David Baldacci: Memory Man

“On the football field. After the hit. They brought me back twice, maybe they shouldn’t have bothered. Then I wouldn’t have said what I did to you and all of those people would still be alive. One life to save all those others. Sounds like a good deal to me.”

“Maybe it would have been,” said Wyatt. “But you didn’t die. Just like I didn’t die. I climbed out of that Dumpster. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have just died.”

Her voice trailed off with this last part and Decker wasn’t sure, but he wondered if that constituted remorse, or at least as close as Wyatt would ever get to it now.

“I see my family’s murders in blue,” said Decker, drawing another stare from Wyatt. “I know you don’t suffer from synesthesia. It’s odd seeing things in color that should have none. It’s one of the things that scared the crap out of me when I woke up in the hospital and found out I was a different person.”

“Well, I was two people to begin with,” Wyatt shot back. “And after they raped and beat me nearly to death I became someone else entirely. So that makes three . A little crowded in someone my size.” There was not a trace of mirth in her tone. She was being deadly serious. Decker would have expected nothing less.

“You chose male over female? Why?”

“Men are predators. Women are their prey. I chose never to be the prey again. I chose to be the predator. For that I needed a full set of balls and a tankful of testosterone. Now I’ve got them and all is right with my world.”

Decker had figured that Leopold was calling the shots, but maybe he was wrong. If so, things were not going to work out so well for him. “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere.”

This was Leopold. Decker had wondered when the man was going to assert himself. Maybe he wanted Decker to know that Wyatt was not running this.

Good, Sebastian, keep it up. I need you in my corner. Until I don’t.

“Somewhere is good. Better than nowhere.”

“Why are you here?” asked Leopold. “Why did you come?”

“Figured I’d save everyone the trouble. I knew you were targeting anyone associated with me. I didn’t want anyone else to have to die because of me. I was surprised that you gave us a warning with the Lancaster family.”

He glanced at the mirror to find Wyatt watching him again.

“You sure you have no empathy?” asked Decker. “You could have killed them.”

“They weren’t worth the trouble.”

“Sandy has Down syndrome, but you knew that. Do you draw the line at killing kids like that?”

Wyatt focused back on the road.

Leopold said, “So you come so readily to the end of your life?”

The gent was downright talkative now. And his formal and somewhat clunky speech was another indicator that English was not his first language.

“We all have to die someday.”

“And today is your day,” said Leopold.

They drove for two more hours. Decker had no idea where he was, and it really didn’t matter to him. Help was not coming.

The van finally pulled off the road and Decker was bumped up and down as the vehicle hit a rough patch but then kept going.

The van hung a sharp left and a few moments later skidded to a stop. Wyatt got out and Leopold motioned for Decker to do the same. His bare feet hit cold gravel and he winced as a sharp rock cut the bottom of his right foot.

There was an old outdoor light in a rusted metal cage over the door they were heading to. Decker could make out the faded, peeling remnants of a sign that had been painted in red on the white brick wall.

Ace Plumbing. Est. 1947.

It looked like flakes of blood resting on the pale skin of a corpse.

He looked to the right and left and saw nothing but trees. A leaning chain-link fence enclosed the abandoned property.

Leopold gave him a shove in the back and he staggered into the building behind Wyatt. Leopold closed and bolted the door after them.

Wyatt was dressed in jeans and a hooded windbreaker. With the wig gone the hair was short, blond, and receding. As Billy, Wyatt had been wearing another wig that had drastically changed his appearance; the same with the waitress gig. Decker figured Wyatt might go bald in a few more years.

If he had a few more years left to live. If any of them did.

A light dimly illuminated the space. It was all concrete, mostly bare, the floor and walls splotched with grease and other dirt. An old, leaning metal shelf at the far end held a couple of joint pipes. A wooden desk with a chair in the kneehole was set near the doorway to another room. A file cabinet sat behind the desk. Some wooden crates were stacked against one wall. The windows were barred and blacked out.

Wyatt pulled out the chair and rolled it across the room. It bumped crazily over the chipped concrete floor.

Leopold motioned with the gun for Decker to sit.

He did. Wyatt took duct tape and wound it around both Decker and the chair until the two were as one. Then Wyatt pulled a large box out from behind the desk, carried it over, and turned it upside down. Tumbling out of it and clattering to the floor were all of the trophies taken from Mansfield. All the ones with Amos Decker’s name on them.

Wyatt picked one up and looked at it. “Football players and cops, my favorite people.” He dropped the trophy.

The pair pulled up two of the old crates and sat on them staring at Decker.

Decker stared back, taking them both in, detail by detail. He could tell that Wyatt was doing the same to him.

Wyatt looked nothing like the teenage girl Decker had seen back at the institute. The twenty-year march of time had hollowed out her features, giving her a perpetually hungry, emaciated look. The mouth was jagged and cruel. There were no smile lines around the edges of the lips. What did Wyatt have to smile about? Ever? The long brow had worry lines that already had been forming back at the institute.

Decker glanced at Leopold. He had cleaned up some since their last meeting at the bar. His hair was combed and his clothes looked clean.

“Can you answer a couple of questions that have been bugging me?” Decker asked. When neither of them responded, he said, “The old man and old woman that were seen out and about in my neighborhood and then Lancaster’s neighborhood. Was that you?”

Wyatt stood, pulled her hood over her head, bent over, mimicked gripping a cane, and walked slowly across the room. In a pitch-perfect impersonation of an elderly man’s voice Wyatt said, “Can you help me find my little dog, Jasper? He’s all I have left.”

She pulled her hood back down and straightened.

“I can fool anyone,” said Wyatt, staring dead at him. “Become anyone I want.”

“Yes, you can,” said Decker.

He wondered if Wyatt had always been able to transform like that. Stuck between two genders, a foot in each with an identity in neither, entrenched in limbo. When she had played the role of Billy, it had been a remarkable transformation. Happy-go-lucky, superficial, innocuous. As she had said, she could play any role.

Well, except for one. Herself.

He imagined Wyatt walking through the halls of Mansfield in the getup that made him look taller and far broader. This slip of a man — formerly a woman — transformed into a giant with guns, massacring people like they were bugs in the grass. Man as predator. Man that could never be hurt by another man. Like a woman could.

“Why did you stay in the freezer overnight? Why not just come in through the base side and meet Debbie in the shop class?”

“Because Debbie was with me in the freezer that night,” said Wyatt. “She snuck out of her house. We did it right then and there. The first time.” He grinned, though it didn’t reach the eyes. “She thought it was so amazing! Sex in the freezer. In the dark. It brought back memories for me, you see. I was gang-raped in the school cafeteria. But now I was the guy doing the girl. Then she left. And in the morning I used the passageway to get to the other end of the school.”