Chapter Thirteen

I DROPPED THE phone and went after my friend. It was a mistake. My body reacted without thought, without reason. I reached for Nick, forgetting the painful education I’d already had of how he operated in this state.

Over the two years I’d known him, Nick had been “episodic” a bunch of times. When he was in an episode, he was psychotic, and I seemed to him just as likely an enemy as a friend. I didn’t know if Nick was imagining he was in battle, or on a distant army base, or on the mean streets of Baltimore, where he grew up. He could have been imagining he was on the moon, for all I knew. But it was immediately clear that whatever fantasy we were in, as soon as I grabbed Nick’s shoulder and tried to drag him off the guy on the asphalt, I marked myself as a threat.

Nick whirled around, his hand as wide and lethal as a grizzly paw as it smacked me sideways and onto the ground. My head hit the pavement. I saw black for an instant, heard a buzzing sound between my eardrums. Nick dragged me up, and threw me against a car, and pinned me there by my coat.

“Whoa! Jesus! Nick!” I yelled. “It’s me! It’s me! It’s Bill!”

“Where is it?” Nick roared, his fist bunched and raised behind him, like a hammer lining up a nail.

“Where’s what?”

“The microphone! I know you’re wired up, you traitorous piece of shit!”

“It’s—” I scrambled to collect my thoughts. I knew it was better to go with the fantasy rather than try to counteract it. I fished desperately in my pockets and handed him the first thing I found. “It’s here! Take it. Take it. Take it.”

Nick snatched my car keys, threw them on the ground, and crushed the key fob under the heel of his boot. People were gathering around us at a safe distance now, officers from the bar spilling out to see what all the fuss was. The guy Nick had thrown out the door was scrambling to his feet.

“Hey, Bill, what the hell’s wrong with this dude?”

Nick crouched at my feet and started to gather up all the pieces of the crushed key fob carefully in his palm.

“This should do it,” Nick was muttering. “As long as there isn’t another copy, we’ll be fine.”

“The guy’s crazy,” someone in the crowd said. “He was talking all sorts of weird stuff in the bar about conspiracies and recordings.”

“He’s just, uh.” I shook my head. “He’s unwell, OK? He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I didn’t even say anything to him! He just walked up and started swinging!” the guy from the street said.

“I’m sorry.” I put my hands up. “I’m sorry on his behalf, all right?”

My face and neck were burning. Nick was muttering to himself, examining little crushed pieces of a plastic keychain with a Boston terrier on it that Susan had given me for my birthday.

“Just—everybody go back inside,” I told the crowd. “I’ll handle this.”

I crouched beside Nick, hearing murmurs from the men and women around me. The words “psycho” and “lunatic” drifted on the wind. Nick’s eyes were wild, his hands shaking as he swept the asphalt for more pieces of cracked black plastic.

“There can’t be any evidence left behind,” he said. “If we can just contain it, then maybe… maybe no one will know.”

“Know what?” I asked.

“We’ve lasted this long,” Nick said, ignoring me. “We can keep going.”

I slid down against the parked car beside us and watched my friend. When Nick’s phone started ringing in his coat, he seemed not to even notice. I saw the device poking out from the pocket, the screen flashing, and despite the danger I reached forward and pulled it out.

The name of the caller was brEECHER.

It took all of my resolve not to answer. But Susan’s voice was ringing in my head, her words about diving into someone else’s past uninvited, opening locked doors with stolen keys. Maybe, whoever Breecher was, it was better for Nick that they didn’t get in contact. Maybe, despite what he’d said, speaking to this person wouldn’t make matters better, but worse. I took the phone and slipped it into my own pocket, and Nick stood and brushed himself off. For the first time that night, he looked down at me with clear, calm, familiar eyes.

“Bill, what’re you doing down there?” he asked. “Is your head bleeding?”

I swiped at my temple, looked at the blood on my fingers. There was asphalt in my hair. I thought about telling Nick the truth about what he’d done and the call he’d missed, but it was late, and we were far from home, and all that had happened made me exhausted at the thought of pursuing anything more than a shower and a clean hotel bed.

“I fell,” I lied. “You gonna help me up, or just stand there looking pretty?”