guarantee brain damage.”
He lay flat, unmoving, and closed his eyes. I let him gather the edges of his control and glue them back together in silence. Hector had had a difficult couple of months. His brother died, a brother he’d loved; I still felt from reading his keys how much Charlie had loved his younger brother. The hero worship he’d seen in Hector’s eyes when they were kids and the respect and affection when they were adults. Then had come the massacres, forcing Hector-who Charlie had known down to his bones was one of the most honest and honorable men around-to resort to something as dirty as blackmail. Now that blackmail was looking more and more likely to get its victim, me, killed. And Hector would hold himself as responsible as if he’d flipped the switch on the detonator with his own hand.
All in all, I figured Hector deserved some stress relief. If that meant letting him throw a punch, what the hell? I’d let him. It didn’t mean I’d take it, but he could swing all he wanted.
Finally, he opened his eyes and shifted them to where I leaned against the fungus-colored wall, arms folded, getting some rest of my own. It was barely past noon, and it had already been a long day. “Sorry,” he said, the traditional Hector Allgood calm back in his voice.
“Yeah, that was pretty sorry. There are five-year-old girls at the Jewish Center who would’ve broken your elbow and your knee, and then crushed your larynx with that kind of swing.” Dark eyebrows knit ominously, and I let him off the hook. “Fine. You’re forgiven. You were only trying to break my nose out of concern for my life. I get it. It’s a little fucked up, but I get it.” I held out a gloved hand.
He hesitated, then took it, and I helped heave him to his feet. “Why don’t you go? Leave? I told you the blackmail’s off. Someone’s trying to kill you. There’s no reason for you to stay and risk your life.”
“Would Charlie leave?” I asked. I wasn’t actually curious. I already knew the answer.
“No, but-” He clamped his mouth shut before the rest of the sentence could escape.
“But I’m not Charlie. I’m a selfish, money-hungry, antisocial asshole who doesn’t give a damn about anything or anyone but myself? Is that what you were going to say?” I wasn’t angry. It was mostly true… or it had been true.
“It was,” he admitted. “But that’s wrong. That’s not you. It takes a lot of digging to get to the real Jackson, but you’re not selfish, and you do give a damn. In this situation, more than you should. Still, you did get one thing right.” His lips quirked. “You are an asshole.”
“Born and bred.” I grinned as we began to walk on toward the armory.
“So,” he said after a pause, “are you going to tell me or not?”
“Tell you what?”
“You said if I managed to get us out of jail, you’d tell me what women really think about men. I’ve been thinking I might be able to use the help.” He didn’t squirm like a thirteen-year-old kid with a crush, at least not on the outside. But on the inside? I knew he did. Meleah had him hooked but good.
“Right. I did say that.” I shook my head dubiously. “Are you sure you want to know? I mean really, one- hundred-percent positive?”
This time, the punch connected, but it was a light one and aimed at my shoulder. I took the sting as a yes.
“All right. Your funeral. Women are smart, and they know men are dogs, which we are. But they also think that there are a few special exceptions out there who put love before sex straight out of the gate. They think when they meet one of these great guys, he’ll be so fascinated by their mind and personality, their hopes and interests, that it’ll be months before he even thinks of looking at their ass. They believe this guy will love them from the beginning-before sex ever enters the picture.”
“No.”
“Oh, and to this Prince Charming, cellulite is invisible.” I slapped him on the back.
“ No. You’re lying. They have to know that’s only movies, TV shows, books-fantasy wish fulfillment. That’s ludicrous. You’re kidding me, Jackson, aren’t you?”
I could smell the desperation in the air. Like several of my clients, he was getting a truth he didn’t want.
I slapped him again, this time with more sympathy. “Welcome to my world. We’re an alien species compared with women, and they know it. But they want to believe you’re the good alien among all the other horny ones ravaging the world. Luckily, Meleah is one of the rare women who can handle the truth. So when she catches you checking out her ass in whatever hot dress she wears on your first date, she’ll just laugh, roll up the menu, and smack you on the muzzle with it. She’ll accept your doggy nature, you lucky bastard. And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about with Meleah. You know. She knows. Even Charlie knew and was about to send her flowers and sign your name to them right before he…” I stopped.
“Before he ran out of time,” Hector finished quietly.
Shit. Now I was the one who was sorry. I didn’t think I ever said I was sorry to anyone except Abby, who would pinch my ribs ferociously if I didn’t. Since the day of the pink shoe, I thought the universe and everyone in it owed me and owed me big. No one deserved a sorry from me. Instead, I gave Hector the best I could: an excuse. “I’m usually smoother as the All Seeing Eye. Maybe if I put the black back on.”
He halted by the armory and knocked on the wire mesh. As the metal rattled, he answered the unsaid sorry instead of my defense. “Don’t be. It’s something about Charlie I didn’t know, a piece of him I didn’t have. That’s a gift.” He cleared his throat, and his eyes lightened. “And you didn’t even charge me for it. Charlie was right. You make a good friend.”
I snorted. “I haven’t come close to totaling the bill for this entire fuckup yet. Just you wait.” Then the mesh slid up, and I could see an entire wall covered with guns. I immediately stepped back but almost as immediately spotted something I liked.
Liked a lot.
16
Thackery didn’t have an office. None of the scientists did. They had workstations and metal stools. No lumbar support in hell. Ergonomics didn’t rear its comfort-conscious head here, not for the peons. But as one of the head honchos, Thackery did have a desk and a real chair.
Hector, too-one that he and Charlie had shared and which had a bag of Milky Ways in the bottom drawer. Charlie loved them. He’d bought that bag at a Walmart a week before he died, along with shampoo, an ugly-as-hell knockoff Hawaiian shirt, a Stephen King book, a box of cereal-the small box. He’d wanted the bigger box, but they were out, and…
I rubbed my forehead with the heel of my hand, the slide of the leather glove breaking the train of thought. Charlie should’ve faded more by now. A death reading takes a few days to turn loose of me, but it’d been more than a week. There was a great deal more of Charlie left in my mind than there should be.
Maybe it was because he wasn’t gone, not completely.
Whatever the reason, it was giving me a headache, and I reached into my pocket for the Tylenol. I carried the bottle with me everywhere now. This place was not conducive to a pain-free existence. I popped two pills for the headache, glumly knowing it wouldn’t help any with facing Thackery’s winning personality.
“Have you been thinking, Thackery? About our mutual problem?” Hector asked flatly as we approached the man’s desk. He had his lab coat back on, but it didn’t do much to hide the new shoulder holster and gun beneath it. “Thinking as if your life depended on it, because it just may.”
Thackery’s glare was coldly emotionless. Everything about the man was cold. Sociopaths-I couldn’t understand how evolution had screwed up so badly to toss out this mutation once in a while. Even having one as a sister, I couldn’t understand it. Glory had always been careful not to touch me once we’d reconnected. At first, I thought it was because I’d let her down, hadn’t found her, hadn’t saved her from being put through who knew what. But after a total of two conversations with her, I’d known-anyone with a shred of conscience would’ve seen-there was a different reason. Glory didn’t touch, as Glory had nothing to give. She could only take. She wouldn’t hug a chair, would she? To her and Thackery, that’s what people were. Things. But she was my sister, and I’d put Band- Aids on her thin, bruised, mosquito-bitten legs from the time she could first walk. I couldn’t make myself forget that. And I couldn’t blame her for the mess I was in. She’d gotten me into it, but I was the one who refused to walk
