Memory Man (Amos Decker 1)

not. That might be why they had left the information about the site with Clyde Evers, just in case Decker made the connection and went to visit the old man. This was all a puzzle, and every piece fit in somewhere.

Thirty minutes went by. Then an hour. Then two hours. Decker just sat there, the color gray chief in his mind. Though he’d lived with this new mind for twenty years now, it still felt like he was existing in someone else’s body. And that any minute, or after an odd synaptic fire, he would be back to his old self and his quite ordinary brain.

His phone buzzed again. It was Jamison. He didn’t answer it.

At the three-hour mark the message popped up in his new account.

You finally got there, bro. Congratulations.

Decker also knew what the “bro” reference was to now. It was simple, really. They were all brothers, weren’t they? All lumped together by Wyatt. By Leopold. It was unfair, of course. It was unjust, but still, he could understand it.

He typed in a request and sent it off. And waited.

Finally, the response came. Why should we?

He had not expected them to simply agree to what he had proposed. He typed in his answer. He hoped it was good enough. He doubted he would get another chance like this.

This needs to end sometime. Why not now? I’m the only one left.

Unless he was missing something really big, he was the only one left. And he didn’t think he was missing anything. Not anymore. In fact, he might have discovered something that everyone else had missed. And he meant everyone, the two people on the other end of this digital line included.

They would suspect a trap, of course. They couldn’t even know it was him. He was expecting a test. And it came with the next missive.

The number of Dwayne LeCroix’s jersey.

They had definitely done their homework, or maybe Wyatt had heard something about him at the institute and dug that up.

The query said he had five seconds to answer. No looking up anything online. Google or YouTube was not going to be an option here. But he didn’t need it. Even without his special talent he would forevermore remember those two digits, even if he hadn’t seen them before the hit occurred.

He instantly typed in the answer and sent it off: 24.

The response was immediate.

Instructions to follow in five minutes. Stand by.

He waited, his internal clock ticking away in his head. When three hundred and six seconds had passed, it came. He studied it.

It was smart, calculated. They were taking no chances. It was like traveling by stagecoach with way stations along the journey, allowing them ample opportunity to see if Decker was truly alone. He would get to one station and there would be a communication telling him where to go next.

They had obviously planned this out previously, as though they knew exactly how all of this was going to play out. And that, Decker had to concede, was more than a little unnerving.

He rose and left. He was back at his room in thirty minutes. It took him all of three minutes to pack up pretty much all he had.

It fit into a bag two feet square with room to spare.

* * *

As he hit the doorway he looked back. His home. The only one he had now, a rental, one room. Not really much of a home. So he felt absolutely nothing at leaving it.

If this turned out badly for him he would miss Lancaster, Miller, and Jamison. And maybe even Agent Bogart. But that was about it.

He closed the door and dropped the key off in the office slot.

He knew he would not be coming back.

That was just the way it had to be.

For a lot of reasons.

Chapter

62

THE BUS TOOK him to Crewe, three towns over from Burlington. The snow was picking up and the lights on the interstate illuminated a fat, wet precipitation that would add tonnage to this part of the country until it finally stopped falling. And then the highway department would spend days cleaning it up, only to see Mother Nature do it all over again.

He looked out the window of the bus, his phone in his hand. They hadn’t told him how the next communication would come, but he wanted to be ready.

He alighted at Crewe along with only three others. Their possessions were nearly as meager as his, although one woman had a full suitcase and a pillow, and a small, sleepy child in tow.

He looked up and down the snowy underhang of the bus station platform. There were few people out and about, and all of them clearly of limited resources.

A man approached him. He was black, in his sixties, with a big belly, snow-caked boots, and a coat with rips down both sides. A flapped hat hung low over his head. His glasses were fogged. He stopped in front of Decker and said, “Amos?”

Decker looked at him and nodded. “Who are you?”

“I’m nobody. But somebody gave me a hundred dollars to give you this, and so I am.” He handed Decker a slip of paper.

“Who was it?”

“Didn’t see ’em.”

“How’d you know to look for me?”

“They said a really tall, fat, scary-lookin’ white dude with a beard. You it.”

The man lumbered off and Decker looked down at the instructions on the note.

He went in and bought another bus ticket. He had two hours to kill. He bought a coffee from the machine in the station. It was more warm than hot, but he didn’t care. He spent his time looking at everyone in the waiting room. It was more crowded than he would have thought. Then he realized something.

Thanksgiving was nearly here. These folks were probably heading out to see family and carve up a big turkey.

He and Cassie had never celebrated Thanksgiving together, chiefly because one or the other had always been working the holiday shift. Decker had spent more than one turkey day chowing down at a diner or a fast-food place. Cassie had spent her share in the hospital dining hall. Whoever had Molly in a given year would eat out. They had enjoyed it and had never felt like they were missing much.

But looking around at these folks, Decker concluded that he had missed more than he had thought.

* * *

The next bus dropped him off at the Indiana border.

There was a compact car waiting in the station parking lot, its engine running. The note had said to walk toward it and tap on the driver’s window. He knew this was also a test.

He went to the car and rapped on the window.

The woman inside rolled down the window and said, “Get in the back.”

He did so. If the FBI had been tailing him, now would be the time to surround the vehicle. They didn’t. Because they weren’t tailing him.

He got in the back. The car was small so his knees were wedged behind the seat.

“You know my friends?” he asked.

“I don’t have friends,” she replied. Her hair was stringy and gray, her body odor strong and unpleasant, especially in the hot car—she had the heater on max and her craggy voice and the hazy cigarette smoke that hung in the air foretold a painful death from lung cancer.

“That’s too bad,” he said.

“Not from where I’m sitting.”

“How much did they pay you to do this?”

“Enough.”

“You meet them?”

“Nope.”