HEAD DOWN AGAINST the wind, he dashes away from the car and into the oncoming drizzle. Navigates a handful of damp commuters coming the other way. He runs on. Brain searing, like an iron pan that’s been too long on the stove. Too hot to be useful. One thought predominates: keep the backpack out of the rain, protect the iPad from the wet and cold.
Hence his direction. Into the wind.
The iPad, the computer, the algorithm. It was right.
He glances over his shoulder and sees Andrea’s big car heading in the opposite direction, or trying to, absorbed in traffic, stymied. Good, right? He had to get away from her but, if only he could’ve kept his cool, he had a captive audience, someone who knew something. He needs to look her in the eye and go point by point, assertion by assertion, lie by lie.
Does she know what the computer is telling him? That the whole world explodes in, what, twenty-four hours?
Is that the real reason why she’s here?
“Easy there.”
The voice belongs to a pedestrian he’s nearly collided with. He skids on the brakes, does a half spin, stopping short of three smokers huddled outside the bar, impervious to the chill. He catches eyes with another smoker, guy with droopy jowls. Guy flicks his cigarette, coughs, half nods, emphysema-laughs. “You okay, pal?” Adds: “You know it’s a rough day when a smoker asks if you’re doing okay.”
Jeremy starts running again, his legs churning in erratic rhythm with his frantic mind, shuffling and tossing puzzle pieces. Harry, dead; Evan, mysteriously appeared; Andrea, conceding his computer was right; log cabin; AskIt.
At the end of the block, Jeremy passes a shuttered sandwich shop, turns left, leans up against the concrete, barely registering the fact that, far from protecting himself from the weather by pressing up against the wall, he remains exposed to the direction of the wind and wet. The drizzle has intensified, now just shy of real rain. To his right, a tall man in a long jacket comes across the intersection, walking Jeremy’s way. The man’s face is down, shadowed. At the corner, the man looks up and Jeremy flinches, a threat in every glance.
Jeremy looks left, sees an opening between the building he’s leaning against and the one next to it, an alley, a refuge.
He slips inside it, sidestepping a homeless man who seems fully passed out, wrapped in a sleeping bag, covered in refuse. The man mutters something, rolls over. Jeremy winces at the stench of spoiled milk and dry leaves. He steps backward, bumping into the bottom rungs of a fire escape.
He closes his eyes. All the questions and disparate pieces of evidence fall away and he pictures Emily. Just at this moment, he can see her putting the broccoli crowns in front of Kent, cajoling him to eat just one, just one, please, allowing him to talk her into letting him instead eat only mac-’n’-cheese for the four-hundredth night in a row. Then he hears her voice, talking to Jeremy. I’m done. He knows she means it. Done with his nonsense. He instantly feels why. As soon as something gets close to great, even just good, he attacks it. Not just with her, with Kent. The fight they had, over the puzzle. Why was he trying to outflank a little boy in a conversation about how best to solve a cardboard puzzle of a rocket ship?
What’s the point of saving the world?
Jeremy shakes off the pointless image, and question. He opens his eyes. He pulls his phone from his pocket. He needs . . . who? Nik, the police? Demand answers from Evan? Isn’t that Peckerhead’s office nearby? So what? Would he even be there? Jeremy goes to the list of his most recent calls. Presses Nik’s number. It rings and rings. No answer. Into his assistant’s voice mail: “I need your help.” Click. He looks up, sees in the distance a foggy horizon, vapors and mist swirling around the apartment complexes on the skyline, near the ballpark. He thinks he makes out his own apartment building in the mist.
Was it Andrea who busted into his apartment? Evan?
Took his knife and stabbed Harry.
Jeremy paws in his back pocket for his wallet and pulls from it a business card, the one belonging to his building manager. He dials the number on it.
After the first ring, a pickup. “Aaron Isaacs.”
“Did you get the security tapes?”
A brief pause, the fuckface getting his bearings. “Glad you called, Mr. Stillwater.”
“Did you get the tapes?”
“I got permission to go through them. I’m not entirely sure what to look for but I started looking.” He pauses.
“Hello?”
“A lot of people go in and out of the building—”
“Anyone in the middle of the night looking like they might want to play Jack the Ripper with my couch?” Jeremy asks.
“I don’t much like the tone.”
This is actually, Jeremy realizes, exactly what he’s hoping for.
“Are you sure you were looking at the security tapes and not just spending another afternoon eating Cracker Jacks and watching Oxygen?”
There’s a silence. Then, calmly: “Mr. Stillwater, why don’t you come down here and check them out for yourself? Maybe you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for.”
“I just insulted you by saying you watch girl TV in the afternoons and eat junk food. Did I mention I suspect you jack off watching women on the front-door security camera?”
“Look, I know you’re frustrated—”
“The cops are there.” Must be following the evidence, looking for Harry’s killer.
A tiny silence, then: “You’re being very paranoid, Mr. Stillwater.”
“Tell them I didn’t do it.”
“What?”
Click.
No cops.
Something compels Jeremy to look up. He sees the woman.
She’s standing across the street, at a bus stop, covered by a thick plastic shell, bathed in the murky yellow neon of a McDonald’s. She’s thin, shapely, arms crossed, familiar. It’s the woman from the bar last night and the Embarcadero. His stalker. She’s looking at Jeremy, not making the slightest effort to hide her interest in him.
He bellows: “What the fuck do you want?!”
The words barely register. They get swallowed by the wind and a bus pulling up across the street, its broad side momentarily blocking Jeremy’s sight of his stalker. On the bus’s side, a lengthwise ad shows a woman sitting in an expansive plain, surrounded by exotic animals, a zebra, wildebeest, elephant, monkey. She holds an iPad. The ad copy reads: “With an iPad, you’re King of the Jungle.”
“Jesus.” It’s the homeless guy, turning over in his refuse. “Find your own spot.”
Jeremy stuffs his phone into his pocket and steps out of the mouth of the alley. He waits for a car to pass on his side of the street, then begins sprinting as the bus departs. When it disappears, Jeremy sees the woman has too.
He’s standing in the middle of the street, looking around, as near as he can be to being frantic. He looks in the parking lot of the McDonald’s. A roadster pulls out, an old Fiat. It’s not the woman. Nor does it appear she’s in the window of the restaurant. Nor up and down the block. She could’ve gotten onto the bus. She could’ve slipped into a car. She could, Jeremy thinks, be a figment of my imagination.
He puts his head back, looks up into the drizzle. He hears tires skid on the pavement. From the far corner of the McDonald’s lot, a midsize car appears, a dark tinted sedan.
Gaining speed.
Heading right for Jeremy.
The car swerves out of the McDonald’s lot. Twenty feet away, ten. Jeremy dives left. A full sprawl. The car misses him by inches. His body smacks into the wet pavement, skids. Brakes screech. Jeremy rolls. Springs up, swivels. Ready to dive again. Sees the sedan drive off.
He tries to shout, or wants to shout: “Stop! Police!” But he can’t get anything out. The car takes a left. Jeremy wants to run. His hands ache. Is something broken?
“I got the license plate.”
Jeremy turns and sees that the voice belongs to the homeless guy who’d been sleeping in the alley. He looks half bent at the waist, a lifetime of tragedy bearing down on him. He’s got wet newspaper stuck to his body.
“F-L . . . something. It started with an F and an L. And then . . . . there was a seven in there.” He shakes his head. “Sorry, man. It’s bullshit out here.” He turns to the alley.
“I’ve seen it before.”
The same car he saw outside the subway earlier in the day, driven by the same stalker, the thin woman.
“Are you okay?” he hears a voice say.
A handful of people have trickled from McDonald’s, peering at the guy in the middle of the street having narrowly avoided a hit-and-run. Jeremy somehow recalls that San Francisco has the state’s highest rate of accidents involving cars hitting pedestrians and bicyclists; it has something to do with San Francisco being both a driving and a walking city.
This was no accident.
He brushes himself off. His hand burns, skid marks, embedded gravel. He can feel eyes on him, bystanders. But he’s lost in thought. A thousand inputs pouring into his brain. That woman at the bus stop, the car, and, oddly, the image on the side of the bus—a woman with an iPad turning into the king of the jungle, a lion.
Something about lions. The computer said something about lions. That’s important. He reaches for the idea, can’t grasp it.
“Sir, you want me to call an ambulance?”
Jeremy shakes his head at the distant voice, no. I’m okay. Ideas, images are circling his brain, his brush with the pavement jostling things together in a new way. AskIt. The computer? He’s struck with an idea, something he can ask the algorithm. He needs a wi-fi network. Someplace to pull out his iPad and keyboard.
He wipes away drizzle from his forehead, ambles to the sidewalk, sits on a bench at the bus stop.
A stout black car takes a left from the street, kitty-corner. The car pulls in front of Jeremy and stops.