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  “All right, look, I gotta call this in. This is all way beyond me.” Bernie grabbed his radio off his belt and took a few steps away to start the call.

  Nat looked around, then remembered she should call her father. She walked away from the guard and the main lab door, back toward the stim room, and hit the speed dial for her father. “Dad? I found Mom’s necklace and her gold earrings too…on the table next to the chair in the stim room…yeah, the guard’s here. The lab tech showed up too, but he didn’t have any new answers. We kinda got into it…I’m okay…he’s in the hallway now. He got a call, and the guard separated us.”

  There was more she wanted to say, but the lab was so quiet, there would be no way to keep the guard from overhearing her side of the conversation. She started for the office to get some privacy, and then she stopped in her tracks. “I’ll call you back. I need to check something.”

  Nat spun on her heels and went back into the stim room. Seated at the console, she noticed again that the fan noise in there was annoyingly loud. The servers are still on, she thought. That’s why it’s so hot in here. She turned the chair around and faced the dark console screen and keyboard. What if…? She nudged the mouse, and the console screen woke up. The lock screen displayed a password prompt for the logged-on user, BillF. Nat let out a hushed breath. “Got him!”

  But she knew she needed more. Looking around the console, she found pens, and in the glistening clean garbage can was a coffee cup with two or three swallows of congealed gray coffee still in the bottom. This place really has been sealed. The trash cans are supposed to be emptied every night; Mom put in a special request for that.

  Then something caught her eye. On the wall, a spiral-bound notebook hung from a pushpin, along with pencil. She plucked it off the wall and flipped through the pages. This was the paper log of the sessions. Her mother insisted on keeping a hard-copy log in case the hard drives failed. Each page was filled with the start times, each sessions purpose, who the subject was, and, in the last field, a coded summary of the results. The entries ended about a third of the way through the notebook. Here it is. This is where yesterday should be. But she found…“Nothing…damn!” Exasperated, Nat dropped the notebook onto the console surface, which was illuminated by the light of the drafting lamp. She sat for a moment, then decided to check again. In the more direct light of the drafting lamp, she leafed through the pages to yesterday and saw that the paper immediately below the last entry was roughened, and eraser shavings clung to the exposed paper fibers.

  She bolted back into the lab to get a better look at the log paper and to share this new information with security. “Bernie, you need to see this! The stim room console is locked. It shows user BillF as having logged on, and something was erased from the paper log.”

  The fiftyish guard was on the campus phone, deep in conversation, and held up a hand to Natalia. “Just a minute, please.”

  Wanting better light, Nat hurried over to the eastern windows for the best of the morning sun. Holding the last page at an angle to the sunlight, she saw…there! She couldn’t make out what had been written, but something had been there and then was harshly erased. She took the pencil and lightly went over the impressions, like she had with “secret” messages with her friends in second grade. The handwriting showed up clearly now, and it wasn’t her mother’s.

  CALIBRATION RUN, SUBJECT A. DOXIPHUS, START 07:10

  The results field was empty. She ran to the door just as Bernie hung up the phone. “My supervisor is on her way. What were you saying just now?”

  “We’ve gotta stop him!” Nat yanked the lab door open and burst out of the lab, looking one way and then the other, but found the hallway empty.

  ***

  “I didn’t sign up for this shit! It wasn’t supposed to be like this!” Bill Fahy squawked in a hoarse whisper into his phone as he made his way down the central stairwell of building 87.

  “Keep quiet and keep moving. It’ll be okay,” said the man’s voice on the other end of what Bill considered his lifeline.

  “Fuck you, man! It will not be okay! They’re gonna find the console and logs and call the cops. I’m screwed!”

  “And what crime did you commit? The device malfunctioned—that’s all. Did you talk to any police?”

  Bill rushed out into the late morning through a side door and started walking more slowly down the sidewalk. “No, I didn’t talk to any cops.”

  “So no giving of false information to the police, and a piece of highly experimental equipment went haywire, so what? You need to take it easy. Don’t forget your compensation.”

  That calmed Bill down a bit—just thinking of what he could do with five grand in cash. I’ll throw one helluva party and maybe even spring for a few strippers. The guys will love that shit. Have to pay off the bookie, but this would take care of that too. Bill continued to walk down the street, passing parked cars. Up ahead he spotted a University City Police unit; the officer was sitting in the driver’s seat.

  “There’s a cop car up ahead. What should I do? Turn around?”

  “No, that would draw attention. Just keep going and act natural. It’ll be okay.”

  As he came up behind the unit, Bill saw that the cop was looking out the window and talking on his phone.

  “Did he see you?”

  “Nah, the fat bastard was yapping on his phone and looking out the window. Probably talking to his cop buddies.” Bill’s spirits buoyed after having walked right past the cop. He continued down the sidewalk with a spring in his step.

  “See? I told you it would be okay. Now just keep going. Don’t go home. Be at The Jester at seven p.m.”

  ***

  In the University City Police unit Bill had just passed, the officer lowered the phone and dropped it on the seat. He cracked the knuckles of his large, pasty white hands while he watched the scrawny man in the T-shirt saunter down the street.

  “He’s a liability now,” the burly redheaded officer said, apparently to no one. He waited a moment and then said, “Understood.”

  ***

  Bill passed a dozen or so more cars and reached his old Toyota. Feeling relieved at reaching his car, he hopped in and pulled out his phone to text his friend.

  Need a backup Jester 7 pm

  Bill reassured himself. This was some scary shit, all right. Dr. D wasn’t supposed to be in a coma or whatever. But at least she’s not dead, and I can blame it all on the machine.

  He thought about the evidence that had been left behind; the console was still on, and he was logged in. Well, no one else has my password, and it’s my job to be logged in to that machine. At least I took care of the paper log and the vomit in the can.

  He started to feel better about his situation. He really hadn’t done anything wrong after all, and for what he did do, he wouldn’t get caught. He smiled as he put his phone away; it was dangerous to drive and text at the same time. In a few hours I get five grand! Hell, yes! Five grand coming, in cash. Yeah, life is getting pretty good for Bill. Time for a little celebration. He reached up under the dash and pulled out a joint, then sparked it up as he drove away.

  ***

  The Jester stood in the middle of a triangular-shaped parking lot. Across the street was an Italian restaurant with picnic tables for eating outside on summer nights like this. The grass was brown and dry here; lawn sprinklers weren’t really an investment for a bar. Across the parking lot next to The Jester was a do-it-yourself carwash, the white paint starting to peel off the cinder block. The bar was in an older neighborhood with prison-block-like storage buildings and 1950s-era houses. Bill walked past a big Harley that was in front of the bar, wondering if he could get himself one of those—used, of course—with all the cash he was about to collect. Striding along the wooden porch, he looked up at a thirty-year-old neon sign that lit up one letter at a time, t-h-e j-e-s-t-e-r, with a laughing guy in a clown hat. Under the sign was the rickety screen door of Bill’s favorite dive.

  Inside the bar, t
he air was murky with cigarette smoke, and peanut shells crunched underfoot as Bill walked over to the bar and took a seat on a stool in the middle. He scanned the darkened room for his friend but didn’t see him yet. Figures he’d be late. Nodding to the bartender, he ordered a beer, lit a smoke, and settled in to wait for whoever was bringing the money. It only bothered him a little that he didn’t know what the person looked like or what to expect. He remembered this whole thing had started here, in this bar, when a woman with shoulder-length dishwater hair and sweet eyes had said she had seen him around the university and offered to buy him a few shots.

  “So I know you work in the Doxiphus lab. They’re so smart! You must be pretty smart too, huh?” she’d said, those sapphire eyes eagerly gazing into his.

  “Well, yeah, I do okay.” He grinned and felt hot, uncertain if it was because of the shots or the girl.

  “What do you do there?” she said, resting her head on her hands and leaning forward across the table.

  “I help Dr. D—Dr. Doxiphus, that is. She and her husband are working on this new device, it’s a combined brain scanner and stimulator.” He took a long drag of his smoke, hoping he looked a little like Bogart. “It gets pretty technical, but I run the computers, manage the lab, and help run the device.”

  “You’re really important to the lab, then.”

  After three more rounds, they went out to his car for some weed. She asked him if he wanted to make some easy cash. She said if he could fry the machine, she’d get him five thousand in cash. Nothing big, just break the machine so it would be out of commission for a good long while.

  “Why do ya want that?” Bill asked.

  “It’s just business,” she purred as she gently stroked the side of his neck.

  “Sure. No one gets hurt, right?” he asked, the last vestiges of his reason quickly slipping away to greed and desire.

  “No one gets hurt. You can even have some help. Call this number if you run into trouble.” She slid a piece of paper and her hand fully into his front jeans pocket. Never having been one to keep his zipper up when the opportunity arose, Bill was all hers from that moment on.

  She left later that night, and he hadn’t seen her since. He had called the number the next day to make sure it was all real, and he was told to look in the trunk of his car, where he found a deposit of five hundred dollars. Now here he was, two weeks later, the job done and waiting for the rest of his money.

  It was 7:30 now, and The Jester was starting to fill up. Bill was on his third beer. A band was getting ready, and the bouncer was breaking up some ice and changing out the kegs. Bill had been watching the door for his friend, but he hadn’t shown, and no one else had approached him either. The table behind him, swarming with bikers, was getting kind of loud, and he had just made up his mind to find a quieter spot to enjoy the band. As he stood up, draining the last of his beer, he heard angry voices and threats.

  “You asshole!”

  Bill spewed that last swallow of beer as a crushing weight pinned him against the rounded edge of the bar, which caught him just under the rib cage. Reacting instinctively, he pushed hard with his legs against the bar to get the weight off him. Spinning around, he saw the men at the table behind him had erupted into a fight. One of them was reaching for something in his back waistband.

  An elbow came out of nowhere and caught Bill in the right eye and cheek, sending a jolt of pain through his head and down his back. He barely could see through his good eye as it welled up with tears. Then, with blind, desperate swings, he actually connected with something hard. The impact made the bones in his hand feel as though they’d shattered.

  “He’s got a gun!” someone shouted.

  Hearing the shout, Bill tried to turn to get to the door. Another blind shove and he was pinned again, this time feeling the edge of the bar against his back. And then he heard a sickening crunch accompanied by a sledgehammer blow right in the middle of his chest. He stopped and collapsed, struggling to breathe, and in his last moments he felt excruciating pain. Struggling to lift his head, he looked down with his good eye at the handle of an ice pick sticking straight out of the middle of his chest. Through his chokes, all he managed to say was, “There’s no blood.”

  ***

  The Jester was painted red and blue with flashing lights as Medic 82 turned the corner, sirens blaring. It was 7:40 p.m., and things were already hopping for John and Megan.

  “A little early for a bar fight,” he told Megan.

  “Must have been one helluva fight!”

  Even from a block away, they saw a sizable crowd in the parking lot of The Jester being contained by University City blue and whites.

  “I’ll get the chest kit and make sure the scene is secure,” John said. “This guy probably has a punctured lung. Get the trauma kits onto the gurney. There’ll be broken bones and lacerations by the looks of this crowd.”

  John leapt from Medic 82 as soon as it was close to stopping. In the distance, he heard the sirens of another ambulance on its way to The Jester. He had already put on his gloves and made sure he had a mask and protective glasses in his pocket. There might be aerosolized blood, he thought. After grabbing the chest kit from the back of Medic 82, he made his way to the door of The Jester, the police waving him in.

  “Is the scene safe?” he asked the uniform at the door, a newly minted rookie all clean and polished.

  “You can slow down. You’re good. We got everyone out and separated the suspects.”

  “The chest wound?”

  The officer turned to John. “No rush. He’s not going anywhere.”

  Inside, two other officers stood over a scrawny man who had what looked like the handle of an ice pick protruding from his chest. Blood had saturated the man’s T-shirt and was pooling on the floor around the body.

  “He wasn’t breathing when we arrived, and well…I couldn’t start CPR,” the younger of the two officers explained to John, who approached the body. He crouched next to the victim to check for pulse and breathing. An unnecessary step, but he had to make it official. As he stood and turned toward the two officers, the rubber sole of his shoe stuck slightly and made a soft tick when he lifted his foot from the pool of coagulating blood.

  He had seen his share of death. It was never the clean, sanitized version you see in the media. A body twitched while it cooled, and wet stickiness crept out, forming a scarlet halo of oxygenated blood on the floor or ground that pushed the everyday world away from the body. Now the acrid odor of the man’s urine climbed up John’s nostrils and mixed with the thick iron smell of the blood, nauseating him.

  “There’s nothing we can do here; you guys need to call the MEs.” He keyed his radio. “Medic 82 to all responders. Start triaging the crowd outside the bar.”

  “What about the chest wound?” Megan said through the radio.

  “It’s a fatality.”

  The younger officer moved a few paces away and was on his radio. They needed the forensics team for the scene and the county medical examiner to collect the body.

  John turned his focus from the wound to the man’s face and got a shock. “I know this guy. His name’s Bill. I just talked to him yesterday.” The surprise in his voice made his declaration louder than intended. It was easier to see a stranger’s dead face. That made sense; you’d never seen the face alive, so there was no reconciliation needed between your memories and what you were staring at. But, seasoned as he was, John hadn’t gotten past the shock of looking at what he remembered as an animated living face, which now was not.

  “Yeah, we’ve been looking for him since this afternoon as a favor to university security. Seems he was involved in some sort of lab accident that left a woman in a coma,” commented the older officer. “Not gonna be much use now.”

  Focusing on the wound again, John asked the older officer, “How’d this get here?”

  The officer crouched next to John. “Pretty simple. A bar fight broke out. This guy caught the bouncer in the back of the he
ad with a fist. The bouncer, who’d been breaking up ice, spun around, heard someone shout ‘He’s got a gun!’ and skewered him in self-defense.”

  “Where’s the bouncer? I should take a look at him.”

  The older officer pointed to a table in the corner next to the bandstand, his eyes still fixed on the friendly end of the ice pick. John looked up and saw a burly redheaded officer with pasty white skin taking a statement from a large man in a Jester staff shirt.

  6 Too Much Information

  “H ere. Hold this on that lump,” John told the bouncer, handing over an instant ice pack.

  “That guy was skinny, but he sure nailed me.” The man winced as he put the ice pack on the goose egg that had grown from the back of his head. “Thought he hit me with something metal…like the butt of a gun.”

  After the police had finished taking the bouncer’s statement, they released him to Medic 82. He sat on the rear deck of the vehicle while John checked him and cleaned him up. Around them, insects swarmed in the lights of all the emergency vehicles.

  “You really should go to the ER and have the doctors take a look at you.”

  “Nah, I’ve been whacked on the head plenty of times. This isn’t even the worst.” The bouncer grimaced as he shifted the ice pack.

  “Okay, but I’ll need you to sign a form stating you were advised to go to the hospital but chose not to.”

  “Yeah, sure. No problem.”

  Ten minutes later, the bouncer had left The Jester with his girlfriend. She insisted on driving, and John saw the man at least had the good sense to listen to her. The crime-scene investigation team was working the site, and the ME van hadn’t arrived yet. Though most of the bar’s patrons were long gone, John had kept Medic 82 at the scene under the pretense of taking inventory of their supplies after the call. Megan had ridden along with another unit that was taking a patient to the ER, letting him avoid any questions about the delay.