“Nope. He might think you’re an idiot and put Super Glue on your desk chair as a lesson about pedestals, but he wouldn’t think less of you,” I said honestly. I’d been less honest about my mother. I hadn’t forgiven her yet for not leaving Boyd. Tess could’ve lived if she had. I wasn’t confident I could ever forgive that. I could forgive the slaps and busted lips my stepfather had given me, but not Tess. I couldn’t forgive that my mother had been part of losing Tess. But there’s the truth, and then there’s too much truth. I gave Hector his truth. Mine was my burden alone.
“One more day, then.” I changed the subject. “Two days since the quarry and one more day until Charlie tries to come through again?”
“One more day,” he confirmed. “And then we set Charlie free.”
Into the freedom of nonexistence. The blackness of the void. The nothingness from where we came. That was another truth Hector had no need to have repeated at the moment. There were times when the truth was worse than any lie.
Like now.
The next day, I was back in the infirmary with a wet washcloth over my eyes and a nice plastic puke basin on the bedside table just in case. “You said on an average day, you read ten people without a problem. Kessler’s still MIA, and Sloane is avoiding everyone now, not just you. That made it only six. What the hell is wrong with you?”
I moved the washcloth a bare inch to glare at Hector with one eye. “Is that a concerned ‘What the hell is wrong with you’ or a where-do-I-find-parts-for-a-malfunctioning-psychic ‘What the hell is wrong with you’?” He knew perfectly well what was wrong—he simply didn’t want to admit it.
“Can’t it be both?” He sighed and settled deeper into the plastic chair that should’ve had his name painted on it by now, as often as I ended up here.
“No.” I gritted my teeth with both pain and annoyance and slid the washcloth back into place.
“All right. It’s the first. And I feel guilty. Since Charlie’s accident, I’ve felt nothing but guilt. Then you show up, the answer to it all, but I don’t get any
answers—only more guilt,” he said, as I kept my eyes closed against the headache and let the heat of three warmed blankets soak into me.
I heard him blow out a frustrated breath before adding, “Two more sociopaths and one psychopath? Are you positive?”
“Scientists who want to work on a project that could lead to U.S. dominance of the entire world’s intelligence community. That reads like a job application for some kid’s comic-book supervillain. Did you think you weren’t going to get some bad apples? I’m kinda surprised there are any
good
apples. Didn’t you have some sort of psychological testing done on the applicants?” Now my jaw was locking up more from the irritation than the pain.
“They are all highly respected in their fields, all with PhDs and some with multiple PhDs.”
He sounded defensive. Good. He should.
“Because, Hector, the men who invented the hydrogen bomb only had their GEDs, and look what a great idea for the world that turned out to be. Now turn over any rock, and you’ll find a terrorist trying to make his own little radioactive toy, and every dictator has a backyard full of nukes. No one was looking at the big picture in that bunker.” I sat up and tossed the cloth. It wasn’t helping. “I’m glad I wasn’t alive then to read any of them. My brain probably would’ve melted and leaked out of my ears.” I pushed the blankets aside, too. The coldness of the
sociopaths had mostly faded. What was left was bone-deep, where artificial heat couldn’t touch.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway. Your three, four counting Thackery, need to be locked away and their brains donated to science to see where nature went wrong, but they didn’t kill Charlie any more than Thackery did.
Why
they didn’t do it, I don’t know, but they didn’t. Biding their time, maybe. You’ll have to ask them. Although Morganstern has killed two hookers so far, and he has no intentions of stopping.” That had been something I hadn’t enjoyed seeing through his eyes at all. A bullet in his head would do the world a favor.
“Now,” I went on, chilled and fed up with evolution’s mistakes, “I need to go outside and get into the sun. My bones feel like they’re made of dry ice.”
He cleared it with Meleah, and soon we were trudging through dried red mud that crumbled under our feet, taking in the scenery of squat, ugly buildings, a fifteen-foot-tall chain-link fence, and the razor wire that looped along the top. It wasn’t a Hawaiian villa with your own private beach, but it had the sun. I’d make do. I’d thought life had finished teaching me about making do. Nope. Life never tired of making you its bitch.
“You’re out of here after tomorrow,” Hector said abruptly. He’d taken off his lab coat, not caring who saw the holster and gun he wore. Or maybe it wasn’t that he didn’t care. Hector was smart. He wanted whoever was out there to know he was ready. “Once
we save Charlie, put him at peace, you’re going home. We’ll still try to fix the project, get Summerland up and running again before the spy makes off with all the schematics and computer codes, but you don’t need to risk your life for our work. And despite the fact that I’m putting him in the ground when all is said and done, Thackery will have a good shot at finding this guy. He’s not psychic, but he can think like the son of a bitch. He’s already shown us that.”
The blistering summer sun felt good, so much so that I wasn’t sweating a drop under my long-sleeved black shirt. My psychic gear. Yeah, like the rockers say, I was back in black—my head in the game. Jackson had left the stage, and the All Seeing Eye had taken his place. That had to be why I felt less than relieved at this talk of my departure—leaving a job undone wasn’t my way. I used to con, lie, and steal, but now I earned every penny I made. Plus, I didn’t like murderers of the innocent. Charlie had been a grown adult, but in his way, he was as innocent as they came. It had to be a combination of the two, because I should’ve been saying, “Praise Jesus, and I won’t let the razor wire hit me in the ass on my way out.”
What would be the point of me staying? I knew there was no justice. There was revenge. Yeah, that son of a bitch Boyd had seen that up close and personal, but there was no justice. It wasn’t my place, regardless, to help out Hector with either concept.
His project, his exceedingly bad apples, and none of it my problem. Hell, I was a saint for sticking around to pull Charlie home. Mother Teresa herself would’ve lent me her spare habit and rosary.
But …
No. No buts. I did not want to be thinking this. It wasn’t about what I liked or didn’t like. This was not who I was. I had a bottom line, and my bottom line was survival. It always had been. Tomorrow night, I was taking a car—after Hector searched it for bombs—and my ass was out of there. Homeward bound. Nothing was changing that.
Not to forget that the bastard spy had tried to kill me twice. That wasn’t the sort of thing I let people get away with. My stepfather would stand up and shout, “Testify!” to that, were he not a decomposing pile in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
Well, unmarked by stone. When I was eighteen, I’d tagged it. I’d been drunk, and I had pissed about a gallon on it. Thanks for the memories, Dad.
This unknown son of a bitch had killed Charlie and tried to do the same to me. It didn’t seem right that I wouldn’t be there to kick him in the head one or five times as a great big fucking thank-you for playing.
It didn’t make a difference. I had a whole day to make that decision. Resort to common sense, stick with my commitment to keep my ass in one piece, get back to the Jackson born in blood and the warm embrace of the emotionally sterile state institute. At
least, that guy I knew. This new guy was nuts, reckless, and far too concerned with things that weren’t his business.
I’d just completed that thought when the things that weren’t my business shot me in the back.
• • •
Lying flat in the same red earth that the county had buried Boyd in, logic told me that I’d fallen. My mind told me that the ground had reared up and smacked me in the face. “Jackson!” Hector’s hand was on my shoulder, squeezing hard.
I coughed and pushed out the words, “Nothing … you … can … do. Go … get … the … dick.”
He hesitated, then there was the sound of his feet pounding against the dirt as he ran. I continued to stay flat, both to be less of a target and because breathing was agony. I didn’t want to imagine what trying to move would be like. The only part of me that disagreed was my fingers digging into the dirt as the pain crushed my ribs in a massive fist. It ebbed and flowed, the fiery, stabbing ache, and finally focused on the left side of my back.
“Jackson?” Hector was back. Already? It couldn’t have been more than minutes, although the agony in my back was saying bullshit to that—it felt more like seconds in recovery time. Unfortunately, Hector didn’t sound as if he was waving a flag of victory. I felt his hand below my scapula, his fingers probing. “Okay. I got it. The son of a bitch nailed you right over the heart.”
“The same son of a bitch who, I take it, got away.” The pain was the same, but I no longer felt as if my lungs had taken the weekend off. Breathing was easier and talking doable. I appreciated that, because I had something to say. “I asked you for a bulletproof vest. I felt the
bullet
fine. I didn’t feel the damn
proof
in it at all.” I pushed up on my hands and knees and groaned at the spike of pain. “Ah, shit. What’s it made out of? Your grandma’s leftover yarn? Christ.”
He hooked his arm under my right one and helped me stagger to my feet before juggling the blob of metal in the palm of his other hand. “It’s a big enough round. Nine-millimeter, same as I use. Without the Kevlar, it wouldn’t have just hit your heart; it would’ve exploded it.”
“I told you the vest was a better choice for me than a gun.” I winced as I tried to straighten. “But I still think someone at the nursing home crocheted the damn thing. It feels like my rib is broken.”
“I’m sure it is.” There wasn’t much sympathy in the pronouncement. I could’ve used more—a whole lot more. “But a cracked or broken rib is a hundred percent better than dead,” he finished matter-of-factly.
“And you didn’t catch the bastard?” I could be wrong. Ghosts could exist. This guy appeared and disappeared at will like one.
“I didn’t even
see
him, and this isn’t a sniper’s bullet by any stretch of the imagination. He had to be
close.” Once I could stand semi-upright and take a step without the threat of being shoved into a Notre Dame bell tower, he let go of my arm.
“I swear, Allgood, if you had been behind me instead of beside me, I’d say you were the shooter. This guy’s goddamn invisible.” I swore out loud and proud with every step I took. I knew …
knew
I could feel the broken edges of a rib grating against each other.
“You’ve already read me. You know I’m noble and true. Red, white, and blue. Practically Superman, I’m so damn heroic, but apparently, I couldn’t find a killer if you dropped me onto death row at a supermax prison,” he said bitterly.
“I’m lacking in social skills except when it comes to flattering my older female clients, but I have a feeling I should say something here. Something to comfort you in your time of emotional upheaval …” I took one more step, blasphemed against God, his son, and the Virgin Mary as my rib howled again. “Here it is: fuck your emotional upheaval. Be a man, for God’s sake. At least
your
ass wasn’t shot.”
Strangely enough, that did the trick.
• • •
As Meleah was looking over my X-ray, after giving me a high enough dose of painkillers to have me seeing the world in a new and improved way, Hector was having the base searched. Not for a nine-millimeter—the base was full of them. Anyone who was carrying a gun was carrying a nine-millimeter.
Instead, he was having the base searched for Dr. Sloane, and he’d sent two soldiers to Dr. Kessler’s house to bring him in. There was no more pickpocketing, and, while Hector knew I couldn’t do any more readings today—not after the axis of evil I’d already come across—he said he was fine with locking the two scientists up overnight for peace of mind. And if they wanted to trade their chances of being part of a potentially Nobel Prize–winning experiment to press kidnapping charges, he’d like to live long enough to see that day.
Hector, the bitterness faded and his mood improved by my newly enhanced social skills, returned and stood patiently at the foot of my gurney—at least, patiently until I asked Meleah why she wasn’t wrapping my ribs and followed it with the advice that if she caught Hector staring at her ass, she should take it for the compliment it was.
“We don’t wrap broken ribs these days. You read too many old private-detective novels. Move slowly and carefully, and it’ll heal fine on its own.” She glanced at Hector, whose face struggled to pick one emotion from the flood that crossed it. I thought he settled on resignation. “He’s quite the romantic, isn’t he, Hector?”
“He’s something, all right. There’s no getting around that.” He frowned, but it didn’t stick. Sighing, he snorted with visible amusement—or invisible amusement and blatant exasperation. He had
the face of an Everest cliff, all granite and ice. It made it hard to tell. Normally, I could read people’s expressions like a mood ring, but not Allgood. He was a challenge. “Just how much pain medicine did you give him?”
“Too much, probably. But considering his reaction to the readings earlier and being shot, along with the bruising and broken rib, I thought he deserved the happy maximum.”