Cutting Edge

11

DeBolt sat alone in a booth at Roy’s Diner. He stared at the menu the hostess had given him with a level of interest likely never before seen in the establishment. Word for word, price for price, it was an exact duplicate of the image fixed in his head.

Shaken to the core, DeBolt tried to delete the thought, tried to force the image away. At one point it did disappear, but by some inescapable urge he called it up again — or perhaps more accurately, he conjured it, like a magician pulling a card out of thin air. The result was the same. Somehow he had an ability to acquire images, displayed perfectly on the tiny screen in his right eye. He remembered seeing the time of the sunrise, and the compass heading that had saved him as he’d foundered in the sea. Both had appeared in a similar fashion, but he’d written off those events as curiosities, as fleeting apparitions. This time there could be no doubt.

“… I said, coffee?”

He looked up and saw a waitress with a metal pot in her hand. “Uh … yeah, please.”

She turned over the upside-down coffee cup on the table and began filling it. “You were a million miles away,” she said. “Never seen anybody so taken with Roy’s breakfast menu.” She was a smiling woman, fortyish, manufactured blond hair, and the beginnings of a stoop in her shoulders.

“Sorry, I’ve been a little distracted lately.”

“Cream?”

“No, black is good.”

“Want me to come back, or have you made up your mind?”

He looked at the menu — the one on the table — and saw a boxed entry on top: Everyday special — two eggs, bacon, and all-you-can-eat pancakes for $9.99. “I’ll take the special, over easy.”

She smiled and reached for the menu. He almost asked her to leave it, but decided it would seem strange and let it go. DeBolt looked around the place, and with some trepidation thought, So what other tricks can I do? A television mounted on the wall nearby was tuned to a cable news channel. The volume had been muted, but in a corner of the screen he saw numbers. DeBolt cleared his head of everything else, and thought: Dow Jones Industrial Average … current value.

A number lit to view in his blind spot. It was fractionally different from what he saw on the television, but soon that number changed to match the one he’d grasped out of nowhere. DeBolt tensed, and a sudden burning sensation caused him to look down. Both his hands were around the coffee cup, and he saw a few drops of brown liquid on one thumb. He dried it using his napkin, then discreetly reached back and fingered the scars at the base of his skull, now hidden beneath hair that was longer than it had been in years. And there, he knew, was his answer. How had Chandler put it?… to make you different. An operation? Had something been surgically implanted? Was his brain now wired to the internet, some kind of biological routing device?

His waitress scurried past and he noted her nametag: SAM.

DeBolt pondered how to phrase a request, and settled on: Roy’s Diner, employees, Sam.

It took only seconds.

DeBolt then noticed a scroll bar at the bottom of his visual field. He concentrated on it, and after some awkward interactions, more information rolled into view.

AGI? he thought incredulously. Adjusted gross income?

He sat motionless for a very long time, pondering the imponderable, until Sam Victoria Tremain arrived with a mountainous plate of food, four pancakes sided by eggs and bacon. In her other hand was the ever-present coffeepot, and she began topping him off.

“Your name,” he said, looking deliberately at the oval tag on her blouse, “I was wondering — is it short for Samantha?”

She chuckled good-naturedly. “I’m afraid not. I was the youngest of five girls, and my dad was Sam Tremain the fourth. Mom insisted on getting her tubes tied after me, so it was the only way to keep the family name going.”

He did his best to mirror her smile, and then she was gone to another table. He briefly stared at his plate, his appetite gone. DeBolt forced himself to eat, and all throughout the meal his eyes wandered the room, seeing countless ways to test his newfound abilities. The potential was all at once frightening, exhilarating, and intoxicating. The cook was named Rusty Gellar, a guy with two cars, one child-support payment, and three minor drug convictions, all over ten years ago. The owner of the place was not named Roy, but Dave. He owed back taxes to the state of Maine for the last two years, and headed up the local VFW. A dozen tables were occupied behind DeBolt, twenty people with backgrounds and stories. All there for the taking.

He sat frozen in his seat, unsure what to do. He stared out the plate-glass window on his right shoulder, and saw a crisp and glorious day. He also saw a world fraught with unthinkable complications. Unthinkable opportunities. It was as though he’d been given the keys to some perilous kingdom. DeBolt was already facing a mountain of problems, life as he knew it having ended weeks ago. And now this.

What the hell do I do with it?

To that question, the high-definition screen in his head remained maddeningly blank.

Lund rose early, and by seven thirty was at the apartment building where William Simmons had lived. She’d arranged to meet the bartender’s wife in front of the unit marked OFFICE, and she was there waiting, a pale-skinned woman with lively green eyes and an eager manner.

“Hi, I’m Natalie. You must be Shannon — Tom told me you needed some help.”

The woman was animated and cheerful, more than Lund could match at that hour. “Yes, thanks for your cooperation.” She pulled out her credentials and showed them to the woman, wanting to keep things official. “How long had William lived here?”

“Since he arrived, about a year ago. I rented the unit to him.” She lost a bit of her buoyancy as she said, “What a terrible tragedy. He was such a nice young man.”

“Yes, that’s what everyone tells me.”

Natalie led to an apartment on the first floor of a three-story affair. She pulled a key and opened the door, then said, “I know the drill — you’d rather I wasn’t here looking over your shoulder. I’ll be in the office. Just let me know when you’re done, and I’ll close up.”

Lund said that she would, and went inside. It was a charmless place consisting of one bedroom, one bath, and a small kitchen, all done up in bachelor modern: a big couch facing a flat screen TV that looked wired for gaming, novelty beer bottles lining a window ledge, and a wall-sized banner with the Denver Broncos logo. No surprises so far.

Lund began in the bedroom. The carpet could have used cleaning, and the bed wasn’t made — reminding her of her own place. She saw some climbing hardware and a poster of a guy free-climbing a sheer wall of granite. All aspirational, but nothing to suggest that Simmons was any kind of seasoned mountaineer. Lund went through the closet and dresser, then spun one last circle. She saw nothing of interest. After another ten minutes in the main room and kitchen, she relented. She had found exactly what she’d expected — the crash pad of an adventurous young man who’d slipped and fallen off a mountain.

As promised, the effervescent Natalie was waiting in the office.

“I think I’m done,” said Lund. “Thanks for letting me in.”

“No problem.”

“I do have one question … earlier, when you said you ‘knew the drill.’ What did you mean by that?”

“Well, it was just last month. Your cohorts came by to see Trey DeBolt’s place. It’s so sad … two boys gone before their time in just a few weeks. Trey in particular I liked — he always seemed so purposeful. That boy was going places, I tell you.”

Lund felt a stab as she recalled her own last vision of DeBolt. “My cohorts?” she repeated.

“Yes, two men.”

“And they said they were with the Coast Guard Investigative Service, here in Kodiak?”

“Yes. At least, I think that’s what they said. They had badges of some kind.”

Lund pondered this. The staff of CGIS Kodiak could not have been more straightforward. It consisted of her and one active-duty chief petty officer. CPO James Kalata rarely worked outside the confines of their office — or for that matter, inside. “Do you remember their names?”

“Well … no, I’m afraid not.”

“Can you describe them?”

“Is there a problem?”

“No, not at all. I was just wondering who they sent out.”

After some concentration, Natalie gave a description of two average-looking young men with short haircuts. That narrowed things down to roughly half the Coast Guard.

“Were they in uniform?”

“No,” she said. “Civilian clothes, like you.”

“Okay. Before I go, would you mind if I looked at that place too?”

“Trey’s apartment? I don’t see why not. Today is actually your last chance.”

“Why is that?”

“There’s a crew with a truck coming later to take his things — it’s all been approved, and he only paid through the end of last month.”

“I see. Where is it all going?”

“Salvation Army — everything will be put to good use, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure.”

They went through the same drill, and soon Lund was alone at the threshold of Trey DeBolt’s apartment. After Natalie was gone, she drew a deep breath. For weeks she’d been trying to ignore the memory — unfortunately, it was the kind of vision that didn’t fade. The interview at the Golden Anchor hadn’t been the only time she’d crossed paths with DeBolt. There had been one other encounter, in a setting so strained and intimate, it would be forever cemented in her mind.

Lund forced her attention to the room.

On first glance it looked very much like the room she’d just seen. There was a surfboard leaning against the wall in a corner, another next to it that was broken in half. Got to be a story there, she thought. A set of scuba gear lay near the closet. On the wall was a framed picture of DeBolt riding a monstrous wave, taken from the tail of his board, a whitewater lip curling ominously over his head. Another of a skydiving DeBolt in free fall, his smiling face warped by the wind and a set of goggles. It took Lund a moment to realize she was focusing on the man and not the room. When she made that shift, her outlook began to alter.

DeBolt’s room was different from Simmons’ in one very troubling way. It had nothing to do with his standards of tidiness or anything he owned. Dresser drawers had been pulled, the contents of the closet upturned. Lund might have written it off as the lousy housekeeping of a twenty-something male, yet she saw neatness elsewhere: shoes paired precisely in line, dishes stacked, books on a shelf perfectly squared. Her concerns were made complete when she found a Walmart-grade security box that had been pried open, and a file cabinet drawer left ajar. Either might suggest a burglary, but she saw three twenty-dollar bills in plain sight on the dresser, and a nice iPad on the kitchen table. Taken together, Lund saw but one possible interpretation. Somebody had beaten her here.

She was looking at the aftermath of a search. One performed by two men confident enough not to care if they left tracks, yet undertaken in a targeted manner. That implied a government agency, but one other than CGIS, because that would have necessitated her involvement. Lund performed a search of her own, and after twenty minutes determined that three things she would like to have found were missing. There was no passport, which virtually any Alaska-based serviceman would have. There was no last will and testament — a requirement for those assigned hazardous duty. Of course, either of those items could have been gathered by someone else with good intentions — DeBolt’s commander or a fellow Coastie — at a time when Natalie hadn’t been present. But the last one bothered her. At the file cabinet, which was nicely arranged in alphabetical order, she saw a distinct gap among the Ms: right between MASTERCRAFT BOATS and MOM’S PAPERS. In a modest leap of speculation, Lund guessed someone had removed Trey DeBolt’s medical records.

She closed the place up and headed back to the office where she dropped off the key and thanked Natalie. Minutes later Lund was in the parking lot. She walked past a fresh-faced young enlisted man in uniform who was probably on his way back to his apartment after a night shift. She found herself hoping the building’s bad karma didn’t run in threes. A Salvation Army truck was just pulling up. Lund considered telling them they’d have to come back another day, but decided against it.

None of the items missing from DeBolt’s place were of singular importance, and their unexplained absence did not constitute a crime, or for that matter, a problem. On the other hand, a pair of men had presented themselves as CGIS officials, and searched the residence of a crewman who’d recently died in the course of duty.

And that? Lund reflected. That was definitely a problem.