Infinite(34)

And then there was nothing. No city. No Chicago.

Nothing at all.





CHAPTER 14

“Hey, buddy.”

I heard the words through a fog in my head, but I didn’t want to wake up. I was caught in a dream.

“Hey, buddy, come on, get up. You can’t sleep here.”

My eyes blinked open slowly, and I tried to focus. Gradually, my senses caught up with my mind. I lay on my back, outside, with the summer sun high in the sky. Somewhere close by, I heard the screech of seagulls and a clamor of children’s voices. The air around me had a strange, sick-sweet smell of body odor and cotton candy. As I turned my head and my face got close to my clothes, I realized that the source of the body odor was probably me.

A man leaned over me, blocking out part of the sky. “Up, up. Come on, let’s go.”

I pushed my stiff limbs until I was sitting up, fighting off a wave of dizziness. My muscles ached, as if I’d been motionless for hours. I winced as I massaged my neck, and I looked around with a terrible feeling of disappointment. Nothing around me had changed. I was still on the same bench at Navy Pier.

Even worse, the man standing in front of me was a Chicago police officer. He was medium height and stout, with wiry red hair and florid cheeks. “You got some ID, buddy?”

My mouth felt gritty. I tried to talk through the dryness. “Um, yeah. Yeah, sure.”

I dug around in my pockets and found my wallet, and rather than fumbling for my driver’s license, I simply handed him the whole thing. He opened it, and I tensed as he read my name. I didn’t know if the search for Dylan Moran had made its way to every street cop yet.

The police officer made no effort to pull his gun or his handcuffs. His mouth mushed into a frown as he tried to make sense of me. I probably had the hygiene of a vagrant, but my wallet contained the identification and credit cards of a downtown professional. “Dylan Moran? Is that you?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“You okay, Mr. Moran? You don’t look like you’re having a good day.”

“You’re right. I’m not.”

“The thing is, parents don’t like to see homeless people sleeping on benches when their kids are around here. You made them nervous. A couple folks thought you were dead.”

I tried to smile. “I’m not dead.”

“You need help or anything? A doctor?”

“No, thanks. It’s just the aftereffects of a rowdy office party, I guess. I don’t remember a lot of it.”

“Well, next time you want to tie one on, party on the buddy system, okay? You get drunk, make sure somebody knows where you are. When you crash out on a bench down here, you’re likely to get rolled, know what I mean?”

“I do. Thank you, Officer. I’ll be heading home now.”

“Good plan. A shower might not be the worst thing, either.”

“Yeah.”

I got to my feet, wobbling as I did, and offered the cop a weak smile. I wasn’t really ready to move, and I didn’t know where to go, but I didn’t want to linger in case he got the idea of calling in my name and having it bounce back with a red flag. A few tourists on the pier looked at me curiously. Suspicious mothers tugged their children a little closer. I tightened my tie for whatever good it did, wiped some of the dirt off my sleeves and pants, and headed toward the city. When I checked my watch, I saw that it was already past noon. Several hours had passed since my early-morning rendezvous with Eve Brier.

As far as I could tell, having Eve inject me with her hallucinatory drugs had accomplished nothing, other than giving me a weird dream and a splitting headache. I didn’t know why I’d expected anything else. In the harsh light of day, the idea of jumping between worlds inside my head sounded like what it was. Impossible. And yet if I was wrong about my doppelg?nger, I also couldn’t explain the murders of Scotty Ryan and four innocent women.

Meanwhile, Eve herself was nowhere to be found. She’d injected me and then left me alone, which made me wonder if she’d hoped that I would never awaken. I dug out my phone and dialed her number. I wanted to tell her I was still here, still in trouble. However, the call didn’t go through. I didn’t get her voice mail; instead, a recording told me that the number was out of service.

Eve had disconnected her phone.

Her message couldn’t be more obvious: she didn’t want me anywhere near her.

When I got to the end of Navy Pier, I stayed by the water, heading toward the downtown skyline. The trouble was, I didn’t know what to do when I got there. Wherever I went, the police would be looking for me. A part of me thought about turning myself in, but I had no idea what to tell them. I had no way to prove that I wasn’t what they thought I was.

A killer.

As I stared out at the water, debating my next move, my phone rang in my hand. When I checked, I saw Edgar’s name on the caller ID. I answered the phone hesitantly—Edgar almost never called me—but I heard my grandfather’s unmistakably raspy voice on the other end.

“Hey, where are you?” he demanded.

“Why, what do you need, Edgar?”

“I’m here at the Art Institute. Where are you?”

“Edgar, we just did that yesterday. We meet on Thursdays, remember?”

“It is Thursday.”