1
Jack stood behind Gia in the first-floor study and stared over her shoulder at the computer screen.
He’d tried every search engine he knew but hadn’t come up with a single hit for “oDNA.” They’d all produced hits for “odna” but none of those had anything to do with genetics. No problem finding rDNA and mDNA, but that wasn’t what he was looking for. So he’d asked Gia to try. She hadn’t fared any better, but he’d been buoyed by the way her fingers flew across the keys. Those physical therapy sessions seemed to be paying off.
He noticed specks of dark pigment on her fingers. He touched one.
“You’ve been painting?”
She shrugged. “If you can call it that.”
“That’s great. Can I see?”
She shook her head. “These aren’t for showing.”
“Not a show—just me.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Why not?”
“Because…because they’re not mine.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I. They’re too…off, if that makes any sense. Not ending up the way I’d intended when I started them.”
“But at least you’re painting.”
She sighed. “If you can call it that.” She nodded toward the screen. “I’m not having any better luck than you did.”
“I thought it was just me.”
“No, there’s no oDNA on the Internet, which means it’s probably safe to assume that it doesn’t exist.”
“I disagree. Just because it’s not on the Internet doesn’t mean there’s no such thing.”
She swiveled in her chair to face him. “The net is chock full of fantasies, delusions, wishful thinking, and outright lies—all sorts of things that don’t exist. Doesn’t it follow that there’d be at least one mention if something did exist?”
He looked at the crumpled sheet from Gerhard’s pad: oDNA? What did the question mark indicate? That Gerhard hadn’t been sure about it either?
But Levy’s reaction was a clear indicator that he was on to something. So why didn’t it show up? And why didn’t Levy want to admit that it existed?
Jack had a feeling that oDNA held the key to Jeremy Bolton’s value to the Creighton Institute and whoever was funding them. Might even be the key to getting him off the street and out of Dawn Pickering’s life—without screwing up Jack’s.
But who else besides Levy and others at Creighton would know anything about it?
He’d have to keep hammering Levy.
“What if some super agency cleaned up all mention of it?”
Gia shook her head. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
Neither did Jack. Unless…
“What if they started early—at the first mention of it?”
She looked up at him. “You really think there’s some secret government agency doing that?”
Levy had mentioned one, and he believed him. But Jack had given Gia only the sketchiest outline of what he’d uncovered.
She reached out and squeezed his hand.
“Are you sure you want to be involved in this? It started off as helping this woman find her private detective, then it moved into helping her get her daughter out of the clutches of an older man, and now…what’s it now? This seems to be escalating every day.”
No argument there. He hadn’t told her about Gerhard’s murder or the abduction—she’d only worry.
“I said I’d help her and I can’t very well back out now. Her daughter’s involved with a bad apple”—though maybe not so bad if the therapy was working—“and I wouldn’t feel right leaving her in the lurch. Don’t worry, I’m being careful.”
All that was certainly true.
“But government agencies and some sort of DNA…what’s that got to do with her daughter?”
“Not so much the daughter as the guy she’s seeing. This oDNA could be something the mother can use to split them up.”
She squeezed harder.
“Be careful, Jack.”
“You know me.” He offered his most reassuring smile. “Careful is my middle name.”
Gia rolled her eyes. “If it were, you wouldn’t do what you do.”
“But I do take every possible precaution.”
“And things still go wrong, don’t they.”
No argument there, either.
The risks involved in this fix-it had quickly escalated. And he was about to take them to a higher level.
But first he had to have a sit-down with another writer. Abe had left a message that he’d made contact with Winslow directly via e-mail through his Web site, pfrankwinslow.com. Winslow had e-mailed him back with a phone number, saying he lived on the Lower East Side and to call anytime.
Sounded like a man looking for all the publicity he could get.
2
“Any relation to Don?” Jack said with a smile as they seated themselves on opposite sides of a window table at Moishe’s on Second Avenue.
Winslow gave him a blank, hazel stare. “Don?” He shook his head. “No Don in my family.”
He was skinny and looked about thirty. He had wavy blond hair, a thin face, and what might politely be called a generous nose. Physically unimposing—a far, far cry from the brawny ex–Navy SEAL he wrote about.
“You’re sure? Lieutenant Commander Don Winslow—he was a Navy hero during World War Two.”
Another shake of his head. “Nope. Nobody ever in the Navy as far as I know.”
How soon we forget, Jack thought.
He’d called the writer from Gia’s this morning, saying he needed to do the interview ASAP if it was going to make the Trenton Times Sunday edition. Winslow said they could meet at a little restaurant near his apartment—that was, if Jack didn’t mind coming to the Lower East Side.
Jack didn’t mind at all. They had to meet someplace, and it couldn’t be Julio’s. Winslow’s turf was fine. The writer had suggested this kosher deli/coffee shop.
“What’ll it be, gents?” said a cracked voice.
An ancient waitress had appeared tableside with two porcelain cups and a pot of coffee. She had bright orange hair, thick blue eye shadow, and a sharp dowager’s hump. Her name tag read SALLY.
Winslow ordered eggs over easy with corned beef hash; Jack ordered a bagel and lox, extra capers.
The menu reminded him of the Kosher Nosh, Gia’s favorite eatery during her pregnancy. But with the baby gone, she’d lost her cravings. They hadn’t been back since. Too painful.
He shook off the melancholy and pulled out his recorder.
“You’re amazingly accessible,” Jack said. “I interviewed Hank Thompson yesterday and had to go through his publicist and meet him at his publisher’s office.” He gestured around. “This is much more relaxed.”
“Well, as far as being accessible goes, I don’t have much choice: I’m available to the press any time, any day.”
“That’s refreshing.”
“No, that’s survival. This is off the record, okay?”
Jack had been about to turn on the recorder but stopped.
“I guess so. Sure.”
Jack wanted to get to his questions but felt he had to play along.
“I just want you to know my situation. My publisher doesn’t do diddly-squat for paperback originals. Like straight-to-video movies. I have to go out on my own and scrabble for every bit of PR I can get. That’s the paperback life. As soon as my latest is shipped, my editor and publisher forget I exist.”
“Paperback, ay? I’d have thought for sure it would make a million for you overnight.”
Jack waited for a rueful smile or some sign of a flash of recognition. Nothing came.
Ah, fame. Fickle be thy name.
“I wish! If I made a million, believe me, I wouldn’t be living in a one-bedroom walk-up in Alphabet City.”
“Okay. Duly noted.” Jack pushed the recorder’s ON button. “Now let’s go back on the record: Where do—?”
“Right. Okay. An
d since I know you’re going to ask me, I remember the exact moment I knew I had to be a writer.”
Jack hadn’t intended to ask and didn’t give much of a damn, but he couldn’t very well tell Winslow that. Probably wouldn’t shut him up even if he did.
“It was back in nineteen-ninety-three. I wrote a letter to the editor of a comic book called The Tomorrow Syndicate. Just a tongue-in-cheek paragraph with a fake return address poking a little fun at the way the editor—Affable Al—used alliteration. Well, lo and behold, they published it in issue number six. I tell you, it was such a rush seeing my name in print as the author of that letter that I knew then and there I had to be a writer.”
“Fascinating.” Not! “Now, where do you get your ideas?”
Winslow smiled. “I’ve been told most writers hate that question, but I love it. But then, of course, I’m just happy someone’s asking me any sort of question.”
Okay, okay. We get the picture: P. Frank Winslow is underpaid and unappreciated.
“The ideas?”
“Dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Yep. They come to me in dreams and I adapt them to the books.”
“What was the dream that led to the first book?”
“Rakshasa! started off with a real nightmare. I was trapped on a rooftop where I was being chased by a monster or demon of some sort—I can’t remember a thing about how it looked, just that it was after me—and no matter what I shot at it, threw at it, cut it with, the thing kept coming.”
Jack felt a chill. Winslow had just described what he had gone through on the roof of his own building nearly two years ago.
“When did you have this dream?”
“Summer before last. Early August.”
The temperature dropped a little further. The mother rakosh had been chasing Jack in early August.
“I woke up all out of breath, like I’d been doing all that running around and fighting myself. I knew if I could capture that terror and frustration in a story, I could sell it.”
“That was it? You got a whole book out of that?”
“Well, no. I had another dream the next night about this cargo ship filled with all these nasty little creatures. So I put the two dreams together and had Jake Fixx come along and clean up the mess. I used real life, too. If you remember, it was right about that time a freighter caught fire and burned in the harbor, so I made that part of the book.”
Jack wiped his palms on his jeans. Yeah, he remembered…remembered all too well.
“Where’s your character Jake come from?”
Winslow lowered his voice and leaned forward, as if about to impart some ancient wisdom.
“Now here’s where the art of writing and creating comes in: The character in the dream was this nondescript sort of ne’er-do-well urban mercenary. I mean, you had to pay him to help you out.”
“No!”
“I’m not kidding. Well, I hadn’t had anything but the letter published back then, but I knew right off that wasn’t going to fly.”
Jack had an unsettling thought. “Did you get a good look at him in your dream?”
He shook his head. “Just like I didn’t get a good look at the monster. The only thing I remember is that he wasn’t very memorable. But his looks weren’t the only problem. Dreams don’t need logic, but novels do. As Mark Twain said, ‘The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.’ I mean how could a loner like that run license plates and check out fingerprints or call in old debts to get reinforcements or the latest weaponry? The readers weren’t going to buy that and neither were the editors. So I created a highly trained professional soldier with tons of survival skills and named him Jake Fixx. Much more realistic.”
“Oh, I agree. Especially that name.”
Sally arrived with their food. Winslow attacked his eggs and hash as if he hadn’t eaten for a week while Jack picked at his salmon. He wasn’t nearly as hungry as when he’d come in.
After a few moments of silence, he said, “What about your new book, Berzerk!—was that also a dream?”
Winslow wiped some yolk off his chin. “Berzerk! was the next book, but not the next dream.”
“You skipped? Why?”
He shrugged. “The second didn’t come till about Christmas. It was kind of science-fictiony—about a new power source and such. My editor didn’t like the idea. Vetoed the next dream as well. That was about all these different conspiracy theories—UFOs and anti-Christs and whatever rolling into one. It ended with this big hole in the Earth swallowing up a house and damn near gulping down our hero. That was probably influenced by that house that disappeared in Monroe last year. Too weird. We settled on the fourth dream I’d had about that drug that was so hot for a while and then disappeared.”
Jack’s gut knotted. “Berzerk.”
“Right—or Eliminator, Predator, Killer-B. It had a bunch of names. In my dream it came from one of the surviving monsters from the first novel. The editor liked that idea because it was a sequel of sorts, so I went with it.”
“When was this dream?”
“Last May.”
Just when those real-life events were going down.
“How about your next book? Any ideas for that?”
“Way past the idea stage. I just handed in the finished manuscript.”
“Already?”
“The publisher’s pipeline is long. If I want this one out next spring, it’s got to join the queue now. This one’s called Virus!—and yeah, it’s got an exclamation point. Our buddy Jake has to call in some favors from the CDC to stop a mind-controlling bug.”
A wave of sadness swept over Jack as he thought of his sister Kate.
“Any more dreams?”
He smiled. “Plenty. I had one about a haunted house last summer that I think will become my next.”
This was sick—this guy’s dreams connected to Jack’s life. He wondered if any of them saw into the future.
“What’s the latest nightmare?”
Winslow smiled and winked. “Can’t tell you that. Trade secret.”
Jack fought the urge to reach across the table and grab him by his chicken neck.
“Just a hint?”
“All I’ll say is it involves a stolen book and a stick figure like that Kicker Man you see all over the place. It’s still developing. I don’t know yet if I’m going to be able to use it.”
That just about did it for Jack. As disturbing as all this was, none of it was helpful. And he wanted away from this guy with the creepy dreams. Somehow, some way, he and Winslow shared a circuit. Why? Some cosmic accident? Or did it mean something? He didn’t know. Maybe he’d never know. But either way, he hated it. Wanted no one with a periscope on his life, but didn’t see how he could stop it.
Who knew? Maybe Winslow would come in handy one day.
He signaled Sally for the check and started gobbling the lox.
“My treat,” he said.
Winslow looked up. “Don’t you want to know about my childhood?”
“Why would I—?”
“Because anyone who writes weird stuff is assumed to have had some sort of childhood trauma.”
“Okay, I’ll bite: What was yours?”
He smiled. “Nothing. I had a completely normal childhood.”
“So did I.”
“Yeah, but nobody thinks you’re weird.”
Jack didn’t comment.
3
Jack arrived at Work about three o’clock and surveyed the spigot handles behind the bar: Coors, Coors Light, Bud, and Bud Light. Depressing. So was Work, kind of. Dark paneling, booths along the wall, scattered tables, pool tables in the better-lit rear section.
Yesterday, as she’d driven him along Queens Boulevard, Christy had pointed out this place, making fun of the name, and saying Bethlehem tended to hang here most afternoons.
Wanting to appear to be a regular schmoe, Jack ordered a draft of the lesser of the four evils from the bleached-blond barmaid and c
arried the Coors to a nearby table.
He pulled the latest model PSP from his backpack and began to play the brand new 3-D version of DNA Wars. If Bolton was half the gamer Levy had said he was, he might be intrigued by a guy wearing 3-D glasses as he played a game. Intrigued enough to come over and check it out.
Jack wanted him to do the approaching. If Jack wandered in and struck up a conversation at the bar, he might get suspicious. But if Bolton made the first move…
After forty minutes and two carefully nursed brews, Jack was beginning to think he’d wasted his time. Maybe Bolton had decided to skip Work today and, oh, say, drown someone.
At least the game was interesting and challenging—different game play and design from the console version—and it made the time go fast.
And then Jeremy Bolton walked in—sauntered was more like it—wearing a denim vest, faded jeans, and light brown cowboy boots. The rustler look. Add a black Stetson he could pass for Kevin Kline in Silverado.
Jack peeked at him over the top of the 3-D glasses. Until now he’d seen only photos and long views through a windshield and across a parking lot. Neither had conveyed the man’s presence. Here was a guy who was comfortable in his skin. He radiated something. Jack couldn’t put his finger on it, but he had a definite aura about him.
The barmaid lit up as she spotted him. She grinned as they shared a few words while she poured him a Bud Light. Beer in hand he turned and leaned against the bar, surveying the room.
Jack focused on the game and let loose a few grunts of frustration as his thumbs pounded the buttons. After a few minutes of this he noticed a pair of booted feet stop next to his table.
“Whatcha playin?” said a voice that dripped the deep South.
Jack gave a little jump, as if startled, then looked up at Bolton through the 3-D glasses. They were the polarized type, rather than the red-blue, but still they made the room look a little strange. He took them off and rubbed his eyes.
“DNA Three-D. Played it?”
“Didn’t even know it was out. Thought you had MG Acid-Two. That’s three-D too, you know.”
“Yeah. But only the cut scenes. This one’s three-D all the way through.”
“No shit? Tell you what: How’s about I buy you a beer and you drink it while I take a look at that.”