Billy leaves the bathroom and starts down the stairs. He can hear commotion below him, plenty of it, but the flight between four and three is empty. The people on those floors are still gawking out the windows. Not on the second floor, though, that’s all Business Solutions, and even without the translucent shades they wouldn’t have the panoramic view offered by the street-facing windows higher up. He can hear them clumping down the stairs, babbling as they go. Colin White will be among them, but no one should notice he now has a doppelgänger, because Billy will be behind them and nobody is going to be looking back. Not this morning.
Billy pauses just above the second-floor landing. He stands there until the thundering herd has dried up, then continues down to the first floor, behind a man in khaki cargo shorts and a woman in unfortunate plaid slacks. For a moment he’s forced to stop, probably because there’s a jam-up in the door giving on the first-floor lobby. This makes him nervous, because folks from the upper floors will soon be coming down these stairs. Some of them will be people from five.
Then the crowd gets moving again, and five seconds later – while Jim, John, Harry, and Phil are still looking out from high above, Billy hopes – he’s in the lobby. Irv Dean has abandoned his post. Billy can see him on the plaza, easy to pick out in his blue security vest. Colin White in his bright orange shirt is also easy to pick out. He’s got his phone raised, taking video of the confusion: cops running up the street toward the smoke billowing from between the Sunspot Café and the travel agency next door, cops and bailiffs shouting for people to go back into the courthouse and shelter in place, people running down from more smoke on the corner, yelling their heads off.
Colin isn’t the only one taking video. Others, apparently feeling that a raised iPhone makes them invulnerable, are doing the same. But they are the minority, Billy sees as he steps outside. Most people just want to get away. He hears someone yell Active shooter! Someone else is shouting They bombed the courthouse! Another bawls Armed men!
Billy cuts across the plaza to the right, onto Court Street Place. This short tree-lined diagonal will take him to Second Street, which runs behind the parking garage. He’s not alone, over three dozen people are ahead of him and at least that many behind him, all using this route away from the chaos, but he’s the only one who pays attention to the DPW Transit van parked at the curb. Dana is behind the wheel. Reggie, dressed in the regulation city coverall, is standing by the back door and scanning the crowd. Most of those fleeing Court Street are talking on their phones. Billy wishes he could pretend to do the same, but the Dalton Smith phone is in his jeans, under the parachute pants. A missed opportunity, but you can’t think of everything.
He knows better than to drop his head because Dana or Reggie might notice that (more likely Dana), but he moves up beside a plump woman who is panting and holding her pocketbook to her breasts like a shield. As they approach the van, Billy turns his head to her and raises his voice in an approximation of Colin White’s when Colin’s doing his I’m-the-gayest-of-them-all shtick. ‘What happened? Oh my God, what happened?’
‘Some kind of terrorism thing, I think,’ the woman replies. ‘Jesus, there were explosions!’
‘I know!’ Billy cries. ‘Oh my God, I heard!’
Then they’re past. Billy risks one quick look over his shoulder. He has to make sure they aren’t looking at him. Or coming after him. They’re not. More people than ever are now using Court Street Place to get away; they crowd the sidewalk. Reggie is scoping them hard, standing on his tiptoes, trying to catch sight of Billy. Presumably Dana is, too. Billy speeds up, leaving the plump woman behind, weaving around others. Not quite race-walking, but almost. He turns left on Second Street, left again on Laurel, then right on Yancey. The exodus is behind him now. A young guy on the street grabs Billy by the shoulder, wanting to know what the hell is going on.
‘I don’t know,’ Billy says. He shakes free and walks on.
Behind him, sirens rise in the air.
7
His laptop is gone.
Billy yanks out the packing paper, now splattered with globs of Chinese food from the overflowing dumpster, and uncovers nothing but old cobblestones. His mind sideslips back to Fallujah and the baby shoe. To Taco saying You keep that thing safe, brah. He kept it tied to his belt loop by the laces, bouncing against his hip with the rest of the things he carried. That they all carried.
He doesn’t need the fucking laptop, he has the flash drive with Benjy’s story on it, Rudy ‘Taco’ Bell and the others still unwritten but waiting in the wings. He can go on once he gets to the basement apartment. There’s nothing on the lappie to connect him to his Dalton Smith life, even if someone, some supergeek out of a movie, could crack the password. The only connection to his Dalton Smith life besides the Jensens is Bucky Hanson, and he has only communicated with Bucky on a phone that no longer exists.
So let it go. No choice and no loss.
But it feels like such bad luck. Such a bad omen. Almost like a final summation of a shit job he should have known better than to take.
He pounds his fist against the side of the dumpster hard enough to hurt and listens to the sirens. Right now he’s not worried about police, they are all headed to the courthouse, where some major clusterfuck is going down, but he has to worry about Reggie and Dana. Once they get tired of waiting, they’ll either conclude Billy’s gotten trapped in Gerard Tower or that he’s crossed them up. They can’t do anything if he’s still in the building, but if he’s decided to abandon the plan and strike out on his own, they can start cruising the streets and looking for him.
It’s not like the baby shoe, Billy thinks. And hell, the baby shoe wasn’t magic either, just magical thinking. The shit that happened after I lost it means nothing. Fortunes of war, baby, and so is this. Someone found the lappie and stole it, it’s gone, and you have to get under cover before that Transit van shows up, rolling slow.
He thinks of Dana Edison’s sharp little eyes behind those rimless spectacles. Billy got past those eyes once and doesn’t want to risk giving the man a second chance. He has to get to the basement apartment on Pearson Street, and fast.
Billy gets to his feet and hurries to the mouth of the alley. He sees a few cars but no Transit van. He starts to turn right, then freezes, amazed and disgusted at his own stupidity. It’s as if the dumb self has become his real self. He was just about to head for Pearson Street still wearing the wig, the Rolling Stones jacket, and the fucking parachute pants. Like wearing a neon sign saying CHECK ME OUT.
He runs back down the alley, stripping off the wig and jacket as he goes. Behind the dumpster again, he frees the waistband granny knot holding up the idiotic parachute pants, pushes them down, and steps out of them. He squats and bundles everything together. He shoves the bundle as deep as he can under the crumpled heaps of bespattered packing paper … and touches something. It’s hard and thin. Can it be the brim of a gimme cap?
It is. Did he really push it that far behind the dumpster? He tosses it aside and reaches in deeper, leaning his shoulder against the dumpster’s rusty side, the smell of Chinese food a miasma. His outstretched fingers brush something else. He knows what it is and can’t believe it. He stretches further, his cheek now against the dumpster’s rusty side, and grasps the handle of his laptop case. He pulls it out and looks at it unbelievingly. He could swear he didn’t push it in that far, but it seems he did. He tells himself it’s nothing like thinking he threw away the wrong phone, nothing at all like that, but it is.