Out of pure piss-headedness, he squeezed the blood pressure cuff a few times too many, and her arm went the color of a toad’s stomach. Reaching casually toward a shelf, he flipped the red switch on an audio recording device. “Tell me about your work with the Wagner group.”
“Now? How do you even know the stuff is working? You just gave it to me.”
He seized her nipple through her thin shirt and twisted. “You probably can’t feel that anymore. In fact, I doubt if you’d feel it if I removed the nipple entirely.”
“You probably don’t get a lot of second dates, do you?”
“Just answer, blondie.”
“What was the question again?”
He reminded her, as he readied a shallow tray of metallic implements she couldn’t quite see.
She told him everything.
Chapter 19
She remembered little of what she said—all the stuff the O.S.I. techs had planted in her brain the night before, she supposed. Gobs and gobs of disinformation, sprinkled with a few nuggets of real facts that wouldn’t hurt anyone if they got out.
It took hours.
She thought.
The drugs made it hard to tell.
“Wakey wakey!” Dr. Loman was yelling in her ear. She jerked away from the sound and nearly fell off the couch.
“What?” Her voice sounded equal parts sleepy and annoyed.
“You sang like the proverbial canary, sugar bumps, just like I knew you would.” He reached out and flipped the recording device off. His glasses slipped down his long nose and he batted them back up into the proper place with a careless swipe of his hand. “They didn’t hire me for my looks, you know.”
“I gathered. Can I have a glass of water?”
“No.” He tweaked her nipple again, and this time it hurt. But she was relieved to see absolutely no scars or marks on her. Whatever the tray had held before, it was nowhere to be found now. “Charmer wants to see you.”
“Great. Where’s—” Kevin, she almost asked, then caught herself. She was a hostage; why should she give a rat’s ass where her supposed captor was? “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Gonna have to wait.” He pinched her thigh, then moved in closer until he was pinching between her thighs. “You look so adorable, all muzzy and groggy and helpless. I’ve got a boner the size of Texas—can you tell?”
She wriggled. Yes, the nano-infected handcuffs had done their job nicely while she was out. Meanwhile, Dr. Disgusting had his hands on her breasts, was rubbing her stomach and watching her face with the greedy gaze of a starved crow. It wasn’t anything about her specifically that gave him the thrill, she knew. She was just a worthless bitch to him.
(To everyone, daughter.)
What was turning him on was the thought that she was helpless. That he could do whatever he wanted.
And he began to do just that.
“Where are they?” Charmer asked petulantly. She bashed her rook against Kevin’s pawn, sending it flying. “I sent for her five minutes ago. Your game is horrible today, Sidewinder.”
“It’s your own fault,” he managed through gritted teeth. “You left her with the company perv.”
“Yes, but he came so highly recommended,” she said reproachfully. Her pout deepened. “I want to see her.”
“I’ll go.” He stood. Just the thought of delicate Jenny in the hands of that maniac for the last three hours—it was enough to make him want to put a fist through the wall. It felt like he’d been crawling the walls for a week. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d checked his watch. “I’ll go right now.”
“You might as well.” Charmer tossed the board to the carpet. “It’s no fun when you’re not paying attention.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that.”
“You bloody well aren’t!” she hollered after him, but he was jogging to the elevators and barely heard her.
Chapter 20
“God,” Dr. Loman was saying, hands busy, hands crawling, “I bet you taste like a peach.”
The fluorescent lights were bouncing off his glasses; she couldn’t see his eyes. It made her feel like a bug under a magnifying glass.
“I bet what I taste like is none of your business, you pathetic asshole.” Why wasn’t she scared? She should be scared. But then, she knew a few tricks this lab-coated moron couldn’t dream of.
You don’t look like what you are, Stacy had once told her. I guess that’s both good and bad. Depending.
Yes, depending. And what was this? Was he—he was! Dr. Loman was climbing up on the exam table with a practiced smoothness that showed he’d done this before. That, more than anything else, made her shudder.
How many helpless detainees? How often before, during, and after a drugged interrogation? How far did he go? Did Charmer know? Did she care?
Of course she doesn’t care, none of them care—you’re in bad-guy central, GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEAD!
He was directly over her and she was repulsed to see the shine of drool on his chin—ugh, he was drooling over her like a rib roast, like a butcher’s special. One spidery hand was busy worming up her shirt, the other busy on the bulge between his legs.
“I really like you,” he said, and slurped the drool back into his mouth.
Is that why you stupidly undid the ankle cuffs?
“You’re really cute,” he added.
“Aw,” she said, and kneed him in the groin. The blow had less than the desired effect, blocked by his own hand as it was, but she followed up by smacking her cupped hands over his ears.
He lost all interest in her, as well as his hard-on.
Clutching his head and screaming the thin, high scream of a cornered rabbit, he rolled off the table and onto the floor, hitting face first with a loud thud that should have been sickening, but which she liked just fine.
She sat up and shook her hands in front of her, ignoring the ache in her shoulders while watching the mottled, shredded metal fly off in all directions. Those metal-eating nanobytes were welcome to find whatever else in this room they cared to eat.
Where did the O.S.I. get this stuff?
And if Caitlyn was infected with them, if that was why she was such a speedy, strong freak, why-oh-why did she never complain? Jenny would have loved to be different. She was flat wallpaper, she blended, she looked like nobody and she was nobody, but it would be pretty neat to—
Her musings were interrupted when the door flew open, framing a wrathful Kevin Stone.
“Time to go already?” she asked brightly, hopping down and giving Dr. Loman a brisk kick in the jaw.
“I’m here,” he said gravely, “to save you.”
He marched over and gave Dr. Loman another kick, actually flipping the other man over on his back. Now Loman was in a fix: he wanted to cup his ears and cradle his ribs, and was about two limbs short.
“Perv,” Kevin said. Another kick—fump. “Sicko.” Fump. “Fuckhead.” Fump. Loman was halfway across the exam room by now, semiconscious. “Asshat. Jerkoff. You don’t. Treat. Girls. Like. That.” Each word, spoken in a scary monotone, was punctuated by another fump. “We’ve talked. About this. Before.”
“Stop, what are you doing?” she hissed, looking around for a surveillance camera. She could see one, but it was dark…no red light, no nothing. Did he turn it off post-interrogation? Or was it always off?
“I said. Saving you.”
She grabbed an arm—it was like grabbing the trunk of a young tree—and yanked. It had all the effect of grabbing a young tree, too. “You’re nuts! I’m your prisoner, remember? You kidnapped me and brought me to—uh—wherever we are—”
“Iowa.”
“Right.” She tugged harder. Enough with the kicking! “Iowa.” Then she paused. “The Snakepit’s in Iowa?”
“Did he hurt you, Jenny? Did he violate you?”
She could see the old kicking machine was getting ready to rev back up. “Of course not. He’s a professional.” A professional shitheap. “And in case y
ou haven’t noticed, I had things under control. Then you had to come bursting in here like Rambo on steroids—”
“What’d you do to him?” Kevin asked, squatting down to look at the now-unconscious Dr. Loman.
“I ruptured his eardrums. And possibly gave him a brain concussion. You know how it is: just a plain old good-bye would have been awkward.”
He laughed in spite of himself, and she was absurdly pleased that she had lightened his puzzling, dark mood.
“Now will you get out of here? What if someone sees you in here? What if Charmer’s watching?”
“What if he’d raped you?” Kevin asked, dangerously quiet. “What if he’d given you stitches where a lady never wants them? It’s happened before. I kicked the shit out of him not six months ago.”
“Again: how have you stayed undercover so long?”
He ignored her. “This was a shitty idea. I never should have agreed. I sold your body for my ticket of readmission.”
She was amazed at the mood change. He hadn’t been this pissed when he’d been in O.S.I. custody. She didn’t think he could get pissed at all. “Will you take a pill? I’m sure we can find his stash. Just calm down. You are totally forgetting the plan.”
“The plan fucking sucks.”
“You’re swearing in mixed company,” she teased.
He remained a stone. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Back up, l’il buckaroo. Not without what we came for. Otherwise this has all been for nothing.”
He took a steadying breath. “Charmer sent me to hurry you along. We didn’t know what was keeping you, and she’s impatient.”
“That’s interesting, a bad quality in the head of a splinter cell of psychos. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Wow, you can talk without moving your teeth!”
Finally, he smiled again. “We’d better go, ’cuz I’m giving serious thought to breakin’ all that boy’s fingers.”
“Yeah, well, I was getting there. Figured I’d try to find Charmer’s office and tell her how I had to fend off her pet rapist. I can do helpless yet pissed,” she added.
“Rapist?” he asked sharply.
“Never mind. I was coming, I just got a little, uh, sidetracked. Now will you please stop talking like you have any interest in my well-being? Remember? Me prisoner, you bad guy?”
“He unhooks the cameras,” Kevin said with scary calm. “Audio only, for an accurate transcript of what the patient says…but not what she experiences. Everybody knows. Charmer tolerates it because he gets results. Nobody can hear or see us right now.” He looked longingly at the bloody heap that was Dr. Loman. “It would be sooo easy. Just twist and snap.”
She shuddered. “Never mind. You’d better bring me back to her office. Remember the plan.”
“I been a soldier since you were in pigtails,” he snapped in a thick southern accent. Ah been. “I don’t need no reminders.”
“No, but you do need English 101. That is English you’re speaking, right?”
He didn’t smile, just took a careful step toward her. “Are you hurt?” he asked quietly. “Did he hurt you?”
“In case you didn’t notice—and I see you didn’t—he didn’t have a chance against me,” she said. “I’m a U of M graduate. Fear the Golden Gophers!”
“I was, uh, real worried about you.”
“I was worried about you, when you charged in here. How did you stay undercover for so long? How did you make it through the first year?”
“Prob’ly because I didn’t have you to worry about.” He put large fingers under her jaw and lifted her face to his. Then he kissed her as if he had all the time in the world, as if they were in someone’s living room instead of the sickly beating heart of an Iowan splinter cell. He kissed her the way she’d longed to be kissed: with rough care and with gentle urgency.
(Crazy crazy crazy.)
She pulled back. It was much, much harder than screwing up her courage to climb into the back of the minivan. “We’d better get going.”
“Uh-huh,” he replied, hugging her.
“I meant to Charmer’s office.”
“Right.” Now he was holding her at arm’s length and looking at her thoughtfully. “You’re a little ’un. If we did that much longer, I’d get a crick in my neck.”
“So buy me a stool for my birthday. Come on, we’re probably late for our debriefing with the psycho Iowan.”
“She’s not from Iowa. She just works there.”
“When we step out of here, I’m your prisoner again.”
“You kidding? After seeing what you did to Loman, I’m not going near you without at least six guns.”
“You’d be amazed how often I’ve heard that after a first date.”
“Never mind your dates.” He looked around the room. “Where’s the cuffs?”
“Gone with the wind.” She pointed to a small pile of metal shavings at the foot of the table. “The nanos chomped through them while I was singing for Loman.”
“They didn’t hurt your wrists?” He took her hands and looked at them, then released her, seeming slightly embarrassed. “Guess not.”
“Besides, you don’t need cuffs on little old me. I’ve already given up all my intel. I’m a dead battery, a burned-out light bulb, pick your metaphor. Why, d’you think you need to put another set on me?”
He actually had a set hanging from his gun belt, which was annoyingly sexy. And she was not that kind of girl. Strictly vanilla for her…
But instead of making like Hutch, he said, “You’re half my size, sweetie, and you’re supposedly drugged to the gills. I think they’ll understand if I don’t truss you like a Christmas goose. How’s the tooth?”
She probed her tongue into her back tooth, the wisdom tooth that had never needed to be pulled. There was a little flap of skin that hung just to the side of the thing, and the O.S.I. techs had stuffed it full of uppers. Sweet, sweet uppers.
Yes, she was supposed to be drugged to the gills, but the drugs had been doing their job nicely for the last five minutes, and she felt ready to take on the world. Snakepit. Whatever.
Maybe it was just the kiss.
“For the record, if you were a betting man, I’d tell you to bet that now’s when Charmer tries to talk me into switching sides.”
“Unless she decides to shoot you instead, since you’re no more use.”
“Nonsense! In case you haven’t noticed, I’m irresistible to everyone in the Pit, not to mention O.S.I. Funny, my guidance counselor never hinted about any of this.”
At last, he smiled. “Irresistible.”
“Irresistible!”
“Yup. Just the word on my mind.”
“Your tiny, overtaxed mind,” she said cheerfully, and followed him out of the bleak lab.
Chapter 21
How did you stay undercover for so long? How did you make it through the first year?
He gritted his teeth as he took Jenny gently (but convincingly) by the back of the neck and guided her down the hallway in front of him. It hadn’t been a matter of making it, of course. It had been a matter of getting away. Distancing himself from the Stones. The joke that was the Stone crime syndicate.
Twenty years ago
He had to pee but if he got out of bed the clawset monster would get him. It was stupid and worse—it was baby stuff, pure Pampers crap, but it was also very, very dark. And the worker bees were upsetting his mother. The worker bees almost never came to the house, almost never late at night, and he wanted Daddy; Daddy would fix the worker bees and maybe come and check on him and Tom and Benny.
His mother’s voice, raised in anger. Too many closed doors between him and her to make out what she was saying, but it sounded loud and angry and scared. What did she have to be scared of? Daddy took care of her, took care of all of them. And grown-ups didn’t see clawset monsters. They didn’t see anything, he sometimes thought.
He could hear stomping footsteps in the hall and shrank into h
imself, imagined himself a soccer ball, a baseball, a tennis ball, a Ping-Pong ball. Something wee and small, something easily overlooked.
In the bunk beds by the window, Tom and Benny slept on. The twins weren’t afraid of anything. It was why he never talked about the clawset monster…his own little brothers weren’t afraid of that baby stuff, and he was practically a grown-up man.
A real man would get out of the bed, cross the floor (evading the fabulous litter of toys the twins managed to leave, like snails with trails), open the bathroom door (ignoring the ajar closet door four feet to the left), go in, turn on the light, flip up the toilet lid, and pee.
A real man wouldn’t be curled up like a shrimp, cupping his throbbing belly and wishing he had a transporter beam that would take him right to the—
His bedroom door was thrown open, spilling harsh light into the room. Kevin barely—just—avoided wetting his pajamas. The twins didn’t even stir.
“You’ll wake them,” his mother said in a scoldy, scared voice. “Leave them be! My husband is coming! My husband is coming and he’ll—he’ll fix everything!”
“Mr. Stone’s dead, ma’am. You and your children will be, too, if you don’t come with me right now.”
His mother swatted at the big man—Sean Garrit, Kevin saw, his daddy’s number one helper—but to no effect. Mr. Garrit crossed the room and started shaking Ben awake.
“Kevin, get up, kid. We gotta go. Help your mom with your brothers.”
“But I have to—”
“Now, kid.”
Kevin got up. To his surprise, his mother was now meekly helping Mr. Garrit—Mr. Garrit, who wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. Mr. Garrit, who always joked about getting Daddy’s job. In the gloom of the bedroom, he looked huge, though Kevin knew his daddy was much bigger.
“Is there—can I pack a couple of—”
“No time, Mrs. Stone. We gotta get in the wind yesterday. You can buy clothes and stuff once we’re clear of Chicago.”