Unravelling

Jared’s unrestrained laughter drowns out what anyone else might be saying, and I’m glad.

I see those images of myself playing out again, watching my life pass me by. As if dying and then being resurrected weren’t enough—as if anything could become more interesting than that.

“Just not sure if interesting will be a good or a bad thing, huh?” Alex asks when he comes through the kitchen. He hands me the dirty dishes and opens the cabinet to grab some Tupperware. Struz did order the left side of the menu, and we’ll be eating Chinese for the next few days.

“I was dead, Alex,” I repeat, because we’ve had this conversation already. At least six times. In the hospital. Whenever Alex made it into my room without Jared or Nick.

“J,” Alex whispers, his hand falling on my arm, “I can’t imagine all the shit you’re feeling, but come on—you got hit by a truck, you lost consciousness, and you had seizures in the hospital.”

“One seizure.”

He pulls his hand back. “It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for your mind to make something up. Besides, when’s the last time Ben Michaels and Elijah Palma even came to the beach?”

I can’t argue with that. I’m at the beach almost every day, and I can’t remember ever seeing them. Not that I would have been looking, though.

Logically, I know he’s right. I’ve heard the Near-Death Experience stories. People seeing angels, tunnels of light, balls of energy, even God. I don’t believe in that. I believe the mind is a powerful thing, and I believe people see what they want to see.

But why did I see Ben Michaels?

“J, did you hear what I said?”

“Hmm?”

Alex glances at the door to the dining room and lowers his voice as he sits on top of the counter and leans over my shoulder. “We should be asking about John Doe, his truck, and where the hell it came from.”

I found out some of the details at the hospital. After hitting me—if it even did—the truck crashed into an embankment and the driver—still unidentified, since the license in his wallet was a fake—died on impact.

Based on the skid marks and the collision, they’re betting he was flying down the hill at more than eighty miles an hour. It’s no wonder I didn’t see the truck coming.

But I still feel like an imposter—alive, when he’s not.

“Are you listening to me?”

“What? Sorry.” I turn off the water and dry my hands, making an attempt to give Alex my full attention.

“I was saying . . .” He draws it out, and I wave my hand to hurry him along. “I found out the truck that hit you, there’s no record of it. They couldn’t pull up the plates or the guy’s registration in the system—no record of any of them.”

“Wait, what was the fake name?”

Alex balks. “Does it matter?”

I don’t have a reason that I can explain. But it does matter.

“Don’t obsess over the unimportant stuff,” Alex says, and I nod because the last thing I want to do is get into an argument about my tendency to overanalyze and the way it drives Alex crazy. “Nothing he had on him matched anything in the DMV database.”

“What, so they’re all fake?”

Alex shrugs. “I don’t know. I only half heard the conversation your dad was having with the cops afterward, but when they ran the VIN and even the parts for the truck, nada.”

“That’s impossible. Even if somebody made fake plates and IDs—even if they stole parts from several trucks, the model numbers would still register. They’d just register to different vehicles.” I shake my head. “Who would go to the trouble for an old Toyota?”

“That’s the kicker,” Alex says, folding his arms across his chest and leaning against the kitchen counter. When he does that, he looks weirdly like my dad. “It’s not a Toyota.”

“Please, are we really going to have an argument about cars again? I thought we agreed you’d stick to calc and physics and leave practical knowledge to me.”

He smiles but doesn’t say anything. He knows something I don’t. And he’s dying to share. I wave for him to continue.

“The frame of the truck is the same design as a ’79 Toyota, but the engine and the vehicle paperwork, even the logo are all really different. It’s actually a 1997 Velociadad.”

“A what?” I turn back to the dishwasher. “I’ve never even heard of a car company anywhere in the world by that name.”

“Which is probably why I heard your dad ask if the truck appeared out of thin air,” Alex says.

I’m not even sure what I can say about that—what can anyone?

Alex is right, of course. This is more important than whether Ben Michaels resurrected me or I hallucinated it. This is real, and my dad is investigating it. That automatically gives it more urgency. It’s something I can handle now.

“Could someone be running a chop shop?” Alex asks. “Stealing vehicles, repackaging and reselling them as something else?”

“It’s possible, but why bother with all the hassle?”

Alex just shrugs and doesn’t say anything else, which means we’ve both reached our limit. Because I’m still pissed that he doesn’t believe that I died, I add, “No theories? C’mon, they don’t let just anyone into West Point.”

“Don’t say that out loud.” Alex looks around shiftily.

I roll my eyes. “Your mother hasn’t bugged my house as far as I know.”

“Your dad thinks I’ll be able to get in.” Of course Alex will get in. He has a 4.6 GPA and he’s bilingual. And my dad will write him a recommendation, since he went to West Point and graduated at the top of his class. Which is one of the reasons Alex wants to go.

Alex has gone silent, staring into space with his jaw set. I feel bad now for making him think about all the drama he’ll have to deal with when he finally admits to his mother he’s not going to graduate early and go to Stanford, thereby deviating from the life plan she’s been outlining for him since he was conceived.

“So which one of the boxes do you think has stuff about the truck in it?” I ask, because getting back to the investigation will be the only way to make him feel better—and because I know my dad has info about the truck. It doesn’t matter that the FBI doesn’t allow you to investigate anything that happens to you or your family or even people you know. My dad wouldn’t let a truck just appear out of thin air and hit me without investigating it.

“When I helped Jared bring them into the office, I set the lightest box in the back corner, farthest from his desk.” He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. We’ve been spying on my dad and comparing notes about his cases practically forever. We’re nerds like that.

hen my cell phone beeps in the middle of the night, I almost say Whatever and go back to sleep. A stolen Toyota—or whatever it is—is hardly worth waking up to check out.

Except for the fact that the driver is dead, when it should have been me.

I roll out of bed and fumble into the hallway. We’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve done the get-up-in-the-middle-ofthe-night stunt enough that I don’t need to turn on the lights. But I curse silently as I head down the stairs and see the sliver of light coming from my dad’s study. Either he and poor Struz are still working, or he’s fallen asleep at his desk.

I imagine it’s this way for all law-enforcement agents—long hours, sleepless nights, obsessive attention to detail, poring over case files. Every FBI agent I know has at least two cases they’ll never forget and never stop thinking about, investigations they’ll carry with them in the back of their minds always, for their entire lives. The one that went right. And the one that went wrong.

For my dad, the case that went right was the one that made his career.

It was more than ten years ago. It was his first case with Struz, who was a junior analyst at the time. I was too young to remember any of the details now, except the ones I heard repeated whenever he relived the story.

Ten Russian spies were discovered and arrested in Temecula, of all places. One was a Fox News reporter, popular with the public and, of course, beautiful. She ended up getting caught in a trap an undercover FBI agent set for her, and as a result all ten of them—and some guy bankrolling them in Budapest—went down. The undercover agent? My dad.