Jack looked at least a few years younger than his true age. He didn’t follow fads in hairstyle or dress, which kind of lent him a clueless, midwestern timelessness. He looked like a Boy Scout or an altar boy who’d somehow managed to make it to adulthood without being molested. People did seem to trust him.
“It was the same with me,” the blonde said. “I saw you and knew I could trust you. And once I tell you why, I think you’ll understand. Maybe even forgive me.”
Kelly opened her mouth, then slowly closed it again. She swept some of the hair from her forehead, looked around the room.
“I have one last favor to ask first. Please bear with me.”
“Sure. Whatever. You poisoned me, you call the shots.”
“I need to use the bathroom. Badly.”
“Try the room with the white seat.”
“Very funny, Jack. But I need you in there with me.”
“Look, I promise I won’t leave. At the very least, I have to find out why you’ve poisoned me. And frankly, I may decide to keep you here for the police.”
“It’s not that. I can’t go alone.”
“What, are you scared? I told you: I’ll be right here.”
“You have to be in there with me.”
“You’re seriously insane, aren’t you?”
“Jack, you’ve only known me a few hours. But by now, you should know I mean what I say.”
I poisoned your drink. Definitely true.
Go along with this or you’ll die. Most likely true.
I need to use the bathroom.... I can’t go alone.
Okay, give her the benefit of the doubt.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s only number one. I think I’d die if it was the other. You should see what I’ve gone through to do that.”
Jack didn’t know what she was talking about; didn’t really care. He wanted answers. So fine, she needed to pee with him in the room, here we go. Very least, it’d be something amusing to share with Donovan Platt first thing in the morning: Don, my man, I had this blonde in my hotel room. And she wanted me to watch her pee. Wild, huh?
Kelly helped him up from the bed—he realized he still felt a little shaky, dizzy—and he shuffled after her into the bathroom. Typical hotel setup: bathtub with shower, vanity, towels washed so hard that you could practically smell the bleach in the air. Jack sat on the edge of the tub and watched Kelly unhook her belt, then unbutton her jeans. She started to unzip, then stopped.
“You don’t have to look.”
Now he was being accused of being a perv.
“Sorry.”
Jack turned his head away, stared at a white square tile on the opposite wall. The sealant around it was a little sloppy. He heard the rustle of jeans slipping down over a pair of legs, followed by what he presumed was a pair of panties. This would make for another excellent image for the wife. Jack, alone in a hotel bathroom with a blonde who had her pants around her ankles. But honey, he’d argue. I was facing a tile wall the whole time. I don’t even know if she’s a natural blonde.
She started to go, making for an incredibly awkward silence. The water hitting water sounded as loud as the Hoover Dam.
“So ... is this, like, a nervous disorder?”
“Nothing like that. You said you had a family. Aren’t you ever in the bathroom at the same time as your wife?”
“Not if we can help it.” Not since she filed for divorce. “We’re private people.”
“I thought men were a little more open than that. I used to date a guy who loved to take care of business with the door wide open. He’d stroll around my flat naked. No shame whatsoever. Then again, he did have something to be proud of. I suspect he was part exhibitionist.”
“Well, that’s not me.”
Now that he thought about it, the only girl he’d ever watched in the bathroom was his daughter, Callie. But that had been when she was toilet training. And that he’d stopped about a year ago, when she was three. “I need privacy, Daddy,” she told him one day. Made him laugh and broke his heart at the same time.
Kelly finished. He heard her rip some toilet paper from the roll, then flush. As she stood to pull up her pants, Jack found himself turning back to face her.
He told himself he thought she was done, already covered, but the moment the thought entered his brain, he knew it was a lie. Because he wanted to see. Because he was a guy.
Men were visual creatures, endlessly fascinated by the random body parts of women they didn’t even find particularly attractive. In his case, even a woman who had poisoned him. He couldn’t not look.
“Hey.”
Jack caught a fleeting glimpse: Kelly’s pale white skin, with a perfectly trimmed triangle of red hair, shaved close. Definitely not a natural blonde. Then it was gone, hidden by the pink stripes of a pair of bikini briefs.
“I’m sorry. Thought you were done.”
“Right.” Kelly smirked. “Though I suppose I owe you at least a look, don’t I? After all I’ve put you through?”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“I owe you an explanation. But are you ready to hear it?”
12:18 a.m.
Edison Avenue
Explain it to me best you can.” Kowalski was on his cell. He’d convinced Ed’s wife—Claudia, her name was—to return to her bedroom for a moment while he called for backup. He, of course, was doing no such thing, and Claudia would know within a minute something hinky was going on. The clock, as always, was ticking.
Welcome to my life.
Then he’d headed back to the bathroom. Christ. The Dydak Brothers would have come in their pants, all this blood. This was at least a six- or seven-hour detail.
Next, he’d hit the phone. Called his handler on the last number he’d memorized. Asked her what to do.
“Explain it to me best you can,” she’d said.
Kowalski stepped inside the bathroom, closed the door—he didn’t want Claudia hearing this stuff—and quickly described the injuries. It was all from the neck up. No visible gunshot wounds or lacerations. All of the blood seemed to have spurted out through the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. Like the man’s brain were a blood orange and some invisible force had reached in and squeezed tight in one spasmodic jerk.
“Hold, please.”
Claudia started sobbing again. He could hear her through the wall. Damn it, this wasn’t going to last long. Hopefully, the brain boys up in CI-6 were moving fast. Telling his handler how to respond. What to do next.
“We’re going to need the subject’s head,” his handler said. “Seal it and await pickup instructions. I’ll call you on this phone.”
That’s what Kowalski thought. Fuck. With the wife next door, this was going to be complicated. Then another thought occurred to him. One subject, kissing another, the new subject dead within an hour. Bioweapon? Supervirus? Ebola?
“Should I quarantine the house? The subject’s wife is here.”
I’m here.
“No need. But do not let any of the subject’s blood to come in contact with any open wounds or scrapes or mucous membranes. Treat it like AIDS. Clear? We also need you to clean the house.”
Kowalski didn’t need clarification on that one. “Clean” didn’t mean Windex and rags.
Claudia was still crying.
Now this joker in the bathroom might or might not have gotten what he deserved. It’s never good karma to kiss a strange woman in an airport when you’ve got a wife at home. But the wife was innocent, as far as he knew.
Claudia, grieving like anyone would.
Anyone normal.
Push it away, Kowalski. Look for tools at hand; obsess over this shit later. It’s what you’re good at, remember? Push everything away.
He opened the medicine cabinet. He found what he needed in three seconds. His eyes checked the label. Yeah, it was the kind he needed. The kind that wouldn’t snap halfway through. Claudia came back to see what was taking so long, why there weren’t a thousand flashing lights and sirens outsi
de her house because her husband, Christ in heaven, her husband’s brain had exploded inside his skull, and the entire fucking world should be racing to the scene to help, to figure out what went wrong. That’s what Kowalski would expect her to be thinking anyway.
“What are you doing in there?”
He grabbed the plastic box of dental floss, flicked the top open.
The best operations supplied their own tools.
“There’s something you need to see, Mrs. Hunter.”
12:25 a.m.
Sheraton, Room 702
They sat on the couch in the upper level of the room, three steps up from the bedroom pit. It was a soft couch, decorated in a bland pattern of light tans and browns. Look at it too long and you’d fall asleep. That was the point, in a hotel like this. Spend most of your time unconscious. Then pay us and head back home. Jack sat on one end, while Kelly sat on the other. She removed her shoes and put her bare feet up on the couch, mere inches away from Jack.
“Okay, let’s get to it. First, I have to tell you why I selected you.”
“So this wasn’t random.”
“Hardly. Had you picked out on the plane from Houston. I was sitting two rows behind. I can’t blame you for not noticing me. You walked to the bathroom in the rear of the place only once, but the plane was rocking a bit. You fought hard to keep your balance. Remember?”
It was true. Jack damn near sprayed his own pants in the rest room, with all the turbulence.
“I heard you talking to the guy in the next seat. He was a lawyer, and you told him you were a journalist. Were you telling the truth?”
“Yeah, I’m a reporter. I work for a weekly newspaper in Chicago. You know, if this is about a story pitch, you could have explained this to me. We could have set up interviews on tape, on the record. I could have helped you, whatever kind of trouble you’re in. Why did you do all of this?”
“Because without you, I’d be dead.”
“Oh.”
Jack paused.
“What does that mean?”
“I mean that literally. If I don’t have someone within ten feet of me at all times, I’ll die.”
12:28 a.m.
Basement, Edison Avenue
Tool time. Kowalski found oversized Glad freezer bags in a kitchen drawer; the Hunters liked to freeze large slabs of meat. Inside their 20.3-cubic-foot Frigidaire freezer chest, he founds whole chickens, legs of lamb, pork chops, flank steaks, you name it. They probably belonged to a warehouse shoppers’ club. Kowalski wondered if Katie would have tried to talk him into something like that—something that went against his longtime ethos of spare, frugal living. Then again, with a baby on the way, it would have been different. Hard to scrounge a diaper at the last minute. You needed stacks of those on hand. Or so he’d heard.
Stop that shit. Get the head, get out.
The freezer bags were the perfect size for a human head.
Down in the basement, Kowalski had his pick of gym bags in a cedar closet. He chose the blandest and sturdiest: a small Adidas Diablo duffel with an easy-access U-shaped opening at the top.
In a cabinet beneath a worktable, Kowalski found a cheap but usable hacksaw. The blade looked like it had never been used.
He’d hoped for a power tool of some sort, but nothing doing. Ed wasn’t into home repair, obviously.
Kowalski’s arm was going to be sore later. He just knew it.
As for destroying the house—and what a shame; it was a nice house, with hardwood floors and a kidney bean-shaped pool out back, complete with hot tub, surrounded by pine trees—that was easy enough. It was a stand-alone, so no neighbors to worry about. The explosion could be devastating, and it would stay limited to these grounds.
He’d use his favorite: the timed-spark gas-line burst. Enough accelerant spread around here and there, the structure would be obliterated within minutes. As would most forensics. Not that it mattered; nothing here could be tied to Kowalski. He was an investigatory dead end. A ghost.
As Kowalski walked upstairs, he thought about Claudia Hunter and how she’d fought her own death. She’d so desperately wanted to live. And for a strange moment, Kowalski found himself weak. Did Katie fight like this, at the very end? he wondered.
He looked at framed photos of Ed and Claudia. She was the strong one, no doubt about it. Ed looked vaguely uncomfortable in every shot, as if he were thinking, Do I really have to be here for this? And Claudia was kicking him in the shins, telling him, You not only have to be here, you have to fucking look like you’re enjoying it.
Ed, kissing a stranger at the airport, hoping for a quickie instead of working shit out at home with his wife.
Kowalski carried the Adidas duffel, Glad freezer bag, and hacksaw into the bathroom. It was time to see how thick Ed Hunter’s spine was.
The skin and muscle were easy. Sawing through the neck bone was a real effort. With every push and pull of the hacksaw, Kowalski found himself silently repeating a sentence, one syllable at a time. Can’t [push] be [pull] lieve [purh] I [pull] do (pushJ this [pull] for [push] a [pull] live [push] ing....
12:32 a.m.
Sheraton, Room 702
Ready, Jack? Don’t make me repeat myself.” “Go ahead.”
“I have an experimental tracking device in my blood. Not one device; thousands of them. Nanomachines. You familiar with the term? Microscopic, undetectable by the human eye. I’m simplifying when I say that they’re in my blood. They’re in every fluid system in my body—my saliva, my tears, my lymph nodes.”
Jack blinked. He looked at Kelly, then at the nightstand across the room.
“Mind if I write this down?”
“I was hoping you would.”
There was a Sheraton pen and a scratch pad on the nightstand. He picked them up and took them back to the couch. He wrote “nanomachines.” Just in case this was leading somewhere.
Or if he should need evidence for the prosecution.
“Okay, so you’ve got these tiny machines inside of you.”
“Is this you being a reporter?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, stop. Let me tell it.”
Jack put down the pen and paper. “Keep in mind I only have seven hours to live.”
Kelly tightened her lips for a moment, then continued. “The machines are tracking devices. They constantly feed information to a satellite: body temperature, heart rate, global position. And that information is relayed to a tracking station.”
“Sounds very Big Brother.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. But think about the possibilities of tracking criminals or terrorists. Another is—wait, you said you have children?”
“A daughter.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’m not sure I want to tell you.” Jack looked at the clock on the nightstand. It was 11:30 back in Gurnee. Callie was no doubt asleep, clinging to her pink bear, which was also a miniblanket. The thing looked like a mutant tree sloth, but she’d had it since birth and refused to part with it.
“Don’t be a baby. How old is she?”
“Callie’s four.”
“Well, imagine, God forbid, if some sick bastard grabbed Callie from a shopping mall one day. You’d have no way of finding her, unless the kidnapper was stupid enough to walk past a surveillance camera.”
The very thought of it formed a cold, dark knot in Jack’s stomach.
“With this system, it would take a second to pinpoint Callie’s position, and the police would be able to recover her minutes later. Abductions would become a thing of the past.”
Jack thought about this. “Unless the kidnappers got smart and learned how to turn these nanomachines off.”
“Not possible. There are too many of them. Self-replicating, using blood waste as raw material. All the benefits of a virus, none of the weaknesses. Except if they leave the body. With nothing to feed on, they die. But once inside, there’s no getting rid of them.”
“You seem proud of these things.�
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“I worked in the lab that created them. That’s my job. Was my job, back in Ireland.”
“You don’t have the accent. Though you did slip and say ‘flat’ a short while ago.”
“I’m trying to blend in, boyo,” she said in a thick brogue. “But now you’re here. And now it’s only you and me and the Mary—you know what I call these things?”
“No, what?”
“The Mary Kates. You know ... those blond twins? The Olsens? They’re just like these little things. They’re everywhere.”
So Kelly here has tiny machines named after a pair of barely legal blondes running around in her blood. Right.
“There’s one more special feature, and this impressed the shite out of everyone. The Mary Kates, you see, can not only track your location; they can tell us if there’s someone in the room with you. The abduction angle again. It’s meant to help rescuers pounce on the kidnappers, not the victim.”
“So right now, these Mary Kates know I’m here with you.”
“Yes. They detect you’re less than ten feet away from me. They’re picking up your brain waves and heartbeat. Very sensitive, these girls.”
“Fucking creepy.”
“Not as creepy as what I’m about to tell you. Remember?”
“What?”
“If the Mary Kates detect that I’m alone, they’ll travel to my brain and make it explode.”
12:42 a.m.
Edison Avenue
The bag was not as heavy as he’d thought. The average human head was about six pounds—two for the skull, a quarter for the skin, and three for the brain, and spare change for water and fat and such. But this Adidas bag definitely felt lighter than six pounds.
Maybe it was all the blood and brains that had spurted out.
Nice, huh?
Kowalski wondered how far he’d have to travel with it. A plane was out of the question. Homeland Security would x-ray his $19.95 bag and see Ed’s goofy mug staring back up at them. Most likely, CI-6 would dispatch someone local to recover it, analyze, do whatever they wanted with it. That’s DHS, folks. Keeping America Safe, One Decapitated Head at a Time.
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