Double Cross [2] (25 page)

A
N HOUR LATER
I’m all coffeed up and cozy in a woolly red turtleneck, jeans, suede lace-up boots, and my black coat and hat. I head down the stairs with Avery’s customer list locked securely in my accountant’s briefcase.

Out front I’m surprised to see that the building next door is festooned with crime tape, and the second-story window boarded up—the window just kitty-corner from the entrance to Mr. K.’s jewelry shop. Another robbery. Clearly this was the source of the crash that woke me up last night.

I’ll find out what happened from Mr. K. when his shop opens. Mr. K. learns about everything that goes on in the neighborhood just from standing in his doorway. He and I frequently bond over our disapproval of cheap new high-rises going up nearby, and the idiotic timing of the stoplight at our intersection. Yesterday I told him how eating diamonds can kill a person. He didn’t believe me, but I suspect it’s because he’s in the diamond business. We had this whole jokey exchange where I told him he’s going to have to put “do not take internally” tags on his necklaces.

I find myself wishing Mr. K.’s was open now. Anything to put off this meeting with Packard. I haven’t seen him since I started dreaming of the kiss. Even though the
memory is nothing but a hollow husk of the past, I still feel overexposed. Will he be amused at my feelings, and how easy it was to charge up the memory? Will he pity me for my gullibility? The incredible ease with which he can manipulate me? Will he be quiet and cool, full of knowing glances? Or will he work it and rehash it, thinking I’ll fall into his arms?

Let him think what he wants. I’ll deliver the list and leave. I wish I could tell Packard I quit, but I’ll keep my word to Simon and wait.

When the time comes, however, I’ll relish telling him about my self-declared freedom. Possibly more than the actual freedom.

Packard lives at the top of a warehouse building north of the river. His is the brightest, airiest living space you could ever imagine—a fishbowl, really, with more windows than walls, more skylight than ceiling, and more porch footage than interior footage. It’s the home of a man who can’t bear to be closed in again.

Francis opens the door.

“Francis!” I say. “You’re out of the hospital.” I barely stop myself from hugging him. Francis is antihug.

“Sprung me yesterday, little missy.” Francis has Coke-bottle glasses and the thickest neck I’ve ever seen. I follow him inside, steeling myself for Packard’s attitude.

Francis stops in the kitchen and grabs a water, asks me if I want something. I shake my head. Even the décor in Packard’s place is light and bright, the polar opposite of the dark, heavy, gaudy Mongolian Delites décor. Packard hated the way the restaurant looked inside, but he could never alter it. Once Otto’s force fields are in place, you can’t change the look of a space in any real way. It just reverts.

We continue into the sunny dining room area, and
there’s Packard, sitting with Carter amid jungle plants, the two of them bent over a laptop.

“Guys,” Francis says.

Packard looks up. “Justine,” he says, with weary indifference. “Everything okay?”

“Sure. Yeah,” I reply.
Where’s the attitude? The knowingness?
He seems … oddly passive. I don’t understand. Was the whole thing just beneath his notice?

Packard tilts his head. “Don’t you have to be at the office?”

“That’s what I’m here about.” I put my briefcase on the table and take off my coat. “I need a word.”

Packard asks Francis and Carter to give us a minute. He motions lazily at the chair across from him and leans back, rubbing his eyes, like he’s so bored and weary.
That’s
how he feels about it? Bored and weary?

“Something’s wrong,” he says.

I settle into the chair, feeling foolish in ten different ways. “No.”

“But not the dreams, right? They’ve been okay …”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. How are you finding them?” he asks. “What do you make of, say, last night’s? What’s your opinion?”

I finger the lock on the briefcase. “Of the dream?” Packard’s asking
my opinion
?

“Yes, the dream.” His green eyes are strangely bright and bleary.

“You want my opinion?”

A momentary hesitation, which he covers with an imperious tone: “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know.”

The imperious tone. He’s bluffing. “Oh my God,” I say. “You weren’t there.”

“That’s silly.”

“You haven’t slept.”

He waves this off. “Justine, Justine.”

“Look at you! You weren’t even there. You haven’t slept for two nights, have you?”

Packard straightens up. “You honestly think I’d go without sleep at a time like this?”

“Yeah. Don’t try to deny it. You haven’t been sleeping—believe me, if you’d been there—” I stop here. Too late.

Sly smile. “What in the world have I been missing, Justine?”

I feel this rush of energy, and oddly, relief. The colors of the world go back to their normal saturation. “You haven’t slept for like forty-eight hours.”

“Actually …” He closes his eyes. “I think it would come to more than that, but I don’t want to calculate it unless I have to.”

“You can’t not sleep. You can’t do that. Packard …” He looks so weary! I want to go rub his shoulders, bolster him. Slap him.

“It’s just for a few more days.”

“People go crazy when they don’t sleep.”

“Not permanently.”

“I don’t like this. People die from no sleep. They
die
.”

“Shh.” He raises a finger to his lips, eyes on mine. “I’m fine.”

“They die!”

“Justine, the human body can go eleven days without sleep, and I’m a highcap. High capacity. I can go even longer.”

“This is dangerous. Oh my God—this is about the secret.”

“You haven’t gotten urges to get up and go to her yet, have you?”

“Don’t change the subject. This is about the secret.” He doesn’t want me in that dream in a very bad way.

He draws his brows together. “You’d tell me if you
were getting urges, right? We can think about setting you up in a cell at HQ if you feel the urge to get to her, to sleepwalk—”

“I’m fine.”

He regards me suspiciously. Even in his sleep-deprived state, he knows when I’m not telling all.

I pull the papers out of my case and slam them down.

“What’s this?”

“The names and addresses of everyone who ordered antihighcap glasses,” I say.

“The customer list?”

“Yes.”

Slowly he lays his hand upon it, like he needs to confirm that it’s real.

I smile.

“How’d you get it?”

“Shelby got it. Or really, Avery.”

He pulls it toward him. It’s a ten-page table: names, addresses, and dates.

“Avery’s a good guy,” I say. “He’s an ally.”

Packard riffles through the pages as though he’s looking for something. “He just handed this over?” he whispers, stopping at a page in the middle.

“Avery agrees that the Dorks need to be stopped. Shelby determined that it was safe to level with him in a limited way, and she was right.”

“Well, isn’t that a hell of a thing.” He pages through slowly now, from the beginning. Even his movements are more tentative than usual.

“Oh, Packard. You need to sleep.”

“I’m fine.” He asks me a lot of questions about Shelby’s getting it and Avery’s disposition.

“Everybody involved here needs to know that Avery’s helping,” I say. “He’s not a threat. He’s acted in friendship toward the highcaps, and we don’t want him in any trouble.”

“Agreed. This was generous of him. We have to thank him.” He looks up. “Let him know how grateful we are.” He snaps into action in the next moments, calling Francis and Carter back, instructing them to round up teams. He asks me to stick around and help.

“Sure,” I say, rocking back on my chair as he makes a few quick phone calls and starts somebody at HQ printing maps. You can’t tell anymore that he’s sleep deprived. How long can he pull this off?

Once everybody’s running back and forth at their tasks, he sits down across from me and curls his hands around a newly refilled coffee mug, the calm eye in the center of a storm he created. I stare at his knuckley hands, thinking about the dream. How he felt. And then he says something strange: “Just hold on for a little while longer, Justine. I’ll get you out of this.”

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing. We’ll get out of this Dorks mess. Okay?”

“That’s not what you meant.” What did he mean? Was that the lack of sleep talking?

He gives me a stern gaze. “What’s up on the Ez front?”

“Things are evolving.”

I half expect him to latch on to this, but instead he guzzles some coffee.

“Packard, look at you. It’s bad when a person doesn’t sleep.”

“Sometimes it’s good,” he says. “Sometimes it gives you time to think.” He bends a paper clip into a new shape; he seems to be aiming for a circle. There’s something different about him.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

He shakes his head, like his thoughts are far too immense to articulate. “If anything makes me crazy, it’ll be too much coffee. I had this idea yesterday that people
were following me. I got these glimpses … slightly surreal.” He works the paper clip.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Except Helmut’s bodyguards.

“Other than that, I feel fine.”

“Have you heard from Otto?” I ask.

“No. Have you?”

“No. Aside from the text.”

“Mmm.” He sets the squarish circle on the table. Then Carter’s back—he’s made his calls, plus copies of the list. By the end of the hour, the list has been split into five geographical zones, which are assigned to five investigative teams—one highcap and one human each. Apparently handpicked humans with burglary and con-artist backgrounds have been standing by, waiting for this moment. The idea is to run down the names of everybody who ordered the glasses. They’re looking for the Dorks first and foremost, but they’re also replacing the glasses with fake pairs. Carter shows me one of the fakes. It’s pretty convincing. He tells me they had a thousand made.

I’m to stay behind on the computer, researching the customer names to see if I can find photos, jobs, daily patterns, anything helpful to the pairs in the field.

People start moving out. Helmut’s waiting for Packard. During a quick moment alone, I tell Helmut that Packard mentioned the strange sense of somebody following him. Meaning Helmut needs to tell Parsons that his bodyguard teams need to be stealthier.

Packard comes back with a can of Fresca for me and sets it on a coaster next to the computer. “Do I need to block WebMD.com?”

I smile. “Get out of here.”

Most of the addresses turn out to be local—not a big surprise. I start Googling the customers. It feels good to perform a crime-fighting task that’s not bizarre. People are in and out of Packard’s place, and I strain for any
news of Otto; I also keep my phone next to me every minute, wishing he’d call. I just want to hear his voice.
I’ve left only one message today; I’m trying to restrain myself.

By bedtime, Packard’s teams have replaced a good quarter of the antihighcap glasses with the fakes, and run down almost half the names, but there are no viable Dork candidates.

That night I handcuff myself to the bedpost once again. I have more memory dreams of Packard, and that kiss in the entrance of Mongolian Delites, though I seem to keep getting woken up from them by my noisy neighborhood.

I also dream of my mom, sitting at her kitchen table with all her anti-vein-star medications that everybody laughed at her for—until she died of a vein star rupture. I dream of the month our family spent in the bunker during the rodent flu scare, too. My parents told our school we were in Guatemala. I’d sit down there doing crossword puzzles and reading Arthurian tales, fantasizing about being rescued from it all—whisked away into a grander, more upstanding life by a noble hero.

That morning, lying in bed, waiting for Shelby to come and unlock me, I realize one person I haven’t dreamed of is Otto. But that only means I’m not trying to suppress my memories of him. It’s after seven in the morning in DC; he’s probably having coffee and scones. He loves scones. I close my eyes, remembering his voice, his laugh, his confidence.

And just like that, it hits me: it’s over.

This is the realization that I have, lying there in the dark. You don’t ignore a person for days on end if you still intend to be in a relationship with them.

I stare at my ceiling, throat thick with tears. I’d made all these excuses, all these complicated reasons for why he hasn’t been calling, but the truth is that I’ve lost him.

I’ve lost Otto. What’s more, my backup plan of what to do to not become a Jarvis hasn’t materialized, and I’m less free than I’ve ever been—I’m literally chained up. And what if I got a vein star blowout while I’m chained up? It really feels like the dream increased the vascular pressure inside my cranium. It occurs to me that there’s a new area of numbness, actually.
Stop it!
I tell myself.
Stop it!

Avery and Shelby come by promptly at six-thirty to unlock me, but it doesn’t improve my mood. Along with a nice tall coffee, they have printouts on payment methods for me to deliver to Packard. Avery thinks they could yield a clue.

“Can you guys bring this stuff to Packard? I’m rollerblading with Ally in an hour,” I say. “And Packard is really grateful to you, Avery. He told me that, and I bet he’d love to thank you in person.” And also, I’m too upset to see Packard. I’m too upset to do anything.

“Avery cannot be seen going to highcap den,” Shelby says. “Perhaps we will mail it. Would you prefer that?”

Reluctantly, I take the papers. I sit there, listening to their boots clomping down the stairs, then the faint clap of the lobby door.

I call Ally to cancel, blaming my security job, as I so often do. I didn’t feel like exercising anyhow; I’m seriously concerned about my head. That numbness hasn’t gone away. I would normally take aspirin for my handcuff-related shoulder pain, but aspirin thins the blood, which can speed cranial bleedout.