Infinity + One

Anger flickered over the detective’s face at Finn’s insolence.

“So you’re telling me that you just remembered all these numbers?

“I’m good with numbers.”

The memory of the last time he’d said that very same line echoed in his head. He’d told Cavaro as much before he’d been beaten up and tattooed with playing cards. He hoped the result here would be different. The detective turned pages again.

“You pulled over on February 28th to assist a motorist with the West Virginia license plate 5BI-662.” Detective Kelly raised his eyes from the page and shook his head like it was highly doubtful.

“That’s right.”

“You wanna explain to me how you remember that little detail?”

“It’s a game I play. I convert letters to their corresponding alphabetical number. So 5BI would be 529. 529 is a perfect square. So is 662. So the license plate had two perfect squares.” Finn shrugged. “That’s how I remembered it.”

“So why didn’t you just remember the 529 662 part? How could you remember which numbers were changed from letters? How did you remember 5BI?”

It wasn’t a bad question, and Finn could have told him then that he had a photographic memory—which he did when it came to anything numerically related, but instead he pointed to the page.

“The guy driving the maroon van was named Bill Isakson—BI. And Bonnie was the one looking for license plates from different states. She had a song for every state. She’d been looking for West Virginia.”

“Okay. Fine. Two perfect squares and a guy named Bill Isakson.”

“It wasn’t his car. It was his daughter’s car. But it shouldn’t take too much digging to verify now that you have the license plate to work with.”

“And you two just made a habit of helping stranded motorists and hitchhikers around every turn? A couple of do-gooders?”

“I wouldn’t have helped any of them. Bonnie’s the do-gooder,” Finn answered.

“Oh, I see. And you just wanted to do Bonnie?” the detective asked.

Finn felt his anger whiz and ricochet around in his head, like he’d released an untied balloon. He took several deep breaths, letting the anger expend itself. Then he looked at the smirking detective and waited. He knew all cops weren’t dicks. But this one was trying to ruffle him. He knew the game. When he didn’t comment, the detective moved on.

“I actually called this Shayna Harris you refer to. She hasn’t returned my call. You say she gave you her number in case you were ever in need of anything. And you memorized it. Kind of creepy, Mr. Clyde. Let me guess, another perfect square?”

“No. Her phone number is prime.”

“Prime?”

“A prime number. You know. Only divisible by itself and one?”

“And her phone number is a prime?”

“Yes. 3,541,541 is a prime number.”

The detective read the number from the sheet. “704-354-1541. How did you remember the area code?”

“It’s three digits. It wasn’t especially hard to remember.” The microwave clock at Shayna’s house had said 7:04 when he’d walked through the kitchen to retrieve the boots she’d given him and found her thank you note with her number inside propped against the laces. He’d left Cincinnati in pursuit of Bonnie and his orange Blazer that evening at 7:04 pm, according to the clock in his rental car.

704 had been the number for the day. He usually discovered there was one—a number that kept reappearing everywhere he looked. It had carried over into the next day too, and the next. He’d spent seventy dollars and four cents filling up Bear’s car and buying two sub sandwiches and several bottles of water at the convenience store in Pacific. William’s initials, G.O.D, were also 704—G is the seventh letter of the alphabet, D is the fourth. And finally, 704 was their room number at the Bordeaux Hotel, which he’d considered a good omen.

“I checked. 704 is a North Carolina area code.” The detective threw this irrelevant piece of information out like he was really onto something.

“Okay.”

“But you say Shayna Harris lives in Portsmouth, Ohio.”

“She does. You’ll have to ask Shayna about her phone number, but her husband’s parents live in North Carolina.”

The detective harrumphed and turned back to the beginning.

“The old man who pulled your car out of the ditch in Ohio . . .”

“His license was CAD 159,” Finn said, not waiting for the detective to finish the question. “Change the letters to numbers and you have 3.14159—the first six digits of pi.”

“The deputy who saw you running in Freedom and asked for your name?”

“His badge number was 112—three consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence. The clock on his dash said 11:23—four consecutive numbers in the sequence.”

One by one, they went through the numbers on Finn’s statement, exit numbers and mile markers and license plates and road signs—numbers that Finn hadn’t consciously tried to remember, but numbers that might save him. Again. The detective grew more and more astonished and less and less skeptical as they talked, until all at once, he stood from the table and walked out of the room without a word, Finn’s twenty page statement in his hands. A few minutes later, Finn was escorted back to his cell where he waited once more, trying not to contemplate the number of times he’d thought about Bonnie and the infinite ways that he missed her.