“She’s right,” Landen had remarked when I told him. He’d lost his leg to a land mine in the Crimea almost three decades before and referred to himself as either a “deconstructed bipedalist” or, more simply, “a man unjustly overcharged for socks.” “Will you be okay?” he asked now.
“I’m fine,” I told him, “with a stick to lean on and four Dizuperadol patches.”
“Four?” said Landen. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“It’s the only thing that seems to have any lasting effect. Slow and constant release—double thickness, too.”
I’d recently moved to the more effective stick-on patches rather than Dizuperadol taken orally. The patches seemed to work for longer, and I’d been prescribed the double-strength ones. Sometimes it felt like I had a waffle stuck to my bum. They were effective, but there were side effects.
“How’s the vision?” asked Landen.
“In focus more often than it’s not. And that’s good, right?”
“A Zen dog dreams of a medium-size bone.”
“Actually, there is one thing you could do. Can you put my all phone in my right pocket so I can get it out?”
Landen did as I asked. I’d been working on the grip of my left hand, but it was slow going. The damage to my hand had been caused by the taxi’s indicator stalk as it passed through my forearm during the vehicle’s sudden stop in the swamp, and it had caused all sorts of mayhem on the way. The stalk broke off when it hit my jaw. These days I used it as a tea stirrer. The stalk, that is, not my jaw.
“I’ll meet you in TJ-Maxx around two,” said Landen, giving me an affectionate nuzzle. “And don’t be too mean with the shrink, will you? They’ve got feelings, too.”
“I’ll play nice. What’s the password this time?”
For a few years now, Goliath had been sending Synthetic Thursdays out into the world to try to get information from people who would speak only to me—Landen being an obvious example. They had also tried to gain access to my house, to the SpecOps records department, and they’d even tried to scam a free membership at a health farm. The copies were initially crude but had made steady and sustained advances in sophistication since first appearing a eighteen months before. The Mark IVs and Vs wouldn’t have fooled anyone, but the Mark VIs were impressive and had been able to crack single code words, which was why we used the more cloak-and-daggerish sentences and responses.
“What about if I say, ‘No cookies at the hunt, sir!’ and then you reply with, ‘It’s not a cookie, it’s a Newton’?”
“Sounds random enough.”
So with the passwords committed to memory, we limped off in opposite directions. I turned once to take a look at him, and he turned as well, and we smiled a simple smile of understanding. Parting for us was generally sweet sorrow, as past experience had taught us there was a fair possibility we might not see each other for a while, if at all—a state of affairs for which I took full responsibility. Sadly, a lifetime in law enforcement tends not to create a bunch of grateful villains happy that you have shown them the error of their ways, but rather a lot of disgruntled ne’er-do-wells eager for payback.