Mortal Fear

told you yesterday, this entire Chinese fire drill of an investigation-I mean every pathetic detail starting with the FBI’s failure even to connect these murders and ending with the glory-hungry shrink and his hot-pants alky wife-will be on A Current Affair by dinnertime tomorrow. And if you think I’m kidding, remember one thing. Miles and I are alike in one very important way. When we say something, we mean it.”

Another icy silence. “I’m not happy about this, Cole.”

“Call somebody who gives a shit.”

This wins me a brief silence. “Let me ask you something, Doctor. What happened today when the EROS file vault opened? I thought you’d sound happier this afternoon.”

“What we found in that vault implicates Turner in ways you wouldn’t like to think about.”

I have no snide response to this, nor any further point to make. “Good-bye, Doctor Lenz. And good luck. I think you’re going to need it.” I hang up slowly, not wanting him to know he rattled me enough to want to smash the phone into pieces.

So much for normal life. The FBI is throwing its weight around again, and Miles is on the run. I’m surprised he hasn’t bolted before now, given his pathological mistrust of authority. What bothers me is that he hasn’t yet discovered how Brahma stole our master client list, or else hasn’t told me that he has. The latter is more likely. Miles is God of the EROS universe, and if a digital sparrow falls within its bounds, he knows it.

Suddenly my office feels about five sizes too small. I grab what’s left of the sandwich, a cold Tab, and my keys and hit the front door at a trot. The Explorer roars at the pressure of my foot on the accelerator and fishtails up the gravel drive toward the blacktop.

Two hundred yards to my right, parked on the wrong shoulder at the first gentle curve in the road, sits a boxy sedan with a gumball light on the roof. I look left but see no car there, only a turboprop crop duster buzzing over the power lines that border our leased cotton fields. My neighbor finished his aerial defoliation several days ago, but duster pilots have an affinity for flying on the deck, so it may be a pilot in transit.

My adrenaline surging, I gun the motor and drive straight toward the parked car. As I draw near I make out the white silhouette of a Yazoo County sheriff’s department cruiser. I keep the Explorer at fifty-five until I’m almost on top of the car, then squeal to a stop beside the driver’s window. The face is a chubby blur behind the glass. Slowly, the motorized window lowers into the door, and a reddish young face with a wad of Skoal tucked behind its lower lip smiles at me.

“Hey, Harp.”

I know this guy. I played football against him in high school. “Strange place for a speed trap, Billy.”

Deputy Billy smiles wider, then spits in the no-man’s land between our vehicles.

“Gonna get hot out here before long,” I comment.

“Already hot. Ground’s so goddamn dry it’s grateful if you take a piss on it.”

I give him a courtesy laugh. “You know why you’re out here, Billy?”

He bites one side of his distended lower lip and looks down at my front tire. “Waitin’ for Turner to show up, ain’t I?”

“You remember him from school?”

Billy shrugs. “Saw him around. Never cared much for the sumbitch myself. Acted half queer.”

This is about what I expected. “You really think he’d come back?”

“Can’t ever tell. Folks do strange things on the run. Sometimes they get the homing instinct, like a sick dog.”

“Not Miles. He hated this place.”

Billy nods distractedly, then fiddles with the laser speed gun mounted on his door panel.

“Let me ask you something, Billy. Straight, okay?”

He looks up a little suspiciously. “Okay.”

“Are you here just to watch for Miles, or are you supposed to keep tabs on me too?”

He takes a while with this one, his beardless chin working around the snuff. “Can’t really say. Sheriff ain’t talkin’ much. Somebody wants Turner’s ass bad, though. You, I don’t know. But they’re talkin’ ’bout you some. Talking to people who know you.”

“Like you?”

He smiles again. “I told ’em you was all right. Had a hell of a forearm on you back in seventy-seven.”

“Not enough to handle you, though, was it?”

He grins wide at this.

“Look, do you have orders to follow me or not?”

Billy’s answer is the eternally inscrutable smile of the Southern law enforcement officer. I guess there’s only one way to find out. I stomp the accelerator of the Explorer and leave six feet of smoking rubber beside the door of his cruiser. When the speedometer pegs seventy, I look in my rearview mirror. Billy’s Caprice is still sitting where it was. He’s probably still grinning like Junior Samples. But at least he’s not following me.

Driving back from a long and pissed-off run through the cotton fields, it occurs to me that Deputy Billy-if he hasn’t handed off his stakeout position and headed home for supper-might stop me and demand to look in the cargo area of my Explorer. He wouldn’t have to open the vehicle to do this, so I don’t suppose he’d need a warrant. But if I took Drewe’s Acura out for a drive one night, the only way anyone could be sure I didn’t have Miles stuffed in the trunk would be to stop me and check. Would that be legal? Would I resist? It’s academic now, of course. But will it remain that way?

Earlier this afternoon, I shifted the Explorer into four-wheel drive and fought my way across three hundred yards of grassed-over tractor ruts that ended at a wide flat bump in the fields. This was the Indian mound where Miles was bullied down into the fort with the rattlesnake. I could still see a low pile of deadfall and undergrowth where the fort had been. I got out and walked around the mound, half looking for arrowheads, and tried to remember what it felt like to be that young and have a friend I trusted like I trusted Miles Turner. I couldn’t quite do it. I’m a different person now, and Miles is too. We’re grown men. Yet somewhere inside, he must carry the tough little boy I knew back then, just as I carry my own. And while he is running for his freedom in New York or Tenerife or God-knows-where, what that little boy sees in the FBI, I am sure, is another gang of stupid bullies who want to scare him or hurt him or worse. And that makes me afraid of what he might do if they corner him.

As hard as the murders hit me, my experiences with the FBI disturb me more. Even with their vast material resources, they seem powerless to locate Brahma using technical or conventional methods. Daniel Baxter as much as admitted to me that they are waiting for the killer to make a mistake. But after several months of observing Brahma on EROS, I have no reason to think he will make one. Dr. Lenz seems to recognize this. Yet his response seems more than a little naive. His reasoning is sound: the surest way to stop a man who cannot be hunted down is to lure him from concealment. But is Lenz the man to do it? Could any man do it? Brahma is the most intuitive person I have ever seen on EROS. The odds that a man could trick him into believing he was talking to a woman for any length of time are probably nil. Worse, Lenz is a neophyte when it comes to EROS. He knows little about its social customs and nothing about its system architecture.

If anyone can trap Brahma using EROS, it’s those who know the system best. Miles and me. I’ve spent the better part of nine months exploring the digital world that is EROS, interacting with women, lurking over supposedly private conversations, learning secrets that caused magnitudinal shifts in my perception of human nature, shepherding the evolution of a shadow community built on anonymity and desire. Miles has done this and more: he built the system from the test bench up.

And there lies the problem.

Miles is the digital sorcerer; I am not even an apprentice. And so far Miles has resisted helping the FBI. Brahma has already proved himself adept with computers; until the riddle of the stolen master client list is solved, I have to assume that he may be as proficient as-or more proficient than-Miles himself. The idea that I could attempt to deceive Brahma on-line without Miles’s help is ludicrous. It was this realization that finally brought me some peace on the Indian mound.

Dusk is falling as I take the gentle curve going toward our house. Billy has indeed changed shifts with another deputy. Just to be an ass, I honk and wave as I pass the new guy. He replies with a sullen stare.

Braking for the driveway turn, I see the low cross-section of Drewe’s Acura coming from the other direction like a cruise missile. She blinks her headlights European style, then cuts in front of my grille and into the drive. By the time I roll in behind her, she is standing on the porch holding her purse and a covered metal pot. She’s dressed