Chimera (The Korsak Brothers #1)(56)
Trailing IV tubing, I placed a hand on the back of his neck and squeezed lightly. “It’s about time you kissed those *s good-bye, don’t you think?”
He exhaled, then gave a wooden nod. “I think. I do think.” Making it to the bed under his own power, he lowered himself onto his stomach. The thin pillow was ignored and pushed aside as he used his folded arms instead. Despite his adult response, he’d never looked younger or more lost, not even when I’d plucked him from the heart of the Institute in the middle of the night. I dragged up a chair beside him, rested the gun in my lap, and ordered, “Get started, Doc. We don’t have all night.”
As he was pushing the X-ray machine in our direction, I reached out and pulled Michael’s left hand from beneath his head. Simple human contact was something he’d been deprived of most of his life. Here was hoping it could help him now. “Squeeze it as hard as you want, kiddo. It won’t break.”
A green and blue stare reminded me that actually it could, if he wanted it to, or worse. But he remained quiet and let his hand lie loosely in my grip. It was only after the X-ray was developed and his bare lower back was swabbed with Betadine with meticulously professional care that his hand swiveled in mine and tightened until my bones creaked. “Butch and Sundance,” he offered in a barely audible whisper.
It was a distant echo of a long-past conversation, one he didn’t remember and one I couldn’t forget. Swallowing thickly, I asked, “What about them?”
“They showed us the movie. Along with others, about all sorts of things. So we’d be convincing, you know? We’d be able to have normal conversations.” His cheek rested against the sheets. “If we had to.”
I don’t think he expected that occasion would’ve arisen—kill and get out; chatting rarely required. “What about our favorite outlaws?”
His eyes shut as a needle delivered the same local anesthetic used on me. His voice had thinned but was still solid. “When they jumped.”
On the run from the posse, they’d sailed off the cliff hand in hand, going down together toward an uncertain fate. “Yeah, I remember.” The soft drip of the IV hung in the background. “So which of us do you think will hit the water first?”
“You. Your legs are longer.”
I admitted with a small laugh, “You’ve got me there.”
He didn’t speak again throughout the rest of the procedure. It was done in a relatively short time although it had to feel much longer to Michael. The chip wasn’t implanted too deeply and was plucked free to lie bloody and innocuous on a sterile drape. It was small, one-third the size of my pinky nail. A tiny bathroom adjoined the room less than four steps away and I promptly flushed the tracer down the toilet. Let them follow that straight to the nearest waste disposal plant. I only wished I could see them stumping through the steaming muck.
Acutely conscious of my eyes on him, Vanderburgh sealed the inch-long incision with some sort of skin adhesive and covered it with a bandage. Backing away as I helped Michael sit up, he muttered something about getting our pills together and sidled over to a glass-front cabinet. I changed my mind about using the shower. I wasn’t turning my back on this piece of shit for a second, much less ten minutes.
“You doing okay?” I asked as Michael rearranged his shirt and stood.
He nodded. “It’s still numb.” Even when the local wore off, it should only be mildly sore. “But I feel . . . lighter. It couldn’t have weighed even an ounce, and until today I didn’t even know it was there.” His hand unconsciously moved to cover the unseen bandage. “It’s stupid, I know.”
“You’re a lot of things, kiddo, but stupid isn’t one of them.” Putting away my gun, I grabbed a square of gauze and used it to quell the gush of blood that welled when I pulled out my IV. I accepted the piece of tape Michael scrounged for me from the pile of supplies on the counter and used it to fasten the gauze to my skin. The grinding headache was still present, but I felt slightly better. The fluids had lessened my light-headedness, if nothing else.
“Antibiotics and pills for pain and nausea. Follow the directions on the label,” Vanderburgh commanded curtly as he extended a clear plastic bag filled with three brown bottles in my direction. I took it, opened all three bottles, and extracted a pill from each.
With my other hand gripping his thick wrist, I placed the pills, red, purple, and white, on his palm. “Dry or with a glass of water. Your choice.”
His fingers closed over the pills. “What?”
“I’m just not a trusting man, Doc. Go figure. Now take the goddamn pills.”
Opening his hand back up, he stirred the tablets with a finger, then took the red and purple ones. Swallowing them dry, he opened his mouth to reveal an empty pink cavity. The white pill he crushed underfoot. “I think perhaps we can find you a different pain pill.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” The gun at my back positively itched to be used. Despite my recent career, I wasn’t prone to violence. I did what I had to do, but I hadn’t liked it. I would’ve liked hurting this man. I think I would’ve liked it quite a bit.
Once he’d demonstrated the new pills were safe, it was payment time. Meanwhile, Michael had moved with alacrity back out to the living room. He may have survived the experience, but it was unlikely he wanted to hang around that medical environment any longer than he had to. By the time I finished passing over the cash and followed, he’d had time to hide Vanderburgh’s gun and start messing with the man’s VCR/DVD player. Yeah, he’d hang on to the VCR part as long as he could. No doubt some of his best stuff hadn’t made it to DVD or Blu-ray yet.