front of my body, blocking it from the window while I studied the cabinet lock. A pin-tumbler—an easy one, thank you Jesus. I gunned it carefully, staying alert for any noise, any silvery click in the front door lock. I was ready to jump at any sound out in the hall, out in the street, out in the world.
The files were color coded. I fingered the C’s until I came to Copely, Georgiana, a thick folder the color of American cheese. I opened it up under one of the desks, put the flashlight on high and started snapping digitals with my cell. Today’s chart was on top, followed by last Friday’s. That was mostly it, charts and charts, lot of ‘em. I wasn’t reading them, just glancing, shooting and flipping to the next one.
It wasn’t until I got to the letter that I paused. It looked like one of those I’ve examined your patient letters from another doctor, usually a specialist. But what stopped me were the words at the top. The doctor sending the letter belonged to a group of oncologists.
I didn’t have time to read it, but I skimmed while I shot it. I caught words like
advanced stages
inoperable
a brain tumor of this type
acute sensitivity to light
I put the cell down and ran through the last paragraph.
based on the rate of growth
less than a year to live
I just knelt there under the desk, looking over the letter again. Acute sensitivity to light. I thought about Georgiana, the constant darkness of her study, wearing sunglasses whenever she went out. I saw her at her desk, hands moving along the wood, telling me with knife-sharp accuracy about the rainy day my wife and daughter left me.
Less than a year to live.
>>>>>>
I got out of the Executive Center at 12:03—didn’t run into any other problems. Didn’t run into anybody in front of the building either. The cleaning woman in the lobby was still cleaning, the guard was still dozing. Nobody had come inside. Nothing out here but bone-white street light.
This was death-shaken paranoia, sure, but it was almost like somebody had been trying to pull a joke on me. I kept waiting for somebody to break out laughing somewhere, for some hard crack of laughter to come thundering out of the sky.
Didn’t happen.
>>>>>>
WEDNESDAY JUNE 20, 7:40 a.m.
THE LAST DREAMS
I needed sleep but I didn’t get much of it. Two, three hours. Which felt even shorter in a hotel room. I saw the morning break, the gray and gold light of a semi-cloudy dawn. If you can’t sleep, think—weigh the situation, form a picture. But I couldn’t think either. I couldn’t finish a thought, come to any conclusion. Emotional exhaustion is not a good thing.
When the phone went off I almost wasn’t going to answer. Then I saw Wooly’s number come up.
And heard Genevieve’s voice.
Please get over here. You have to help. Something terrible’s happened.
I found Wooly in the guest bathroom. His eccentric industrial hand dryer was splattered with blood. So were the walls and floor. It looked like a Parkinson’s patient had tried to open a can of paint. Wooly was sitting on the toilet—with the lid down—his arms shining red with fresh gashes. Pieces of a smashed champagne glass, the stem still intact, were spread all around him. He was using one of the bigger shards to slice himself up, cutting his fingers in the process. This was how I’d seen him in the backyard two years ago, drawing his own blood, mutilating his own flesh, completely psychotic and lost.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” said Genevieve. Her eyes were sagging in the sockets.
Wooly turned his head, staring wild-eyed at me, Genevieve and Nickie standing outside the doorway.
“She’ll be coming around the mountain, Quinn,” he said. “She’ll be coming around the mountain when she comes.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t be asking me,” said Genevieve. “One little phone call and he goes all to shit.”
“The check is in the mail, Quinn,” he said in his insane little singsong. “And I’m really enjoyin’ William Saroyan.”
“What was the call?”
“Farooq,” said Genevieve, “the manager at the lab. I took it. He said somebody Jay or something was filing a suit for non-payment, theft of service.”
“Jay Chan,” cried Wooly, suddenly aware. “That pale-assed skidmark chink Jay Chan!”
“Allegedly,” Genevieve went on, “he did some repairs on some machinery and he never got paid. So I give the message to this one and he goes all in a panic. Goes to the computer, couple minutes later he’s gone. He takes one of these glasses in there—and this is good glassware—cracks it on the sink and you can see what he’s done.”
“He brought this on me!” Wooly wailed.
Genevieve looked at him and shook her head. “What’s the big deal? Why should he get so upset? He gets sued all the time. I’ve sued him.”
“It’s an omen,” said Wooly. “Don’t you understand? It’s a fucking omen. Remember? Remember what she said? Nickie, what did she say?”
“The threat will come from the east. It will come with stalks…with solid lines and broken ones.”
“Right.”
“The threat will come from the east, but it will be everywhere. What is here is elsewhere.”
“Right—the threat will come from the east. Well where the fuck’s Chinaman Jay Chan from? He’s from the east. And the threat will be everywhere? Far as I’m concerned, the threat is everywhere.”
“Okay,” I said, “what’s with the stalks? The solid lines, the broken ones?”
“That’s what I looked up. That’s what I searched. That’s what they used in the I Ching—rice stalks. They used broken and unbroken rice stalks to tell the future. And you know what the root meaning of I Ching is? Weaving, tying things together, thread, fabric. And what do I do for a living? I test fucking fabric.”
“This isn’t real,” said Genevieve. “This is not reality.”
“It’s another fucking prediction!”
“It’s like the last days of the Romanovs around here.”
“I can’t stand this!” Wooly screamed, starting to cut himself again, slapping the piece of glass into his arm until his face went white with pain. “I’m gonna fucking die!”
I stepped inside. The bathroom seemed smaller now—Wooly had a way of completely filling space by himself. I moved toward him, negotiating the crunchy mess on the floor.
“Watch your footing,” said Genevieve.
I stopped six feet away from the toilet, giving the bughouse bastard some space. “Put it down.”
He blinked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“The glass,” I said, “put it down.”
He shook his head. “I can’t get away. Everything keeps reminding me what’s going to happen. No fucking escape.”
“So what good is cutting?”
“It’s relief. It calms you—I told you that once. It hurts so much it makes everything silent. Sometimes you can actually pass out from it.”
“And then what? You’re right back where you started.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what else to do. You know the feeling.”
“I know the feeling, but I don’t feel that way anymore.”
“Yeah well fuck you.”
“Put it down. You’re just fucking yourself up.”
“I can’t put it down. I’m in too much pain. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see I’m in pain?”
“What about me?” Genevieve yelled from the doorway. “I’m your wife. It’s my pain too!”
“Go fuck yourself!” He raised the shard and went to gouge another big hole in his arm.
I pulled the Glock and pointed it at his head. “Put it down.”
Wooly was astounded. “What’re you doing? You’re gonna shoot me?”
“Quinn,” Nickie said behind me, “I can’t let you do this.”
I wasn’t gonna let her stop me.
“Just put it down,” I said.
“You’re gonna shoot me?”
“If you don’t put it down.”
“What kinda threat is that? I’m gonna die anyway.”
“You want to go now or you want the extra 24?”
His lips started moving but nothing was coming out. It was like he was talking to himself. Then his face all at once collapsed and tears were running out of his eyes like fresh blood. He’d broken down crying just like that. He began curling himself into his own body as he let the glass fall on the floor. He was fetaling as he sat on the toilet, cocooning himself in his own flab.
“Don’t bother with me,” he sobbed. “I’m not worth it.”
Genevieve nearly knocked me over as she bowled into the bathroom. She grabbed two towels and ran them under cold water while I put the Glock away.
“My life’s a waste,” Wooly moaned. “My life is useless.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Genevieve said as she wrapped the towels around his bloody arms. “I don’t know how much more of this I can put up with.”
“I’m incompatible with myself is what it is.”
“You know what, I’m going to get the Bacitracin from the other bathroom and fix you up. When I’m done, you need a trip to the rock.”
Wooly declined. “I don’t deserve it. I’m not fit for the rock.”
“Well you could use it.”
He turned to the bathroom’s small window while Genevieve mopped at his limbs. “What’s the weather for tomorrow?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“This could be the last time I see the sun. This could be my last sun.” He
looked back, staring at the dripping walls. “And tonight will be my last night. My last sleep, my last dreams.”
“Get your ass out. I need to clean up in here.”
Wooly stood, a very wobbly affair. Genevieve took one armpit, I took the other and we began to shuffle him out. Nickie limped ahead of us as we guided him to the kitchen, halting as he grabbed the walls for balance.
“I’m inconsolable,” he kept saying. “Can you do something?”
We dropped him down on a kitchen chair. He stared at the table in front of him like it was beyond his comprehension.
“You want something to eat?” said Genevieve. “I’ll fix you something.”
“Why bother eating?” he lamented. “It all just turns to shit.”
“Then just stay put. I’ll go get the B.”
Wooly watched her leave. “She’s the only one who understands me,” he said, “and she doesn’t understand me.”
I glanced at Nickie. All I got back was a look of complete neutrality. She was acting as if I wasn’t there.
Wooly seemed to collect himself a bit. He turned to me. “You’re here,” he said with a genuine sense of discovery. “I guess you made out okay last night.”
I told him what I found. I told him about the letter, the inoperable brain tumor, the acute sensitivity to light.
Genevieve came back with the Bacitracin and gauze when I delivered the prognosis.
“Georgiana’s got less than a year to live.”
The women went into shock, plenty of oh my God’s going around.
Wooly, though, he just shrugged. “That makes two of us.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say,” said Genevieve. “Is that the best you can do? The woman’s dying, she’s sick and she’s dying, and this is what you have to say?”
Wooly began to weep again. “You’re right, you’re right. Horrible, you’re right. I’m a horrible person. I say horrible things. I do horrible things. I’m just a horrible human being.”
“Sad to say,” said Genevieve, “there’s probably worse out there than you.”
The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams Page 12
