Hector-being Hector-didn’t give up. “You’d leave Charlie the way he is? You’d take the chance people might die?”
“Sooner or later, you’ll happen to have your fancy million-dollar Charlie lifeboat in the same location he pops up in. There are only so many local massacre sites, and I’ve helped you map all the questionable ones. And I haven’t stopped anyone from almost dying. You’ve done most of that yourself. Now, where’s your car parked?”
“Fine.” His lips tightened. “I won’t make you stay.”
“But I will.”
A hand grabbed my shoulder, squeezed it painfully tight, and pushed me back down. Good old sociopathic Thackery-I’d seen him across the cafeteria from the moment we sat down.
“Allgood, if you can’t deliver what the project requires, I will. We carry dual responsibility here, which means dual authority.” The grip tightened. “If it takes guards to keep you here, Mr. Eye, I know we have a sergeant locked up who’d enjoy some face time with you.”
I gave him a shove away. “I don’t do my best readings with a broken jaw.”
“All we need you to do now is Charlie detection and acting as a lure. You can do that with several broken bones, jaw included. Think about that.”
With those friendly words, the dick was gone. I waited a beat and tossed Hector’s keys back to him before flourishing another set with a smug grin. “And that, Dr. Allgood, is how you steal an object to read.”
We went back to our room where we’d slept and Hector had played Secret Service. He’d ruled out an empty lab as too dangerous. Thackery was everywhere in the science division, overseeing all, stealing every ounce of credit he could, and stripping away any presence of self-esteem down to the bone, then sucking the marrow as an afternoon snack.
“No, tell me what you really think about the guy, Hector.” I grinned as I sat on the mattress and studied the key chain on Thackery’s keys. It was a small, squat metal rocket with “Fat Man” hand-painted on the side. Figured.
Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb, had once quoted “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” He’d had concerns over what he’d helped birth into an unsuspecting world. Thackery was no Oppenheimer. Thackery was all about patents and royalties and the hell with the consequences.
“How about I tell you instead what I think about you and your show at breakfast?” He wanted to be pissed, but I, who myself was all about self-survival and cynicism, was putting my life on the line for him and his brother. It left him without a leg to stand on and hesitant about using the other one to insert a boot up my ass. Despite what he’d said in the cafeteria, I hadn’t done what he’d expected. I hadn’t done what I’d expected, either.
Argh, I couldn’t be changing. If life had taught me one thing, it was that change was rarely for the better.
“Never mind that. Why don’t you tell me why you’re staying? It’s definitely not in your best interest.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. As for the show, the Art of the Con,” I offered cheerfully, in spite of my inner perplexity at straying outside the Jackson norm of looking out for my own ass and my own ass only. Ignored it and went with the good mood, because putting one over on Thackery just automatically summoned one. “Misdirection, misdirection, misdirection. Oh, and dumb marks and clueless eyewitnesses.”
The clueless eyewitness didn’t care much for that, either, but gave it up with a disgruntled exhalation. I laid the keys down on the bed and peeled off my glove, letting my tattoo show. “I picked pockets before I was a psychic. It’s like riding a bicycle. Larcenous fingers never forget. And I faked years of psychic shit before I gave in and started using the real deal. You don’t have to have special talents to steal from or manipulate people to get things done. You only need flexible morals and an extra-small in off-the-rack consciences.”
“You didn’t use your psychic ability when you worked the carnival as a teenager?” When I shook my head, Hector asked in the simple confusion any normal person would use, “Why?”
“Because it’s not fun.” I hovered my hand over the keys. “It’s never fun.” It sucked is what it did. It sucked long and hard, but I muscled through because it was how I made my money and it was who I was. I hadn’t wanted to believe that for a long time, but in the end… it was me.
I closed my hand around the keys and felt the flood.
I didn’t let it through. I had no choice. I touched, and it came, sure as death and taxes. I knew one much better than the other, but that’s why God made accountants.
I tightened my fist around the metal as wave after wave crashed over me. I could feel my body temperature dropping like a rock.
Great.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
I’d mentally called Thackery a sociopath more than once, but I hadn’t meant it. True sociopaths are rare. Assholes are common. I’d thought Thackery was more likely the second. I was wrong.
Stepping into the mind of a true sociopath was like locking yourself in a walk-in freezer, alone. All the warmth was immediately drained out of you. There was no physical reason it should happen-sociopaths weren’t walking Popsicles-but it happened just the same. And then there was the aloneness. There was no one else in the world but you. No one in the room, no one in the building, no one in the state… the country… across the ocean. Not a single speck of life anywhere, not even bacteria. You might as well be on the surface of the moon.
That was being a sociopath. The sole creature in their universe. People, animals-they weren’t the same as you. They weren’t alive. They didn’t have meaning beyond that of game pieces on a board. Usually less meaning than that, more like stupid, clunky furniture you had to rearrange to get a certain result. Boring, all that manipulation. So damn boring. Sometimes the result could be entertaining, depending on how you were hardwired. Some sociopaths killed, and some didn’t. It wasn’t that the ones who didn’t kill had a problem with it-other than risk. Manipulation was boring, but prison was even more so.
Thackery was smart. Little Julian hadn’t cut up Fluffy and Fido behind the shed. No, little Julian went to an advanced school and took many perfectly reputable biology and anatomy classes where you obtained your own cat for dissection from the local shelter.
Teenage Julian hadn’t strangled coeds at his college. He paid hookers, who took a little extra money for a lot of extra abuse.
Grown-up Julian hadn’t killed his widowed father for a hefty inheritance. He simply hadn’t reminded the forgetful man to take his heart medicine and made a bet with himself how many months it would take.
And Dr. Thackery hadn’t killed Charlie…
I hadn’t killed Charles Allgood, because I’d known there was a spy in the program who would do it for me. I’d seen subtle alien fingerprints in the computer codes. Witnessed the tiniest of glitches barely perceptible to me, much less the peons around me, and I told no one. I thought, “What would I do as a spy out to sabotage and steal a program?” and I’d been correct. Disrupt the equipment and kill the test subject. Now I was calculating that I was smart enough to identify the spy in time to fix blame, save the program, and become Charles’s successor.
There was the remaining Allgood to think about-and then the unbelievably improbable discovery of a real psychic. Someone who could find the spy before I did and snatch the spoils. I had to rethink my lifetime rule of doing the one thing that could potentially destroy my life. And it came down to the question: did the risk outweigh the benefit? I hadn’t been certain.
But then, as they most often did for me, things began to fall into place. I hadn’t targeted the spy yet, but the spy had targeted the worst problem for both of us.
Jackson Lee Eye.
And if I was very fortunate, Allgood, in a doomed attempt to save a scientifically perverse life, would be disposed of as well. Because that was Dr. Hector Allgood down to his DNA.
A “good man.”
A Boy Scout.
An idiot.
“Jackson, you’re turning blue, for Christ’s sake. Are you all right?”
I dropped the keys and gazed blankly at an unfamiliar hand, bloodless and white, with blue, cold-pinched fingers. Allgood was calling me by that troublemaker’s name. It was insulting, demeaning, debasing. I wasn’t a mutant. I was genetically perfect. “Shut up,” I ground out, fighting a tense jaw and numb lips. “And do not call me that.”
“Damn it. I can do nothing but fuck up with this shit. It’s a wonder Charlie lived as long as he did with my ass
