“I guess that’s why you’re so expert at the tables,” I said to Pellerin. “You’re good at reading people.”
“You have no idea, Small Time,” he said.
I wiggled the gun. “You’re not in a position to be giving me attitude.”
“You going to shoot me?” He gave a sneering laugh. “I don’t think so. You’re about ready to piss yourself just hanging onto that thing.”
“Josey!” Verret started to stand, then remembered the shackles. “I’ll tell you,” she said to me. “But I’d rather do it in private.”
Crain threw a conniption fit, heaving himself about in his chair, attempting to spit out his gag.
“You see,” she said. “He’s going to act like that every time I tell you something. I have to use the restroom, anyway.”
I undid the shackles, then I locked Crain and Pellerin in and escorted her down the hall, lagging behind a step so I could check out her butt. When she had finished in the john, we went into one of the storerooms. I set up a couple of folding chairs and we sat facing one another.
“May I have some water,” she asked.
“Help yourself.”
She had a drink of water, then sat primly with the plastic bottle resting on one knee. I knew I had to watch myself with her—I’d always been a sucker for tall brunettes who had that lady thing going. She must have had a sense of this, because she worked it overtime.
“Here’s what I know,” I said. “The Ezawa project was investigating voodoo remedies. And Josey Pellerin, according to your bodyguard, is not a natural man. That suggests…well, I’m not sure. Why don’t you just tell me everything?”
“Everything? That’ll take a long time.” She screwed the bottle cap on and off. “The project wasn’t considered important at the outset. The only reason Ezawa got funding was because he was a golfing buddy of one of the trustees. And he was brilliant, so they were willing to give him some leeway. He isolated a bacterium present in the dirt of old slave graveyards. He used dirt from the graveyard at the Myrtles—that old house over in Saint Francisville? The bodies were buried in biodegradable coffins, or no coffins at all, and the micro-organisms in the dirt had interacted with the decomposing tissues.”
She left room for me to ask a question, but I had none.
“A DNA extract from datura and other herbs was introduced into the growth medium,” she said. “Then the bacteria were induced to take up DNA and chromosomes from the extract, and Ezawa injected the recombinant strain into the cerebellum and temporal lobes of a freshly dead corpse. The bacteria began processing the corpse’s genetic complement and eventually the body was revivified.”
“Whoa! Revivified?” I said. “You mean, it came back to life?”
She nodded.
“How long were these people dead?” I asked.
“On the average, a little under an hour. The longest was about an hour and a half. The process required a certain amount of time, so the bodies had to be secured quickly.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Getting the paperwork done for releasing a body generally takes more than an hour.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Jesus. Ezawa was basically making zombies. High-tech zombies.”
She started, I presumed, to object, but I headed her off.
“Don’t bullshit me,” I said. “I grew up voodoo. Datura’s one of the classic ingredients in the old recipe books. I bet he tried goat’s rue, too…and Angel’s trumpet. The man was making zombies.”
She frowned. “What I was going to say, the term was appropriate for most of the patients. They were weak. Helpless. They rarely survived longer than a day. But there were a few who lived longer. For months, some of them. We called them ‘slow-burners.’ We moved them out to a plantation house in bayou country and brought in a clinical psychologist to assess their new personalities. You see, the patients developed personalities markedly different from the ones they originally had. The psychologist, Doctor Edman, he believed these personalities manifested a kind of wish-fulfillment. His theory was that the process changed a portion of the RNA and made it dominant. ‘The bioform of their deepest wish,’ that’s how he put it. The patients manufactured memories. They recalled having different names, different histories. In effect, they were telling us—and themselves—a new life story, one in which they achieved their heart’s desire. The amazing thing was, they had abilities commensurate with these stories.”
I could have used some of Pellerin’s ability to read people. What she had told me had a ring of authenticity, but if I were to accept it as true, I would have to rearrange my notion of what was possible. I started to speak, but I was on shaky ground and wasn’t certain which questions to ask.
“It’s hard to believe,” she said. “But it’s the truth.” She let some seconds slip past and then, when I remained mute, as if she were trying to keep the conversation going, she went on: “I disagreed with Edman about a great many things. He demanded that we allow the patients to find their own way. He believed we should let their stories come out naturally. But I thought if we prompted them some, if we reminded them of their original identities…I don’t mean give them every detail, you understand. Just their names and a little background. That would have afforded them a stronger foundation and perhaps we wouldn’t have had so many breakdowns among the slow-burners. These people were re-inventing themselves out of whole cloth. They were bound to be unstable. I was hoping Crain would agree with me, but…” She made a contemptuous gesture, then seemed to remember where she was. “Do you want to know anything else?”
I still was at a loss for words, but I managed to say, “So I’m guessing Pellerin’s a slow-burner.”
“Yes. He was born Theodore Rankin. He’s forty-three. He believes he’s the world’s best poker player. And he may well be.”
“What was he before?”
“A bartender. He was killed during a robbery. I don’t know how the corporation got hold of the body.”
“The corporation. I assume they took the project over after it went in the toilet at Tulane.”
“That’s right. But there was a gap of ten years or so.”
“Why’re they so interested in a poker player?”
“It’s not the poker playing per se that’s of interest, it’s the patients’ underlying abilities. Their potentials go far beyond the life story they construct for themselves. We don’t understand what they can do. None of them lived long enough. But with the advances in micro-biology made during the last two decades, Doctor Crain thinks Josey may live for years. He’s developing more rapidly than the others, too. That may be a result of improvements in the delivery system. We used a heart pump at Tulane, but now they…”
“I don’t have to know the gearhead stuff.” I mulled over what she had told me. “You were fired from the original project. Why would Darden hire you? Where do you fit in?”
Verret toyed with the bottle cap. “I helped a patient escape. I couldn’t go along with what they were doing to him anymore. He developed some astonishing abilities while he was on the run. I’m the only person who’s dealt with someone that advanced.”
“What sort of abilities we talking about?”
“Perceptual, for the most part. Changes in visual capacity and such.”
She said this off-handedly, but I doubted she was being straight with me. I decided not to push it, and I asked what they had been doing at Harrah’s.
“At Tulane we kept the patients confined,” she said. “But Crain thought Josey would develop more rapidly if we exposed him to an unstructured environment under controlled conditions.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Turns out we didn’t have much control.”