“They showed us the movie. Along with others, about all sorts of things. So we’d be convincing, you know? We’d be able to have normal conversations.” His cheek rested against the sheets. “If we had to.”
I don’t think he expected that occasion would’ve arisen—kill and get out; chatting rarely required. “What about our favorite outlaws?”
His eyes shut as a needle delivered the same local anesthetic used on me. His voice had thinned but was still solid. “When they jumped.”
On the run from the posse, they’d sailed off the cliff hand in hand, going down together toward an uncertain fate. “Yeah, I remember.” The soft drip of the IV hung in the background. “So which of us do you think will hit the water first?”
“You. Your legs are longer.”
I admitted with a small laugh, “You’ve got me there.”
He didn’t speak again throughout the rest of the procedure. It was done in a relatively short time although it had to feel much longer to Michael. The chip wasn’t implanted too deeply and was plucked free to lie bloody and innocuous on a sterile drape. It was small, one-third the size of my pinky nail. A tiny bathroom adjoined the room less than four steps away and I promptly flushed the tracer down the toilet. Let them follow that straight to the nearest waste disposal plant. I only wished I could see them stumping through the steaming muck.
Acutely conscious of my eyes on him, Vanderburgh sealed the inch-long incision with some sort of skin adhesive and covered it with a bandage. Backing away as I helped Michael sit up, he muttered something about getting our pills together and sidled over to a glass-front cabinet. I changed my mind about using the shower. I wasn’t turning my back on this piece of shit for a second, much less ten minutes.
“You doing okay?” I asked as Michael rearranged his shirt and stood.
He nodded. “It’s still numb.” Even when the local wore off, it should only be mildly sore. “But I feel . . . lighter. It couldn’t have weighed even an ounce, and until today I didn’t even know it was there.” His hand unconsciously moved to cover the unseen bandage. “It’s stupid, I know.”
“You’re a lot of things, kiddo, but stupid isn’t one of them.” Putting away my gun, I grabbed a square of gauze and used it to quell the gush of blood that welled when I pulled out my IV. I accepted the piece of tape Michael scrounged for me from the pile of supplies on the counter and used it to fasten the gauze to my skin. The grinding headache was still present, but I felt slightly better. The fluids had lessened my light-headedness, if nothing else.
“Antibiotics and pills for pain and nausea. Follow the directions on the label,” Vanderburgh commanded curtly as he extended a clear plastic bag filled with three brown bottles in my direction. I took it, opened all three bottles, and extracted a pill from each.
With my other hand gripping his thick wrist, I placed the pills, red, purple, and white, on his palm. “Dry or with a glass of water. Your choice.”
His fingers closed over the pills. “What?”
“I’m just not a trusting man, Doc. Go figure. Now take the goddamn pills.”
Opening his hand back up, he stirred the tablets with a finger, then took the red and purple ones. Swallowing them dry, he opened his mouth to reveal an empty pink cavity. The white pill he crushed underfoot. “I think perhaps we can find you a different pain pill.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” The gun at my back positively itched to be used. Despite my recent career, I wasn’t prone to violence. I did what I had to do, but I hadn’t liked it. I would’ve liked hurting this man. I think I would’ve liked it quite a bit.
Once he’d demonstrated the new pills were safe, it was payment time. Meanwhile, Michael had moved with alacrity back out to the living room. He may have survived the experience, but it was unlikely he wanted to hang around that medical environment any longer than he had to. By the time I finished passing over the cash and followed, he’d had time to hide Vanderburgh’s gun and start messing with the man’s VCR/DVD player. Yeah, he’d hang on to the VCR part as long as he could. No doubt some of his best stuff hadn’t made it to DVD or Blu-ray yet.
I took note of the now-empty coffee table and was duly impressed. Vanderburgh probably wouldn’t rush out to shoot at us as we drove down the street, but there was no need to leave him the option, and Michael hadn’t. “Let’s go, kid.”
“Okay.” He dropped the tape he was shifting from hand to hand and stood from his squat. As he walked toward me, he passed close to Vanderburgh—much closer than I liked and much closer than he normally would have. I’d noticed in the store and restaurants that Michael had a large sense of personal space—not surprising considering what he’d been through. That he was voluntarily violating it now made me wonder . . . until I saw his hand brush Vanderburgh’s robe below the tie. It was the lightest of touches with the most drastic of consequences.
The old man’s face went an unpleasant plum color and the portly figure of the former doctor fell to his knees with a choking gasp. Fat hands paddled desperately before settling on his crotch, cupping with exquisite care. “What?” Air whistled through his open mouth. “What—what’s happened?”
What indeed.
“Good-bye, Dr. Vanderburgh,” Michael offered politely before exiting from the front door. He didn’t look back at his handiwork, although I did. Vanderburgh had fallen onto his side and curled up, an obese and tearful fetus. He could cry the proverbial river; it wasn’t going to equal one of the tears of his victims.
Trailing after my brother, I closed the door behind us and cut off the pants and sobs issuing from behind us. “Misha.” I watched as he fished the keys from the pocket of his sweats.
“Mmm?” He inserted the key into the lock.
“All right, Mr. Casual. What did you do?” I demanded.
“Cut off the blood flow to his testicles. Permanently.” Opening the door, he looked at me across the top of the car. “You were right. He’s not a nice person. Not nice at all.” Then he disappeared behind the wheel.
The tape. Michael had seen something on that tape that had given him a glimpse at Vanderburgh’s blackened soul and that glimpse had given new meaning to the phrase “blue balls.” Once in the passenger seat, I took one of the pain pills. After swallowing, I said in the best big-brotherly tone I could manage through my pounding headache, “You really shouldn’t destroy a man’s balls.”
“No?” The car started, the sound only ratcheting up the pain in my head a notch.
“No.” I closed my eyes.
“Even if they deserve it?”
He had me there. “Well . . . yeah, the son of a bitch definitely did. There’s no denying that. But I don’t want you getting hurt in the process.”
“It doesn’t hurt me.” He sounded so certain, but I remembered just last night how he’d told me he and the others at the Institute couldn’t do anything good and how in the morning he expected me to discard him as tainted and leave him behind.
I rolled down the window an inch and let the cold air play over my face. I was getting tired, damn tired, and the twilight chill would help keep me awake. “Funny. You didn’t seem so sure of that when those assholes had you trapped in the bathroom.”
“That’s different.”
I opened my eyes the better to see in his face exactly what it was he was trying to say. “How so?”
“He hurts kids. Normal kids,” he amended. “Kids who can’t protect themselves.”
“Yeah, they can’t protect themselves like you can, but that doesn’t mean you’re not normal.” He rolled a darkly disbelieving eye in my direction but didn’t comment. “But that’s not what I’m talking about,” I added. “I want to know why you’d do something for faceless strangers that you won’t do for yourself.” It wasn’t as if there was much he could’ve done in the face of two guns, but even if the men had been unarmed, I still doubted he would’ve “laid on the hands,” so to speak. I’d seen his face. He wouldn’t have done it . . . not then anyway.
He shrugged with discomfort that wasn’t as concealed as he thought, but I didn’t let it go at that. “Misha. Give. Why wouldn’t you protect yourself? You wouldn’t have to kill, God no. But you could give a little of what you gave to the doc. So why not?” I could understand his never wanting to use what he had in him. I might think it unrealistic, but I would understand. To use it for others and not himself, though, that I couldn’t.
There was the squirt of cleaner on the windshield and the swish of wipers. He watched them with fascination before reluctantly bowing to the inevitable. “Because”—he paused—“because I’m beginning to wonder if I don’t
