Anyone normal.
Push it away, Kowalski. Look for tools at hand; obsess over this shit later. It’s what you’re good at, remember? Push
He opened the medicine cabinet. He found what he needed in three seconds. His eyes checked the label. Yeah, it was the kind he needed. The kind that wouldn’t snap halfway through. Claudia came back to see what was taking so long, why there weren’t a thousand flashing lights and sirens outside her house because her husband, Christ in heaven, her husband’s brain had exploded inside his skull, and the entire fucking world should be racing to the scene to help, to figure out what went wrong. That’s what Kowal-ski would expect her to be thinking anyway.
“What are you doing in there?”
He grabbed the plastic box of dental floss, flicked the top open.
“There’s something you need to see, Mrs. Hunter.”
12:25 a.m.
They sat on the couch in the upper level of the room, three steps up from the bedroom pit. It was a soft couch, decorated in a bland pattern of light tans and browns. Look at it too long and you’d fall asleep. That was the point, in a hotel like this. Spend most of your time unconscious. Then pay us and head back home. Jack sat on one end, while Kelly sat on the other. She removed her shoes and put her bare feet up on the couch, mere inches away from Jack.
“Okay, let’s get to it. First, I have to tell you why I selected you.”
“So this wasn’t random.”
“Hardly. Had you picked out on the plane from Houston. I was sitting two rows behind. I can’t blame you for not noticing me. You walked to the bathroom in the rear of the place only once, but the plane was rocking a bit. You fought hard to keep your balance. Remember?”
It was true. Jack damn near sprayed his own pants in the rest room, with all the turbulence.
“I heard you talking to the guy in the next seat. He was a lawyer, and you told him you were a journalist. Were you telling the truth?”
“Yeah, I’m a reporter. I work for a weekly newspaper in Chicago. You know, if this is about a story pitch, you could have explained this to me. We could have set up interviews on tape, on the record. I
“Because without you, I’d be dead.”
“Oh.”
Jack paused.
“What does that
“I mean that literally. If I don’t have someone within ten feet of me at all times, I’ll die.”
12:28 a.m.
Tool time. Kowalski found oversized Glad freezer bags in a kitchen drawer; the Hunters liked to freeze large slabs of meat. Inside their 20.3-cubic-foot Frigidaire freezer chest, he founds whole chickens, legs of lamb, pork chops, flank steaks, you name it. They probably belonged to a warehouse shoppers’ club. Kowalski wondered if Katie would have tried to talk him into something like that—something that went against his longtime ethos of spare, frugal living. Then again, with a baby on the way, it would have been different. Hard to scrounge a diaper at the last minute. You needed stacks of those on hand. Or so he’d heard.
Stop that shit. Get the head, get out.
The freezer bags were the perfect size for a human head.
Down in the basement, Kowalski had his pick of gym bags in a cedar closet. He chose the blandest and sturdiest: a small Adidas Diablo duffel with an easy-access U-shaped opening at the top.
In a cabinet beneath a worktable, Kowalski found a cheap but usable hacksaw. The blade looked like it had never been used.
He’d hoped for a power tool of some sort, but nothing doing. Ed wasn’t into home repair, obviously.
Kowalski’s arm was going to be sore later. He just knew it.
As for destroying the house—and what a shame; it was a nice house, with hardwood floors and a kidney bean-shaped pool out back, complete with hot tub, surrounded by pine trees—that was easy enough. It was a stand-alone, so no neighbors to worry about. The explosion could be devastating, and it would stay limited to these grounds.
He’d use his favorite: the timed-spark gas-line burst. Enough accelerant spread around here and there, the structure would be obliterated within minutes. As would most forensics. Not that it mattered; nothing here could be tied to Kowalski. He was an investigatory dead end. A ghost.
As Kowalski walked upstairs, he thought about Claudia Hunter and how she’d fought her own death. She’d so desperately wanted to live. And for a strange moment, Kowalski found himself weak. Did Katie fight like this, at the very end? he wondered.
He looked at framed photos of Ed and Claudia. She was the strong one, no doubt about it. Ed looked vaguely uncomfortable in every shot, as if he were thinking, Do I really have to be here for this? And Claudia was kicking him in the shins, telling him, You not only have to be here, you have to fucking look like you’re enjoying it.
Ed, kissing a stranger at the airport, hoping for a quickie instead of working shit out at home with his wife.
Kowalski carried the Adidas duffel, Glad freezer bag, and hacksaw into the bathroom. It was time to see how thick Ed Hunter’s spine was.
The skin and muscle were easy. Sawing through the neck bone was a real effort. With every push and pull of the hacksaw, Kowalski found himself silently repeating a sentence, one syllable at a time.
12:32 a.m.
Ready, Jack? Don’t make me repeat myself.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have an experimental tracking device in my blood. Not one device; thousands of them. Nanomachines. You familiar with the term? Microscopic, undetectable by the human eye. I’m simplifying when I say that they’re in my blood. They’re in every fluid system in my body—my saliva, my tears, my lymph nodes.”
Jack blinked. He looked at Kelly, then at the nightstand across the room.
“Mind if I write this down?”
“I was hoping you would.”
There was a Sheraton pen and a scratch pad on the nightstand. He picked them up and took them back to the couch. He wrote “nanomachines.” Just in case this
Or if he should need evidence for the prosecution.
“Okay, so you’ve got these tiny machines inside of you.”
“Is this you being a reporter?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, stop. Let me tell it.”
