Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

him but he pushed me away. He kept banging his head against the window. A small smear of blood appeared on the glass.
    Dad swung the car over onto the shoulder. Mom jumped out, nearly losing her footing on the gravel, and opened the back door. She wrapped her arms around my brother, pulling his bruised and bloodied head to her breast.
    “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re going to take 99. We’re going to go home just the way you said.”
    * * *
    I didn’t like going into Thomas’s room. Entering his domain made me uncomfortable in the same way the decorated hall did, only more so. Maps were stuck to the wall everywhere and scattered across the floor. The one set of bookshelves spilled over with various editions of atlases, old AAA TripTiks with the spiral binding (did anyone use those anymore?), large cardboard tubes with maps Thomas had ordered off the Internet, hundreds of printouts of maps he’d studied online. Satellite shots of cities I couldn’t instantly recognize.
    It was hard to find the single bed pushed up against one wall, it was so buried with paper. It was like vandals had gone on a rampage at the National Geographic headquarters. I wondered how many fire codes were being violated. Between this room and the map-plastered hall, all someone had to do was wander through with a lit candle and this place would go up in smoke in seconds.
    I seriously had to think about that.
    Thomas was seated at his computer. He had one keyboard and three flat-screen monitors arrayed in front of him, each showing a different browser. On the screens were three images of the same street—left, middle, and right-side views. At the top of each screen was the Web site address:
whirl360.com.
    I had to admit, it was a pretty amazing Web site. Ten years ago I couldn’t have imagined anything like this.
    Once you were there, you basically had the world at your fingertips. You picked a spot anywhere on the globe and initially viewed the location from above, either in a traditional map form, or in satellite mode, as though you were suspended in the sky. You could zero in right down to the roof vents on the skyscrapers.
    Cool enough.
    But it got so much better.
    You could click on a specific street, and see it. Really
see
it. Like you were standing there, right in the middle of it. With each click of the mouse you progressed several yards ahead. When you clicked and held, you could move to the left or right, or all the way around for a 360-degree view. If something in a store window or a restaurant caught your eye, you could zoom in on it. Read the daily special—“Liver and onions $5.99”—if you wanted.
    It was the kind of site I found myself on occasionally. The year before, on a trip to Toronto, I’d visited a friend from my college days who lived just south of Queen Street in the Beach, a trendy neighborhood in the city’s east end. In his e-mail, he told me to come by the house; then we’d head to an Italian restaurant that was only a short walk away.
    I went on Whirl360, did the walk from his place up to Queen, then explored a couple of blocks in each direction. Only found two restaurants. I looked them up online, found the one billing itself as Italian, studied their online menu, and knew before I got there I was going to have the lobster ravioli.
    So I could appreciate the fascination, understand how for someone like Thomas, the arrival of this kind of technology was a dream come true. Like a
Star Trek
fan waking up one morning to find out he was actually living on the USS
Enterprise
.
    The street Thomas was currently fixated on was unknown to me. It was narrow, just enough room for one lane of traffic, with cars parallel parked down the right side. I was guessing maybe someplace in Europe.
    I set the ice cream next to the phone. Thomas had his own line up here that our parents had put in back when Internet hookup was over the phone. Thomas spent so much time on the Net that our parents were missing calls and couldn’t place any, so installing a second line meant Thomas could be on as long as he wanted. Now, with Wi-Fi in the house, Thomas didn’t have much need for the phone, and about the only calls he got were from telemarketers.
    He glanced at the ice cream and said, “No chocolate sauce?”
    “We’re out,” I said. I hadn’t actually looked. “Where’s this?”
    “Salem Street.”
    “Salem Street where?”
    “Boston. In the North End.”
    “Oh, okay, yeah, of course. I thought you were