“No.” I closed my eyes.
“Even if they deserve it?”
He had me there. “Well . . . yeah, the son of a bitch definitely did. There’s no denying that. But I don’t want you getting hurt in the process.”
“It doesn’t hurt me.” He sounded so certain, but I remembered just last night how he’d told me he and the others at the Institute couldn’t do anything good and how in the morning he expected me to discard him as tainted and leave him behind.
I rolled down the window an inch and let the cold air play over my face. I was getting tired, damn tired, and the twilight chill would help keep me awake. “Funny. You didn’t seem so sure of that when those assholes had you trapped in the bathroom.”
“That’s different.”
I opened my eyes the better to see in his face exactly what it was he was trying to say. “How so?”
“He hurts kids. Normal kids,” he amended. “Kids who can’t protect themselves.”
“Yeah, they can’t protect themselves like you can, but that doesn’t mean you’re not normal.” He rolled a darkly disbelieving eye in my direction but didn’t comment. “But that’s not what I’m talking about,” I added. “I want to know why you’d do something for faceless strangers that you won’t do for yourself.” It wasn’t as if there was much he could’ve done in the face of two guns, but even if the men had been unarmed, I still doubted he would’ve “laid on the hands,” so to speak. I’d seen his face. He wouldn’t have done it . . . not then anyway.
He shrugged with discomfort that wasn’t as concealed as he thought, but I didn’t let it go at that. “Misha. Give. Why wouldn’t you protect yourself? You wouldn’t have to kill, God no. But you could give a little of what you gave to the doc. So why not?” I could understand his never wanting to use what he had in him. I might think it unrealistic, but I would understand. To use it for others and not himself, though, that I couldn’t.
There was the squirt of cleaner on the windshield and the swish of wipers. He watched them with fascination before reluctantly bowing to the inevitable. “Because”—he paused—“because I’m beginning to wonder if I don’t belong in a cage after all.”
That woke me up quickly and thoroughly. Glaring, I reached over and thwapped him lightly in the back of the head. Startled, he looked over at me with wide eyes. “Say something stupid like that again and you’ll never see an empty calorie again as long as you live. No cakes, no candy bars, nothing. You’ll be cut off.”
He was smoothing the back of his hair as I talked and entertaining the thought of giving me a dirty look. I could see it as clear as day. “Don’t bother,” I warned. “Bottom line, kid. You don’t belong in a cage. No one but no one is going to say that, not even you. Got it?”
“Guess I had better, hadn’t I?” he answered with what seemed to be only mild irritation. After a few minutes of the only sound being the tires on the pavement, he said quietly, “I wouldn’t have given up. I wouldn’t have let them take me without a fight.” The dusky purple light filled the car, making him increasingly hard to see . . . as if he were fading away. “I just don’t know if I could hold that part of myself back once I started to use it in a situation like that. All the adrenaline. Fighting for my life.” I thought I saw his face work in the darkness. “I won’t risk killing again. I can’t. I still remember how it felt . . . with that man’s heart beneath my hand. How it pounded; then the muscle melted like wax. I could feel it scream and die even through his chest.” He stopped, and I wasn’t sorry he did. Hearing that wasn’t doing either of us any good right now. There would be time to talk about it later. When we were free and safe, we’d talk about a thousand things until he was at peace with every one of them.
“Then you don’t have to.” End of story. “Leave the violence to me, Misha. I’m already used to it.”
He had something to say about that; I didn’t have to see him to know the wheels were spinning in his head. But winter air and determination aside, I dozed off before he was able to get the words out. Against a concussion and a pain pill, consciousness was a lost cause. Michael woke me up when we stopped at a gas station and I cleaned up as best I could in the grubby bathroom. The paper towel dispenser was empty and I scrubbed away dried blood with wet toilet paper. There wasn’t much I could do about what was matted in my hair, but hopefully I would pass a brief inspection at the motel.
I did. It was a small, run-down place with only ten rooms and a small gravel lot. The guy behind the counter had blond dreads decorated here and there with rusty metal hoops. If he had noticed the condition of my hair, it would only have been to give me a thumbs-up. The room was even worse than the outside, but it didn’t matter. With a thin, rock-hard mattress and a dingy cracked ceiling, it was the Ritz-Carlton as far as I was concerned. I fell into bed as if it were feather stuffed and covered with silk sheets. I was gone in an instant, and I dreamed. Like Michael’s, my dreams were of horses. There was also the beach with churning waves and a sky as improbably blue as an Easter egg. There was no strange man; no gun. There were only horses that lived to canter into the water and boys who never learned to live without their brothers. They were good dreams.
The best.
Chapter 19
“Saul, you’re giving me a headache.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but he was adding to my already existing headache.
“Giving you a headache?” Outraged and louder than the voice of God booming down on Moses, it had me yanking the phone from my ear with desperate speed. “Giving you a headache? I’ve got Pudgy the Pervert crying to me from his hospital bed that his balls have been cut off. Have you ever heard a fat ex-con cry? It’s no goddamn fun.”
“I didn’t do anything to the man’s sack, okay?” I repeated with weary patience for the third time.
“The balls are gone, aren’t they? And my business relationship with the dickwad isn’t looking too good either. He might be a bastard, but he was handy to have on the roster.”
“He still had balls when I left, Skoczinsky,” I growled.
“You can’t blame that on me.” On Michael maybe, but I was thoroughly innocent. As for the missing balls, either the hospital had amputated them or Vanderburgh had botched a do-it-yourself home job.
“I know you, Korsak. You had something to do with it.” He’d said my name on a cell phone, the least secure connection in the world today, which broke his rule of “protect the client.” He was pissed all right. There was a groan that turned into an aggrieved sigh and then a reluctant question. “He wasn’t doing that shit again, was he? With the kids?”
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly.
“If he was, I would’ve driven up to hold him down while you made with the cleaver. You know that, right?” I did know, but he didn’t wait long enough to hear my confirmation. “Ah, hell, balls or not, he can still work. And speaking of work, I’ve got that info you wanted.”
Fumbling for the bottle of pills on the nightstand, I wrestled with the stubborn cap. “Yeah? Lay it on me.”
There was the rustle of papers and Saul became even louder as he cradled the phone between shoulder and chin. “John Jericho Hooker. Forty-seven years old, raised in Massachusetts. He’s a doctor several times over, medical and otherwise. He has doctorates in human and molecular genetics and biochemistry. Started college at the tender age of fourteen—a genius brat apparently—and hasn’t looked back since. Genetic replacement and manipulation—what there is to know he practically wrote the book on. What his peers felt wasn’t worth knowing is where he got into trouble.”
This sounded promising. Getting up, I filled a glass at the bathroom tap while Michael showered. “How so?”