Memory Man (Amos Decker 1)

Wyatt was dressed in jeans and a hooded windbreaker. With the wig gone the hair was short, blond, and receding. As Billy, Wyatt had been wearing another wig that had drastically changed his appearance; the same with the waitress gig. Decker figured Wyatt might go bald in a few more years.

If he had a few more years left to live. If any of them did.

A light dimly illuminated the space. It was all concrete, mostly bare, the floor and walls splotched with grease and

other dirt. An old, leaning metal shelf at the far end held a couple of joint pipes. A wooden desk with a chair in the kneehole was set near the doorway to another room. A file cabinet sat behind the desk. Some wooden crates were stacked against one wall. The windows were barred and blacked out.

Wyatt pulled out the chair and rolled it across the room. It bumped crazily over the chipped concrete floor.

Leopold motioned with the gun for Decker to sit.

He did. Wyatt took duct tape and wound it around both Decker and the chair until the two were as one. Then Wyatt pulled a large box out from behind the desk, carried it over, and turned it upside down. Tumbling out of it and clattering to the floor were all of the trophies taken from Mansfield. All the ones with Amos Decker’s name on them.

Wyatt picked one up and looked at it. “Football players and cops, my favorite people.” He dropped the trophy.

The pair pulled up two of the old crates and sat on them staring at Decker.

Decker stared back, taking them both in, detail by detail. He could tell that Wyatt was doing the same to him.

Wyatt looked nothing like the teenage girl Decker had seen back at the institute. The twenty-year march of time had hollowed out her features, giving her a perpetually hungry, emaciated look. The mouth was jagged and cruel. There were no smile lines around the edges of the lips. What did Wyatt have to smile about? Ever? The long brow had worry lines that already had been forming back at the institute.

Decker glanced at Leopold. He had cleaned up some since their last meeting at the bar. His hair was combed and his clothes looked clean.

“Can you answer a couple of questions that have been bugging me?” Decker asked. When neither of them responded, he said, “The old man and old woman that were seen out and about in my neighborhood and then Lancaster’s neighborhood. Was that you?”

Wyatt stood, pulled her hood over her head, bent over, mimicked gripping a cane, and walked slowly across the room. In a pitch-perfect impersonation of an elderly man’s voice Wyatt said, “Can you help me find my little dog, Jasper? He’s all I have left.”

She pulled her hood back down and straightened.

“I can fool anyone,” said Wyatt, staring dead at him. “Become anyone I want.”

“Yes, you can,” said Decker.

He wondered if Wyatt had always been able to transform like that. Stuck between two genders, a foot in each with an identity in neither, entrenched in limbo. When she had played the role of Billy, it had been a remarkable transformation. Happy-go-lucky, superficial, innocuous. As she had said, she could play any role.

Well, except for one. Herself.

He imagined Wyatt walking through the halls of Mansfield in the getup that made him look taller and far broader. This slip of a man—formerly a woman—transformed into a giant with guns, massacring people like they were bugs in the grass. Man as predator. Man that could never be hurt by another man. Like a woman could.

“Why did you stay in the freezer overnight? Why not just come in through the base side and meet Debbie in the shop class?”

“Because Debbie was with me in the freezer that night,” said Wyatt. “She snuck out of her house. We did it right then and there. The first time.” He grinned, though it didn’t reach the eyes. “She thought it was so amazing! Sex in the freezer. In the dark. It brought back memories for me, you see. I was gang-raped in the school cafeteria. But now I was the guy doing the girl. Then she left. And in the morning I used the passageway to get to the other end of the school.”

“And how much did she know about the plan?” said Decker. “We found the picture of you in cammies.”

“I wore them sometimes when we were together. I told her I was former military. And now I was in military intelligence. She thought that was so cool. I told her I was here investigating a possible terrorist cell, and that she could help me. And of course I ended up seducing her. It wasn’t hard. She knew nothing of the real plan. She just thought we were going to do it in the shop classroom smack in the middle of everybody. I suggested it, of course. It had to happen that way.”

“And how did you find out that she might know something about the passageway?”

“I read an article years ago about bombproof shelters being put under schools. I figured with an Army base right next door there might be such a thing, and possibly more. So I searched the old Army base. It was easy to get inside. In a drawer in one of the rooms I found a duty roster with employee names on it. Simon Watson was on there. It said he was in engineering. Sebastian and I did some more digging and found out that the old man had lived with the Watsons and that Debbie went to Mansfield. I ‘ran’ into Debbie one day. It took time and I let my ‘undercover’ story out slowly, but it finally got around to her great-grandfather and things he had told her about the base. She knew about a passage and generally how it ran. She also knew that it connected to the base, she just didn’t know exactly where. But that gave us what we needed. We started from the base end and worked our way toward the school. It all came together. And since she believed I was here on a secret mission she understood why no one could know about ‘us.’ She kept the secret. She was actually very useful.”

“She called you Jesus, you know. You were the only positive in her life. She loved you very much, apparently. Right up to the second you blew her head off. Jesus.”

Wyatt said nothing to this.

Decker glanced at Leopold. “Did you build the outfit that he wore in the school?”

“We did it together. We do everything together.”

“And you found out the players on the football team and what classes they were in?”

“Debbie again. I told her I might have to recruit some of them in case I needed local muscle. It was stupid but she’d believe anything.”

“And ‘Justice Denied’? You left that paper at Evers’s dump in Utah. So I guess you wanted us to know about it. It was how I was able to contact you.”

“I’m not alone,” said Wyatt. Decker glanced at her.

“Not alone?”

“There are lots of others like me. People like me can get justice too.”

Decker nodded. “What name do you go by now? Or do you want me to just call you Wyatt?”

“You can call me Belinda. You’re from that time. Not from this time. Not much longer, anyway.”

“Okay, Belinda. And Leopold here introduced you to ‘Justice Denied’?”

Wyatt now looked surprised. “How could you know that?”

“Well, for starters it’s a foreign-based site. And Leopold is Austrian. His family was murdered. He actually started the site. Some of the word choices on there show that English was not the creator’s first language.”

Wyatt and Leopold exchanged a glance.

Decker shifted a bit in his seat. “You know, it would have been easier for you to just kill me,” he said. “And leave my family alone.”

“No one left me alone,” said Wyatt. “No one.” He drew a knife from his pocket and held it up. “I used this to kill Giles Evers. His father should be getting a package in the mail any day.”

“He disappeared a long time ago. What have you been doing with him all this time?”

“Things,” said Wyatt. “Just things.” He looked like he wanted to smile, but it didn’t seem that he could manage it.

“I don’t think Clyde liked his son all that much. Giles sort of ruined his life.”

Wyatt stood, walked across the room, and jammed the knife into Decker’s thigh.

Decker screamed. When Wyatt worked the blade around he cried out more, cursing and twisting in the chair trying to free himself. Wyatt finally withdrew it and Decker slumped over and threw up from the shock of it.

“I didn’t hit the femoral,” Wyatt said calmly, retaking a seat on the crate. “I know where it is. Trust me. I read lots of medical books. And books on embalming,” Wyatt added. He tapped his temple.