Free Memory Man by David Baldacci Page A

are still one big dude. Leopold wouldn’t have had a chance.”
    “You can’t arrest someone for thinking about committing a crime.”
    “No, and sometimes that’s more a curse than a blessing.”
    “So why the riot act with the cops and Brimmer here?”
    “I’m the captain, but I have bosses too.”
    “So this was a CYA visit?”
    Miller surged to his feet and adjusted his tie, sliding the knot back up to his Adam’s apple.
    Decker looked up at him, the migraine starting to beat against all sides of his brain. He half closed his eyes to keep out even the dim light that felt like a million incandescent bulbs. “So what are you going to do?”
    “With you, nothing. Now Leopold will be arraigned based on his confession. After that we either confirm his story or we prove it false. I’ll seriously consider all that you’ve told me. At the end of the investigation he either stays locked up, goes to trial or cops a plea, or he goes free.”
    “And if someone got him to do this?”
    “Might give us an opportunity. I’m sure you thought of that already.”
    “Will you let me know what you decide with Leopold?”
    “You’re no longer on the force. I wish you were, but you’re not.”
    “It was the choice I had to make at the time.”
    Miller rubbed his nose and buttoned his jacket. “Well, different times call for different choices.”
    He started to leave but turned back. He held up one finger. “Today was your freebie, Amos. You only get one, so you have none left. Don’t forget that. And forget Sebastian Leopold is even on the same planet as you. We’ll take it from here. You screw me over on that, I’m no longer your ally. I will crucify you. Have a good one.”
    Amos Decker sat there for a minute and then rushed back to his room, locked the door, closed all the curtains, lay on the bed with the pillow over his face to block out all the remaining light, and succumbed to the beast devouring his vastly altered mind.

Chapter
    11
    T HE HEAVY CLOUDS ate away at the fragile sky until there was no significant light left, although the sun was up there somewhere, diminished and vacant. It was akin to staring at a forty-watt light bulb while wearing a gauzy blindfold. For Decker, who was deeply influenced by color in everything, it seemed the only one left in the world right now was gray.
    He had his hands in his pockets as the chilly wind bit into him. He had recovered from the migraine, gone to a local Wendy’s, and gulped down a Coke, letting the sugar drain the last vestiges of the discomfort away—an acid wash on dreary, stained metal—and allowing the sweat to dry off his pores. He had then bused back downtown and retrieved his gun and clothes from the trash can. Fortunately, they had not been discovered. He could not afford to lose his only other set of work clothes any more than he could his only weapon.
    Now he was standing there in his old clothes, braced against a stiff wind and staring over at Mansfield High. It had been built, along with thousands of other schools across the country, in a postwar construction boom. The birth rate had spiked in 1946 and those kids would need to go to high school at some point. That’s what being away from home fighting a war for four years did to a man. It made him horny as hell. The wives of America’s returning veterans probably hadn’t slept for an entire year.
    Mansfield was three stories high, all brick, and time had not been kind to it. Windows were boarded up or broken. Mortar had leached out from the neat lines around the rectangular bricks and mottled the school’s façade like meaningless graffiti. The grounds were full of chickweed and dirt patches, the asphalt cracked and the chain-link fences mangled, with gates hanging off twisted, rusted hinges. The place now looked more like an abandoned state mental asylum than a high school.
    It had been built principally as a school for children of the military personnel who worked at the Army base right next