The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Jack saw me on the way out of the courtroom. He ignored me. I didn’t try to talk to him. I’m not sure why. Certainly, it didn’t make National Data any happier. Instead, I interviewed the several disgruntled psychiatrists who would have been substantially well paid to get on the stand had the defense not caved. It wasn’t a total loss. I managed to cause an argument between the Dean of Harvard Law School and the Grid Systems Legal Affairs Correspondent. It made good coverage and when the Dean took a swing at the Correspondent I was there with the National Data cams. It made me think of Sam. The Dean hit like a girl.

Jack was transported to Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge by the end of August. I spent a day or so setting up small segments for National Data and then the contract was finished. I didn’t see Sam again. I suppose he took his little floatplane back to some tiny lake deep in the heart of Beck-Lewis.

For one reason or another, I didn’t go back to New York right away. Instead, I caught a plane over to Forsyth.

Full Moon Tours operated out of an old and nearly abandoned strip mall. Wolf Pack Observation was only one of its many tourist packages. I wandered around in the office, checked out the brochures, the posters and the rough log walls and the soundproofed ceiling. Fishing trips, hiking trips, elk hunts-all in Beck-Lewis. I wondered if Sam knew about these people.

A pretty young woman with perky breasts worked the counter. She smiled radiantly at me and I smiled back. It wasn’t hard to smile at her; she reminded me of Gina.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Not really. I just stopped in. What about this one?” The brochure had a close-up picture of Jack and his wolves on the cover.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she apologized. “We don’t do that tour anymore.”

“Really?” I asked. “How come?”

“It was too hard to protect the clients from the wolves.” She looked at the brochure. “I’m sure we’ll offer something like it next year. We just have to get the bugs out of it.”

“Ah.” I nodded and left.

Deer Lodge was three hundred and fifty miles away and I suppose somewhere in my mind I was always planning to get there. Not that a detour to Forsyth would necessarily indicate that. I had no reason to go. Jack had nothing left I could use. The contract with National Data was over. Still, a few days later I stopped at the Montana State Prison. It had been a week since Jack had been brought here. I found Jack in the prison hospital.

I met Jack in the day room. He had the orange wrist brace of a possible violent offender, universal in this sort of facility. A sort of motion-activated tazer. I had done a story about brace abuse two years before. The guards at Riker’s Island had developed the nasty habit of tuning the braces down for inmates they didn’t like. Men were forced to stand like statues to keep from getting tazed.

Jack was sitting in an old plastic chair watching the trees outside. He turned slightly as I approached him.

I sat down beside him and looked at him. They had shaved him and the pigment of his skin was blotchy. His blue eyes were rimmed with red and he was gaunt and haggard and his hands shook. “You look like hell.”

He laughed shortly. “They tried to drug me the first couple of days I was here because I’m so much stronger than the other inmates. But the modifications interfered and messed me up. Now, I wear this.” He held up the brace. He turned back to the window.

I let the silence go on for a bit. “I wasn’t sure you would see me.”

He shrugged. “Why not? What could you do to me now?”

I ignored that. “You’re not a wolf anymore.”

“I was never a wolf.”

“Yes you were.”

He looked at me.

I spread my hands. “Not in shape, of course. But you had left people behind. You didn’t start coming back to civilization until I threatened you. Until you had something to lose.”

He watched me a moment, then looked back outside. “Autumn’s coming.”

“It does that.”

He grunted and didn’t speak.

Finally, I asked: “Why did you do it?”

“What?”

“Kill Bernard.”

Jack held up his hands. “What else could I do? He killed Raksha’s pup. Raksha would have killed him if I hadn’t killed him first. Then, she would have been destroyed. Better me than her.” He turned back to the window.

“You could have gotten off completely,” I said. “Did you know that?”

He shrugged.

“Was it Warburg’s idea?” I looked around the room, the antiseptic white and beige of the walls. Outside were the guards and the exercise field and the cells. “You can appeal. You can say you were given inadequate counsel. You were given inadequate counsel. That’s absolutely true. She should never have taken the deal. You could have been on your way back to Beck-Lewis that afternoon.”

“It wasn’t Warburg’s idea,” he said softly. “It was mine. All of this was my fault.” He looked up at me for a long time, shook his head and turned away.

And I understood.