Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Switch

Writers of the Future Volume 31

The teenager is sprawled by pump number five, multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, the word “deceased” hovering over his body through the projection in my retinal overlay. We’re in the middle of a crime scene at a gas station in Jackson Heights, Queens just after sunset, where the decedent expired during a shootout with police. One officer was hit in the face, pronounced dead on site, the other two in the neck by return fire, now at a nearby hospital. I pray they make it.

The June humidity makes me want to tear off my clothes. Instead, I let my blazer bunch up around the elbows as I squat by the body. We have the station taped off and the street blocked on either end with a couple of cruisers.

Lieutenant Briggs is on his way, and at some point we’ll talk to the media. There’s a crowd of hungry spectators beyond the barricade, along with several news vans. I’m not going anywhere for the next few hours.

My partner, Detective Ed Mullins, holds up an evidence bag. He’s sweating worse than me. “Three casings, nine mil.”

“Where are the rest?”

“That’s it.”

“What, he got lucky or something?”

Mullins shoves a stick of chewing gum in his mouth. “That’s what I’m saying. I checked the mag on his Glock. You can count the bullets yourself, if you want.”

I peer at the teenager with fresh eyes while Mullins chomps his gum. The suspect is a good-looking kid, Puerto Rican with an athletic build, ocean wave-style trendy haircut and gelled sideburns. He’s wearing a plain, bloodied white t-shirt and expensive jeans and sneakers. Doesn’t fit the profile of a sharpshooter.

“How many shells from our side?”

“Eleven.” Mullins pops a bubble. “Our ME says this one took four to the chest. He must have been on something, ’cause he didn’t drop until after our guys went down.”

I didn’t take the kid for a user, but then again, you can’t assume anything these days. We ID’d him as Kurt Rodriguez, seventeen, address from the nice part of Forest Hills. His head is cocked to the left. I part the hair above his ear, exposing the port of his temporal lobe implant. There’s a designer enamel grommet clamped on, Chinese characters around the ivory-colored rim. Kids love to mod their TLI ports with all kinds of stuff. This is pretty conservative considering what I’ve seen.

Twelve feet away is a splotch of blood soaked into the grime from where Officer Nolan Yee bled out, numbered markers left in place of his body. Part of me wants to plant the heel of my shoe over Rodriguez’s skull and cave it in.

Yee and my younger brother Tommy graduated from the academy together. I remember Yee and his girlfriend coming over to the house at our big Super Bowl party where we shared beers while barbecuing out in the cold. Yee was a smart kid, with aspirations of making detective. His girlfriend was pretty, and I could tell he was crazy about her, from the way he kept his hand on the small of her back to the goofy I’m-in-love smile tattooed on his face. Such a freaking shame. He wasn’t a close friend of Tommy’s, but they were rookies together, paying their dues on patrol. I can’t imagine how Tommy will take the news, but it pisses me off just thinking about it. Rodriguez won’t even get a chance to stand trial for what he’s done. Son of a bitch!

The stench of gasoline is heavy. Mullins steps closer, blocking the bright gas station canopy lighting with his two-hundred-twenty-pound frame, belt swooping below his enlarged gut as if holding back a storm. He points at the body. “I’m still picking up a TLI broadcast.”

“Me too. Should have quit with brain death, but something must still be firing.”

Every few seconds, I get a discovery ping from Rodriguez’s temporal lobe implant, which flashes red in my overlay. Usually, you set your TLI on discovery mode if you want another device to find you over the Mindnet. Some neural activity must have triggered the response, but I’m no doctor, so I don’t bother dissecting it.

Our blood spatter analyst corroborates the stories from a couple of eye witnesses that gave their take on what went down at the gas station, including the attendant: Rodriguez had walked over to Yee, who was buying a bottle of water at the kiosk, and shot him point blank in the face, without provocation.

According to Dispatch, two officers in a squad car heard the gunshot from down the block and zipped over in their cruiser. They engaged the suspect and squeezed off a number of shots before Rodriguez fired back, just twice, taking down each officer from about fifty feet away after being critically wounded. The crazy part is that the suspect made no attempt to run or hide.

Mullins shares my sentiment. “He just stood there and picked them off. I’m telling you, he was on something.”

I search the kid’s pockets, turning them inside out. House keys, cash card, mini flashlight, and a packet of breath-freshening strips.

Mullins squats next to me. “Nada, huh?”

I want to agree, but I pop open the plastic dispenser and hold it up to my nose. It smells of cinnamon and cloves and something else I can’t quite place, but I’m positive what we’re dealing with without needing to wait for results from a lab. I lick my lips, imagining how it would taste, dissolving the wafer-thin strip until only the exotic oils remain on my tongue.

Mullins calls my name, but I don’t respond until he says it a second time. “Parker!”

I snap the dispenser closed. “Yeah, just thinking.”

“Well, think out loud.”

I hold up the blue plastic case. It’s half the size of my thumb. “Homegrown.”

“You sure?”

“Smell.” He does, but his face clouds over, like he’s trying to wrestle with the fact it’s not something you buy at a 7-Eleven. He wrinkles his nose. “What kind of product, you think?”

“Switch.”

He nods slowly, getting it. “Told you he was on something. They usually come in pasty dots, printed on paper ribbon, or in clear tabs. Haven’t seen this form before.”

But I have.

Sublingual delivery is by far the best way to get it into your bloodstream. Dots, tabs, strips—doesn’t matter. Stick one under your tongue and say goodbye to foggy thoughts. It’s big with the underage crowd because they love to surf the Mindnet in long marathon sessions. Rat race junkies enjoy the extra boost when they have to pull eighty-hour workweeks. Athletes have been accused of taking it, but there is no mandatory testing yet in the sports community. Same with military and law enforcement.

The best way to describe the experience is to imagine a massive caffeine high. You get that awesome rush, that laser focus, that burst of euphoria, like who cares if it’s Monday morning at the office with a ton of shit to do. Nothing matters at the moment because your brain has turned off all your concerns, all the pain, all the problems of the day—everything. What you’re left with is your subconscious mind taking over; and you just go with it. Switch does that. It gives you a mental edge over those around you. You think better, you work better, you fight better. You are better.

Unfortunately for the enthusiast, it’s illegal, and you don’t just get a misdemeanor for possession these days.

“Well, it explains a few things.” Mullins waves a hand over the scene. “But it doesn’t explain why he snapped and went on a killing spree.”

Mullins is wrong, but I don’t say it. He’s never had a taste, so his only experience is what he learned during morning briefings, and on the Net. This is cutting-edge, psychotropic-grade product, and the scientific community is just starting to discover its true potential. In my mind, this stuff is a game changer.

I hold the dispenser between gloved fingers with newfound respect, almost reverence. So small, yet a powerhouse of mind manipulation. I place it in an evidence bag and resign it over to Mullins. “See if your guy can get us an expedite on this. I want to know how much is in our susp’s system.”

Mullins holds the bag up to the light. “I’ll see what I can do.”

I come to my feet, and the blood returns to my cramped legs. We need to finish processing the crime scene. “All right, chief, let’s get a move on.”

It’s almost midnight by the time I crawl into bed. I’m so exhausted I can’t sleep. We made a statement to the press, buttoned up the scene, and tried to interview the murder suspect’s mother, who was in pieces over her son’s death. Then I had to spend almost thirty minutes on a call with Tommy, trying to calm him down. The whole evening was a mess.

My wife Suzie’s eyes flutter open when I turn on the lamp. She looks over at the clock radio on her nightstand and frowns. “So late. Everything okay?”

“It’s just work. I’ll tell you about it in the morning, sweetie. Go to sleep.”

She yawns. “Caitlyn asked about you. I wished you would have called.”

“I know.” Our four-year-old loves to hear my voice at least once before she goes to bed, even if I’m on the job. It’s not like me to miss the opportunity. If I had even the briefest moment alone…

I give my wife a cursory kiss on the cheek and let her roll onto her stomach, covers pulled up to her neck. She tells me in her drowsy voice that she loves me.

“I love you too, babe.”

Thirty seconds later, she’s asleep. I watch the soft rise and fall of her back and the dark-brown tumble of hair lying across her shoulder blades. I’ve been married twelve years, and I still see the same twenty-one-year-old, that fragile girl who defied her parents to marry a cop.

Caitlyn is the spitting-image of her mother. She’s incredibly smart and uses the Net better than anyone I know. She was born into the Mindnet generation. I was sixteen when it became commercially available, touted as the “Internet for the mind,” and twenty-nine when I got my temporal lobe implant. I used to the think the Internet was the end-all-be-all, as a kid. Then the Mindnet came along, and all of a sudden, we were using wearable prosthetics that could connect our brains to banks, retailers and social networks. TLIs followed, replacing cell phone calls, e-mails and texts with thought-enabled communications. My parents would laugh, recalling a time when a networked computer was a marvel. Now it’s the brain, and little Caitlyn will think of the Mindnet as I did of its predecessor, and how she never knew a time before it existed.

I shut off the lamp, but I still can’t sleep. I’m smelling cinnamon and cloves and…

Cardamom! That’s the spice I couldn’t think of!

I connect to the Net through my TLI and quickly pull up a wiki on Switch. It appears in my retinal overlay as a semi-transparent page against the room’s darkened background. There’s a complete onscreen breakdown of the history of Switch. It started as an accidental offshoot of a popular antidepressant, found to increase memory retention and response time in rodents. The pharmaceutical name is Duoxatane, but it was never approved for human trials. Still, somebody came up with the brilliant idea to package it into digestible form and put it on the street. The Cardamom masks the bitter taste of the active ingredient.

Thoroughly awake, I log into the precinct portal and pull up the case file for today’s homicide. A thumbnail of each page is tiled across the bottom of my overlay. I select the first one and start at the beginning. Some of the information on the expired suspect has been updated, but it will be at least tomorrow when the lab work comes back. I remember Alicia Rodriguez crying her eyes out, wondering how her son could have shot anyone. There were similar reactions from the father and younger sister, who swore Kurt Rodriguez, track and field star of Forest Hills High School, was incapable of perpetrating the murder of one police officer, let alone three. Wait until they find out how much Switch was in his system.

I get out of bed and peek in on Caitlyn. She’s asleep, thumb in her mouth, with the covers bunched around her feet, same long, dark hair as her mother. She’s got my wide-swept ears though. I feel bad about missing our nite-nite chat. I pull her blanket over her shoulders and tell her how much Daddy loves her. She snoozes on. I wish I could sleep like that.

I go down to the basement, my man cave. I’ll never get the smell of cigars out of the carpet, but it’s comforting to me, and this is where I do my best thinking. There’s a workbench by the water heater, with an old, rusted vise mounted on the side, and a bunch of small tools I use for my hobby work. I rest my palm on the vise for a moment. It was my father’s. He was a tool-and-die worker, and spent most of his career at a ball bearing manufacturing plant in Philly. He always wanted me to find an honest job, and stick to it; and all I wanted to do was make my old man proud.

I take a deep breath and ease open the plastic organizer that holds the assortment of nails, screws, washers and bolts. There’s a box of matches underneath a dozen ten-penny nails. It doesn’t have any matches in it. I turn on the bench light and open the box. Like precious bars of gold bullion, the wafer-thin strips glint in the light. I’m greeted by a fresh burst of apple and hint of cardamom. There are only three strips left, and a slight panic settles in. I usually do a strip before breakfast, but on a night like tonight, especially when my conscience is weighed down, I’m tempted to do a second. That would leave me a day to restock. Suzie doesn’t know about my secret habit. I could never tell her.

A pang of guilt floods my innards. I imagine what my father would have thought of my stealthy enterprise. What would I say to him—that I started because of the long hours at work; that it helped me cope with the Nolan Yee’s of the world; that I kept going to deaden my nerves any time I came upon a teenage tragedy like Rodriguez’s? My father wouldn’t buy any of it.

I reach over and give the vise a good pat. Thank goodness the old man’s not around to witness this. He had that sixth sense, the kind that kicked in anytime I did something wrong, no matter how good I thought I was at hiding it. Tommy, on the other hand, seemed to get away with everything.

I dislodge a paper-thin sheet from the matchbox. It adheres to the moisture on my fingertip. I hold the see-through amber film up to the light, marveling at how such a thing could have driven Rodriguez to murder. I can understand the elevated aggression with higher and more prolonged doses, but the same could be said of alcohol. Was the Switch enough to make a star athlete snap?

I have a lot of questions percolating through my head. At the top of the list is finding out what drove Rodriguez to murder.

I place the strip on my tongue. It dissolves in seconds. Immediately, my head is clear, my concentration restored. I can feel the heat from the light, the faint scent of glue from the applicator across the room, the electrical pulse of my TLI firing packets of data out into Mindspace.

I am not the man I was a minute ago. I am not like my partner, whose mind is dulled by everyday living, nor like the honest working man I aspired to be. I am something else entirely. Free. Evolved. A new category of species. My unamplified self would condemn my actions. But in my enhanced state, I am exactly who I need to be.

We’re in our cubicle farm at the precinct, a little after eight in the morning. Mullins distracts me with his nasty habit of biting his nails. Forty-three, divorced with five kids from two different marriages, and alimony payments to both wives, he’s a perpetual ball of nervous energy. I thank my stars Suzie and I have stuck through thick and thin and waited until I made Detective before we had Caitlyn. Mullins was fresh out of the academy when he had his first kid. He looks like an old man, with deep rings under the eyes on his puffy face. I feel sorry for him, but not as sorry as I do for his children. My parents divorced when I was seven, so I know about shitty deals.

The second dose from last night kept me going until dawn. Even though I started out the morning feeling like a zombie, I’ve had two cups of coffee on top of my usual strip, so I’m a little more wired than usual. I don’t like to dose in the evenings for exactly this reason, but I needed the extra perk to keep my mind from racing in random directions, which would have kept me up anyway. With my cleared thoughts, I was able to contend with the culpability of using, of being a deceiver who classified Rodriguez as a criminal when I wasn’t much better.

But then again…I hadn’t shot Yee in the head.

Mullins stops gnawing long enough to speak. “I don’t get it. He was being interviewed by scouts from two top-ten universities, with the chance at a sports scholarship. He had his whole life ahead of him. What’s wrong with this generation?”

I’ve asked myself the same question a million times.

As expected, the lab test came back positive for Duoxatane. We’ll have to wait four weeks for the full toxicology report, but at least we have a preliminary finding that supports my suspicions. Rodriguez had twenty-two milligrams of the drug in his system, a lethal quantity. There were also markers indicating cumulative dosing. It means he was an experienced user, and that he knew what he was doing when he dosed up. Now I’m really irked. And the more I think about it, the more I want to know where he purchased his product. There aren’t too many dealers that supply Switch in the strip form. Could it have been my guy? I give it a few seconds of serious consideration before I dismiss it as coincidence. It could have been anyone—a close friend, a family member, or someone at school.

Mullins pops open a can of soda and slurps loudly. “I’ve been doing a bunch of medical research on Switch.” He pauses to belch. “It doesn’t just amp you up; it interacts with the same neuroreceptors that our TLIs use. I’ve been thinking about how our suspect took just three shots and hit every target. He struck each of our guys above the neckline. You know what kind of skill you need for that in a firefight? How about the fact he didn’t hit them in the Kevlar, like most suspects would? See—this shit is different.” He crosses his arms, smug, as if he’s telling me something I haven’t already figured out.

I flick his can with a finger. “I guess you ruled out paramilitary training, or that he might have been an experienced marksman with a handgun.”

Mullins knots his forehead, not getting my joke. He uses a nail clipping to floss his teeth. It bugs me to no end. “Do you have to do that?”

He frowns, then wipes his saliva on his sleeve, and shrugs. “All I’m saying is that this stuff is potent.”

I grab my jacket.

Mullins looks up. “Where are we going?”

“To get answers.”

“Look, I don’t know where he got it. I already gave my statement. You think I would have let him take that crap under my roof?” Mr. Luis Rodriguez is angry. He’s clutching a white handkerchief embroidered with his initials in his left hand while seated on a bourbon-tinted leather armchair.

We’re at the Rodriguez’s three-bedroom co-op in Forest Hills. It’s upper middle class like the rest of the neighborhood. Mr. Rodriguez works for Delta Technologies in Manhattan, a maker of smart furniture. Supposedly the leather couch I’m sitting on can sense when my back is aching and offer oscillating stimulation to pamper me. It doesn’t feel any different than the other overpriced couches I’ve sat on.

I read over the hand-written notes on my yellow pad. We’ve already spoken to deceased’s mother, sister, track coach, last girlfriend, next-door neighbor, and a former coworker from where the young Rodriguez caddied at a golf course last year. His father is the last stop on a day of zero leads, and I’m hungry. It’s half past four, and the last thing I ate was a bagel with cream cheese first thing this morning. Mullins is sitting next to me, probably ravenous from the way he’s massaging his belly. We’re no closer to getting any answers than before we left the station. The only thing of interest came from the coach who said Kurt Rodriguez had smashed the state record in the hundred-meter dash about a month back.

I give Mr. Rodriguez a few seconds to settle down before I ask the next question. “What about his behavior? You must have noticed something different.”

Mr. Rodriguez’s tone is less confrontational. “Not really.”

“Nothing at all?”

He scratches behind the ear. I examine the body language, but it doesn’t look like he’s covering up for his son.

“I guess the only thing that jumps out at me is that he was studying really hard before the summer break,” Mr. Rodriguez says. “He stayed in his room a lot.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Kurt used to hang out with his buddies after track practice every day. His sister said he stopped doing it altogether and complained he was in his room all the time, playing loud music. I’d always come home late from work, so I didn’t notice the change, and I didn’t think a lot about it.”

I tap my pen against the scribbles on my notepad. I’m surprised the sister didn’t say anything to us about her brother’s newfound seclusion. “How do you know he was studying when he was in his room?”

Mr. Rodriguez looks at me oddly with his tired, sunken eyes, either surprised or offended by my question. “His grades were the best I’ve ever seen. His GPA was always in the high twos, low threes. He got a 4.0 his last marking period. He even scored a perfect hundred on his Math Regents exam. He’d never gotten more than a C in math. So, yeah, I assumed he was studying in his room.”

I want to write something down, but the information is unremarkable. “What about changes in mood? Was he happy, mad, irritated, depressed?”

Mr. Rodriguez glances off to the side. Any hostility he felt toward me is replaced by sadness. He presses his fingertips into the hollows of his eyes while holding up his other hand. I give him a moment. When he opens them, tears roll down his face, and he quickly wipes them away.

“Mr. Rodriguez, I’m sorry, but we need to ask these questions.”

He nods rapidly. “It’s just that—” He clears his throat. “I mean, there are all these calls I have to make. I have to arrange the—you know—the funeral and—” His voice catches. He rubs the stitched initials on his handkerchief with his thumb, and then notices me looking at it. “Kurt gave this to me a week ago for Father’s Day. He had it personalized. See?” He turns it over, and the stitching reads, “To the best father in the world. Love, Kurt.” The anger returns in his voice. “You think he would have done that if he was messed up on that stuff?”

We sit for a moment. I give Mr. Rodriguez the space to collect himself. Mullins is impatient, tapping his foot annoyingly. I shoot him a quit-it look and he stops. I resume my questioning.

“Mr. Rodriguez, do you know what Switch does to the central nervous system? It rewires it. It affects judgment, restraint, motor skills, focus and attention. If you’re doing bad in math, it fixes it. If you think you’re weak, it changes that. If you’re feeling aggressive, it amplifies the sensation. It does a lot with just a little. And when the high is off, the craving hits you, because feeling normal just isn’t good enough anymore.” I hit a high note with the last part, my sermon fueled by confession. Mullins looks at me strangely, but I ignore him, and continue.

“Mr. Rodriguez, it’s not that we don’t hear what you’re saying. No one wants to think their child uses. But do you think nothing was wrong when he shot those police officers?” I’m surprised at my own flare of anger.

Mr. Rodriguez brandishes the handkerchief. “He wasn’t on it when he gave me this! I know my son. He must have taken it for the first time yesterday. Or someone drugged him. Why aren’t you looking into that?”

Kurt Rodriguez was an addict, pure and simple. His father can’t recognize the signs. “We found quite a bit in his bloodstream. There were indications he was dosing regularly. No one drugged him.”

Mr. Rodriguez perks up. We’re not allowed to share lab specifics during an investigation, especially before the official report comes out, so I leave it at that.

I try to get back to obtaining a meaningful answer. “What about new associates? Did your son meet any new people, either outside of school or over the Mindnet?”

“None that I was aware of.”

“What about his feelings toward authority? Any changes in his views on religion or politics or the government?”

Mr. Rodriguez throws his hands up. “Look, I already told you I don’t know anything. I hardly saw him as it was, and now…” He swallows. He’s on the verge of crying. His voice comes out chaffed. “And now, I won’t get to see him again.”

I sigh inwardly. We’re spinning our wheels.

I thank Mr. Rodriguez for his time. He barely acknowledges me. We leave him in his armchair, handkerchief clenched in his hand, tears of defeat streaking down his face.

Back at the precinct, we go through the items seized from Kurt Rodriguez’s bedroom. The little shit had to have been OCD, because everything was arranged and aligned perfectly on his desk and drawers—his socks, underwear and t-shirts folded and pressed, his other clothes hanging in the closet, hangers spaced evenly apart.

I recognize the pattern. Switch makes you do things like that. You get all this energy, all this creativity, and you have to use it or you get antsy. Suzie would always ask me how much coffee I drank whenever I’d redo our cupboards, making sure every label on every can or box faced forward, all stacked and sorted neatly, and dust-free; or when I’d work on the lawn for hours, snipping the edges with a scissor, on my hands and knees.

Rodriguez’s room was a total disaster by the time our team was done tearing it apart. The only computerized device they found was his digipad, loaded up with meaningless, hand-drawn sketches and the notes he took during his junior-year classes. The problem these days is that anything of merit is on the Net, and since people use their TLIs instead of old-tech computers for just about everything, you have to go to the cloud if you want anything.

Mullins and I review the panoramic photos taken of the kid’s room, looking for additional clues. The one facet of interest is on the north wall where Rodriguez had meticulously pasted a few hundred blank sticky notes in straight rows and columns, each sticky equally spaced apart.

Mullins shakes his head. “You mean to tell me his father didn’t notice this?”

Thinking about the pattern gives me an idea. I rub my hands together. “You know what we need to do, right?”

“What, get something to eat?”

“No, we need to tap into his last memories.”

Mullins tents his eyebrows, forehead creasing in puzzlement. It takes him a few seconds to get what I’m suggesting. Then he smiles big. “I’ll get us the warrant.”

It’s called a cerebral trace, and it requires an okay from a judge. I’m not a big fan of digging into a person’s private memories, even when they’re dead, but it’s helped us in the past, like when we scanned the last memories of a murdered rape victim a few months back to find a serial killer before he struck again. I honestly think we saved lives, because we weren’t anywhere near catching the bastard. Privacy advocates argue the technique violates Fourth Amendment rights, and in a way, I see their point. With a pending case at the Supreme Court, we’ll see what happens. Until then, we keep doing our job.

Mullins and I race over to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manhattan, warrant already forwarded. We meet with Dr. Sanjay Parekh, a neuropathologist certified in cerebral traces. Time is of the essence, considering the decomposition of the brain after death, so I’m happy to see Parekh already at work in the autopsy room. Rodriquez’s blanched form is lying upright on a metal table, the body covered with a sheet below the collarbone, a probe jutting from his skull where I imagine Parekh drilled into it only moments ago. It’s a good thing too because I get a little queasy seeing drills and bone saws in action. Plus, I hate the odor. Mullins always jokes that it smells like corn chips.

Parekh plugs the other end of the electrode into a beige cylinder with a monitor affixed to a mobile cart. “Almost there,” he says, as he continues to set things up.

Mullins chomps noisily on his gum. “Hey, I got a question about the autopsy report.” He attempts a bubble, but the gum flops over his lower lip. He shoves it back into his mouth. “You mentioned something about his right shoulder tattoo being animated. I thought those things stopped post mortem.”

I’d noticed the oddity too, but hadn’t thought much about it. Rodriguez had a black-and-white tattoo of a Bengal tiger with bared teeth that transformed into Chinese characters when animated—nothing fancy or useful in my opinion.

Dr. Parekh checks the monitor while adjusting the cranial probe. The screen is grainy, a dark sea of shimmering speckles. “It’s rare, but not unheard of. Skin cells can survive for days. Animorphs—animated tattoos—function as long as the cells sustain them.”

“So, it’ll work now?” Mullins asks.

Parekh moves over to Rodriguez’s left side. “Take a look.” He presses a gloved finger firmly into the stiff muscle of the shoulder. The Bengal tiger dissolves, changing into a pair of Chinese characters, and then back to the original tiger. “See? Animorphic transformation. Pretty cool, actually.”

Mullins lifts his eyebrows. “Huh. What d’ya know?”

“Stand back, please.” Parekh motions for us to not make contact with the cadaver. I maintain a safe distance.

The doctor taps an icon on the side of the monitor and Rodriguez’s body convulses for a split second. The speckled screen dissolves into a blob of gray and black gradients, expanding and contracting like heated wax in a lava lamp. Parekh rotates his finger over a shaded dial in the sidebar menu, and the screen’s contrast brightens. He adjusts several more controls, and the blur sharpens into an image that looks exactly like the canopy lights at the gas station. “It’s the last thing he saw,” Parekh explains. “We call it residual retinal burn. Let’s see if we can get anything else.”

He taps the screen. The body shudders again. We see fractured images, glimpses of a school locker, a crowd of students in a hallway, a few flashes of different parts of the Rodriguez household—boring scenes, although I’m quite impressed that we’re actually seeing what Rodriguez saw when he was alive. I’ve been through this process before, but it amazes me every time.

The onscreen image changes. We’re looking at what I imagine to be a Mindnet page showing an online store, followed by a chat session with a succession of static images representing a conversation. I’m thinking we’re going nowhere until I spot the familiar packet of strips. I assume our suspect is holding the dispenser when it turns out to be someone else. The dispenser gets handed off to Rodriguez, but I glimpse a y-shaped scar on the knuckle of the tanned individual before it disappears from view.

“Wait, go back!” I jab my finger at the monitor.

Parekh freezes the frame. He tries to retrieve the last scene, but now we’re looking at a bowl of cereal and Rodriguez’s brown fingers moving a spoon around in circles, not bothering to eat. “Sorry, I can’t go back. Don’t worry, it’ll be on the recording.”

The scene continues with Rodriquez still not eating. Something must be bothering him. “Any idea how far back this is?”

“Probably the morning of the incident, or the day before,” Parekh says.

“Not earlier?”

“I’ve never seen any memories older than seventy-two hours. This is pure visual cortex feedback. It’s always short-term.”

Rodriquez slams the spoon down on the table, splashing milk everywhere. There’s no sound with these memories, just raw imagery. Someday, I hope the technology improves so we can get audio. Rodriguez removes his dispenser from his pocket and empties out all the strips. He stuffs the entire wad into his mouth. There had to be at least ten strips in the bundle! Mullins and Parekh seem unfazed. Am I the only one who noticed?

The better part of a minute goes by with Rodriguez sitting at the table. He takes the spoon and bowl and neatly moves them to the side, wiping up the spill with his napkin. Whatever agitation was coursing through him seems to be gone. We watch as he calmly leaves the table and goes up to his room and locks the door. It’s bizarre as he walks in a circle, round and round. He finally stops, and lifts up his mattress. He grabs a handgun resting on the box spring.

Mullins snorts a laugh. “Hah, there’s our murder weapon!”

I ignore Mullins’ outburst and continue to watch as Rodriquez takes his firearm over to his desk. He removes the magazine and makes sure the chamber is empty. He then disassembles the rest of the gun—slide, recoil spring assembly, barrel, pistol base. Each piece is carefully placed on the desk. It’s as if Rodriguez is creating an exploded diagram from an engineering schematic. He retrieves a cleaning kit from a drawer, and proceeds to clean the components with obsessive detail. I recognize the precision in his movements, the need to clean. He’s amped, a fully-charged human turned into a purpose-driven machine.

From there, Rodriguez picks up the pace. He does at least a hundred pushups on the carpet of his bedroom, runs up and down the stairs two at a time, assembles and disassembles his gun faster than anyone I’ve seen. The tasks are repetitive, the mind trapped in a continuum of exacting execution. The next scene shows Rodriguez running on the sidewalk. He glances at his body once. It confirms he’s wearing the clothes we found him in, establishing a timeframe. He hops a chest-high chainlink fence like it’s nothing, dodges cars in a frantic burst across a busy intersection. He then runs past three young males in front of an apartment building. They’re perhaps a little older than him. I catch a sneak peek of their stereographic tattoos. Gang glyphs, visible only through a retinal overlay. Rodriguez stops and turns around with near inhuman dexterity. The largest of the three is goading him, making obscene, taunting gestures. The other two laugh, but in a blink, Rodriguez is on them. He smashes the first in the side of the head with his fist, the second in the Adam’s apple, the third in the side of the neck. It’s something I picture a Navy seal doing to enemy combatants. They’re down in an instant, squirming.

I’m getting an adrenaline high watching the action. I want to deny it, but I can’t help but revel in Rodriguez’s ass-kicking abilities. I want to mimic his superpowers, to become invincible like him.

The thrill ends the second I recognize the gas station. Rodriguez is running at full steam. Without missing a step, he pulls the Glock from his belt. A second later, the kiosk comes into sight. Officer Yee is holding a bottle of water, ready to pay the cashier behind the glass. He looks over to Rodriguez, mystified expression. Rodriguez slows to a walk. My heart is beating crazy in my chest. I know this feeling, this anticipation. The animal wants the prey to engage him. Yee holds off a moment longer, as if trying to rationalize what he’s seeing. He then goes for his duty weapon. Rodriguez blasts Yee in the face. The three of us gasp, Mullins adding in a “Holy shit!” I want to turn away, but I can’t. I’m captivated by Rodriguez’s inhuman display of savagery.

Rodriguez takes a long moment to stare at his reflection in the kiosk glass. I feel like I’m looking at myself, carriage heaving to suck in more oxygen, a predator ready to maul his next victim. I clutch my chest. My heart is thumping like it’s going to explode. Mullins looks my way. “Parker, you all right?”

I have to get out of this room. I need air.

I’m becoming Rodriguez, mirroring his animalistic breathing, a hair trigger from snapping at anything that touches me or comes too close. I think Mullins senses it too, because he leans away.

We let the rest of the scene play out—the arrival of the police cruiser, the shootout with the other two officers, the suspect’s violent death. It ends with the first image we saw of the canopy lighting, then speckled blackness. We’re all quiet, as if waiting for the end credits to the horror movie we just saw.

Mullins is the first to say anything. He turns to Parekh. “You get all that?”

“Everything. My God!” Parekh is obviously shaken.

“‘My God’ is right.” Mullins wipes the sheen of perspiration from his forehead. “I swear, if that SOB weren’t already dead…” Mullins knots a fist, then relaxes his grip. He looks my way. He raises his hand, like he wants to place it on my shoulder, but drops it quickly. “You okay, partner?”

“Fine,” I say. But I’m anything but fine.

“This is crazy, you know it?” Mullins has his jowls pushed up on his left hand, fat folds in his face bunched like a shar pei’s. He’s on his third can of energy water, the other two empty and crushed into pucks.

We’ve been going over Rodriguez’s recording for almost four hours. Everyone on our floor has gone home for the evening, leaving the rest of the cubicle farm dark and quiet, except for us.

Mullins is playing with his bowl of microwaved popcorn, circulating the kernels endlessly, his nervous energy eating away at my resolve. He points a greasy finger at the screen. “I mean, who gets this kind of front-row seat into a murder’s craziness, huh?”

I replay the scene showing the dispenser handoff between what I imagine is the drug dealer and Rodriguez. We’ve already run the still image against our biometrics database, searching through the collection of tattoos, scars and birthmarks. Fifteen potential matches were returned, not a single one quite like the knuckle scar in the still. The only thing we were able to determine were generic traits: male, late thirties to mid-forties, approximately five-nine in height, medium build, possibly Hispanic.

Mullins downs the last of his water and burps. “Hey, I gotta go. Sandy is driving me crazy. She keeps pinging me to pick up Kevin.”

“I thought this was her week to watch him.”

“It was.” Mullins heaves himself out of his chair and grabs his blazer. He sighs heavily, the weight of life showing in his weary eyes. I don’t envy his situation. Both his exes can be a pain-in-the-ass.

“You’ll be fine,” I say. “Just think: you can knock back a couple after Kevin goes to bed.”

He jiggles his big belly with a smile. “Yeah, that’s what I need.”

I shove him playfully. “Go on, get out of here!”

He tosses a goodbye hand wave and disappears, leaving me with the video of our dead suspect. My smile fades when I see the frozen image of the dispenser in the dealer’s hand. It not only reminds me that we’re no closer to figuring out who’s moving product on the street, but that I’ll be out of my own supply tomorrow evening. I begrudgingly turn off the monitor, sinking into a cesspool of disgust, most of it aimed at myself. What would happen if I were to just go on empty? It’s not like I’m addicted to the stuff.

I catch myself licking my lips again.

I bang the desk, angry. I need to fix this. And the only way I see how, is to do exactly what I’m not supposed to do.

I park on Sutphin Boulevard, about a block from the Jamaica Long Island Railroad station. A little after eleven, and the streets are still teeming with pedestrians. It’s a shithole of a neighborhood, as mixed as a melting pot gets, mostly low- to middle-income, depending on which side of the block you’re on. My beat-up SUV is fine where it is. I push through the mangle of people walking by toward the subway and stores at the end of the street. I hear the L train in the background as I turn down an alley. I’d ended up going home after Mullins left, only to head out after reading Caitlyn a bedtime story and telling my wife that duty called. In a way, it’s not too far from the truth.

I ring the bell to Apartment Fifteen on the steps outside a rundown tenement. I’m wearing a nondescript tee, jeans and sneakers, with a Mets baseball cap, brim pushed down over my forehead to keep a low profile. I’m mindful of the pair of gang members sitting on the stoop two buildings over. I can tell they’re tracking me as they talk to each other. They’re both wearing wife beaters and shorts that extend down to the ankles. I recognize the stereographic tattoos projecting in front of their chests, burning sigils of circles with exes for eyes. These guys are la hermandad de fuego, Brotherhood of Fire, a Dominican gang that controls this part of Jamaica; and judging from their dot rankings above the circles, I’d say low-level enforcement. The lanky one doesn’t even bother covering up the handgun with the taped grip peeking out from his waistband. He turns my way, and I sense a pingback through my retinal overlay. It’s a discovery ping, a way of saying, “Who are you?” I ignore him; don’t even move an inch to let them know I’m aware of what he’s trying to do. If I were on the job, I’d do my own active pingback, and pull up his rap sheet through our NYPD portal using the electronic signature from his own temporal lobe implant.

The buzzer sounds just in time. The lanky one stands and whistles at me. He just wants to see my face. I quickly push through the door, pretending like I didn’t hear him, and make sure it locks before heading up the stairs.

The building reeks of trash, and the hallway walls are filled with graffiti. How can anyone stand living in a place like this? I knock once on the metal door of Apartment Fifteen. Reggie opens the door, but leaves the chain on. His one visible eye is looking at me, red-glazed, pupil dilated. He’s getting skulled, I’m sure. It’s a cheap high, requiring a Mindnet app you download to root the firmware of your TLI. The TLI fires a pulse every few seconds, flooding the brain with alpha waves. Stupid in my opinion, because you can get stuck in an endless loop, and eventually, a coma.

Reggie wipes the dribble dangling from his lip. “Hey.”

“You going to let me in?”

He waves a catatonic hand. “Pockets.”

It’s the same ritual every time. I turn my jean pockets inside out and lift my shirt to show him I’m not packing. He’s too stupid to ask me to lift the cuff on my pants. I’ve got a .22 handgun concealed in an ankle holster. Not much use against the guys downstairs though.

“Okay.” He unlatches the chain and lets me in.

I hate the routine—going inside, smelling that rotten Chinese food stink that never goes away, seeing the disarray of clothes, wrappers and dirty dishes everywhere. I’ve asked him a number of times to exchange product for cash at the door, but he wants me to wait on the dirty couch as he tries to remember where he stashed his supply of Switch. This time, I’m glad he let me in. I’ve got to talk to him.

“Have a seat.” He points at the couch as he teeters toward the kitchen. I don’t bother sitting.

Reggie is an odd-looking creature, real narrow head, with a leather-brown Columbian complexion, early thirties, although his compulsive drug use has him looking much older. He was a certified informant for us a couple years back, paid to report on local gang activity. He helped me make a buy, and that’s where I got a sample of the good stuff. He’s no longer on payroll, but he’s still my go-to-guy.

After a few minutes, he staggers back in. “Yo, I can’t find it.”

It’s not what I want to hear. “You can’t remember where you put it? Maybe it’s in the bedroom, like last time, or the closet.”

His drowsy face twists into a frown. “You telling me how to run my shit? I”—he yanks his hand haphazardly—“Yo man, I know what I’m doing. Don’t tell me how to run my shit, okay?”

I let him go through the motions. Part of my brain says I’ve made a mistake coming here, the other part knowing this guy’s track record. He’s always come through for me. I’ve used other sources in the past, but Reggie’s stuff is hands-down the best, even if he’s out of his mind.

His expression clouds over. Then he starts giggling like a child, snot bubbling from his nose. “Wait!” He snorts his way into a laughing fit. He catches his breath and then settles into a massive grin. “The bathroom! Yeah, it’s there.”

He weaves out of sight, returning a minute later, waving a plastic dispenser with a Listerine logo, carrying a few more in his other hand. He tosses me the one with the logo. “Hope you like grape.”

I exchange money for product, taking possession of the five dispensers, a hundred strips total. I’ve asked for more in the past, but Reggie claims it’s all he has.

I click open each dispenser, examining the contents, making sure I’m getting a full supply per unit. The cardamom scent is subtle.

“What, you don’t trust me?”

I ignore him and shove the collection into my jean pocket. I pull out an equal sum of money as I gave him a minute ago, along with a folded printout from my back pocket. He looks at me and just blinks. “What’s this?”

“I need to find someone. Here, take the money.” He palms it, still blinking in confusion. I show him the blowup image of the knuckle with the y-shaped scar. “I’m looking for a guy who deals, Hispanic, with a scar like this on his hand.”

He holds up the printout and squints. He looks at me, then the printout, and darts his eyes back and forth several times. He stops and tosses it on the floor, along with the money. Bills spill over the dirty carpet. Damn!

Reggie points harshly at me. “You crazy, man? What’s this all about? What do you want? I don’t work for you anymore!” He rocks back and forth, anger blossoming into mental discord.

I hold up my hands neutrally. “Slow down, Reggie. I just want to know who he is, that’s all.”

His rocking gets more pronounced. “What do you want with the Candyman?”

The name rings a bell. A big-time street dealer with an even bigger ego, if memory serves me correctly. “I want to meet him.”

Reggie grunts. “That’s crazy talk, ’cause he don’t want to meet you.”

He gets his shoulders into the back-and-forth swing. Spittle flies from his lips. I’m worried he’s going to flip out on me and do something stupid.

“You know him, Reggie? You know the Candyman?”

He shakes his head manically.

I keep my hands raised, a peace offering. “It’s okay, Reggie. Calm down, buddy.”

The manic jerking continues. “No!” He keeps his eyes fixed on the sprawled printout between full shoulder swings.

I should leave, cut my losses. But he acts like he knows the guy. I pump him for information. “You see this money? It’s yours. Just tell me who the Candyman is.”

He snorts, getting his chin into the swing. “Candyman’s crazy. Yessiree. Crazy.”

“You sure he has a scar on his knuckle? Did you see it yourself?”

Spit dribbles down his chin, and his eyes are wide, as if in a trance. It reminds me of what a voodoo shaman from Haiti might look like.

“Reggie?”

He stops abruptly, gaze leveled my way, drool leaking from the corner of his crooked mouth. His voice turns gravelly. “You’re too slow for the Candyman, white boy.” He opens his mouth in a lunatic grin, revealing a missing front tooth. “Craaaazee slow.”

He’s not making sense, but I need to see where this leads. “Why am I too slow, Reggie?”

“Why?” His gaze wanders off, lost in the mess of his apartment. He drops his voice to a whisper. “Why.”

“Yeah, Reggie, why?”

He almost sounds lucid as he speaks the next couple of sentences. “Because he’s got the mojo, that’s why. The best mojo, not like yours.”

“And how to do I get a hold of this mojo?”

He flicks his eyes at me, insanity restored. “You gotta go down the rabbit hole, white boy. You gotta go deep. And when you get there, the Candyman will be waiting. Yessirree. And when he catches you, he’s gonna snap you in half, ‘cause that’s what he does when you’re too slow.” He cackles, gap in his teeth wide and ugly.

He’s speaking gibberish. Pure, worthless trash. I bend down to retrieve the printout. He can keep the money, but there’s no way I’m going to leave the photo.

Reggie shouts at the top of his lungs, scaring me stiff. “Don’t touch that!”

I unclench my body. “Just grabbing my paper, Reggie. Money’s yours, okay? That was the deal. But this I’m taking.”

He shakes his head like a rabid dog. “I don’t care. You’re leaving it. Get out!”

“Look, Reggie, I’ll just take the paper and—”

He grabs what I imagine is a paper bag stuffed with garbage from the ratty credenza behind him, but when I see the gun, I know better than to make a move. I swallow, watching his hand tremble with the revolver pointed at my chest. It’s a .357, enough to put me six below. I don’t have my vest, so there’s no point questioning whether it’s loaded.

“Okay, Reggie,” I say in a surrendering tone. “I’m going to leave, all right?”

“Yeah, you need to go.” He jabs the air with his gun. He’s got his index finger tugging on the trigger. You have to put some effort into pulling it, but I’m not taking any chances. My thoughts filter over to Suzie and Caitlyn, and I imagine them, for a split second, crying in the hospital room as I lie on a bed with a respirator.

I back away. Reggie keeps pace with a jagged twitch to his carriage. He then tosses his head back and talks to the air, in Spanish. “Sí. El blanco hombre sigue aquí.” He laughs his twisted laugh, and it chills me to my core. My panic button goes off.

Who’s he talking to?

You can do anything through the Mindnet without the other person knowing. Reggie definitely contacted someone, either through a thoughtlink or M-text. The fact he spoke aloud just confirms it.

I’m out the door in a flash. It rattles closed, muffling Reggie’s hyena laugh. Down below, I hear heavy footsteps reverberating off the treads of the stairwell, and voices. I peek over the railing and see the Dominicans, guns drawn. One spots me and points. They break into a run. Shit!

I sprint up two flights of stairs to the top landing and slam open the door to the rooftop. The gravel on the flat roof crunches as I scamper for cover. I duck behind the industrial cooler as the door shuts, and take out my .22 pistol. The one thing in my favor is that it’s dark, with the only strong light source behind me, by the door I exited. Ahead, the roof’s ledge rises a couple of feet, blocking some of the city lights, aiding in my concealment.

I hurriedly scan my surroundings. I’m sandwiched between two apartment buildings. The rooftop of the closer one is about a half flight lower. I might be able to outrun these guys and get to the door on the other side. It’ll either be open, or I’m screwed. Calling for backup is out of the question.

I get ready to launch, quickly estimating my jump and landing. The door swings open before I take one step. I hear the familiar whistle of the lanky Dominican. “Hey blanco, oh blanco,” he calls out in a singsong voice. He claps, then makes kissing noises. From the sound of their footfall, I can tell they’re splitting up. They know I’m hiding, and I know they’re hunting. I can fire a warning shot to buy more time, perhaps create a standoff. Except, when they realize I’m using a small-caliber weapon, it will be for naught, and I will have wasted a precious bullet.

“Hey, blanco, come out,” the lanky one says. “We just want to talk.” The other one laughs, giving away his position. They’re closing in from either side, covering all angles of escape.

My heart is racing. How the hell did I end up here? Again, my thoughts turn to my family. No hospital room this time, just an image of my bullet-riddled corpse being scraped off the concrete sidewalk below. I won’t even get an honorable burial. This isn’t getting killed in the line of duty. Not even close.

I’m swelling with anger. I had no business coming here. There was a reason my supply of Switch was almost out. There was a reason why I witnessed what it did to a teenager with no priors. And there was a reason why my gut told me to leave Reggie alone and head home.

All the signs; yet I didn’t pay attention to any of them.

I yank the bundle of dispensers from my pocket. I’m tempted to hurl them toward the edge of the roof. Or better, try to barter my way out of this predicament. The product has street value, although I doubt my stalkers would be interested. As I squeeze the collection of plastic dispensers in frustration, one pops open. Reggie’s cackling fills my thoughts, and his accusation: You’re too slow for the Candyman, white boy.

Too slow.

Craaaazee slow.

My fingers go to work, hinging on a ridiculous idea. I wedge the .22 into my belt and rip the plastic sheath open. I drop the rest of the dispensers on the ground. I grab the whole stack of strips from the open container and bite down. I chomp furiously. The Dominicans are maybe eight or ten paces away. In a few seconds, they’ll have a clean shot. Saliva mixes with film, and my mouth is awash in grape and cardamom. I slosh around the shreds, feeling bits churn into a paste. I chew frantically, trying to get the mixture to dissolve in time.

Within a couple of seconds, my cheeks warm. Two more, and my face flushes.

Then something inexplicable happens.

Time slows, as if each frame of the film reel in my vision is moving a tenth of its normal speed. Yet my mind accelerates in a hundred different directions.

My eyes dart around, picking up the minutest details: bird droppings along the ledge, peanut shells in the gravel, the hoarse breathing of my pursuers, the step of each foot, the position of their bodies, and the intention of each movement.

My .22 is no longer useful, I realize. I rest it on the ground and crouch, leg muscles bunched to spring. There’s a clarity in my thoughts so bright that I could count the strands of hair on my head and still have time to measure my next move. My other senses kick in, and I pick up the scent of unwashed skin, the change in air pressure, the tang of foreign sweat.

I scoop up two large pieces of gravel, and transfer one to my throwing hand. The lanky one clears my line of sight first, just as I hurl the rock. It strikes him in the left eye, and he staggers sideways.

The second guy appears on the other side, momentarily distracted by his partner—enough for me to hit him squarely below the Adam’s apple. He drops his .38 and clutches his throat, wheezing as he steps back.

Everything is happening in slow motion.

I’m after the lanky Dominican, predator urge unfettered.

He fires a blind shot, ricocheting off the ground where my foot was a moment earlier, his good eye blinking reflexively and tearing. A second shot rings out as I dodge to the right. I shift all my weight, calculate the distance to close on him, and spring, taking to the air.

My fist catches his jaw with an audible crack, dislocating it. He shrieks as I land opposite him, grabbing his wrist and wresting his pistol in one fluid motion. He loses his balance, sprawling to the gravel, crying out in pain, neutralized.

His partner is gasping, trying to recover his breath while aiming at me. I’m moving again, a blur, faster than before. I run to the side of the cooler, concealed for little over a second, and skid, throwing up a shower of rocks.

He pulls the trigger prematurely, hitting nothing. By the time I appear on the other side, I’m on him. My brain computes a combination of fatal blows—strike to the temple, elbow to the summit of the nose, hook to the base of the cerebellum. The information is just coming at me, as if my brain has been transformed into a supercomputer.

I opt for a non-fatal blow, and shatter his clavicle instead, pile-driving my fist with agonizing force. It knocks him back into a screaming tumble.

I hold still, both assailants in my peripheral vision. My heart is pumping harder than it’s ever pumped. I’m supercharged, and I know I can kill these men a dozen ways to Sunday if I want to. And I do.

But I need to resist the craving. I’m a vampire, fighting my nature to drain their lives. Thoughts even go to Reggie and what I might do to him. I clench my fists, try to remain rigid and block out the temptation. I’m not going to become a Kurt Rodriguez. I’m not going to indulge, even though I want to snap these creatures to pieces.

I straddle the chest of the second man, startling him. The doorway light catches the dread in his eyes. He’s breathing fast, groaning from the agony of the pressure I’m placing with my knee squashed against his broken clavicle. He’s mine.

I squeeze either side of his mouth with my fingers like a vise. “I’m going to ask you once, and if you lie, I’m going to rip your fucking jaw off. Comprende?”

He nods, scared out of his ever-loving mind.

My voice is a hiss, a venomous hiss. “Where do I find the Candyman?”

There is no coming down from a twenty-strip high, at least not in the first couple of hours. Before this moment, I had no idea what it was like to do more than two hits in a twenty-four-hour period. Now I’m worried the high will never end.

I’ve got the worst case of the jitters, and I’m holding my arms to keep from shaking, braced against an I-beam beneath the elevated transit line that ferries the 7 train to and from Manhattan.

Mullins picks up on the other end of my call. “Hey.” He’s barely awake. A second later and, “God, it’s one in the morning. What’s up?”

There are a thousand things I want to say, blistering thoughts competing at light speed in my overclocked brain. “Rodriguez wasn’t a victim.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He enjoyed every minute of his high. He wanted to kill those cops. You see, it’s a dark side, Ed. It’s a dark side that wants to control you. And if you don’t have the strength, well, you’re a goner.”

There’s a pause on the other end. Mullins’ voice comes back dead serious. “Hey, is everything okay? This doesn’t sound like you.”

Mullins has it wrong again. It sounds exactly like me. The true me. The unleashed me. “You’re a good guy, Ed. I know you’ve had it rough, but I’m telling you, it’s going to work out in the end.”

“Man, you’re scaring me. You’ve been drinking or something?”

“Ed, I want you to listen for a second, okay?”

He keeps quiet on the other end.

“If anything happens to me, I want you to take care of Suzie and Caitlyn. It’s a partner’s oath. You remember that, right?”

“Of course.” He sounds like he wants to say more, but he’s afraid, I can tell.

“There’s nothing to worry about, Ed. I’ve got something to take care of, and I’m going to follow the rabbit hole. I’m going to dig deep, real deep, and finish this.”

“Finish what?”

“What we started. I’m going to close out the Rodriguez case. I’m going to make it right for Yee’s parents, for the family of the other two officers that were shot, for my brother Tommy, for Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez. For you, buddy, and the rest of the boys. I’m going to rip out the source and make it right.”

“Jesus, Terry, what the hell is going on? Are you in trouble? Hey, man, I’m here. I’m here, you understand? So talk to me!”

He never calls me by my first name. It gives me a modicum of comfort. “I gotta go, partner. See ya.”

“Wait, Terry. Hey—!”

I disconnect and block him from calling back. The L train grinds above me and I let go of my arms. The jitters wrack my body, and I vibrate to the rolling of steel wheels over the tracks. I’m a ball of bottled-up venom, every sedentary moment poisoning my blood a little more. I need to release it. I need to release all of it.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

It’s a fifteen-minute drive to my destination. With each passing streetlight, the pressure builds. I want to uncork the pressure, to let it burst. But I have to hang on a little longer.

I park in the heart of Astoria, Queens, a twenty-four-hour nonstop mini-Manhattan of low-rise apartment buildings and single-story businesses. Spanish, Greek, Arabian and Brazilian clubs and cafes are hopping, showing off the neighborhood’s multicultural personality.

The one I’m interested in is a club called El Toro Loco. My rooftop informant said the Candyman fronts as a legit businessman, using the nightclub scene to traffic product. He claimed he didn’t know which club, but I followed the rabbit hole to its very depths. It’s amazing what you can learn through the Mindnet when your neurons are ablaze.

Reggie was right about the “crazy” part. El Toro Loco translates to “The Mad Bull,” or literally, “The Crazy Bull.” I don’t know if it was his rabid ranting, or he was trying to tell me the answer.

Latin dance music echoes out onto Broadway. Young twenty-somethings are clustered in line, waiting to get into the club while 3-D glyphs advertise drink specials that change in price as demand shifts during the night.

The bouncer at the door is big, like an NFL offensive tackle, close-shaved afro indicative of prior military experience. He’s three hundred pounds easy, with very little body fat. My brain has already calculated six ways to take him down using nothing more than my God-given hands. I’m not dressed for the club, and he makes it a point to tell me to remove my hat and get to the back of the line. I do neither. The young crowd makes no attempt to hide their disgust for my older presence. I don’t care about them. I want in.

There are nineteen people in line at El Toro Loco. A video camera above the door confirms that we’re being watched. The old me would have flashed a police glyph, and the bouncer would have moved aside.

There’s no room for the old me.

I step toward the bouncer.

“Sir, I’m going to ask you again. Please move to the back—”

Faster than he can react, I sock him in the windpipe. He claws his throat, bug-eyed. I follow it up with a knuckled fist to the kidney. His body flexes involuntarily, and he hits the ground, all three-hundred-plus-pounds of solid manpower, down for the count. I step over his mountainous carcass, leaving an astonished crowd behind.

The club is packed. Lasers, stereographs and booming bass thrills my senses. I see two men with the word Security across the front of their black t-shirts quickly pushing through the throng toward me. I’ve been made.

I shove sideways across the dancefloor, toward the restrooms and staircase leading up to the catwalk and second bar. People are hanging out everywhere, laughing, talking, drinking and dancing. I don’t want to alarm them. I just want to get to my prize.

I’m rough, pushing people aside, swimming upstream, trying to beat my pursuers. I hit the stairs a couple of paces ahead of them. I punch up the steps, zigzagging precisely between bodies. I’m four strides ahead by the time I catch the top step. It’s less crowded up here, and I bolt toward the back area, past the VIP roped-off access and velour-cushioned lounge chairs, along the black walls toward the solitary door in the very rear. The door opens six paces before I get there. The suited, short Asian man that exits fires a stun gun at me. A pair of electrodes shoot out. Time slows again. I see the dart-like projectiles and conductive wires propel through the air. I bend sideways, eluding their trajectory. It forces me off balance, but my brain won’t let me fall. It tells me to throw my weight into my right foot and push off into a leap. Airborne, I rain down, driving my forearm into the bridge of my assailant’s nose, breaking it and knocking him to the ground with my momentum.

I waste no time getting my bearings. I grab the butt of his stun gun and wheel about, clipping the first bodyguard across the forehead with the carbon fiber grip. He knocks mouth-first into the wall, and pitches heavily to the side. The second guard tries to put me in a bear hug. I smack him upside the chin with the butt of the stun gun, snapping his head back. He’s down a moment later, lights out.

I take an adrenalized pause to absorb my audience, frozen with their drinks in their hands. Their expressions vary from shock to sheer terror. They’re seeing the venom released, the poison of what I’ve become. It triggers momentary remorse. A second later, and I’m ready to engage my prize, any notion of guilt extinguished and forgotten. I told Mullins I was going to finish this, and I am.

I toss the stun gun on the floor and enter the lion’s den.

He’s sitting comfortably behind the solitary wood desk in the small office, stained glass peacock lamp illuminating his face in a wash of yellow light. He’s not some prizefighter, or Olympian, or martial artist or bodybuilder. He’s ordinary, my age, Hispanic mixed with Caucasian, with a medium build hidden beneath a tailored suit. Behind the calm eyes is a storm I recognize, a tidal wave waiting to crash ashore. I wasn’t expecting an amped welcome, but I’m not frightened by it either.

I lock the door behind me. There are no windows, no secondary exit, just the four walls of our cage. He could have chosen any place to wait for my arrival. But he chose here instead. One way in, one survivor.

He loosens his red silk necktie. I’m drawn to the crimson hue as it shimmers against the bright, recessed lights above, but more so by the y-shaped scar on his tanned knuckle. Air conditioning is piping in, blowing down on us. I can’t feel the cool though.

“So, you’re the Candyman.”

“And you’re Detective Sergeant Terrance Parker.” He has an American accent.

I don’t care that he knows who I am. Facial recognition technology in networked video cameras can easily pick up a name. They use it in casinos; why not a nightclub?

“I’m not here to arrest you.”

His eyes are set on me, hungry, seething. “I know.”

“Good. I just wanted to get that out of the way.”

He pulls his tie off, folds it in thirds, and sets it parallel to the edge of his table, same as what I would have done in his place. His jacket comes off next as he remains seated. I’m surprised as he tosses it over his shoulder, letting it land sloppily atop the wastebasket in the corner. I notice the clothing hooks embedded in the cinderblock wall behind him. “Yes,” he says, catching my gaze. “You would have hung it there.”

He unbuttons his left cuff and rolls up his sleeve. My mind is parsing his comment, analyzing its meaning: why he tossed the coat; why he told me that I was expecting it; why he seems so relaxed while I’m nearly quaking from anticipation.

I launch an active pingback. It comes up empty in my retinal overlay. I check the signal strength of my Mindnet connection. It’s at ninety-seven percent, almost perfect. Why can’t I get a read on him?

“You won’t find me that way,” he says, starting on the other sleeve. His movement is steady, but I can tell his blood is boiling. “My name is Jean Le Vau. All you had to do was look up the owner of this club, and you would have found me. Easy.”

I’m surprised that I missed that. Is the Switch finally wearing off? I had left the other dispensers behind on the rooftop of Reggie’s building. I’ve got no backup. It’s just me and the chemical substance in my bloodstream.

Someone bangs on the door. “It’s all right,” Le Vau says loudly. The banging ceases. “Sorry about that.”

“You look Honduran,” I say. “I wouldn’t have guessed French.”

“My mother was Nicaraguan, my father French. But you didn’t come all this way to figure me out, did you?”

“No, I came to kill you.” I’m surprised to hear myself say it. It sounds like a line from an old James Bond film. Maybe I’m not crashing after all. I can feel the surge of excitement, the tingle in my face, the need to put this man to his end. I quickly remind myself that I’m a police officer. I’m not going to kill this man. Am I?

Le Vau takes off his watch and places it next to the tie. Everything he removes lightens the load, allows him to be more nimble in a fight. I should be considering my own outerwear, but I’m already stripped down to a t-shirt and jeans. I remove my baseball cap.

“Feel free to toss it,” he says. He points at his jacket.

I want to throw the cap, but I need to place it neatly somewhere. I center it on the cushion of the chair facing him. He smiles politely, hateful beast masked by a level of control I can’t comprehend. How does he do it?

Le Vau offers me a seat. “You can always put your hat over there.” Again, he points at his jacket.

“I’ll stand.”

I’m evaluating his physicality, considering all the ways I can take him down. He will have his own brand of tricks, enhanced by heightened senses. Dig deep, I tell myself. Reggie’s advice.

“How long have you been using?” he asks, removing his gold wedding band, which I had failed to notice. I expect him to toss it on the jacket, but he surprises me again and sticks it in the drawer. I would have put it next to the tie.

“Two years. And you?”

“Five.”

I had no idea Switch has been around for half a decade. Hardly anyone knew what it was when I stumbled upon it. Even the wiki didn’t date its origin back that far.

Le Vau responds as if reading my mind. “Yes, it’s been that long. The first generation product was terrible. Liquid drops. It caused violent mood swings. We replaced it with clear tablets, but the stomach acid destroyed a lot of the positive effects, so we went to coated tablets, and even those didn’t do the job quite right.” He unbuttons the top of his blue dress shirt. Curly chest hair spills out. “Your generation has been around three years. It’s very good, but it also has its limitations, as you well know.”

My generation? He makes it sound like there’s something else. I’ve encountered plenty of variations in the form, quality and efficacy of the product. Is Le Vau alluding to that?

“My condolences, by the way,” he says. “I heard about the shooting at the gas station.”

His comment makes me mad. If we’re going to fight, what is the point of being polite? I examine the desktop for anything I can turn into a weapon. A pen to the eye, a letter opener between vertebrae, a paperweight to the philtrum, that area between the upper lip and the bottom of the nose. There are plenty of choices with these ordinary objects. Again, I’m thinking of killing, not wounding him. I amend my thoughts and consider a blow with the stapler to jostle the cerebral cortex. That might do the trick.

“My generation, however, has none of the side effects of yours,” he continues. “We’re experimenting with the dosage. If all goes well, we should start FDA trials next spring and get our approval fast-tracked. We’ve got some good people working on it. A much better business venture than the street has to offer.”

My mind tells me not to believe him, that he’s trying to placate me into thinking he’s working for the greater good. I’m not going to fall for his guile. Yet I’m stuck on the “we” reference. Who’s “we”?

He lifts the stapler. “Of course, I’m not all about the legal dosage for recreational use. If you’re going to save the best champagne for the best occasion, why waste your time on the cheap stuff, right? You go for the gusto!”

He switches the stapler to his left hand. His dominant hand.

“The good news about your generation of product is that it will be off the market once ours hits the pharmacies. No more psychotic episodes, no more cop killings, no more psychological addiction. You get a prescription for that attention deficit disorder you’ve been complaining about, and you’re good to go.”

He’s feeding me a line, but I’m keen on his game. I think his silver ballpoint pen is the best weapon to use. I come up with eleven methods to paralyze him without even thinking about it.

“You know, that’s a pretty good story,” I say. “I’m sure someone will buy it, but not me. So how about we cut the bullshit?” I step toward him. “Why did you deal to Kurt Rodriguez? Was he an experiment to you?”

Le Vau rolls back in his chair, leaving the stapler on the desk at a strange angle. The compulsiveness in me wants to nudge it just a little so it’s even with his tie. Again, he appears in control of his emotions. Not a blink at the mention of Rodriguez’s name. “That boy had potential. I was just curious to see how far he would take it. I had no idea he’d go all the way.”

“So he was an experiment. And you, what, coached him?”

Le Vau is smug in his response. “He had that spark. I simply opened his eyes.”

Le Vau makes it sound as if he was a benefactor. As if he were helping Rodriguez. Rodriguez wasn’t some kind of loner or misfit or abandoned child. He was well-liked by his friends, and loved by his family. All he wanted was a way to distinguish himself from the ordinary. It’s funny how you find what you want if you really seek it. Le Vau happened to own the candy store, evangelizing the merits of his product. One strip, and studying becomes easier. A second, and you can run faster. Up the dose again, and maybe you’ll make history. Keep going, and you’ll become God.

Le Vau is nothing more than a preacher, spreading his infected gospel while hiding behind a club to pursue his true proclivity.

“You could have stopped him.”

Le Vau stands and pushes in his chair, bringing it flush with the edge of the desk. “I could have done a lot of things. How about you? Who did you stop?”

He wants to make me out to be a hypocrite, and maybe I am. My selfishness hasn’t made me a better husband or father. It hasn’t made me a better partner to Mullins. And it hasn’t helped kids like Rodriguez stop themselves before it was too late. Right now, my nerves are frayed to the point where I’m not sure of what I am. But I know this: our encounter is going to end with one man standing.

Le Vau walks calmly around to the front of the desk and perches himself on it. It’s a disadvantageous position. He’d have to go on the defense to fend off my attack. Why would he do that?

He pulls a clear plastic sheet from his pant pocket. He lifts it up, exposing a two-by-five set of gel-like buttons, also clear. He pops one square off the perforated sheet. There’s a single button in the middle of the square. He pockets the rest of the sheet. “One of these is better than thirty of your strips. Except you don’t pop it in your mouth. You apply it to the skin, like this.” He places the square flat against his wrist and pushes the button. It pops inward, squeezing out a gel that reminds me of hand sanitizer. He tosses the empty square on the table and rubs the gel into his wrist. “See? It absorbs almost instantaneously. The rest evaporates, with no residue. It’s pharmaceutical grade quality. The good news is that it hits twice the neuroreceptors as the old product. That means you’re firing on all cylinders.”

I’m painfully aware that I just let him dose up in front of me. I think my senses are dulling. Are the strips finally wearing off?

He answers my next question before I even ask it. “It’s my second application today.” He folds his hands, scarred knuckle on top. “Normally, I do one but, you know, special company and all.”

He’s blocking the pen by sitting on the desk. And all the other implements I was considering using. He’s outmaneuvered me before I realized it. Even though I don’t feel afraid, I’m starting to get this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Well, there you have it,” he says with a smile.

I can’t resist asking, “So, what happens now?”

Le Vau slides off the desk. He shrugs, still smiling. “Now, I kill you.”

He comes at me before I have the chance to duck out of the way. His knee connects with my stomach, propelling me backward. I stumble three steps before righting myself, the wind nearly knocked out of me.

Instant nausea rises up my throat. I suppress my gag reflex. It costs me an elbow to the face. I barely deflect it, taking the brunt of the blow with my shoulder, the rest with my cheek.

I collide with the wood casing adjacent to the door. It’s a hard knock to my scapula, pain surging up my back.

Le Vau throws a kick. Somehow, I manage to sidestep it. His foot demolishes the sheetrock to my right instead of my sternum.

When he removes his shoe from the hole he created, I’m already to his left, near the desk. Pieces of drywall chip off and cascade to the floor. He stamps the dust from his foot. The whole bottom part of his pant leg is coated with sheetrock debris. It seems to infuriate him, but only for a moment.

“You’re good,” he says, shifting the weight to his left heel. “Nice to see you actually remember your combat training as a police officer.”

There are equations firing in my brain. Some are telling me that my odds are greatly improved using one of the desktop implements available to me. The others are telling me that I have a one in five chance of surviving, period, based on the amount and quality of product in my system. I need something better to even the fight.

“It’s right here.” He pats his left pocket, again reading my mind.

One gel would do it. But I’d never last long enough to get one.

I lunge for the pen, snap it up, and roll across his desk, knocking over his expensive lamp. It crashes to the floor. The glass and bulb shatter, but I’m on my feet, desk between me and my foe, my only safety net.

He steps around to his right as I circle back. I expect him to grab the stapler, but he’s going to use his bare hands.

He hops oddly on each foot toward me, like some kind of wound-up toy with springs for legs. I wait for his bounce to reach one body length and then swing the metal pen to stab him in the carotid artery.

I’m mid-swing when he alters his step, ducking below my thrust. I can’t block his punch to my groin. Pain explodes from my testicles.

I double over and lose the pen, along with my balance. He follows up with a kick to my solar plexus, sending me skidding into his coat-covered waste basket.

I land on my back, cushioned only by his sports jacket. I try to use my leg as leverage to stand. I manage to get one foot on the floor. I cry out as the pen I’ve dropped is driven through the top of my sneaker.

“Ouch,” he says. “That must hurt.”

I’ve never experienced agony this intense. I’m unable to get up. The waves of crushing pain are radiating upward from my foot. I’m seeing stars.

“Anyway.” He peels me off his jacket and onto the floor. My face strikes broken glass. It cuts into my skin. The pen is sticking out of my sneaker, punched through the tendons in my foot, gnawing at my nerve endings.

Le Vau ties the arms of his jacket together around my throat, lifting me up. I instinctively pull at the hangman’s noose, try to breath.

He slams me onto my side in the middle of his shattered lamp, knocking my skull against the brass base. My head throbs, but the air rushes back into my lungs. I’m left gasping, a dab of blood rolling down my cheek.

He reaches across for something on his desk. I should take advantage of the split second his midriff is exposed above me, but I can’t do anything. My autonomic system is misfiring. He pulls back, standing over me with an object in his left hand. It takes me a second to focus, and when I do, I’m seeing that silly stapler.

I actually laugh. It’s funny, although I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the idea of Mullins reading my cause of death in a report, crying and cracking up at the same time.

Le Vau laughs too. “I know, who would have thought: a stapler!” He hefts it. “It’s made of resin, fabricated by a 3-D printer. I’m guessing part of it will disintegrate when I drive it through your skull. What do you think?”

I keep laughing, not because it’s funny, but because I need to buy time. There’s a moment in any life-and-death situation where you know whether you’re going to make it or end up with a headstone. That’s when you need that FM, that f’ing miracle. It happened to me once, when I was rookie, during a shootout with an armed robber in a convenience store. My duty weapon had jammed, and all the junked-up kid needed to do was take me out with his pistol. Instead, the clerk did what she wasn’t supposed to do: engage the suspect. The pepper spray to the face bought me my second chance. Now I need that same kind of FM. Too bad no one’s around to save my ass.

I feel glass beneath my right hand. A couple of pats, and I find a shard about four knuckles long. I grab a hold of it. I fix my sight on Le Vau’s left thigh, right where his pocket is. If I can just get myself into a sitting position…

“Let me ask you something.” It’s a last-ditch effort to gain a few more precious seconds. I push myself up onto my elbows, knuckles down, shard hidden. I prop my back against the wooden leg of his desk. “If you had the new generation of product available, why didn’t you sell it to Rodriguez? Why give him the old stuff?”

He rotates the stapler with one hand, the other ready to wield it if I flinch wrong. “I think you already know the answer.”

I do, and it sickens me. Le Vau is a sadist, pure and simple. He wants to create an army of flawed super humans to watch them destroy and combust. The new product isn’t any better. It’s the same maker of monsters, except the user will think he’s in control, when in fact, he will end up changing into the very thing Le Vau has become.

He gives the stapler one last twirl and then holds it up. I know he’s faster than me. I know he’s stronger than me. I also know that I’m dead sitting here. If I make it out alive, they’ll probably take my shield away, and that’s okay. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, and I don’t like what I’ve turned into. But the most important thing is that I don’t want to leave my daughter a legacy of a loser father who threw his life away chasing a drug high just to feel “normal.”

In slow-mo, I watch the grip in Le Vau’s left arm tighten. I can tell he’s going to be dramatic and go for the overhead blow by the way he’s arching back, emboldened by my injury and compromised position no less. It’ll take him a half second longer to execute, but the payoff will be as grandiose as he had hoped.

His thigh is within arm’s reach. I don’t need theatrics for what I have to do.

I pivot the weight to my right hip. With all my strength, I lash out with my glass dagger. I anchor the point three inches in from his hip flexor, sinking deep and dragging down with a ripping motion. He yelps, losing momentum.

With my other hand, I reach for his torn pocket. I snatch the bloodied sheet of plastic tabs from the fabric, tearing away three gel squares in the process. Reflex drives Le Vau backward to recover from my stabbing. I smash the torn sheet against the floor, popping the gels with my fist, slathering my skin with clear liquid and blood. His eyes widen, a notion of fear and recognition on his pain-tortured face.

I feel my skin electrify as I yank the pen from my foot. I’m hit with a major endorphin rush as it falls from my hand. Every synapse and neuron awakens. I’m slowing time more than I ever could with just the strips.

A second goes by, and I’m on my feet. I know there’s pain in my foot, but I reroute the signal, and block it off. I’m thinking faster, multitasking processes normally handled linearly, going deeper than I’ve ever gone.

Instinctively, I’ve got my hands gripped on the lip of the desk, assessing weight, size and mobility. I don’t even think through the shift in power to my lower body. I just do it.

Le Vau swings into action. He knows what I’m about to do.

But I’m faster. I redistribute power to my hands and forearms and flip the wood table up. I anticipate his angle of attack and thrust hard. The desk smashes into his torso. I throw all my momentum into the push, crushing his body into the cinderblock wall. There’s no yield to the masonry’s ruthless surface. The desk breaks apart from the force of the collision, two of the legs prying loose, splinters flying.

Impact complete, I grip the side of the damaged table and toss it. It lands loudly a few feet away, upside down. Le Vau crumples to the ground, blood streaked along the wall from where his head made contact.

I collapse to my knees next to him, winded. He looks at me, head cocked oddly, neck vertebrae damaged. “I can’t feel my hands,” he manages to say, alarm in his voice. Something’s wrong with his mouth too because his speech is slurred. “Go ahead,” he prompts. “Finish it!”

There’s nothing more in the whole world that I want. I conceive eighteen different ways to sever his spinal column. It’s what a Roman gladiator would have considered with a fallen adversary in the arena. I look around the disaster of the office. There’s no emperor to give me the go-ahead. The decision is mine.

“No.” I pat him on the shoulder, my way of saying, “You’re not getting out of this easy, pal.” The reality reflects in his horror-stricken eyes. I imagine he’s scared shitless of going to prison as a cripple after facing an unforgiving jury. I don’t care what he thinks.

I try to rise to my feet, but something’s wrong with my motor functions. It’s like the wires have been disconnected from the battery, leaving my limb muscles unable to contract voluntarily. I push back against the wall with what little strength I have.

Time begins to return to normal. With Le Vau incapacitated, my thoughts shift to home. I want to crawl into bed so badly, to hold Suzie close and confess everything, and ask for forgiveness; to promise her my selfishness is over, and that I will be the father and husband she deserves.

The door bursts inward. Knob and lock smack the vinyl floor. I glimpse a portable battering ram being retracted.

The first police officer aims his submachine, shouting, “Don’t move!” He’s wearing ballistic armor and goggles. He gives an “all clear” and two more team members enter, followed by a most unexpected sight: Mullins, in jogging pants and a striped polo shirt a couple sizes too small.

Mullins glances at Le Vau, and takes a knee beside me. “Hey partner, what the hell, huh?” He looks me over. “Jesus H. Christ. What have you gotten yourself into?”

It’s a damned good question. I lean my head against the cinderblock. “I know.” I don’t bother asking him how he found me. I’m sure my subconscious mind wanted this. I thumb in Le Vau’s direction, pointing out his scarred knuckle. “Arrest him.”

Mullins registers a sliver of surprise and nods his head slowly. He motions to the element leader. “Read him his Miranda rights, and then get someone with a backboard in here.” The SWAT member goes about his task.

I feel my brain baking under a torrent of neural activity. I’m crashing, and I’m crashing hard. My eyes close for a moment, electrical pulses firing across my retinas.

Mullins snaps his fingers. “Stay with me, buddy. I’ve got EMS on the way.”

I reach out, my arm blurring into three. How fast is my pulse racing? Mullins takes my hand. “Easy there, stud.”

I try to keep from fading. “I’ve done a bad thing.” My throat is suddenly dry. I’m parched and there’s no water to be found. “Real bad, Ed.”

“Yeah, I know. It’ll be fine.” To me, “fine” amounts to rehabilitation, maybe incarceration. I do appreciate Mullins not being a jerk about it. He adds, “You can give me the details over a beer.” He shakes his belly for emphasis, and grins.

We both know it’s a joke. I eek out a smile for him. “Yeah, that’s what you need.”

I’m fighting to stay awake. I want to sleep, to pass out so badly. I can’t help myself.

I slip into the shadows, drift toward the dark.

It fades to white, and I see my wife sleeping next to me, chest rising and falling as I watch her peaceful form. I get up and go to Caitlyn’s room. She claps when I offer to read her a bedtime story. She snuggles next to me as I start on her favorite book, giggling at the way I act out the characters in the pictures. She’s barely awake by the time I finish. I tell her that I love her with all my heart. She says she loves me too. She wants to know if I’m going to be around to read to her tomorrow night. “Of course, sweetie. Daddy’s not going anywhere.”

It’s a nice dream.