“With a Z. Like me.” The head of the Kiner Neurology Department managed a small, vacuous smile.

“Very good. Let’s say a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You’ll also be setting Freddi Linklatter up in a new and bigger apartment. So she can receive the goods you buy, and then work on them. She’s going to be a busy girl.”

“I’ll be setting her up in a new and bigger apartment so—”

“Just shut up and listen. She’ll be needing some more equipment, too.”

Brady leaned forward. He could see a bright future ahead, one where Brady Wilson Hartsfield was crowned the winner years after the Det.-Ret. thought the game had ended.

“The most important piece of equipment is called a repeater.”

Heads and Skins

HEADS AND SKINS

1

It’s not pain that wakes Freddi, but her bladder. It feels like it’s bursting. Getting out of bed is a major operation. Her head is banging, and it feels like she’s wearing a plaster cast on her chest. It doesn’t hurt too much, mostly it’s just stiff and so heavy. Each breath is a clean-and-jerk.

The bathroom looks like something out of a slasher movie, and she closes her eyes as soon as she sits on the john so she won’t have to look at all the blood. So lucky to be alive, she thinks as something that feels like ten gallons of pee rushes out of her. Just so goddam lucky. And why am I in the center of this clusterfuck? Because I took him that picture. My mother was right, no good deed goes unpunished.

But if there was ever a time for clear thinking it’s now, and she has to admit to herself that taking Brady the picture wasn’t what has led her to this place, sitting in her bloody bathroom with a knot on her head and a gunshot wound in her chest. It was going back that had done that, and she’d gone back because she was being paid to do so—fifty dollars a visit. Which made her sort of a call girl, she supposed.

You know what all this is about. You could tell yourself you only knew when you peeked at the thumb drive Dr. Z brought you, the one that activates the creepy website, but you knew when you were installing updates on all those Zappits, didn’t you? A regular assembly line of them, forty or fifty a day, until all the ones that weren’t defective were loaded landmines. Over five hundred. You knew it was Brady all along, and Brady Hartsfield is crazy.