Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [146]
EXECUTIVE ANNIE OAKLEY ENDS MADMAN’S MIDNIGHT TERROR SPREE. She would be a heroine.
There was a 40 percent chance the substance Stephanie had injected into me would reverse the syndrome, which meant there was a 60 percent chance it would not.
I’d been living with this syndrome for six days, but it felt like six months. Or six years. Time had sped up and slowed down, compressed and expanded. I was prepared to leave this world, conditioned to give up the ghost through either the death of my body or the loss of function in my central nervous system.
No matter what happened, my view of life on this planet would never be the same. I would take nothing for granted. Not after burying Harold Newcastle and Stan Beebe. Not after seeing Joel McCain, Jackie Feldbaum, and Holly Riggs turn into nerveless lumps. Not after escaping Caputo’s trailer explosion, watching my house burn down around my ears, not after thinking my children were dead. After hammering a writing utensil into a man’s brain. Nothing would be the same.
Life was a matter of time. If I’d learned anything this week, I’d learned time was what you made of it.
When I looked away from my image in the window, I caught DiMaggio staring at my hands. “That’s right. They’re waxy. I hear it’s big this season.”
“When did that start?” She joined the others behind the desk.
“My hands? I told you about it. Six days ago. Which makes tomorrow my last day, doesn’t it? I may drop at any second.”
The room grew silent. I knew if I did drop, one of them would pick up the gun and shoot me. No need for the world to try to figure out why I was brain-dead. Better to shoot a maniacal ecdysiast in the middle of the night than to have people listening to my theories about Canyon View Systems. I waved the gun in the air. The man seemed most frightened, possibly because he thought I was going to shoot him first.
He was wrong.
DiMaggio would be first.
“I was in your shoes,” I said, “I’d stand around and wait me out. That’s what you’ve been doing all week, isn’t it?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” DiMaggio said.
63. A HISTORY RIFE WITH UNUSABLE BRAINS
It occurred to me that the man and woman with DiMaggio thought Donovan was on the floor with a pen hammered into his eye socket because I’d run amok, not because I’d been defending myself. That they thought I was naked and holding a gun because I was stark raving mad, not because my clothes had been shredded off during our struggle.
That I had arrived this way.
That I’d been running around Redmond bare-assed all night. For all they knew, the last stage of the syndrome was insanity. Or nudity. Or both. Hell, for all I knew, the last stage of the syndrome was insanity. Or nudity. Or both.
In fact, for all I knew, I was as crazy as a shithouse rat. I wondered if anything I’d been saying made sense. I wondered if Stephanie had actually found an antidote and stuck me with a hypodermic or I’d imagined it.
DiMaggio wasn’t afraid of me, perhaps because she had a built-in arrogance that staved off self-doubt, just as it staved off second thoughts. We didn’t have a woman here who second-guessed decisions. No. This was the sort of person who could leave a litter of kittens in the woods, justify it in her own mind, and never think twice about it.
“I don’t know how much money you guys are going to get when you sell the company, but I’ll be rooting for you from the nursing home. New cars. Fine houses. Hire your own architect. Do it up right. Get yourself a Ferrari. What’s it like to know you’re responsible for so many broken lives? You murdered Chief Newcastle in North Bend and two others in Tennessee. Probably six more, actually. My friend Stan committed suicide when he found out what was happening to him.”
“That’s not how it is,” said the woman to DiMaggio’s right. “That is not how it is at all. We were not responsible.”
“That’s right. You’re not responsible. But you are to blame.”
“Shut your trap, Clarice,” DiMaggio said.
But Clarice wouldn