I’m now sitting in a state of euphoria, waiting for the next torture to begin. Nurse Peterson swims in front of me. “I’ve changed your pain medication,” she says.
My fear of the pain still overdrives my need to be coherent on the computer. “Are you sur we shu?” I talk slowly, blowing a lot of air through the holes in my teeth. The Ds and the Ts—those hard letters for which a properly functioning tongue is needed—may as well be removed from the alphabet.
“This will stay in your system for less time, but it’ll be more effective during and right after your therapy.” She touches my face. “How does that feel?”
“Okay. You can escribe mecation?”
“Doctor Weiss prescribed it.”
“He back?”
“Just for the day. He’ll be by to see you soon. Also, I’m giving you something else to take during the rest of the time which should make you comfortable without compromising your alertness and mental capacity.”
“Okay,” I say and she goes to work.
When it’s over, I feel better than after any of the other sessions. I wonder why we didn’t use this medication before, or am I simply healing that well?
“Lie down for about an hour. When you start feeling it wear off take two of these.” She hands me a bottle of pills. “These will last four to six hours. Do not take any after six o’clock.” She hands me the other bottle. “Take one of these at 9:30 tonight, a half hour before we do the therapy. Same thing in the morning. Do not take any of the first ones after 8:00. Take the second at 11:30.”
“Are they okay with vitamins?” I ask. I concentrate on the hard letters and, in my head, it doesn’t sound too bad.
“The nutritionals Ulla is giving you, you mean?”
I nod.
“Yes. Keep up her program. It’ll keep your body strong while it works at healing itself. On your face I’m using a skincare product called Sensé, and Doctor Zitnik’s formula. Sensé is good for your skin, but certainly not a healing product. Zitnik’s formula is nothing but miraculous. I’ve never seen anyone heal this fast.”
Lying down for an hour stretches to an hour and a half. I awake in pain, not nearly as bad as it has been, but enough that I immediately go for the new medicine. I make a mental note to take another dose at 6:00 and then stretch out on the recliner with the computer in my lap and again stare out onto the melting snow. Nurse Peterson said that spring won’t really arrive until May, or possibly even June.
“Nature likes to tease us,” where her words.
The calendar on my computer desktop displays April 11th. How do people in this part of the country keep from getting depressed?
I’m drifting in and out of a nap when there comes a knock and the door opens. “Mister Price.” It is Lance Evans.
I bring the chair upright and turn to see him, Doctor Weiss and Victor Vandermill standing inside the door. “Hello,” I say perfectly. The pain is gone and my mouth feels almost normal, although very dry. I reach for my bottle of water.
“How is the speech coming along?” the doctor asks.
“Pretty good.” There is only a slight slur through my broken teeth, the Ts coming out soft.
“Amazing progress,” says Vandermill. “Four days ago I wouldn’t have bet a nickel you’d do this well, even with my faith in Doctor Zitnik.”
“I thought it only worked on the frostbite,” Lance says.
Doctor Weiss examines my face. “It goes a hell of a lot deeper than that,” he says. He then looks in my ears and in my eye, listens to my heart and then pounds on my back while moving his stethoscope around. When he removes the covering over my empty eye socket Lance makes a face and turns away.
“Very good,” the doctor says.
“Mrs. Price is doing very well,” Lance says while looking out at the snow. “She’s out of serious trouble now. She wants to know when you will be coming.”
“I don’t believe that’s up to me, is it?” I watch the doctor dip a gloved finger into a jar of what I recognize as Zitnik’s formula. “Why do I have to be here to complete my task? I can write anywhere.” He applies it to my eye-hole.
“We can talk about it,” Vandermill says. “Has Nurse Peterson been taking good care of you?”
“Her and Ulla both.”
“Excellent.”
Nothing more is said through the remainder of the examination and treatment. When he’s completely done Doctor Weiss shakes my hand and says he probably won’t be seeing me again. He then excuses himself.
“When can I go see my wife?” I ask when the doctor is out the door.
“How is the book coming along?” Vandermill asks in response.
“I wish I could say it’s done. It’s moving slowly. I don’t have the feel for the hone.”
“I’m sorry?”
My words are falling apart. “Tone,” I say more distinctly. “No feel for tone.” I slow down. “Just words on paper . . . no direction. You never said what message you want conveyed. You gave no idea if you want a strict nonfiction accounting or a fictionalized story based on facts. I have an outline. Have roughed out most chapters. It is hollow and weak. No substance.”
“You’ve read Aileen’s book I assume.”
“Bits and pieces.”
“Hers is too factual. I want something that will compel a reader to pick it up at the bookstore or at a grocery checkout and then after they read it will rush to tell their friends.”
“A page turner,” I summarize for him. “Every writer’s dream. A novel on everyone’s bookshelf. You’re not a writer and you’re way richer than even Stephen King or Nora Roberts could dream of.”
He stands.
“What are you after?” I ask very slowly
He turns to Lance and says, “I’d like to talk with Zach alone if you don’t mind, Lance.”
Lance seems to be surprised by Vandermill’s request. He looks at both of us and then dutifully leaves.
“Come with me, Zach,” Vandermill says.
I rise to my feet and wait for the expected dizziness. There is none. We go to his apartment.
“Please have a seat. Would you care for a beer or a soft drink?”
I don’t have my straw. I really don’t need it anymore and the beer sounds tempting, but . . . “No thank you.” I look around and remember the last time I was in here, when the lamp fell on Aileen’s head and we were herded out at gunpoint. The smoked glass bubble in the corner catches my attention.
Vandermill follows my eye. “Don’t worry. I own the company. I’m not so crazy as to have myself watched every minute of the day. I turn on this camera only when I’m away. We are quite private now. Besides, not much use for security anymore. Most of the staff is gone.” He sits in a chair across from me with a glass of juice. “It’s very interesting the way things have turned out. If we were anywhere else but here in Northwest Montana, things would certainly be different. Sheriff Shwartzberg is so easy, so gullible, maybe a real life Barney Fife.”
My impression of Sheriff Shwartzberg was nothing like that. “You had four deaths and then there is Tanya and me. How have you managed to get all that past him?”
“No one knows about you and your wife except the doctors in Denver. A hiking accident as I mentioned before. Fortunately Lance got to Mrs. Price before she said anything about Miss Bravelli.” He pauses at Aileen’s name. At first I think it’s a few seconds of respect. Then it seems like it’s something else. It slips from my grasp. “I’m afraid Aileen has perished in a boating accident near a dig in Costa Rica. The only one who would question it would be her mother, who no longer knows she has a daughter. Lester, the security guard, had even less family. He won’t be missed by anyone. He died of a heart attack while vacationing in Arizona. The Mexican gentleman, who thought running would be a good idea, also won’t be missed by anyone who I have to worry about. The other two, Doctor McCully and Thomas Holm, have been investigated by the authorities and dutifully placed in the closed file. They have been assured that the animals
responsible for both attacks have been destroyed.”
“Which of course has not been done,” I say.
“Why destroy animals because they follow their instincts? They are born to be predators.”
“Doctor McCully wasn’t an accident, was he?”
“A very sad situation.”
“But it wasn’t really all his fault, was it?”
“He didn’t attempt to turn away Aileen’s advances. He cheated on Traci. She didn’t deserve that.”
His guard is coming down. He’s been one of those people who I cannot read and now I begin to understand why. He has a barrier around him that covers his emotional history. Things are now slipping through the weakened barrier and it’s like vignettes that I’m picking up. I work up a bit of saliva in my suddenly dry mouth. “Aileen instigated it, didn’t she?” I have to focus on every syllable in instigated. “She went to his bed in the middle of the night and slid in next to him. It takes a very strong, very moral man to turn that away. I don’t get the feeling that morals are high on the prerequisite list to be employed by Sans Sanssabre.”
“I’ve given her everything she could ever want.”
I suddenly notice a framed sixteen by twenty photo which I’m sure wasn’t there before. It’s of Aileen. It’s not a studio pose, but rather a candid shot at an excavation somewhere. This is the real Aileen Bravelli. Her hair is stuffed up under a safari hat. Clear-glass goggles are pulled up onto the hat and smudges of earth decorate her face. Maybe some very important discovery had been found just before the photo was taken, or maybe it’s only a trick of light, but through the smudges and dirt glows her essence. This is what she was meant to do. Vandermill is staring at the photo as well.
“That’s the woman you fell in love with, isn’t it?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Unfortunately, she had one weakness.”
He turns toward me and waits for me to continue.
“She needed to be needed.”
“I needed her,” he says. “Still do.”
“No! You loved her and you wanted her, however, you didn’t need her to the point of dropping everything for her. That’s what she had to have and all her life she never got it. For a time she gave everything of herself for you, but you never returned it. You already had a wife who you never gave up. You also had this.”
“I built this for her.”
“Did you really? Was it her idea to bring an extinct species of cat back to life or did you only assume it would be something she’d appreciate? Did you ever tell her you built this for her?”
He smiles but gives no response.
“I don’t think it would have made any difference if you had.” I point to the photograph. My mouth and jaw are getting sore and tired, but I have thoughts forming fast and they have to get said. “That is who she was, right there. No doubt that Sans Sanssabre was exciting; however, that is what made her happy. All she was missing was a man who would dig in the dirt right alongside her, who she could lie next to in bed at night and share the day’s events. Her soul mate. She was forever excavating for her soul mate. She did not crawl in bed with McCully or me for sex. She truly only wanted to talk. Whether she knew it or not, she was looking for her soul mate. If a man fell into a certain category, that is if they passed a preliminary test, she checked them out further and sometimes that meant getting into bed with them. Here’s another matter-of-fact, Victor. I think I came very close to passing her test. She placed her near naked body next to mine and I did not immediately crawl on top of her. If I ever were to have any intention of making her a permanent part of my life—pretending of course that Tanya did not exist—I ended it when I had sex with her before she was ready. There was still too much preliminary relationship building to do. However, because of Tanya, it would have never worked with us, no matter what I did, just as it would never have worked for you no matter what you did. Just the fact that the two of us cheated on our wives was enough to knock us off her list of prospective soul mates.”
“Very interesting speech, an odd way of looking at it all.”
“Men do it to women all the time. They date them until they can get them into bed and then dump them because they’re sluts. In neither case are they conscious of what they’re doing. They just go with what they feel.”
“What makes you such an expert?”
I shrug. “I am an observer of life. I also have a psychic streak in me that allows me to be able to see the insides of some people, such as yourself.”
I immediately regret those words. His aura is pulling back and the barrier is coming up, but it’s too late. I stumble forward with my words, wishing I had my water. “You, like Aileen, are also a person of need. Unfortunately you probably have less of a handle on that than Aileen did. You think you can buy anything you want because you’re a billionaire. What you can’t buy is a relationship and because of your billions you’ll probably never find one, buying it or not. Your money is a brick wall around you. No one can get in and you can’t get out.”
“Very interesting theory, Mister Price.” He is completely closed now; as protected as Fort Knox.
“In a way, I feel sorry for you, except that you committed murder. I don’t find that excusable.”
He laughs. “You think I murdered Peter McCully?”
“Or had him murdered.”
He smiles. “I see why you’d think so. On this, my psychic friend, you are quite wrong.”
I cannot read him anymore. If I had kept my mouth shut about being psychic, I would have been able to tell if he was lying. “Then who?”
“Who else would be motivated?”
Of course. “Traci Strong.” I look at the sabre-tooth jaws in the case. “She came up here and borrowed your steel jaws to do it with, didn’t she?”
“She apparently went a little crazed. She knew the cameras existed but went about it anyway, doing her best to make it look like the cat did it.”
“But if she knew she would be seen, why . . .”
“She also knew we would cover for her, or else her crazed mind overlooked it. The evidence was gone before the police entered the picture. They bought what we told them. I assure you, Zach, Traci is no longer here. She has been removed from my employment.”
Where has she been taken? Has she been removed from life as well? Has she been turned into big kitty food? “Why are you assuring me?” Something about that statement strikes me as odd.
“Apparently you’ve got some psychic weaknesses. She also tried to kill you and Aileen. Unfortunately for Thomas Holm he got in the way.”
“So that’s how the Bengal got out. I understand why she felt motivated to kill Aileen, but why me?”
“She thought you knew about her killing Peter, that you wrote about it and hid the disk in the box of cereal. She needed to eliminate both you and the disk.”
“She got the disk.” I had suspected she was the black clad figure in the night.
“Yes, and now I have it. Your journal is very interesting.”
I should be surprised, but I’m not, yet I feel my jaw go a bit slack. “How did you get the file open? It was password protected and I’ve been assured that Microsoft has built that feature to be unbreakable.”
“You are like most human beings, Zach. You use the same passwords for everything, yet can’t remember which one you used for what. You created a little spreadsheet with a list of files and websites you have log-in privileges with, and associated user names and passwords. You have twenty-seven such websites you go to and you use only four different passwords. It was just a process of trying each one until your journal opened. You’re probably already aware that your journal has been removed from your computer. You could rewrite it, but I think in light of our agreement you’d be a little more judicious.”
“I understand,” I assure him.
“I’m bringing in a network cable for you so you may network with our server and thus gain high speed access to the Internet. I’d rather you don’t use the ph
one line to call your Internet provider in Dallas. This will be much better.”
You can also monitor my every keystroke this way and know everything I do and everyplace I go. “I don’t have Ethernet.”
“You will shortly. That and the cable are being installed as we speak.”
I don’t like my computer being manhandled every time I’m not looking.
“Remember, Mister Price, judicious is the word. Don’t go doing something you might regret. In a week or so I’ll arrange for you to visit your wife.”
Follow the threat with a carrot. “I would appreciate that.”
“If things work out with Mrs. Price, we might be able to get a computer and hookup for her so that you and she can communicate.”
If things work out for her? What does that mean? If she gets better or if she agrees to cooperate? “That would be appreciated as well.” I hate my capitulation. I’m acquiescing at every turn, but what other choice do I have? He has me by my balls. Worse yet he has me by my family. The fate of Tanya and the girls is balanced on his next whim, which in this case may be triggered by whatever it is that I do.
“One other thing I’d like you to know is that I’m shutting down the operation.”
“No more cloning?”
“That’s correct. No more cloning, animal or human. The sabre-tooth program is being dismantled. I already mentioned that most of my staff have departed. Those who aren’t with the ladies are already setting up financially independent lives elsewhere. I am honoring all baby contracts, so by the end of the year it’ll be as though it never took place. As of tomorrow all that will be here will be Nurse Peterson, Ulla, myself, Mister Evans, Doctor Zitnik, several security, one pilot, and of course, you.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 32