Cookie Cutter Man (4 page)

It was the last full night of sleep he would ever have.

When Daniel rolled over and looked at the clock, it was
quarter to noon. The sunlight ignited his eyes, the mocking coo of gutterbirds
drilled holes in his mind. With his head heavy and thick with pain, he got out
of bed and hobbled into the living room, where Echo was busy cleaning.

She turned off the vacuum cleaner as he sat on the coach
with a half-muffled groan.

“Morning,” she said, with an edge in her voice that had
never been there before. “Want me to get you a pill?”

“No. They bother my stomach.” He got his weed out of the
drawer in the end table. Now why hadn’t
it
been tipped over?

The living room was back to normal, but the ghosts of the
wreckage could be seen in the right light. He stared at his reflection in the
dead screen of the television, unable to think.

Daniel took as big a hit as he could and handed the pipe to
Echo. “We need to talk.”

“I’m sorry about last night,” Echo said. “For pulling away.”

“Forget it. It was just a bad night, that’s all. But I have
to know if you believe me.”

Echo hesitated a little. “I don’t think you lied to me.”

“That’s not really the same thing, now is it?” Daniel asked,
taking another hit from the pipe.

“I think maybe it was just the drugs that got to you. Mostly
the coke.”

Sure. The drugs. Mostly the coke! There had been a time not
two days ago when he was bound and determined to believe that getting clean
would make everything good again, normal again, that all the weird shit would
evaporate in a cloud of white powder and self-induced paranoia.

Echo went on: “That stuff does weird things to a person’s
mind, Daniel.”

“I think maybe you’re right,” he said, and he hoped she was,
but again, who was he kidding?

“Well, I talked quite a bit to Dr. Stanzliek—”

“Who?”

“Your doctor, the bald guy.”

The doctorbug, Daniel thought. “What’d he say?”

“That you might have a concussion. That we need to watch
for, uh,
mood swings
, was how he put it.”

“What do you mean?” Had that come out too defensive? Was
this
a mood swing?

Echo shrugged. “That’s just what he said. That erratic
behavior is a sign of a concussion.” Echo looked at the clock. “Dammit! God, I
don’t
wanna
go to work.”

“I thought you were off on Wednesdays?”

“Oh, I’m opening for Anne. But
you
take it easy
today, OK? Promise me.”

“I promise.” He was only sitting on the couch, but inside
he felt like he was falling.

Echo gave him another kiss and went to take a shower. Daniel
turned on the television. He didn’t really believe his conversation with it
last night was anything more than a dream, did he? Of course not.

Then how come you haven’t taken any pills? He asked himself.
He flipped past cell phone commercials, old sitcoms, and a debate on stem-cell
research. On the news they said his favorite writer, Billy Lee, had just died
of a heroin overdose.

Now he walks in the Black
, said the voice in his
head.
Careful, or you’ll join him.

I don’t know what that means, Daniel thought.

There was a
taptaptap
on the front door, so faint
that it might not have been there at all. A moment later he heard the door
leading from the hall to the stairwell creak shut on its ancient pneumatic
hinge.

Daniel crept like a thief to the peephole. Nothing. He
listened again, this time with his ear pressed to the wood. Echo came out of
the bathroom and went to the bedroom as he unlocked the deadbolt. He eased the
door open until there was a solid three-inch gap to peer through. On the
welcome mat sat a small orange prescription bottle. Daniel knew he should just
close the door and pretend this wasn’t happening. Instead he took a deep
breath, leaned out, and grabbed the bottle.

Good pills rattled inside and he stared at it in his hands,
as if the bottle was going to sprout legs and run. He stashed it in his pocket
just as Echo walked into the living room.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Was it a simple question,
or an accusation?

Was
this
erratic behavior? Daniel re-locked the
deadbolt. “I thought I heard someone knock.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

He shrugged. She smiled at him and then gave him a hug.

“Are we OK?” She looked up at him, her arms around his neck.

“Of course.” Daniel kissed her and went into the kitchen,
wondering if the pills were the same. He switched the original bottle given to
him at the hospital pharmacy into his pocket and carried the new pills into the
living room with a glass of water. The labels were identical. He removed the
cap and peered at the microcosm of man-made tolerance. The hall-pills looked
the same as the others; he shook one out into his palm for closer examination.
Were they just a touch rounder? Maybe.

You’re not really going to take that are you,
the
voice in his head asked.
Pills you found in the hall?

They have my name on the bottle, Daniel argued, and realized
Echo was staring at him. He popped the pill and washed it down.

Daniel saw her expression before it changed. It hadn’t been
a strange one, a doubtful one. It wasn’t a look that said “Hey man, I think
maybe that hit on the head
really
shook something loose up there.”

But it was close. He could see it lurking there. Just below
the surface, like a crocodile of her mind.

“I thought those bothered your stomach,” Echo said.

“They do, but not as much as my head bothers the rest of
me.”

“Oh. Well. I gotta go to work. You relax today, OK?” She
kissed him and waved as she went out the door.

Daniel gave her a 10-count and locked it behind her, then
sat back down on the couch, waiting to see what this hall-pill would do to him.
What if it killed him? What if the juices in his stomach were working at the
coating even now, about to release a massive dose of cyanide or something? What
if Echo came home to find him once more on the floor, only this time instead of
a pool of blood around his head she’d find he’d died shitting out his
intestines or something?

Or, Daniel thought, fuck me, but what if this is a gigantic
hit of LSD and I fry myself? What if I claw my eyes out or jump out the window
but only break my back and end up some goddamn blinded cripple in a nuthouse
somewhere?

His pulse was up and he’d broken into a sweat, so he sat
back and closed his eyes and listened to his body. Daniel laughed to himself
when he realized that while he’d been sitting there imaging all these horrible
things, the pain in his head had broken like a poisoned wave on a beach and had
finally begun to roll back. Another 10 minutes after that and the blackness in
his head had faded out to gray, and then, finally, was gone.

Daniel didn’t feel stoned, like on the other pills. His head
was clear for the first time in quite a while. It was this that convinced him
that what he was going through was real, but he would soon find it was far
bigger than he had reason to surmise.

There had to be a way to get a hold of Jared. He thought of
the conversation he had with the TV last night ... a guy like that wouldn’t
exactly be in the phone book. But if precedent held true, Jared would be
contacting him.

Contacting you? Who are you? Double-O Junky?

Fuck off, why don’t ya?

You need to get back to that doctor, man. That hit on the
head really shook something loose up here.

Yeah, like what?

Like me.

Daniel pushed the stranger out of his mind and held the
original bottle of pills in his left hand, the bottle of hall-pills in his
right. They were identical, right down to the doctor’s name and the phone
number to the pharmacy. He opened one, then the other, gazing in at two
different galaxies. He shook a planet from each and studied them very closely.
He had been right; the hall-pills were a little rounder. He put them back, and
was about to recap them when he happened to look at the underside of the lid.
There was a word there.

rub

That was all it said. He looked at the lid from the original
bottle. Nothing. He let it drop from his hands. The bad pills landed at his
feet and scattered. Daniel set the bottle of hall-pills on the end table and
stared down at the lid.

rub

What the hell? He rubbed. The white coating on the
underside of the lid first smeared and then was gone, revealing more words,
tiny words.

dannyboywhenit’s

safepickupthephone

Was it safe? Safe for what? He was alone in the apartment,
and that made him safe as any other time so he reached for the phone. He pawed
for it on the table before remembering how it had been obliterated.

Daniel recapped the new bottle and pocketed it, then buried
the old pills in the bottom of the trash. He went to use the bedroom extension
and cautiously, as if expecting a shock, lifted the phone out of its cradle and
put it to his ear.

Dial tone.

What the fuck did you expect? Ave Maria?

“Hello?” He felt a little odd speaking into a dead receiver
... or was that someone breathing, quietly, on the other end?

“Hello?” Louder this time, more sure of himself.

“Is it safe to talk?” The voice sounded canned and tinny,
far away.

“You tell me, man,” Daniel said.

“We can’t be traced this way. Are you alone?”

“This is Jared, right?” Daniel asked.

“You’re quick, Dannyboy.”

“Don’t call me that, Jerry-boy.”

“Fair enough. Did you get the pills?”

“Yeah. Now what’s this all about?”

“Can you meet me to talk?” Jared asked.

“I thought you said we could talk here.”

“We can, but I prefer to do this sort a thing face to face,
no?”

Daniel hesitated, but what choice did he have? “Where at?”

“Good man! Remember where we bumped into each other?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you be there in 20 minutes?”

“I’ll have to call a cab.” Echo had taken the Mustang, and
though his head was clear of narcotic cobwebs, it still ached like a bastard
and he was a little unsteady on his feet.

“Don’t have it sent to your house,” Jared said. “Go up the
street and use a payphone. The one on Grant.”

Before Daniel could ask anything else he heard a double
click. The dial tone stuttered and the line went dead, and he might as well
have imagined the whole thing.

You did! Can’t you see that?

Daniel ignored the stranger and got his jacket.

Daniel handed the cab driver a medium-sized tip because
that’s what people always did in books when they didn’t want to be noticed. He
shut the yellow door behind him.

The station wagon was parked across the street to the right;
Jared was leaning on it, wearing a black pea coat against a bitter October
wind, smoking a cigarette. He locked eyes with Daniel, and got in the car.

The Country Squire pulled away from the curb, right blinker on;
Daniel cut across the paseo headed south. When he emerged from amidst the
tourist shops on the other side, the station wagon turned the corner and came
down the street toward him, pulled up to the curb and stopped.

Daniel bent to look in the window, half expecting to be
shot, stabbed, or otherwise double-crossed. Jared was alone in the car, looking
straight ahead. Daniel drummed his fingers on the roof of the station wagon,
looking over his shoulder; traffic was about to start piling up behind them. Despite
his better judgment, Daniel got in the car, wishing he had thought to bring
along some means of defending himself. The babbled protests of the stranger in
his head rose until the slam of the closing car door cut them off.

“Where we headed?” Daniel asked.

“Nowhere yet. I need to talk to you first, and you need to
make a decision.” Jared pulled away from the curb and was sucked back into the
herd of plodding metal beasts. “We’ve been watching you for a while now,
Daniel. But it was
Them
that sparked our interest in you, because
they’ve been on you for even longer.”

“
Who?”

“Them. Big Brother. The Man. Pick a fuckin’ name bro, it’s
all the same set of eyes.”

Daniel felt sick to his stomach. “But why me?”

“Because they can’t catch you, or haven’t yet, anyway. They
have enough to put you away for a long time, but they have that shit on most
people. They just can’t use it in court.”

“What do you mean?” Daniel asked.

“Everything they have on you is stolen information. Illegal
phone taps, surveillance—”

“My place really
was
bugged?”

“We sent over a cleaner to sweep the place, so it’ll be
clear when you get home.”

“You mean someone’s in my house right now?”

Jared glanced at his watch. “Probably. But don’t worry.
Copper’s the best at this.”

A cleaner named Copper is debugging my house, Daniel
thought, to see how it would make him feel. Numb. Was numb a mood? Had he swung
into it?

Anger flashed in his guts. “Are you the ones that trashed my
place?”

“We’ve never been inside your apartment before. Why? Was
anything missing?”

“No, but someone tore it up pretty good.”

Jared shrugged. “We can find out for you.”

“How? We don’t have enough road to get up to 88, doc.”

Jared grinned. “You’ll see.”

“So what do
you
want with me?”

“We want to help you, and we want you to help us.”

“Help you? How?” Daniel lit a smoke.

“Like I said, they haven’t got enough on you to call in the
dogs, and they’ve been watching you for almost a year now. You’re good at this,
Dan. Maybe born for it.”