“Huh? Wha?”

The stare is dazed but not completely blank. There’s probably no Al Brooks left inside that plundered head, but there’s still a bit of the alter ego Brady has created. Enough.

“Hey there, Z-Boy,” Brady says, squatting down.

“Hey,” Z-Boy croaks, struggling to sit up. “Hey there, Dr. Z. I’m watching that house, just like you told me. The woman—the one who can still walk—she uses that Zappit all the time. I watch her from the g’rage across the street.”

“You don’t have to do that anymore.”

“No? Say, where are we?”

“My house,” Brady says. “You killed my wife.”

Z-Boy stares at the white-haired man in the overcoat, his mouth hung open. His breath is awful, but Brady doesn’t draw away. Slowly, Z-Boy’s face begins to crumple. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. “Kill? . . . did not!”

“Yes.”

“No! Never would!”

“You did, though. But only because I told you to.”

“Are you sure? I don’t remember.”

Brady takes him by the shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault. You were hypnotized.”

Z-Boy’s face brightens. “By Fishin’ Hole!”

“Yes, by Fishin’ Hole. And while you were, I told you to kill Mrs. Babineau.”

Z-Boy looks at him with doubt and woe. “If I did, it wasn’t my fault. I was hypnotized and can’t even remember.”

“Take this.”

Brady hands Z-Boy the gun. Z-Boy holds it up, frowning as if at some exotic artifact.

“Put it in your pocket, and give me your car keys.”

Z-Boy stuffs the .32 absently into his pants pocket and Brady winces, expecting the gun to go off and put a bullet in the poor sap’s leg. At last Z-Boy holds out his keyring. Brady pockets it, stands up, and crosses the living room.

“Where are you going, Dr. Z?”

“I won’t be long. Why don’t you sit on the couch until I get back?”

“I’ll sit on the couch until you get back,” Z-Boy says.

“Good idea.”

Brady goes into Dr. Babineau’s study. There’s an ego wall crammed with framed photos, including one of a younger Felix Babineau shaking hands with the second President Bush, both of them grinning like idiots. Brady ignores the pictures; he’s seen them many times before, during the months when he was learning how to be in another person’s body, what he now thinks of as his student driver days. Nor is he interested in the desktop computer. What he wants is the MacBook Air sitting on the credenza. He opens it, powers it up, and types in Babineau’s password, which happens to be CEREBELLIN.

“Your drug didn’t do shit,” Brady says as the main screen comes up. He’s actually not sure of this, but it’s what he chooses to believe.

His fingers rattle the keyboard with a practiced speed of which Babineau would have been incapable, and a hidden program, one Brady installed himself on a previous visit to the good doctor’s head, pops up. It’s labeled FISHIN’ HOLE. He types again, and the program reaches out to the repeater in Freddi Linklatter’s computer hideaway.