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“I know he served. I don’t know what went so wrong over there.”
“So look it up,” I said.
“You say that very casually,” Susan said. Her words were getting short, clipped, defensive. “But it’s not a casual thing to do. My departure from the Bureau was problematic. And I have my own reasons for not going further into that. But Bill: I only looked up everybody in the house because I wanted to protect myself. It was wrong, and I won’t be doing it again. I can’t just fish around in someone’s past for my own entertainment.”
“It wouldn’t be for your own entertainment,” I said. “It’s to help him. Nick’s on the edge. He thinks people are coming for him. If we knew who these people are and why he thinks that, maybe—”
“No, I’m not doing it,” Susan said. “I love you but I’m not doing it. Nick will be OK. With some help from a professional. I promise you, he will be OK.”
I didn’t have a chance to respond. The door to the bar beside me burst open and a guy flew out so hard he hit the street between two parked cars and rolled twice. A taxi that was cruising for patrons had to swerve to avoid hitting him. Nick came storming out after the guy, his fists balled and murder in his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I DROPPED THE phone and went after my friend. It was a mistake. My body reacted without thought, without reason. I reached for Nick, forgetting the painful education I’d already had of how he operated in this state.
Over the two years I’d known him, Nick had been “episodic” a bunch of times. When he was in an episode, he was psychotic, and I seemed to him just as likely an enemy as a friend. I didn’t know if Nick was imagining he was in battle, or on a distant army base, or on the mean streets of Baltimore, where he grew up. He could have been imagining he was on the moon, for all I knew. But it was immediately clear that whatever fantasy we were in, as soon as I grabbed Nick’s shoulder and tried to drag him off the guy on the asphalt, I marked myself as a threat.
Nick whirled around, his hand as wide and lethal as a grizzly paw as it smacked me sideways and onto the ground. My head hit the pavement. I saw black for an instant, heard a buzzingsound between my eardrums. Nick dragged me up, and threw me against a car, and pinned me there by my coat.
“Whoa! Jesus! Nick!” I yelled. “It’s me! It’s me! It’s Bill!”
“Where is it?” Nick roared, his fist bunched and raised behind him, like a hammer lining up a nail.
“Where’s what?”
“The microphone! I know you’re wired up, you traitorous piece of shit!”
“It’s—” I scrambled to collect my thoughts. I knew it was better to go with the fantasy rather than try to counteract it. I fished desperately in my pockets and handed him the first thing I found. “It’s here! Take it. Take it. Take it.”
Nick snatched my car keys, threw them on the ground, and crushed the key fob under the heel of his boot. People were gathering around us at a safe distance now, officers from the bar spilling out to see what all the fuss was. The guy Nick had thrown out the door was scrambling to his feet.
“Hey, Bill, what the hell’s wrong with this dude?”
Nick crouched at my feet and started to gather up all the pieces of the crushed key fob carefully in his palm.
“This should do it,” Nick was muttering. “As long as there isn’t another copy, we’ll be fine.”
“The guy’s crazy,” someone in the crowd said. “He was talking all sorts of weird stuff in the bar about conspiracies and recordings.”
“He’s just, uh.” I shook my head. “He’s unwell, OK? He didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I didn’t even say anything to him! He just walked up and started swinging!” the guy from the street said.
“I’m sorry.” I put my hands up. “I’m sorry on his behalf, all right?”
My face and neck were burning. Nick was muttering to himself, examining little crushed pieces of a plastic keychain with a Boston terrier on it that Susan had given me for my birthday.
“Just—everybody go back inside,” I told the crowd. “I’ll handle this.”
I crouched beside Nick, hearing murmurs from the men and women around me. The words “psycho” and “lunatic” drifted on the wind. Nick’s eyes were wild, his hands shaking as he swept the asphalt for more pieces of cracked black plastic.
“There can’t be any evidence left behind,” he said. “If we can just contain it, then maybe… maybe no one will know.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“We’ve lasted this long,” Nick said, ignoring me. “We can keep going.”
I slid down against the parked car beside us and watched my friend. When Nick’s phone started ringing in his coat, he seemed not to even notice. I saw the device poking out from the pocket, the screen flashing, and despite the danger I reached forward and pulled it out.
