Cutting Edge

by Ward Larsen

  His previous conclusion was more persistent than ever. They had come for him. Joan Chandler’s last words came back in a particularly haunting echo. The surgery you had … it wasn’t only to make you well. It was to make you different.

  Different.

  He remembered how he’d been saved last night, when he’d lost sight of land and was being swept seaward. The odd vision that had guided him to shore, a tiny arrow pointing west. Any connection seemed inconceivable, and DeBolt shook the idea away.

  Of all the tragedies to find him in recent weeks, last night was singular in its cruelty. The crime had taken place only hours ago, and it occurred to him, given the remoteness of Chandler’s cabin, that it might not yet have been discovered. A pang of doubt set in. Could Joan Chandler possibly have survived? He recalled the agonizing scene, watching her collapse and fall still. Even so, no matter how slight the chance, DeBolt knew he would second-guess himself for the rest of his life if he didn’t put in a call for help. He searched the cottage. No phone, no radio, no computer. It left only one option.

  He hurried outside into a cold wind, pulled the collar up on a jacket that wasn’t his, and set out to find a road.

  * * *

  Joan Chandler’s leveled cottage was discovered at 9:24 that morning. A reserve deputy, called into action under the auspices of the Washington County Emergency Preparedness Plan, drove his truck to within a hundred yards of the cabin before breaking clear of the trees and seeing the problem.

  He instantly realized that the storm, severe as it had been, could in no way be responsible for the catastrophe in front of him. The cabin, which the deputy had seen often from the sea while fishing in nearby coves, was essentially gone. The only markers of where it had been were a charred slab of concrete, one section of wall, and a few pipes and conduit sleeves that rose up like the stumps of cut saplings. Even now, hours after the initial report of an explosion, a few wisps of smoke remained, and bits of debris dressed the nearby pines, turning them into so many postapocalyptic Christmas trees.

  The deputy knew better than to get any closer. He suspected—correctly it would soon be proven—that he was looking at the aftermath of a gas explosion. There could be no survivors, and he wondered ruefully if the nurse, whom he’d once met but whose name escaped him, had been home last night. He put in a radio call to dispatch, requesting both sheriff’s department backup and a fire department response. As an afterthought, he mentioned to the duty officer that there was no particular hurry.

  10

  DeBolt set a brisk pace along the shoulder of the first road he came across. It was twenty minutes before he saw a sign announcing the nearest town: Jonesport, Maine, lay two miles ahead. He thought the name sounded familiar, although the reason escaped him. He kept a good pace along the two-lane road, and his body loosened up. At that point his main impediment became caution. Twice he scrambled into the woods to avoid being seen by oncoming vehicles. After the chaos of last night, at least some degree of paranoia seemed in order.

  He tried to come up with a plan, and decided his first priority was to alert the authorities to what had happened at the cottage. Even if Chandler hadn’t survived, the sooner the police reached the scene, the sooner they would begin searching for the men responsible. DeBolt assumed the attackers were still in the area, and might be looking for him—the reason he dodged out of sight whenever a car appeared in the distance. As a secondary matter, he considered his AWOL status, and the madness of being declared dead weeks ago. He strongly suspected it was all connected. Unfortunately, the idea of walking into a police station with such a story was problematic to say the least.

  A distant growl brought his eyes up, and he saw an eighteen-wheeler approaching from the opposite direction. He looked to his right and saw a broad ditch filled with water. Across the road, more of the same. DeBolt simply kept going, thinking it doubtful that such an obviously commercial vehicle could pose a threat. As if to validate his thinking, the truck thundered past, never slowing, and kicked up a swirl of dust in its wake.

  He slowed and turned away from the cloud, but not before his face was misted with particles. He came to a stop, and rubbed his irritated left eye with a knuckle. As he did so, DeBolt noticed a distinct blank spot in his vision. When the irritant cleared, he kept his left eye closed and looked into the distance. It was definitely there—not dark, not light, but simply an off-center void in his field of view. He moved his head left and right, and distant objects vanished. He opened both eyes and the problem abated, bilateral vision compensating for the loss. Was it another complication from his head injury?

  Great. First I’m seeing things, and now I have holes in my vision. What next?

  He set out again, and soon the township of Jonesport came into view. It was a small place, so small that he wondered if there would even be a police station. He considered borrowing a phone from someone to call 911, but didn’t like the complications involved. His face would be remembered, his position pinpointed. Ridiculous as it seemed, DeBolt felt a compelling urge to remain anonymous.

  He reached the center of town in no time, and walking briskly along Main Street he took in homes, businesses, and the rocky shoreline bordering the bay. Across the water in the distance he saw a collection of islands, most dotted with what looked like vacation homes. He saw a few people out in town, most of them cleaning up after the storm—collecting downed branches and tending to boats. He passed a boatyard that looked full, all manner of craft having been lifted to dry storage for the winter. Then, at the base of a distant bridge, a revelation—DeBolt saw why the town’s name had seemed familiar. He also saw an answer to his problem. He knew exactly how to alert the authorities while remaining anonymous.

  In that moment, DeBolt realized that his former way of life, a once orderly and purposeful existence, was being amended into something else. He found himself detouring, ever so slightly, into darker disciplines.

  DeBolt moved quickly. He was so engaged in his plan that he never noticed the white Chevy Tahoe parked on the opposite side of Main Street.

  * * *

  “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”

  Seaman Apprentice Jacob Wilhelm bolted upright in his chair and reached for the volume control on the number three VHF radio. The receiver was always tuned to channel sixteen, the emergency maritime frequency, and for that reason it was seldom used. Coast Guard Station Jonesport was a small boat station, home to three utility and response boats and the eighty-seven-foot patrol vessel Moray. On this particular morning, CGS Jonesport was unusually quiet. Moray was at sea, along with her crew of ten, and two of the rescue boats had run to Bar Harbor where the storm had hit hardest. It left Wilhelm alone in the communications center, with only two other enlisted personnel on station. Both were on the far side of the building.

  “Calling mayday, say your vessel name,” Wilhelm instructed.

  “Mayday! This is the sailboat Spar! I am in southern Wohoa Bay and need information relayed to local law enforcement agencies!”

  “Is your vessel in distress?” Wilhelm responded.

  “Negative, negative. I’ve just witnessed a shooting onshore. I’m familiar with the area—immediate police response is required at the southern end of Cape Circle Road.”

  It was a highly irregular call, Wilhelm thought, but at least one that wouldn’t require a Coast Guard response. That was good, because they were acutely short staffed today. He initiated a phone connection to the Washington County sheriff’s department, and while it ran, he said, “I need your name, and can you tell me anything else about the situation?”

  Wilhelm waited. The radio remained silent.

  A woman answered the phone line with, “Washington County Sheriff.”

  Wilhelm identified himself and explained the situation.

  “Cape Circle Road?” the dispatcher replied. “We’ve had people out there all morning.”

  “So there was a shooting?”

  “More of an explosion, from what I heard. One of those lit
tle cabins blew sky high from a gas leak last night. The fire department is finding pieces over a mile away.”

  “Okay,” Wilhelm said hesitantly. This was getting stranger by the second. “So if anything was happening out there, I’m guessing you guys have it covered.”

  “Been there for hours.”

  “Great. If I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  The phone connection was broken. Wilhelm went back to VHF number three, and again tried to raise the sailboat Spar. There was no response, but all the same, he kept the volume up on channel sixteen. It was probably a hoax of some kind—Lord knows, they got their share. He heard nothing but static for the rest of his shift.

  * * *

  The sheriff’s department had indeed been crawling over the remains of 302 Cape Circle Road for the best part of an hour, ever since the fire department had given the all clear to approach the place. They quickly found traces of human remains, but the condition of that evidence—indeed, the condition of everything—suggested a long and arduous inquiry. An investigator from the fire department, who was responsible for determining whether the blast was accidental, said her answer would take at least a few days. Unaccustomed to such devastated scenes, the sheriff’s department requested help from the regional FBI office, who replied tentatively that they might be able to send someone by in a day or two.

  While the local specialists went about their work, the sheriff department’s lone detective, a dour and long-faced man named LaSalle—tenth-generation Washington County—saw right away that there was little useful evidence at the scene. That being the case, he began interviewing neighbors—a simple enough process, as there were only two, and one of them had not been in residence for nearly a year.

  At the threshold of the only door he knocked on that day, LaSalle asked an elderly couple if they had seen anything unusual at the cabin to the south. They said they hadn’t. That was when LaSalle got his only break of the day, or as it would turn out, of the week. The couple’s young granddaughter, who’d been staying with them for a month, and who spoke with one cheek pressed to her grandmother’s apron, said she had seen a young man exercising on the beach near the cabin. Her fifth-grade narrative was painfully lacking in details. Her eyesight, however, was excellent. She placed the man at the cottage on three consecutive days that week. He was rather tall with sandy hair, and seemed a very good swimmer. Pressed on this last point, the girl insisted she’d seen the man walk from the cottage to the beach each day, and swim until he was out of sight.

  When LaSalle could think of nothing more to ask, he thanked them all, and warned them to stay clear of the adjacent property for the next few days. He left wondering who had been visiting the nurse. And perhaps more troublingly: Whose DNA had exploded across half his jurisdiction?

  * * *

  DeBolt turned off the battery switch to power down the VHF radio. He was thankful to have selected a boat that had been pulled from the harbor only recently—in a few months the ship’s batteries would likely be dead in the middle of a cold and hard winter. Before leaving the radio panel, he reengaged the red DSC switch on the VHF control head. Had he not disengaged it earlier, his exact GPS position would have been automatically transmitted with his distress call.

  The boat was a Grand Banks trawler, forty-two feet of polished brass and hardwood set high on a hard stand. Her bottom was not yet scraped clean, and her left prop was missing. More of interest to DeBolt, the cabin had high sidewalls and a salon door that had been left wide open. She was at the back of a large storage yard, and the only person in sight was a single listless mechanic—he was presently drinking coffee near the main shed fifty yards away. It had been simplicity itself to round the perimeter fence unnoticed, climb aboard, and power up the radio. With his mission complete, DeBolt did it all in reverse, and was soon back on Main Street.

  He began walking north, covering new ground. The skies were clearing fast, the storm having moved east, and a strong wind filled the void, pulling in Arctic air from the north and raking whitecaps across the bay. DeBolt looked cautiously up and down the street. Nothing seemed out of place. He passed a playground where a toddler climbed a ladder under the watchful eye of his mother, and at the end of a jetty an old man with a walrus mustache stood contentedly with a slack fishing pole. Normal people resuming their normal lives after the passing of a storm.

  But how can I? he wondered.

  He was thousands of miles from Alaska. Men were hunting him. He had twenty stolen dollars in his pocket, and no way to get more. DeBolt had no identity documents to prove who he was—indeed, nothing to prove he had ever existed, save for a copy of his death certificate, and that was back in the cottage, a place to which he could not return without risking another deadly encounter.

  And then there was the other problem: the odd visions he’d experienced twice now. Hallucinations? His battered brain playing tricks? He wanted desperately to reclaim his life, but the obstacles seemed overwhelming. So DeBolt went back to basics. He decided it was time to eat.

  He reached into his pocket and fingered the twenty-dollar bill. He looked up the street and saw a restaurant, then a second farther on. Roy’s Diner was the closer of the two, and something called The Harbor House a block beyond. Both looked open.

  A gust of wind sent leaves cartwheeling across the street, and DeBolt stood on the sidewalk making the most basic of decisions. Roy’s Diner, he thought. I wonder what’s on the menu.

  Seconds later the answer arrived, posted in absolute clarity. In the blind spot in his right eye, he saw a high-definition image of the breakfast menu for Roy’s Diner.

  11

  DeBolt sat alone in a booth at Roy’s Diner. He stared at the menu the hostess had given him with a level of interest likely never before seen in the establishment. Word for word, price for price, it was an exact duplicate of the image fixed in his head.

  Shaken to the core, DeBolt tried to delete the thought, tried to force the image away. At one point it did disappear, but by some inescapable urge he called it up again—or perhaps more accurately, he conjured it, like a magician pulling a card out of thin air. The result was the same. Somehow he had an ability to acquire images, displayed perfectly on the tiny screen in his right eye. He remembered seeing the time of the sunrise, and the compass heading that had saved him as he’d foundered in the sea. Both had appeared in a similar fashion, but he’d written off those events as curiosities, as fleeting apparitions. This time there could be no doubt.

  “… I said, coffee?”

  He looked up and saw a waitress with a metal pot in her hand. “Uh … yeah, please.”

  She turned over the upside-down coffee cup on the table and began filling it. “You were a million miles away,” she said. “Never seen anybody so taken with Roy’s breakfast menu.” She was a smiling woman, fortyish, manufactured blond hair, and the beginnings of a stoop in her shoulders.

  “Sorry, I’ve been a little distracted lately.”

  “Cream?”

  “No, black is good.”

  “Want me to come back, or have you made up your mind?”

  He looked at the menu—the one on the table—and saw a boxed entry on top: Everyday special—two eggs, bacon, and all-you-can-eat pancakes for $9.99. “I’ll take the special, over easy.”

  She smiled and reached for the menu. He almost asked her to leave it, but decided it would seem strange and let it go. DeBolt looked around the place, and with some trepidation thought, So what other tricks can I do? A television mounted on the wall nearby was tuned to a cable news channel. The volume had been muted, but in a corner of the screen he saw numbers. DeBolt cleared his head of everything else, and thought: Dow Jones Industrial Average … current value.

  A number lit to view in his blind spot. It was fractionally different from what he saw on the television, but soon that number changed to match the one he’d grasped out of nowhere. DeBolt tensed, and a sudden burning sensation caused him to look down. Both his hands were around the
coffee cup, and he saw a few drops of brown liquid on one thumb. He dried it using his napkin, then discreetly reached back and fingered the scars at the base of his skull, now hidden beneath hair that was longer than it had been in years. And there, he knew, was his answer. How had Chandler put it?… to make you different. An operation? Had something been surgically implanted? Was his brain now wired to the internet, some kind of biological routing device?

  His waitress scurried past and he noted her nametag: SAM.

  DeBolt pondered how to phrase a request, and settled on: Roy’s Diner, employees, Sam.

  It took only seconds.

  SAM VICTORIA TREMAIN

  AGE: 41

  ADDRESS: 1201 CRISP BAY ROAD, APARTMENT 3B

  DeBolt then noticed a scroll bar at the bottom of his visual field. He concentrated on it, and after some awkward interactions, more information rolled into view.

  MARITAL STATUS: DIVORCED 12/03/2014

  2015 AGI: $24,435

  AGI? he thought incredulously. Adjusted gross income?

  He sat motionless for a very long time, pondering the imponderable, until Sam Victoria Tremain arrived with a mountainous plate of food, four pancakes sided by eggs and bacon. In her other hand was the ever-present coffeepot, and she began topping him off.

  “Your name,” he said, looking deliberately at the oval tag on her blouse, “I was wondering—is it short for Samantha?”

  She chuckled good-naturedly. “I’m afraid not. I was the youngest of five girls, and my dad was Sam Tremain the fourth. Mom insisted on getting her tubes tied after me, so it was the only way to keep the family name going.”