Choice of Evil

“Mom!” he called out, running toward us.

Simba was there by then, but he didn’t challenge, just stepped back and watched mother and son embrace. I couldn’t tell anything from his wolfish grin, but he looked safer than he usually does. I stepped out while I waited for Terry to open the gate so I could stash the car inside.

“Go ahead, Burke,” the kid called over to me. “Take the Jeep. Mom and I’ll walk over, okay?”

The kid wanted to spend some time with her alone, I guessed. I took off quick. Let Terry deal with Michelle trying to walk a quarter-mile of junkyard in four-inch heels.

Simba trotted alongside the Jeep, easily keeping pace—anything over ten miles an hour was a life-risking move on that terrain, and the trail was marked so faintly I had to steer mostly with my eyes anyway. When I got to the clearing near the Mole’s bunker, I saw the cut-down oil drum he uses as a lounge chair was empty, so I sat down on it myself and lit a smoke.

“Mole?” I asked Simba.

The beast knew the word. But he gave me another close look, not moving. I got it then. He wasn’t a sight hound, couldn’t be sure it was me. Only thing to do was let him hear my voice some more.

“Simba,” I called out softly. “Mighty Simba-witz, Lion of Zion. You remember me, boy? I sure remember you. Such a valiant warrior you are. Come on, Simba. Go get the Mole for me, okay?”

The big dog nodded his head, accepting me, aural memory kicking in. Then he took off, a rust-colored shadow in a city the same color. I wasn’t even done with my smoke by the time the Mole appeared. Like he always does, without a word.

“Mole!” I greeted him.

And he returned the greeting the same way he answers the phone—silently, waiting to hear whatever you have to say.

“Can you take a look at something for me?” I asked him.

Again, he was silent. But he moved close enough for me to show him what I’d brought: a blow-up of the little icon from the top of the handle of the killer’s ninja spike. “You know what this is?” I asked him.

“Terry. . .” he started to say, just as the kid himself walked up, Michelle on his arm.

“Look, it’s Mom!” the kid practically shouted. The Mole’s only reaction was to blink rapidly behind those Coke-bottle lenses of his, standing rooted to his spot. Michelle closed the ground between them, wavering a bit on the spike heels, but making progress. The Mole didn’t move, just watched her, his mouth open in the same amazement he always shows every time he sees her.

Michelle planted a chaste kiss on the Mole’s cheek and he turned a dozen shades of red. “Well?” Michelle demanded, doing a spin in front of him to show off her outfit.

“You look. . . beautiful, Michelle,” he finally said.

“Yes, I do. And you can tell me all about it later,” she said, her head nodding toward the opening to the Mole’s underground bunker. That about finished the poor bastard, and I knew I had to move fast if I was going to get mine before he got his, so I said, “Mole, what about this?” and practically shoved the photocopy under his nose.

“Terry knows about that,” the Mole said.

Which, of course, got Michelle interested. “What is that? Some kind of dinosaur?”

“It’s a velociraptor,” Terry said confidently, looking over her shoulder.

“A what?” I asked him.

“Wait, I’ve got a whole book about them,” the kid said, taking off like a shot.

“He’s a genius,” Michelle gushed. “Just like his father.”

The Mole looked everywhere but at Michelle, back to total silence.

“Terry’s interested in stuff like that, Mole?” I asked. “Dinosaurs and all.”

“He is interested in everything,” the Mole replied, unable to keep the love-pride from clogging his voice. “His CD-ROM library is. . . extensive. And I. . . help too.”

Sure. Terry was probably the only kid in America home-schooled in a junkyard, but his tutor was light-years ahead of anything walking around a university. Terry wouldn’t be there much longer. College was coming. And when they weren’t fighting about where he’d go—Michelle wanted him close—they were caught up in that proud sadness when your child turns a major corner. And moves another step away.

But now the Mole and Michelle weren’t moving, they were waiting. Another couple of minutes and the kid came bounding out the opening to the bunker, his arms full of books. “It’s better on the computer,” he said, “but I thought. . .”

He didn’t have to finish—Michelle and the Mole were already on their way downstairs, and spectators weren’t what they were going to need for a while. The kid slapped together a desk from wooden milk crates and assorted planks, then he laid out his stuff for me.

“Mongolia’s got the best fossil beds,” Terry told me. Not a trace of officiousness in his voice, just the facts. Like his old man. “In the Gobi Desert. Near the Flaming Cliffs. That’s where they found the first one. About seventy years ago.”

“The first. . .?”

“Velociraptor,” the kid said. “It means ‘swift plunderer.’ It was maybe about the size of a turkey, but it really packed a wallop.”

“I thought raptors could fly,” I said.

“They can now,” the kid said patiently. “There’s a system—it’s called cladistics—to identify extinct animals and group them according to the characteristics they share. Scientists usually only have skeletons to look at, so they concentrate on stuff like a certain bone in the wrist, a hole in the hip joint. . . even the number of toes on a foot.”

“And this. . . velociraptor was like a bird that way?”

“Sure. They both have three primary toes on their hind feet. And necks that curve into an S shape. And, see here,” he said, pointing, “velociraptor has long arms, and a wrist bone like a bird’s wing. There’s other common characteristics too: like how nerves travel from the brain, the air spaces in the skull, and the construction of the hips and thighs. It may even have built nests like birds and tended its eggs and all.”

“But not fly?”

“Not in that. . . stage. We don’t know if it disappeared, or just evolved into something else. Like the eohippus into the horse, see?”

“Sure,” I said. The kid was already talking like his father—what I really needed was a translator.

“Look at the skeleton,” he said, pointing again. “From the sizes of the various bones, and the light, delicate structure of the limbs, you can see it was probably a fast, nimble runner. It wasn’t huge or anything, but it was well armed. See this?” he asked, pointing to a large, hook-shaped piece coming out of the toe joint. “They call it a ‘killing claw,’ so it was probably used to hunt other animals, not to dig in the ground or anything. Velociraptors had more than eighty teeth, some of them over an inch long, and each with a sharp, jagged edge. Awesome, huh?”

“Were they. . . I don’t know. . . smart?”

“Probably,” the kid assured me. “The brain was large and complex. That means that they were probably intelligent, with good hearing and eyesight, and even a good sense of smell.”

“So they were like predatory birds—hawks and all—but they worked the ground, right?” I asked him. Thinking how human vultures never have to fly to feed.

“We really don’t know,” the kid said solemnly. “Only one truly great specimen was ever discovered—a fossil. And it shows a velociraptor and a protoceratops locked in deadly combat.”

“But nobody knows who started that one?”

“Or who finished it either. Like a movie where you have to leave before it’s over. But, from all I read, it seems like velociraptor was a great hunter. And a great fighter too. The evidence. . . I mean, what they found. . . it had characteristics of both birds and crocodiles—that’s those rows of teeth and all. And those are both still around— birds and crocodiles, I mean. So I don’t think it died out, the way the bigger ones did—it was too well adapted to its environment. It probably just. . . evolved into something else.”

Was that his message? I thought to myself. That he hadn’t died, just