Afterparty Part 8

It was just after eleven in the morning. The place was open, but there was no one at the front counter, no one at the tables. The air was warm, and I could smell noodles cooking. I called out the standard sonar for empty buildings: "h.e.l.lo," "Excuse me," etc. A dark-haired boy about five years old burst through the kitchen door, saw me, and ran back before I could stop him. A minute later a tiny middle-aged Asian woman came out wiping her hands with a dish towel. "How many?" she asked.

"Ollie sent me," I said.

She frowned.

"Olivia Skarsten? She said to-"

"You know Olivia?" Her voice low and fast, the accent compacting the syllables. I couldn't read her expression.

"Yes. Yes, I do."

"You have seen her lately? In the hospital? She is well?" Each question a jab.

"Uh..."

"She has visitors?" Now the anger was coming through.

I put up my hands. "Listen, I'm just here as a favor. She sent me to pick up her bag."

"Oh, she wants her things." The woman started shouting angrily in another language-I a.s.sumed Thai. A girl who could have been anywhere from sixteen to twenty-five came running out of the kitchen, and yelled, "Ma! Ma! Settle down!"

The mother kept shouting. The girl's eyes darted from her mother's face to mine, her expression s.h.i.+fting in quantum jumps from confused to concerned to p.i.s.sed off. Now I had both women to deal with. I said, "If she owes you money-"

The daughter pointed at me. "Stay the f.u.c.k there." No trace of an Asian accent-she sounded like an angry Edmonton Oilers fan. I upped her minimum age to eighteen. She shouted something at her mother in Thai and then marched across the dining room, heading toward the restrooms. The mother glared at me, lips pursed, nostrils flaring. Genuine, high-quality seething.

A minute pa.s.sed, two. I looked back toward the gla.s.s door glazed with condensation, hoping that the blurry shape beyond was Bobby's car, ready for my getaway. I felt naked without Dr. Gloria at my back.

The kitchen door b.u.mped open, and a man in an electric wheelchair rolled out. The father, evidently, or maybe the grandfather. He slumped in the chair at an odd angle. His right arm was dead in his lap, but his left hand gripped the armrest controller. The chair coasted to a stop, and his eyes drifted up to mine.

Everything clicked then. The wheelchair, the angry mother, the angrier daughter. Maybe if Dr. G had been there I wouldn't have been so slow to understand.

The daughter reappeared, dragging behind her a wheeled black duffel as big as a body bag. She dropped it between us. The mother burst into tears and spun away from us, slammed her way into the kitchen.

Heat flushed my cheeks. I bent to pick up the duffel, and the daughter said, "Is she still claiming she's insane?"

"I don't think she's claiming anything." The bag was heavier than I expected.

I started toward the door, and the girl said, "Wait. You tell her."

I stopped. "Look, I'm just-"

"Tell her when he was bleeding away on the stairs, waiting for the ambulance, he kept saying, I should have knocked, I should have knocked. He felt pity for her. That's the kind of man he is."

I looked at the old man. He said nothing. I said, "I'm sorry for-"

"No more sorry," the daughter said. "All those letters she sent-I apologize, I'm so sorry, please forgive me, I wasn't myself. They mean nothing. Tell her that my mother wanted to burn that bag. The only reason she didn't is because Dad wouldn't allow it. And because, when that psycho came to pick it up, she'd finally have to face us in person-no hiding behind letters." Her smile was a grimace. "I guess we were wrong about that."

I pushed open the door. The girl said, "Tell her she's a coward."

I froze, one hand on the door, one hand on the bag. I turned on her, ready to cut her down: You f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h, you have no idea how brave she is. But the old man was looking up at me out of that bent body.

I banged through the door without saying anything. Outside I smacked the trunk of the car, and Bobby popped the lid. I wrestled the duffel inside, then got into the backseat.

"Let's get out of here," I said.

Ollie sat with her arms across her stomach, staring straight ahead. Bobby said, "Did they give you a hard time?"

"No, no. Charming people. I don't think I'd order from there anytime soon, though."

We carried the bag up to Bobby's apartment and set Ollie up on the couch with the drapes closed and the lights off. She was corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g deeper into the withdrawal, and the headaches and nausea were on their way. We scavenged Bobby's bathroom and came up with some ibuprofen. The roommate's door remained closed-I still hadn't seen him.

I said, "I have to make a call. You two good?"

Ollie waved. Bobby said, "I'll make tea."

I said, "Give me your pen."

Bobby looked hurt as he handed it over. "You should really buy your own." He didn't know about the phone Fayza had given me.

I walked down to the street before I unrolled the screen. I found Brandy's name in the contact list and left the drug dealer a message: "This is Lyda. I'm looking for a custom. Immediately. I'll pay for the rush."

The message wouldn't go directly to whatever burner phone Brandy was using, so it would probably take a while. I started walking. The pen chimed before I'd reached the corner.

The sender's address was an obviously randomized mash of letters and numbers. "Have you found G.o.d yet?" Brandy asked, cheerful. The call was voice only; he hadn't turned the video on.

"Still looking," I said. "But thanks for the referral."

A pause as he tried to figure out if I was being sarcastic.

"I warned you, you didn't want to talk to my distributor," he said.

"This isn't about that," I said. "I need something else. Ever hear of a drug called Clarity?"

"Of course. For a while very popular. I can print it up for you, no problem."

"Bulls.h.i.+t. That stuff was enzymatic. You can't print it."

"Did I say print? I will order for you, quick-"

"n.o.body makes it anymore, Brandy, not even the Chinese. Too many suicides."

"Don't sound so angry! What I mean is that I can make you something like Clarity."

"That's what I'm looking for-something close. There's a drug called Guanfacine that hits some of the same pathways-it's sold under the brand name Tenex. Can you get me that?"

"Students ask for it by name! Why didn't you say so?"

"I need it in an hour."

He gave me the name of an intersection a half mile from me. "There's a threading shop there. You know, Indian ladies doing that thing to eyebrows? Stand in front of that. Or go inside and get some work done."

He laughed. I hung up on him.

"My eyebrows are fine," I said.

The neighborhood grew shabbier the farther I walked. I put out my Don't f.u.c.k With Me Vibe, which deterred the homeless from hitting me up. I put away Bobby's pen and took out Fayza's phone. There were two messages, both from Hootan, asking if the a.n.a.lysis of the wafers was done yet. I'd told him it would be at least forty-eight hours, but here he was hara.s.sing me after one day.

Light flashed at the edge of my vision. I glanced up from the pen, expecting to see Dr. Gloria, but there was only a homeless guy, hunched over his black garbage bag. Fine, I thought. Play hard to get.

Sometime after dark, after Brandy's custom-printed drug had frolicked for a few hours in her system, Ollie said, "That's a person." I'd just come back from another errand, and she was sitting where I'd left her on the couch, still wearing scrubs, staring at the chair across the room. Bobby was slumped in the chair, asleep. A hole in his jeans showed a white kneecap.

"Wow, look at you, noticing things on things," I said. "You're feeling better?"

"A little, but not too much. The calm before everything starts turning too ... meaningful." She nodded at Bobby. "He's a sweet kid. He thinks the world of you."

"G.o.d knows why."

"I think it was the werewolf."

I laughed. "Jesus, what did he tell you?"

"You saved his life."

"An exaggeration." I sat down beside her. "When Bobby showed up in the ward, he was getting bullied by a thug named Torrence, a huge guy who'd gotten his skull dented in a motorcycle accident and woke up remembering that he'd been a hyena."

"What?"

"Oh yeah, and he could turn back into one at any moment."

"You're s.h.i.+tting me."

"It's called clinical lycanthropy, but the animal can be anything, even a c.o.c.kroach."

"So how'd you save Bobby? Shoot Torrence with a silver bullet?"

"You're not listening-he was a hyena. Totally different."

"Of course. My mistake."

I checked to make sure Bobby was still sleeping. "It wasn't much. I just told Torrence that if he didn't lay off Bobby, I'd tell the doctors about his drawings."

"Drawings?"

"Filthy stuff. I tell you, I'll never think the same way about La.s.sie again."

Ollie laughed, willing to go along with my bulls.h.i.+t. "So, you ready to talk?" I asked.

She found my face and kissed me hard. "Now I am. Tell me everything you can remember about the church."

I went over the exits I'd seen: the heavy loading dock doors, the reinforced gla.s.s front door. I couldn't tell her whether there was an alarm system.

As we talked she tipped over the duffel bag that I'd retrieved from the Thai place. It slammed against the floor and Bobby startled awake. Ollie froze for a moment, staring in his direction. The kid scrunched his face and yawned like a bear.

I said to Ollie, "It's still Bobby."

"Right," she said. She unzipped the bag. There was no lock on the zipper, not even the tiny padlocks they put on cheap luggage. She started pulling out the contents, mostly clothes, and dumped them on the floor.

"Any security cameras at the church?" she asked.

"None that I could see." I picked up one of the articles of clothing, a bulky camouflage jacket. It didn't look like army, but something a hunter would wear. A hunter much bigger than Ollie.

From the bag she lifted out a heavy object that was a bit bigger than a toolbox. It was sealed in opaque plastic wrap. She turned it in her hands, spending a lot of time looking at the zigzag heat seal on the wrap.

"Is there a problem?" I asked.

"Trying to decide if anyone's opened it," she said. "I think we're good."

She tore open the plastic seal. The object was a steel box, with a lid closed by a thick black padlock.

"I hate myself sometimes," she said.

I looked at the lock. It was a mean-looking thing, embossed with the name Medeco. "Do you have the key?"

She rubbed at her forehead. She was sweating, but that was probably a side effect of Brandy's jumpstart. "There is no key," she said.

"You lost it?" Bobby asked, fully awake now.

"I melted it down. That way they couldn't steal it from me, or force me to give it to them."

"Who?" Bobby said, alarmed.

She smiled sourly. "You know. Them." She hopped to her feet. "Let's see what's in the kitchen."

There was a sharpness to her that I hadn't seen since I first met her, in my early days on the NAT. She'd been palming her meds then, playing a game of chicken with her own crazy. Her paranoia was kicking in. As a newcomer I was of course under suspicion. Lyda Rose, Agent of Them. But I was a testy addict drying out, and of course eager to push anyone's b.u.t.tons, including those of the tiny chica with the dark eyes. In group, it was her reactions I watched the most. On the floor I could sense her tracking me, monitoring who I talked to. We were wary of each other and tuned in at the same time. The first time we had s.e.x it was like full contact tae kwon do. Eventually I talked her into going back on her prescription, even though-or maybe because-I was in such rough shape myself. The meds soaked into her bloodstream, seemingly having no effect, then bang-the paranoia fell away and the agnosia kicked in. She became sweeter, softer, a little out of focus. Easier to love. And a lot less s.e.xy. A flaw in my character, but there it is. I've always been a sucker for the beautiful and the bats.h.i.+t.

Ollie came back to the living room with a collection of junk: wire twist ties, a grocery store bonus card, a paring knife. Bobby said, "Don't you have lock pick tools?"

"They're in the box," she said.

"But why would you-?"

"Shhh." She kneeled next to the duffel. One night on the ward, during one of our after-hours kitchen runs, I'd asked her if picking locks was part of her government training. She laughed, said it was the tweaker itch, one of the side effects of Clarity. A mentor had told her not to fight it. Better to use the itch and get a hobby. So instead of taking apart old vacuum cleaners like a meth head, she attacked locks. Worked her way through the bibles of the field by a guy named Tobias, staying up all night, immersing herself in the craft like parachuting into a foreign country.

Ollie cut the grocery card in two. One half she shaped into a rough key. The other was a narrow strip. She slid the fake key into the lock, then rapped on it with the heel of her shoe. Next she took out the key shape and replaced it with the strip.