Revenant

Chapter 23

I could have taken a cab back to my place, but I opted to walk in that direction for a bit. It was a nice enough day outside, but mostly I just wanted some time to ponder, and I do some of my best pondering while walking around.

For the most part, I didn't really know what to think about my conversation with Atticus. The guy was smart, quite obviously, but there were also times he seemed crazier than a sack of ferrets at a chicken barbecue. I'd never heard of any condition that even remotely resembled the one he described, although how he explained it did seem to make some small measure of sense. Therapists prescribed drugs for schizophrenia in order to balance them out and help them make sense of the world. Ethanol was a depressant, and had very tangible effects on the brain, so maybe this was merely an extreme case of the same sort of thing.

Of course, his behavior could still be some sort of act. He'd seemingly pulled information about me out of thin air like he some sort of mystic, and if I didn't wish to entertain the possibility that things like augury and divination were actually possible, then I was forced to assume he'd possessed information about me beforehand. And of course, if he'd known about me and what I was doing there, then there was a very good chance he'd been one of the guys on Diavolo's list of 'experts'. But then again, if that were the case, he'd already consulted with Diavolo and handed over all the stuff he knew, which meant I probably already had it. So why on earth did I offer him money to translate some passages from a musty, dusty book for me?

And why did it feel like that information was important, somehow?

Well, one possible answer was fairly obvious - I was going crazy.

Sometimes, trusting your instincts on something is a decidedly difficult thing to do, especially if you're ending your thoughts with phrases like 'Am I crazy?'

Regardless, what I needed to do right now was to re-focus on the task at hand. I'd wanted some sort of expert on the supernatural that I could consult, I'd come down here, and now I had one. The information he was getting me could be helpful, or it could be useless, but neither outcome negated the fact that I'd still need some sort of plan when it came to dealing with Stevie. What sort of notions had I been toying with prior to coming out here again?

An explosion. That's what it was. I wasn't exactly happy with the notion of something big and attention-grabbing like that, which might have explained why I'd come out to Atticus's bookstore today. I didn't really enjoy doing stuff that gets noticed, or ends up on the nightly news. Forensic science has come a very long ways these past thirty years or so, and tricky cases no longer required a Sherlock Holmes type to swoop in and find the answers. Nowadays, a case could be broken by a nineteen-year-old intern at the police lab who knew nothing more than which buttons to press on a spectrometer.

So, if Stevie was going to meet his untimely end via an explosion, there were several things I had to sort out before actually figuring out how I would make it happen. The first thing to consider was the size of the explosion I wanted.

A detonation doesn't need to be very big or impressive in order to do its job. An explosive shock front ripping through air faster than the speed of sound is usually enough to ruin anyone's day, no matter how small the explosive is. The CIA was always increasing their 'covert assassination' arsenal with things like cellphone bombs and exploding cigars, and neither of those things are very big. Of course, it doesn't take much Semtex to cause the top half of your skull to part company with the rest of you . . .

That wasn't what I wanted, however. I needed this guy in pieces. Once that was done, I could put all of this strange crap behind me and get on with my life. So, unfortunately, the explosion I required was likely going to attract a bit of attention.