Agent Charlie Ratesic, the hero laid low, muttered from the depths of his unconsciousness while his head lolled back and forth in his hospital bed. The machines keeping him alive and free of pain beeped endlessly in the small room, their rhythm like a mechanical pulsebeat.
I was sitting on a chair by the edge of his bed, as I had been sitting for a week, keeping him company, telling him stories, waiting for him to wake.
“I’m sorry, Charles,” I said, as much to myself as to him, as much to the captures in the room as to the person who lay before me, past the reach of hearing. “I am so dreadfully sorry.”
I had said these words so many times already. Others had come and gone. Charlie’s heartbroken parents, our colleagues bearing flowers, cards, the doughnuts they knew he loved, which at the end of each day I took out with me and distributed to the doctors and nurses. Poor Laszlo, Charlie’s brother, had come every day, come and sat silently beside me for hours after his own shift was through.
Technically, I had little to apologize for. I had told Charlie not to return to that warehouse. Indeed, I had not only warned him but ordered him not to go. He knew that it would be my duty and my responsibility to shut it down: an Off Record house could not be abided any longer, and I had to act.
He knew we would be going in there, and that we would come in with weapons blazing.
And yet when the decisive day came, and we swept in with the full force of the State, there he was, still undercover, skulking among the conspirators, unable to free himself from the idea that there was a monster left for him to find.
He had been caught in the cross fire. Shot six times, including twice in the stomach and once in the chest—a bullet that pierced the lungs and brought him perilously close to dying right there, off the Record, on a dirty warehouse floor in Glendale.
And perhaps that would have been better, I thought with sadness as I listened to the machines breathing for him. As I watched the medicine dripping into his arm. Drip, drip.
“Arlo?”
I had fallen asleep, I suppose. My eyes opened to find his looking into mine. Charlie, dear Charlie. He spoke, clearly but with difficulty. “The monster,” he said, and I closed my eyes. Still. “I have to…” He cleared his throat. Turned his head to one side. “Get the monster.”
“Goodness, Charlie,” I told him. I opened my eyes, leaned forward, and took poor Charlie’s hand. “I wish you would take pleasure in your success.”
“Success,” he murmured. “Success.”
It was like he could not accept the word. Like he was rolling it around in his mouth, tasting it, unsatisfied. The machines beeped and hummed.
“Yes, Charlie,” I said. “Success. Numerous arrests were made. A grave assault on the Objectively So was thwarted. All because of you, Charlie. Because of you.”
“The monster…” He couldn’t stop. He wouldn’t. My old friend, still in the thrall of this wild idea. What was to be done? He looked up at me. Desperate that someone believe him. “What if it were an Expert, Arlo? What if it were someone from the Office of the Record?”
“Or”—I stood up, wiped my hands, leaned as far over his bed as I could, whispered as quietly as possible—“a Speculator?”