belong in a cage after all.”
That woke me up quickly and thoroughly. Glaring, I reached over and thwapped him lightly in the back of the head. Startled, he looked over at me with wide eyes. “Say something stupid like that again and you’ll never see an empty calorie again as long as you live. No cakes, no candy bars, nothing. You’ll be cut off.”
He was smoothing the back of his hair as I talked and entertaining the thought of giving me a dirty look. I could see it as clear as day. “Don’t bother,” I warned. “Bottom line, kid. You don’t belong in a cage. No one but no one is going to say that, not even you. Got it?”
“Guess I had better, hadn’t I?” he answered with what seemed to be only mild irritation. After a few minutes of the only sound being the tires on the pavement, he said quietly, “I wouldn’t have given up. I wouldn’t have let them take me without a fight.” The dusky purple light filled the car, making him increasingly hard to see . . . as if he were fading away. “I just don’t know if I could hold that part of myself back once I started to use it in a situation like that. All the adrenaline. Fighting for my life.” I thought I saw his face work in the darkness. “I won’t risk killing again. I can’t. I still remember how it felt . . . with that man’s heart beneath my hand. How it pounded; then the muscle melted like wax. I could feel it scream and die even through his chest.” He stopped, and I wasn’t sorry he did. Hearing that wasn’t doing either of us any good right now. There would be time to talk about it later. When we were free and safe, we’d talk about a thousand things until he was at peace with every one of them.
“Then you don’t have to.” End of story. “Leave the violence to me, Misha. I’m already used to it.”
He had something to say about that; I didn’t have to see him to know the wheels were spinning in his head. But winter air and determination aside, I dozed off before he was able to get the words out. Against a concussion and a pain pill, consciousness was a lost cause. Michael woke me up when we stopped at a gas station and I cleaned up as best I could in the grubby bathroom. The paper towel dispenser was empty and I scrubbed away dried blood with wet toilet paper. There wasn’t much I could do about what was matted in my hair, but hopefully I would pass a brief inspection at the motel.
I did. It was a small, run-down place with only ten rooms and a small gravel lot. The guy behind the counter had blond dreads decorated here and there with rusty metal hoops. If he had noticed the condition of my hair, it would only have been to give me a thumbs-up. The room was even worse than the outside, but it didn’t matter. With a thin, rock-hard mattress and a dingy cracked ceiling, it was the Ritz-Carlton as far as I was concerned. I fell into bed as if it were feather stuffed and covered with silk sheets. I was gone in an instant, and I dreamed. Like Michael’s, my dreams were of horses. There was also the beach with churning waves and a sky as improbably blue as an Easter egg. There was no strange man; no gun. There were only horses that lived to canter into the water and boys who never learned to live without their brothers. They were good dreams.
The best.
Chapter 19
“Saul, you’re giving me a headache.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but he was adding to my already existing headache.
“Giving you a headache?” Outraged and louder than the voice of God booming down on Moses, it had me yanking the phone from my ear with desperate speed.
“I didn’t do anything to the man’s sack, okay?” I repeated with weary patience for the third time.
“The balls are gone, aren’t they? And my business relationship with the dickwad isn’t looking too good either. He might be a bastard, but he was handy to have on the roster.”
“He still had balls when I left, Skoczinsky,” I growled.
“You can’t blame that on me.” On Michael maybe, but I was thoroughly innocent. As for the missing balls, either the hospital had amputated them or Vanderburgh had botched a do-it-yourself home job.
“I know you, Korsak. You had something to do with it.” He’d said my name on a cell phone, the least secure connection in the world today, which broke his rule of “protect the client.” He was pissed all right. There was a groan that turned into an aggrieved sigh and then a reluctant question. “He wasn’t doing that shit again, was he? With the kids?”
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly.
“If he was, I would’ve driven up to hold him down while you made with the cleaver. You know that, right?” I did know, but he didn’t wait long enough to hear my confirmation. “Ah, hell, balls or not, he can still work. And speaking of work, I’ve got that info you wanted.”
Fumbling for the bottle of pills on the nightstand, I wrestled with the stubborn cap. “Yeah? Lay it on me.”
There was the rustle of papers and Saul became even louder as he cradled the phone between shoulder and chin. “John Jericho Hooker. Forty-seven years old, raised in Massachusetts. He’s a doctor several times over, medical and otherwise. He has doctorates in human and molecular genetics and biochemistry. Started college at the tender age of fourteen—a genius brat apparently—and hasn’t looked back since. Genetic replacement and manipulation—what there is to know he practically wrote the book on. What his peers felt wasn’t worth knowing is where he got into trouble.”
This sounded promising. Getting up, I filled a glass at the bathroom tap while Michael showered. “How so?”
“Two words. Human chimeras.”
Okay. I got one of those words, and that wasn’t so bad. I was the king of partial credit in college. “Come again?”
“Human chimeras, obviously. Surely you’ve heard of them, Korsak. Big college-educated mob guy such as yourself.” Then Saul dropped the lofty tone and admitted, “Yeah, I’d never heard of them either. Apparently there are more things in Heaven and Earth, just like my bubble gum wrapper said. A human chimera is the result of twins, mostly identical but occasionally fraternal, intermingling in the womb. Blood or other genetic material mixes between the two of them. One twin usually dies in the womb and the twin left has the building blocks of two instead of one. Sort of like human to the second power, I guess.”
All right. It was vaguely interesting, but was it pertinent? The jury was still out on that one. “And what’s this have to do with the man in the moon?”
“Hooker is one. A natural chimera—and damn proud of the fact. He did a lot of groundbreaking work, so says Google, that’s the backbone of the field of genetics today, but his true passion was for chimeras. He was of the opinion that his humans squared should be stronger, faster, smarter . . . everything we are, but only much more so. Now, the fact that he wouldn’t submit proof of that was really no big deal. It was a pet theory; all scientists have them. It was when he started into the psychic crap that eyebrows began to rise.”
A single cold finger climbed my spine as if it were a ladder. Psychic. I didn’t know exactly how to classify what Michael and the other Institute children could do, but it had to occupy some twisted corner of the psychic realm. “Psychic? What the hell?”
“I know. As we said in the van, he’s a goddamn fruit loop. He calculated that if they would be stronger and faster, they would also have a heightened psychic ability. Of course, if he’d ever bothered to demonstrate all those abilities himself, maybe he wouldn’t be the pariah he is today.” I heard him yawn. “Shit, maybe I’m a chimera myself. Twice the sexy jammed into one body. Now that’s a science project worth the bucks.”
“Bucks? How about cents?” I replied absently. Michael had come out of the bathroom. Bare-chested, he was wearing a pair of my jeans that bagged ridiculously on him and a towel hanging around his neck. My eyes went instantly to the incision on his lower back. He’d said it hadn’t hurt when he’d gotten up this morning, and now I could see why.
It was gone.
The only sign the surgery had ever taken place was the thinnest of silvery lines, nearly invisible to the naked eye. I felt my mouth go dry. Stronger or faster, I didn’t know if there was truth in that or not, but Jericho had certainly proved resilient. It had to be the same resiliency that Michael was exhibiting. The recollection of his tattered feet from the night of the rescue hit me. The next day he’d said they were fine when I’d asked and had
