Part 20

Melody had a past with Bobby. True, more than a decade had gone by since she’d last seen him, but for a year prior to that she’d been more or less his babysitter. For six months she’d been his live-in babysitter. Building on that relationship may have been easier for her than forging the relationship I had with him.

In any case, she decided to jump right in, once she determined she wouldn’t be judged.

They slept in the other bedroom. Actually, I don’t think they got a lot of sleep. I heard them at least twice when her strained voice woke me up. She was having a good time.

The next morning she didn’t meet my eyes when she came into the kitchenette, where I was brewing a pot of coffee.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I know exactly how you feel.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I wasn’t myself last night.”

“Sure you were. That’s who you and Bobby are, now.”

Finally she looked at me.

“I’m old enough to be his mother.”

“His very young mother,” I said.

“I’m forty. I need to get to a pharmacy. I haven’t had to think about birth control for years!”

“Morning after pill?” I queried.

She nodded.

“I thought about that, but never got around to it,” I said.

“But what if... ?”

“I suspect Bobby could take care of it,” I said.

She blanched.

“It’s no different than an abortion,” I said.

“I’ve always come down on the right-to-life side of things,” she said.

“It makes you wonder,” I said. “What would his children be like? Would they have the same genes - or lack of them - that he does?”

“Of course,” she said, her eyes opening wide. “His genome would transfer to them in normal mitosis.”

“So Bobby could make more Bobbys,” I said.

She swallowed.

“Theoretically ... yes,” she whispered.

“And if we do to other people what Noel did to Bobby, they could have ‘enhanced’ children, too?”

“It wouldn’t happen all the time. That might be a recessive gene, that would normally be turned off. That’s what his notes suggest, anyway. I just don’t know. There are so many things I don’t know!” she wailed.

“Hi,” said the boy who had rocked both our worlds. He looked harmless, standing there in a T shirt and shorts. “What’s there for breakfast?”

“Pop tarts,” I said, resisting the sudden urge to push him back into the bedroom and get my bell rung.

“We should really eat better than that,” he said, sounding grumpy.

“You go out and get a job to pay the bills,” I shot at him.

“How do you pay the bills?” asked Melody.

“You don’t want to know,” I said. “It’s not exactly on the up and up.”

“I do want to know. I want to know everything he can do.”

“ATMs have mechanical parts,” I said, reluctantly.

“No!” she said, obviously shocked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m not happy about it, but we had to have money to move around.”

“Wow,” she said, softly.

It was quiet while Bobby ate a Pop Tart.

“I wonder,” said Melody, obviously to herself.

“What do you wonder?” I asked.

“He can cause synapses to widen,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And he can physically manipulate other body parts, too, like blood vessels.”

“Yes.”

“He can obviously tap into what we are thinking in his dreams.”

“So he dreamed last night?”

She nodded, looking distracted. “You’re right. It’s difficult to separate fact from fiction, but it was obvious he could tell what I wanted. It was off a little bit, but he had to have gotten some of his information from my mind. That wasn’t physical. That was in the realm of something we don’t have a name for, unless we put it under the umbrella of ESP.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So what I wonder is, can he sense other things in someone’s body?”

“Such as?”

“What if he followed the optic nerve to the retina. Could he then see what that person was seeing?”

I blinked. This was something I’d never thought of. This was why we needed Melody on our team. Reluctantly I admitted to myself that we needed more than just her and me.

“Why don’t we ask him to try that?” I said.

“I’m right here,” said Bobby, with no little amount of sarcasm in his voice.

“Well, what do you think?” I said.

He shrugged.

“I never know what will happen until I try something,” he said.

“Do you grasp the concept?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You know me pretty well,” I said. “I’ll go in the other room and look at something. You try to use my optic nerve and my brain to see what I’m seeing.”

“It might take a while,” he said. “I’ll have to figure out how to do this.”

“It’s just an experiment,” I said.

“Okay.”

I went to the bedroom they had slept in. It smelled like sex. There was a bathroom that connected to both bedrooms and I went inside it. I sat on the toilet and stared at the shower curtain, which had a repeating pattern of seashells on it.

It was maybe ten minutes later that Melody came and found me.

“Sea shells?” she asked, excitement in her voice.

“Well fuck me to tears,” I sighed.

This changed everything. Again. That seemed to be common when Bobby was involved.

He described it as looking through wavy glass, but felt like it would get better with practice. I had him try seeing with Gator. He said an image was there, but it didn’t mean anything to him. It was blurry. Melody and I went into the other room while he tried it on her. She was looking at me when he yelled. We rushed back, worried that doing this might “break” him in some way.

“I could see your colors!” he gasped.

“Mine?” I asked.

“She was looking at your face. I could see your colors!”

“But how? groaned Melody. You and I can’t see colors!”

“Our eyes can see them,” I said. “Our brains just can’t. It’s like the photographs. The colors are there, but you have to have Bobby’s genes to see them. I mean interpret them. I mean ... I can’t explain it.”

“I get it,” said Melody. “Wow! You do realize this proves that gene therapy would make us like him. We’d be able to see what he sees.”

Once again, this changed everything.

I thought about it from a tactical perspective. We could now see what the enemy could see. We could see reports as they were read, notes as they were made. My mind kept going until I realized that if he was using someone else’s eyes, his own wouldn’t see what was going on around him. Or would they?

There was so much we didn’t know.

While I’d been busy with that, Melody had gone on to seeing if he could hear through someone else’s ears. That turned out to be harder, because there were more parts of the body involved. The physical parts, in the ear itself, were pretty easy, but those vibrations were interpreted by the brain, and it turned out different parts of the brain were involved. He thought he could figure it out, but that it would take time.

It was months later when he got the bright idea to feel the tympanic vibrations in someone else’s ears, and transfer those to his own nervous system, so that his own brain interpreted the sound.

It was like when we made love on both the physical and metaphysical planes. Some of what we felt was real, and some was a transfer of mental data.

It went on like that. Melody had vacation time stacked up, and her boss actually wanted her to use some of it. She took three weeks and lived with us the whole time. Bobby’s “go public” date got pushed back again, this time at Melody’s insistence. She said we were learning too much to have that interrupted by the chaos of dealing with the government. Bobby needed more practice to hone his skills.

It was during that time that she came up with a scheme that would solve our financial situation permanently.

Her idea was that unscrupulous people and criminals stashed money in Swiss bank accounts routinely. If Bobby could be watching through their eyes as they made a transfer, then the secret codes they used would be in our hands. We could take their ill-gotten gains and they wouldn’t even know how it was done.

Of course that sounded great on paper, but the mechanics of it were almost impossible. First you had to decide who was unscrupulous and had a Swiss bank account, or some other off-shore stash of illicit money. Then, you either had to watch through their eyes all day, day after day, or have a suspicion of when they’d make a transaction. If that wasn’t enough, you had to be actually watching when they keyed the computer and put in the account number and password. That might take a whopping ten seconds, and if they blinked, or looked away, you were shit out of luck.

It was a great idea, but I came up with what I thought was a better one. Who moved illicit money around in the U.S.?

Drug dealers. That’s who.

Couriers bring drugs into the country, and take money out. When I was stationed at Bragg I read in the paper several accounts of highway patrolmen stopping a car and finding large amounts of money in it. If we could grab one of those, it wouldn’t set us up for life, but it probably would keep us going for a few years.

The mechanics of that were difficult, too. You had to identify the courier, first of all. But then all you had to do was watch him from afar and wait for him to drive south into Florida. After that, it would be easy pickings.

So how do you identify a drug courier?

While Melody worked with Bobby, I took a little trip down to Florida and went into Special Forces mode. I went to a spy shop and then bought a four motor drone. It took me a week of roaming on high at night, looking for heat signatures on the little thermal camera attached to the drone, but finally I saw a go-fast boat that was acting like it didn’t want anybody to know it was there. It met up with another boat and the bright images of people looked like they were transferring something. The go-fast boat went back the way it had come and the other boat, which didn’t produce nearly as much heat, went to the shore, about a mile north of where I was sitting.

I could see the difference between the temperatures of land and water, but they were too far away to actually fly the drone over there. I hopped in my car and drove north, about a mile. Then I launched the drone again. Somebody had started a fire on the beach. I couldn’t tell if it was the same place as where the boat had come ashore, and I couldn’t see the boat. I could see people, though, and as I ranged up and down the beach, they were the only people I could see.

I parked the drone by the car and then moved toward them.

Finding them was easy. They weren’t trying to be quiet. It occurred to me that the best cover drug traffickers could have was that of normal people having a party on the beach. Thankfully, there was only one car there, a Suburban with blacked-out windows. I say “thankfully” because I’d only bought one magnetic tracker at the spy store.

They never knew I was there. When they left, they were a little dot on the screen of my receiver.

They drove straight to Boston.

I went to Boston, too. It turned out there was only one guy in the car. He went to - I had to laugh - a massage parlor. He came out almost immediately and got in a different car. That was pretty slick. He delivered the car with drugs in it, and they had a money car packed and ready to go.

I needed a picture of the driver. I bought a burner phone and waited. I followed him south, and when he stopped for gas, I did, too. I got his picture when he came out of the bathroom. He was a white guy, with long, greasy hair. He was skinny, but had that wiry look. He also had a shitload of tattoos. I turned away and, when he left I went back to the motel in [redacted].

I’d been gone two weeks and had lived rough.

“Here’s our guy,” I said, handing the burner to Bobby. “He’s headed south on Interstate 95. I left him in Philadelphia. He’s alone, so he’ll probably stop for the night in North or South Carolina, unless he pops some uppers and drives straight through.”

I soaked in the tub and ate way too much takeout before I tumbled into bed.

I had them wake me up four hours later. Bobby woke me up with his hands, stroking my naked body, but I pushed him away. We could do that later.

“I found him,” said Bobby. “He isn’t moving. He hasn’t moved for an hour.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

He already had the atlas out, open to Georgia. He put his finger on Savannah.

“If we’re going to catch him on this trip, we have to move,” I said. “If we miss him, who knows when he’ll make another run.”

We were north of him, but caught up while he was sleeping. Bobby was able to get us to the seedy motel the guy was staying in. I saw the Chevy Malibu Shithead had been driving the last time I saw him. I wished I’d thought ahead and gotten more than one tracker. I was losing my touch.

Melody sat in the driver’s seat while Bobby napped in the back. I was drowsy, and napped, too. I told Melody to wake me up every twenty minutes, mostly to give her something to do so she wouldn’t succumb to fatigue.

Again, we were lucky. Melody woke me up for the third time.

“I think he’s going. A man came out and got in the car.”

I woke Bobby. He rubbed his eyes and his head swiveled.

“Yeah. It’s him,” he said.

Then it was a matter of following him until he got to Florida. When he got off the interstate, onto highway one, we shortened the distance. He stopped at Sebastian and checked into another fleabag motel. I figured he’d do the money transfer in the hours of darkness, but I didn’t want to wait until there would be more people to deal with. I parked across the street, outside a bar, and watched as Shithead came out of the office and moved his car to park in front of a room. He got a duffle bag out of the trunk of the car. It looked heavy. He took it inside with him and closed the door.

I told Bobby to let me know when he thought Shithead was asleep. I don’t know why I didn’t have Bobby just put him to sleep, but that didn’t occur to me.

I took another nap and, two hours later, Bobby said he wasn’t moving around in the room anymore. Fifteen minutes later, Bobby said, “He’s asleep.”

“Let’s go,” I said, starting the car.

I might not have gotten enough trackers, but I had thought of other things. I had a cheap pair of handcuffs with me, and a stuff-bag, designed for camping. It would make a nice hood, though.

I parked next to the Malibu and told Bobby to see if he could manipulate the lock to Shithead’s room while we were still in our car. He’d studied the locks of the places we’d stayed, but it wasn’t smooth sailing. It took fifteen minutes before he said, “I think I unlocked it.”

“Is he still asleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you render him fully unconscious?”

“I don’t know. How?”

“Find the carotid arteries in his neck,” I said. “Pinch them just a little, to restrict the blood flow until it’s just a trickle.”

“Be careful,” said Melody, nervously. She’d been excited, initially, about all the cloak and dagger stuff, but now it was getting real.

Bobby sat, staring.

“I get it,” he said, softly. “When I cut off the blood flow, his colors dampen down to almost nothing.”

“Don’t kill him,” groaned Melody.

“He’s not dead. He’s just not thinking about anything.”

I got out and tried the door as if I lived there. It opened. I moved in swiftly, ready to deal with Shithead if he wasn’t as under as Bobby thought. Shithead was limp on the bed. I bagged his head and cuffed his hands behind his back. I went to the door and motioned for Bobby to join me. Melody knew to stay in the car, ready to start it up at a moment’s notice.

Shithead didn’t even have a change of clothes. All he had was a military duffle bag, stuffed with so much money that I didn’t think I could get one more dollar in it. I had been prepared to interrogate Shithead, to find the money. I was glad I didn’t have to.

I closed the duffle bag and took it to the car.

Shithead could breathe through the bag. I didn’t care how he’d handle the cuffs. He’d picked his profession. Now he could live with the consequences of that.

The first thing we did was buy three smaller bags. I parked at a rest stop and moved the money from one bag to another. I wasn’t the only person who might think of using a tracker. I found their tracker at the bottom of the bag. It was the kind that had double sided tape on it, but the cover had never been peeled off.

I threw the rolled up bag in the trash can while Melody casually walked by an eighteen wheeler and stuck the tracker under the rear end.

Now all I had to do was pray that we or the car hadn’t been caught on a CCTV camera somewhere.

I like to think I’m pretty intelligent. I like to think I plan well. Ripping off the drug courier had gone smooth as silk, after all. Granted, thinking back on it, we might have done things differently. Like having Bobby disable Shithead as soon as he went in his motel room, instead of waiting hours for him to go to sleep. Or, we might have just zapped him as soon as he parked the car and then done to him what we did to Frick and Frack. But it had gone pretty well, and I admit I was smug as we drove away with his money.

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