Better Off Dead (37 page)

Carroll was coming down the hall toward me.
I could hear him opening doors, checking rooms, slamming doors shut
again. All of the labs had been unlocked and I had a bad feeling
about why: they were setting a trap for me.

His footsteps neared the room next door. A
doorknob rattled and a moment later, his footsteps approached the
room I was in. I ducked behind one of the metal counters just as
the door of the mouse lab opened. Carroll had turned the lights on
in the basement hall and his round body was silhouetted against the
background glare. He leaned inside, listened, heard the scrambling
of the mice, hesitated, started to leave—then changed his mind and
stepped inside. A moment later, the fluorescent lights blazed on,
casting a greenish glow over gleaming metal counters and the white
tile floor, sending the mice into frantic action.

Carroll took another step inside. I sank
down on the floor and leaned against the counter behind me,
planning my escape. If he stepped to the right and went down that
line of cages, I might be able to slip around the central
counter—it ran through the middle of the room like an island—and be
out the front door before he could fire. If I could keep him
chasing me until the police arrived, Helen and I would have a
chance.

If the police ever arrived.

Carroll stepped to the right and I moved
quickly. Too quickly. I slipped, and the tire jack clanged against
the metal counter wall. The sound vibrations sent the mice into
chaos.

"Get up," Carroll demanded. "I know you're
in here."

"Fuck you," I called out, still crouched
below the counter. At least I had several metal walls between me
and his gun.

"You can't get away," he said in a calm
voice.

"Fuck you," I told him again.

"You did a good job but it's over." His
voice was a parody of soothing encouragement. "David and I are
impressed. But this is the end of the line. Please do not mistake
my innocuous appearance as a sign of weakness. I assure you it is a
deliberate and deceptive disguise. I could drill a bullet hole
through your right eye with my eyes closed. I am very good at what
I do."

"Bullshit," I called out. "You're telling me
that you're a pathetic, tubby nobody by choice? You're nothing but
a limp dick coward who can only overpower women smaller than you,
women frightened out of their minds, women who have never had to
fight back before. You can't take me down. I could kick your fat
ass with both hands tied behind my back."

"You might get the chance to prove that," he
said—then laughed. That I did not like. He sounded too confident.
"Stand up slowly, hands over your head, and I promise I won't
shoot."

Above me, a row of empty beakers stood
arrayed in descending size. I grabbed two of the biggest and lobbed
them at Carroll. The containers sailed across the room and
shattered against the wall behind him. The mice began to squeak, a
chorus of frightened pips that grew in volume when Carroll started
to laugh. And I'd thought Brookhouse had a creepy giggle: Carroll
sounded as if someone were simultaneously tickling him and twisting
his nuts. No wonder the mice were freaked out.

"Where's Helen?" I shouted.

"Helen's a little tied up right now," he
told me.

"That's very funny. Where did you hear that
one? While sitting home alone on a Friday night watching shitty TV
movies and dreaming about how you're so much stronger than those
poor women you tie up and drug? Because that's the only way you can
get it up and we both know it. And the only way a woman would stand
still long enough to let you get near her. What did you do with
that poor woman you were dating, anyway? What's her name? Candace?
She was only fucking you to get close to Brookhouse again, you
know. She said she had to close her eyes and pretend it was someone
else to get through the sex."

That made him mad. But only for an instant.
Not long enough to do me any good. He swept a counter with his arm,
sending books and jars and pens flying across the floor.

"You are nothing but a balding, big-gutted
putz," I told him. "It's pathetic. You're a cliché. You and all the
other tiny-dick rapists."

I was inching my way toward the door, hoping
to get him mad enough to squeeze off a wild shot, at which point I
was ready to run like hell.

"Nice try," he said, his voice calmer. "But
I wrote the textbook on people like me," he explained. "And I'm not
going to fall for your goading. I win. You lose. There isn't much
more to say about it."

"I lose what?" I asked. I had crawled
halfway to the door, but I still had a good fifteen feet left to
go. Above me, the mice had reached frenzy status. They were
swarming from side to side in their cages, panicked, confused,
giving in to the fight-or-flight reflex.

Sort of like me.

"You lose everything," Carroll announced.
"Stand up and let's get it over with."

"You can't possibly get away with this," I
stalled. "Believe me, the cops know everything. I told them all of
it. Including all about you."

He laughed again. With intimidating
confidence. "My dear, when we are done with you, you will wish it
was all over. And yes, I've known who you are since Candace said a
female P.I. came by. I knew you were too old to be enrolled here as
a regular student. I've been playing you for weeks."

"First of all..." I promised him, eyeing the
teeming cage above me. Maybe I could...? No, that was ridiculous.
"You're not laying a finger on me. If you think you're getting near
me without the fight of your life, you're wrong. I'm not scared of
you. I'm not intimidated by you."

"Really?" he asked. "Then why are you hiding
behind that counter?"

I lunged upward, grabbed the closest mouse
cage, opened the door and started flinging mice. I tossed them two
and three at a time over the counter at the fucker, hoping to
confuse him long enough to buy some free time.

It confused him all right. He started
shooting.

I crabwalked down the aisle, knocking cages
off the counter, opening doors, releasing at first dozens and then
what seemed like hundreds of mice into the room. Some of the cages
bent open on impact as they crashed to the floor, others I stopped
to unlatch. The more the merrier, I decided. The harder time he
would have getting to me.

White mice flooded the floor. They scurried
everywhere, including up my pants and into my lap and on my
shoulders and into my hair. I grabbed them and flung them at
Carroll, moving closer and closer to the door.

Carroll squeezed out another shot, but then
he slipped on a horde of running mice and went down, his upper body
falling hard. He landed behind me, his torso sprawled at the far
end of my row. Mice swarmed over him and he tried to scramble free,
brushing them away so he could clear a spot and stand.

I heaved myself up on my knees in a
sprinter's stance and dashed for the lab door. It opened just as I
reached it, slamming into me with full force. I bounced back
against the counter, hitting my stomach dead on. It knocked the
wind out of me. I doubled over, heaving for breath.

Brookhouse took me from behind. He grabbed
my hands and twisted them behind me, securing them with a pair of
handcuffs. "I've got her," he told Carroll. "Get the fuck up off
the floor." Mice scurried toward us, around us, over our feet.
"What a mess," Brookhouse said mildly, kicking a flattened mouse
with the toe of his shoe. "This is so typical of you, Lyman."

Carroll didn't like that. He pulled himself
aloft and waved his gun at me. "We're not done with her until I've
had a private word with her."

"No," Brookhouse announced firmly. "There's
no time for that." He was dressed in black slacks, a matching
turtleneck sweater and a gleaming pair of ebony loafers. The
gentleman rapist. A dapper killer. And that made him a better man,
apparently, than the fat slob dressed in a rumpled sweatsuit who
was drooling on me from a few feet away. What a great pair of
guys.

"We don't have time for your recreational
pursuits," Brookhouse lectured Carroll. "And I find your lack of
control rather troubling. Helen is arranged in the other room. Help
me get this one in there. Everything is ready to go."

"I told the cops about everything," I lied.
"There's nothing you can do to get out of this."

"Of course there is," Brookhouse said
mildly. "We're going to burn everything. The records, the rooms,
the drug samples. Plus you and Helen, did I mention that? And now,
thanks to Lyman's bumbling, I fear we are going to have to hurry."
He smiled at Carroll, who did not smile back. "In case you had not
noticed, gunshots are loud."

"Does he always talk to you like this?" I
asked Carroll. Brookhouse wrenched my arms upward in reply and I
screamed.

"Not so tough now," he said, smiling. "Keep
your gun on her," he ordered Carroll. "Do not do anything unless I
tell you to."

Carroll opened his mouth to argue, then shut
up and moved closer until he was directly in front of me. He
pressed his stomach against me and reached his hand under my shirt.
His fingers were cold and stubby as he snaked his hand under my
bra. He grabbed a handful of breast and squeezed painfully hard,
pinching my nipple between his thumb and forefinger at the same
time.

I kicked him in the balls so hard he dropped
to his knees, grunting like the pig he was.

"I warned you," I said. "You're going to
have to kill me before you touch me like that again."

Brookhouse was laughing. He was also poking
a gun into the small of my back. "Don't do that again," he
suggested in an almost pleasant voice.

Two guns. And, despite my bravado, what
Carroll had done to me had scared me. His touch had triggered some
primordial fear deep inside me. It made him stronger than me
somehow, the fact that he had been able to rob me so easily of my
physical privacy like that. I had faced guns. And assholes bigger
than him. But he wanted to take something from me that was only
mine to give, and just the thought of being violated like that
compromised my will to fight. It made me feel inherently weaker. It
made me lose my focus. Fears flashed through my mind: there were
two of them. They could hold me down. Tie me up. Look what they had
done to Helen. Unwillingly, scenes played in my mind: Carroll,
naked, breathing above me, Brookhouse watching with a dispassionate
gaze. I could almost feel his hot breath on my face, his weight on
my body.

I had to get beyond it. I couldn't let the
threat of being raped rob me of my power. I had to stay angry,
angry enough to fight back.

"Get up, you little limp-dicked coward," I
spat at Carroll. I was putting on a pretty good face, but my knees
had turned to jelly.

Carroll struggled to his feet, one hand
still holding his crotch. He slapped me across the face with his
gun hand, metal hitting bone. I felt a tooth crack. And maybe my
jawbone, too.

"That's enough," Brookhouse commanded. This
time he sounded serious. "Move it," he ordered, poking me in the
back with his gun. He glanced at Carroll. "Follow me and don't
touch her again until I say it's okay."

Brookhouse opened the door to the lab and
prodded me with his gun. I marched out into the hallway, followed
by Brookhouse. Carroll and several hundred scurrying mice brought
up the rear.

The smell of rodent fear was overpowering:
urine and... something else. I glanced down. My pants were dry. I
wasn't that damn scared. Yet. But still...

Then I saw it. A long dark line that ran
along the basement corridor, snaking across floors and into rooms,
splashed against the wall. It had an acrid odor.

They really were going to burn it all down.
With me and Helen inside.

"This way," Brookhouse said, pushing me
toward the soundproof interview rooms. "A friend of yours is
waiting."

Where the fuck were the cops?

Helen was in one of the interview rooms,
either unconscious or dead. She was splayed in a chair that had
been pushed up to a table. Stacks of files and papers surrounded
her. She had been arranged so her head slumped forward. It was
resting on a stack of documents.

"It won't work," I told them, knowing they
were some how setting Helen up to take the fall for their dirty
drug study. "She hasn't gone outside her house in almost a year.
Thanks to you. No one will ever believe she had anything to do with
this."

"Don't be an idiot," Brookhouse told me. "We
study the gullibility of people for a living. Our story is
believable for one simple reason: we are willing to sacrifice our
careers. People will believe us when we tell them you were trying
to blackmail us about the drug study. Because we'll admit to
sanitizing the results. We'll say Helen remembered our
improprieties and convinced you to help her blackmail us. That she
was here with you, going through the evidence, hoping to milk us
for more. Any evidence that escapes the fire will support our
charges. We may lose our jobs but, believe me, we'll walk on
everything else."

Ah yes, the principle of believable
sleaziness. It worked all the time. Politicians built entire
careers based on admitting to lesser charges—and slipping past with
the real crimes.

Brookhouse shoved me into a chair. Carroll
began tying my feet to the legs with thick hemp rope that cut into
my ankles. The metal handcuffs had started to dig into my wrists.
Somehow, the pain helped ground me.

I realized with some surprise that I wanted
to get inside Brookhouse's head almost more than I wanted to live.
I had hated him every minute of every day for over a month and I
was not about to go down without a fight.

"They'll catch you," I told him, forcing
myself to smile. "You will never be able to walk down a street
again without being watched. Every breath you take. Every move you
make, they'll be watching you." I hummed a few bars of my favorite
Sting song. Neither one of them looked like they appreciated my
talents. Or my seeming nonchalance.