by Hal Bodner
“Alec! Those are museum quality! Examples of indigenous culture! Weren’t you going to have them mounted and framed?”
“I never got around to it. I know it’ll be hard but please don’t worry about me. I’m going to try and sleep and I don’t need Randy to barge in half a billion times dressed like Florence Nightingale.”
Pete shuddered. “Yeah. I can see how that might make you sicker. Still, I really wish…”
“Enough!” I put my index finger to his lips to quiet him. He sucked on it, playfully. “The Belgians will be here for two weeks and they’re paying top dollar. I want to get them started out on the right foot. As soon as I’m sure there are no complications, I’ll let Randy take over. Besides, how long have we been meaning to rip out that crappy carpet downstairs and fix the parquet underneath? With the fees from this gig, we can afford to start converting the nightclub so that we have a decent sized living room for a change.”
“Go on then,” he said. “But I don’t have to like it.”
“So long as you still love me…”
Peter surprised me by sweeping me into an embrace so tight that, had I been a normal human, he would have bruised my ribs. He pressed my face into his shoulder and buried his in my hair.
“Oh, Alec,” he whispered. “If you only knew how much.”
When he broke the clinch, not releasing me but putting just enough space between us to let me breathe again, he had tears in his eyes.
“The only thing I want in this whole world is to make you happy. I know you think I worry too much, but if God forbid something ever happened to you…”
His tears spilled over. My own eyes grew moist.
“I don’t know what I’d do. My job at Greene Genes is important but you…you’re my whole life.”
Smiling through his tears, he continued with almost frightening intensity.
“Please forget about that stupid agency for once. I’ll skip work, too. We can both stay home. It’ll be like a mini stay-cation.”
“What about Jackson’s funeral? All the lawyers? The insurance people?”
“Deborah Macintosh can deal with it. Herman would prefer me not to be around anyway. We can spend all day in bed. No sex, if you’re not up to it. We’ll just hold each other and think about how lucky we are. How about it?”
“No,” I whispered. “We can’t. Not today. We have responsibilities. Both of us do.”
His arms tightened around me for a brief instant. Then, he let go.
“Soon? Promise me?”
“Wild horses couldn’t stop me from keeping that promise.”
His face lit up. “You’d better.”
He kissed me again and left for work. As the door closed behind him, I had a last glimpse of the back of his head, hair still slightly damp from the shower. A horrible chill washed over me, an ominous frisson from out of nowhere. I almost called out to him. I wanted to tell him I’d changed my mind. But I knew I couldn’t. I shivered, though it wasn’t cold. I sat on the bed and drew my legs into my chest, wrapped my arms around my knees, and couldn’t stop shaking.
I told myself that it was nothing worse than a side effect from the stress of the past few days. I had no other explanation for the horrible, irrational sense of dread that whispered to me that I would never see my husband again.
Chapter Seventeen
“I’m telling you, he won’t do it.”
While I’d been home recovering from my injuries, Randy had been experimenting with blond highlights. His normally ebon tresses looked like a slice of tuxedo cake. The bizarre visual effect made it very difficult for me to concentrate on what he was saying.
“They’re paying more than triple his usual rate,” I growled. By this point in the conversation, I had no need to feign a headache.
“He says the thing with the rubber raft is too twisted.”
“It’s a fetish, you dizzy queen. It’s supposed to be twisted.”
One of my boys, Lance, had refused a date with one of the Belgians. Normally, we could have simply sent a different guy. Monsieur Tremblanc, however, had a crush on Lance and was willing to pay through the nose for him.
“It’s not just the raft. God knows, Lance had done far kinkier things. Did you see that video he made? Who knew you could do that with cottage cheese? And the bit with the Ficus tree? Our Lance is truly inspired when the impulse strikes.”
“What’s the problem then?” I longed to end this conversation, and not just because I needed to suit up and get busy.
Randy lowered his voice as if confiding a secret.
“It’s the wiener dogs. Lance says they creep him out.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I finally exploded. “It’s not like they participate! They stay in the damned cage.”
“They watch,” he said, smugly, as if that settled the matter. “What’s worse is…Lance swears they lick their lips.”
“Dogs can’t actually do that, can they?”
“When they see that much ground meat, they do. Tremblanc isn’t a small man. Last time, it took thirty pounds of sausage.”
“Which we made a profit on as well,” I pointed out.
“Not after Tremblanc let the dogs out and the greedy little monsters gobbled up what was left over and got sick. Deep cleaning hotel carpeting is not cheap.”
“He reimbursed us.”
“Four months later.”
“Tell Lance,” I said. “If he does this, I’ll move him to the front of the line for the next time Chet Herrington comes to town. Last year, Chet flew David to Hawaii for the weekend.”
“That might do it.” He pursed his lips while he was thinking things through. “Yes, I think he’d go for that.”
I breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Make it so. While you’re at it, hold all my calls. I’ve got a headache to beat the band.”
“Even calls from Peter?”
“Especially from Peter. Tell him I’m napping and I threatened to rip that dye job out by the roots if you wake me.”
“I’ll have you know that Terrence at Mein Lieber Hair did it. It took me months to get an appointment.”
“God made you a brunette for a reason,” I said. “And your eyebrows defy His Divine Will. What color is that? Goldenrod? Lemon Chiffon? Banana Creme Pie?”
“It’s all the rage,” he pouted.
“Maybe for an elf on crack,” I said.
“Go ahead,” he yelled over his shoulder as he flounced out in a huff. “Insult the help if it makes you feel like a big man.”
“No calls!” I yelled after him.
Five minutes later, I was good to go. Travis had come up with several lists of all the places in and around Centerport where a research scientist might be held hostage. The first list was depressingly long until we realized that, if Thanatos had kept Brad Harmon alive, it was because he needed the doctor’s expertise. Bradley would, in turn, need certain resources in order to work, chief among them being reliable internet access capable of handling large amounts of secure data. Since ISPs rarely run cables into abandoned subway stations or the sub-basements of defunct factories, we were able to narrow the options substantially.
One location stood out.
The old Tellmore Lighthouse loomed over a high bluff about a quarter of a mile north of where the Fillmore river emptied into the sea. It was a popular picnic spot until the cliffs just below it began to collapse from erosion. The building was so rickety and dangerous that even high school kids looking for a place to shack up or smoke weed didn’t dare risk breaking in. Travis found it very curious, therefore, when the Centerport Public Utility Company’s records revealed that the water and power were still turned on. Digging a little deeper, he found that the bills were paid by a subsidiary of Greene Genes. The final straw, however, was when he found that someone had gone to the trouble of installing fiber optic internet in a lighthouse which was, supposedly, condemned.
It didn’t take rocket science to conclude that we’d found a bad guy. The only question wa
s whether or not it was our bad guy. After all, Centerport was not Thanatos’ exclusive stomping ground.
Of course, it was always possible that some desperate, and possibly insane, real estate developer had decided to convert the lighthouse into quaint condo units. I scotched that option within seconds of my arrival. I took one look at the place and the words “wreck,” “shambles,” and “bulldozer” were the ones that most readily sprang to mind.
I circled the building, wary of any suspicious picnic blankets. The shiny new padlock on the rear door was yet another give-away. There were no security cameras and no visible alarms either. If this was the place where Doctor Harmon was stashed, it looked like Thanatos had been banking on our being unable to find him, rather than worrying about what would happen if we did. That kind of thinking smacked of over-confidence, or just plain sloppiness. I wasn’t sure which possibility troubled me the most.
Before I entered, just to make sure that he wasn’t going to spring a bunch of leather-clad minions on me at the last minute, I closed my eyes and engaged my proximity sense. The place didn’t feel very occupied. Nevertheless, I got the sense of at least one presence inside the lighthouse that had more intelligence than a stray raccoon or squirrel that might be nesting in the battered stone walls.
The lock was a cinch. Unlike what they show on TV, they don’t actually crumble into powder when you squeeze them. But if you grab the hasp and twist hard enough, they generally snap open. The door itself was metal, sturdy and had no discernable knob, although there was a little panel with numbers set into the shadows of the door frame.
Oh joy, an electronic lock.
In retrospect, it made sense. Given how tightly Thanatos’ costume fit him, there wasn’t much room for him to carry a set of keys. If I’d let Travis come along with me, he’d have been in his element. He loves any opportunity to use his gizmos, whether it’s to bypass locks, or to eavesdrop on government agencies. He’d have happily fussed around with his wires and gadgets until he came up with the combination.
I don’t have that kind of patience.
So, I just ripped out the door.
Frame and all.
And left it propped against the stone wall next to the doorway.
The corridor was dark, and as dank as you’d expect the hallway in an abandoned lighthouse to be. There was no light switch. Just in case Thanatos was an afficionado of late-night infomercials, I clapped my hands once, softly. Still, no light.
Most of the doors on either side of the hallway were ajar. At one point, the rooms they revealed had been used as living space for the lighthouse keeper and his family. Now, they were empty of everything except ruined furniture, broken glass, used condoms, and miscellaneous junk. My muscles were still a little dicey, and a battered sofa tempted me to rest for a minute, but the stench of mildew and the furry critter that ran across one of the torn pillows made me reconsider. At the end of the passage, I found a landing with one long stairway going up, and one even longer going down. I looked for a third one, the one that went nowhere just for show. But there were only the two.
I had no need of my proximity sense to detect the waves of despair percolating up from the lower stairwell. The feeling of hopelessness that pervaded the place was almost palpable. Down I went, hugging the wall like a horror movie heroine creeping into the basement where the disembodied limbs of her fellow summer campers were stored. The stairs dead-ended at a small landing, with stone walls broken only by a single door sheathed in layers of sheet metal. The space seemed even more claustrophobic because the only light was from a single, low-wattage bulb, set high up on the wall, behind a protective mesh grill.
Gently, I tested the door and found to my surprise that it wasn’t locked. Though it swung open easily enough, it scraped against the stone floor of the room within. I winced at the noise and, before it could alert anyone, I stepped inside.
My initial impression of the place was that Doctor Frankenstein could really use a maid service. There were a couple of heavy tables bolted to the floor, littered with scientific apparatus. The largest one was covered with beakers and burners, flasks and petri dishes, test tubes and microscopes, all scattered willy-nilly without any sense of organization or order. A few glass containers lay on their sides in puddles of whatever had spilled out of them.
The second table held half a dozen machines with glowing screens. One of them was a desk top computer; I had no idea what the other ones were for. As far as I knew, they could have been doing anything from tracking satellites to smog checking Thanatos’ car. Post-It notes almost completely obscured a couple of the screens, and more paper, mostly full sheets, was taped to almost every vertical surface. It was as if whoever worked there needed to be able to see a written summary of every single thought he’d ever had, no matter how minor, all at the same time. Crumpled balls of paper littered the floor and there was a spray of broken glass where someone had tossed a container at the garbage can, missed, and hadn’t bothered to clean it up.
A heavily padlocked cabinet was soldered to the near wall, wedged between a household refrigerator and a commercial freezer that was large enough to hold half a cow. Aside from the dim glow from the few unobstructed computer screens, the only light sources were a couple of overhead fixtures with faulty florescent bulbs that flickered and popped, alternately bathing the room with a harsh and chemical light, and plunging it into deep gloom. The strobe effect caused me to mistake the mound against the far wall for a pile of rubbish until, with a distinct clanking of chains, it moved.
“Whirlwind?” The voice was both exhausted and relieved.
Though I’d never known Bradley Harmon all that well, the distinctive whine in his voice was as memorable and as abrasive as the scrape of steel cutlery on stoneware dishes. “Grating” was an apt description of the sound. While he wasn’t someone you might want to speak to at a social event unless you’d brought along a healthy dose of aspirin for the inevitable headache, in this case, the irritating quality in his voice was a boon. Otherwise, given his current condition, it would have been a stretch for me to have identified him by sight alone.
Not to mince words, the good doctor looked like shit.
Bradley was the typical absent-minded professor, albeit far more arrogant and impatient than most, so the rumpled clothing and cheek stubble wasn’t unexpected. He was the type that, even at the best of times, often forgot to shower and shave for a few days because he was too absorbed in his work. Now, however, Harmon had been wearing the same Hawaiian shirt for so long that the outlines of the hula girls had bled into the rest of the pattern. Had it not been for the palm fronds all over the thing, I’d have thought the shirt was decorated with dancing turnips.
The only reason he wasn’t corpse-pale was probably that he’d been kidnaped under the bright sun of Tahiti. Even so, the remnants of his tan bathed his complexion in a sallow cast, and his skin was the color of an unbaked lump of dough that had gone bad. His eyes were deeply hollowed, dark with fatigue, and desperate, and his hair was greasy and disheveled, as if Albert Einstein had plugged his finger into an electric socket.
And he stank. Good Lord, how he stank!
Bradley seemed to perspire a lot for someone who seemed as allergic to doing anything physical as I knew he was. The armpits of his filthy lab coat were stained yellowish brown. Only heaven knew what the underarms of the dancing vegetable shirt looked like underneath it. In any case, it was clear that he hadn’t been allowed to bathe since his capture. Aside from the body odor, there was the scent of something unwholesome and fetid in the air; the shackle locked around his leg had chafed, and there was a large, festering wound on his ankle, leaking puss. It looked like a pit bull had chewed on his foot and smelled like a rancid compost heap.”
“Oh, thank God! Thank God!” He kept repeating it.
He buried his face in his hands, weeping uncontrollably, while I stood awkwardly, trying not to gag on the stench and waiting for him to get control of himself. To his credit, the waterwo
rks didn’t last long.
“Quickly!” he pointed. “That cabinet. On the top shelf. You’ll find a rack of vials.”
I tore the door off the locked cabinet and located the proper stuff. When I handed it to him, I made sure to stand as far back as I could, and breathe through my mouth. To my surprise, he prepared a hypodermic and rolled up his sleeve.
“Um…I don’t want to be judgmental but do you really want to be doing that now?
“Huh?” He expertly injected orange goo into his veins and dropped the empty syringe to the floor.
“I just think…I mean, we still have to get out of here. It’ll help if you’re not completely stoned when we do it.”
“Stoned?” he snapped. “What nonsense is…? Oh! You meant…”
He started to laugh and, in a way, it was worse than the weeping. It was high-pitched and bordered on hysteria. At least it seemed to release some of his tension.
“I’m not an addict.”
“Of course not,” I agreed amiably. “Because given a choice between escaping and shooting up, you naturally chose…”
“I was poisoned, you idiot!”
He riffled through some of the ubiquitous paper, casting most of it aside until he found what he wanted. He rolled it into a tube and stuffed it into the pocket of his lab coat.
“The antidote’s only temporary. But we have no time to worry about that now. Has that horrible man released the stuff yet?”
I nodded.
“Damn! Then we’ll need these as well.”
He quickly poured a measure from several different beakers into a small collection of plastic test tubes, capped them, and skillfully labeled them with a permanent marker.
“Oh! And this, of course…”
He grabbed a small box full of microscope slides.
“I almost forgot…”
He snatched a handful of flash drives and stood with his lab coat pockets bulging, tapping his uninjured foot impatiently.
“Well…?”
He waggled his cuffed leg.
“Are you planning on doing something about this? Or should we wait until Thanatos shows up and kills us both?”