by Jude Hardin
“And?”
He smiled bigger. “It worked. Anna woke up right away. She recognized me. She said my name. She was confused about where she was and what had happened to her, and she had no idea what year it is, but I’m sure all that will improve with time.”
“So when Stottolini said they were getting very close to producing a suspension that would allow the procedure to work—”
“He probably didn’t even realize how close they were. Number fifty-eight was the one. They must not have tried it yet. They were only one injection away from the breakthrough they were looking for. They were only one injection away from performing viable brain transplants. Temporary ones, anyway. Can you imagine? It’s like science fiction.”
Like some sort of horrible future that needed to be prevented, I thought.
“Have you talked to the police yet?” I said.
“No. Just the EMS guys. I haven’t seen anyone else.”
“I need a flashlight.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled one out and handed it to me.
One of those little ones doctors use to check your pupils.
“I found it in a drawer,” he said. “I needed it to perform a neurological exam after Anna woke up.”
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.
“Where are you going?”
“There’s something I need to take care of.”
The doors with the numbers on them. There were seventy in all. I had a hunch what they were for.
I switched on the flashlight and trotted back into the maze, hoping that one of Stottolini’s keys was a master that fit all of the numbered doors. I stopped at door number one. On the tenth try, the key slid in and I turned the knob and pushed the door open.
The room was only slightly bigger than a closet. There was a shelf full of chemicals in bottles and a countertop with some beakers and flasks and burners and copper tubing. There was a yellowed piece of paper tacked to the wall with a bunch of handwritten letters and numbers on it. Dots and dashes and hexagons and circles. I didn’t know anything about chemistry, but it looked complicated. And it looked old. There was a signature at the bottom of the page.
F.T. Blood.
It appeared to be a page from the original notebooks. I wondered why Stottolini or one of the Penworths hadn’t made copies. I pulled the page down from the wall, held it up and looked at it with the flashlight. And then I knew. Watermarks. Parts of the formula could only be seen by shining the light on the page at a certain angle. Copy machines and scanners didn’t exist in the 1940s, but cameras did. Apparently F.T. Blood had taken measures to prevent his work from being stolen.
I opened door number two. Same thing. Bottles and beakers and flasks and burners and a yellowed piece of paper tacked to the wall. My hunch had been correct. There was a different laboratory setup for each suspension.
Seventy in all.
Fifty-seven failures so far. Fifty-seven setbacks for Carlo Stottolini and Bailey Penworth.
And Brighton Penworth, who’d gotten the whole thing started.
Fifty-seven clinical trials. They’d been one formula away from the suspension that worked. They must have been planning to inject number fifty-eight—along with the cells from Anna’s temporal lobe—into either Thrasher or me. One of us was going to be their next test subject. Instead, they’d been defeated, and Thrasher had given Anna her own cells back.
As I ran past doors three, four, and five, and onward through the maze, zigzagging past a bunch of other doors with a bunch of other mini-labs behind them, I wondered if I was doing the right thing. I wondered if, in the right hands, the ability to transfer one person’s memories and self-awareness into another person’s brain could ever be used for the good of mankind. I didn’t think so. The potential for corruption was just too great. Mostly it would create a brand new means for human trafficking to thrive. For the poor and helpless to be used by the rich and depraved.
And there was too much of that in the world already.
I made it to number fifty-eight. I slid the key into the lock and turned the knob and pushed the door open. I switched the light on, grabbed the yellowed piece of paper tacked to the wall, and struck my final match.
18
Detective Hollinger interviewed Thrasher and me at the warehouse, and again at the sheriff’s department substation. He thanked us for our cooperation, said he might need to talk to us some more. It was after midnight by the time I got home.
Brighton Penworth and Carlo Stottolini and Bailey Penworth were all dead now, so there were some questions that would probably never be answered. Like how they chose their victims. I had a hunch it had something to do with the survey on the Stottolini’s Pizza website. There were some questions on there about age and marital status and employment, questions that on the surface might have seemed like reasonable information to acquire for demographic purposes, but I had a hunch that it was more than that. I had a hunch that some of the personal data from the survey had been used in the selection process for the experiments.
The sheriff’s department and the FBI were still sorting everything out, but I doubted that they would ever share much information with the public. Or with me. Which meant that I would probably have to keep wondering about a lot of it until the inevitable media leaks and book deals.
And I would have to keep wondering about some of it indefinitely. Like what Carlo Stottolini had been planning to do as president of the United States. That was the scariest part. It made me shudder just to think about it.
Kei Thrasher showed up at my office five days after the ordeal at the warehouse. I poured him a cup of coffee and told him to have a seat.
“Anna’s flying out to Oregon to visit with her dad,” he said. “I just got back from taking her to the airport.”
“So she’s okay?”
“Yeah. She’s fine. They discharged her after one night in the hospital. We’re going to get to know each other better when she gets back to Florida. We have a date a week from Friday.”
“You’ll get to know each other pretty quick if you’re going to share that apartment,” I said.
“I’m going to let Anna have the apartment back. I’ll just stay in the storage unit for now.”
“You must like her a lot,” I said.
“I guess you could say it was love at first sight. Has that ever happened to you?”
“It has. A long time ago.”
“And?”
“Didn’t work out.”
It was a lie, but I couldn’t tell Thrasher anything about my past.
My real past.
I got up and poured us both some more coffee.
“I went by DP’s Barbecue yesterday,” Thrasher said. “Harold’s not going to give me my job back. He won’t even talk to me.”
“You’ll find something.”
“It’s tough. Nobody wants to hire an ex-con. Not even the fast food joints.”
“What kind of job would you like to have?” I said.
“I’d like to be practicing medicine again. But that’s not going to happen.”
“What’s your second choice?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve been thinking about something,” I said. “I could use some help sometimes.”
“Some help doing what? Mowing your grass?”
“Investigative work.”
“I thought the state required a special license for that.”
“Only if you play strictly by the rules,” I said. “We could call you my personal assistant.”
“You would do that for me?”
“You saved my life. I owe you one. Anyway, I really could use some help. I’ve been talking to the attorney on the other side of the shopping center. She said she can keep me as busy as I want to be. I can’t pay you a lot at first, but it’ll probably be more than you were making at DP’s.”
“I don’t really know anything about being an investigator.”
“You’re smart,” I said. �
�You’ll learn. And I saw the way you handled yourself in a crisis situation. I liked what I saw.”
Thrasher agreed to give it a try. I told him he could stay at my place until he found another apartment. He agreed to that as well. I gave him a key to my front door, and he headed on over to the storage facility to clear his things out.
After he left the office, I decided to make a phone call.
There were some free kittens I needed to see about.
The Girl from the Wrong Side of Cordial, Copyright © 2016 by Jude Hardin
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
February 2016
The Blood Notebooks, Copyright © 2015 by Jude Hardin
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.
November 2015
Table of Contents
About THE GIRL FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF CORDIAL
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Sample: COLT
THE BLOOD NOTEBOOKS
PROLOGUE
Part 1 Thrasher
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Part 2 Retro
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18