Edge of Midnight (21 page)

The first bite that hit her mouth made her gasp with delight. It was just a honey-nut granola bar, but it tasted like heaven. So did the crackers with peanut butter, the oily sardines, the can of warm Coke. They sat cross-legged on the bed together and went at it like wolves.

“I can’t believe I’m eating this crap,” she said. “It tastes so good.”

“Convenience store haute cuisine.” He handed her another loaded cracker. “Stick with me, babe, if you want to live large.”

“So what are we doing here, anyhow?” she asked. “We can’t hide in this room eating crackers and having wild, crazy sex forever.”

“Wish we could,” he said, sounding wistful. “But I have a friend we can crash with. She’s expecting us late tonight.”

Liv went tense, and was angry at herself for being so. “She?”

Sean lifted his hands defensively. “Not an ex-lover, as God is my witness. I would never dream of getting it on with Tam. She intimidates the living bejesus out of me. She’s just a really unusual, ah, friend.”

“Intimidated? You?” She snorted. “Oh, please. Get real.”

“I’m kind of a wuss, if you want to know the truth,” he confessed.

“Right. Big lily-livered wuss.” She rolled her eyes. “Unusual how?”

“You have to meet her to understand. Tam is indescribable.”

“Whatever,” she said. “I need to contact my parents first.”

“Davy’s done that. They know you’re safe,” he said.

She shook with a burst of dry laughter. “Um, no, Sean. They know that I’m with you,” she corrected. “They don’t know that I’m safe.”

He handed her his cell. “Be my guest. If you have the strength.”

She took a deep breath, and dialed the number of Endicott House. It was snatched up on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Mother?” she asked. “It’s me. I’m—”

“Oh, my God, Livvy. Have you gone insane? Where are you?”

“I’m with Sean,” she soothed. “I’m fine, I’m safe.”

“How could you do this to me? Come home this instant!”

“Um, actually…no. I’m going to disappear for a while. I—”

“The police need to talk to you, Livvy! That man is dangerous!”

Huh. Her definition of dangerous had gotten a sharp adjustment lately. “You’ve got the wrong idea,” she explained. “Sean rescued me.”

“Are you trying to punish me, Livvy?” Her mother’s voice cracked. “When will it be enough pain to satisfy you? When will it stop? When?”

Liv swallowed back all the rest. No point. Nobody was listening. “Give Daddy a hug for me,” she said. “Bye, Mother. I’ll be in touch.”

“Livvy! Stop! Don’t you dare hang up that—”

Click. She broke the connection and stared down at the phone in her hand. She felt empty, light. She could float away, like a dry leaf.

“Well,” she whispered. “I’ve done my duty. For what it’s worth.”

She set the phone down. Sean was rifling through his big, heavy olive green duffel bag full of mysterious equipment. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said. “Something that’s going to be hard to hear.”

He went motionless for a moment, then straightened up, gripping the mattress on either side of him. “Yeah?” he said warily.

“Remember how you told me that everyone breaks under torture?”

He jerked his chin in assent, and waited for her to go on.

“It’s not always true.” She tried to swallow over the stone hard bump in her throat. “T-Rex said…that Kev never told them anything. Where the tapes were, where the notebook was. Who I was. No matter what they did to him. He didn’t tell. So…I owe my life to him, too.”

Sean looked away. He got up and circled the bed. He sat down with his back to her and sagged forward, leaning his face on his hands.

Liv crawled across the bed and draped herself against his back.

They stayed like that for a long time, waiting for night to fall.

His nostril flared with distaste as he swabbed the puncture wound on Gordon’s furry buttock. The man’s body stank. Yeasty and rank. This type of intimacy was repulsive to him. It was coming back to him, why he had abandoned the idea of practicing medicine, and chosen the realm of pure research. Fewer revolting odors.

He would have enjoyed the power that being a famous surgeon would have given him, but human bodies were disgusting. Particularly a sweaty animal like Gordon. He simply did not have the stomach for it.

“Spray on more anesthetic, you fucking sadist,” Gordon barked.

Osterman ignored him. The slices on Gordon’s back, the jagged puncture wound on his cheek, the teeth marks on his wrist, had been duly taken care of, but Osterman had not been gentle.

Idiot. Jerking off, at Osterman’s expense. Correction. At Osterman’s huge, crushing, exorbitant expense. He dug the needle in.

“Fuck!” Gordon hissed.

“Keep your voice down. A professional with years of experience, trounced by an unarmed research librarian. The mind boggles.”

“I told you. Sean McCloud kicked my gun out of my hand while that crazy bitch was stabbing my face and biting my arm!”

“I don’t want to hear excuses,” Osterman fumed. “I don’t understand why they aren’t just dead, damnit.”

“I don’t get it.” Gordon’s voice was a rasp of frustration. “I waited on a rock right over that goddamn road. I was going to take them out when they came down, but they never did. That road dead-ends on Garnier Crest. I checked. The only way out of that place was down. They must have taken his truck off-road, or maybe they—”

“I was paying you to think about all that before the job,” Osterman fumed. “You should have put a bullet through her eye.”

“That wouldn’t have been in character,” Gordon said grumpily. “That’s what a professional does. Not a sexually obsessed maniac.”

“Yes, and you identify so intimately with the role, hmm? You have no end of excuses for wallowing in your trough. You medicated yourself before you picked her up, too, didn’t you? I can tell from your stink.”

“I wanted to be sharp,” Gordon muttered. “I took some ZX-44.”

“It’s supposed to give you an edge in a high-stress situation,” Osterman lectured. “You may as well have popped barbiturates.”

“I didn’t think McCloud was going to turn up out of nowhere—”

“You didn’t think at all.” Osterman swabbed and bandaged as quickly as possible, trying not to inhale. “You stopped thinking a while ago. You are degenerating. As of now, our contract is null and void.”

“Shut the fuck up, Chris.” Gordon swiveled his head around. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffy. His face was beaded with cold sweat. “There are lots of reasons to reconsider that decision. Most of them I don’t have to say out loud. Like how popular you’d be in prison with that pretty face of yours, for instance.”

“You can’t expose me without incriminating yourself.” Osterman’s body was gripped with tension. His worst nightmare was coming true. Held hostage by a crazed, malodorous thug.

It made him so angry. That he, a gifted scientist who had given so much to humanity, who had given up all hope of a personal life, who had poured all his strength into selfless work to improve the quality of peoples’ lives, should be forced to deal with such filth. Such squalor.

He braced himself. “You’ve gone beyond any reasonable—”

“But the most important reason is one you don’t know yet.” Gordon’s voice took on an oily, insinuating tone.

Osterman set his teeth. “And what might that be?”

“I once heard you say that you made more progress in your research in those four days that you had Kevin strapped to your examining table than the rest of your entire career. Before or since.”

“I fail to see how that is relevant to—”

“The most promising lines of research. The most innovative product designs and ideas.” Gordon’s grin froze, as it pulled at the blood-spotted gauze taped to his cheek. “And you never had so much fun in your life than you did dicking around with that freak’s overdeveloped brain. You were on fire. You played him like a fine instrument.”

“Make your point, and be done with it,” Osterman snarled.

“One,” Gordon held up a thick finger. “Back off on the lectures about self-indulgence. Two,” he waggled another finger, “consider this before you have me waste Sean McCloud. He’s Kevin’s identical twin.”

Osterman’s breath froze in his lungs. “Identical…”

“Yes.” One side of Gordon’s lip curved up, in a grotesque smirk. “Are you still sure you want me to turn that brain into a bucket of pink slop before you have a chance to play with it? Think about it, Chris. An exact, identical genetic copy of your favorite toy.”

Osterman stared at him, his palms sweating. “Why didn’t you tell me he was Kevin’s twin?”

Gordon shrugged. “I didn’t know ’til now. They didn’t play up the resemblance. Sean was behind Kevin in school, because Kevin kept skipping forward and Sean kept getting expelled. I found out they were twins when I questioned the girl. When I checked my obit collection—”

“Keeping a string of scalps on your Palm Pilot is a disgusting, twisted, barbaric practice,” Osterman cut in. “Dangerous, too.”

“Sure enough,” Gordon pushed stubbornly on, “the obit said ‘survived by brothers Davy McCloud, aged 27, Connor McCloud, aged 25, and Sean McCloud, aged 21.’ Same age as Kevin. Take a look at the photographs from their file. If you study them, you can see it.”

Osterman stared at the wall, clenching down on an excitement so intense, it was like sexual lust. “I want him alive,” he said hoarsely.

He could feel Gordon’s triumphant smile behind his back.

“All right,” the other man purred. “You can strap down McCloud and play your dirty games, and I’ll have my fun with the girl. Everybody gets their rocks off. Deal?”

Osterman gave him a short nod. He swallowed the excess saliva that was pumping into his mouth. He was trembling with eagerness.

“I’ll need to hire some backup,” Gordon said.

“Of course. It’s clear you can’t handle him alone.”

Gordon’s eyes sharpened. “I thought you wanted me to play it safe,” he said slowly. “To cover your ass. To cover Helix’s soft, pimply white corporate ass, too. If you want me to go mano a mano with that crazy fucker, I’ll do it. But you’d be rolling the dice right along with me. The guy’s extremely dangerous. And he’ll be on his guard.”

“Hire whoever you need,” Osterman snapped. “Just keep it contained.”

“I’ll need people for surveillance. The McClouds would notice us watching, but the Endicotts are idiots. I’ll tap their phones…”

Gordon droned on, but Osterman was no longer listening. He was lost in the memories of those four amazing days he’d spent playing with Kevin McCloud’s brain. Released from any responsibility not to injure his subject, since thanks to Gordon’s machinations, the young man had already been officially dead. Ashes, floating on the breeze.

Which meant that the unhappy creature strapped to that chair had belonged, completely and utterly, to Christopher Osterman.

What a feeling it had been. Utter power, total freedom. Bliss.

He’d been trying ever since to repeat the experience. In vain. He hadn’t found a brain with anything near that capacity to diddle with.

This was dangerous. Gordon was nuts. Things were slipping out of control. He was risking everything he’d spent his whole life building.

But this temptation Osterman could not hope to resist.

“I can’t figure out what we’re doing wrong.” Cindy fast forwarded through the homemade audition tape to see if that wobbly wah-wah sound was constant throughout. It was. She tried not to groan.

“It sounds like I’m playing underwater,” Javier said glumly. “I can’t send in that piece of shit. They’d laugh their asses off.”

Cindy couldn’t deny it. The tape sounded horrible.

She really wanted for Javier to get into the Young Artists’ All Star Jazz Program. He was more than good enough for a scholarship, even if he was barely thirteen. He played the hell out of that sax.

It wasn’t his fault that the recording wasn’t great. Her mike sucked, the acoustics sucked, and the recording device sucked, to say nothing of what she herself might be doing wrong. She needed a decent mike, a soundproof room, a digital recording device. Someone who knew what he was doing. In short, she needed Miles.

Too freaking bad, honey. He thinks you’re a brainless snow bunny.

“I’ll ask around, see if I can find a better recording setup,” she offered. “We’ll try again. Don’t get discouraged.”

“Nah. The application said it had to be postmarked by tomorrow.” Javier was downcast. “Thanks for trying, though. Don’t sweat it.” He gave her a smile that hurt her heart. He’d been disappointed so often, he’d come to accept it, with an adult grace that put her to shame. She was ten years older. She bitched and moaned ten times as much.

“No, really. Don’t give up yet. I have a friend who’s a sound magician. I’ll see if he can help us out,” she promised rashly.

Javier gave her a “whatever” shrug as he took his sax apart and lovingly laid it in the nest of crimson fuzz inside the case.

She wanted that scholarship for him so bad, she could taste it. She’d bonded with Javier at the beginning of band camp. They were about to throw him out for fighting, and she’d taken him aside to figure out what the deal was. Turned out that the spit-shined mama’s boys in the brass section had been ragging him because his dad was in jail.

“No kidding? So’s mine,” she’d said. “Sucks the big one, huh?”

Javier’s eyes had narrowed to liquid brown slits, hyper-wary of being messed with. “No shit,” he said. “How long’s he in for?”

“Life.” Her throat still clamped down painfully on the word. It had been years, but she just couldn’t get used to the idea of Daddy in jail.

“No parole?”

She shook her head. “Not a chance. They slammed him but good.”

“What’s he in for?” Javier demanded.

“Murder, mostly. Some other stuff, but that was the biggie.”

That had impressed the hell out of Javier. “Wow,” he breathed. “Bummer. Mine’s just in for pushing dope.”

She’d won him over with that little bit of one-upmanship. She’d had a sharp word with Mike, who led the brass section, and things had evened out. She discreetly gave Javier twice as many lessons as camp curriculum called for. It was no chore. He wasn’t so hot at reading music yet, but who the hell cared? His improvisations blew her away.

She was so pleased with herself for wrangling him a great deal on a professional quality used sax. She’d used tits, mindless giggling, and judicious blackmail on Dougie, the proprieter of Doug’s Music. She’d given Dougie to understand that she knew what had gone down at his piggy bachelor party, and with who. His bride, Trish, did not know. Nor should she, ever, if Dougie knew what was good for him.

Maybe Cindy had been a bad girl, but Javier got a good instrument, Trish remained blissfully ignorant, and Dougie was an oinking piglet who deserved to be slow roasted with an apple in his mouth. So whatever.

Javier deserved that scholarship. She didn’t have time to find someone else to bully into helping her. It had to be Miles. The dojo where Miles taught was close by, and it was early evening, class time. She would just pop down there and hope he didn’t bite her head off.

Being on Miles’s shit list truly sucked.

She hopped on her bike and sped past the ruins of the bookstore. It was still shrouded with lingering smoke. What a drag. Endicott Falls had needed a good bookstore. It had been too good to be true. Typical.

Speaking of drags. Of all the things currently getting her down, Miles topped the list. It was so hard to accept, that he was definitively blowing her off. They’d been friends forever. He knew her embarrassing secrets, all the crazy shit she’d done, and he’d accepted her anyway.

Not anymore. He’d abruptly cut off the total acceptance part.

She’d known that he had a thing for her, of course, but what could she do about that? She’d never led him on. She’d been clear from the start that he wasn’t her type, that she just wanted to be friends.

Call her shallow, but when it came to romance and sex, she went for big, gorgeous, muscular guys. Like, duh. So shoot her, already.

It was so hard. She kept on wanting to talk to Miles about all her problems, all the weird stuff that happened. She missed his sarcastic, funny take on things. Life was flat, without Miles to bullshit about it with. And he was so freaking brainy, too. It had been super convenient, having a crazy smart, insanely competent best friend. Like being smart herself, but without the effort and the bother. How awesome was that.

At least she had the satisfaction of knowing he still missed her. Or why would he have used her for his Mina profile?

That had given her an idea. A favor she could offer him, in return for helping record Javier’s tape. She wasn’t asking any more free favors.

Not while she was still smarting from that crack about her being a concubine, when she was not.