Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

“I ask only one favor, Jerry.”

“You’re not in a position to—”

“Go around front and get the car and pick me up here.”

“I’m not leaving you.” Jerry smirked.

Lyle gave the first officer his wallet and keys as collateral. “I think we’re being followed,” Lyle said. “Let’s not take any chances.”

For some reason, this conspiratorial logic appealed to Jerry. For Lyle’s part, this was conspiratorial but also likely: the driverless car, he thought, was tracking him via his cell phone and, possibly, taking video of him. Who knew? Anything was possible, given the improbability of everything that had already happened.

Ten minutes later, Jerry appeared in the Miata in the alley behind Lyle’s apartment. Sweat beaded his forehead.

“If anyone was following us, he’s not now,” Jerry said. Lyle climbed in. Jerry continued. “First in my class in evasive maneuvers in a workshop three years ago put on for gun-certified first officers.”

“Would you mind turning off your phone?” Lyle asked.

“Are you kidding me? You’re giving me orders?”

“Phones can be tracked. Just a precaution.”

“Screw you,” Jerry said. But he turned off his phone.

Jerry stopped in front of a white house with a tall fence in a neighborhood Lyle couldn’t recall ever seeing. Less dense houses, bigger than flats, unattached, virtually suburban. So it was in San Francisco; the neighborhoods and architectural patches like the residents themselves, all over the map. It was called Forest Hill and aptly so, with trees and hills.

Lyle got out of the car. “This one?” He gestured to the two-story white house.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know,” Jerry said. He started walking up the hill without explanation as to why he hadn’t parked in front of the house they were evidently walking to. Maybe he was testing Lyle or maybe sneaking up on Eleanor or maybe, Lyle thought bemusedly, this was some trick he learned in first-officer-gun-carrying school. Lyle followed Jerry to the house.

Lyle felt a rush of urgency. They were running out of time and he didn’t even know what the stakes were. It was like he was bedside with a patient with mysterious symptoms, nothing he’d ever seen before, but who most assuredly would die in hours if Lyle didn’t figure it out.

“You knock,” Jerry said and nudged Lyle forward to a round-faced gray house on the corner. Stylish and deliberate, the house was not ordinary; clearly the work of someone who knew what they wanted. A window wrapped around the corner of the house, giving a glimpse inside at an equally fashionable living room. Eleanor answered the door with a mug in her hand. She blinked with surprise when she saw Lyle, but then her face took on a warm look. Then she saw Jerry. She looked alarmed.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You two?”

With as much subtlety as Lyle could channel, he shook his head. No, we’re not in cahoots.

“Hello, Eleanor,” Jerry said. “Your first officer has come to the rescue.”

Lyle watched Eleanor’s jaw tense.

“Jerry, you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Then let us in already so no one sees us.”

Eleanor gestured them in. As Jerry passed, she touched him gently on the shoulder. “Are you carrying, Jerry?”

“These are not ordinary times.”

“Why don’t you leave it in the guest room? It’s down the hall.”

“It’s not loaded.”

“It would make me feel better.”

He shrugged. He took the short hallway beside a set of stairs going up. He walked into the second door on the left. Eleanor touched Lyle’s elbow until he turned to face her. She mouthed, What is going on?

“I might actually have an idea about that,” Lyle said quietly. He caught her eye and tried to reassure her. She pursed her lips.

“I’ll make some coffee.”

Ten minutes later, midafternoon, the three of them at the kitchen counter stared at Jackie Badger’s picture on Eleanor’s laptop. Lyle watched their reactions and could imagine what they were feeling. This person looked familiar to them but only in a dreamlike way. While they stared, Lyle told them his theory. He told them that he had three reasons for suspecting this woman: he’d written Melanie a text about a woman in his class and she had been in his class; he’d been followed by a Google car and she worked at Google; when he saw her picture, it sparked something inside him.

“It’s pretty thin,” Lyle said. “I’m not even sure this is really Jackie Badger. Maybe the picture belongs to someone else.”

Eleanor had her eyes closed. She grabbed Jerry’s forearm.

“She was on the deck, Jerry.”

“What?” Lyle said.

“The flight deck. I remember her.” Eleanor still looked at Jerry.

“You do?”

“I thought I was going to die.”

She tried to describe to them what she was experiencing. She couldn’t grasp most of it, and some of it she didn’t want to say aloud. Eleanor could see this woman standing in her flight deck as Eleanor had had the feeling she was going to be joining Frank, her ex-boyfriend, true love, who had died years earlier. It wasn’t Jackie Badger that Eleanor was remembering, not exactly. It was a powerful memory of loss and the prospect of death that Eleanor was experiencing. It was pushing through the miasma of lost memory.

“What do we do about this?” she said.

Lyle told them his plan.

Jackie opened the door to the Lantern headquarters in Nevada. The dull hum of servers strummed through the air. Jackie held a white bag with takeout. The heavy door closed behind her. She wore a tight black cap over her short hair.

“Hello, Alex. How’re things?” She stepped inside. “I know you’re surprised to see me, just let me say something,” Jackie said. “First, at the risk of sounding insincere, it is good to see you. Really, it is. I owe you an apology. You were right, Alex, all along. So was Denny. I wasn’t being a team player. We weren’t on the same page, not aligned in our mission.”

It sounded clichéd, bordering on the glib.

“In my defense,” Jackie said, walking forward to Alex’s cubicle, “Denny never trusted me, as you rightly noted. Do you know that his distrust of me was so great, so profound, that he actually had a colleague attack me, feign an assault, a near-sexual assault. Ridiculous, right? Denny thought it would make me more beholden to him, trusting of him, so that I would follow his musty old sellout footsteps into another self-congratulatory, world-changing innovation he envisioned. Another liar, Alex, another fraud.” Jackie stopped and shook her head. “I’m rambling, I know it. I just thought I owed you some explanation.”

Alex sat in her cubicle. Her head hung to the left side. A dull smile held her catatonic face. Drool pooled beside her lip.

“Eh, who am I kidding,” Jackie said. “I don’t owe you shit.”

Jackie walked beside Alex’s swivel chair and kicked it a few feet to the left. The chair flew and Alex with it, eventually sliding off the edge and falling to the ground with her dumb, absent stare and pasted smile. Jackie reached into her pocket and pulled out a gray rectangular device that looked very much like a cell phone. “I think you’d be proud of me, Alex,” she said. “I can now change the electrical pulses on your device with this little thing. It’s a remote control—for your brain.”

She stared at Alex.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jackie said in a happy singsong voice. “Yes, yes, yes. I did the whole Steamboat thing, and I took over Lantern, and covered my tracks, blah, blah, blah. And yes, I hacked into your computer and changed the video so that it looked like you were getting on the plane. Do you take me for an idiot? No, of course not. You took me for a genius.” She leaned over Alex. “But you treated me like I was too much of a child to trust!” She kicked the grounded woman in the ribs. Still, Alex smiled dumbly. “You took me for a weak, indecisive, helpless fool. For the last time, I might add. Jackie Badger will have plenty of time now to make smart, thoughtful decisions.