“Step toward me,” the voice said. Her flashlight was too bright, her voice too loud.
When he cleared the trees, he stopped, his hands still raised.
“Do you have ID on you?”
“Yes,” David said. “In my pocket. Do you mind if I reach for it, or do you want to?”
“You can do it. Slowly.”
He pulled his wallet from his pocket and tossed it at the cop’s feet. Her partner picked it up and leafed through. “David Geller-Bradley. That sounds familiar.”
David shrugged. “It’s a common name.”
“Nah . . . wait . . .” He held his flashlight in David’s face. “You look awful, but you’re the guy from the Pilot ads, aren’t you?”
“He can’t be. He doesn’t have a Pilot.”
If ever there was a time to trade on celebrity, this was it. “Yeah, that’s me. I had my Pilot deactivated.”
“No way. Why would you want to do that?” The flashlight lowered, as did the gun.
“I had a problem with it.”
“Is that why you look so rough? We got called out for a sketchy homeless dude lurking in the bushes.”
“I’m . . . on vacation. Visiting some friends who live here. You can check with them.” He gave the apartment number, hoping Karina would vouch for him and not be pissed off.
“But, uh, why were you back there?”
“I think I scared a woman in the parking lot accidentally, and I wanted to show I wasn’t following her, so I walked away.”
“Into the woods instead of toward the street?”
David’s answer wasn’t a total lie. “It was silly. I wasn’t thinking. I’d never been back here, so I thought maybe I could cross the tracks and come out by the shopping center. Didn’t realize there was a fence.”
The cops both looked more relaxed. The woman paused. “Do you mind if I take a picture with you? My girlfriend thinks you’re cute.”
He didn’t object to using his celebrity in this context. If they were taking pictures with him they weren’t arresting him. They hadn’t even asked him to empty his pockets, so he hadn’t had to toss his pills. Except that was stupid; they could just as easily have had him on the ground. They might not have recognized his famous face under his depression beard. Instead, they let him go with a warning to try to look a little less sketchy and go somewhere else.
Now he definitely couldn’t go back upstairs. The apartment windows looked out this way, so Karina had probably seen the whole thing. Embarrassing enough without the fact that he’d just thrown away all his pills. He’d taken one, so he’d be good for the next few hours, but he had nothing to stop the noise from creeping in again.
He had never bought Quiet from anyone other than Karina’s sister and his buddy in the park, neither of whom he could ask right now. Where to go, then? There was a liquor store down the road a mile or so that had the right look, with a scattering of Piloted white teenagers hanging around in the alley outside. He watched them from afar until he noticed them watching him back, sizing him up. One whispered to another and they scattered. They weren’t going to sell to him; they probably thought he was a cop.
He walked over. Let them see him up close; let them smell him, for that matter. They could decide for themselves if he was undercover. He browsed the store shelves until two lookout kids repositioned themselves, then he bought a fifth of cheap whiskey from a cashier behind bulletproof glass.
“Hey,” he said as he walked out, before the kids could leave again. “Do you know where I can get some Quiet?”
The first looked at him blankly, and he realized that was his own name for it. “Fortress of Solitude, I mean. I call it Quiet ’cause that’s how it feels. It has a lowercase q on it. Teal pill. Bluish.”
The second guy shook his head. “I’ve seen those, but that isn’t a q. It’s a b. You were reading it upside down.”
“What’s b for?” his friend asked. “Blue?”
The second guy shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe. I don’t have ’em either way. Sorry.”
At least he’d tried. David opened the whiskey and took a swig. Offered it to the two guys, who declined, exchanging pity glances. He felt a little sorry for himself, too. As he crossed the street, he called Phil from the park, one last effort to avoid the thing he knew he would do if he had to.
“Already?” Phil asked. “I mean, not that it’s my business, but I saw you yesterday.”
“Went to a party,” David said.
“Gotcha. Like I said, not my business. But I’m afraid to say, I can’t help you tonight. Empty house.”
David was about to disconnect, again picturing blue pills in gravel, when his friend added, “Hmm. I do know one guy who can help you.”
He rattled off an address on the other side of town. David didn’t have enough cash left to get there and buy from a stranger, who would know that for Phil to have sent him, he must be desperate. Not to mention, even with a referral, he was obviously giving off bad vibes tonight. There was no guarantee they’d trust him, and he’d have gone all the way over there for nothing.
“Thanks, anyway,” David said. “But hey, one other question. What’s the b on the pill stand for?”
“Balkenhol. You know, BNL, like the Pilots.”
David hung up, his mind reeling. Why was Balkenhol making pills to dampen their own Pilots? Was that even their purpose? Were they on the market, available if you told the right doctor you had a noisy head? He couldn’t stand the thought that the same people who ruined his head and refused to fix it might also have manufactured the only bandage he’d found for the wound they’d created. He was still theirs, just in a different way now. He craved the Quiet, or whatever it was.
His
