House. He reconstructed the image of the jogger in his mind, searching for possible clues. The man wore one of those hooded gray tops, a little baggy, so he could be packing. His jogging pants were the faggoty, snug sateen kind with no bulges in the wrong places, so no weapons were stuffed in there.
He was a little out of breath by the time he’d looped back through the trees, leaving the path so he could take cover. The jogger was standing outside the back door, running in place, the way those adrenaline junkies did when they were punishing themselves for taking a little break.
Kleingarten wasn’t sure how to play it. If he let the guy run away, then Kleingarten would have to give chase, and his feet were already killing him. Best-case scenario, he’d get the guy’s car tags, but if the jogger was a pro, the plate would be stolen or forged anyway.
Option Two was to see if the guy tried to break in, which meant he knew a little something, but probably not enough, or else he would have taken a different avenue into the factory. Like maybe getting a job like Kleingarten did, asking around, doing a little research.
No, this guy knew just enough to be dumb. And therefore he was dangerous.
On the other hand, the guy could be on the Home Team, paid by the same handlers as Kleingarten, except without Briggs’s knowledge. That made the most sense, because somebody obviously had a lot invested in the Monkey House. And if that investment was riding on a wild card like Briggs, it was good business to see which other cards were in the hand or up the sleeve.
Okay, so we play it “pro to pro.” That will cut the bullshit about me having to pretend to be a security guard and him having to pretend to be a lost jogger.
Kleingarten emerged from the woods. “Howdy,” he said, trying to sound like a dumb-ass Southerner instead of a California ex-con.
The jogger quit with the leg-pumping-in-place and let out an exhausted pant. “Hey. I was running through the woods and saw this old building. What was it, a school?”
Yeah, right, a school that only has windows thirty feet above the ground.
“Nah.” Kleingarten kept approaching, steadily, the nine in his palm but still tucked into the jacket pocket. “It’s a secret research lab.”
The jogger gave a “just guys” grin and wiped sweat from his forehead. “Ha, that’s a good one. Like on that TV show, Twenty-Four, right? Kiefer Sutherland?”
“Yeah, just like that.” Kleingarten had never seen the show, but it sounded stupid as shit.
A drop of sweat slid down the jogger’s nose and dangled at the tip. “Nice day to be outside, huh?”
“Nice day to be on private property.”
The jogger frowned. “CRO?”
“Hell, no,” Kleingarten lied. “I’m with the Feds.”
“Then you shouldn’t know this is a secret research lab.”
“And neither should you, I reckon.”
The man made his move then-or maybe he was just reaching up to wipe that itchy drop of sweat from his nose-and Kleingarten reacted at the first twitch. If he was a Fed, he was poorly trained, and if he was a lone op like Kleingarten, he wasn’t cut out for the job anyway.
Kleingarten had his nine out and smoking in less than a second, and the jogger gave a girlish squeal as blooms of red erupted on his chest.
Kleingarten knelt over the corpse, wondering what sort of gun the amateur was carrying in the pouch of his hoodie. Probably a. 357 Magnum. That’s what guys pack when they watch too much TV.
All he found was a water bottle.
“I’ll be damned,” Kleingarten said.
At least he’d discovered that the secret research lab was not so secret, so it wasn’t like the murder had been a total waste.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“These are the same pills,” Roland said, avoiding looking around Wendy’s apartment because he was afraid of how much she’d changed without him.
“How the hell do you know?” Wendy said. “A green pill is a green pill. Unless you want to have the cops run a test.”
“Be cool, Wendy,” Alexis said. “If this is what we think it is-”
“No. If we go down that road, we don’t come back.”
Alexis, sitting on the sofa beside Wendy, took a tight grip on Wendy’s forearms and pulled her hands from her face. “We can’t hide anymore.”
Wendy was nearly in tears, and Alexis was afraid if the dam burst, there would be no patching the pieces back together. The friends had drifted apart after Susan’s death, but that had been an instinctive act of survival, not a conscious decision.
They had all stayed aware of one another, bound by the understanding that they held a collective fate in their hands. Any of them could break the code of silence at any time. But none of them seemed to remember it in exactly the same way.
Roland, standing by the locked door, shook his head at Alexis. His sudden appearance had served to unsettle Wendy even more. And, just like during the trials, Alexis now felt responsible, as if she’d let things go too far through her own fascination with untapped landscapes of the brain.
“All right, Wendy,” Alexis said, hating herself for lapsing into the cold, academic bitch she knew slept inside her. “Let’s look at the facts. We each got the same vial with the same pills and the same prescription. And you said Anita got them, too. That makes four of us.”
“Where’s David Underwood, then?” Wendy said.
“Right here,” Roland said, and they both glared at him. He fumbled in his back pocket and pulled out his license and flipped it toward Alexis. It knocked over the three pill bottles they had placed on the coffee table.
Alexis retrieved it from the carpet and studied it. Roland’s face and David Underwood’s name.
“He’s back,” Alexis said.
“But why?” Wendy said. “He’s got more to lose than any of us.”
“You know why,” Roland said.
Wendy burst from the couch and lunged at him, delivering a solid slap to his cheek. He reacted in time to catch her wrist as she began clawing at his eyes.
“Don’t blame me because you fucked him,” Roland said. “I forgave you, remember?”
“Oh, hell, no, you didn’t,” Wendy said, shrieking and kicking. “If you forgive, you’re supposed to forget!”
Alexis hurried to help Roland restrain her, but Wendy seemed to have the strength of ten, just like the drug- war horror stories about arrests of criminals high on angel dust. But Wendy was fueled by an even deeper toxin: her own rage, fear, and shame.
Alexis took an elbow in the abdomen before trapping one of Wendy’s arms, and by then Roland had wrapped her in a bear hug and was carrying her to the bedroom. “Grab something to tie her with, quick!”
Alexis opened the hall closet and found a couple of scarves dangling from a coat rack, along with an Ace bandage on the shelf. She carried them to the bedroom, where a wailing Wendy was now pinned to the bed by her ex, who straddled her and dodged her kicks. Heeding an unspoken command, she secured Wendy’s feet at the ankles with the Ace bandage, then helped Roland bind her wrists.
Wendy let loose a stream of expletives loud enough to be heard outside the apartment.
“You fucking bastard,” Wendy yelled at Roland. “I knew I should have got a restraining order.”
“Like a piece of paper’s going to undo the past?”
“Roland, please,” Alexis said, pissed off at having to be the responsible one. “She’s vulnerable right now and everything’s raw. You know what the trials do.”
“‘Do’? You say that like they’re still going on.”
Alexis ignored him, leaning over Wendy to stroke her hair. “Hush, honey, or we’ll have to use this scarf on your mouth, and we don’t want to do that.”
