Reflex (8 page)

Then the chains loosened and he walked forward, expecting them to stop again where the end of the bed had been. Instead, Thugs One and Two and the woman backed up against the door. The chains stopped when he was two yards short of them. The arc of the chains let him walk over most of the room, excepting only the end of the room with the mirrored window and the door.

The woman said, "Get the bucket."

Again, it wasn't directed at Davy. The hook-nosed redhead stepped through the door and returned, rolling an institutional mop bucket in yellow plastic with a mop squeezer. There was a mop in it and he heard liquid sloshing. Davy caught the heavy smell of pine-scented disinfectant.

"You want me to mop the floor?" Davy asked.
I could reach you guys with that mop.

She looked at him, eyes narrowed. "In a minute." She turned her head to the side, toward the mirror. "When you're ready."

Davy coughed. He frowned. He didn't have a cold. He hadn't been drinking or eating.
Some saliva in the windpipe?

He coughed again, harder. And there was an odd tingling in his throat. He coughed hard enough to double him over but when the spasm was over he had no trouble breathing, no feeling of something in his throat.

"That's it?" said the woman, looking toward the mirror.

The computer voice came back. "Calibration. Just a tickle.
This
is the operational level."

Davy doubled over, vomited violently, and lost all motor control, falling to the floor. His chest hurt, stabbing pain in the vicinity of his heart, and he was having trouble breathing. He vomited again and again, though the first spasms were so spectacular that now he was bringing up just drops of bile.

Abruptly, it stopped.

He was lying on his side, in a puddle of his own vomit, his face and hair sticky with it. He gagged again, but it wasn't the tectonic upheaval of seconds before. It was mild, by comparison. He tried not to breathe through his nose.

"Oh, Christ." He became aware that he'd lost bowel control, as well, apparently as violently as everything else. The combination of smells was nauseating, but he truly didn't have anything else to throw up.

He climbed to his feet, aware of aching stomach muscles and sore spots on his shoulder, elbow, and the side of his head where he'd hit the floor. The pain in his chest had lessened though the ghost of angina seemed to linger. One of his hands was free of vomit and he gingerly touched his head. The finger came away with blood on it.

He had trouble meeting their eyes. Even though he was aware that what had just happened was done to him—not by him—he felt humiliated and ashamed.

The two men watching him were pale, the blonde, Thug One, tending toward an actual shade of green. The woman seemed unaffected. She took the mop handle and pushed the bucket into the part of the room he could reach, letting the mop handle fall to the floor where it bounced—bap, bap, bap—three times.

Thugs One and Two went out the doorway, eagerly. The woman paused, with the door still open, and tucked a few stray hairs back into the tight bun on the back of her head. She smiled.

"Now you can mop the floor."

It took two attempts before he could climb to his feet. He was weak as a kitten and, once vertical, the room spun around him. It took all his concentration to stay on his feet.

Well, the only good thing was that, with his chains lengthened, he could actually go into the attached bathroom and use the bath. He had wanted to bathe before this incident, but now, dripping with three different kinds of bodily fluids, his want had been supplanted by overpowering
need.

The bathroom looked like a standard residential toilet except a large mirror over the sink had clearly been removed—paint and the outer layer of some Sheetrock had been ripped out by the glass adhesive—and a smaller, plain steel mirror had been bolted to the wall instead. Davy took one look in the mirror, then turned away.

The gown nearly defeated him. It was disposable paper, but the fibers running through it made it hard to tear and, even though he managed the ties in back, the chains prevented him from just taking it off. Finally he summoned the strength to rip out the shoulders, allowing him to pull it off the chains. He wadded it up and stuffed it in the small plastic trash basket.

He didn't know if they had a camera in the room. He pulled the shower curtain closed and, with the water full in his face, let himself cry. He did his best to keep it quiet and to hide the tears with the running water, but he didn't stop until it abated several minutes later.

There was a bottle of squeeze soap in the shower and he scrubbed himself again and again, until his skin hurt. He knew he'd gotten all of it, but he still didn't feel clean.

He got soap on the bottle and it slipped through his fingers, falling to the bottom of the tub. He groaned as he picked it up, then stared at it. He turned his back on the shower and squirted soap underneath the manacle padding on his left arm, twisting it to distribute the soap all around his wrist.

He pulled and twisted, trying to relax his hand as the manacle rode up the base of his thumb. The padding compressed to a degree, but the manacle stopped short right below the accumulated bulge of knuckles at the base of his fingers—but it had slid a lot farther than he'd expected. He wondered what would happen if he soaped both wrists, then jumped.

He looked down. The restraints on his ankles weren't going to fit over his foot, no matter how much soap he used. He sighed and rinsed the soap out from under the manacle padding.

Drying off, he looked in the steel mirror over the sink and shuddered. The scar on his chest, a semicircular curve starting an inch below his collar bone, had the red, raw look of still-healing tissue. A smaller straight version, healed to the same degree, was midway up the left side of his neck. He wanted to claw through the skin and yank it out, whatever they'd put in there, but judging by the scar, part of it was very close to the jugular.

He looked up at his eyes. The scars were awful in and of themselves and also in what they concealed, but what he saw in his eyes was even more terrible, more frightening. He had to look away and it was beyond his strength, just then, to look back.

When he returned from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, he found a pair of what looked like hospital scrubs on the bed. He held them up and found that the outside pants seams were Velcroed from cuff to waist and he could actually put them on despite the chains. On the short-sleeved shirt the Velcro was on the side seams from the waist to the underarm side of the sleeve. He could pull them on over his head and seal the sides.

He liked wearing pants again, but thinking about the forethought his keepers had put into this bothered him. It looked like they didn't expect to take off the chains anytime soon.

The room stank, and his mess and footprints were still on the floor. Like in the shower, he washed the floor several times more than necessary.

It's not the mess you're trying to erase, is it, Davy? No matter how many times you wash the floor, it won't undo it. It happened.

And it's probably going to happen again.

Millie armed Sojee with a stack of flyers and the stapler, then dropped her on Columbia, near Christ House.

"I'll make the rounds," Sojee told her. "I'll call you if I hear something."

Millie gave her some change. "Call me around five, even if you don't hear anything, okay?"

Sojee's lips smacked several times and she finally said, "Well, okay. About five."

Millie had the taxi drop her back on the street in front of Interrobang. She walked slowly down the street and around the corner, back toward what she was coming to think of as the "departure zone"—the place where Brian Cox had died and, possibly, the place where Davy might have been seen last.

Hopefully, Davy had "departed" that place in a different manner than Cox.

She'd had breakfast with Sojee, but she went into the restaurant anyway, asking for a table at the window,
the very one,
she figured.

The windows in the place were bordered with announcements of this and that performance, this and that dance studio offering classes, this or that dojo offering martial arts instruction, this and that person looking for a roommate. Even when they'd been ripped off, the layers of yellowed Scotch tape formed reefs and shoals. Except
this
window. This window must've been replaced recently. There were a few announcements on it, but none of the ancient evidence of bygone posters. This window had just been replaced.

She ordered coffee but didn't drink it.

Hopefully the management was a little more careful about letting non-employees serve food now, but this wasn't the time to test the issue.

She felt a little odd, today, like a corner had been turned. She'd looked, the day before, for the NSA watchers, but hadn't really seen anybody. She believed they were keeping back, depending on the bug and intermittent checks, hoping to lure Davy's snatchers back into the open. Their absence had been palpable after the seven days she'd spent under surveillance back in Stillwater.

Today, her back itched.

They're out there.

She laughed at herself.

You're imagining things.

The itch was still there and no matter how she squirmed in the chair, she couldn't scratch it.

She left Interrobang and walked east, but the sidewalks were so busy that anybody could have followed her without detection. A cab went by, then another. She flagged the third one, self-consciously thinking about Sherlock Holmes, and told the driver, "The Mall, please, at the Capitol end."

He dropped her at the corner of Fourth and Independence and she walked across the grass to the East Wing of the National Gallery. She headed up the stairs for the Upper Level where the huge red and black Calder mobile hung in space beneath the faceted glass roof, but when she reached the top of the stairs the elevator doors opened and a woman pushing a fussing baby in a stroller got out. Millie couldn't hear anybody on the stairs below but she stepped quickly into the elevator. The doors shut, then it continued up. She stayed in when it opened on the top floor, then she pushed the basement button and took it down and rode the moving sidewalk down the concourse toward the older West building. At the end of the walkway, she crossed to the gift shop, and browsed, standing behind one of the display shelves and watching the pedestrians coming from the East building carefully. Across the way, water sheeted down the glass wall of the Cascade Café.

Several minutes passed and she frowned. There was a cluster of Japanese tourists, a family of five, three elderly ladies practically tottering, one of them using a rolling walker, and a single man carrying an easel and wooden paints case.
They'd have to be more organized than I could imagine to come up with that outfit on such short notice.

She was about to relax when she saw him, a man coming
from
the West Building, walking slowly, casually checking out the patrons seated at the cafe. Over half the five hundred seats were full and he was pausing often to examine a particular grid of tables, then moving to another.

He'd actually walked past Millie already, but hadn't seen her as she'd been blocked by a shop display. She moved around that same display unit and positioned herself to peer over it, between two large coffee-table art books.

He was average height with blond hair cut very short around a large bald spot—
like a monk's tonsure
—and wearing a dark blue windbreaker and slacks.

He could be looking for his wife. His kids. His grandmother.

She looked at the way he stood and something made her doubt his innocence. She pulled off her blue raincoat and rolled it, white liner out, into a compact bundle. There was a lull at the counter and she stepped up quickly and purchased a scarf, a fabric printed with a reproduction of Mary Cassatt's
Children Playing on the Beach.
She paid quickly, with cash, and asked for a larger bag than the one the clerk initially offered her. "For my coat," she explained, smiling.

The clerk shrugged and gave her a paper bag with plastic handles. "Thank you
so
much."

The "monk" had stopped at the edge of the café, where the walkways terminated, his eyes directed toward the East Wing.

Millie ducked into the restroom, right by the Gift Shop, and hurriedly tied the scarf around her head, gypsy style. Wrapped and tied, it transformed the kids on the beach to just another abstract pattern in tans and blues with the cheeks of the girl a pink highlight above the knot. She exited slowly and walked across to the Espresso and Gelato Bar.

He was still standing at the end of the walkway but now he was talking on a cell phone.

Is he NSA? They said they'd keep clear.

She was trembling and, she realized, afraid, but it didn't make her want to run. It made her want to break things. She focused on the man's bald spot.
Or heads.
Fight or flight. She was surprised which side of the divide she came down on.

If I could only hear what he was saying.
Unconsciously, she was leaning forward, even though he was over sixty feet away, at the other end of the restaurant, straining to hear with her entire being.

"—sign of her. We picked her up at the hotel. She dropped the black woman on Columbia then came to the National Gallery." The accent was vaguely British, but not—perhaps Australian. "Hyacinth followed her into the East Building and her team is staking out the ground floor exits while I'm covering that underground walkway to the other building."

Millie nearly screamed, but managed to contain it. Her knees wobbled and she sagged heavily to the right, clutching at the waist-high barrier that separated the Cascade Café from the walkway.

She was standing right behind the Monk. She turned her back on him, breathing deeply.

I jumped?

I jumped.

I jumped!