feel the need to tell him I’d made a quick trip outside to check for an escape route from the bathroom. The only window I’d seen was far too small for even a lanky teenager to get through, and I made it back to the table long before Michael finished washing up.
Freshly combed hair was threaded back damply with only one strand springing free to curve and touch his eyebrow. He’d apparently run the comb under the tap before taming the fly-away strands of brown hair. I hoped he wasn’t too attached to the color. “Looking good,” I said approvingly, accepting back the comb. “You’re going to break Mrs. Delgado’s heart.” I knew her name from the face beaming from a framed picture over the cash register. Letters carefully painted on the glass read TESTIMONY DELGADO, PROPRIETOR AND EMPLOYEE OF THE CENTURY. She was a woman who knew her own worth, our hostess.
The flush that had filled his face with color before he went to the bathroom reappeared. “I thought you wanted to hear about Jericho,” he snapped defensively.
He wasn’t used to being teased, that was easy to see. Hopefully, that would change, along with so many other things he’d been denied. “Yeah, I do.” Pouring him a glass of the breakfast elixir of the gods. “But drink your juice first. I don’t want a swat with the Delgado dish towel.”
Lifting the glass, he gave the contents a doubtful sniff before taking an experimental swallow. “It’s good.” He sounded surprised, no doubt thrown off by the lack of chocolate syrup.
“
Michael looked down at his plate, then back up at me with round eyes. “Holy shit.”
“Hey, watch it,” I laughed. “Where’d you pick up language like that?”
“Movies.” He picked up his fork and started on the eggs. “And you.”
He had me there. I’d tried to keep it clean once we made it out of the compound, but how foolish was that? Michael had faced much worse in his life than a few dirty words. Besides, when I was seventeen I was playing football, smoking behind the gym, and my mouth had been anything but pristine. And I’d been a fairly good kid. Given that I had a father like mine, the little rebellions of a normal teenager had seemed innocently naïve . . . even to me. How could you be tempted to worse things when your father ordered men killed between dinner courses? Cheating, graffiti, vandalism—what the hell would be the point to those?
They were old thoughts and I shrugged them off to dig into my own breakfast. I ran out of steam about halfway through, my stomach uncomfortably full. Michael kept going to finish every bite on his plate and then eyed mine. The kid could eat and that was no lie. I thought about giving him my leftovers, but the image of his spewing eggs and ham in a manner not even Dr. Seuss would approve of stopped me.
“About Jericho,” I prodded as I leaned back in my chair, hoping against hope for a quick digestion.
“Oh.” He stalled by helping himself to another glass of juice. That the subject of Jericho was harder to face than the Institute didn’t give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. “Jericho.” He took a swallow, his throat convulsing as if the juice were much thicker than it looked. “Jericho . . . He oversees the Institute. The students, the classes, everything.”
“Even that room in the basement?” That ghastly room. “Does he oversee that too?”
Hand clenched tightly around the glass, he lowered his gaze into the icy red liquid. “Jericho has been at the Institute as long as I can remember. He’s a scientist. All of the instructors called him Doctor.” The curl of his lips was brutally bitter. “Or stuttered and wet their pants.”
The memory of the shadowy figure from the back of the van was all too clear. The man had no fear or a surreal belief in his own immortality. Either one made him a dangerous man, not to mention a demented lunatic. But . . . he hadn’t looked like a loony. He’d looked cold, hard, and completely in control.
“A scientist, huh?” I commented with the image of that rotating DNA helix I’d seen on the compound computers flashing through my mind. I had no difficulty picturing this Jericho involved in medical experiments on children. Of all the violent shit I’d seen in my life, nothing had turned my stomach as that thought did. “And what kind of science did the son of a bitch practice? What’d he do?” Something with a genetic flavor to it, I was presuming, but the two biology classes I’d taken in college hadn’t exactly prepared me for any educated guesses.
He pushed the glass back and forth. The squeak of that and the sloshing juice were the only immediate sounds. There was the murmur of the other diners and Testimony Delgado’s humming “Amazing Grace” in the background, but at our table there was silence. “Misha,” I started, trying my best not to pressure him. “I’m trying to help. . . .”
The slamming of the glass on the surface of the table shut me up as it was intended to do. “Trying to help me. Trying to save me. I know.” His voice was raw. “You keep saying so.” From his tone it wasn’t easy to tell whether he possessed any confidence in my ability to pull it off. “But you don’t know. You can’t know.”
“Then tell me.” I eased the glass from his grip and set it aside. “Explain it to me.”
His shoulders slumped and he gave in. “He made us special. Jericho made us special.”
That was the last I was able to get from him. Mrs. Delgado interrupted to drop the check on the table, but I had my doubts that he would’ve said anything more even if she’d kept her distance for a while longer. For the moment he’d reached the end of his rope; the strain was evident. He needed time to recuperate and regain a little distance.
The fact that I had questions boiling, hot and unsettled, would have to be put on the back burner for the time being. Special . . . made them special, what the hell could that mean? Misha was special to me; he was my brother. What could Jericho do to him that would make him special in a way that had Michael’s voice breaking on the very word? Distracted, I dropped a few bills and a generous tip on the table. I might have been caught in my own thoughts, but I still appreciated what Mrs. Delgado had done for Michael. It had to be the only mothering he could remember receiving in his short life. There were a thousand things I wished he could recall, but our mom was at the top of the list. Chances were he wouldn’t have remembered much about her anyway; he was five when she died. There would have been only scraps that remained, bits of warmth and emotion, but I would’ve given anything for him to have those scraps back.
In the car I tried to focus. We needed a new car. We needed a new look. We needed a destination other than just “north,” and we definitely had to find out how Jericho had picked up our trail so quickly. It was a list all right, and I knew how to accomplish only two of them.
For those two we’d need a town.
Chapter 14
The parking lot of the drugstore was nearly full, clogged with cars, and the store itself was full of people—good signs, both of them. It had taken a few exits to find just the place I had in mind. Shoving my gun into the back waistband of my pants, I got out of the car and made sure my shirt concealed the weapon. “Come on, kiddo. Be good and I might buy you some ice cream.”
He was torn between outrage and desperation for a sugar fix. Settling on mildly disgruntled, he trailed after me. After walking through the automated door he looked around curiously. It was one of the superdrugstores that carried enough merchandise to cure the diseases of a small Third World country, then throw a party to celebrate, complete with wine, balloons, and barbecued weenies. Colors and noise, it was a lot of stimulation for a kid who was shuttled to the mall once a year to “act normal.”
I nudged him as he stalled by the doors to stare at a woman pushing a stroller loaded with squalling twins. Accustomed to the sound, she absently reached down to smooth two nearly bald heads and kept moving. “Weird,” Michael murmured, more to himself than me. “Seeing where they come from.”
They, not we. Moving us both into an aisle, I lightly bumped his shoulder with mine. “I have pictures, tons of them. I’ll show you where you came from. It’s pretty much the same.”
