by Draker, Paul
Blake’s whole head seemed too big now, and weirdly lopsided.
Aiming a large handgun at my chest—a stainless steel 1911-style .45 semiautomatic—he bent to one knee with the careful, slow stoop of a man in considerable pain. Using his other hand, he grabbed the end of the thick hose I had fed under the door, and yanked it forcefully.
A loud clunk came from outside—the sound of the five-gallon drum tipping over. He pulled a few more feet of hose inside, freeing the other end from the drum so chlorine gas would no longer flow into the storage unit.
I stayed hunched over the stream of air from the tank as if it were a drinking fountain, breathing from it while I watched for an opportunity. But the muzzle of the pistol never drifted far enough.
With a grunt, Blake stood up again, breathing heavily through his regulator.
I rubbed the back of my head, feeling sticky wetness and sending another spike of pain through my skull.
“Ow!” I said. “You fucking pistol-whipped me? That really hurt!”
“I was trying to knock you out,” he said.
I laughed, and the vise of agony tightened around my temples.
“Doesn’t usually work,” I said.
“I didn’t want to hit you too hard by mistake,” he said.
Probing my bleeding scalp with my fingers and finding nothing broken, I relaxed.
“I have a really hard skull,” I said.
I could see Blake better now. Even from across the room, I could see how badly his gun hand was shaking. His face was a mess: swollen and blotched with purple. Someone had really tooled him over.
Blake raised the gun and aimed it at my forehead. “I doubt even your thick skull is hard enough to stop a bullet,” he said.
The muzzle traced a jittering figure eight in the air.
I looked at his deformed face. Seeing the full extent of his injuries, I felt a pang of sorrow tighten my throat.
Blake was no threat to me. He was terrified, hurt, and in pain. And out of shape and old.
“Who did this to you?” I asked.
Blake’s bruised eyes widened behind the mask. “What?” He sounded incredulous.
“It’s not a trick question, Blake.” I straightened and took a step toward him, holding out a hand. He flinched violently and stepped back. I could feel rage starting to build inside of me, tightening my neck and forearms like cables.
But I wasn’t angry at poor Blake.
I was angry at whoever had hurt him this way.
And furious at myself, too, for getting this so wrong.
Blake wasn’t a killer. He was a gentle kook who wasted his weekends building lame underwater vehicles, like this silly ROV whose ballast tank I had just tapped for air. He was an eccentric white-collar dork whose big dream was to salvage crusty old Navy artifacts nobody else wanted.
What kind of sick fuck could take a harmless old guy like Blake and beat him half to death, like some ’08er OPW skinhead working over a Mexican gangbanger from Bako? Blake could have had a heart attack or a stroke. He might still die from the head injuries I was looking at.
My lips skinned back from my teeth and my voice turned into a guttural snarl. “Who the fuck did this to you?”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “You’re asking me… who did this? Are you joking?” He took a step backward and steadied the gun as best he could with his other hand. The way he moved his arm told me he had some cracked ribs, too. It reminded me of the bruise on my own side from the sprinkler head, which was competing with a splitting headache for my attention.
Blake’s quavering voice went up an octave. “Trevor… you’re seriously trying to say that… at this exact moment, you don’t know who beat me up?”
I didn’t, but I was getting a weird idea that I couldn’t shake. My anger drained away, and a chill raced down my back. Goose bumps popped up on my arms, triggered by the memory of PETMAN stalking me through Blake’s lab, leaning over me as I eased past his chest, those powerful steel arms poised on each side of my head...
My voice dropped to a surprised whisper. “Did fucking PETMAN do this to you?”
“PETMAN?” Blake stared at me like I was crazy, and I realized how stupid I sounded.
“Just kidding,” I said. “I have no clue at all who beat you up, and I don’t want to play some dumb guessing game. So tell me.”
“Oh, shit.” He shook his head, taking another step backward, still looking at me like I was crazy.
“Don’t make me say this to you, Trevor. I can’t. You’ll kill me.”
“Wait a minute… you think I beat you up or something?” My eyes narrowed in annoyance. “How hard did you get hit in the head, Blake?”
“Oh, shit.” Even through the regulator, he sounded as though he was about to cry. “I don’t know what you want from me now. I don’t know what to do, and I’m so tired of being afraid. I just want it all to stop.”
I felt really bad for Blake. Stepping away from the diminishing flow of tank air, I sniffed. The atmosphere inside the storage unit smelled like an indoor pool, but at least it was breathable now.
Time to quit fooling around. I needed to find out who had hurt Blake, and get Blake someplace safe so he could get proper medical attention.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You won’t have to be afraid much longer.”
A wordless squeal of terror came out of his mouth. The gun wavered in his hand, and his elbow drew back toward his body.
I was suddenly afraid of what he might do. I could still picture Cassie, with Kate’s face buried in her shoulder, mouthing the words “suicide watch” at me. I needed to get the gun away from Blake before he decided to turn it on himself.
“Let’s just calm down and talk this through,” I said. “I can guess most of it already. Someone caught you here and beat you up…”—I squinted at his bruises, gauging their color, which was aging from purple to green—”…on Saturday or Sunday. Whoever it was, they told you that I asked them to beat you up—”
“No, to kill me,” Blake said. “You want me dead, Trevor, just like McNulty. Only no one would ever find my body.”
His beefy frame shuddered with silent sobs. “Leaving me alive was a personal favor. You were never supposed to find out. I was going to g-go away forever, like I promised—just disappear—but instead, I’m stuck here.”
“They took your white key card—”
“My whole wallet,” he said. “Credit cards, IDs, everything. To show you, as proof I was dead. I mean, how was I supposed to get away, then? With no money or ID?”
With a sinking sensation, I now realized what Garmin and I had both missed.
Key-card records were meaningless. Whoever had sabotaged Frankenstein and killed Bennett didn’t have to be one of the DARPA leads at all. With Blake’s key card in hand, it could be anyone.
“But it wasn’t me, Blake.” I kept my body loose, tracking the gun in my peripheral vision, ready to spring. “I had nothing to do with any of it. So you need to tell me who—”
A muffled metallic pop sounded outside the door, sending something spattering against the side of the storage unit. A soft whoosh followed, and I almost cringed—because I could picture exactly what was happening outside.
The chemical reaction I had set in motion had spontaneously combusted. The fallen container had burst, spraying flaming hydrazine against the wall next to us.
“Oh, shit.” Blake half turned toward the sound, grabbing at his hair with his free hand and spitting out the scuba regulator. “Are we on fire?”
I nodded. “Got an extinguisher?”
Then the phone in my pocket rang. I pulled it out and saw that it was Cassie. Shrugging, I stepped toward Blake, holding the phone out to him.
“It’s for you.”
“What… who?” He instinctively reached for the phone with his free hand, and the gun’s muzzle drifted off target.
I dived forward, grabbed the gun by the slide, and yanked it out of his shaking fingers.
; With a trapped moan, Blake crumpled to a squat at my feet and wrapped his arms protectively around his head. Getting a proper grip on the gun, I stepped back, putting a little space between us.
“Ssshh,” I said. “Just relax. Try to think of something happy.”
Shuddering, he curled tighter.
Pressing the mag-release, I let the full magazine fall to the concrete and kicked it away. It slid out of sight beneath the ROV. Then I racked the pistol’s slide, ejecting the chambered round to send it tumbling end-over-end through the air in a long arc of brass. Dropping to a squat across from Blake, I slammed the hammer-end of the gun against the concrete floor, knocking the slide completely loose from the frame.
I tossed the parts onto the floor in front of Blake. Surprised the clatter, he lowered his arms and looked up. “You broke it.”
“I don’t like having guns pointed at me, and that’s twice today already.”
I slid an arm under his shoulders and gently helped him to his feet, giving him a reassuring pat on the back.
“Let’s go find that fire extinguisher,” I said. “Then we’ll get you to a doctor.”
CHAPTER 66
I got Blake into the Mustang’s passenger seat, but before I could turn the key he grabbed my arm in a vise-tight grip.
“I can’t go to a hospital,” he said. “They’ll find me there. They’ll kill me.”
“Who?” I asked for what seemed like the hundredth time. “Just fucking tell me already, Blake, and they’ll never hurt you again. Because I’m going to find them first.”
He let go of my arm. “No, no,” he said in a small voice. “I just need to go away forever, like I promised—”
“You’re repeating yourself. And I really don’t have time to argue about this.” I checked my phone: Amy’s flight arrived in an hour. “I have to be someplace.”
“Where?”
“The airport.”
“Perfect. If you can let me borrow a little money—”
“You’ll what? Catch a flight and disappear?” I brought up the phone’s front-facing camera and handed it to him to use as a mirror. “Blake, have you seen yourself? You look like you crawled out of a fucking morgue drawer. Do you think you can walk into an airport looking like that, no ID, buy a ticket with cash, and no one’s gonna notice?”
“I don’t know what to do.” Blake took a deep breath. “To you, this is some kind of big joke, I guess—all fun and games. Everything is. But I don’t want to die, Trevor.”
“Then tell me who hurt you, for fuck’s sake. Was it Homeland Security?” I watched his face closely. “Is it the Navy? Is Kate involved somehow?”
“If you really don’t know, then you should run away, too.” His bruised and swollen face was impossible to read. “They’re setting you up to take the blame for all of this.”
“Who is? Don’t protect them. You’re being such an idiot—look what they did to you!” My hands tightened on the wheel. “Just. Fucking. Tell me. Or, I mean it, I’ll…”
“Beat it out of me?” Blake turned his mournful, swollen, lopsided moon of a face toward me. One of his eyes was an orb of solid red.
“Are you going to hurt me too now, Trevor?”
I shook my head. I could have made him tell me—it would have taken all of thirty seconds, I figured, before I got it out of him. But I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterward.
My jaw hardened in anger and I started the car. I resented Blake’s selfishness and cowardice, even though I knew that wasn’t being fair. He had spent the past two or three days cowering in his storage unit, terrified and in pain, frozen up like a jackrabbit staring into the headlight of an oncoming train.
Whoever beat him up had broken him.
We drove in moody silence for a while. My side throbbed with pain. My head hurt, too, and I could feel the tacky stickiness of drying blood on the back of my neck. Touching the place where Blake had hammered me with the gun, I winced.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
I shook my head, even though it made my skull throb worse and sent a wave of nausea rippling through me.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” he said.
I patted his shoulder, and he flinched away, which made me feel terrible. “I’m sorry I smashed up your lab,” I told him.
He stiffened. “But… why would you do something like that?”
“You got me good, Blake.” I gave a sour chuckle. “It was funny, I’ll admit, but you scared the crap out of me. That fucking robot of yours—I still get goose bumps every time I think about it.”
Blake didn’t say anything, but his posture stayed stiff.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m over it now. Hell, I probably even deserved it.”
He started shaking. “I swear I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
My chest tightened, sending a spike of pain through my injured side. “The night McNulty died—you didn’t rig a trap in your lab?”
Blake shook his head. His trembling intensified.
“Then why were you in so early?” I asked.
“He called me. R-Rich called me and woke me up. He said there’d been a security breach, that I should come in and ch-check my lab.”
“McNulty called you? What time was this?”
“Five a.m.—an hour before we f-found him… you know, dead. I thought he called all of us.”
I shook my head. “Did McNulty seem any different on the phone?”
“He sounded really stressed. It was a short call.”
“But are you sure it was McNulty?”
“I think so. He said someone had used my workstation to b-break into the admin subnet, and he was pretty damn sure he knew who.”
Blake pushed his trembling palms against the dashboard. “He meant you, Trevor.”
I took the freeway on-ramp and didn’t say anything. I had used Blake’s workstation to crack the admin subnet and McNulty’s computer. There was only one problem with what Blake was saying: I hadn’t done it until two or three hours after McNulty died.
Someone had really been putting in the overtime to make sure I looked guilty.
But Amy’s flight would be landing soon. I had to figure out what to do with Blake. I silently considered my options and came to a decision.
After a few minutes, he spoke up. “Where are we going?”
I pointed at the sign for the airport turnoff, signaled, and spiraled down the ramp.
“But you said…”
I laid a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down. “Duck.”
Blake hunkered as low as he could, trying to stay out of sight, but it didn’t work too well—he was a big, hulking guy. I turned into arrivals and drove past the luggage carousels, all the way to the darkened vacant end of the pickup area. Then I pulled over and turned the car off.
Opening my door, I stepped out and handed Blake the keys. I found a couple of hundreds and a bunch of twenties in my wallet and gave those to him, too.
“Go back to Flanigan,” I said. “To my house, not yours. Pull into my garage—the opener’s in the glove box. There’ll be a couple cops parked outside my door, trying to keep tabs on me—which is good, because they’ll keep you safe. Just make sure they don’t realize you aren’t me. Stay away from the windows, and don’t answer the door. Not for anyone.”
“But what if—”
“There’s food in the fridge and a first-aid kit under the bathroom sink. Don’t worry about anything. Just rest and heal up. I’ll be back soon, and we’ll figure this out together.”
I thought of something else, and stuck my head back in the door just as he was sliding over to the driver’s side. “Blake, one more thing…”
He looked up in sudden alarm.
“Don’t smoke in my car. Or in my house,” I said. “Don’t even think about it, or the people you’re hiding from now will be the least of your worries.”
I closed the car door and walked away before he could reply. I heard him start the Mustang and pull a
way from the curb before I had taken three steps.
I headed toward the terminal, and another wave of nausea rolled over me, making me feel light-headed. I shook it off and pulled out my phone to check the time. Amy’s flight arrived in fifty minutes, and I needed to find a bathroom and clean up the blood so I wouldn’t scare her. But I could also see several missed calls on my phone from Cassie. And texts. They all said pretty much the same thing, but with increasing degrees of urgency: she wanted me to call her ASAP.
I dialed, and she picked up immediately.
“We need to talk,” she said, breathless. “I’m at my uncle’s, outside on the driveway. No one can hear me right now. Where are you?”
“At the airport.”
“Oh shit, Trevor. That’s not good news. Listen, I can be there in… forty-five minutes.”
“What’s going on?”
“Not over the phone. But don’t go anywhere.”
“Don’t worry.” I didn’t have a car, anyway. “I won’t.”
“Promise you’ll wait for me.”
“I already did,” I said, annoyed. “I’m not running away, if that’s what you think.”
“I didn’t say you were—”
“First floor. Arrivals.” I hung up and went in the terminal, wondering what Cassie had to tell me, but not really able to give it much attention. Instead, my gaze was drawn to the digital billboard listing incoming flights. I searched for Amy’s plane and found it. On time.
Back at Pyramid Lake, a train wreck was unfolding in slow motion. It was mangling and killing my colleagues and threatening my freedom—maybe even my life. But right now none of that mattered to me. Not even Frankenstein.
I’d be seeing my daughter soon.
CHAPTER 67
Holding an airline-issued unattended-minor escort pass and my driver’s license in a palm that tingled with pinpricks of sweat, I stood next to the airport’s twin rows of slot machines and watched deplaning passengers stream out of the security entrance. Pain needled my scalp from my head injury, which throbbed with a rapid, shallow pulse I could also feel in my throat. My gaze was fixed at chest height as I craned my neck for a sight of Amy’s blond curls.