Mind + Body - Aaron Dunlap (big screen ebook reader txt) 📗
- Author: Aaron Dunlap
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There were still some things I need to go over with her before I the sit-down with the FBI.
In the meantime, my mom and I went to the bank together to deposit the check. She jokingly said I made a good bodyguard, being so quiet. The quiet was on account of my contemplations, but the idea was interesting to me. When I’d read that novel on the plane to Vienna about a bodyguard, I thought it sounded like it might be a cool job. Swearing your life to protect somebody, it seemed noble. It was interesting to watch the teller at the small bank branch try to hide her reaction to the amount on the check, the same way they had when we deposited our life insurance checks.
After a few hours of staring at my arsenal, Amy sent notice that she was downstairs. I told my mom I was going to go check out the dinner buffet in the lobby, but that’s not what I did.
“Am I not going to see your room?” she asked when I approached her in the lobby.
“I’m sure you can imagine it,” I said, walking toward the business center where there was a room with a few computers for rent. It was empty, and suitably private.
“So you’re still leaving school at lunch?” I asked.
“Well, I wasn’t going to. I was going to start hitting classes four through six, but yesterday I got a memo from the office that fourth hour study hall was canceled so I thought, what the hell, and called off the rest of the day.”
“They canceled study hall?”
“Yeah, couldn’t get anybody to proctor it or something.”
“How hard is it? Everybody just sits there.”
She shrugged.
“Was Comstock there?” I asked.
“At school?”
“Yeah.”
“No, not today or yesterday.”
“All right, we need to go talk to him,” I said.
Amy paused, thinking. “Why?” she asked after not coming up with an answer for herself.
I told her about the meeting planned with my FBI friends tonight, how they want me to tell them everything, but that there was too much I didn’t know. Comstock would have those answers, so I have to ask him.
“Do you have his number?” she asked.
“I did,” I said, “it went with the house. I think there was a three in it.”
Amy looked down at the bank of computers. “Is that camera thing still at his house? We could at least see if he’s home.”
I thought about it. I didn’t have the address to view the camera feed, but I could get it from my e-mail. “Good idea,” I said.
I sat at one of the computers, logged onto my e-mail, got the address, and in a few seconds the familiarly grainy and tree-obstructed picture of the front of Comstock’s house was on the screen. The lights were on inside the house.
“Good enough for me,” I said.
Before we left I stopped at the business center’s main desk and asked if I could reserve the small conference room from seven to nine tonight. It was available, so I reserved it and asked for coffee service and a sandwich platter for the room. I walked away feeling like a rich person, realized I technically am a rich person, but felt better about it knowing it wasn’t my money I was spending.
“What do you need to talk to Comstock about, anyway?” Amy asked in the middle of the drive across town.
“What Schumer told me doesn’t add up,” I said. “He says that Comstock’s main job was to wrangle an open class into my schedule so I could have my brain blasted with Marine Corps trivia every day, but if that’s the case, why do I remember every single class? There should be on class where I can’t remember any classmates, or that I can’t focus on.”
Amy and I walked through my class schedule for this semester. College Writing was my first hour, and I had group projects that I’d talked about with other kids. Anatomy was my second hour, and I had done group projects there too. I also had to memorize and learn so many terms that it had to be real. Third hour was Pre-Calc/Trig, and while it was amazingly boring, I remembered it too vividly and I’d done too much homework for it to be a self-imagined product of hypnosis. After lunch was fourth hour study hall, which I had with Amy so that had to be real, plus I can remember the other students from the class. After that was Euro History and the Computer Networking class, both of which I had with Dale Carpenter. He definitely wasn’t imaginary.
“Maybe the hypnosis classes were before, and since this is your last semester there aren’t any fake classes now,” Amy suggested.
“Schumer said it all started because I stopped showing up for my daily brainwashing after the fight, and he said that if I had kept going, they could have ‘fixed’ whatever went wrong with my brain.”
“So maybe Schumer was lying,” Amy said.
“He was lying about something, I know that much. If he was lying about this, then it changes everything.”
“So you want Comstock’s side of it?” Amy asked.
“Yes, and another thing,” I grinned.
“What?”
“I, uh, want to have him make sure I graduate,” I said.
Amy was silent, and then laughed. “Are you going to hold him at gunpoint and tell him to make sure you have the credits?”
“I don’t have any guns on me. I could hold him at knifepoint. Again.”
“You’re serious?” she asked.
“I—no, not about that, but I can still ask him. He owes me that. I don’t want to have to make up a summer of classes because of the stupid ‘program’ and this recent screw-up. He can fiddle with my grades the same way he fiddles with everything else about my school life.”
“Allegedly.”
“Right.”
We arrived at Comstock’s house and, for the first time, didn’t have to sneak around. I pulled into his driveway, and we both got out and walked up to the front door. I practiced in my head how this would go, I could play it straight or I could be the bully again. The shadowy man with a knife and a tape recorder. Did he even know that it was me in Vienna? I thought Schumer said he figured it out, but I couldn’t remember.
We got to the door and Amy reached out to ring the bell but I stopped her. Something twitched in the back of my mind like I was missing, something that wasn’t right. The door was already open a crack, I noticed.
I stepped around and tried to look through the windows beside the door but couldn’t see anything inside, just empty hallways and a living room. I reached my palm out the door and gave it a light tap to swing it open, but the door didn’t move. I pushed again, something was blocking it. I used both hands and my shoulder and pushed, the door opened slowly, pushing whatever obstructed it. After a few feet, the obstruction had been pushed out of the way and the door, newly free, swung open and slammed into the stopper loudly.
The foyer wasn’t lit, but the thing blocking the door was evident. It was about six feet long, laying on the floor awkwardly, and looked a lot like a dead Nathan Comstock.
“Okay, I wasn’t expecting this,” I said, standing in the open doorway of Nathan Comstock’s house and looking down at his corpse.
“Is he dead?” Amy, standing beside me, asked. If she was either shocked or alarmed, she demonstrated neither.
I took a broad step over the body, into the house, and looked around for a light switch for the foyer. I found one, and flicked it with my knuckle. An overhead light turned on, scaring away the shadows from around Comstock’s face. Oh yeah, he’s dead.
“Still wondering?” I asked, looking down.
Comstock’s body was rigid, lying across the wood floor like he’d stopped suddenly in the middle of running. His legs were bent, his arms tucked in against his body. His fingers were flexed as if holding invisible baseballs. His face was pale and sickly, trapped in an expression of panic. There was no blood anywhere. He was wearing khaki slacks, a turquoise polo shirt, and brown loafers; as if he had planned to go out for a late brunch, got as far as the front door, and dropped dead.
“Why does he look like that?” Amy said before stepping over the body.
“It looks like rigor mortis,” I said. “The more pertinent question, I think, is why he was killed.”
“I thought rigor mortis takes a few days to set in. And why do you think he was killed?”
I looked up from the body, around the parts of the house I could see from where I stood. Everything looked reasonably normal. He couldn’t have just died, though. Not when he’s in the middle of this conspiracy. I was somehow involved in a spiraling swarm of death and secrets.
“People involved in government conspiracies don’t just die, they’re killed. It’s like a rule or something.”
“We should call the police,” Amy said.
“Should we? I mean, are there any reasons we shouldn’t?” I asked, trying to think through it. They’d wonder why we were here, but there’s nothing too suspicious about that. The FBI would probably swoop in anyway and take over.
“I don’t know. Maybe you should call one of your FBI pals instead,” Amy said.
“I was just thinking that,” I replied.
I pulled out my phone and held it in my hand as I took a few steps around.
“It’s disgusting,” Amy said as I walked away. “Look, his eyes are still open.”
I stepped around a corner and found myself in the kitchen. It was nicely appointed with stainless steel appliances and Italian-looking tile. There were bags and wrappers from a carryout place nearby scattered around the counter. Maybe he had brunch in, instead.
“He might just be paralyzed,” I said, loud enough so Amy would hear me from where she was. “We should check for a pulse.”
“I’m not touching him. It could be contagious,” she called out.
“What? Death?” I said, going around a corner into the living room.
If death were a contagious disease, I must be a carrier.
The lights were out in the living room, but enough light from the kitchen and foyer came in to let me see rough shapes. There was a glass sliding door in the back, a long sectional couch facing a square TV set sitting on a wooden stand, and a fireplace on the opposite wall.
“Who could have done it?” Amy asked, now in my line of sight.
“He was afraid that his bosses in the Marines were going to kill him, I guess he was right,” I said, standing in the middle of the living room.
“If they’re capable of doing that, then this is worse that you figured.”
“Worse than I figured…” I said, “This gets worse than I figured by the day.”
I’d always hoped that the threat was coming from an outside party. Schumer acted like he wanted to help me, the FBI agents acted like they wanted me to help them. Someone came to my house, shot at me, and then burned the place down. If it was Schumer or the Marines behind all this, there’s nothing I can do to stop them. I can’t outrun them, I can’t hide. The real mystery was why I wasn’t dead already.
The sight of Comstock’s face
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