Fuck, fuck, fuck. The presence of mind to use the clean bath towels to wipe off as best I can, to wipe off the bottom of my shoes and my hands, and everything in the room I’ve touched, hoping the police, when they find the body, won’t be able to trace me here. Wiping down the walls, inadvertently smearing Mook’s blood. Just stop, just stop. I drop the towels in the tub. Rinse the blood I’ve already stepped in off the soles of my shoes and leave them near the door. The blood on the carpet seeps through my socks, sticky cold, but I keep my shoes off so I won’t leave bloody shoe prints through the halls when I leave. I’ve been here almost twenty minutes already—too long. Concentrate, damn it. Theresa. I’m here to find Theresa or information about Hannah Massey, or Timothy, or Waverly. Information would have been in Mook’s Adware, if anywhere, but the Adware’s gone. I try the bedroom. Clothes in the bureau, a desk scattered with papers and a computer but the computer’s been smashed open and gutted. I look over the papers—bills, drawings, things I can’t understand. There’s nothing I can find here about Theresa or Hannah Massey, nothing about Timothy or Waverly, nothing. I’m shaking—I need to get out of here. Back in the main room I fear Mook’s body might breathe and stand up on its own. I stare at it almost willing the dead to stay dead. There’s nothing here, nothing.
That’s not quite true—
A series of framed watercolors hangs over the sofa—six of them, of uniform size and barnwood framing, on cream paper, maybe two feet on a side. The paintings are finely drafted but raw, a mixture of ink, charcoal and watercolor, all depicting facets of the same house—the house down in Greenfield with the words of Christ painted on the broad side. The house of Waverly’s wife, of Timothy. Thinking of Timothy’s memory maps that Simka showed me, the draftsmanship—are these paintings Timothy’s? No, the style’s too different. The artwork emits despair and ruin, each drawing a skewed, cubist detail of the architecture—of a wrecked cornice, a sagging overhang, a window frame without a window, a rotting cellar door. The whitewash words of Christ fold in on themselves in the collapse, unreadable if I didn’t already know what they said: Except a man be born again. These are drawings of a ghost, made by a ghost. I push the couch with Mook’s body a few feet from the wall so I can sidle near and pull down the paintings. Too heavy to carry a stack of six framed pieces, so I slide the artwork from the frames, hands shaking, smudging bloody thumbprints on the first two pieces until I’m more careful and pull the rest out clean. I roll the pieces together and tuck the tube into my suit jacket. Fingerprints on the framing glass? I wipe them down and leave the frames in the tub with the bloody towels. I put on my shoes, feeling Mook’s blood on my feet like I’ve been walking on water.
The AutoCab’s where I asked it to stay and I tell it to drive, suffering another bout of dry heaves, the image of the man’s body recurring.
“Destination?”
“Drive. Just drive—”
“Destination?”
It’s not a warm day but I’m sweating. The hovering flash billboards advertise luxury watches but the rubies in their faces look like spots of blood. “Shit.” I can’t think. “Just—take me back to my hotel, where you picked me up. I don’t know the address—”
The AutoCab pulls from the building. I left the windows open—up there. Fuck, fuck. Thinking of ways they can track me—vomit on the balcony, shoe prints in the blood—the AutoCab’s route is saved, they can tell I was dropped off and picked up from the building if they check the AutoCab records. They must have security cameras. I must have left fingerprints, or hairs, or something—they’ll find those. Did I wipe off the window that I opened? Did I wipe off the handle I’d used to open it? No. Did I wipe off the door handle? No—No. I should ping the police, tell them everything. Ping Kelly. I’m innocent. Innocent in this, I should—
“Drop me off over here—”
A few blocks from my hotel. A Payless shoes—I buy a pair of Adidas for cheap, pay with a retinal scan. My old shoes and socks in the Payless bag and thrown out in an alley dumpster. Think. It dawns on me: three District soldiers approached Kucenic, intimidated him. Three District soldiers stopped me at a checkpoint shortly after I quit Waverly—they downloaded something, I remember. Some quick thing I accepted. Fuck. There’s a Cricket Wireless storefront across the street—the place smells like marijuana smoke and Burger King. The clerk’s a few minutes slow to wander from the back room. He seems surprised to see me waiting at the counter.
“I need you to tell me—how I can fix—I think there’s someone listening in on my thoughts, following me around through my Adware—”
“Come into the back,” he says. “You’re either paranoid or hacked. Either way, happens all the time—”
While the clerk’s running a malware scan, he cleans his tools with an alcohol-dipped cotton swab. He whistles as he applies the local anesthetic, tells me my brain’s loaded with spyware, tells me not to worry—he’ll take care of it. He cuts open my head. He digs out my receiver, replaces it. He tells me I might have some performance issues because the Cricket parts are Euro imports, nowhere near the quality of the Chinese iLux gear—but the iLux processors will still work and without the malware everything will speed up anyway. I switch connection plans, picking up a Cricket pay-as-I-go.
“You’re a new man,” he tells me, bandaging my head. He writes out a prescription for medicinal cannabis for the postanesthetic pain. “Brand-new—”
A quick trip to Walgreen’s for Tylenol and Advil and a pack of THC cigarettes. At the hotel I shower twice, the water scalding my fresh scalp wounds. I ball up my bloody clothes in the paper bag from City Lights and pitch it in a dumpster outside. The Cricket clerk’s done a shitty job and when the anesthetic starts wearing off my skull feels like a plague of fire ants—I check beneath the bandage and my scalp’s puckered with his careless incisions. Fuck, it burns. Swallow the pills and light up and start to numb—numb for hours as I watch TV, waiting for the police to charge in, thinking they might do it like cops in the streams, with a battering ram to splinter the door and SWAT agents rolling me to the ground, tasing me. Voter ID laws passed twenty years ago—I remember registering my fingerprints and DNA with the government when I renewed my voter registration card. Was it constitutional for the police to check the voter ID rolls without cause? I think there might have been a court case—