32
Kev
hit the floor. He saw Petrie lunge across Zia Rosa’s lap. The
picture window was shattered, glass everywhere. Coffee table,
too.
Kev looked around for Sean across the
carpet strewn with demitasse cups, spattered coffee, broken cookies,
shattered glass.
And blood. Costantina sprawled next to
the upended metal frame of the coffee table, mouth gaping. Her
throat was a raw, bloody mess. Blood pooled behind her head. Her
tangle of knotted gold jewelry was like a red wet noose around her
neck.
Sean poked his head around the couch.
Their eyes met. Zia was yelling. Kev could barely hear it. Deafened
by gunfire. The yelling was a good sign. At least she was alive.
Petrie still lay across her lap, hand pressed to his side. His hand
was red. Ah, shit. Not a
good sign.
Kev pointed to himself, gestured
toward the foyer. Pointed to Sean, then toward the shattered
picture window. Sean nodded.
Kev writhed on his belly over the rug.
Don Gaetano lay on his side, each breath a labored whimper. Flecks
of blood spattered his lips and chin. He clutched his gut, his hand
dripping. Shot in the belly, and it looked like he’d taken one in
the thigh, too. Kev was sorry, but he kept on crawling into the
foyer. Couldn’t see out the windows this low, couldn’t tell how
many assailants there were, where they were shooting from. He
slithered up the stairs to the first landing, peeked between the
banister slats, through the high, towering windows.
He saw nobody on the lawn. He kept
looking, waiting . . .
There! A spot of green, shifting and
moving against the rosebushes in the fountain. Darting behind the
door and coming this way. Kev clambered up onto the banister,
poised himself. Leaped into empty space. He caught the huge wrought
iron candeliera, hung on
like a monkey. It swung through the air like a pendulum, creaking
madly, the bolts sunk into the wall straining. He willed m to
hold.
He careened in wide, lazy arcs, trying
to drag himself up into a ball. In the other room, he could just
barely see Sean crouched near the picture window. His brother
peered past the drapes swaying in gusts of wind. He looked up,
shook his head. Kev jerked his chin at the door.
Sean positioned himself, drew his
weapon. The candeliera’s
swinging was slowing, but it creaked and cast a moving shadow.
Slower . . . slower. Swaying. Kev held his breath. The handle
turned.
The barrel of an assault rifle
preceded the guy into the room—no. Not a guy. They were slender,
brown female hands that held the M4. An emaciated woman in combat
gear, a drab green cap on her head.
She looked up to see what the shadow
was. Bam, Sean squeezed
off a shot. She stumbled
back, and rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, pumped more rounds into
the living room. Kev prayed she hadn’t hit Sean, Zia, or Petrie,
but he was airborne now, heading for the killer like a sack of
cement—
Thud, he hit her. They slammed to the ground
together.
Kev had his Beretta 8000 under the
woman’s jaw before she could recover. She was dazed and
unresisting. Sean scrambled in on his belly.
“That’s the one who came at us at the
cabin,” he said, yanking plastic ratcheted cuffs out of his pack.
“I saw her through the scope. Are there more?”
“Don’t know yet. Didn’t see
any.”
Sean fastened the woman’s hands behind
her back. Then her feet.
“One more look,” Kev said. “I take the
door, you the window?”
Sean nodded. He crawled on his belly
back to the living room while Kev edged closer to the gaping door.
On his feet. Back to the wall.
He spun, Beretta at the ready . .
.
No one there, just the wind, sighing,
whipping the trees. He took a step out onto the porch. A
nondescript white Volvo sedan idled on the street. No backup. She’d
come alone? What the fuck?
Sean had come to the same conclusion
in the living room. They met at the couch. Michael Ranieri was
stretched out behind the couch, a hole in his forehead, blood
fanned on the wall behind him. Don Gaetano was dead, too. His eyes
stared up, blank.
They eased Petrie off of Zia Rosa,
brushing the shards of glass off the white leather so they could
slide the wounded man to lie full length on the couch cushions. Zia
looked fine, underneath him. Wild-eyed, gulping for breath, but not
hit. Petrie had taken the bullet for her. Amazingly, it hadn’t gone
right through him and into Zia. Maybe it had bounced off one of his
ribs.
Kev ripped open Petrie’s shirt and
hissed with dismay. Big hole, leaking fast. Sucking sound at each
labored breath. The bullet had punctured his lung. He was
conscious, eyes open, teeth gritted. Sean was digging into his kit,
yanking things out.
“I told you that habit of yours was
dangerous,” Kev said. “The curiosity thing.”
Petrie flashed him an eloquent
look.
“Zia, call the ambulance for him,” he
told her.
Zia grabbed her purse, smeared with
Petrie’s blood, and dug for her phone. She gabbled into it, giving
shrill orders to the emergency dispatcher. He left her to it, and
he and Sean worked over Petrie together.
The first flush of adrenaline was
easing down, and under it was grief, fury, frustration. The only
people whonown the name and location of the fucker who held Bruno
were all dead.
“Goddamnit,” he exploded. “Just a
name, before that bitch started shooting. Just a goddamn name, that
was all I asked!”
“Calm down,” Sean said quietly, his
hands busy.
“Why? How can I? That’s it!” he
snarled. “The last thread I had to grab on to. I have no other
trace! None! What the fuck do I do now?”
“You’ve got her,” Sean said, jerking
his chin over his shoulder, toward the bound woman lying in the
foyer.
“The bitch is useless, Sean! These
fucking nutcases self-destruct! She’ll rip her own tongue out or
explode in my face if I start to lean on her!”
“Having hysterics will not help,” Sean
said, taping the bandage into place. “We have her. We’ll use her.
We’ll think of something, we’ll improvise. Christ, I hope that
ambulance hurries up. I’ve done everything that I can.” He looked
around. “Say, where’s your crazy Zia?”
“Oh, fuck. No.” Kev looked around the
ravaged room. No Zia. “I’ll go track her down.”
He sprinted through the first floor.
Formal dining room, enormous kitchen, breakfast nook. Teak-paneled
personal office. Huge game room, with pool and Ping-Pong tables.
Swimming pool behind the house. No Zia Rosa.
Back through the foyer. He leaped over
the bound female shooter, who panted motionless on the floor, and
sped up the curving staircase.
He found Zia in the master bedroom,
which was white and gold and pink, full of baroque swirling like
the frosting on a cake. A room fit for a Hollywood diva of the
thirties. Zia sat on the end of the pillow-strewn white satin bed,
clutching an inlaid jewelry box on her lap. She stared up at Kev,
eyes wide and stricken behind her glasses. Tears streamed down,
mixing with the blood spattered on her face.
Terrified hope jolted through him.
“Oh, God, Zia. You found it?”
Zia Rosa looked lost. “We played
together with this jewelry box when we were little, Tittina and
me.” Her voice was almost childlike. “We played with it. With our
dolls.”
Kev sank to his knees in front of her.
He took the jewelry box from her and opened it. It was heaped with
gold chains, rings, brooches.
He dumped them out onto the bed in a
tangled, glittering pile, and shook the empty box. Something
shifted inside. His heart thudded.
“There’s something in here.” He felt
for the sliding panel. Sure enough, it slid open. But Bruno had the
key.
“Nonna taught us to sew together,” Zia
went on. “How to make the blessed animal cookies, for
Natale. We were best
friends back then, Tittina and me. And now . . . Dio. Poverina.”
He grabbed her hands. “I’m sorry. But
we just can’t do this now.”
Zia Rosa ignored him. “That picture of
Magda that I have in my wallet? Just like Tittina, when she was
little. Just like the little girl at the baby store. The one with
that bitch nurse.”
“Zia, we have to hurry—”
“I shoulda known about those two, but
they were so nice, you know? Her husband, too! He even come running
back to give me my phone after it fell in the baby’s stroller! Aw,
so sweet of him, I thought, to go to all that trouble, eh? Who’d
have thought they was both killers? With those beautiful
bimbi? Nobody woulda
thought that!”
Kev went rd as the picture shifted in
his mind. New shapes, new possibilities, new scenarios. “Wait. Zia,
those people at the baby store . . . they handled your phone? When
you weren’t watching?”
She blinked as she tried to remember.
“I suppose they did. It dropped in the stroller. He found it and
ran it back to me in the parking lot. Ouch! Kev! Don’t squeeze so
hard!”
He let go of her hands, his heart
thudding. “Sorry, Zia. Where’s your phone right now?”
“Downstairs, in my purse, on the
couch,” she said. “Why? You need to call somebody? What’s wrong
with yours?”
“They loaded software on your phone,
Zia. Or a tracking device, or God knows what.” His voice shook with
excitement. “That’s how they’ve been following us, catching us.
With your phone!”
She sucked in air. “O Dio! I’ll flush the thing down the
toilet!”
“No, no, no! It’s all we’ve got to
link us to Bruno! We’ll use it!”
“How?” She flapped her hands. Her
voice cracked. “How?”
“Who the fuck knows? I’ll come up with
something. Just listen to me. We’re going downstairs. I’ll take the
jewelry box. I’m going to say, loudly, near your purse, that my
phone’s out of juice, and I’m going to borrow yours. You can call
us using Petrie’s phone.”
“Where you going?” she demanded. “What
will you do?”
“I don’t know yet, but we’re hauling
ass out of here with the shooter, and you’re staying with Petrie
while he goes to the hospital.”
She inhaled to argue. Kev clapped his
hand over her mouth. “No, Zia,” he said, his voice steely. “Not
this time. Petrie took a bullet for you. You will hold his hand in
the ambulance. It’s the least you can do.”
She stared at him. Gave him a nod. He
could hardly believe he’d managed to convince her so
easily.
A siren sounded, far away in the
distance. Good, for Petrie’s sake. No time to smash the box open
here.
“That’s our cue,” he said. “Come on.
Move.”
“Where is she?” King demanded. “What’s
taking so long?”
Hobart tapped the keyboard. “Just
waiting for the database to—”
Whack! King slammed the side of the computer
desk, making them all jump. “Do it faster!”
Hobart flubbed the string of
characters he was entering. He blocked, deleted, entered it again.
“Yes, sir.”
King hung over the man’s shoulder.
Melanie and Julian stood by, eyes downcast, shutting down external
signals, hoping not to be noticed. He swung around upon Melanie.
“Have they said anything?”
Melanie’s hands lifted to the earbuds
in her ears. “Nothing new. No conversation. The McCloud who got
wounded is just groaning.”
“Good.” King was glad the son of a
bitch had taken a bullet. Let him ache and throb and bleed until he
died. King wished him a nasty strain of antibiotic-resistant staph
to gnaw at his suppurating wound for a few agonizing days before
that happy event.
“I have it!” Hobart’s voice was tight
with excitement. “They’re in a self-storage facility outside
Newark!”
King peered down at the screen at the
satellite shot of the McCloud brothers’ vehicle. As he watched, the
door opened and a man in a lack knit cap got out. He went to the
back of the SUV, opened it. Then opened the door of the unit. He
returned to the car, seized a long, limp bundle. It did not
move.
“Is she alive?” he
demanded.
“Vitals all strong,” Hobart
said.
The man dragged Zoe into the unit and
came back out, locking it. He got back into the vehicle. Melanie’s
hands flashed to the earbuds.
“Put the sound on the external
speakers!” King snapped.
Hobart pushed buttons. Sound blared
out, fuzzy and distorted. “. . . to the emergency room before I
bleed to death, goddamnit!”
“Yeah, we’ll go, OK? We had to stash
her first. She’d be hard to explain parked outside the Urgent Care
if she started to squeak. And I want a crack at her before we
deliver her to the cops, so you can—”
“What the fuck do I care? I want to
plug this hole!”
“Calm down. I’ll take you to the
Urgent Care, and then I’ll come back and have a chat with monster
chick. We’re gonna get friendly.”
“Tell me about it after,” the wounded
McCloud snarled. “I’m hemorrhaging!”
“That’s not hemorrhaging. It was a
ricochet, OK? Stop being such a pussy. I’ve gone out clubbing after
worse than that.”
“Yeah, and I want stitches and an IV
antibiotic, so drive the fucking car . . . now.”
No talk after that, just grumbling and
the sound of the engine revving. The vehicle began to move. The
screen showing the RF frequency bleeping from the chip embedded in
Zoe’s clavicle remained stationary in the storage unit. The one in
Zoe’s cell phone and the one in Rosa Ranieri’s cell, which her
adopted nephew had conveniently taken, began to move. King watched
the vehicle until it pulled into the covered area attached to the
administrative office of the storage facility and was lost to
sight. He calculated the timing. Came to a decision.
“Hobart, Julian,” he said. “Go
retrieve her.”
Hobart’s eyes widened. “But I
thought—”
“Plans change. Her com device is with
them. She’s immobilized, probably unconscious, so she wouldn’t be
able to fulfill a Level Ten command even if I could deliver one.
And I don’t want her interrogated.”
Melanie piped up, her voice anxious.
“Sir, I could go with Hobart. I have more experience than Julian.
He hasn’t even completed his final training, and if the McClouds
come back before we—”
“Your combat skills are not up to a
McCloud. Julian’s are superior to yours. Do not presume to question
me again.”
Melanie’s face turned crimson. All
three operatives were frozen, inert.
“For God’s sake!” he roared.
“Move!”
Hobart and Julian scuttled out of the
room. In the silence that followed, King heard choked
sobs.
His teeth clenched. His hands fisted.
He carefully did not look at Melanie so as not to lose control
completely.
How had a specimen so defective, so
inferior, managed to get through his culls? He was tempted to
initiate the sniveling cunt’s mortal command sequences then and
there. He forced himself to stop. He was down to a bare minimum of
three functioning agents, one of whom was not even fully trained.
He’d called back others from outside assignments, but it would be
days before they came home.
He could get rid of Melanie when his
rankshe attendants swelled to an acceptable number. Until then,
distasteful though it was, he needed her. Which meant he had to
hold his nose and manage her.
He softened his voice. “Melanie.
Forgive my sharp tone. It’s an act, for Hobart and Julian’s
benefit. Would you really want to leave me all alone here, with no
one to back me up? As you so intelligently pointed out, Julian
hasn’t even completed his training program. Call me selfish, but if
I’m going to have the support of only one sole operative, it has to
be the best one.” He gave her a conspiratorial smile. “And you can
imagine why I can’t say that in front of the others. Can’t
you?”
Melanie blinked away her tears. Her
face illuminated. She stood up straighter, with a tremulous smile.
“Of course, sir.”
“Come here, Melanie,” he said, keeping
his voice soft.
Her face turned pink. She moved toward
him, eyes shining. He smiled at her, trying in vain to remember her
command sequences. He prided himself on knowing every operative’s
command codes by heart, but nothing was coming to him today. Too
tired, too stressed. It irritated him. He grabbed his handheld
organizer. Melanie waited, eyes wide and expectant, while he
punched them up from his private database.
Ah, yes. Medieval Georgian. Melanie’s
whole pod had been command coded in that language. Why he hadn’t
been able to recall it was beyond him.
“Give me your hand, my dear,” he
purred. Her slender fingers were ice cold, though her face was
pink, eyes exalted.
He recited a Level Eight reward
sequence, and Melanie convulsed with a shriek, eyes rolling back.
She sagged against him.
He caught her by the armpits and held
her, cursing long and bitterly at the indignity of his situation.
His creations were not supposed to fall apart on him when he needed
them most. They were not supposed to lose consciousness when he
gave them a reward sequence. They should not be so jealous, so
competitive, so distastefully oversexed. It should not be so easy
to destabilize them. This problem went beyond Zoe’s breakdown. It
was a general defect in DeepWeave that he had to address before he
began with the new, fresh ones.
But first things first. He let Melanie
drop to the floor. Took ten seconds to let his temper cool. He
crouched and slapped her.
She moaned, opened her eyes. They were
fogged with devotion.
“Get up, my dear.” He kept his voice
gentle, by brute force of will. “No time to wallow! We have work to
do.”
She scrambled ungracefully to her
feet, still panting.
King clicked on the video interface
until he found Parr’s cell. The woman was sitting in the corner, on
the floor, positioned in such a way that he could not see her face,
it being below and behind the camera’s eye. Just jeans-clad legs
and pale, bare feet. There was a dusting of scattered white dots
around her on the floor. He peered at them, then at the movement of
her fingers. She appeared to be picking at some piece of paper.
Shredding it. “Did you send Howard’s video archive to play on the
monitor in Parr’s room?” he asked Melanie.
“Oh, yes. She’s probably seen the
whole loop three times by now.”
“I want to know what she thinks of
it,” he said. “Bring her to me.”
“Lemme get this straight, mon.” The
dreadlocked Jamaican cabbie crossed his arms over his chest,
releasing a pungent cloud of patchouli and weed. “You want me to
drive your car to the Urgent Care, alone. Grning and cursing. Park
in the ambulance zone, where they will tow your ass away. Take two
cell phones into the emergency room and put them in the garbage
can. And then walk back to get my cab.”
“That’s all,” Kev said.
The man stared at the eight
hundred-dollar bills fanned out in Kev’s hand, clearly tempted.
“That’s fucking weird as hell, mon.”
“Yeah, sure. But you have to go
now,” Kev said. “This
thing’s time sensitive. It times out in a minute. And so does the
pay.”
The man shook his head. His eyes were
slitted with suspicion, but sharp. “What other kind of sensitive? I
don’ wanna go to jail, mon. I don’ want no trouble with
nobody.”
“You won’t be doing anything illegal,”
Sean told him. “You’ll be helping save innocent people from
criminals. I swear it, before God.”
“Swear all you want, mon,” the man
said. “These bad guys, they gonna be mad, and I don’ wanna talk to
them ’bout it, after. I don’ want to be caught on no security
camera. I got me a woman, a baby girl.”
Kev reached for his wallet again,
peeled out four more hundreds. “This is for your woman.” Another
four. “This is for your baby girl.” He pulled out two more. “These
are for making your mind up, fast.”
The guy shook his head again. “Fast is
not good, mon.”
Kev sighed through clenched teeth. “It
is today.”
The guy walked around Kev and Sean’s
vehicle. He opened the back hatch, looked in. Looked at the cases
of equipment that Sean and Kev had unloaded. “What’s in those
cases?” he asked.
“Nothing you need to concern yourself
about,” Kev said. “They won’t be in the car you’ll be driving. And
then abandoning. Forever.”
“I will be on the cameras at the
emergency room,” the cabbie pointed out.
“Maybe so, but you won’t have
committed a crime,” Kev countered. “Just a traffic violation. In a
car not registered to you.”
The guy stared at the fan of bills in
Kev’s hand once again. His hand stretched out, even though his head
was still shaking. The extra thousand had clinched the
deal.
Kev looked at Sean. “Get the phones
out of the trunk.” He turned to the cabbie. “Listen up. As soon as
he brings you those phones, do not say another word. Not one more
word. Got it?”
“Ah! Bugged phones? This is so fucked
up, mon. I don’ like this,” he said, but the money had already
disappeared into his pockets.
“Me, neither,” Kev said fervently.
“Don’t forget the cursing and groaning, like you have a painful
wound.”
“No problem. I groan real good. I
drive all day, in this winter slop, and my arthritis kicks up.
Auooow! Fuck, mon, that hurts . . . auooow!”
“Don’t overdo it, for God’s sake!” Kev
said, alarmed. “Muffled groans, OK? Or they’ll be able to tell it’s
not one of our voices. Got it?”
“Oh, yes, I got it, I got it,” the guy
assured him.
“Take them out of the bags before you
go in. If someone sees you drop a handbag into the garbage, they’ll
think you’re leaving a bomb.”
The guy winced and opened his mouth,
but Sean was there, finger to his lips, holding up the bag that
held the phones. Kev clapped his hand over the guy’s mouth and
yanked the driver’s side door open. Sean opened the back door and
tossn.
The guy still looked miserably
doubtful, but he climbed in. Kev slammed the door shut. Nodded
farewell. The guy nodded back, started the engine with a roar. The
SUV leaped and bumped out of the shelter, down the short concrete
ramp, onto the street. It turned and was gone.
Sean walked over to stand beside Kev.
They stared at the place where the vehicle had left their field of
vision. They couldn’t step out of that shelter until the other
piece of their hastily cobbled plan drove up.
“That was stressful,” Sean commented.
“I hope that guy doesn’t get distracted and stop for munchies
somewhere.”
Kev shook his head. “He wasn’t stoned.
But he was scared.”
“So am I,” Sean said. “Do you think
we’re fucking him up?”
“I don’t think so. There are no
explosives in monster chick’s phone. They must have gotten nervous
about that, after the cabin. And there’s no way anyone could trace
him back to the phones, even using fingerprints. He was wearing
leather gloves. He’s safe from the Butthead Brigade. Unless they
recognize him personally, if he gets caught on some camera. And
that’s not likely.”
“None of this shit has been likely,”
Sean said, darkly.
They stared glumly out at the
rain-slicked street, and another vehicle appeared, turning onto the
ramp. It was the aging but fitlooking Volkswagen panel van that
Sean had spotted in a nearby used car lot.
The guy they’d met in the storage unit
got out. He was a heavyset guy with slicked-back hair. “Here she
is,” he announced. “I got ’em down to thirty-six hundred and filled
her with gas, like you said. She runs real good.” He held out a
handful of cash. “Here’s your change.”
“I appreciate the savings. Keep it as
part of your commission.”
The guy looked taken aback. He slid
the wad of money into his pocket. “Uh, thanks. Why didn’t you buy
it yourself? You on the lam?”
“No. Long story, but nothing illegal.
So, like I said. The van’s in your name. We borrow it from you
today. When we’re done, we give it back to you, free and clear.
I’ll call your cell, we get you the van.”
The guy shook his head, his mouth
flat. “If you use it to commit a crime, I’m rolling over on you,”
he warned. “I will fuck you up.”
“Fair enough,” Kev said. “Say we stole
it. I’m fine with that.”
Kev and Sean began loading the plastic
cases into the back of the van. The man stared at them. “Yeah.
Sure. And, uh . . . now?”
“Now we go,” Kev said. “And thanks for
your help.”
The man just stood there. “What did
you put in the storage unit?”
Kev just looked at him.
“Yeah, never mind. Whatever.” The guy
walked away.
They climbed in. Sean started up the
motor. It sounded pretty good. Kev opened up the laptop and opened
the surveillance program, clicking open the view from the slap-on
vidcam he’d attached with a single discreet gesture to the outside
wall of the storage unit they had rented, using gray-brown putty
and fuzz disguise, which made it almost invisible. They’d
positioned repeaters to augment the signal at least to the street
outside the storage unit.
“How far can we go and still get the
signal?” he asked.
“Let’s park around the first corner.”
Sean turned the van around and put it into park. “It’s ris, though.
They might just eyeball us when they come. Those two guys both
think we’re going to blow up the Chrysler Building, or
something.”
“I know,” Kev said
bleakly.
“You think they’ll call the
cops?”
Kev stared at the screen, watching as
the guy they’d gotten the van from approached their newly rented
storage unit and stared at it.
“They might,” Kev said. “At least, the
dreadlocked guy might. The other guy’s still hoping to score a free
car out of the deal. Best we can hope is that they’ll wrestle with
their consciences just long enough for us to snag a tail. Then they
can do whatever they want, and welcome.”
Sean shook his head. “It’s so damn
risky. Bringing strangers in.”
“I know!” Kev exploded. “All I can do
is try, right? I’m pulling this thing out of my ass as I go along!
And I am wide open to suggestions!”
“Sure you are,” Sean soothed. “I just
hope the Butthead Brigade cares enough about monster chick to send
someone to pick her up. At least she didn’t blow up in our faces,
like the cabin guy. Small mercies.”
Kev reached down, rummaging for the
inlaid jewelry box. He slid the back panel aside. “Give me your
blade,” he said.
Sean handed it over. Kev snapped off
the entire back panel, splintering it as he wrenched it off. He
slid the blade into the wooden seam of the drawer and pried.
Ker-ack, the wooden
frontpiece snapped in half. He fished out the loose piece, pried
out fragments, wrenching loose tiny nails, until a dark slot opened
up. He peered inside, heart beating so frantically it felt like it
was banging his throat from underneath.
Something was in it. He tipped the box
forward, tapped, knocked, shook. Please,
God. Let it be a lead.
A clump of floppy disks slid out,
scattering over his lap. The ancient kind that he remembered from
college. Not even the rigid 3.5 plastic-jacketed ones. These were
the ones that were genuinely floppy.
The two of them gazed at the ancient
disks, disheartened.
“Fuck.” Kev’s voice shook. “Where are
we going to find a machine that can read this prehistoric shit fast
enough for it to matter?”
“Miles could,” Sean said. “He’s a
specialist. He’s got some real museum pieces in his dad’s basement
in Endicott Falls.”
“Three thousand goddamn miles away!”
Kev yelled.
“Hang on to your shit.” Sean’s voice
was all steely calm. “Put them aside. We watch for the people who
are coming for monster chick—”
“If they come at all! And if they
don’t?”
“We’ll deal with that when the time
comes.” Sean studied him, narrow-eyed. “Those glaciers are melting
faster than I thought. What happened to Zen Dude, floating over the
rough edges of the world?”
“There is no Zen Dude,” Kev snapped.
“It was bullshit all along.”
“That’s a relief. Welcome back.
Remember when it was me, flipping out, and you were trying to talk
me down?”
“How could I forget?” Kev paused.
“Unless somebody tortured me, inflicting brain damage that caused
eighteen years of amnesia, that is.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Sean
admitted.
Kev wiped moisture out of his eyes.
“It’s funny, about Bruno. I think one of the reasons it was so easy
for me to bom cith him years ago is because he reminded me of
you.”
Sean looked alarmed. “Me? Bruno? That
spastic bonehead? That smart-mouthed clown? Surely you
jest.”
“Nope.”
Sean settled back into his seat and
contemplated the rainspotted windshield. “Uh. Yeah. I’m not quite
sure what to make of that.”
“Under the circumstances, I suggest
you take it as a compliment.”
“Weird compliment, if you ask me, but
at least you’re being real with me again. Thank God for small
favors. I’ll even thank Bruno.”
If we ever
get the chance. The thought hung there,
unvoiced.
Kev gathered up the floppy disks and
slid them back into the jewelry box. They propped the laptop
against the dash and waited.