Читать книгу Fade To Midnight - Shannon McKenna - Страница 9

The guy across the poker table in the big blind position was staring at him. Chilikers. The one who’d cornered him in the men’s room and begged him for a stake a couple of hours back. Chilikers had been desperate to get back into the game and make up his losses, so Kev had fronted the guy fifteen thou against his car. But he hadn’t done Chilikers any favors tonight. Kev could practically smell the guy’s shit luck. As bad as his foul breath. And now he was staring.

To be fair, there was a lot to stare at. It was weird for a guy to wear sunglasses at four in the morning in a darkened room. Add to that the webwork of old scars across one side of Kev’s face, the redder, fresher scars that showed through the spiky ash-colored hair sticking up all over his scalp; mementos from the waterfall bashing and the subsequent surgeries. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. The tremor in his hands had nothing to do with the cards he held, but if his fellow players should misinterpret that as a tell, fine with him.

Chilikers snapped to attention as the dealer distributed starting hands. Kev glanced around for tells. Laker was petting a stack of chips even before the rest of the cards were dealt. Moriarty didn’t like his hand. Kev felt it, from the set of his shoulders, the muscles contracted on either side of his nostrils. Chilikers’s eyes had a hot gleam of excitement. Kev’s eyes swept the other players, plugging in data.

He squeezed out his hole cards. An ace of hearts and an ace of spades. In a ten-handed game, pocket aces were good almost a third of the time, but the table was modestly tight. There’d probably only be three or four players in the pot, and he’d be a 3-2 favorite. He wished he could take pleasure in it, but he hurt too much. His head throbbed, and he had a heavy knot in his guts. Sensory overload. The volume was turned up to the highest decibel, and he couldn’t turn it down. Whatever had damped him down before was gone. Going over Twin Tails Falls hugging an enormous tree had killed it.

And ah, Christ, how he missed it now.

Sunglasses helped, and ear plugs, and the poker game itself. But smells got him, too, and he could hardly go around with a plug on his nose. He was used to being stared at, but even he had his limits.

He could have endured the sensory overload, if that had been all it was, but the overload came from inside, too. Emotions blazed through him, leaving charred trails in their wake. He wasn’t equipped to handle such violent endocrinal activity, after years of floating numbness.

Still, he preferred to call this state emotional overload rather than bugfuck insanity. Not that he could really quantify the difference.

All day, he surfed waves of rage and free-floating terror. When those eased down, aching melancholy awaited him, interspersed with jittery euphoria. And the lust was through the ceiling. He’d steeled himself to ask Bruno about that, and Bruno solemnly informed him that constant sexual awareness was more or less normal for a healthy guy, and welcome to the club, already. According to Bruno, normal guys thought about sex constantly. All night and all day, porn footage unspooled in their heads. How normal guys managed to get through their days without totally humiliating themselves was a mystery to him.

At night, if he slept at all, his dreams were turbo-charged nightmares that spat him into waking consciousness flash-fried on adrenaline. He was taking a protracted break from sleep. He couldn’t take the stress anymore. All-night poker was more restful.

If he could keep his mind on it, that is. He yanked his attention back to see Laker limp in with 200. Kev raised 600, three times the big blind, breathing with his mouth so as not to smell the guy’s aftershave.

He’d been in this unenviable state since he’d woken from the second coma, the one following the stress flashback. The one which had necessitated reconstructive surgery upon the face of Dr. Prateek Patil, Kev’s neurosurgeon. Embarrassing, considering how hard the guy had worked on Kev’s fucked-up brain. Patil hadn’t deserved to get pounded all to shit for his trouble. But life was seldom fair.

He doubted that same fit would come over him if he should see Patil again, but nobody wanted to experiment with that hypothesis, least of all Patil himself. The guy had a restraining order out on him.

On the button, Stevens cold called $600. Kev wrenched his mind back into focus. Stevens’s hand couldn’t be that great. His normal pattern was to re-raise big hands, get the blinds to fold, and eliminate random hands that could flop big and crush a high-percentage hand.

Pay attention. Hard to calculate what kind of hand Stevens would be playing with, his head pounding like this. Moriarty folded. His $100 blind went into the pot. Chilikers squeezed his cards and studied them again before he called $400 more. He’d been an early winner, after he got the stake from Kev. He’d even gotten ahead by about thirty thousand for a while, but for the last hour he’d been taking beat after beat. He’d gotten more sullen with each one.

Laker, the limper, called. He was getting pot odds for any two cards. That left four for the flop. Laker, Chilikers, Stevens, and himself.

Chilikers was staring at him again as the dealer burned the top card and flipped up the board. Queen of diamonds, jack of diamonds, two of clubs. Coordinated board. Sucked, for him. Anyone with two diamonds only needed one more to win, or any two connecting cards for a five card straight. His head throbbed sickeningly. He stuck his hand in his pocket, clutching the prescription bottle, but the pills would be useless now. He’d waited too long, hadn’t wanted to dull his edge. He was so nauseous now, he wouldn’t be able to digest them. So there was no way out of this shitty headache now but straight through it.

Besides. Seemed stupid to zonk himself into deliberate dullness after years of spending a fortune on extreme sports just to prove to himself that he had a fucking pulse.

Man, he felt that pulse now. Every heartbeat a meat mallet blow to his frontal lobe, thudding against the swelling, the scar tissue, the knitting bones of his skull. The healing process would be slow, though the doctors had assured him that the situation would improve. The pain, nausea, dizziness, the disorientation would diminish over time. And they had. He’d already gotten off the antiseizure meds. He might even regain some lost memories, they had hopefully hypothesized.

Though it was clear none of them wanted to be anywhere near him when that happened.

But Christ, it hurt. Every beat of his heart. Sometimes he wished that organ would give it a rest. Just stop, and leave him the fuck alone.

Concentrate, goddamnit. Stop whining. Self-pity is not useful.

That would be a lot easier if that bastard would stop staring.

It didn’t usually bother him, but the disgust, the veiled hostility on Chilikers face bothered him a lot, in his current state. Kev met his eyes straight on, and silently invited him to state his fucking problem.

Chiliker’s eyes flicked away. He checked. Stevens, too.

Kev bet $1,500. Stevens called. Chilikers, too, then Laker. The pot was up to $8,500. And Chilikers was glaring again.

Ignore the fucker. He funneled his mind by brute force into the calm detachment that he craved. He played for the express purpose of concentration, detachment, serenity. And he was blowing it because some greedy asshole was giving him the hairy eyeball? Unacceptable.

The dealer burned, and flipped the turn. Ace of diamonds.

Ah. Now that was a problem. His mind seized on to it hungrily, rejoicing in the new slew of calculations to make. He had a set, yeah, but a bunch of possible hands could beat a set of aces. His brain churned out the list, examining probabilities in a blinding inner stream of data that gave him sweet relief. As long as he could keep it up.

He’d happened upon this new coping mechanism by chance. Bruno had brought him a laptop to keep him from going nuts in the hospital, after they’d taken the restraints off. He’d discovered online poker while fucking around with it. It had taken serious effort to get those restraints removed, and convince the hospital staff that he was not going to wig out and attack them. He winced, just thinking about it.

Online poker was the first thing he found that helped. It chilled him, just that crucial bit that kept him halfway sane. He needed dark glasses to stare into the computer, and even so, the glow of the screen intensified his headaches badly, but it was better than a padded cell.

He’d played for days on end, until the doctors started talking about taking the computer away. He’d made it clear that wasn’t an option, and shortly afterward found himself discharged, much sooner than hospital protocol dictated. The staff was scared shitless of him.

He didn’t blame them. Christ, he scared himself these days.

As soon as he could stagger out on crutches, he’d sought out some real poker games. High-level play. Seasoned, talented players. The more layers of complexity, the better the trick worked for him. Those guys played for real money, though. They’d kicked his ass for a while. It had been an expensive coping tool while he made the adjustment.

Not anymore, though. He won, now. Almost always. He cycled through a big circuit of clubs, so that no one got too tired of that fact.

Not that he gave a shit about winning. The money in his pocket when he walked out was a byproduct. It was the process he craved. The stream of calculations in his head, blotting out the jangle of emotional overload. The game as he played it was painkiller, anxiolytic, and sleep substitute. After hours of probabilities calculation, he felt almost rested.

Patil was still pissed. There was a lawsuit pending. But whatever. If Patil wanted money to compensate his shock, pain, and mental anguish, Kev would give it to him. Of course, money didn’t do shit for shock, pain, or mental anguish. He should know. He had plenty of money, and what fucking good had it ever done him?

He’d apologized to Patil, very sincerely. Bruno had gone to see the guy while he was recuperating from his surgery, to grovel on Kev’s behalf, since they wouldn’t let Kev himself anywhere near the man. But Patil had been unimpressed. Maybe it was the shattered orbital bone, the dislocated jaw. Kev could relate to that. He’d had a shattered orbital bone and a dislocated jaw himself when Tony had found him. He’d been too damaged to talk at the time, but he remembered the pain just fine.

It had an unsalutory effect on a guy’s sense of humor.

Bummer, for Patil, that he’d resembled the troll from Kev’s nightmares so closely. No. Correction. Not nightmares. Memories.

Not clear ones, nor particularly useful ones, but still, they were memories. Not dreams, or fantasies, or hallucinations. He was sure of it. If there was one good thing about going over a waterfall and getting pounded to pulp, it was that. He had a narrow bridge connecting him to his former self, and he was clinging to it.

He no longer went out, except for the nighttime poker. He just holed up in his loft, trolling cyberspace all day, sunglasses on, shades drawn. Looking for his memories under every rock he could turn up. Since he finally had a snowball’s chance in hell of finding them.

Osterman. He had a name for the monster who haunted his nightmares. He even had a visual reference, in the luckless Patil’s face.

Osterman was the name of the troll that stood guard at the door where his memories were locked. And a name was something to start with. It was a seed. Entire forests could be grown from a single seed.

He had a scarce handful of other data. The date, August 24, 1992. The warehouse south of Seattle where Tony had saved his life. A man had been beating him to death, Tony had ascertained, after watching on the closed-circuit camera for a while. Tony had been unwilling to get involved, but he didn’t like the look on the guy’s mug. He’d been enjoying himself a little too much. A few shots with Tony’s Beretta sent him scuttling like a rat, and Tony had been left with a comatose guy, soaked with blood and beaten to hamburger. No identity. None of his marbles, either. Dead weight.

The homemade tattoo on his leg that read “Kev” was as good a name as any, so he’d stuck with it. Though it seemed odd for a guy to tattoo his own name on himself. What, like he might forget it? Hah.

Then there was the fact that he spoke some Vietnamese, of all things. That, plus his combat skills had led old Tony to conclude that Kev was Special Forces, but Vietnamese? Special Forces would make sense if he spoke Arabic, Persian, Pushtu, Croatian, Spanish. He was thirty years too young to be a Vietnam vet. It didn’t track.

And the math, the science. Big bodies of human knowledge he was inexplicably familiar with. Theoretical physics. Biochemistry. Computer engineering. Earth sciences. Astronomy. The physics of flight. The history of aeronautics. The migratory patterns of birds, animals, and insects. Extensive first aid and field medic skills. Carpentry. He could sew, for the love of Christ. He connected the dots and got a scrambled clot. None of it made sense. But did any human life make sense?

Since the ride over Twin Trails Falls, his dreams had gotten clearer. They lingered after he woke up, instead of scuttling away to hide. Things were shifting in his mind, tectonic plates moving. Little puffs of steam, spouts of ash, but no dramatic realizations, no floods of returning memory, no “aha!”

Nothing so easy. Just feelings, images. Teasing, poking at him. Like his tiny angel, for instance. What the fuck was she about? She was too perfect, too iconic to be a real person, in that shining dress of hers. More like an angelic doll. A divine symbol, not a person.

Maybe he’d desperately needed a benevolent presence to counteract Osterman’s evil, and his brain had fabricated the little angel for protection. Maybe he’d been religious, before. Spiritual.

And then again, maybe not. He remembered throwing someone through a window. That didn’t strike him as particularly spiritual.

He shied away from analyzing the angel, though. She had saved his life and sanity. Whenever he slid into that paralyzed black hole in his head, he hung on to her, and she led him safely out. She’d led him out of the first coma, the one he’d been in when Tony first found him. She’d guided him back into speech again. Maybe a psychiatrist could explain her psychological function, but no thanks. He still needed her too badly to risk spoiling her magic with clinical explanations.

The first memory that had come to him after the waterfall had been of trying to convince some guy to help him, to believe him, but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what it was that he wanted the guy to believe. He remembered the man’s disapproving face perfectly. Long nose, thin mouth, curled lip. But not his name.

It was maddening. Total amnesia had been more peaceful.

He remembered Osterman gloating over him. He remembered a blond, leering man with a thick red face, too. An open flame, coming toward his face. The sizzle of contact. And pain. So much pain.

There were gentler memories. A bearded man with a seamed, unsmiling face. Boys. A weathered house in the woods. A rough table, a kerosene lamp, like a scene from another century. Maybe he was remembering a past life. Pioneer days. Hah. This life alone was enough for him to wonder about. Spare him the red tape of past lives, too.

He needed more. Frames of reference. Names, dates. Hard data.

Concentrate, goddamnit. He’d lost the thread. He stared down at the cards. They were floating, shifting. Double vision, glowing with a halo. His ears were ringing, tinny and sharp. He couldn’t screen out the soaps and deodorants of the men around the table. The detergents their clothes had been washed in made his nose burn. The earthier smells of their bodies, their sweat, their breath. Chiliker’s chronic lung infection, the alcohol emanating from the pores of the dealer to his left. Cigarette smoke, peeling paint, dust. Mildewy water damage.

The fetid stink made his head throb like a rotting tooth.

And everyone was waiting for him to snap out of his vague dream, get off his ass, and bet. Chilikers had checked, so had Laker.

Kev stared at the backs of his two aces. He couldn’t take this tonight. He’d play like a hothead rookie, end it fast. “Seven thousand.”

Stevens blinked. “All-in, nine thousand five hundred.”

Chilikers eyes darted to Stevens. He hadn’t expected that. “All-in, seventeen five,” he said, but his voice sounded nervous.

Laker folded, shaking his head.

Kev shrugged inwardly. What the hell. “I call. I’m all-in.”

They all stared at him for a long moment. 5.5:1 pot odds didn’t technically justify his drawing odds, but he wanted it to be over, and he was feeling reckless. Angry. Twitchy. Acting out, like a bad little kid.

“Two players, all-in. Turn over your hands,” the dealer directed.

Kev turned his aces, and looked to his left. Stevens had flopped a set of queens. Chilikers had turned the flush.

“Pair the board,” Kev said.

The dealer burned the top card, and turned over a jack of hearts.

Full house. Aces full of jacks. He’d won fifty thousand bucks. Son of a bitch.

He flicked a few fifty dollar chips to the dealer as a tip, and walked out the door with fifty-eight thousand and change. Plus the title and keys to Chilikers’ 2007 Volvo, which bit his ass, but whatever. More than usual. He usually averaged ten thou a night, and that was playing more carefully and consciously than he had tonight.

He limped out into the predawn chill. Chilikers was there, staring morosely at his Volvo, smoking a cigarette. The final blow for his infected lungs, no doubt. Kev crossed the street toward him. “Hey.”

Chilikers did not turn. “Two fuckin’ outs,” he said, teeth clenched.

“More like seven. Eight, with Steven’s quad Queen draw,” Kev replied quietly. “You were the 4:1 favorite. I just got lucky.”

Chilikers muttered something obscene under his breath. “Asshole,” he growled. “You didn’t even have the fucking odds to call.”

“No. I didn’t.” Kev gazed at him for a long moment. He fished the title and keys out of his pocket, and held them out.

Chilikers stared. “You won that,” he said slowly. “It’s yours.”

“You paid,” Kev replied. “But I don’t need it. Got no place to park it. Don’t want to insure it, or deal with selling it. Take it back. Please.”

Chilikers looked tempted, but then his mouth hardened. He flung his cigarette down, stomped it. “What, feeling sorry for me, now? I don’t need any fucking favors, freak. You won it. You keep it.”

Kev held his breath, teeth clenched. Whew. Before Twin Tail Falls, that interchange wouldn’t have registered on his radar screen. Walk away. He already had a lawsuit in course for assault and battery.

He walked away, careful not to limp. So he was driving home, with Chiliker’s unwanted fucking car. He refused to let himself feel grateful. His leg was better, but it would have taken forty painful minutes to stagger home on foot with a headache like this.

He peered up at the sky as he got into his new car. It smelled like Chilikers, he noted. Not good. But he’d unload the car soon. It was later than usual, and when the sun rose, it would drive long, cruel nails of light into his throbbing brain tissue. But with the wheels, he could afford to make a detour before he holed up in his dark lair.

He parked by the battered brick front building on NE Stark. A sign by the door read “ANY PORT IN A STORM.” It was a shelter for runaway teens. It provided twenty-four-hour-a-day crisis intervention, emergency shelter, individual and family counseling, transitional living programs for homeless youths, street outreach, emergency housing, help for kids who were addicted to drugs. He’d done some cyber snooping, and he liked the place. He pulled the wad of cash out, shoved it into the brown envelope he’d shoved into his coat pocket for that purpose, scribbled the name of the director, and sealed it up. He’d give them the car, too, if it would fit through the slot, but he wasn’t up for anything that would require human interaction. His head hurt, his jaw hurt. He worked the envelope through the letter slot, waited for the thud. Saved him the bother of writing out a bank deposit slip.

He’d had some incidents, on these morning walks. He’d once brought a young prostitute to the door of Any Port, after saving her from being beaten up by her john. The john he left where he lay, moaning in the gutter. Fuck him. Punching a teenage girl in the face. Kev tried to be tolerant, but there were limits. Another time, he’d been ambushed by a couple thugs near this very shelter, but he’d flattened them with no trouble. All in all, though, his morning walks were mostly uneventful.

But Christ, his thigh hurt. And his ribs. His arm. Everything.

His reflection in the glass window in the door caught his eye. So thin, haggard, cheekbones jutting, cheeks hollowed. He stared at himself, seeking recognition in the face he saw. But it eluded him.

All he had now was what he’d made of himself since Tony found the bashed up wreck of his body eighteen years ago. That ought to be enough, but it wasn’t anymore. Not since the waterfall. Memories were stirring, and his hunger to know more itched and burned, prodding him along with nasty, anxious urgency. Almost as if something terrible might happen if he did not succeed in remembering.

He parked by the unlovely brick warehouse building on NW Lenox that housed his loft apartment, an alley in the less swank, not-quite-gentrified-yet northern outskirts of the Pearl District. His hand shook with gratitude as he stuck the key into the lock…until he smelled Bruno’s aftershave. Shit. He himself had taught Bruno to pick locks, back when Bruno was a delinquent teenager. Now, Bruno was a delinquent thirty-year-old, with skills more suitable for a career criminal. His own fault. He shouldn’t have taught the kid to pick locks.

Bruno lay in wait, lounging on a stool and drinking coffee like he owned the place. The smell of frying bacon assaulted Kev’s olfactory nerve like a wrecking ball when he stepped in the door. So did the perfumed cream that fop had smeared over himself after he’d shaved. The stink was enough to knock a brain damaged guy right on his ass.

Kev switched off the overhead, and pressed a switch that brought the shades over the high skylights. “What are you doing here?”

“Came to see you eat breakfast,” Bruno said.

Kev slowly took off the sunglasses. “Breakfast,” he echoed, in hollow tones. “Uh-uh.” He sank into a chair, rubbing the thigh that had gotten snapped in two places in the waterfall plunge.

“Played cards tonight?” Bruno asked.

His brother’s tone put him on the defensive. “And? So?”

“Win anything?”

“Some,” Kev admitted, reluctantly.

“How much?”

Kev rubbed his eyes. “Don’t remember,” he said. “Dumped it on the way home. I don’t need it. That’s not why I play. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know that. Mr. Pure doesn’t need money. He floats above the grotty obsessions of us normal folk. That’s exactly the elitist, improvident thinking that’s always driven me nuts about you.”

Kev rubbed his aching head, feeling the thick ropy scars on his scalp. “I told you. It’s not about the money. I do it for—”

“Yeah, you explained. I get it, insofar as a mere mortal could. You only cop a buzz when your brain is maxed to the limit counting cards. I’m not sure yet if that’s technically cheating or not, but it definitely classifies you as a fucking weirdo. Not that this is any surprise to me.”

Kev snorted. “Quit it with the ‘mere mortals’ bullshit, Bruno. I’m brain damaged, OK? I do the best I can with what I’ve got to work with.”

“That’s negative thinking, dude,” Bruno said in a lecturing tone. “If you want to get your life back on track, you’ve got to—”

“I am trying!” The force of the words drove a hot nail of pain through his head. He held his fragile eggshell skull together with his hands until he dared to breathe again. “Or trying to get a life, period,” he amended. “I’ve never been on anything resembling a track.”

“What’s wrong with your life?” Bruno demanded. “It was fine! So get back to it! You haven’t worked since the waterfall, and you’ve been capable for months now!”

“You’ve got plenty of designs to develop,” Kev pointed out. “When you run out, I’ll come up with more for you. Whenever you need it.”

“I’m not talking about what I need!”

Kev’s lips twitched. “So this is to keep me busy? You think my mathematical masturbation will make me go blind?”

Bruno made an impatient gesture. “It’s a waste. You need to get out, get some sun, get laid. You made us a fortune with Lost Boys. Are you going to just throw it all away to—”

“You made the fortune,” Kev said, with quiet emphasis. “Go make the piles of money without me. I’ll be OK.”

Bruno looked frustrated. “But what the fuck? You’re just sitting here in the dark, staring at your computer, obsessing about your past. Let it go! Start from where you are! Your life couldn’t have been that good, considering how fucked-up you were when Tony found you!”

Kev couldn’t deny it, but he couldn’t agree, either. “I need to know where I came from,” he said.

“Why?” Bruno yelled. “What would it help? What’ll it prove?”

Bruno was right. There was no reason to think knowing his past would make the quality of his life better. And there were many reasons to think that it might make it worse. But curiosity was driving him bonkers. He’d always wanted to know where he came from, but since the waterfall, that want was fueled by raw emotion, like burning rocket fuel. If the truth should prove to suck ass, he still had to know it.

But Bruno was on a roll. “What’s wrong with the life you’ve got? You’ve got plenty of money, or would if you’d stop throwing it at the widows and the orphans. You’ve got me and Tony and Rosa for family. What are we, chopped liver? Too lowbrow for you?”

“Don’t be stupid. It has nothing to do with you, Rosa, and Tony.”

“We’re just not enough,” Bruno raged on. “You’re fixated on that hole inside your head, instead of the life you’ve built. Ever thought that what’s in that hole might be a big disappointment to you? You were in shit-poor shape when Tony got you. Whoever your people were, they didn’t stand by you! They left you to die! Fuck them!”

Kev gazed at the younger man. “I won’t blow you off. Even if I find my former family. You’ll always be my brother. No matter what.”

Bruno looked embarrassed. “It’s not about that.”

Kev just looked at him.

“Oh, shut up,” Bruno snarled. “Just shut the fuck up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Kev said.

“You didn’t have to. It was the look on your face. Come on. Eat this.” He slapped a plate with a fried egg on a roll, bacon draped over it.

Kev swallowed back the clutch of nausea. No way to let Bruno down gently. He shook his head. “I’ll take coffee,” he offered.

Bruno muttered something foul in Calabrese, and spun the loaded plate in the direction of the sink like a Frisbee. The crash of breaking crockery made Kev jerk, covering his ears. Jesus. That hurt.

He took off his coat and poured coffee, ignoring the anger radiating from the broad back of his adopted brother. He tried not to limp as he crossed the room. Any show of weakness set Bruno off.

He sat at his worktable and turned the computer on.

“Don’t jerk off with that while I’m talking to you,” Bruno growled.

“I’m not jerking off,” Kev said mildly. “And if you do, I’ll talk back.”

“With only half your brain? That irritates the shit out of me.”

Kev clicked his browser. “Half a brain’s all I’ve ever had.”

“Hah. You could solve complicated higher math problems while simultaneously operating a nuclear missile launcher, analyzing weather patterns, and shaving a poodle. But normal folk call that bad manners.”

Kev tried not to smile. “That’s funny, coming from a guy who just picked all my locks. Get out, Bruno. I’m working.”

Bruno grabbed a chair and straddled it. “I’ll leave when you eat.”

Kev sighed. “It’ll be hours,” he explained. “My stomach’s fucked up. No digestive fluids. I’m not being difficult. It’s a timing thing.”

“So I’ll wait til you’re better,” Bruno said.

Kev rubbed his throbbing forehead. “Thanks for caring, but no. I love you, man, but I’m busy now. Fuck off.”

“Make me,” Bruno said.

Kev exhaled slowly, dismayed. He’d managed this badly, out of exhaustion. Now there would be no getting rid of him without a fight.

He looked at the challenge in the younger man’s eyes, the set of his jaw. He looked like Tony, with that expression. Scary thought.

Kev had taught Bruno to fight. Consequently, Bruno was lethally skilled, with the advantage of being ten years younger, buff as an Olympic athlete, and not currently recuperating from going over a waterfall. Kev’s bones were still knitting. He was far from a hundred percent. He might prevail, but he’d pay a price he couldn’t afford.

He decided to suck it up. “Whatever. Be bored, then.” He put the sunglasses back on. “Don’t bug me, though.”

Bruno stared at Kev’s face, trying to see past scars, skull, into the brain inside. Bruno was persistent. And ferociously intense. Two things Kev loved and respected about his adopted brother. They were also huge pains in the ass. But life was like that. Full of trade-offs.

“Tony’s been asking about you,” Bruno said.

Kev stopped in the act of lifting coffee to his lips. He took a sip, not breathing so as not to smell the stuff. “Oh, yeah? And?”

“He worries about you,” Bruno said. “He’s your family, too.”

Kev stared at the screen, but did not see what was on it. “Ah.”

Bruno cursed under his breath. “C’mon, Kev. Tony didn’t take advantage of you on purpose,” he said gruffly. “He was just, you know. Being Tony. He can’t help himself. And besides, he thought he was doing you a favor. Keeping you out of sight.”

“While doing unpaid menial labor for him, for years? Yeah. He’s a real prince,” Kev said. “Tony doesn’t do favors, Bruno. Nothing’s for free. Not even for you, and you’re his own flesh and blood.”

Bruno didn’t deny it, since he couldn’t. “He worries about you,” he repeated. “He really does. He’s a mean old son of a bitch, but he does.”

Kev’s silence was more eloquent than words could have been.

Bruno’s mouth hardened. “What the fuck do you think he should have done for you, anyway?”

“Nothing,” Kev replied. “He was under no obligation to do anything. I have no reason to complain. If he hadn’t saved me, I would have died. If he hadn’t given me a place to be, I would have been homeless. I would have frozen to death on the streets that first winter.”

“So why are you so pissed?”

Kev shook his head. “I’m not pissed,” he said wearily. “Sure, I owed him. I owed him big. But I think I’ve worked out my indentured servitude by now, in sweat and blood.”

“He never thought of you that way,” Bruno said. “And fucked if you’re not pissed. You’re mortally pissed.”

Kev didn’t have the energy to deny it again. He thought of those miserable, stifled years. Lying on a cot in the narrow, smelly room behind the restaurant where Tony had parked him during off hours. Freezing in the winter, roasting in the summer. Steeping in smells of stale boiled vegetables, and the reeking Dumpster in the alley behind. Washing with a plastic bucket and rag because the squalid bathroom back there had no shower. Splitting headaches, night after night, so bad they made him vomit. Nights filled with horrific dreams.

Crying into the dingy, flat pillow every night. So fucking alone. Unable to speak, but wanting to so badly, it made him want to explode. A big rock was sitting on top of his mind, squashing him flat. He knew he did not belong there, but he couldn’t get any grip on where he did belong. He couldn’t think a straight thought through from start to finish. Couldn’t focus, or orient himself. He was locked in a purgatory of tedium and fear. Tony had shoved a dishrag in his hand, pushed him in the direction of a pile of greasy plates, and there he stayed. For years.

Until Bruno came to stay with Tony and Rosa. He was their grandnephew. Tony and Rosa’s niece, Bruno’s mother, had begged Tony and Rosa to take her son for a while, to get him away from his abusive stepfather. Just until she sorted things out and got free of him.

As it turned out, she’d sent Bruno away just in time. She hadn’t sorted things out, or gotten free. She’d died right after. Badly.

As soon as he arrived, Bruno started following Kev around, talking incessantly. The fact that Kev was incapable of replying hadn’t mattered to Bruno. He’d had enough talk for two. Twelve years old, traumatized by his mother’s murder, jerked around by his hormones, bouncing off the ceiling. He’d desperately needed someone to listen, and Kev was the perfect listener. The quintessential captive audience.

Bruno’s nonstop chatter and intense emotional need had been the first chink in the wall that closed Kev inside himself. Bruno had started the long, slow process of Kev’s healing. It was no thanks to Tony.

He wasn’t complaining. He had Tony to thank for his life, his skin, and a place to start healing. It was a lot. He had no reason to expect more. He couldn’t blame Tony for not doing more, or caring more. There was no point. People were what they were. They cared, or they didn’t. He was just damn lucky to have had Bruno.

This line of thought was making his gut cramp up. Who the fuck needed it? He turned his attention back to the computer.

After a while, Bruno got up and sprawled onto one of the couches, flipping channels until he found some sports event he liked. The squawk of the TV audio soon faded from Kev’s consciousness as he systematically searched the vast pseudo-space of the Internet.

His current mode was to find data on all male Ostermans between the ages of fifty and seventy. He’d ruled out most of the ones in the Northwest. One still interested him; Christopher Osterman, research scientist, recently deceased. There were thousands of references to his cognitive research, but he hadn’t found a photo yet. Many references were to “the Haven,” a mysterious research facility dedicated to optimizing brain function. Reading between the lines of the promo material, he concluded that the Haven was a think tank for rich kids whose parents wanted high-achieving offspring to feed their egos. The project had been dismantled after Osterman’s death, three years before.

Many of the young people who had participated in the Haven had since gone on on to brilliant careers in medicine, science, or business, or so the promo material said. Further research appeared to back this claim up, but that could be more a function of wealth and connections than it was a result of Osterman’s brain massages. Who knew?

Kev was currently browsing some Haven alumni he’d found on Facebook. They archly referred to themselves as “Club O,” and liked to reminisce online, exchanging pictures, memories, bragging and self-congratulation. In fact, he found them oddly repellent, as a group.

He was startled when Bruno spoke up from behind him. “It’s been hours,” his brother said, belligerently. “Hungry yet?”

He’d forgotten that his body existed. He located his stomach in time and space, assessed its condition. Not optimal. “Not yet,” he said.

Bruno harrumped, and peered over Kev’s shoulder. “Facebook? What, cruising for chicks now? Is it the lust thing, kicking your ass?”

Kev snorted. “I’m looking at online photo albums. Alumni of this place called the Haven. Dr. Christopher Osterman ran the place. He did cognitive research. Brain enhancement. Big network of alums.”

“How did you get into these peoples’ Facebook pages?”

Kev gave him a look, and Bruno rolled his eyes. “OK. Stupid question. Never mind. Cognitive research? Brain experiments? So you’ve been altered. Ah! Yes. That would explain what a whack job you are.”

“It would,” Kev agreed, unoffended. “This guy died a few years ago, though. A fire in his lab, they say. I want to see a photo of him.”

“Excuse me? You want to look at a picture of this freak? The last time you saw someone you thought looked like this Osterman, you went into a fugue state and practically killed an innocent neurosurgeon!”

“Shut up, Bruno,” Kev said absently, still clicking. “I’m busy.”

Bruno subsided, grumbling. “If you freak out and attack me, I’ll kick your sorry ass to hell and back,” he warned. “I won’t hold back just because you’re a pathetic bag of bones. Be warned.”

Kev clicked on yet another photo. His eyes flashed over faces, his hand already clicking to magnify them as a name in the caption registered.

The illustrious, late, great Doctor O explains it all for us.

His hand froze on the mouse. It was set to increase magnification by ten percent at each click, but with no new activity, it defaulted to one magnification per second, the center being at the cursor. The picture zoomed in on the guy in a white lab coat. Close-set dark eyes. His arms flung over the shoulders of two teenagers. Mouth open, in a big laugh.

Kev couldn’t move. His muscles were frozen. He couldn’t even blink. Switches were flicking on and off inside his brain, he could not control them. He observed, as the power grids in his brain started to go dark, that the guy really did look like Patil. Patil was darker, being Indian. Dr. O looked like the Greek or Italian version of the same man.

The pressure built in his brain. He struggled to breathe, to move.

Kev? What the fuck? Kev, what’s the matter? Hey! Kev!

It was Bruno’s voice, faraway. He couldn’t answer. Couldn’t look at the other man. Muscles frozen. Falling back, into the dark oubliette.

Oh fucking shit, man, no! Don’t do this to me again…

Bruno’s frantic voice faded into the distance. The photo got bigger. The face filled the screen. The mouth. Bigger and bigger.

Pop, pop. Something gave way in his eye. A hot rush of liquid down his cheek. Broken blood vessel. A haze of red obscured his vision. That red, toothy mouth stretched wider and wider, hungry to devour. The image widened still more, into a meaningless checkerboard of pixels.

Lights out.