Chimera (11 page)

He gave me a look of his own—utter and complete dismissal. The curiosity had vanished. “That’s a story you should tell your brother, not me. If he’s alive.” Resting his head back against the seat, he ended without emotion. “If there ever was a brother.”

I didn’t lose my temper, not at him. He was a victim in all of this. I saved my anger for those responsible. “Can you drive?” I asked abruptly.

He straightened, startled by the curt question, then said, “What did you—”

I cut him off. “Can you drive?”

Nodding slowly, he said with a trace of uncertainty, “Theoretically.”

Whatever that meant, it would have to be good enough. “Fine. Take the wheel.” As he hesitated, I took his hand and put it on the steering wheel before twisting around to reach the duffel bag behind my seat. Ignoring the sudden weaving of the car, I searched until I found what I was looking for. Sitting back up, I reclaimed the wheel just in time to keep us from riding up the ass of a semi. “Whoa.” I applied a light foot on the brake and peeled Michael’s hand free of the wheel. “Thanks. I’ve got it now.”

Blinking and a little pale, he said with faint dismay, “It’s harder than it looks.”

“Most things are, kiddo.” And that was perhaps the truest thing I’d ever said. Without any further comment, I dumped the picture frame in his lap. He stared at the back of it for a moment. The crisp black velvet had the sheen of a smugly healthy cat and he ran his fingers along it in a stroking motion. Thanks for the Christmas present, Dad, I thought with grim satisfaction. It’s going to help me after all.

It was the portrait of a knife-edged moment lost in the greedy maw of time; two children who could’ve grown up to become anything at all. Instead one was now a criminal and the other a teenager lost, in body and mind. And both of us might very well be damaged beyond repair. All that and more was waiting behind velvet.

“Turn it over,” I commanded softly, hoping what was at once painful and wonderful to me might trigger something similar in him.

With one last petting motion, he did. There we were . . . in all our glory. And it was a genuine glory, despite the ache that hit me every time I saw it. I didn’t know what I would see in his face as he took it in. An explosion of memory that opened a floodgate in his mind? No, I didn’t think it would be that easy; nothing in life ever was. The most I could realistically hope for was a small sliver of recognition or a flash of yearning for something just beyond his reach—the tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, that he knew something was there even if he didn’t know what that something was.

I didn’t get any of those. What happened was a shade to the left of that and one step lagging. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but in many ways it was close to what I’d expected. You know what they say: Expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised. Not so. Expect the worst and find out your imagination is sorely lacking; that was my philosophy.

Confusion was the primary emotion that washed across skin that saw far too little sun. He truly hadn’t believed there was a brother at all, much less one who could be him. “He doesn’t look that much like me,” he murmured with automatic denial. The same finger that traced the velvet now touched the glass gingerly. “Just the eyes, that’s all.”

“Isn’t that enough?” He didn’t want to look past age-regressed features or the light hair of childhood. He wanted to hold on to something familiar, no matter how horrible the familiar was. It was understandable, the fear, but I wasn’t going to allow him to overlook the more obvious similarities. “That and the age. How many seventeen-year-old kids in southern Florida are running around with those eyes and are lacking parents? Go on, Misha, take a guess. How many?” It was a coincidence even too great for him to deny . . . or so I thought.

He hesitated, then turned the frame over again, the picture safely hidden against his legs. Our history was dismissed just that quickly. “I don’t know that I’m seventeen.” Strangely, it seemed as if he’d been about to say something else at first. What did finally come out was meant to be logical, I could tell, but it had more of a stubborn ring to my ears. It made the corner of my mouth twitch upward until the meaning of those obstinate words hit me.

“What do you mean by that?” I demanded. The semi was still ahead of us, ambling along, slowly and placidly, like an elderly elephant on Prozac. “Are you saying you don’t know how old you are?” I didn’t know why that surprised me. The Institute undoubtedly didn’t spend much on birthday cakes or clowns with balloons . . . unless the clown was hiding a hypodermic in one Day-Glo orange glove.

“No, I don’t.” He pushed up a sleeve that had slid down over the heel of his hand. “Nearly old enough for graduation, that’s all I know.”

“Graduation? What . . .” I wasn’t able to finish. The widening of Michael’s forward-facing eyes had me jerking my attention back to the road in front of the car. The back of the truck had opened to reveal five men, four of whom were wearing disturbingly familiar tan pants. It was hard to believe that I’d come to a point in my life where the sight of a pair of khakis or passing the Gap gave me the same surge of adrenaline than a hit attempt on my former boss once had. Marginally worse than the pants were the guns pointed in our direction. HK assault rifles were serious weapons, and I wondered if the concern was to get Michael back alive or simply get him back period.

The fifth man answered my question by pointing at us and saying something I couldn’t hear through the glass. It was our pal from the van. He was dressed this time and not in goddamn khakis either. A dark gray suit and black shirt set him apart from the others almost as much as the ferocious intelligence in his dark eyes. Then I decided to stop with the fashion assessments and try avoiding a shitload of bullets instead.

Yanking the wheel to one side with one hand, I took the car into the emergency lane. With my free hand I grabbed Michael’s shoulder and shoved him down into the small space between the seat and the dashboard. “But they’ve already seen me,” he protested, wincing as I crammed him pretzel fashion onto the floorboards.

“It’s not about the seeing. It’s about the shooting.” I rapped as the driver’s side mirror was torn away by a bullet. “Keep your ass down.” I wasn’t about to let it get shot off, not on his first full day of freedom. Ducking low behind the dash, I felt frantically for the gun under my seat. “How the fuck did they find us?” I muttered to myself. It certainly hadn’t been by a trail of cookie crumbs. Sugar-shark Michael would’ve taken care of any one of those, no matter how small.

The windshield shattered into gummy green safety glass. It showered over my shoulders and rained down on the brim of my hat. Straightening, I rested my hand on molded black plastic that had long lost the new car smell and pulled the trigger of my 9mm. One of the men spun around, his white shirt blooming crimson on the right side of his chest—lipstick red, but it wasn’t the kind of kiss anyone would welcome. Jamming the gas pedal flat to the floor, I tried to take the car up past the truck. I saw the lips of the obvious leader, in all things including couture, move as he spoke into the mouthpiece of a slim headset similar to those worn by SWAT. The truck immediately swerved and cut me off.

Swearing, I tried the other side. Most of the cars around us had braked or halted altogether at the gunfire, but I still managed to send one oblivious driver yammering on his cell phone spinning out of control into the median. As the truck began a move to counter mine, I rethought my plan. “Hang on, Misha,” I gritted as I twisted the wheel and the car into a one-eighty.

“Not really necessary,” came the exasperated response. He was packed down there tightly enough that it was unlikely anything less than the Jaws of Life would pry him free. Beneath the irritation I heard the same dread that had first surfaced in the van. He might not be afraid of me, but Michael was afraid of someone. Sooner or later, I would find out why. When I killed that child-stealing, malevolent son of a bitch, I wanted to know each and every reason to equal each and every time I pulled the trigger.

Dodging haphazardly stopped cars with white-faced, gaping drivers, I stuck mainly to the emergency lane as I sent us speeding the wrong way up the interstate. Once or twice I had to detour into the main lanes if some shaking motorist was already hogging the side strip of gravel. Behind, the semi had stopped and the four men who were still mobile had jumped out onto the asphalt. Either they had a car that had been pacing them or they would commandeer the nearest one at gunpoint. I wanted to be at the last exit we’d passed before that mystery was solved. Barely two miles away, I began to run into moving traffic just as we reached it. If I had thought I could have made it across the median, I would’ve made the attempt, but the chances of getting bogged down in stagnant water and thick mud that grew reedy swamp grass was high. This was a low-slung machine we were traveling in, not an SUV. Political correctness—it’ll get you killed every time.

In a blare of horns and metal scraping metal I grazed a light green Volkswagen and sped onto the off ramp. Narrowly escaping being crushed by a gasoline tanker, we bounced off a guardrail, skidded, and managed to get on the right side of the road. A quick look in the mirror showed a white Ford following the same perilous path, but with less success. Colliding with the front cab of the tanker, the white hood crumpled and a tire smoked from the friction, but the car kept coming. The bastards had commandeered their own car and were determined. Let them be—their resolve wasn’t a drop in the deep blue compared to mine.

Looking left, then right, I made a split-second decision that had Hog Heaven barbecue patrons running for cover. Engine growling, the car jumped the parking lot curb and spun wildly in the crushed-clamshell stretch behind the seafood restaurant next door. Next to that was a gas station with a tiny alley framed by the back of the cinder- block building and undergrowth-choked trees. As we barreled through it, I caught a glimpse between buildings of the Ford rushing down the street toward the barbecue joint.

“Can I get up now?” Michael asked patiently with glass glittering in wind-tousled hair. Other than the look in his eyes when he’d first seen the man from the van minutes ago, he was as abnormally calm as if we were simply making a run to the grocery store. Maybe that class had followed the one on acting . . . calm in the face of certain death. Bring a number two pencil.

“No,” I answered instantly. “Keep the balls of steel out of sight.”

There was the quizzical quirk of light brown eyebrows before I put my attention back to driving for our lives. The car banged loudly into a green Dumpster at the back corner of the gas station and sent it chasing after a bald man with a beer belly who had just exited the bathroom. He fled promptly, his legs pumping and toilet paper fluttering from his shoe. I followed, bypassing him and the metal box on wheels before taking a sharp corner at the front of the building. After dodging a row of pumps, I took out a flock of plastic pelicans and then an equally gaudy fake purple pig.

That put me right behind the Ford as it smoked its way through the parking lot I’d just vacated fifteen seconds ago. Slamming into it, I propelled it several feet into a three-foot-high metal drainage pipe that marked the back boundary of the lot. The Ford flipped. There were sparks flying from the metal striking metal and a distinct crunching accompanied by the cacophony of smashing glass. The sound of a catastrophic wreck wasn’t one you could mistake, but it usually didn’t give you a warm glow.

Shifting into reverse, I could see a modest group of diners boiling out of the barbecue joint. It was a good thing I’d chosen an older model car or I wouldn’t have seen much at all. It was generically inconspicuous, so the eye slid away from it naturally and it had the added bonus of no airbags. Instead of breathing in powder and plastic, I could see the pig crowd. I could also see something else, something a whole lot less pleasant than slightly greasy pork lovers.

Colors of gray, black, and red coalesced into the driver crawling with painfully slow deliberation from the overturned car. The man was as indestructible as a New York cockroach. “Who the hell is this guy?”

“Jericho.”

With a pale face even paler, Michael had straightened enough to see out of what remained of the windshield. “Jericho,” he repeated before sliding back down to wrap arms around his legs. Eyes far away, he rested his chin on his knees, to all appearances completely disinterested, completely gone; the poor goddamned kid. If there had been fewer people in the parking lot, I would’ve stopped the car, walked over, and taken the shot from a distance where missing wasn’t possible. I didn’t care if I was seen, but as far as I’d fallen, taking a chance on hurting an innocent if deluded bystander still was beyond me—I hoped.

This Jericho might still be moving, but he wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon. For this moment, that would have to be good enough. His name was ironic, considering that when I’d first seen the compound I’d thought of the biblical walls of the same name. It was ironic and not a little goddamn spooky, but now wasn’t the time to dwell on creepy coincidences.

Within minutes I had us back on the road. The interstate was a challenge with cars still snarled and sirens approaching, but it cleared out after the first few miles. And then we were just one more car in a flowing stream of them. Granted we were missing some glass and were pocked with bullet holes, but no one’s perfect. Jesus, as conquering heroes went, I left a lot to be desired.

“We’re going to need a new car,” I commented brusquely. Looking over, I added in what I hoped was a more encouraging tone, “You can get up now, Misha. We’ve lost them.”