Maybe somebody there knew Rapier?
He shook his head.
For all he knew, anybody he asked could be the guy, and wouldn’t that be an unpleasant experience? Having Rapier field his call and know he had gotten to him?
Of course, it might scare him off, getting a call from Thorn, but then again, maybe not, and he didn’t want to give the troll the satisfaction of knowing he had rattled Thorn’s cage.
Time to give it up, Tom. You have other things to occupy your time. It’s just a troll, a pathetic man with no life. Let him stew in his own juices.
Before he shut down, he tapped in the URL for the cybercafe’s webpage.
The splash page came up, with a directory, and Thorn clicked on the biography for the cafe’s operator.
Dennis James McManus was a slight, fair-skinned red-head, balding, about Thorn’s age, a serious, almost scowling expression on his face. He leaned against a dark wall, arms crossed, practically glaring at the camera.
He was about to log off, had, in fact, hit the quit button on his browser, when he noticed a word in the bio, just a quick flash as the page blinked off:
Hello?
Thorn quickly logged back on and read the bio.
Apparently, Mr. McManus had been a collegiate fencing champion in Ohio.
Well, well, well. How about that…?
John Howard was talking to Julio when he looked up and saw Alex and Toni Michaels heading toward them.
“Alex, Toni. I thought you were in Colorado.”
“We almost were,” Michaels said. “We caught a flight back as soon as we heard. How is he?”
“Julio talked to Saji a few minutes ago — she’s in the ICU with him.”
Fernandez nodded. “No change. He’s unconscious. The bullet apparently broke apart when it hit the windshield, and about a third of it glanced off his forehead, just above the right eye, dug a bloody groove, but did not penetrate the skull. It hit him hard enough to rattle his brain, and he is in shock. Everything else seems to be working okay, but he hasn’t come around and nobody is quite sure why.”
Michaels nodded. “What about the guy who shot him?”
Howard shook his head. “No sign of him.”
“Why did he do it?” Toni asked.
Again, Howard shook his head. “We don’t know. We’ve got some witnesses who said a car cut him off, a guy hopped out and headed for Jay. He had a gun. Jay tried to back his car away and the guy opened up on him. One shot — ballistics says it looks like a Thirty-eight Special or Three fifty-seven Magnum round, from the pieces they dug out of the car.”
“Road rage?” Toni said.
“Looks like,” Howard said.
“Cops have any idea who they are looking for?”
“A tall-short-fat-thin-blond-brunette-white-black guy,” Fernandez said. “Joe Average, wearing glasses, moustache, had a band-aid on his chin.”
Michaels said, “Anybody thinking that maybe it wasn’t some angry commuter? Maybe somebody targeting Jay in particular?”
Julio and Howard glanced at each other. “The thought had crossed our minds. We’ve got somebody going over Jay’s e-mail and phone log, checking on all the projects he was working on, like that. Thing is, Jay isn’t the kind of guy whose enemies pack guns — most people who’d be after him would use software at ten paces.”
“Anything we can do to help?” Michaels asked.
Howard shrugged. “The new Commander was here — the doctors told us all to go home, and he did. We’re running down everything we can think of now. We were just fixin’ to head out ourselves.”
“Can we see him?” Toni asked.
“Yeah. Check with the nurse’s station, he can have two or three people in at a time. I’m sure Saji will be glad to see you.”
“Who’s watching your son?” Fernandez said.
“Guru,” Toni said. “He’ll be fine.”
Howard smiled a little. The old lady they called “Guru” was the woman who had taught Toni the martial art
“We’ll go check on him,” Michaels said.
“You need a place to stay?” Howard said.
“Hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
“You can stay with us. The guest room hasn’t got too much crap stored in it at the moment.”
“Thanks, John.”
As he watched them head for the nurse’s station, Howard found himself pleased. They didn’t have to be here. It would have been easy for them to say they hadn’t heard about it, or that they had to get settled in their new lives, that they couldn’t do anything anyhow. But that’s what friends did — when you had trouble, they came to offer their help.
To Julio, he said, “Make sure whoever is going over Jay’s life looks real close. I want the man who did this. Before I leave, after I leave, whenever.”
“I hear you, John. But you’ll have to stand in line behind me to have a chat with him.”
12
Jay woke up with a headache. At least, “woke up” was the best term he could think of to describe it. It was as if he’d been dozing, only vaguely aware of his surroundings, until something brought him back to a more active mode of being.
The scenario had changed — if indeed it was a scenario — the beach had given way to a dense northern forest with moss on all sides of some of the trees, huge primeval ferns, and pine needles scattered under the canopy of the great woods.
He’d never been here before, yet he had the strangest sense that he had
As if he were God Himself. God with a headache.
He stood there, zoning out, staring at the trees, each leaf a perfection of fractal form, replicating the entire tree on a small scale. He probably would have stood there all day, except the sharp stabbing pain in his head kept dragging him back to action.
Headaches weren’t something you got in VR. Stim units only affected the sensory nerves. Pain from something inside of his head shouldn’t be possible. And even if it had been, not something he would have inflicted on himself — what would be the point?
He frowned. A thought seemed to come close to the surface of his consciousness — something important
