“I know,” she said.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I’m screwed up. My emotions don’t work right anymore. This is just another thing to me, no matter how it goes.”
“I don’t believe that for a second,” she said.
“Don’t interrupt me while I’m being self-centered,” I said. “The point is that you’re not screwed up. You’re normal, and that’s not something I’m saying like I’m superior. There is value in being a whole person. When a tornado comes and there’s room in the basement for everyone but the dog, you don’t kick a person out to let the dog in. The people get to live.”
“That’s not how it is,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It kind of feels like it is.”
“Don’t mind me,” said Babd. “I’m identifying as a tornado these days.”
I could feel the other Lincolns around me. Some of them were saying these things, and others were saying other things, and some of the Gwens were leaving, and some were laughing, and some were kissing the Lincolns. But here, I just said what I said because I knew how it would go.
“I’ll keep you company for as long as you like,” Gwen said.
And there. That would work.
“But not if you’re planning to kill him,” she said. “That’s off the table. I don’t care what you say about yourself, but you’re not someone who can just plan to kill a person and go up and do it. I know you’re not. Promise me right now that’s not the plan, or we go our separate ways.”
“I’m not planning to kill him,” I said.
“Are you hoping that you get to? Because that’s just as bad.”
“No,” I said. I didn’t think that I was. Maybe I was. But at the moment I didn’t think so.
She looked at me skeptically.
“Lincoln, I know you better than you think. I’m not worried about Dan. I’m worried about you. You still have … stuff … to deal with. And doing something like this is only going to make it harder. You can change yourself in ways that you can’t change back, you know. And I like the you I’m starting to see, not the you that happens down that other road.”
Damn it.
The problem was that all of the roads I could see, every single one that didn’t involve Gwen and I turned into little smoking cinders, they all lead through Dan bleeding out. All of them. My predictor didn’t see anything else that wasn’t merely a fringe possibility. And if that was the case, I could plan or not plan and it was probably still going to happen. So why not plan for it, and try to make sure that it was him and not us?
To do the other thing, to go in unprepared and chock full of naivete was foolish.
“I promise I won’t plan to kill Dan. And I’m hoping nothing like that ends up happening.”
Neither of those things were true.
“Okay,” she said.
“Great,” I said. “Now what do you do with your dead bodies around here?”
“There are two empty apartments on the third floor. We could put her up there.”
Instantly I saw the paths and risks around that floated before me. The body would be discovered at some point, so there was no sense in trying to actually get rid of it completely. We didn’t have the means or really, the stomach, to do that. Temporary storage to just get it out of the way would be fine.
The biggest risk was in tying it to us once it was found. Our best chance of having that not happen was to get the body out of the foyer immediately, get into one of the apartments without leaving a trace, then making sure we cleaned the body from anything that would point to us. Fortunately, we hadn’t touched her. There was no visible trauma. No murder weapon. Not a lot of physical evidence other than just the fact that she was no longer living.
It was doable, and our risks decreased dramatically the more quickly we acted.
I dialed Gwen’s phone with my backup phone.
“Get upstairs,” I said. “I’m taking her in the elevator. We’ll stay on the phone. If anyone is up there in the hall, let me know and I’ll handle it. Babd, you come with me. I’m going to have to drag her. Let me know if anything falls off of her. We don’t want to leave anything behind.”
I was short and strong, but it was too risky to try to carry her. Too easy to get something traceable to myself on the body.
I stripped off my jacket, folded it over three times and placed it under her feet. I was going to drag her, and I didn’t want scuff marks on her shoes or on the tile floor.
Gwen was still standing there.
“Go!” I said.
“You look like you’ve done this before,” she said.
“Nope,” I said. “I’m just a good guesser.”
She shook her head and ran up the stairs.
I grabbed Brigit as gently as I could under the arms, lifted slightly and pulled. She was even lighter than I expected. Had this woman ever eaten a sandwich?
I slid her easily toward the service elevator in the back of the hall and bumped the raised Up button with my elbow.
The door opened immediately. I pulled her inside and recollected my jacket.
“Babd, are we good?” I said.
“Neither of you left debris,” she said as she walked into the elevator.
“How are we upstairs?” I said into the phone.
“Not there yet... not an Olympian,” Gwen huffed from the earpiece.
I covered my finger with the sleeve of my jacket and pushed 3.
“Get there,” I said.
A few seconds passed as I waited for the elevator door to close. There was a clear view from the elevator out to the lobby, through the front door and into the street. It took a long, long time.
“We’re clear,” said Gwen through the phone.
The door closed. It was a slow ride.
“Still good,” she said almost twenty seconds later.
The door opened. The same old tile from the foyer lined the hallway, but this time in shades of dark green and maroon. Gwen was there, and no one else. Three doors on either side of the hall, two of them leading to empty apartments, which meant four had tenants. The odds of someone coming out within the next few minutes were low but not zero. Gwen pointed to the left side of the far end of the hall, then to the door nearest to me on my right. Those were the empties.
I wadded my jacket back up, put it under the Brigit’s heels again and motioned for Gwen to come to the elevator.
“Stay here. I’ll get the door. If anyone comes out, hit the button for another floor and pray.”
She didn’t look pleased but took up a position inside the elevator. She put her foot in the path of the door, so it wouldn’t shut.
I drew Fox, held him close to my face and said, “Fox, make me a key.” He pulsed.
I placed the barrel of the gun against the key slot on the doorknob and pulled the trigger.
No sound. No motion.
After about two seconds, the gun pulsed again.
I tipped the barrel downward, and a key slid out into my left hand. I pulled my sleeve down over my right hand, wiped the key, then gripped it as well as I could through my sleeve. I put the key into the deadbolt lock and turned. It worked.
I pulled the key and quickly but quietly unlocked and turned the doorknob. I lifted up slightly on the door as I opened it, in case the hinges were bound and would squeak. I didn’t want to give any nosy neighbor a reason to think someone was checking out one of the empties on the floor.
The door opened without a creak.
I glided back to the elevator and motioned Gwen and Babd out. I grabbed Brigit under the arms like I had before, and within five seconds we were inside the empty apartment, and the door was shut.
“You feel that?” I said to Gwen, still in a half voice.
My muscles were jazzed and twitchy. I felt triumphant.
“If you mean the look of ‘win’ you have on your face right now, then no. I’m not sharing it. I’m scared shitless.”
“Right,” I said. “Right. You should be.”
“Let’s get this over with,” she said.
The apartment was the same layout as Gwen’s, so the bathroom was through the living room and down the hall on the left.
I didn’t want to leave drag marks on the ugly carpet.
“Can you get her feet?” I said. “We should carry her.”
“Jesus Lincoln.”
“It’s only a couple of yards. She’s super light.”
“Not the point. I… don’t want to touch her.”
“Oh okay, I get it.”
“I don’t think you do. When Babd and I came to get you from the Guard, I had to steal propranolol from Tish to do it. Surgeons and public speakers use it to get rid of their anxiety. That’s how I was able to show up there and not just fall apart. And that was to save your life. This kind of shit is not for me. Right now, I want to burst into tears and take a header out the window.”
“Oh,” I said, because what else can you say to that?
I dragged the body through the room, down the hall and into the bathroom. It would have been easier to get her in the tub with Gwen’s help, but I wasn’t going to ask. I wanted to be as gentle as I could with the body, not out of any respect for Brigit, but out of a need to want to do as little post-mortem damage as possible, should the police decide that this was something really worth digging into instead of just adding to some poor schlub’s caseload.
Then again, maybe they could make conclusions by the fact that there was so little post-mortem damage to the body. So, a zero-sum game maybe? I realized that I didn’t know nearly enough about police procedures to be worrying about something like that.
All I should be caring about was getting out as quickly as possible without being seen, and not leaving any obvious personal evidence laying around. The rest would just have to go into the increasingly large pile of unmanaged risk I was carrying.
I lifted the top of the body over the lip of the tub, pushed, and the rest just kind of slid in. Easier than I expected. I’d have to remember that the next time I was dragging a body around.
I rearranged her arms so she looked kind of natural. Well, as natural as you can be when you’re laying in a dry tub in your street clothes, dead. With my sleeve still over my hands, I closed her eyes, because ugh. I’d been too busy to really notice, but now that I had a second to breathe, it was unbelievably creepy.
“Can we get out of here?” said Gwen. She was standing in the bathroom doorway.
“Sure,” I said. I stood, and took a last look down at Brigit. She’d been my friend for a year. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she had just been using me. But the fact was that without her and Dan, regardless of what had come later, I would have spiraled after that night with the Zoro. I was not in a good place to begin with. I know myself. I’d be dead.
“Shouldn’t we say something?” I said, in spite of myself.
“Um,” said Gwen, “she was an asshole?”
She had been strange and aloof and superficial. Acerbic. Often mean. There wasn’t a lot to like there. But I understood that there was a time when I probably came across the same way, before I figured out how to People. I always had hope for people like that. They hit one of my few soft spots.
In my head I said, Thank you for saving me. I’m sorry you didn’t get to be a better person. And that was it. All that I had the emotional energy for. I had a flash of a different life where she was joining Gwen and I for dinner, with a bunch of other people somewhere and she was… different. Happy. Not horribly guarded and always stabbing. Getting a text on her phone, and a look of love coming over her face, instead of one of ironic amusement. The kind of person you make room for in the cellar when the tornado comes.
Shit.
I didn’t have time for this. Got to go.
We walked back to the living room.
“I scuffed up the carpet for you,” said Gwen, and indeed she had. I couldn’t even tell that someone had been dragged across the floor.
“Let’s get your stuff,” I said.
“We still need it, even if we’re not running?”
“I think so. It won’t cost us anything, and I might chicken out. Or this may not work. Let’s get it.”
“Okay.”
We made our way out of the apartment, locked it and made sure we didn’t touch anything with our bare hands. I put the key in my pocket. I’d have to get rid of it in a public garbage can at some point. Once the body was discovered, I didn’t want to have an illicit key to the apartment on my person, regardless of how low the odds were that the police would somehow ever connect me to this.
We went up the stairs to Gwen’s floor, and she was packed in three minutes.
“I like this shitty place,” she said.
“Well, hopefully you’ll get to keep liking it. This is just a precaution.”
“Where we going next?”
“Not sure,” I said. And I wasn’t. I needed somewhere to set the SparkleOS hardware up. I needed internet access and a location that wouldn’t be disturbed. I thought for a second about a self-storage unit with electrical, but that was too much paperwork. Also, I’d need something for internet access. That was easy though. I could just grab a wireless USB/Wifi hub from any of the big mobile carriers. 4G/LTE would be plenty fast enough for my needs.
I really didn’t need the storage facility. It would only be for a day; two, max. A hotel room would suffice.
A quick map search turned up everything I needed within a fifteen-minute drive.
“We’re going shopping, then getting a hotel,” I said.
“Oh!” said Gwen. “Finally.”
We went back downstairs. It was weird, walking through the lobby, thinking about what had just happened. About Brigit’s body in the tub.
It felt like it wasn’t real. It was a thing that had happened to someone else, and I had just read about it or seen it in a movie.
Shake it off.
Keep moving.
We still had two cars. Probably best to consolidate at this point. We’d take mine, just because it weighed more than fifteen pounds. The Waterfront, which had electronics and a cheap hotel was only minutes away.
Best Buy checklist:
4G LTE USB hotspot (of course SparkleOS hosts USB!)
Three external phone batteries
Wired throat mic and earpiece, which it turns out they don’t have
Bluetooth earpiece
Speakers and mic for the computer, which I had cleverly left behind in my house on purpose
Power strip
The Holiday Inn Express was only $108/night, so I got three nights, just in case. I wasn’t sure how long everything I needed to do would take, but no sense worrying that someone was going to pull the plug on me if I could prevent it for a couple hundred bucks. Also, the HIE ran motel-style, which meant I wouldn’t have to cart my equipment through the lobby and get all kinds of weird looks. I paid the extra $20/night so Babd could hang too.
We got a ground floor room and quickly got everything inside. It only took five minutes to get it all plugged in and set up.
I fired up the LTE hub, plugged it into the main computer and was online right away. I woke the Fox AI.
“Hi Fox,” I said.
“Hello.” The word appeared simultaneously on screen and through the connected speakers.
“Ask him about the social graph,” said Gwen.
“Right!” I said. Fox had told me he’d resolved it, but in my hurry I’d completely forgotten about it before I’d shut him down. “You resolved the graphing problem I gave you. Please share the results.”
My phone buzzed, and I heard Gwen’s do the same.
“I have just emailed you profiles of the three most important nodes in the graph,” said Fox. Three pictures appeared on the main computer screen. The first was a man in the indistinct area between 35 and 50 where you can’t really tell how old someone is. He had very dark, olive-toned skin and jet black hair. The pic was professionally lit and nicely composed, like an upper executive
headshot for a press release after a high-profile promotion.
The second picture was of an older woman, Asian and dressed in a gray business suit. She looked like a hardass. The picture appeared to be taken with a long-distance lens, and she was mid-stride, crossing a busy urban street. A man and woman in smart suits walked beside her.
The third picture looked like someone had grabbed a random party pic off Facebook. The woman in the middle was young, at the beach with four other girls (all mugging for the camera) and hoisting a Corona. Also, super, super ginger.
“Their names and contact information are in the emails,” said Fox.
“Thanks, buddy,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
These three people, whoever they were, were the nexi of high value activity on the social network that Fox had been able to build based on the phones I’d taken from the Guard. It wasn’t 100 percent certain—hell it wasn’t even 60 percent certain—that they were leaders in the Praecant community, but I had to trust the algorithm. They were very well connected and associated with the topics I’d given to Fox.
“Hey Fox, what’s your confidence in these results?”
“Very high,” said Fox. “I achieved the sames results in over eighty percent of the fifteen-billion simulation rounds.”
“Billion?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Any second tier candidates we should know about?”
“In the remaining simulations, no other candidates achieved a plurality of presence.”
“So you’re saying that there really aren’t any other candidates?”
“Correct.”
“Well all right.”
I tapped some things into my phone.
“Fox, I’m sending you some special instructions along with a phone script. Read the instructions and execute them. When I tell you to, I want you to contact these three people by all available methods— phone, text, twitter, everything—and deliver the script.”
“Acknowledged.”
I sent him the email.
“Next thing,” I said. “I need to design a new payload for the gun.”
“What are you working on?” said Gwen.
“You’ll see,” I said. “Hang on.”
Babd had jumped onto the bed and curled up on the pillows. I was glad I’d paid the fee.
Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog Page 25