Fear itself

7

Say what you will about the inconvenience of being hunted for capital crimes, it not only kept the blind rat at bay almost as efficiently as the most elaborately planned session of the fear game, but was a liberating experience as well. There was no need for Simon to dispose of Zap Strum’s body, or even hide his own culpability-they could only execute you once, only incarcerate you for a single lifetime.

On the other hand, it was Simon’s understanding that every web site or e-mail address, every keystroke recently accessed on a computer, could somehow be recovered from the hard drive. Which meant that somewhere in this rat’s nest of a loft was information that could not only tell the cops (and when Simon thought of cops now, it was Pender’s face that came to mind) where Simon had been, but might also tip them off as to where he was heading.

“Can’t have that,” Simon explained to Zap, still slumped in his expensive chair, as he rolled the Aeron out from in front of the command post and tipped it forward to empty it. The dreadlocked corpse hit the floor with a meaty, tumbling thud-a gratuitous discourtesy on Simon’s part, as it turned out, the blood-soaked seat back and cushion rendering the chair unsittable.

Undeterred, Simon dragged the saddle-shaped leather foot-stool over to the desk, straddled it, and began tapping the keyboard randomly-he assumed Zap’s own system had a poison pill or fail-safe device similar to the one Zap had installed on Simon’s. Sure enough, the screensaver-a blond woman with breasts larger than her head, performing an endless striptease-fragmented into hundreds of tiny ASCII characters; a few seconds later the screen went dark.

Just to be on the safe side, though, Simon decided to go lowtech for backup. He ducked under the desk, unplugged the CPU box from the surge protector, and proceeded to dismantle, not just that CPU, but every computer and Zip drive in the apartment, then take a ball peen hammer to every silvery disk he found. There was also a small box of floppy disks-these he incinerated in Zap’s toaster oven, along with a videocassette he’d ejected from a deck that looked as if it might be connected to the security camera monitoring the vestibule.

Fifteen minutes later, just as the first wisps of oily, pungent, probably toxic, black smoke had begun to issue from the counter-top oven, Simon located Zap’s stash in a false-front bookcase, behind a dummy set of vintage Encyclopaedia Britannica s. “Mercy buckets, dude,” he muttered, as he stuffed a few prebagged ounces of sinsemilla into his satchel, along with an eclectic, rainbow assortment of uppers, downers, and the milder psychedelics he preferred.

Then, after a short wait in the downstairs vestibule until the sidewalk was clear, it was sayonara Zap, sayonara SoMa, and sayonara San Francisco as Simon, his getaway satchel bulging with cash, drugs, and most important, the Pender printout, pointed Nelson’s Volvo toward the shadowy lower deck of the Bay Bridge, in the direction of Concord, sanctuary, and one final reunion with a bathtub-bound childhood friend-his last surviving friend, it occurred to Simon.

It was a bittersweet realization, a little sad, a little lonely, and as intensely liberating as being hunted for murder. With Missy and Ganny gone, once Nelson was out of the way, Simon would be alone on this earth. Except, of course, for the old woman in Atlantic City who called herself Rosie Delamour, but she didn’t really count. Screw her and the horse she rode out on, was Simon’s motto.

But even thinking about her could degrade a bittersweet mood down to just plain bitter. And bitter was no way to be when you were about to bid farewell to your oldest friend, thought Simon as he pulled into Nelson’s driveway and used the remote clipped to the Volvo’s sun visor to open the garage door, then close it behind him.

Inside the garage, all was peaceful again-at least after Simon had treated himself to a few tokes of Zap Strum’s finest. Dim gray light, smell of old oil stains and cement dust; the only sounds were the hum of the water heater inside its cozy blanket of insulation and the distant, homey gurgle of water through overhead pipes, which reminded Simon of Missy and her endless bath. A little catch of a sob caught in his throat, even as the memory brought a smile: the bittersweet feeling was back.

Not for long, though. As he let himself into the house, it suddenly dawned on Simon that there shouldn’t have been any water-heater hum or homey gurgle in the pipes-there shouldn’t have been any water running anywhere in that house, unless a pipe had burst or Nelson had somehow-

But no, that was impossible. Had to be a pipe, he thought, stepping back as a drop of water fell past him and hit the already saturated hall carpet with a fat plop, then looking up to see the dark, continent-shaped water stain spreading across the underside of the ceiling, a nipple-shaped drop gathering at its center. Simon hurried down the hall into the living room, saw that the flood in the hallway was relatively minor compared to the cataract sluicing down the narrow enclosed stairway from the second-floor landing, as if the staircase were a salmon ladder cut into the side of a dam. He splashed up the stairs two at a time, careened around the corner, raced through Nelson’s bedroom, and skidded to a halt at the bathroom door, the heels of the hard-soled black loafers he’d borrowed from Nelson that morning kicking up tiny rooster tails in his wake.

And although Simon had not knowingly been afraid of water since Grandfather Childs had cured him of his fear of drowning nearly half a century ago, he found himself frozen in the doorway, unable to move, watching helplessly as the torrent poured full-throated from the tap, noisily churning the surface of the bath and overflowing the side of the tub like a miniature Niagara. All he could see of Nelson were a few strands of blond hair waving like tendrils of seaweed in the roiling water.

“Coward,” he screamed, as much at himself as at Nelson; Simon could forgive himself anything except cowardice. “You yellow coward.” The shoes were soaked, his feet wet to the ankle, but the phobia had him in its grip, and he knew that until he had mastered it again, he would be unable to either retreat or advance.

You can do it, he told himself. You’ve done harder things than this in your lifetime; you’ve overcome more than this. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it. And if he concentrated, if he listened hard, in the human-voiced burble of the running water he could hear Missy singing to encourage him, singing that song she sometimes sang to encourage herself: “Cinderelly, Cinderelly, you can do it, Cinderelly.”

And call it foolish, even infantile, but slowly his feet began to move, shuffling through the water, one step at a time, but one foot following the other, until he’d reached the tub.

Afterward Simon couldn’t remember turning off the water; all he knew was that it was quiet again, except for the sound of the water still dripping down the staircase, and he was leaning over the tub looking down at poor drowned Nelson.

My last surviving friend on earth, he thought sadly-then it was time to go.