Time passed and I spun myself up more and more. I couldn't stop myself from shuffling and reshuffling the cards in my head, dealing hand after mental hand of solitaire in my mind’s eye.
The Driver was the only thing I needed to pay attention to right now. Ding an Sich, baby: What was that thing in itself?
How did the he think? What drove his twisted plans? I kept trying to put myself in his shoes but they sure weren’t a comfortable fit. He was arrogant and impulsive, utterly dangerous and seemingly close to some kind of final frenzy – but he could be manipulated and somewhat predicted.
Out of the people I knew, which one was he? Hell, did I even know him? Changing his voice might’ve just been him having fun, deliberately feeding me a red herring.
No, that was bullshit. Ockham’s Razor had to be kept in play. Keep it simple, Markus – you knew the Driver, all right.
What was Rick Hoffman’s place in all this? Was he the Driver? What was going on behind that blank Noh-mask face of his right now?
Or was it Killer Reese? And just how did that rogue cop’s actions fit into the larger campaign? Kendra had loved him, but so what? Either she’d understand what I was doing or forget her.
Someone with influence was protecting the Driver, that was for sure. What would make law enforcement shield a serial killer, make them willing to frame me and let him keep on doing his thing? Was the whole department in on it, or just enough to muster a hillbilly death squad with the other Stagger Bay police unable to break the rogue cops open? They had that 911 dispatcher at least.
And how did Stagger Bay herself feel about so many law-abiding white citizens disappearing? Exactly how many were part of it? Was it pretty much the whole town – or just enough to make it fly, with all the rest too scared to do anything about it, or paying with their lives if they were reckless enough to stand up? A lot of these good people here were making healthy construction-job wages off all the new development coming in. They had enough at stake it’d be easy for them to put the blinders on and live tunnel-vision lives.
This was when it really came home that my big brother was gone forever. Karl would be calming me right now, watching my back while I prepped my head for the upcoming fracas, maybe cracking one of his many dorky jokes to break the tension.
Despite his twitchiness and his many flaws, he’d always tried to be the careful one; the complement to my wrecking-ball nature. Me, I’d always been more hey-diddle diddle, right up the middle, come right at you and say hi as it were.
Karl had always forced himself to sniff at our scores like a leopard examining possibly poisoned bait. Still, it had been easy enough for them to make him die alone with no one to notice or care except Sam and I.
As for me? I figured I was a little too high profile right at the moment for them to feel comfortable about taking me out quite yet, unless I really pushed them. Heck, I’d given them every reason to feel safe; they had to be thinking I was no threat at all.
I was a buffoon; a cage-rattling blowhard that woofed on TV, made a few soapbox speeches to curry favor with Stagger Bay’s underbelly, and talked some inconsequential smack to their faces. After it blew up on me with little Mai, I know they had to have been laughing their asses off – hell, I would have mocked me if I was them.
When I made my move, its speed and suddenness after my previous inactivity would be doubly appalling to them. Underestimate me some more, fools – it felt good they did so.
‘Unrealistic expectations,’ Sam had said. But wasn’t that what life was all about? Stumbling along, doing our best to hypnotize ourselves into believing we could make some kind of difference?