Bio-Justice

by Scott Takemoto

  “Paris!” Danny said, crouching down beside him.

  Paris laughed, in a way that suggested delirium. “You made it, boy.”

  “Paris, what happened?”

  Reaching up with his vein-striated hands, Paris grasped Danny by the shoulder. “What happened? You know that shit they’re selling? The youth drug. Wayback—some of the guys are calling it. Did you see Delphia downstairs? I was thinking of making it a night, you know? ’Cause there aint a whole lot to look forward to these days. Stole a bunch of shit to sell off so I could get me some of the Wayback. That way I get to give Delphia the old Paris, you know what I’m telling you? I wanted to send that girl to the moon and back. Well, I shot the shit—double dose now—and Delphia comes in and it’s just laying there. Nothin’. She tries to help me get it going but nothing’s happening. That’s when I excused myself and took one more, my last hit, in the bathroom. I never made it back to Delphia. I collapsed on the floor—my head felt like it was flying off my shoulders. Delphia freaked and she ran out of here…”

  “A couple of Viagras wouldn’t do?”

  “You don’t understand,” Paris said. “It’s not just the dick. I wanted to look good—like I used to. I wanted to be worthy of a beautiful woman’s attention.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t speak so much. Let me call a doctor.”

  “For what? To keep me alive—for what?”

  Danny reached for his phone. Paris knocked it out of his hand which surprised Danny.

  “It’s over, man. Just sit with me for a while.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Paris.”

  “Don’t make me fight with you, Danny—the last fucking thing I do on earth.”

  Danny watched Paris shrink before his eyes. His chest looked caved in, his arms flopped about like a marionette, but it was in Paris’ eyes that Danny could see imminent death. Danny saw a water bottle on the table and uncapped it for Paris.

  “I can’t even swallow,” Paris said wearily.

  “I don’t know what to do for you,” Danny said frantically.

  “Just talk. Just talk to me. Hey, let me have some of that water.”

  Danny held the bottle up to Paris’ mouth but most of it brimmed over his lips and spilled outside his mouth. What little made it into his mouth, Paris swallowed and grimaced hard.

  “That’s good,” he said. And after a few halted breaths, Paris spoke again. “Do you remember Art?”

  “Of course,” Danny said.

  “He hung himself.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “I guess he couldn’t take his wife’s sainthood anymore,” Paris laughed. He cleared his throat and grimaced again. “Well, they’re getting what they wanted—the ones that don’t die off in old age, they kill themselves with rope…or this.” Paris held up a used syringe hidden by his useless legs. “I guess they would say we got what we deserved.”

  Danny could see the light flickering out in Paris’ eyes. He tried to give Paris another drink but he pushed the bottle away. Danny felt his tears pushing forth and he quickly wiped his face with his hand before Paris could see it.

  “Man, that girl had some tits on her. And her skin…was like…butter cream.”

  Danny looked over at Paris and then shook him, but he was gone. A hundred beads of sweat covered Paris’ face, capturing the last of his life’s essence. He held Paris without moving for a long time. An anguished sigh burst from Danny’s lips and his chest rose up and down causing Paris’ head to bob as if it were floating in water. Danny put his hand over Paris’ eyes to close them. Then he lifted his friend, placing him gently on the old sofa, taking one last look before leaving him.

  Danny left the Cedar Hotel and kept walking. Blocks were covered and for hours Danny barely felt his feet on the pavement. The sounds of the noisy city seemed suspended and a foggy silence filled his ears only occasionally compromised by a honking car close by.

  By the time Danny boarded a train back to Brooklyn, he had traversed some thirty blocks in Queens. His feet now felt tired and he decided to take a soaking bath when he got back to his apartment. Louis’ warning was pushed back in his consciousness after the trauma of Paris and of seeing his own face again in that of another.

  His apartment building, by contrast with the unsavory hotel he had just left, was quiet with no activity culled around its periphery. Danny entered the building quickly and climbed the steps to his floor. Pushing the door open and stepping inside his apartment, there was a moment before he reached for the light when the air felt energized with an element dark and sinister. When the light wouldn’t come on, Danny stepped cautiously forward in the pitch darkness, balling his fists, hoping that the bulb just needed replacing.

  A pair of outstretched legs in his path tripped up his footing and Danny struggled to keep from falling. He grabbed at the blinds which separated as it flew up, illuminating the room in sharp slices. Danny could now see Louis seated on his couch, his legs extended and splayed open, his head tilted back with his eyes rolled and motionless. A kitchen knife was buried just below Louis’ rib cage and the front of his shirt kept the blood from pouring forth. The middle finger of his blood-drenched right hand was extended over his knee, a crimson drop beaded and ready to fall onto the carpet.

  “Oh, fuck!” Danny said low and panicked. His head spun around the room and for a moment he could see nothing. Then he heard two voices with an unnerving clarity mocking him. “Now what have you gone and done?” said one voice. “Yeah,” came the second voice. “Why’d you have to go and kill good ol’ Louis Castillo?”

  The disembodied voices were restored to their sources as two men came out of the shadows from different directions towards Danny. The second voice, attached to a leering, hulking brute, continued, “Looks like he was waiting up for you and you didn’t like what he had to say. It’s a shame you couldn’t control your temper.”

  Danny looked at the faces of the men but they meant nothing to him—two murderers with brutal faces, closing off the space between Danny and freedom.

  “I don’t understand,” Danny said. “Louis didn’t do anything.”

  “Obviously, he did enough,” the first man replied.

  Danny made a quick rush toward the narrowing space between the two men, heard one of them laugh before he felt two metal pins pushed to his neck. He heard the sickening crackle of electricity as his body constricted into a plank of pulled muscle. Bits of froth gathered at the corners of Danny’s mouth, his eyes rolled back, his arms flailed wildly. He fell to the ground in a heap, inhaling the acrid smell of his own burning flesh, as the two men shackled his wrists in handcuffs and carried him under the armpits to the hallway and down the stairs.

  The awaiting car, which had been parked in front, was opened, and Danny was shoved head first into the back seat. Quietly, inconspicuously, the car pulled away into traffic. The roads were smooth as if freshly paved and travelling the predetermined route occurred without incident. The car maintained the deliberate speed of a school bus. No police cars would think to pull it over for any reason. Broken shafts of light from the streets carved up the darkness where Danny lay, his hot face flush against the cool upholstery.

  Soon the car flowed into the turnpike and increased its speed. The two men in the front seat mostly sat in silence but turned around every so often to gawk at their captive as they sped on the highway towards New Jersey.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 20

  The stun gun had done its job and Danny laid quietly subdued in the back seat, his cuffed hands rustling back and forth as the car lolled gently along the main roads. As the car entered Conlan Laboratories through the security entrance, Danny pulled himself up into a sitting position. He stared down at the cuffed hands in his lap, and then looked at his two captors coldly, and with calculation.

  “Home sweet home,” Danny muttered.

  The cuffs hung off his wrists loosely. It had been tricky to look nonchalant as he used the pick from his belt buckle to work on the locks.
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  The first thing Danny was taught when he was placed in a juvenile correctional facility at the age of fifteen was how to pick locks. There was a small runty kid there, Angel, who was a savant of sorts when it came to locks. Danny had stood up for him against Rafael, a tall, muscle-bound bully who went out of his way to make sure every morning was one that Angel began with dread. That day Rafael snorted back before firing a viscous glob of spit onto Angel’s lunch tray. Danny had been standing nearby and instinctively punched Rafael so the pupils of his eyes telescoped in and out. Unfortunately, Rafael recovered quickly and unleashed his sledge hammer, a roundhouse right hook that knocked loose one of Danny’s molars. Then Rafael spewed a string of expletives at both Danny (who cupped his hand under his chin to catch the blood as well as his dislodged tooth) and Angel, who glared back defiantly at his nemesis. After that, Rafael never bothered Angel or Danny again and seemed satisfied to shoot menacing glares when he passed them in the halls. In Danny, Angel had found a friend and the two spent a lot of time together. Starting with padlocks, Angel meticulously showed Danny how to crack just about anything that required a key including handcuffs and eventually car door locks. It wasn’t much of a leap from there for Danny to develop a propensity in the art of car theft. After all, stealing a car was just getting through a series of locks and the ride was yours.

  The sedan came to a stop in a different parking area than the one he had arrived in months earlier. It was smaller, more isolated, meant for more clandestine arrivals. Danny waited as the two men stepped out and opened his door. “Try anything funny and you’re as dead as your friend Louis,” the driver warned.

  Danny hadn’t figured it all out but he knew the plan was not to see him dead. “Somehow, I don’t think so,” Danny said with impudence as he stepped out of the car. Danny took note of where both men had their pistols and stun guns under their coats.

  The other thug, the bigger of the two, promoted a threat of sadistic, well-executed violence as his bravado. “Look, we can fuck you up so bad you’ll wish you were dead, so keep it up.”

  It was funny, Danny thought, these apes kept snapping death over his head like a cracking whip so he would feel coerced to balance himself on the tightrope of obedience. Fuck them, he thought, I’m a dead man already. They might as well lower me into the ground right now and be done with it. Everyone he ever cared about had banished, abandoned or died on him. The faces of Sonya, Maggie, Louis, Paris and even Art and Vic he would never see again. So what was it to be this despairingly alone, this achingly disconnected? For one thing, it forged within him an unexpected freedom that feels no pull of responsibility or love or obligation to anyone, the kind of freedom that courts death because the gamble has been stripped of its consequence. His life was now so absent of connection it only had value in its kinetic energy, in its ability to make itself known.

  Danny kept his hands hung low as the two brooding escorts marched him into the elevator and pushed the button for Level 4. The humming silence of the elevator as it launched upward emboldened Danny as he turned to each of his captors. “Which one of you gentlemen killed Louis?”

  The driver smiled and shook his head, amused by the reckless question. The larger one, who had threatened Danny with a blitzkrieg of physical pain answered the query while still facing forward. “I did,” he said. Danny nodded as the doors swept open.

  The three faced a long white corridor that was empty as if evacuated for Danny’s arrival. Danny looked to his right and noticed the closed doors and their identifying plaques—Research Lab E, Research Lab F, Radiology Unit, Storage Room 6. When they came upon the door marked Stairs, Danny, without hesitation, plunged through, his captors’ outstretched hands missing him by inches.

  Smashing through the door, the two men were surprised to see Danny standing on the landing waiting for them. By the time they saw the handcuffs drop to the concrete floor, Danny’s hand had thrust under the driver’s coat onto the stun gun, unsheathing it, as his free hand crushed the driver’s face with his fist. Now activated, the stun gun crackled and Danny pulled the second man’s head down by the hair and stuck the metal pins into his ear.

  “Did he suffer?” Danny cried as he shot the electrical charge into Louis’ killer until it was spent. The body was still convulsing when Danny removed the Glock from the thug’s holster. To his left, the driver was struggling to recover as he held his face and fumbled for his gun. Danny slammed him head first into the steel railing of the stairwell, dropping him where he stood. Swiveling, Danny saw the other thug resurrecting himself. Fighting back from the electrical charge, Louis’ killer found his focus again and goddamn it if Danny didn’t catch him smiling. Danny wondered if Louis had faced that grotesque smile as he begged for his life before this cunt bastard stuck the blade deep into his abdomen. Danny embraced the searing rage in his heart, his arm making a dizzying overhead arc as he brought down the butt of the Glock onto the skull of Louis’ killer. He felt the impact of the crack, signaling the subsequent hemorrhaging to the brain. After stuffing the Glock inside his pants and relieving the other thug of his Beretta, Danny took the handcuffs and shackled the killers to each other, around the wrists and threaded through the stair railing.

  Danny removed the shoes of the unconscious driver and stripped off his socks, stuffing them into the gaping mouth. He gave the driver a thirty percent chance of survival, his partner perhaps five.

  If the world had chosen to descend into savagery, then it would be so.

  From the feverish violence, a dark purpose was born. There could be only one objective now: somehow he would find Conlan, who promoted and justified evil in the name of scientific progress, and punish him for all the human misery he had brought into the world.

  The audible violence on the stairwell was a concern. Employees may have been aroused on the other side of the door. Danny hurried up the stairs two floors to a door marked Level 2. Entering the floor, he quickly made his way down the corridor looking for an elevator. Passing a technician in a white lab coat, Danny picked up on the suspicious glance cast towards his ruffled street clothes. A conspicuous spot of blood sparkled from his sleeve.

  An elevator bank was tucked to the side near some lavatories and Danny pressed the up button. Immediately, the doors opened and Danny stepped into the empty car. He was momentarily flustered that the top destination of the car was only street level.

  Danny would have to make his way from the street level reception area to a separate elevator that would take him to Conlan on the fifteenth floor and that meant exposure. But before he could press the button, the elevator lurched downward.

  The elevator came to a stop at the bottom, the lowest subterranean floor, Level 6. The doors opened to another white corridor, more stark and foreboding than the others, with higher ceilings and fewer entry points, leading back as far as the eye could see. Perhaps there was a more direct route to the upper floors so Danny decided to find out. He stepped out onto the floor, the doors of the elevator closing behind him, and walked slowly down the hypnotic passage. Passing through two double-plated doors, Danny looked about for surveillance cameras but saw none. He came upon another door that read Research Ward 2 and tried it. The door opened and Danny continued on.

  Research Ward 2 had a more traditional layout with administrative offices and testing laboratories partitioned off from each other on either side of a labyrinthine corridor. The space seemed evacuated and Danny could hear the hum of the ventilating units and the clopping of his own footsteps on the speckled linoleum. He flinched when he heard a click but presumed it to be coming from one of the many machines, in offices whose doors he passed, still operating through the night. When he reached the end of the corridor and could see no other elevator bank leading to other floors, Danny turned on his heel but stopped when he heard a sound that confused him.

  It was a chirp, a wounded sound, small but intense with feeling. It was a sound both familiar yet strangely unfamiliar. Danny had flight on his mind but could not resist fo
llowing the continuous gabble reaching his ear. He entered a half cracked door—the Glock drawn—and he heard rustling, much clearer, as he approached the source. The room was an annex for live laboratory work, stacked with primate cages, hutches for rabbits, glass terrariums for mice. None were currently occupied so the warbling sound intrigued Danny even more—coming down from a short passage of tables and testing devices—for it seemed to come from a larger creature. Danny imagined some large dog wheezing or even a high-pitched ape attached to electrical wires.

  But that idea was instantly scrapped when Danny, on the verge of discovery, heard the unmistakable sound of a woman crying. He could see her now. She was turned away from him when she came into view—young, perhaps twenty-one, with long unruly blonde hair. A flimsy slip barely covered her curvaceous body. The woman’s face was hiding in the crook of her forearm which rested on a utility table cleared of all objects, sobbing miserably. Then he saw the handcuffs around one of her wrists and fastened to the leg of the bolted metal chair she was sitting on.

  “What’s going on here?” Danny said.

  The young woman gasped and looked up, terrified at Danny’s sudden appearance. Her eyes fixed on him. They were brown, as wide as a doll’s in a porcelain face, with fluttery lashes. Her pink mouth trembled open to emit a scream.

  “No!” Danny hushed. He lowered his gun and with his eyes beckoned her to be still. She complied as if used to responding to commands. Danny swallowed as he took in the sight of her. Large pillowy breasts, wide swollen hips and awkwardly long tapered legs—like a paid stripper at a bachelor party, only without the hardened, weary look that tried to mask (usually unsuccessfully) the contempt they had for their clients. This girl was pretty, the kind that entered pageants, not wet t-shirt competitions. He thought to himself—fresh and unspoiled, like the girl next door who was sheltered by an overprotective father with a shotgun. But, no—her mouth was starting to form a scream again.