Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  “I talked to you on the phone. Can you find all this stuff for me?”

  David looked at the list and used one finger to push his glasses farther up his nose. “You building some kind of transmitter?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m just picking this up for a friend.”

  The clerk shuffled through the four pages of Julissa’s neatly scripted list and looked up at Chris. “I hope she’s gonna pay you back, because just to warn you, this’s gonna be at least two thousand dollars worth of stuff.”

  Chris smiled. “She mentioned that.”

  “You wanna go somewhere for about half an hour? It’s gonna take a while to find all this.” The clerk gestured at the store with a sweep of his hand. “This place isn’t exactly in alphabetical order.”

  “Sure,” Chris said.

  He walked out of the store and back onto University Avenue. It had been ten years since he’d been in Berkeley and he’d never known the town well anyway, so he walked without a plan or a destination. He just wandered. There was plenty to think about. He’d been hoping the police investigating the Intelligene murders would leak something useful, but so far, there’d been nothing. He and Julissa had never talked about how the killer had tracked down Chevalier. After it found Chevalier, it picked up the trail leading to the four of them and their investigation in Galveston. They’d been so busy running from the consequences of that disaster, they’d hardly had a chance to consider how it had come to pass.

  Chevalier had emailed some of his results outside of Intelligene—his last letter to them mentioned a researcher at Harvard who’d done isotope hydrology tests on saliva from the fork—so there had been at least one breach to the outside. It was impossible to know how far downstream the information had run. Then there was the chance, which Chris considered more likely, that Chevalier had contacted the FBI. Chevalier couldn’t have known the killer had a direct conduit into that database. He tried to think of any other plausible explanations and couldn’t.

  He took out his phone and called the hotel room. Julissa answered on the first ring.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “It’s me.”

  “Okay. God. I was scared when the phone rang. I thought—well, I don’t know. I’m just jumpy.”

  “I wanted to check and make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m all right. I’ve got the chain on the door and I kept the butter knife from breakfast this morning because it’s the only thing I’ve got.”

  “I’m in Berkeley. I found a store that has everything on the list. The clerk’s getting it together now.”

  “Did he know what it’s for?” she asked. Her voice was so gentle on the phone. He thought, again, about the way their bodies fit together when he held her.

  “He asked if it was a transmitter.”

  “Yeah. It might look like that. Good.”

  “Listen,” Chris said. “I had an idea about Intelligene. I think Chevalier might’ve tried to contact the FBI. Maybe he got scared after he thought about what he’d found. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Julissa was silent and Chris could picture her thinking about it, tapping the end of a pencil against her chin and picking his idea to pieces.

  “It makes sense. But they can’t be that aware of what goes on at the FBI, or they would’ve known about the joint task force looking for them. If they knew about that, why risk of sending those guys into the U.S.?”

  “But they didn’t take a risk. The FBI doesn’t have a clue how they got into the country.”

  “So you think maybe they know about the task force and they don’t care?”

  “It’s a thought. Can you think of any other way he could’ve found out about Chevalier?”

  Now he actually could hear her tapping a pen against something, probably the leather-topped desk in the hotel room.

  “We know Chevalier emailed that researcher at Harvard, the isotope hydrologist. That guy might’ve spread results to other scientists, and scientists talk a lot. The killer might have a few on his staff somewhere, or might have a few he’s watching.”

  “Why would he have scientists on his staff?”

  “Maybe he wants to know more about himself.”

  Now Chris was silent. Julissa had just hit on something he’d never considered before, and he was disgusted when he found the smallest pull of sympathy for the thing. He saw it out there, alone in the world, wondering: What am I? And then on the heels of that thought he had another that was more disturbing still: what if it tracked scientists not because it wanted to know more about itself, but because it wanted to find another creature like it? What if it had some reason to believe that it wasn’t alone in the world? Could it be searching for a mate?

  “Chris?”

  “I’m here.” He paused. “Just thinking. I’ll be back in the city in about an hour and a half. Can I bring you anything besides the stuff on the list?”

  “No. I’m okay. Just nervous being in the hotel alone.”

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  He hung up and continued walking along Berkeley’s side streets, lined with neatly kept professors’ houses. He thought about Intelligene and the killings in Foxborough. There was more to it than they were seeing. Maybe more than they would get from the hacker they were tracking, but he couldn’t see it clearly yet. He put his hands in his pockets and looped around one more block before coming back to the store. The clerk, David, had loaded everything into two cardboard boxes on top of the counter next to the cash register.

  “What’s the damage?” Chris asked.

  “Worse than she predicted. Twenty seven hundred and change.” He handed Chris an invoice and Chris gave him a credit card.

  Driving back into the city, stuck in the traffic at the toll booth to get onto the Bay Bridge, he thought about Julissa alone in their hotel rooms. She had every reason to be scared. They still had no idea how it was tracking them. If it found them the first time, it could find them again. And now they were defenseless because they’d been forced to leave all of their weapons aboard Sailfish when they abandoned her on Molokai. They would have to think of a way to protect themselves. It was next to impossible to legally buy a gun in San Francisco. They would have to improvise. He looked at the two heavy boxes on the passenger seat next to him. A solder gun lay atop the plastic-wrapped pile of capacitors and oscillators and god knew what else. At least he could put himself to good use by finding them some weapons while Julissa somehow put all that together.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Westfield was having a hard time staying on his barstool. He was holding on to his drink with both hands and staring down into it, focusing on the disk of liquid that vibrated gently in time to the music. He must have closed his eyes there for a little while, but now he was back and he focused on the drink. When he thought about it, he could remember ordering it a minute ago. It was Jack Daniel’s, neat. Two fingers’ worth in a tumbler, the way he always got it. The bartender was standing at the other end of the bar talking to another customer. There was a voice from the stool next to him, a man asking a question, and he turned and looked at him. Another drunk, sitting on the stool next to his. He looked like he was drinking the same thing as Westfield. Maybe they’d ordered this round together at the same time. Yes, that was it. He remembered it now and turned back to the man. The room spun a little as he turned, the mirror behind the liquor bottles spinning nicely, the neon lights it reflected going into a good swirling blur. This was his favorite part of getting drunk: those fine hours when he was truly wasted, yet capable of drinking infinitely more without any real effect at all until much later when he simply blacked out, usually, but not always, in his own bed. As always, he felt elated to have achieved this state. I did it! he wanted to shout. Instead he finished his slow swivel on the barstool and looked at the man next to him.

  “You say something?”

  “You go away there for a second, pal?”

  “Yeah. I guess I did.” He set his drink dow
n.

  “You were telling me about your friends.”

  He remembered his friends. God, it was good to have people behind him again. Good people he could trust.

  “I don’t know where they went. I wish I had their phone number or something. Could get ’em to come over here. Chris is a really good guy. Julissa’s drop-dead beautiful, but she’s got a dangerous mind, you know?”

  He reached out with his right hand to pick up his drink. His fingers fumbled it and it almost spilled onto the bar. He looked at his hand and couldn’t quite focus on it, but his fingers looked bent sideways at each knuckle. That couldn’t be right; in fact, that was so fucked up it was almost funny.

  “My fingers look bent out of shape, you know?” he said to his new friend. He held up his hand. Moving his right hand made his left hand sting around the wrist. That didn’t make much sense either.

  “Don’t worry about that,” his friend said. “You look okay to me.”

  “Okay.”

  The Jack Daniel’s was warm and sharp, the only truly familiar thing in this whole place. He couldn’t remember coming in here. What city was this?

  He must have said it out loud because his new friend answered.

  “Galveston, Aaron.”

  He tried to remember how he got in here and couldn’t. He could remember Galveston. He remembered some flashes of a different bar. A girl in leather chaps and nothing else, dancing against a polished brass pole. His new friend was shouting and trying to wave her over with a handful of hundred dollar bills. Had they really been in a strip club? He tried to think of it and just had that one flash, the whole memory a scene about a second long: the girl dancing against the pole, his friend shouting, the glare of the spotlight. He couldn’t see her face. Her head was turned away from him and he could just see the way her flaming red hair spun through the air as she moved. That was all. He remembered walking down the street, afterwards. This man, who was his new friend, was propping him up at the elbow and telling him he shouldn’t have grabbed at the girl that way. That it was okay to look but not to touch. That he’d take him somewhere quieter to get a drink and then maybe they could try another place after he calmed down a little. But that memory swam in and out and he wasn’t sure if he was looking at it straight on, or if he was just seeing its reflection on the surface of his drink. That didn’t make sense, but he thought for a second he was on to something. It slipped away. The man was talking again and he looked up.

  “I asked you if you remembered what Chris and Julissa were going to do when they left the hotel.”

  “Julissa went home. Chris went to Boston, and then they both met in Hawaii.”

  “Why?”

  He remembered the man picking him up off the sidewalk when he’d tried to stop. He’d wanted to just lie down on the sidewalk and sleep on warm concrete, but the man helped him up, told him that the cops would come and put him in the drunk tank if he did that. And he didn’t want to end up in a drunk tank in this town, the man promised him. You want to land in a drunk tank in Texas? Are you kidding me? But that memory was as hollow as the strip club.

  “Why?” the man asked again. “Why’d they meet in Hawaii?”

  “We were looking for the guy.”

  “What guy? The killer?”

  “No, not the killer, the other guy. Look, you need another drink. I need another drink. Let’s get another drink.”

  “We just got this one,” his friend said.

  He looked around and saw the drink. That’s right. Jack Daniel’s, neat. Two fingers’ worth.

  “Then let’s drink it.”

  “Okay.”

  Westfield picked up his drink with both hands and finished it in one long, burning swallow. As he did so, his sleeve fell down on his left wrist and he saw a handcuff there. No chain, just the cuff. There was a pair of tweezers jammed under the cuff, so tight against his skin that the sharp tips were drawing blood. When the whiskey wore off a day or two from now he was going to have a lot of questions about tonight. That struck him as funny and he laughed.

  “What?” the man said.

  “Nothing.”

  “C’mon, don’t hold back on me. I’m your buddy. Who else pulled you off a sidewalk tonight? Or got you out of the way before bouncers beat the shit out of you?”

  “I was just thinking this is gonna seem pretty fucked up tomorrow when I get up.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Westfield looked down at the bar again. His glass was full to the brim now. The bartender must have come up behind him and filled it, but he’d never seen any bartender fill a tumbler level full with whiskey.

  “Who were they looking for?”

  “The computer guy, you know, whoever’s changing the VICAP data on the dead girls. I talked to Julissa before she got on the plane in Austin.”

  “You think they can find him?”

  “Julissa? Sure. She’s dangerous. Did I say that already?”

  “When they track him down, what are they going to do?”

  “Ask him questions.”

  “In person?”

  “What, do you think we’re going to call him up on the phone? Ask him to take a survey? We’ll go in person. All of us.”

  “Let’s drink on it.”

  They raised their glasses and drank. Whiskey sloshed over the sides of Westfield’s glass and ran down his fingers and wrists and burned the cuts and broken bones like boiling acid, but he held on to the glass and drank it dry. The room was spinning, the good way it did when he was all the way down in the deep well of Jack Daniel’s.

  He looked at the man, his new friend, and saw him do a strange thing. He reached into the pocket of his black pants and took out a phone. It was big for a cell phone these days, its antenna thick and boxy. Westfield recognized it for what it was: a satellite phone. The man dialed a number, put the phone to his ear and waited. He locked his eyes on Westfield’s.

  “It’s Kent,” he said. “The girl’s looking for our technician. Wilcox is following her. They’ll be in San Francisco, if she’s any good.” He listened for a while longer and then put the phone back into his pocket. Then he stood, turned around, and walked away from the bar. He passed the jukebox, and headed towards the door.

  “Hey!” Westfield said.

  The man didn’t turn around.

  “Hey!”

  He opened the heavy steel door by turning a wheel and pushing with his shoulder. Then he stepped out onto the street, straightening his clothes. The sound of traffic roared into the bar and then quieted again when the door slammed shut. Westfield watched the wheel spin as the man sealed bar’s door from the other side. That had to be the craziest bar door he’d ever seen. He sat on his barstool and tried again to piece this night together. He tried to remember what had led him into a strip club, but now he could only remember the idea he’d been in a strip club. It was all words. His friend explaining how the girl was dancing on the pole, explaining how he’d been right there next to him, shouting and waving the cash. Explaining how the bouncers came running when Westfield had tried to grab the dancer. That’s all he had now, just the memory of the words. Like he was feeding me, Westfield thought. He pushed up his sleeve and looked at the cuff on his left wrist. It was so tight it was cutting the circulation to his fingers. I’m going to need to get that thing off pretty soon, he thought.

  The bar was empty now. Closed, in fact. The only light came from the red glow of a neon Budweiser sign the bartender neglected to switch off. It was reflected in the mirror and the shuttered windows and a hundred more times in the bottles lining the back wall. Westfield thought about going around the bar and pouring himself another drink, but instead, he pushed off his stool and tottered carefully to the pool table. Its felt was protected by a faux-leather cover that was probably blue but looked black in the red light. He climbed up onto the table, lay on his back, and passed out.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The device took shape faster than she’d expected.

  When Ch
ris came back from Berkeley, he stood on the bed with masking tape and a shower cap from the bathroom to seal off the smoke detector so she could use the soldering iron without setting off an alarm. Then he’d gotten out of her way, walking into Chinatown. They decided there was too much risk buying a gun in a store, because of the background checks. Getting something on the street, or stealing guns from an empty police car, were out of the question. Julissa didn’t need to point out if he got arrested, and disappeared to jail along with his access to safe sources of funds, she would only last about as long as the cash in her purse. So they decided Chris would see what he could buy just by asking around in shops.

  When he left, she kept working, but it was harder when she was alone. At every sound in the hallway, she stopped and stared at the door, expecting it to be kicked in. There were the usual hotel noises, like the soft whir of the elevators running up the central atrium, and the rattle of a housekeeping cart. She was listening for padded footsteps that stopped outside her door, and she was thinking of men in cheap suits who had killed for their countries and who now killed in the name of the thing. She was thinking of the thing itself, wondering how it might come at her. Maybe it could slide through the air vents and spill onto the floor like an uncoiling snake; maybe it would come through the twentieth-floor window after scurrying up the wall like a spider. She thought of picking up the phone to call Chris on his satellite phone, but stopped herself. She had work to do.

  And in spite of her fears, she got it done. She had a polished version of the software by the time Chris came back with a black duffel bag, which he unzipped and unpacked on the bedspread. He’d found two Tasers, four bottles of pepper spray, and half a dozen stainless steel throwing knives in leather sheaths. The knives were serrated and heavy, and reminded her of the kind of junk they sold in border towns along the Rio Grande. Chris shrugged, embarrassed. He said he’d found this cache in the back room of a basement-level Chinatown shop that sold pirated pornographic DVDs. It wasn’t much of a defense against the thing hunting them, and she could tell by his face he knew it. She took him and held him close. His hands slipped low onto her back and she kissed him.