Mind + Body - Aaron Dunlap (big screen ebook reader txt) 📗

my eyes, waiting for my thoughts to pull themselves together when I heard my name.

I opened my eyes and looked up to see Rubino, his little FBI badge hanging over the side of his belt. He looked tired and annoyed.

“What happened?” I asked when he was close enough.

“You fell asleep. It was cute.”

“I mean with Amy,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“Right. They moved her up to ICU for observation.”

ICU. Intensive Care Unit. The ‘I’ stands for Information. I smiled for a second.

“So she’s all right?” I asked.

“More or less. They said they have to leave the breathing tube in and that she’s hypotensive. Or it might have been hypertensive. “

“Was she still having spasms?”

“I think she would be, but they have her on paralyzing drugs.”

“Okay, where’s the ICU?”

Rubino paused. “Uhh, I don’t think you should go up there,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“Because her dad said, ‘Don’t let that kid up here.’”

“He’s mad at me?”

“Yes.”

“Why? What did you tell him?”

“That she got some food from your hotel room and that it had poison in it. I think all he heard was ‘hotel room’ and ‘poison.’”

“So you didn’t mention how I’m a walking rampage of destruction or the pile of dead bodies I leave in my wake?”

“I did not.”

“And he still doesn’t like me?”

“Correct.”

“Well I should still be able to see her,” I protested.

“Not unless you want to get mauled. Besides, there’s not much to see anyway, she’s out cold and is riddled with tubes.”

“So what am I supposed to do, wait?”

“Go back to your hotel; get some sleep and some unadulterated food.”

“No, I want to go see Schumer and get some answers.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no? What, ‘we need him alive’?”

“No, but we don’t have anything connecting Schumer to any of this. Plus, if he does want you dead, which unlikely, but if that’s the case — you shouldn’t just march onto his territory with no sleep and an empty stomach.”

“So, I should get some food and sleep and then go kill him?”

“Nobody’s killing anybody—”

“Everybody’s killing everybody!” I said.

“Not anymore.”

“Are you sure? Because I can’t think of anybody I’ve met in the past month that hasn’t been killed or tried to kill me. Except you and your partner, of course. I’m just wondering whether you’re going to be one of the ones getting killed or one of the ones trying to kill me.”

Rubino smiled. “Killing you isn’t really my job.”

“And what is your job?” I asked. “I mean, I can’t figure out what you or the FBI is even doing in all this. Shouldn’t you guys be bugging mobster’s houses or something?”

He held his grin. “I’m just doing a personal favor. Now let’s go to wherever you left your car.”

In an hour I was in my car and then back at the hotel.

At the front desk there was a uniformed police officer talking with a hotel staffer. Up in the hall of my floor, two cops stood post outside my room. They eyeballed me as soon as I got off the elevator. When I approached the door, one of the two cops put a hand out to stop me. Just for fun I tried to imagine how many seconds it would take me to have both of these guys on the floor, but I decided to be polite and announce that I live in there.

Special Agent Bremer, Rubino’s older partner, was just inside the door talking to somebody in the kitchen and he heard my voice, turned, and told the officers I was alright.

Inside the suite there were four more cops and five FBI personnel. It was like a law enforcement cocktail party, but instead of lemon rickeys and gimlets people mixed blue and clear chemicals in small glass bottles. My mother sat in one of the couches facing the TV talking to somebody with a notepad. When she saw me she got up and ran over to hug me in front of a fleet of law enforcement personnel.

“How’s your friend?” she asked.

“Well enough, I think. She’s in the ICU.”

“You didn’t have any of the food?”

“No, as can be seen by the fact that I’m alive.”

The refrigerator door was open and everything from inside was either on the counter, the table, or being placed into large clear bags. Bremer saw me looking and came over.

“There’s strychnine in pretty much everything,” he said. “Heaviest concentrations are in the tea bottles, though. None in the water.”

“The bottles were sealed, how’d he get the stuff inside?”

Bremer grabbed one of the bottles of green tea from the table and held it up to me, pointing at the plastic just under the rim and cap. There was a small raised bump in the plastic, like the bottle had a pimple. “Pierced the plastic with a needle and injected liquid strychnine, then sealed the hole over with some super-glue or by melting the plastic with a soldering iron.”

“Diligent,” I said.

“I’ll say. We’ve been going over everything with the hotel management and staff. Nobody saw anybody come in with a carton of groceries and the delivery staff says that there wasn’t a food order form on your door last night.”

I closed my eyes and tried to remember. When Amy and I left Comstock’s house around eight, I came back here and sat around for a while, wrote out a grocery list for the hotel people and hung it on the doorknob like always, then tried to sleep. Whoever this guy is, he must have followed me from Comstock’s, found out what room I’m in, saw the grocery list, and saw his opening. He bought all the food on the list himself, and laced all of it with strychnine. The thought of a killer with a knife wound in his leg at the grocery store, looking for green tea and cereal bars from a list seemed a bit absurd. That guy must have a whole vat of strychnine somewhere.

I told Bremer all of that, and he agreed. “Sounds about right, though for him to have followed you he would have had to have a car nearby your principal’s house. It’s possible that he didn’t follow you and already knew where you were.”

“If this is about revenge for last night, he wouldn’t know who I was or where I lived. If it’s about revenge, he would have just kicked the door in and popped me in bed.”

“Could be. He could just have a thing for strychnine. If it’s a pattern, we could use it to track him down. Someone’s back at the office looking up all the strychnine poisonings in recent history.”

“The alternative is that this isn’t revenge, though. That I was always a target, and my showing up at Comstock’s last night was just a coincidence. That would mean that whoever put the hit on Comstock also put a hit on me. It would mean there’s a guy out there with a paycheck riding on killing me, and a guy willing to pay money to see me dead. I don’t know if that would be better or worse than a professional killer simply having a grudge against me.”

“I really don’t know why you’d be so popular,” Bremer said, scratching his forehead with the top of his pen.

I tried to think, again, of all the people who would actually want me dead. It didn’t make sense for Schumer to put a price on my head; it made a bit of sense for him to want to kill Comstock, him being a gigantic idiot and all, but is hiring a hitman really apt punishment for making the mistake of hiring a hitman? If it’s not Schumer, who wants me dead? The Interpol guy, Pratt? He thought I was a hitman. Maybe it was the people my dad was supposedly selling Schumer’s program to. Maybe they thought that if they couldn’t have it — nobody should; so they kill anybody involved. Comstock, me, Schumer? My dad?

Considering Bremer and Rubino’s odd interest in finding out exactly how the program works, I started to wonder if it was them that my dad was in the middle of selling the secrets to. Maybe they’d turned on him, killed him, and now wanted to wipe the whole program off the books. Could Bremer, Rubino, or both of them be the ones behind this? What does “a personal favor” mean? I was giving myself a headache.

If the FBI boys really want me dead, they could have just pulled me around a corner and shot me in the face with an untraceable weapon. They’d only have a hitman do all this if they really, really wanted to insulate themselves.

At the beginning, I thought this was all about my money. Those seemed like simpler times now.

For all of that, in the back of my mind was still the thought of Amy. They had to paralyze her to stop her muscles from tearing themselves apart, but what if she woke up and was still paralyzed. Unable to move, with a tube down her throat, in pain. A mind trapped in a useless body. I told myself that couldn’t happen.

The hotel suite was still stuffed with FBI and police and all I wanted to do was sleep. I also needed to eat, but I doubted I’d feel safe eating for a while.