The 6th Target - James Patterson [14]
“He’d say to me sometimes, ‘Did you hear what Wolf Blitzer just said to me?’ Like the TV was talking to him, y’know? And he was getting twitchy-like, humming and singing to himself. Made management uneasy,” Jones said, lightly running a hand across his T-shirt. “When he started missing work, it gave them a reason to ax him.
“I saved his books,” Jones told us. He reached up to a shelf, pulled down a box, set it on the table.
I opened the flaps, saw heavy stuff in there by Jung, Nietzsche, and Wilhelm Reich. And there was a dog-eared paperback of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.
I picked the paperback out of the box.
“That was his pet book,” said Edison. “Surprised he didn’t come back for it.”
“What’s it about?”
“According to Fred, Jaynes had a theory that, until about three thousand years ago, the hemispheres of the human brain weren’t connected,” Jones said, “so the two halves of the brain didn’t communicate directly.”
“And the point is?” Jacobi asked.
“Jaynes says that back then, humans believed that their own thoughts came from outside themselves, that their thoughts were actually commands from the gods.”
“So Brinkley was . . . what?” Jacobi asked. “Hearing voices from the television gods?”
“I think he was hearing voices all the time. And they were telling him what to do.”
Jones’s words sent chills out to my fingertips. More than forty-eight hours had passed since the ferry shooting. While dead ends piled up, Brinkley was still out there somewhere. Taking orders from voices. Carrying a gun.
“You have any idea where Brinkley is now?” I asked.
“I saw him hanging out in front of a bar about a month ago,” Jones said. “He was looking pretty ragged. Beard all grown out. I made a joke that he was returning to the wild, and he got a wacky expression on his face. Wouldn’t look me in the eye.”
“Where was this?”
“Outside the Double Shot Bar on Geary. Fred doesn’t drink, so maybe he was living in the hotel over the bar.”
I knew the place. The Hotel Barbary was one of the several dozen “tourist hotels” in the Tenderloin, rent-by-the-hour rooms used by prostitutes, junkies, and the nearly destitute. It was one step above the gutter, and not much of a step.
If Fred Brinkley had been living at the Hotel Barbary a month ago, he might still be there now.
Chapter 18
THE WEATHERMAN SAID it would rain, but the sun was high and milky overhead. When Fred Brinkley held out his hand, he could see right through it.
He headed for the dark of the underground, jogging down the steps into the Civic Center BART, where he used to go when he still had his job.
Brinkley lowered his eyes, marking off his paces on the familiar white marble-tiled floor with black granite borders, walking steadily across the mezzanine, not looking up at the corporate slaves buying their tickets and flowers and bottled water for their commute. He didn’t want to pick up any thoughts from their hamster-wheel brains, didn’t want to see the prying looks coming from their hooded eyes.
He took the escalator down to the tunnels, but instead of feeling calmer, he realized that the deeper he went, the more agitated, angry, he became.
The voices were on him again, calling him names.
Ducking his head, Brinkley kept his eyes on the floor, and he sang inside his mind, Ay, ay, ay, ay, BART-a-lito-lindo, trying to quash the voices, trying to shut them down.
As soon as he got off the escalator on the third level down, he realized his mistake. The platform was packed with deadheads going home from work.
They were like thunderclouds, with their dark coats, their eyes boring into him, closing in and trapping him where he stood.
Pictures he’d seen on the wall of TVs in the electronics-shop window streamed into Fred’s mind: the images of himself, shooting the people on the ferry.
He did that!
Brinkley sidled through the crowd, mumbling and singing under his breath until he stood at the edge of the platform, standing on one square only, his toes curled over the void.
Still, he felt