Jonathan grinned. “Sure,” he said. “That should be fun. You know the address?”
“I found your car, didn’t I?”
There was the Fibbie hubris that Jonathan had come to depend on, the self-aggrandizing nonanswer answer. “See you there in half an hour.”
Graham pretended to sleep in the shotgun seat of the Mercedes sedan they’d taken from the doctor. It was every bit as comfortable as it was hot looking. Best of all, it was quiet.
So many numbers. Too many numbers. They swam in Graham’s head like the schools of fish you see in documentaries, where great clouds of them swarmed and shifted directions and blocked out the view of anything else.
That’s what life was like when you lived with a memory that recorded everything, all the time. He’d told his therapist once — Doctor Harper — that it was like eating a Thanksgiving feast every day, maybe twice a day. You get progressively more stuffed, but you keep cramming more in. That was an imperfect comparison, though, because you could always puke up a meal to make more room. His head just got progressively more full. Doctor Harper had assured him that his brain would not rupture from the pressure. He’d also promised that one day, Graham would learn to live with his ability — to tame it — and that he’d come to see it as more a gift than a curse.
But that’s what parents and doctors always said. They marginalized everything with phrases like one day or you’re too young to understand or I’d give anything to be like you. Somehow, they all forgot what it was like to be a freshman in high school, where all those other assholes lived today at the age they were in a world where being smart was punished by sack-taps in the hallway and bags of dog shit slipped into your backpack when you weren’t looking. The fact that he’d be envied when he was thirty didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot when he wasn’t yet half that age.
He’d tried playing dumb, intentionally missing questions on tests, and spending five minutes figuring out math problems that he’d already solved at a glance, but that brought on a whole new breed of derision and animosity. Who knew that pretending to be stupid was insulting to people who really were stupid? Rather than waiting for him to tame what came naturally, how about somebody step up and tame the herd of assholes that swarmed the halls between classes?
Names and dates were one thing when they flooded his head. They got pushed into their own files, ready to be recalled when he needed them, but otherwise never to be thought of again. It was the number sequences that cost him sleep, that obsessed him. While words made sense in and of themselves — people arranged letters into words, and then words into sentences that had clear meanings — numbers were meaningless outside of a known pattern. Three digits plus three digits plus four digits was probably a phone number, but other less obvious number sequences appeared random, yet rarely were because someone had arranged them with a purpose. He could spend hours trying to decode such sequences. More often than not, he’d be able to add meaning, but he’d rarely know for sure if the solution he’d identified had any relation to the true intent of the sequence’s author.
Graham liked to imagine that he had a kind of curator living inside his head — he even had a name. Linus never slept. Instead, he catalogued every phone number, address, locker combination, and historical fact that flowed through his brain. When Graham needed the information, whatever it was, Linus would produce the correct folder, and everyone would think that Graham was brilliant.
If sticking a coat hanger in his ear would kill Linus, Graham would have done it ages ago.
Right now, as Jolaine drove through the jet-black countryside, on their way north, the number sequence that bothered him most had nothing to do with the cipher on the bloody scrap of paper. At least not directly.
Follow the protocol.
The protocol was a telephone number. If anything bad ever happened to the family, or if he were ever threatened with harm, he was to call the number and follow instructions. Easy-peasy.
But there’d been no mention of codes. And there’d for sure been no mention of murder.
Even during the ridiculous evacuation drills that his dad had insisted on, where Dad would start yelling in the middle of the night and use a stopwatch to time how long it would take to get to the garage, there’d been no talk of codes or murder. There hadn’t even been any guns.
The shit that was going down tonight was all brand new — and it had nothing to do with the protocol. That was just a trouble number to call when he was told to call it, a meaningless exercise that had never risen even to the level of 911 in the hierarchy of memorized phone numbers.
None of this was right. None of it made any freaking sense.
The smear of Mom’s blood on his chest had begun to itch.
Why is this happening?
“We need to stop,” Graham said without opening his eyes. “I need to make a phone call.”
“Not tonight,” Jolaine said. “It can wait till morning.”
“But Mom said—”
“I know what she said. I was there. But not tonight. We’re both exhausted and neither one of us is thinking straight.”
“But the protocol—”
“It can wait,” Jolaine snapped. “Look, Graham. The world is coming apart tonight. I have no idea what direction is up anymore. Until something makes sense — at least one thing — I don’t want you calling anyone. I don’t want you talking to anyone. Promise me.”
She was glaring at him when she should have been watching the road. “But the protocol—”
“Promise me,” she pressed.
Graham accepted that Jolaine was in charge. He didn’t like it — he wasn’t even sure he respected it — but he accepted it. She was right that nothing made sense, and there was no denying that bad people were gunning for them, literally and figuratively. Maybe a few hours really wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
“Okay,” he said. “I promise.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Boxers lived on Swann Street, in a part of the city that had only recently begun to recover from the devastation of the 1968 riots. He’d bought his Federal-style townhouse — DC’s answer to the New York City brownstone — ten years ago for a song, back when the street was a haven for drug dealers and muggers. Since then, gentrification had begun to take root, and in some stretches of the street, home values had more than quadrupled. Secretly, Jonathan had always wondered if the mere sight of Boxers entering and leaving his house hadn’t convinced the miscreants on his block to take their business elsewhere.
No one wanted to mug Sasquatch.
“Are you going to call him first?” Venice asked.
Jonathan chuckled. “Not a chance. But I think it’s probably important that mine be the first face he sees.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. Twelve-fifteen. “Oh, yeah. I definitely need to be the first face he sees.”
With the lateness of the hour came the challenge of finding street parking. Rather than rolling the dice on something closer, Jonathan took the first space he found, thus committing them to a four-block walk, three of them past places where gentrification had not yet begun. As they climbed out of the car, Venice said, “Clearly, you’ve never worn high heels.”