by CJ West
“That’s me,” I said. “By the tire.”
Somehow the prosecutor projected a red dot on the image. It fell right on top of me. I can only assume it was a signal from my tracking device caught at the instant of the gunshot.
“Did you question Mr. O’Connor about this incident?”
The prosecutor conferred with the lead officer who’d taken me from the house. It seemed the new court system left no time for stories to be fabricated on either side. The officer admitted he had not and the judge was not pleased.
“Our technology does not excuse shoddy police work,” he boomed.
The prosecutor and the officer seemed surprised. I guessed they hadn’t lost a case against a relearner in a long time. Armed with indisputable facts, why would they? What I didn’t know was that this was a court for relearners only. Citizens who had never been convicted of a crime entered the old system of juries and admissibility and free passes. When the officers came here they expected to win, just like they expected to be whamboozled when they stepped in front of a jury.
The judge called Wendell up front and the two whispered. The rest of the room fell silent and I heard bits and pieces of the conversation. “You’ve done great things... This one isn’t going to make it... You’re on the edge. I’d hate to see that happen to you.”
They got quieter, but I knew what was going on. The judge was offering Wendell a chance to dump me, to send me to the cat baggers where I couldn’t give him any more trouble. It was the easiest path for Wendell. One of his biggest problems could be solved with a few short clicks. I thought I heard Wendell say he didn’t mind that I’d come to his house, but it was so soft I couldn’t be sure what they were saying.
He came back to the table.
The judge pronounced me innocent of the charges.
The prosecutor was in shock, ditto the officer behind him. They shot me dirty looks as the prosecutor went up front, clicked the screen a few times and pressed his thumb to the scanner. I didn’t know what the thumb print was doing. Maybe it was charging him for the court time because he lost. Whatever the penalty was, he blamed me for forcing it on him. I was collecting enemies every day. If I was looking for an ally, I wouldn’t find one there in the courtroom.
Wendell and I filed out solemnly, but when we reached the conference room, he shook my hand vigorously. He told me he was glad to finally win a case. It was like a great weight was lifted. Like he was about to be closed down and those few words from me had kept him in business.
He sat across from me and said nothing for several moments. He was probably thinking about how lucky he was. If his funding were cut off maybe he’d lose that huge house. Maybe he’d be vulnerable to all the relearners he’d tormented over the years. He nodded as if he were talking to himself and then he said, “I can help you with Blake.”
He didn’t say he knew what Blake was doing, didn’t even say he believed me, but my spirit lifted. Until I got my delivery the next morning, I didn’t know how generous Wendell’s offer was.
I was surprised at what happened next. The whole time I’d been telling him about how he was being cheated, he shrugged it off. I didn’t even think he was listening, but there in the conference room, he turned angry. For once he wasn’t angry at me. He said he wanted my help. If I could collect convincing proof that Nathan was gaming the system, he’d make sure I never had to see Blake again. He promised I’d get all the help I needed to pass the program.
I agreed without considering what I’d have to do. It was the most hope I’d had since waking up with the oxygen mask over my face.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
I barely slept that night. Never did I sleep well in that apartment. Maybe it was because I was being watched. Or maybe it was something they were doing to keep me awake. After hearing about the cat baggers and the drugs in the drinking water, I didn’t trust anything in my apartment. They always knew where I was. They could tamper with my soda or my food whenever I was a few blocks away. The longer I lived there, the more paranoid I became.
I thought a lot about helping Wendell and how great it would be if I never saw Blake again. My first plan was to gather the names and criminal histories of the men in both complexes, but that wouldn’t work. Nathan Farnsworth would explain away the differences by saying his program was better. I didn’t want to cause any more trouble for Wendell, so I decided I had to figure out who was cherry picking the easy cases for Farnsworth and directing the tough cases to Wendell. I had to prove that person was cheating the system. First I had to find him.
Doing that was going to take time. I decided to head to the donut shop, have some breakfast, and think about the best way to get started, but when I opened the door to my apartment, Wendell was standing there with an armload of books. He hadn’t knocked, but he knew I was coming.
He invited himself in and placed all of the books but one on the coffee table. He told me that when I started the program again, I was to go to the English section. It would ask me to start reading, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he handed me. Then he did a surprising thing. He picked up the gray pads and tucked them beside the television. Next he unplugged the wrist strap, wound the cord around his hand, and stuffed it next to the pads.
“You won’t need those anymore,” he said, but he cautioned me to read the book carefully, then read it again before answering the questions on the black box. “If you don’t understand a word, look it up.”
I told him I would.
“You’ll need this.” He showed me what looked like a pen with two buttons, one red and one black. He pressed the red button and pointed the pen at my face. I winced, but nothing happened. When he held the black button, my face appeared on the television, looking awkward and nervous. The pen held hours of video, adding to what was recorded each time the red button was pressed. There was no way to delete what was captured.
He shook my hand, thanked me for my help, and left.
There were five other novels on the coffee table and an unabridged dictionary. I was glad to have the wrist strap and the gray pads gone. I didn’t know how Wendell removed the punishments from my lessons and I didn’t really care. I could never have finished if I had to do push-ups every time I made a mistake. Actually, as you are listening to me here in this hall, you’re hearing the improvement Wendell helped me make by giving me those books and forcing me to read them over and over. My vocabulary blossomed and as I talked with educated people like Nick and Charlotte, I understood more of what they said and even what they only implied. If Wendell had brought me before you when I first awoke, I’m afraid this entire speech would have sounded like it came from a fifth grader, which, I guess, is what I was—a fifth grader with highly-developed vocational skills.
With Wendell gone, I walked downstairs without the book for fear of losing it on the street. I walked the sidewalks on alert, watching everyone who approached and every car that drove by. None appeared threatening. I wished I knew who had attacked me the day before. My two candidates were Nick and Nathan Farnsworth. No one else wanted to kill me, except maybe Wendell.
Nathan had the most to lose. His program could fall apart if the relearners knew it was full of subliminal messages. He had big money on the line and he’d already proven he couldn’t be trusted. I had to go back there and I’d have to be careful to stay clear of the cameras when I did. When I returned to see Stephan, no one in that control room could know I was there. That was going to be a challenge since I couldn’t find the cameras in my own apartment.
The other possible assailant was Nick, but I ruled him out right away. He had threatened me, but that was just a bunch of hot air. He wanted his kid and I couldn’t blame him for that. He couldn’t afford to have me shot and besides, he was all about law and order. That’s why he hated me so much. A guy like Nick can’t pick up a shotgun and start blowing out display windows. Nathan was my guy, but for the next few days, I’d stay away from both of them.
I reached the donut shop alive, had my coffee an
d Boston Kreme, and thought about how I could use the pen to help Wendell. I’d never tried to catch a criminal before and it took some time to get my head around the idea. The closest I’d come was sending junkies into neighborhoods I’d been hitting hard. That had worked for me in the old days, but this was different. I couldn’t walk away and let the cops do everything. I had to see where the case went every step of the way. The guy I really needed to catch worked inside the system. Busting a criminal in the act was just my way in.
I left the donut shop, thinking about who I could go after. One name came to mind: Cortez. I owed him after what he did to me. He was the one guy I could feel good about putting away.
As I stepped outside, I noticed the neon blue sedan parked in front of the display window. The window had been replaced and the area was so clean you couldn’t tell I had almost been killed there a day before. The sedan didn’t show a single scratch from the pellets I heard hit the fender. I should have suspected something then. I hadn’t checked the license plate while I was running for my life, but I knew it was the same car. It should have had a bunch of dents and scratches, but it didn’t.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
I went back to my apartment because I didn’t know where to start my investigation and I didn’t feel safe hanging around on the street while I decided what to do. I knew how to get into almost any home, what to take, and how to sell it. Catching criminals was a whole different mindset, and ideas didn’t come easy. I sat on the couch and thought about Cortez. He probably still worked nights at the hospital and I could pick him up there and follow him home. This time of day he was probably home sleeping. I didn’t know where he lived. I didn’t even know his real name.
Maybe I was stalling because I didn’t now where to start, but I picked up the book Wendell had given me and set to reading. It was rough at first. I didn’t understand what I read, so it was a chore that moved at a dreadfully slow pace. There were ten or twenty words on every page that I didn’t recognize and I fumbled in the dictionary to find them. Even the definitions used words I didn’t know, so I ended up looking up words to understand the words I’d looked up, to understand a book full of gibberish that hadn’t been used in a very long time. It was frustrating, but it was easier than push-ups and impossible math problems.
A few times I set the book down and thought about giving it up for the day, but there wasn’t much else to do in the apartment except bounce the tennis ball against the brick wall. That accomplished nothing. When I thought of quitting, I remembered the night Blake took me for a ride. The memory of bone and flesh meeting concrete and the screams echoing out into the trees was enough motivation for me to find a way to understand the story.
I never thought I’d take reading so seriously, but I opened the notebook I bought to beat Blake’s insane math problems and I wrote, Tom Sawyer, at the top. From then on, every time something important happened or a new person joined the story, I wrote it down. The notes were a shortcut to what was happening. I couldn’t find anything in the pages of the book, but if I needed to know something, it was probably in my notes.
The craziest thing I did helped the most. After I finished a chapter, looked up the words I didn’t know, and took notes, I went back and read the whole chapter again. To my surprise, it got more interesting. When I read the chapter a third time, I understood what was going on and even how the characters felt about what was happening to them.
Hours passed. About the time my eyes started to hurt I realized Wendell was telling me something by giving me this particular book. Tom was clever to get other people to do his work, but tricking others and shirking his responsibilities was wrong. Wendell saw a lot of Tom Sawyer in me. I should have finished school. I should have gotten a job. I should not have taken things from other people. Wendell was telling me to change in every way possible. I was already working at it, but I’m not sure that was enough for him.
I was really hungry that afternoon, but I kept on reading. Every time Tom took advantage of someone or told a lie, I felt guilty. I didn’t know how Wendell did it. I hadn’t eaten anything from the apartment in a long time and I hadn’t turned on the television, so it wasn’t drugs or subliminal messages. Wendell couldn’t be manipulating my feelings except through the words on the page. Was that possible? However he did it, I was changing. Maybe it had been happening for weeks and I was just realizing it then. Or maybe this was how everyone felt when they read this book. For me it was a new experience.
It was well past two o’clock when I put the book down and went into the kitchen. I was still wary about eating anything from my apartment, but I wasn’t afraid of Wendell. He didn’t need to pick out that book for me. He could have poisoned and tortured me if he wanted to. Wendell was a dogooder. If I had any doubt, it vanished when I saw the sleek black computer on the kitchen table. A note said the computer was to help complete my errand.
I microwaved a frozen pizza without a second thought to what might have been surreptitiously injected into the package. (That was one of the words I looked up from another book.) I washed it down with a Coke and turned on the computer. I’d used computers in the library to check baseball scores, watch videos, and search for music. I’d never had one of my own before and couldn’t help checking it out. I ate most of the pizza while I checked the weather and how the Sox were doing.
I don’t know where the idea came from, but I realized the computer might be able to help me find Cortez. I typed his name into Google, but all I got was a bunch of stuff about some guy who invaded South America a thousand years ago. For the next twenty minutes I mostly stared at the computer and sipped Coke. I found some interesting stories, but none of them were any help.
Finally, I read a newspaper report about a guy who got shot outside a bar downtown. They mentioned a few people connected to the case and I knew what I needed to do. I searched for my name and stories about my arrest and trial five years earlier. I spent a long time reading articles that made me sound evil. Someone who used computers every day might have found it in five minutes, but half an hour later, I followed the links about my trial to Cortez’s real name: Carlos Mendoza.
When I typed his real name into the computer, it listed addresses all around Boston. I narrowed it down to West Roxbury and Hyde Park, and in another ten minutes I had an address that was close to the hospital. I wasn’t sure if this was what Wendell expected me to do with the computer, but I had my first target and I was ready to step onto the other side of the law.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
As excited as I was to get started, I forced myself to go to bed early so I’d be alert at four o’clock the next morning. The donut shop wasn’t even open when I hopped a cab for the hospital. What I had planned wasn’t illegal, but if Cortez saw me following him he’d know what was up. We both know he ratted me out. My following him could only mean I’d come to get even. So I hunkered down in the dark at the edge of the parking lot where I could see everyone coming and going from the hospital. I sat there for two hours and the only movement was the sunrise and an ambulance that pulled in at six o’clock. It wasn’t until almost seven that cars started pulling into the employee lot.
Fifteen minutes later, people dressed in scrubs, some blue, some white, some with little patterns on them, all marched out toward their cars like zombies headed back to their tombs for a day of rest. One lady headed for a Volvo two cars down from me. I pushed back onto the grass and opened The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I wasn’t sure why I’d brought it along, but it convinced her I wasn’t there to cause trouble. Strange as it was for someone to be up this early, reading on the little strip of grass at the edge of the parking lot, she backed out without revealing my hiding place.
Two minutes later Cortez drove by in a Toyota and I recorded the license number in my notebook. I didn’t run for a cab. I knew where he was going, at least I thought I did. I let him get out of sight then took a cab to the address I’d found online. It only took a few minutes to find the Toyota with the plate number
I had written down.
I didn’t have the fancy gadgets Wendell used to spy on me. All I had was my notebook and the slender camera. It was enough, but what I didn’t think through was that after working all night, Cortez would be tired. Neighbors started coming out of their houses. Parents drove off to work. School kids stood on the sidewalk and waited for the school bus. People walked their dogs. I was in the middle of it all trying to blend in.
After about an hour, Cortez’s wife came out with a little girl in blue farmer jeans and a white shirt. She got on the last school bus that went by. The poor kid had to lean forward as she walked to balance the heavy backpack. The woman was young with black hair. She was dressed up in pants, like she worked in an office where she didn’t want to hear comments about her legs. She went inside for a few minutes after the bus left, then pulled an old Honda out of the driveway and drove off. I assumed she went to work. And when she didn’t come back for the next several hours, I guessed I was right.
That left me on a bench a block and a half from the Mendoza’s house. When Cortez didn’t come out in the first hour, I realized he was probably sleeping. Women kept coming out to walk their dogs and my only disguise was my book. I read and they left me alone.
I was on that bench all morning. I hadn’t brought anything to eat and by lunchtime I was starving. My throbbing bladder forced me to sit still. I was dying for a Coke to keep my eyelids from drooping, but that would have forced me to go looking for a bathroom. I kept nodding off in spite of the pain and finally had to stop reading. I held the book open and pretended to read while I looked over the top of the pages at Cortez’s house. A dozen times I wondered what I was doing there. I needed to go, but I couldn’t leave. I kept hoping he’d come out to meet someone and then I’d have him, but I knew it was a fantasy.