Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

“I actually just wanted to pick your brain.” She sat down on one of his workbench stools, and Walker did the same.

“Go ahead,” he said. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, and Juliette saw how old Walker had become. She remembered him without so much white in his hair, without the wrinkles and splotchy skin. She remembered him with his shadow.

“It has to do with Scottie,” she warned him.

Walker turned his head to the side and nodded. He tried to say something, tapped his fist against his chest a few times and cleared his throat. “Damn shame,” was all he could manage. He peered down at the floor for a moment.

“It can wait,” Juliette told him. “If you need time—”

“I convinced him to take that job,” Walker said, shaking his head. “I remember when the offer came, being scared he’d turn it down. Because of me, you know? That he’d be too afraid of me bein’ upset at him for leaving, that he might just stay forever, so I urged him to take it.” He looked up at her, his eyes shining. “I just wanted him to know he was free to choose. I didn’t mean to push him away.”

“You didn’t,” Juliette said. “Nobody thinks that, and neither should you.”

“I just don’t figure he was happy up there. That weren’t his home.”

“Well, he was too smart for us. Don’t forget that. We always said that.”

“He loved you,” Walker said, and wiped at his eyes. “Damn, how that boy looked up to you.”

Juliette felt her own tears welling up again. She reached into her pocket and brought out the wire she’d transcribed onto the back of the note. She had to remind herself why she was there, to hold it together.

“Just don’t seem like him to take the easy way—” Walker muttered.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “Walker, I need to discuss some things with you that can’t leave this room.”

He laughed. Mostly, it seemed, to keep from sobbing. “Like I ever leave this room,” he said.

“Well, it can’t be discussed with anyone else. No one. Okay?”

He bobbed his head.

“I don’t think Scottie killed himself.”

Walker threw up his hands to cover his face. He bent forward and shook as he started to cry. Juliette got off her stool and went to him, put her arm around his trembling back.

“I knew it,” he sobbed into his palms. “I knew it, I knew it.”

He looked up at her, tears coursing through several days of white stubble. “Who did this? They’ll pay, won’t they? Tell me who did it, Jules.”

“Whoever it was, I don’t think they had far to travel,” she said.

“IT? Goddamn them.”

“Walker, I need your help sorting this out. Scottie sent me a wire not long before he… well, before I think he was killed.”

“Sent you a wire?”

“Yeah. Look, I met with him earlier that day. He asked me to come down to see him.”

“Down to IT?”

She nodded. “I’d found something in the last sheriff’s computer—”

“Holston.” He dipped his head. “The last cleaner. Yeah, Knox brought me something from you. A program, looked like. I told him Scottie would know better than anyone, so we forwarded it along.”

“Well, you were right.”

Walker wiped at his cheeks and bobbed his head. “He was smarter than any of us.”

“I know. He told me this thing, that it was a program, one that made very detailed images. Like the images we see of the outside—”

She waited a beat to see how he would respond. It was taboo to even use the word in most settings. Walker was unmoved. As she had hoped, he was old enough to be beyond childhood fears. And probably lonely and sad enough not to have cared anyway.

“But this wire he sent, it says something about P. X. L.’s being too dense.” She showed him the copy she’d made. Walker grabbed his magnifiers and slipped the band over his forehead.

“Pixels,” he said, sniffing. “He’s talking about the little dots that make up an image. Each one is a pixel.” He took the note from her and read some more. “He says it’s not safe there.” Walker rubbed his chin and shook his head. “Damn them.”

“Walker, what kind of screen would be eight inches by two inches?” Juliette looked around at all the boards, displays, and coils of loose wire strewn about his workshop. “Do you have anything like that?”

“Eight by two? Maybe a readout, like on the front of a server or something. Be the right size to show a few lines of text, internal temps, clock cycles—” He shook his head. “But you’d never make one with this kind of pixel density. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t make sense. Your eye couldn’t make out one pixel from its neighbor if it were right at the end of your nose.”

He rubbed his stubble and studied the note some more. “What’s this nonsense about the tape and the joke? What’s that mean?”

Juliette stood beside him and looked over the note. “I’ve been wondering about that. He must mean the heat tape he scored for me a while back.”

“I think I remember something about that.”

“Well, do you remember the problems we had with it? The exhaust we wrapped it in almost caught fire. The stuff was complete crap. I think he sent a note asking if the tape had gotten here okay, and I sorta recall writing back that it did, and thanks, but the tape couldn’t have self-destructed better if it’d been engineered to.”

“That was your joke?” Walker swiveled in his stool and rested his elbows on the workbench. He kept peering over the copied charcoal letters like they were the face of Scottie, his little shadow coming back one last time to tell him something important.

“And he says my joke was truth,” Juliette said. “I’ve been up the last three hours thinking about this, dying to talk to someone.”

Walter looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyebrows raised.

“I’m not a sheriff, Walk. Never born to be one. Shouldn’t have gone. But I know, as sure as everyone, that what I’m about to say should set me to cleaning—”

Walker immediately slid off his stool and walked away from her. Juliette damned herself for coming, for opening her mouth, for not just clocking into first shift and saying to hell with it all—

Walker shut the door to his workshop and locked it. He looked at her and lifted a finger, went to his air compressor and pulled out a hose. Then he flipped the unit on so the motor would start to build up pressure, which just leaked out the open nozzle in a steady, noisy hiss. He returned to the bench, the clatter from the noisy compressor engine awful, and sat down. His wide eyes begged her to continue.

“There’s a hill up there with a crook in it,” she told him, having to raise her voice a little. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve seen this hill, but there are two bodies nestled together in it, man and wife. If you look hard, you can see a dozen shapes like this all over the landscape, all the cleaners, all in various states of decay. Most are gone, of course. Rotted to dust over the long years.”

Walker shook his head at the image she was forming.

“How many years have they been improving these suits so the cleaners have a chance? Hundreds?”

He nodded.

“And yet nobody gets any further. And never once have they not had enough time to clean.”

Walker looked up and met her gaze. “Your joke is truth,” he said. “The heat tape. It’s engineered to fail.”

Juliette pursed her lips. “That’s what I’m thinking. But not just the tape. Remember those seals from a few years back? The ones from IT that went into the water pumps, that were delivered to us by accident?”

“So we’ve been making fun of IT for being fools and dullards—”

“But we’re the fools,” Juliette said. And it felt so damned good to say it to another human being. So good for these new ideas of hers to swim in the air. And she knew she was right about the cost of