Part 63 (1/2)

He tapped his forehead. And went to fetch her food.

The doughnuts delivered, Chaz leaned a hip against the desk a few feet from where Hafidha sat and watched her eat the first two. ”How did it go with Dad?”

She shrugged, and washed down jelly doughnut with a swallow of milk. ”I think Il Dottore would like to put a tracking collar on me, and maybe a microchip in my b.u.t.t so they know where to s.h.i.+p me home to if I stray. But since I've spent the last three weeks jumping through every hoop he can devise, my veto held. Did we figure out the mechanism in the Omaha case?”

”It was catharsis,” he said, when her mouth was full of doughnut again. ”They thought he was teaching them to contact spirits. But he was just channeling his own trauma through them, over and over again. Slamming neurons to induce hallucinations. Retraining their brains to operate like the minds of schizophrenics. And one by one, they were going mad.”

”We say 'experiencing a psychotic break,'” Hafidha said, swilling coffee.

Chaz took a deep breath. ”How much of it do you think was the anomaly, and how much was Vietnam, and how much was just James Cauldwell?”

She stared, and he backtracked hastily.

”You did the right thing,” he said. ”I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. You doing better on the food front?”

She lifted her chin, still staring. He saw it from his peripheral vision, because he wasn't looking at her directly. ”Starting to gain some weight back,” she said. ”There were a couple of bad days there. I honestly couldn't eat enough to keep up. You're worried. About you.”

”Well, duh.” He looked at his wrist.w.a.tch. ”Breakthrough. It's scary.”

She shrugged. She was still staring, so he figured he might as well stop faking inattention. When his eyes slid over to her, she said, ”Well, except for the part where I did it without even noticing. Seriously. It's a great toy, Chaz. I have wireless. Everywhere. And hey, look at this!”

She turned to the computers. She wiggled her left hand as if on the mouse. Screens lit up, data scrolled.

Chaz felt his pupils dilate. ”I am totally sick with envy, you know.”

”I know,” she said. ”I would be too. That's why I'm buying you lunch today.”

”What?”

”I just cancelled my broadband, smarty-boy. I've got thirty-nine bucks a month I've got to blow on something, and my closet's already full of shoes.”

It was hard to stay jealous around somebody so d.a.m.ned pleased to be themselves.

”You really like this, don't you?”

”I really, really do.” There was an edge on it, though. A kind of melancholy. Chaz was a good enough profiler to catch it when it hit him between the eyes.

And he was a good enough profiler to defuse it, too. ”Man, why do you get all the good stuff? If I got a manifestation, it would probably be miraculous projectile vomiting.” His voice wobbled. He hadn't realized it wasn't a phrase you could say with a straight face. ”Bah. You have your uses.”

He grinned, but she wasn't over being half-sad. Her fingers moved, a little twitch, as if she were keyboarding. They never left the arms of her chair. Screen savers blossomed everywhere. She turned and gave him a look. ”I liked the field, too,” she said. ”I miss the heart-racing thing, sometimes.”

”Even when you wind up shooting somebody?”

Okay, way to go, cowboy. Smooooth. He waited for her face to crumple, for the shakes in her hands. It's what he would have done.

But she just looked down at them and shook her head. ”He was trying to put a knife in Reyes, honey. I feel okay about it, actually.” And then she took a big deep breath and said, ”Hey Chaz?”

”Hafs?”

”If... if anything bad happens?” She held up her pinky, crooked. ”Promise me you won't let me do anything like that to anybody, man? You'll do what you have to? Pinky- swear?”

”You won't.” He hooked his own pinky around hers, feeling the dry warmth of her skin. He hoped she wouldn't notice that he hadn't promised. ”Pinky-swear.”

She looked at him for a long time before she nodded and pulled back her hand. ”People,” Chaz said, shaking his head. ”You think you know a girl, and she turns out to be a gunslinger.” He was angling for a laugh, and didn't get it. Dammit, this had not been supposed to be an awkward conversation, all sharp angles and obliques. He swallowed. And then he stepped away from her chair. ”Like this thing with the will, and my mom.”

Oh, there it was. The track he'd needed to get around to the thing he had to say, and didn't know how: You're not what I thought you were, Hafidha. But it doesn't matter, because you are still and will always be my friend.

Still, and always. The only person in the world who got it, or ever would.

He could get there from here. He could tell, because she made a circle with one hand and asked, ”You going to go to Texas?”

”Eventually.” He shrugged. ”In my copious spare time. But yeah, I think I can face it. It's just a house she used to live in, right?”

”It's just the place where she grew up,” Hafidha said. She picked up a third doughnut and took a bite, and handed him the fourth. ”It worries you.”

”I thought I knew who she was,” he said. ”I remember her really well. n.o.body in the foster system believed that, you know. They thought I was making things up. And I know-” He shook his head. It took a deep breath to get through the pain trying to lock his throat. ”-I know she didn't leave me on purpose. But that's the way addiction works. The addiction is more important than anything else, in the end. It's like cancer. It eats everything it touches. Oh, d.a.m.n. ”

The tension in the muscles of his face made his head ache, all the way around to the back. Hafidha reached out, softly, and touched his hand. ”Can't do that with the wireless in my head,” she said, to make him smile.

He blinked rapidly, and got the stinging in his eyes under control.

She pulled her hand back. ”While we're on the topic, c'mere. Wanna show you something. I got nosy while I was out. One more f.u.c.king Minnesota Multimoronic Personality Inventory and I was going to bite somebody. Probably El Jefe. ”

Chaz turned to see her screens. The screensaver zipped off and a page of text popped up front and center. It looked like a scanned magazine article, dated early 1978. ”'One Thousand In Guyana.' Solomon Todd. Oh, my.”

”You knew he was a reporter before he was FBI.”

”I didn't know he was a reporter in f.u.c.king Jonestown.”

”Well,” she said. ”I guess he got out before.”

”Before,” Chaz echoed. She meant: before nine hundred and nine people died in a ma.s.s-murder/suicide of Biblical proportions. Chaz shook his head. ”You'd never guess it to look at him, would you?”

Hafidha looked at Chaz, and shook her head, smiling. ”No. You'd never guess.” And then she said, very carefully, ”You think you understand people, you know? You know what they eat, you know how they take their coffee.” She gestured with the pastry in her hand. ”You know what kind of doughnuts they like. So you think you know them. You think you know yourself.”

”Yeah,” Chaz said, understanding. ”You think so. And then you don't. You really don't.”

He touched her shoulder. She laid her cheek against his knuckles briefly.

He said, ”But that's okay.”

Epilgoue He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

-Samuel Johnson The Living Word Baltimore, MD April, 2007.

The woman standing by the crosswalk shoved a flyer at Hafidha. ”Have you found Jesus?”

Hafidha stopped. ”No.” She held eye contact until the woman-white, middle-aged, suburban upper middle cla.s.s, not the usual profile for a streetcorner proselytizer- s.h.i.+fted nervously. Then she smiled and took the flyer. ”But if I see him, I'll tell him you're looking for him.”

She was two blocks away before she looked at the flyer in her hand. Kinko's made professional-looking flyers possible for the rankest of amateurs, but whoever had made this one had a good eye for graphic design. THE TRUTH IS REVEALED UNTO US, it said. THE LIVING WORD OF G.o.d WILL SPEAK TO YOU. 7 P.M., EVERY WEDNESDAY. And then an address that was almost certainly a store-front.