“Okay. I’ll make my mark in at least ten places, then I’ll sleep, then I’ll drive over to that house you want me to watch. Or should I stop doing that now that they’re dead?”

“I think you can stop now. Let’s review, okay? Who killed my wife?”

“I did, but it wasn’t my fault. I was hypnotized, and I can’t even remember.” Z-Boy begins to cry. “Will you come back, Dr. Z?”

Brady smiles, exposing Babineau’s expensive dental work. “Sure.” His eyes move up and to the left as he says it.

He watches the old guy shuffle to the huge God-I’m-rich ­television mounted on the wall and draw a large Z on the screen. Zs all over the murder scene aren’t absolutely necessary, but Brady thinks it will be a nice touch, especially when the police ask the former Library Al for his name and he tells them it’s Z-Boy. Just a bit of extra filigree on a finely crafted piece of jewelry.

Brady goes to the front door, stepping over Cora again on the way. He bops down the porch steps and does a dance move at the bottom, snapping Babineau’s fingers. That hurts a little, just a touch of incipient arthritis, but so what? Brady knows what real pain is, and a few twinges in the old phalanges ain’t it.

He jogs to Al’s Malibu. Not much of a ride compared to the late Dr. Babineau’s BMW, but it will get him where he needs to go. He starts it and frowns when classical shit comes pouring out of the dashboard speaker. He switches to BAM-100 and finds some Black Sabbath from back when Ozzy was still cool. He takes a final look at the Beemer parked askew on the lawn, then gets rolling.

Miles to go before he sleeps, and then the final touch, the cherry on top of the sundae. He won’t need Freddi Linklatter for that, only Dr. B.’s MacBook. He’s running without a leash now.

He’s free.

11

Around the time Z-Boy is proving that he can still count to ten, Freddi Linklatter’s blood-caked lashes come unstuck from her blood-caked cheeks. She finds herself looking into a gaping brown eye. It takes her several long moments to decide it isn’t really an eye, only a swirl of woodgrain that looks like an eye. She is lying on the floor and suffering the worst hangover of her life, even worse than after that cataclysmic party to ­celebrate her twenty-first, when she mixed crystal meth with Ronrico. She thought later that she was lucky to have survived that little experiment. Now she almost wishes she hadn’t, because this is worse. It’s not only her head; her chest feels like Marshawn Lynch has been using her for a tackling dummy.