Less than thirty seconds later, she’s staring with disbelief at a message on her screen: THIS FUNCTION IS NOT ALLOWED. She reaches out to try again, then stops. For all she knows, another go at the website may nuke all her stuff—not just her computer equipment, but her credit cards, her bank account, her cell phone, even her fucking driver’s license. If anyone knows how to program such evil shit, it’s Brady.

Fuck. I have to get out of here.

She’ll throw some clothes in a suitcase, call a cab, go to the bank, and draw out everything she’s got. There might be as much as four thousand dollars. (In her heart, she knows it’s more like three.) From the bank to the bus station. The snow swirling outside her window is supposed to be the beginning of a big storm, and that may preclude a quick getaway, but if she has to wait a few hours at the station, she will. Hell, if she has to sleep there, she will. This is all Brady. He’s set up an elaborate Jonestown protocol of which the rigged Zappits are only a part, and she helped him do it. Freddi has no idea if it will work, and she doesn’t intend to wait around to find out. She’s sorry for the people who might be sucked in by the Zappits, or tipped into attempting suicide by that fucking zeetheend website instead of just thinking about it, but she has to take care of numero uno. There’s no one else to do it.

Freddi makes her way back to the bedroom as rapidly as she can. She gets her old Samsonite from the closet, and then oxygen depletion caused by shallow breathing and too much excitement turns her legs to rubber. She makes it to the bed, sits on it, and lowers her head.

Easy does it, she thinks. Get your breath back. One thing at a time.

Only, thanks to her foolish effort to crash the website, she doesn’t know how much time she has, and when “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” begins to play from the top of her dresser, she utters a little scream. Freddi doesn’t want to answer her phone, but gets up, anyway. Sometimes it’s better to know.

2

The snow remains light until Brady gets off the interstate at Exit 7, but on State Road 79—he’s out in the boondocks now—it starts to come down a little harder. The tar is still bare and wet, but the snow will start to accumulate on it soon enough, and he’s still forty miles from where he intends to hole up and get busy.

Lake Charles, he thinks. Where the real fun begins.