Hanging Curve by Dani Amore Read Free Book Online Page B

waterways around his home. She was tall, like him, with an athletic frame that now carried some extra weight.
    She turned and faced her brother.
    Wallace looked at her, into her eyes, tried to get a feeling for where she was today. He didn’t like what he saw.
    “This is my house,” she said.
    Mack drained the rest of his coffee and stifled the sigh that nearly escaped his mouth. Adelia caught his eye and he gave her his cup for a refill.
    “Yes, I know,” he said, playing his part in the conversation that he’d played many times before. He knew what was coming before she said it.
    Her eyes squinted and Mack met them directly.
    “Well why are you here?” she said. “And more importantly, who the heck are you?”
    “I’m Wallace, your brother,” he said. “And I live here with you. We share this house.”
    There were several variations on the next part of the conversation. Mack hoped it would be one of the less dramatic avenues.
    “Okay,” she said, and sat down. Mack felt a small amount of relief. Sometimes she denied she had a brother. Sometimes she accused him of being a spy, impersonating a brother she didn’t have. Or a spy from the doctor’s office where no one liked her.
    “Someone was watching me yesterday,” she said.
    Mack nodded. One feature of Korsakoff’s Syndrome was confabulation, a function of the brain that compensated for severe memory loss by creating new, totally fabricated events. Mack sometimes compared it to living with an actor who constantly improvised everything in her life.
    “That’s interesting,” he said. “Hey, I thought I’d ask Adelia to make waffles this morning, Janice. How does that sound?”
    Adelia returned with a fresh cup of coffee and put her hand on Mack’s shoulder.
    “I’ve got fresh blueberries, bought ‘em yesterday at the market,” she said.
    Janice stared at the river. Mack could see reflections of the water in her eyes.
    “I’ll try a waffle,” she said. “It sounds good.”
    “They’re very good,” he said. “There’s nothing better than fresh blueberries and I think we’ve got some real maple syrup somewhere.”
    He stood and moved toward the kitchen when she spoke again.
    “But someone really was watching me,” she said. “A man.”

 
     
    15.
     
The Commissioner
 
    The man strapped into the fishing chair of the seventy-two foot Hatteras sportfishing boat was known to the Internet hacking community as Millipede. He’d earned the nickname from his own spyware program, one of the first of its kind that had an amazing ability to grow millions of “legs” and scurry from one secure server to another, undetected.
    The legend known as Millipede was tied to the fishing chair with thick cords, his eyes were wide, and the strip of duct tape across his mouth held firm against his screams.
    The man who called himself The Commissioner looked at his captive. He was amused by Millipede (whose real name he knew to be Keith Goulet) because even though the man was in his forties, he dressed like a high school burnout; he had on dirty black pants and a stained Metallica t-shirt. He was barefoot.
    They were just off the coast of California. The Commissioner turned from the bound hacker and poured buckets of blood and fish guts over the side of the boat into the sapphire blue of the ocean.
    Already, he had seen at least one Great White shark cruise by.
    “Carcharodon carcharias,” he said over his shoulder. “Very impressive, aren’t they?”
    The hacker lunged against his restraints and screamed into the tape which turned his terror into a series of muffled gibberish.
    The Commissioner ignored him and tossed the last of the bloody chum into the water. Something in the churning water thrashed and foam sprayed the side of the boat.
    The Commissioner walked into the boat’s forward cabin and returned with a small medical kit. He opened it and took out a scalpel. The sunlight caught the knife’s laser sharp edge and flashed in the lenses of his