Day 9 (7 page)

 

CHAPTER 14

 

Asheville, North Carolina - Today

"You can't fire me," said Quincy. "I fwit."

"'Fwit?'" said Dunne.

"It's
flanguage
, dumbass!" Quincy pounded his fist on the table, making the plates and silverware jump. "I
fucking
quit
!"

Dunne ran fingers through his sandy brown hair, stealing a look around the restaurant. Every customer, waitress, and busboy in the place was staring at Quincy at once.

Maybe a late dinner after flying in to Asheville, North Carolina hadn't been such a great idea after all. The mood at the table had been lousy from the start. Hannahlee hadn't even been eating, just drinking ice water.

That, in fact, was what had led to the outburst. Quincy had said something about Hannahlee not eating anything. Then, he had said this:

"Are you still anorexic? Is it true you had an eating disorder during the filming of
Weeping Willows
?"

At which point, Hannahlee had raised her index finger. The Bullshit Detector.

And she had flicked it all the way to one side. Held it horizontal and quivering, pegged to the maximum reading.

She had locked her fiery green gaze upon him like a gun sight. "No more blog fodder," she had said. "I give you nothing."

Quincy had scowled as if she were insane. "'Blog fodder?' What in Gawain's green manhood are you talking about, my dear?"

"I know you've been posting online," Hannahlee had said. "From your cell phone. You couldn't resist breaking the story on the internet, could you?"

Quincy had chuckled. "Zounds! What the fuck's the
finternet
? Some
sweetmeat
or the like?"

"Halcyon's paying you a stipend," Hannahlee had said. "By selling reports to the news sites, you've been double-dipping. And you know what
that
is." She had flicked her finger hard several times, as if the needle on the gauge had been bouncing. "
Bullshit
."

"Okey-fenokee, Pokey." Grinning, Quincy had seized Hannahlee's finger. "So are the rumors about the anorexia
true
?"

Hannahlee had reached out her other hand. "Give it to me. Your phone."

Quincy had laid a French fry in her palm. "My
food
? You got it!"

Hannahlee had tossed the French fry in his face, then leaned across the table. "You're fired."

And that was when it had gotten nasty. That was when Quincy had pounded the table, drawing stares from around the restaurant. That was when he'd told her he'd "fwit."

So now, everyone in the restaurant awaited the outcome. Watched to see if the ponytailed giant lashed out at the poor woman.

He stared at her across the table, shoulders heaving, smiles nowhere to be found. She stared back at him with teeth clenched.

Dunne should have known better than to try to defuse the situation. "Hey, guys," he said. "I'm sure we can work this out."

Neither Quincy nor Hannahlee said a word in reply. They continued to stare at each other, giving no sign that either was considering compromise or surrender.

Then, finally, Quincy made a move. He pulled a cell phone from the pocket of his black-and-red vest and held it in front of Hannahlee's face.

"Hi! I'm Quincy's cell phone!" He said it in a high-pitched voice. "Wait till you see the
next
item on the news sites. The one about your behavior at this dinner table!"

That said, Quincy swept the phone back into his vest pocket, got up, and slid out of the booth. Dunne watched as he bounded into the night, leaving the sound of the jingling doorbells in his wake.

As Dunne turned to Hannahlee, he felt a wave of relief. He was sure they were better off without unpredictable, uncontrollable, irreverent Quincy in the mix.

Still, Dunne thought he should steer clear of the subject for now. He didn't want to look like he was gloating.

"When should we leave for Sensophile tomorrow?" He held up his cup as the waitress approached, and she refilled it with coffee. "Eight A.M., maybe?"

Hannahlee locked him in her fiery emerald gaze. "Are
you
going to quit, too?"

Dunne was caught off guard by the question. "Why do you ask?" He frowned nervously.

Hannahlee continued to stare. "Would you have signed on if you'd known we'd be facing a killer? That your life would be in danger?"

Dunne covered his hesitation with a sip of coffee. "Of course."

Hannahlee raised her index finger and flicked it all the way to one side. "Bullshit."

"Excuse me?" Dunne was stunned to be the target of the Bullshit Detector for once. "Are you calling me a liar?"

"I'm thinking about firing you," said Hannahlee.

"
What
?" said Dunne. "
Why
?"

"Because you drink
coffee
." Hannahlee winced. "Why do you
think
?"

Dunne stared at her, speechless, for a long moment. He remembered the way she'd looked at him after they'd hidden from the killer. After he'd run from the fight.

Maybe she'd seen through him. Maybe she understood him better than he'd thought.

"What do you want me to say?" Dunne sat back and folded his arms.

Hannahlee's green eyes flared. "I've made terrible mistakes in my life." Her voice rose, edged with anger and sadness and power. "But I've stopped
running
from them."

Dunne looked away.

Hannahlee got up from the table. "I won't let my
mistakes
turn me into a
liability
anymore." She snapped up the check and started toward the register.

Then, she stopped and turned. "Should Quincy and I wait for you in the morning?"

"What?" Dunne frowned. "But he
quit
."

"Not for long. Trust me," said Hannahlee. "But don't let that stop you."

"From what?" said Dunne. "From quitting?"

"I'll leave it up to you," she said. "
This
time."

And then she was gone.

Dunne was left sitting at the table alone, head spinning from the events of the past few minutes. It was as if the three of them, after traveling together for days, had finally reached critical mass. Time to let off steam or melt down.

Dunne tried to take a sip of coffee, but his hand was shaking too much. He felt like he'd been smacked around.

As he put the cup down on its saucer, he wondered how Hannahlee seemed to know so much about him. Did she have a knack for reading people? Was she just a good guesser? Or had she studied his background before the mission?

And if she'd studied his background, just how much did she know? Some of it...or all of it?

Dunne held his head in his hands. The thought that Hannahlee...Lianna Caprice...Kitty Willow...knew all of it filled him with shame. The thing that he'd done, that had ruined his life, had been despicable.

He wondered if he could even face her again. If he could bear to feel the weight of her accusing gaze and know that she knew.

If he could stand before her ghost, as he did so often in his dreams, and smother in the heat of her rage. Choke as she cut his throat. Scream as she shot him in the face.

Not Hannahlee.

His wife.

He wondered.

 

CHAPTER 15

 

"Ring ring!" Quincy spoke in a high-pitched squeak as he held out a tiny computer chip on the tip of his thick finger. "I'm another piece of Quincy's cell phone! Please take me, pretty Kitty!"

Hannahlee took the chip and dropped it in her purse. It was the twelfth cell phone piece that Quincy had handed over that morning. Apparently, though he'd decided to turn over his phone, he was going to surrender it one piece at a time.

Hannahlee had been right about him not quitting. He'd shown up promptly at 8 A.M. in the hotel lobby, all smiles and pockets full of cell phone parts.

This latest piece, he gave up in front of the headquarters of Sensophile, just as Hannahlee was opening the door. The two of them had come to hunt Cyrus Gowdy in Sensophile's online game, Willowtopia.

And they weren't alone. Dunne caught the door and held it open for them both, then followed them through. In spite of his doubts and shame, he'd been the first one waiting in the lobby that morning. The lure of writing the script for the
Willows
big screen movie had outweighed his other concerns. Maybe, with luck, the three of them would find Gowdy, and Dunne could avoid more danger long enough to claim his prize.

Sensophile, at least, promised to be a non-threatening stop. Housed in a nondescript glass and steel box of a building, the company's lobby looked bland to the extreme—plain gray walls, fluorescent lights, and one reception desk with nothing on it. Even better, as far as Dunne knew, no original
Willows
actors were on the premises. No targets for the killer.

Except Hannahlee. And maybe, since Quincy was no longer posting online updates of her whereabouts, and not everyone recognized her current appearance, she could stay off the radar.

"Where
is
everybody?" Quincy rapped on the receptionist's desk. "They know we're coming, right?"

Dunne tried the knob of the only door other than the one through which they'd entered. It was locked. "Maybe there's a fire drill."

That was when he heard the music.

It started out soft, thrumming from the walls. It quickly grew louder, pulsating with drums and guitars.

Dunne recognized it almost immediately. Quincy caught his gaze and grinned with recognition of his own.

"'Face Hockey Smash Cut,'" said Quincy. "It's the
feme
song
, baby!"

Hannahlee nodded. "The opening theme of
Weeping Willows
."

Right after she said it, the door swung open, and the music blared. People poured into the lobby, every one of them wearing a different colorful costume.

Every one of them dressed up as a different Weeping Willow.

The costumed Willows surrounded Dunne and Hannahlee, cheering and whooping, throwing confetti and playing kazoos. Some sang along with the
Willows
theme song, rattling off the lyrics from the unrecorded version written by Cyrus Gowdy.

Only one of the crowd wasn't dressed like a Willow—a young man in a sleek black suit with a red necktie. He charged through the door and sprang up onto the reception desk, spreading his arms wide.

"Hey now, heroes!" he said, and the mob said it, too—one of
Willows
' famous catch phrases. "What're we fightin' for?"

"Love and justice!" said the crowd.

"Darn tootin'!" The man on the desk grinned down at Hannahlee. "We have genuine
royalty
among us today, gang! How does Sensophile welcome the
original Kitty Willow
, Lianna Caprice?"

"Group hug!" The ersatz Willows threw their arms around their guests and each other and squeezed.

The man on the desk clapped. "And we have
another
luminary with us, too! None other than the man who's written 43
Willows
novels...and who's writing the
brand new big screen
Weeping Willows
movie
! Dunne Sullivan!"

All the Willows gasped at once. This time, Dunne got an extra-long squeeze from a beautiful girl during the group hug.

His heart pounded, and his body felt light. For once, he felt like someone special. Like a star.

And it was
awesome
.

"Now let's get to work, folks!" The man on the table blew a tune on his kazoo. "We have to help our honored guests track down
Cyrus Gowdy himself
."

The crowd cheered and applauded as if Gowdy had just appeared in the flesh. Then, they poured back through the door out of the lobby, sweeping Hannahlee, Dunne, and Quincy along with them.

 

"What the hell's a 'slashfic filker?'" said the man in the black suit and red tie as he led Dunne and the others through the office suite.

"
You
know," said Quincy. "I sing about crazy sex pairings, like Bella Willow and Archie Bunker. And I
specialize
in
Weeping Willows
slashficfilk."

"Riiight." Black suit man nodded and winked. "Well, good luck with that." Then, he turned his attention back to Hannahlee.

Quincy slumped. "But culture-wise, it's the next big viral
breakout
."

Dunne patted his shoulder. "We know, Quincy. It's all good."

"Can't freason with a philistine, I guess." Quincy shrugged and sighed. "I wish I'd brought my dulcimer. I'd really show
him
."

Quincy kept mumbling, but Dunne stopped listening. He was much more interested in what black suit man was saying.

"My name's Todd Myriada, by the way." Black suit man gave Hannahlee a little bow as they walked. "President and CEO of Sensophile. I'm a very
hands-on
kind of guy." He flickered his fingers over his face and laughed.

Dunne looked around at the suite as he followed Todd and Hannahlee. It was a vast, wide-open space, free of cubicles or any typical workplace furniture...even desks. The employees, still costumed like Willows, sat in bean bags on the floor or lay in hammocks hung from the ceiling, tapping away at laptops and handheld computers. All sorts of toys and snacks were scattered around—foam rubber footballs and giant bags of Doritos. People filled cups of soda from taps on the wall and watered the jungle of green plants growing over and around all the windows.

Dunne thought it looked like a fun place to work...for a twentysomething. The kind of free-spirited, non-traditional videogame industry workplace he'd read about in magazines.

Complete with a free-spirited, non-traditional boss.

Without slowing his pace, Todd spun and pointed at Hannahlee and Dunne. "Who wants ice cream sundaes? Before we get started? Anyone?"

Quincy waved his hand. "Right here, my good man!"

Todd ignored him and turned back around to face forward. "Okay then," he said. "Let's skip straight to the cherry."

Big frosted glass doors split apart at his approach. Dunne, Hannahlee, and Quincy followed him into a giant room like a movie theater, with rows of seats on tiers and a huge screen that took up a whole wall.

"Make yourselves comfortable." Todd waved at the rows of seats as he jogged down the aisle toward the screen. Popping open a tinted glass cabinet set into the wall, he snatched out a laptop.

Hannahlee sat in the front row, and Dunne sat beside her. Before Quincy could sit on the other side of her, though, Todd trotted over with the laptop and dived into the seat.

Quincy stared at him for a moment, mouth open, about to say something...but Todd paid no attention to him. With a snort and a disgusted flick of the wrist, Quincy walked off to take a seat at the far end of the row.

Todd popped open the laptop and hit a few keys. "Here we go." Suddenly, the big wall screen burst to life. "Welcome to Willowtopia."

On the screen, computer graphics depicted a familiar scene. Seedy storefronts hunched along a city street at night, lit by flickering neon and dim streetlamps. Shadowy figures slouched along the sidewalk, trash blowing around their feet like tumbleweeds. Old cars with their windows smashed in sat on cement blocks, stripped and burned out. Screeching cats pitched their cries against distant squealing tires and the muffled shouts of angry drunks.

Dunne recognized it instantly. "Cool," he said. "That's
Scratchtown
."

"You betcha." Todd hit more keys on the laptop, and the scene shifted, rotating to show the other side of the street. A bearded, burly man in a gray fur coat sat on a stoop there, glowering over the glittering head of his bejeweled cane. He was surrounded by a dozen scantily-clad women of all sizes and colors. "Which would make them...?"

"Jeremiah Weed," said Dunne.

"And his Rainbow Brides." Quincy shouted it from the end of the row.

"Arch-enemies of the Willows," said Dunne. "Appeared in eleven of the twenty released episodes."

"Sex objects of Quincy Winslow," shouted Quincy. "Appeared in my wet dream fantasies for over thirty-four years!"

"Let's jump in somewhere friendlier." Todd typed and worked the mouse pad on his laptop. The scene on the screen instantly changed to a grassy park under sunny blue skies.

People in 1970s-style garb—bell-bottom jeans, silk print shirts, knee-high socks, short-shorts, and Earth shoes—mingled and chased Frisbees on the gently rolling hills. Some sat on park benches, some lay on picnic blankets. The biggest crowd gathered around a bronze statue at park center—a statue of two blindfolded men grappling.

Dunne knew the statue well. It had been a gathering place in the TV show, too—the symbolic heart of many a soul-searching scene. The two blindfolded men were identical; they were meant to be the same man, fighting himself. The man is blind to his similarity to the enemy, to the fact that he's only hurting himself.

The statue was called "My Foe." In the lore of
Weeping Willows
, it was cast by Bella's great-grandmother, Livia Armstrong, after World War I. One of Dunne's novels, in fact, was all about Livia and her struggle to erect "My Foe."

It had been his worst-selling book.

"Justice Commons," said Hannahlee.

"Exactly," said Todd. "Players tend to congregate here. If we're going to bump into Gowdy, it'll be here."

"What do you mean, 'bump into' him?" said Quincy. "I thought you could trace his I.P. address through the system."

"Not that easy," said Todd. "We have thousands of avatars in the game, many with fabricated identities...at least a
hundred
registered under some variation of the name 'Cyrus Gowdy.' He could be
one
of them or
none
of them."

"So trace 'em all!" said Quincy.

"Do you know how
long
that would take?" Todd's fingers continued to fly over his laptop keyboard. "
Long
." On the big screen, three wireframes with human outlines appeared near "My Foe" in Justice Commons.

As skin, clothes, and features flowed onto the figures, Dunne realized that he was looking at two men and a woman. Todd was building them, adding fresh detail with each keystroke.

"Much easier if he identifies himself," said Todd. "We can mine his data in a heartbeat once we know which one he is."

"So which one am
I
?" Suddenly, Quincy popped up in the next row back, directly behind Todd. No more sitting at the end of the row, away from the action, for him. "Am I the tall one with the wavy blond hair?" He pointed at one of the figures on the screen.

"That's me." As he said it, Todd kept typing. Army fatigues and a Day-Glo yellow smiley face t-shirt appeared on the blond avatar. "War Willow."

"Oh." Quincy stuck a big arm over Todd's shoulder and pointed at the screen. "So
that's
me, then. The Buzz Willow lookalike."

As Todd typed and moused, the other male figure gained a black crew-cut, glasses, and muttonchops. "That one's Dunne." More keystrokes put Buzz in a navy blue cardigan, khaki trousers, and light blue Oxford shirt complete with pocket protector.

"And that's Hannahlee, of course," said Todd as the female avatar took on the look of a young Kitty Willow, circa 1976. Her feathered red hair was shiny and full. She wore a red pantsuit, complete with vest, over a white button-down blouse, open at the throat to frame a gold pendant. The pendant was the symbol of the Willows—a circle of joined hands with the scales of justice in the middle. The scales were shaped like a willow tree, with a trunk for the central mast and branches for the beam.

"So fwhere am
I
?" said Quincy.

"
Fowhere
," said Todd. "Now
fut up
before I
frow
you out!"

Quincy stared at the back of Todd's head, looking stunned and indignant. His lips moved as if he were readying jabs of his own...and then he sunk back into his seat with an exasperated sigh.

"Okay then." Todd kept typing on the laptop. "Let's start mingling, you guys."

The three new avatars started walking through the crowd around "My Foe." As they passed, other characters—also made up to look like Willows notables—turned to look at them.

Hannahlee gazed at the screen, its multicolored light dancing over her features. "Is this all they do?" she said. "Socialize?"

Todd chuckled. "They do it
all
, Lianna. Have adventures, fall in love, start a business. Whatever people do in a
world
, because that's what this is. A whole
world
."

"You built a whole world out of seventeen episodes?" said Hannahlee.

Todd hiked a thumb at Dunne. "
He
built forty-three
novels
out of 'em. It's
rich
soil
, Lianna. That's one of the reasons the show has held up so well after all these years."

Another avatar done up like Buzz, with a slightly different haircut, waved at Dunne's Buzz. The new Buzz's mouth moved, and computer-generated speech played over the theater's speakers.

"Hey, good-lookin'."

Todd spoke. The onboard microphone on his keyboard picked up his words, and Dunne's Buzz avatar in the game repeated them. "You look familiar, but I can't place you."

"I get that a lot," said the other Buzz as he wandered off-screen.

Todd laughed. "There are five hundred some Buzzes in Willowtopia. The big names—War, Kitty, Leif, and Free—have two to three thousand a piece."

"So out of all these copies," said Hannahlee, "how are we supposed to find Cyrus Gowdy?"

"Ask around," said Todd. "Put the word out. The good thing is, no one knows it's
you
behind that Kitty avatar. Hopefully, even Cyrus won't figure it out till it's too late."

"This could still take forever," said Dunne, "and we're under a time crunch. Someone's out to kill Gowdy and the Willows, remember?"

"Then it's a good thing we have help." Todd typed furiously, and his War Willow avatar pushed through the crowd onscreen. He stopped at the base of "My Foe" and reached out a hand to a male avatar leaning against it.

The avatar wore sunglasses and a black leather jacket and turtleneck. He also wore a black baseball cap with the black-and-white yin and yang symbol on the front; he took it off as he shook the hand of Todd's War, revealing slick, black hair with white streaks.

"Everyone, this is Hiss Willow himself," said Todd. "Baine Sherwood."

"Hello, Lianna," said the Hiss avatar on-screen. "Long time no betray."