Word had gotten to Chiffon as to what the detective had done, and she was none too pleased. She made a few calls, even going so far as to send Brody an e-mail explaining what was to happen. While everything that had come to pass with Hark Telecom was getting sorted out, he would remain in county after the day and a half he spent in the hospital being treated for his various injuries. He could write his statements behind bars, and if things matched his story, he would be transferred via prison bus back to Minneapolis where all his remaining community service hours would transfer directly, hour by hour, into prison time, with an additional three hundred for missing their scheduled appointment.
Brody could say nothing in protest; it was a fine deal. He was confident that everything with Hark would come to light—all the evidence was still in place at the shipyard, and the contents of Hubert Ward’s files contained the nefarious goings-on that the company had been behind. It was the Fairlane—which was full of evidence, even with some of Brody’s blood—and the Zäh that kept him behind bars.
“Things aren’t quite tallying up in a savory way in that particular department,” Chiffon wrote in her e-mail, complete with italicization.
For three weeks Brody remained in his cell, except for two hours a day to go to the gym or walk the chain-link cube in the courtyard. He navigated the world with his sonar, stared at the TV mounted to the wall behind metal grating in the cafeteria, unable to see its picture—but heard Hark Telecom stock was, no big surprise, plummeting.
What was happening to Hark was the talk of the entire country. The company was divided up and sold off in massive chunks. The endless cubicle farms were cleared out, the office furniture sold in the corporate equivalent of a sheriff’s sale, held in the employee parking lot. The number of jobless people was higher than it had ever been in Chicago. The more talented employees were hired at various companies the world over, once they had been determined to have not worked anywhere near research and development of course. Soon the Hark building that presided over downtown was empty and at night, all the other high-rises around it would be lit up here and there with late-night workers and cleaning crews, but that building became a stoic black monolith, wholly unlit and unoccupied.
The police chased as many leads as they could. The only one that had an easily sniffed trail was the one involving Hubert Ward, the shipyard, the six thousand miles of cable, the computers that pumped out endless streams of a broadcast-ready frequency that, once tested on laboratory rats, offered a plethora of results. Some rats became hostile to certain frequencies and exposure to the radiation within the wires—others more docile, tame. Some of them grew antisocial and never left their plastic hutch in the corner of their pen.
Stephen Marko, the CEO of Hark Telecom, made a public announcement claiming he had no idea what had been going on in his company. The man who had built up Hark from a telephone repair company started weeping on live television, telling the world that he was deeply remorseful for those affected. Since the company was essentially dead and all the funds were dried up, he couldn’t offer any compensation. All he could offer was an apology.
Brody heard footsteps enter the cafeteria that weren’t from prison-issue foam flip-flops. The sonar pinged the man standing in the back of the room searching the prisoners as they ate loose mashed potatoes and wheat toast, determining it was Nathan Pierce. Brody remained in his seat since getting up—or even so much as preparing to stand up—before they’d been excused by the guard wasn’t just frowned upon but often resulted in a broken rib.
Nathan found Brody at the table, gave him a nod. He met eyes with the nearest guard and pointed at Brody, then jutted a thumb over his shoulder.
The guard, not breaking his stoic stance at the end of the buffet line, gave him permission with a wave.
Nathan and Brody left the cafeteria for the reception center. He was given a cardboard box with his belongings—his ruined clothes and wallet and keys and even the knuckleduster.
When he was finished getting dressed, Nathan took Brody’s phone and replaced it with a small box.
“For me? You shouldn’t have.”
“Go ahead,” Nathan said, flipping Brody’s phone around to open the panel on its reverse side.
Brody couldn’t see what was printed on the box, so he shook it next to his ear. By the sound of it, a new contact lens charger with a set of fresh batteries.
“On the house,” Nathan said, fiddling with Brody’s phone.
Brody and Nathan were alone in the locker room with benches and lots of yellow lines painted on the floor that prisoners, by no means, were to cross before being told to do so. They stood on either side of that line, Brody at the mirror and the row of sinks carefully putting the lenses into his eyes.
His reflection spiraled out ahead of him, the digits blinking: 29:59:59. He saw the detective behind him, looking at Brody’s dead cell phone. “What’s wrong?” Brody asked.
“I don’t want anyone to hear what I’m about to say,” Nathan said, giving Brody his slumbering cell, then going into his own pocket to do the same to his own. He glanced at the corners of the ceiling. Brody noticed that was where black domes were set up, just as they would be in any square inch of the prison.
Nathan sighed. “We’re releasing you today.”
Brody turned around. “You make it sound like a bad thing.”
“You kicked over a pretty big rock. Consider the can of worms officially opened. That e-mail was like the one piñata string that once pulled makes everything fall out.”
“That’s a lot of metaphors.”
“Bear with me. I haven’t slept. Just listen, okay? I’m trying to tell you, even though Hark has been splintered up and sold off, we couldn’t keep up with everything—stuff got away from us. When our tech guys tried to pry into certain sensitive files, they’d vanish. Self-destruct. Poof, gone. But we were able to chase it back out through the firewall and see that it was e-mailed in enormous chunks to an address, an overseas registry.”
“Any idea who it could be?” Brody said.
“We’re asking for a search warrant to get into that account and find out who was stockpiling Hubert Ward’s files. But it’s going to take a good deal of time and patience before we’re going to see any progress.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I want you to forget about all this once you’re released. You did your time. You won’t have to report to Chiffon anymore. The slate has been wiped clean. Take this as an opportunity for a fresh start.”
“What about January? The reform. Wasn’t that a week ago?” Brody had been keeping track of the time by moving a pile of matchsticks from one pile to another, but at some point his count got screwed up, and now he wasn’t sure if it was a week into January or New Year’s Eve.
“It was, and since you were out of state it didn’t apply.”
“What?”
“I pulled some strings for you. In exchange, I want you to tell me right now you’re going to leave it alone. That’s all I want.”
“Do you expect me to go after whoever is stockpiling Hubert’s files?” He shook his head. “Explain it to me again. Why the hell am I being released? You tell me I have a clean slate, but if I go walking out the door and get arrested the minute my jig gets scanned at a convenience store, I’m going to be kind of ticked.”
“You got a Get Out of Jail Free card. The judge ruled to change the adulterer’s law, but since there were so many cases, he took the unpopular route and had them all thrown out, claiming they were just misdemeanors anyway.”
“So I have a clean record now?” Brody laughed. “Haven’t had one of those in a while.”
“Don’t get too ahead of yourself. There’re still a few marks on there but nothing I can hold you for. The investigation with Hark is ongoing, and you can’t leave the state or much less break wind without my preapproval—so once you’re home: stay there.” Nathan stared at Brody, his mouth a single flat line cutting across his face like it had been scored there.
Brody scratched his beard. “There’s something else. Just go ahead and say it.”
“We don’t know what to do next,” Nathan said. “There’s no way to know. Until we get the clearance to chase this thing overseas, we’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled. But with you and Thorp being under this shit for years—I mean, I know you told me you don’t use a gun, but there was an awful lot of dead bodies at that shipyard …”
“I did what I had to do.”
Nathan sighed. “I’m going to leave it at this. Make it a onetime thing. Keep all this under your hat and don’t consider this bullshit something for you to take care of. Put it behind you. Move on. Get a nine to five, meet a girl. Just don’t go round thinking that Hark is going to come and get you again because—trust me—they’re through.”
Brody thought about the shipyard and the violence he’d cut loose on those men. Titian Shandorf in particular. Hubert Ward. After replaying the scene over and over while lying in his cell, Brody determined the number of men was eleven. Twelve, if you included Rice—which Brody did. He thought about those lives he had ended, shoveled together in the same pile with the one man he had killed before that night, the man in Cairo. He’d ended thirteen lives. He considered what Hubert Ward had told him about self-control, about being a pugilistic misanthrope—and how that wasn’t by choice, just an unanticipated effect of the silver fox signal.
He shook his head as he put the rest of his belongings into his pockets. He held the last item, the knuckleduster, in his palm and thought about how many men he had hurt or maimed. It ranked into the hundreds. One or two a week for all those years since he got out of the Army. Hundreds of fractured collarbones, knocked-out teeth, flattened noses, broken arms. Same deal following: red and blue, flashing. Metal cuffs on the wrists, stale coffee and stale air of the interview room, Chiffon’s office with the horrible gospel music playing on an endless loop—all of it, none of it—was it him or was it an unconscious influence?
Brody put the knuckleduster in his pocket, shook Nathan Pierce’s hand.
“We’ll probably need to call you in to clarify a few things. Thorp volunteered information about Sebastian Calloway and his friend Anthony ‘Spanky’ Ellis.”
“And?”
“The courts are so backed up—trying to put away Hark’s people who knew what Ward was up to—that they’ve decided to look the other way. Calloway and Ellis were both pretty high on the DA’s list, and a few of the judges I mentioned their names to said they were practically on a first-name basis with them, and, well, as far as they were concerned, two less faces they have to see a dozen times a year is a good thing.”
Nathan sighed. “And besides that, I’ve still got a notebook full of questions for you. Naturally, without said notebook with me, I can’t remember a single one of them for the life of me.” He looked at Brody for a few seconds, his eyes bloodshot. “I called Thorp. He’s coming to pick you up.”
“Thanks.” Brody turned on his heel and walked to the reception center door and waited to be buzzed through. “See you back in Minnesota?”
Nathan nodded.
The metal door slid aside and natural light flooded in, the sound of snow falling in a whispery, wet hiss. Brody faced the cold and went through the three layers of fence—all topped with razor wire—to the outside.
He blinked at the cold, his eyes sensitive to the new lenses, and saw an idling cab on the corner with a couple of familiar faces looking out the back window. Brody couldn’t help but smile as Thorp and Nectar got out and rushed over to him.
Thorp hugged him, nearly squeezed the breath out of his lungs with a bear hug.
“Easy now,” Brody said. “I still got some stitches.”
Nectar also hugged him but it was much weaker. Brody patted her back. Her spine was still easily felt through her shirt, but it wasn’t to the degree it had been when he’d last seen her. She looked much better.
She winced, tucking her hands into her jeans pockets. “I hope you didn’t get in too much trouble.”
“No, it wasn’t because of this—it was because of previous convictions. Nothing major.” He watched Nectar sweep a band of hair behind her ear. “Just some old stuff that had to get squared away.” He said it and a moment later it caught.
Nectar naturally missed it. As she thanked him, Brody looked to Thorp who looked back at him with an appreciative smile. They nodded at one another.
“It was really great of you to do that for me,” Nectar continued. “I don’t normally take pills unless I know what they are. And you know how it can be, you’re in Tokyo having fun with your friends and one thing leads to another and you don’t want to be the one not getting high—and, well, I just have to ask: How did you know to look for me at the bus station of all places?”
Brody turned to Thorp. His friend shrugged, stared at the sidewalk. Brody glanced back at Nectar and smiled as genuinely as the whirling confusion in his head would allow. “Lucky guess, I suppose.”
Thorp still peered down at the sidewalk, his face screwed up tight.
“Lunch?” Brody suggested.
Thorp smiled. “Yeah. Sure.”
The three sat in the back booth at America’s Favorite Automat across the street from Nectar’s former apartment building.
Nectar kept looking out the front window at her stoop, where she used to call home. “I can’t believe those assholes evicted me. I was just a couple of weeks late on rent. People go through hard times, right?” She looked to her brother, then to Brody.
Neither of them said anything.
She went back to glaring out the window for a few more seconds, then slid out of the booth, claiming, “I’m going to go look at the pies.”
When she was out of earshot, Brody turned to Thorp across the table and leaned forward. “She doesn’t remember anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“What happened in the hospital? Did she wake up talking about going to Tokyo and accidentally taking a bad pill and you and me finding her at a bus station? Where did she get all this?”
Thorp shrugged. “I never left her side. No one ever came into the room except for the doctor. He told me that sometimes the mind will build a story for itself to fill in gaps, that the narrative of memory needs to be continuous and all blank spaces need to be filled in with something, even if it sounds ridiculous to other people.”
“So no one supplied this Tokyo story?”
“No.”
“Jesus, that’s strange.”
Thorp scoffed. “What hasn’t been strange about this past month?”
“Do you suppose it was what they wanted her to think?” Brody asked after a moment. He waved a hand next to his ear, “So if she got free or something she wouldn’t actually remember where she was or anything?”
“Beats me.” Thorp watched Nectar over Brody’s shoulder. “Beats the hell out of me.”
When Thorp grinned, Brody turned to watch as Nectar twirled in front of the slices of pie, doing some sort of ballet with hands raised and spinning on her toes. She caught her balance on the plastic wall of the pie display case, looked around, then went back to dancing.
Brody turned back around and hunched over the table. “Detective Pierce, the one I e-mailed the information to? He told me to leave it alone and move on with my life.”
Thorp sipped his coffee. “That’s a good idea.”
“I think you should do the same.”
Thorp took his napkin and wiped the coffee foam from the tip of his nose. “Not to worry about that. After we got home, I wanted something to do with my hands and started working on the Terrapin …”
Brody lit a cigarette to hide his displeasure with the direction Thorp’s story was taking.
“The lawyers said I could keep all the money from Hark they had given me over the years. I said I wasn’t planning on giving it back, anyway. And then they told me someone was going to remove the wires at my house. Apparently, even though they had shut down the source at the shipyard, more units might still be sending out the signal and they didn’t want to chance it. They don’t want me to sue is what it sounds like. Either way, I got the Terrapin running. Me and Nectar did, actually. And we ripped that tower out of the ground ourselves.”
Brody smiled, pleased to see the story ended differently than he expected. “So, it’s over. You won’t be getting your checks anymore. Is that fine with you?”
“Yeah,” Thorp said. “I could stand to return to the hustle and bustle of the city, get out among people again. No man is an island, right? Got a job interview downtown Monday, crane operator and maintenance.”
“Handyman.”
“You know it.”
Nectar approached the table, picked up the cigarette Brody had in the ashtray, took a deep drag, and released the smoke slowly. “Good Lord, that’s wonderful.” She sighed.
She caught Brody looking at her and took another drag, her eyes lighting up. She pulled out the collar of his shirt and blew the smoke into the material. As the smoke drifted up between their faces, she stepped back, looked at her handiwork, and laughed, giving the mark a swipe with her thumb to ensure a job well done.
She sat down. “I’m sorry. Don’t worry about it—it’ll come right out. It’s just something I do to people on a lark.”
“It’s fine,” Brody said, smiling. He studied the ovalshaped nicotine stain on his shirt, the death kiss, and looked at Nectar. She had selected a piece of blueberry pie.
The Artificial server came to the end of their table and sized them up. She kept her gaze on Thorp, her expression flat. “Sir, will you be paying today? It seems that within your party, you are the only one with a bank account currently in the positive. You can pay at the counter when ready.”
Thorp leaned to one side to retrieve his wallet, took one last sip of his coffee, and left the booth.
Brody watched Nectar eat her pie, one large forkful at a time. He continued to look at her until she met his eyes. She set the fork down and plucked some napkins from the dispenser. “What?”
Brody pointed at his collar, the death kiss, and raised his eyebrows.
Her face remained flat. She folded the napkin in half, set it aside. “Not in front of him, okay?” she said, keeping her voice low and subtly cocking her head in Thorp’s direction where he was struggling to insert his jigsaw into the nautilus. “If he knows I know, then he’ll never let it go. This way it’s a clean break.”
“You remember everything?”
“Yeah. But as long as I say I don’t remember any of it, he won’t talk about it. And if he won’t talk about it, then we’ll be able to move on and just … live our lives.” She glanced Thorp’s way, and so did Brody. He was getting his receipt for the meal. Speaking fast, “I want him to go to the doctor, get on some kind of pill to fix whatever they did to his head.” She smoothed the napkin’s folds out to its original square shape. “And be done with it.”
Thorp began walking back, scrutinizing the receipt.
He had to ask. “What about Axiom? Did you hear anything about—?”
She stared at him. For a moment, it was hard to read what her eyes were telling him. Was she surprised he knew the name? Did the mere mention of him frighten her? She held that strange look for a few more seconds. Just as Thorp’s shadow fell across their table, she nodded, nearly imperceptibly, even going so far as to scratch her ear as she did it. But she did nod; Brody saw it. She had at least heard him say Axiom, whoever he was and whatever role he had played in all this.
“All right,” Brody said. He had a bevy of questions, but this wasn’t the time or place. He wasn’t about to screw up what Nectar was already doing, this stellar job of playing ignorant in front of her brother. The whole bit about Tokyo and the bus station, he had to admit, was convincing.
Thorp put his hand on Nectar’s shoulder after he’d sat down beside her. She leaned into her brother’s chest, closed her eyes, and seemed to go to sleep immediately. Thorp shifted a strand of hair out of the corner of her eye. He looked up and saw Brody watching them and gave him a grateful smile.
Brody returned it.