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  "How bad?"

  "Bad," Dr. Stamos says, then hastens to add, "but not hopeless."

  "Don't skate around it, just tell me."

  "It's pancreatic cancer, and I'm afraid we caught it . . . well . . . rather late in the game. Your liver is involved."

  Hodges finds himself fighting a strong and dismaying urge to laugh. No, more than laugh, to just throw back his head and yodel like Heidi's fucking grandfather. He thinks it was Stamos saying bad but not hopeless. It makes him remember an old joke. Doctor tells his patient there's good news and bad news; which does the patient want first? Hit me with the bad news, says the patient. Well, says the doctor, you have an inoperable brain tumor. The patient starts to blubber and asks what the good news can possibly be after learning a thing like that. The doctor leans forward, smiling confidentially, and says, I'm fucking my receptionist, and she's gorgeous.

  "I'll want you to see a gastroenterologist immediately. I'm talking today. The best one in this part of the country is Henry Yip, at Kiner. He'll refer you to a good oncologist. I'm thinking that guy will want to start you on chemo and radiation. These can be difficult for the patient, debilitating, but are far less arduous than even five years ago--"

  "Stop," Hodges says. The urge to laugh has thankfully passed.

  Stamos stops, looking at him in a brilliant shaft of January sun. Hodges thinks, Barring a miracle, this is the last January I'm ever going to see. Wow.

  "What are the chances? Don't sugarcoat it. There's something hanging fire in my life right now, might be something big, so I need to know."

  Stamos sighs. "Very slim, I'm afraid. Pancreatic cancer is just so goddamned stealthy."

  "How long?"

  "With treatment? Possibly a year. Even two. And a remission is not entirely out of the ques--"

  "I need to think about this," Hodges says.

  "I've heard that many times after I've had the unpleasant task of giving this kind of diagnosis, and I always tell my patients what I'm now going to tell you, Bill. If you were standing on top of a burning building and a helicopter appeared and dropped a rope ladder, would you say you needed to think about it before climbing up?"

  Hodges mulls that over, and the urge to laugh returns. He's able to restrain it, but not a smile. It's broad and charming. "I might," he says, "if the helicopter in question only had two gallons of gas left in the tank."

  22

  When Ruth Scapelli was twenty-three, before she began to grow the hard shell that encased her in later years, she had a short and bumpy affair with a not-exactly-honest man who owned a bowling alley. She became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter she named Cynthia. This was in Davenport, Iowa, her hometown, where she was working toward her RN at Kaplan University. She was amazed to find herself a mother, more amazed still to realize that Cynthia's father was a slack-bellied forty-year-old with a tattoo reading LOVE TO LIVE AND LIVE TO LOVE on one hairy arm. If he had offered to marry her (he didn't), she would have declined with an inward shudder. Her aunt Wanda helped her raise the child.

  Cynthia Scapelli Robinson now lives in San Francisco, where she has a fine husband (no tattoos) and two children, the older of whom is an honor roll student in high school. Her household is a warm one. Cynthia works hard to keep it that way, because the atmosphere in her aunt's home, where she did most of her growing up (and where her mother began to develop that formidable shell) was always chilly, full of recriminations and scoldings that usually began You forgot to. The emotional atmosphere was mostly above freezing, but rarely went higher than forty-five degrees. By the time Cynthia was in high school, she was calling her mother by her first name. Ruth Scapelli never objected to this; in fact, she found it a bit of a relief. She missed her daughter's nuptials due to work commitments, but sent a wedding present. It was a clock-radio. These days Cynthia and her mother talk on the phone once or twice a month, and occasionally exchange emails. Josh doing fine in school, made the soccer team is followed by a terse reply: Good for him. Cynthia has never actually missed her mother, because there was never all that much to miss.

  This morning she rises at seven, fixes breakfast for her husband and the two boys, sees Hank off to work, sees the boys off to school, then rinses the dishes and gets the dishwasher going. That is followed by a trip to the laundry room, where she loads the washer and gets that going. She does these morning chores without once thinking You must not forget to, except someplace down deep she is thinking it, and always will. The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots.

  At nine thirty she makes herself a second cup of coffee, turns on the TV (she rarely looks at it, but it's company), and powers up her laptop to see if she has any emails other than the usual come-ons from Amazon and Urban Outfitters. This morning there's one from her mother, sent last night at 10:44 PM, which translates to 8:44, West Coast time. She frowns at the subject line, which is a single word: Sorry.

  She opens it. Her heartbeat speeds up as she reads.

  I'm awful. I'm an awful worthless bitch. No one will stand up for me. This is what I have to do. I love you.

  I love you. When is the last time her mother said that to her? Cynthia--who says it to her boys at least four times a day--honestly can't remember. She grabs her phone off the counter where it's been charging, and calls first her mother's cell, then the landline. She gets Ruth Scapelli's short, no-nonsense message on both: "Leave a message. I'll call you back if that seems appropriate." Cynthia tells her mother to call her right away, but she's terribly afraid her mother may not be able to do that. Not now, perhaps not later, perhaps not at all.

  She paces the circumference of her sunny kitchen twice, chewing at her lips, then picks up her cell again and gets the number for Kiner Memorial Hospital. She resumes pacing as she waits to be transferred to the Brain Injury Clinic. She's finally connected to a nurse who identifies himself as Steve Halpern. No, Halpern tells her, Nurse Scapelli hasn't come in, which is surprising. Her shift starts at eight, and in the Midwest it's now twenty to one.

  "Try her at home," he advises. "She's probably taking a sick day, although it's unlike her not to call in."

  You don't know the half of it, Cynthia thinks. Unless, that is, Halpern grew up in a house where the mantra was You forgot to.

  She thanks him (can't forget that, no matter how worried she may be) and gets the number of a police department two thousand miles away. She identifies herself and states the problem as calmly as possible.

  "My mother lives at 298 Tannenbaum Street. Her name is Ruth Scapelli. She's the head nurse at the Kiner Hospital Brain Injury Clinic. I got an email from her this morning that makes me think . . ."

  That she's badly depressed? No. It might not be enough to get the cops out there. Besides, it's not what she really thinks. She takes a deep breath.

  "That makes me think she might be considering suicide."

  23

  CPC 54 pulls into the driveway at 298 Tannenbaum Street. Officers Amarilis Rosario and Jason Laverty--known as Toody and Muldoon because their car number was featured in an old cop sitcom--get out and approach the door. Rosario rings the doorbell. There's no answer, so Laverty knocks, good and hard. There's still no answer. He tries the door on the off chance, and it opens. They look at each other. This is a good neighborhood, but it's still the city, and in the city most people lock their doors.

  Rosario pokes her head in. "Mrs. Scapelli? This is Police Officer Rosario. Want to give us a shout?"

  There is no shout.

  Her partner chimes in. "Officer Laverty, ma'am. Your daughter is worried about you. Are you okay?"

  Nothing. Laverty shrugs and gestures to the open door. "Ladies first."

  Rosario steps in, unsnapping the strap on her service weapon without even thinking about it. Laverty follows. The living room is empty but the TV is on, the sound muted.

  "Toody, Toody, I don't like this," Rosario says. "Can you smell it?"

  Laverty can. It's the smell of blood. They find the source in the kitchen, where Rut
h Scapelli lies on the floor next to an overturned chair. Her arms are splayed out as if she tried to break her fall. They can see the deep cuts she's made, long ones up the forearms almost to the elbows, short ones across the wrists. Blood is splattered on the easy-clean tiles, and a great deal more is on the table, where she sat to do the deed. A butcher knife from the wooden block beside the toaster lies on the lazy Susan, placed with grotesque neatness between the salt and pepper shakers and the ceramic napkin holder. The blood is dark, coagulating. Laverty guesses she's been dead for twelve hours, at least.

  "Maybe there was nothing good on TV," he says.

  Rosario gives him a dark look and takes a knee close to the body, but not close enough to get blood on her uni, which just came back from the cleaners the day before. "She drew something before she lost consciousness," she says. "See it there on the tile by her right hand? Drew it in her own blood. What do you make of it? Is it a 2?"

  Laverty leans down for a close look, hands on his knees. "Hard to tell," he says. "Either a 2 or a Z."

  BRADY

  "My boy is a genius," Deborah Hartsfield used to tell her friends. To which she would add, with a winning smile: "It's not bragging if it's the truth."

  This was before she started drinking heavily, when she still had friends. Once she'd had another son, Frankie, but Frankie was no genius. Frankie was brain-damaged. One evening when he was four years old, he fell down the cellar stairs and died of a broken neck. That was the story Deborah and Brady told, anyway. The truth was a little different. A little more complex.

  Brady loved to invent things, and one day he'd invent something that would make the two of them rich, would put them on that famous street called Easy. Deborah was sure of it, and told him so often. Brady believed it.

  He managed just Bs and Cs in most of his courses, but in Computer Science I and II he was a straight-A star. By the time he graduated from North Side High, the Hartsfield house was equipped with all sorts of gadgets, some of them--like the blue boxes by which Brady stole cable TV from Midwest Vision--highly illegal. He had a workroom in the basement where Deborah rarely ventured, and it was there that he did his inventing.

  Little by little, doubt crept in. And resentment, doubt's fraternal twin. No matter how inspired his creations were, none were moneymakers. There were guys in California--Steve Jobs, for instance--who made incredible fortunes and changed the world just tinkering in their garages, but the things Brady came up with never quite made the grade.

  His design for the Rolla, for instance. It was to be a computer-powered vacuum cleaner that would run by itself, turning on gimbals and starting in a new direction each time it met an obstacle. That looked like a sure winner until Brady spotted a Roomba vacuum cleaner in a fancy-shmancy appliance store on Lacemaker Lane. Someone had beaten him to the punch. The phrase a day late and a dollar short occurred to him. He pushed it away, but sometimes at night when he couldn't sleep, or when he was coming down with one of his migraines, it recurred.

  Yet two of his inventions--and minor ones at that--made the slaughter at City Center possible. They were modified TV remotes he called Thing One and Thing Two. Thing One could change traffic signals from red to green, or vice-versa. Thing Two was more sophisticated. It could capture and store signals sent from automobile key fobs, allowing Brady to unlock those vehicles after their clueless owners had departed. At first he used Thing Two as a burglary tool, opening cars and tossing them for cash or other valuables. Then, as the idea of driving a big car into a crowd of people took vague shape in his mind (along with fantasies of assassinating the President or maybe a hot shit movie star), he used Thing Two on Mrs. Olivia Trelawney's Mercedes, and discovered she kept a spare key in her glove compartment.

  That car he left alone, filing the existence of the spare key away for later use. Not long after, like a message from the dark powers that ran the universe, he read in the newspaper that a job fair was to be held at City Center on the tenth of April.

  Thousands were expected to show up.

  *

  After he started working the Cyber Patrol at Discount Electronix and could buy crunchers on the cheap, Brady wired together seven off-brand laptops in his basement workroom. He rarely used more than one of them, but he liked the way they made the room look: like something out of a science fiction movie or a Star Trek episode. He wired in a voice-activated system, too, and this was years before Apple made a voice-ac program named Siri a star.

  Once again, a day late and a dollar short.

  Or, in this case, a few billion.

  Being in a situation like that, who wouldn't want to kill a bunch of people?

  He only got eight at City Center (not counting the wounded, some of them maimed really good), but could have gotten thousands at that rock concert. He'd have been remembered forever. But before he could push the button that would have sent ball bearings flying in a jet-propelled, ever-widening deathfan, mutilating and decapitating hundreds of screaming prepubescent girls (not to mention their overweight and overindulgent mommies), someone had turned out all his lights.

  That part of his memory was blacked out permanently, it seemed, but he didn't have to remember. There was only one person it could have been: Kermit William Hodges. Hodges was supposed to commit suicide like Mrs. Trelawney, that was the plan, but he'd somehow avoided both that and the explosives Brady had stashed in Hodges's car. The old retired detective showed up at the concert and thwarted him mere seconds before Brady could achieve his immortality.

  Boom, boom, out go the lights.

  Angel, angel, down we go.

  *

  Coincidence is a tricksy bitch, and it so happened that Brady was transported to Kiner Memorial by Unit 23 out of Firehouse 3. Rob Martin wasn't on the scene--he was at that time touring Afghanistan, all expenses paid by the United States government--but Jason Rapsis was the paramedic onboard, trying to keep Brady alive as 23 raced toward the hospital. If offered a bet on his chances, Rapsis would have bet against. The young man was seizing violently. His heart rate was 175, his blood pressure alternately spiking and falling. Yet he was still in the land of the living when 23 reached Kiner.

  There he was examined by Dr. Emory Winston, an old hand in the patch-em-up, fix-em-up wing of the hospital some vets called the Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club. Winston collared a med student who happened to be hanging around the ER and chatting up nurses. Winston invited him to do a quick-and-dirty evaluation of the new patient. The student reported depressed reflexes, a dilated and fixed left pupil, and a positive right Babinski.

  "Meaning?" Winston asked.

  "Meaning this guy is suffering an irreparable brain injury," said the student. "He's a gork."

  "Very good, we may make a doctor of you yet. Prognosis?"

  "Dead by morning," said the student.

  "You're probably right," Winston said. "I hope so, because he's never coming back from this. We'll give him a CAT scan, though."

  "Why?"

  "Because it's protocol, son. And because I'm curious to see how much damage there actually is while he's still alive."

  He was still alive seven hours later, when Dr. Annu Singh, ably assisted by Dr. Felix Babineau, performed a craniotomy to evacuate the massive blood clot that was pressing on Brady's brain and increasing the damage minute by minute, strangling divinely specialized cells in their millions. When the operation was finished, Babineau turned to Singh and offered him a hand that was still encased in a blood-stippled glove.

  "That," he said, "was amazing."

  Singh shook Babineau's hand, but he did so with a deprecating smile. "That was routine," he said. "Done a thousand of them. Well . . . a couple of hundred. What's amazing is this patient's constitution. I can't believe he lived through the operation. The damage to his poor old chump . . ." Singh shook his head. "Iy-yi-yi."

  "You know what he was trying to do, I take it?"

  "Yes, I was informed. Terrorism on a grand scale. He may live for awhile, but he will never be trie
d for his crime, and he will be no great loss to the world when he goes."

  It was with this thought in mind that Dr. Babineau began slipping Brady--not quite brain-dead, but almost--an experimental drug which he called Cerebellin (although only in his mind; technically, it was just a six-digit number), this in addition to the established protocols of increased oxygenation, diuretics, antiseizure drugs, and steroids. Experimental drug 649558 had shown promising results when tested on animals, but thanks to a tangle of regulatory bureaucracies, human trials were years away. It had been developed in a Bolivian neuro lab, which added to the hassle. By the time human testing commenced (if it ever did), Babineau would be living in a Florida gated community, if his wife had her way. And bored to tears.

  This was an opportunity to see results while he was still actively involved in neurological research. If he got some, it was not impossible to imagine a Nobel Prize for Medicine somewhere down the line. And there was no downside as long as he kept the results to himself until human trials were okayed. The man was a murderous degenerate who was never going to wake up, anyway. If by some miracle he did, his consciousness would at best be of the shadowy sort experienced by patients with advanced Alzheimer's disease. Yet even that would be an amazing result.

  You may be helping someone farther down the line, Mr. Hartsfield, he told his comatose patient. Doing a spoonful of good instead of a shovelful of evil. And if you should suffer an adverse reaction? Perhaps go entirely flatline (not that you have far to go), or even die, rather than showing a bit of increased brain function?

  No great loss. Not to you, and certainly not to your family, because you have none.

  Nor to the world; the world would be delighted to see you go.

  He opened a file on his computer titled HARTSFIELD CEREBELLIN TRIALS. There were nine of these trials in all, spread over a fourteen-month period in 2010 and 2011. Babineau saw no change. He might as well have been giving his human guinea pig distilled water.

  He gave up.

  *

  The human guinea pig in question spent fifteen months in the dark, an inchoate spirit who at some point in the sixteenth month remembered his name. He was Brady Wilson Hartsfield. There was nothing else at first. No past, no present, no him beyond the six syllables of his name. Then, not long before he would have given up and just floated away, another word came. The word was control. It had once meant something important, but he could not think what.