The Lucky Ones(84)

“Wait. He tried to fix you like a cat? Do you mean he neutered you?”

Antonio laughed. He had a nice laugh, a warm masculine chuckle. It was almost painful for her to keep her distance from him. This man, with a laugh like that, chained to a hospital bed for fifteen years... She wanted to run her hands through his hair, hug him, talk with him like anyone else.

“There was a cat at the house,” Antonio said. “The potato cat.”

“Brien,” she said. “Potatoes O’Brien. He’s still alive.”

“He’s a Ragdoll,” Antonio said. “They told me that.”

“Yeah, Dr. Capello got Brien for Deacon to replace his cat that died.”

Antonio snorted like she’d said something stupid.

“You’re an idiot,” he said. “You don’t know anything about it.”

Allison tried not to let that comment hurt. Michael had warned her not to take Antonio’s remarks personally.

“Tell me, then. I want to know. What about Brien?”

“He was a test,” Antonio said. “Deacon’s cat didn’t die the way a regular cat dies—being stupid, getting hit by a car or whatever. He killed it.”

“Who killed it?”

“Deacon killed it. Stabbed it with a knife, cut off its head, skinned it. And the neighbor’s cat. And the neighbor’s dog... Little asshole. Even I didn’t kill dogs.”

Allison couldn’t speak at first. She’d been shocked into silence.

“Say something,” Antonio said. “You look dumb just sitting there.”

“Deacon killed animals.”

“I just said that.”

“How do you know all this?”

“They told me,” he said. “Before they cut me. They told me it would make me better, said it worked before on other kids. Like Deacon.” Antonio grinned. “He was a monster like me. Then he wasn’t anymore.”

“A monster? How were you a monster?” Allison asked. She pulled up a chair and sat in it right across from Antonio’s face.

“I was bad...” Antonio whispered. “I hurt girls.”

She tried to imagine what a child could have done to hurt other kids. “Hurt them? You kicked them? Punched them? Pulled their hair?”

“No, I had to do...stuff to them.”

“What stuff, Antonio?” she asked.

“I started cutting off their hair when they weren’t paying attention,” he said. “And then I would rip it out.” Allison watched his hand open and close into a fist and then he jerked his hand, jerked it hard as if yanking out a hank of hair. “And other things.”

“Other things?”

“I was on top of one girl,” Antonio said. “Caught her on the playground. Teacher got to me before I could get started.”

“Jesus,” Allison said, clapping her hand over her mouth in horror.

“You look stupid,” he said. “Everything I say makes you look stupid. Not your fault. I’m tied up. I look stupid, too.”

She slowly lowered her hand. Her head swam. Her stomach was lodged in her throat.

“Why did you hurt all those girls?”

“I couldn’t stop,” he said. “I don’t know why. I wish I knew why. If I knew why maybe I wouldn’t have had to go under the knife.”

“You had brain surgery because you hurt people?”

“Nothing else worked.” He didn’t say those words so much as sing them. “Drugs didn’t work. Doctors didn’t work. Beating the shit out of me didn’t work.”

“Did you have a brain tumor?” she asked. She remembered Roland telling her about the famous patient with the brain tumor who’d turned into a sexual predator because of it and returned to normal once the tumor was removed.

“That’s what they said. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. But they took something out of my head and, for a while, it worked, but then I had a stroke and all the wiring went...” He moved his fingers in a pattern of chaos, like a ball of yarn tangled up in a thousand knots. “Now I’m here forever.”

“You said he fixed you like a cat,” Allison said.

“The cat, I forgot the cat,” Antonio said. “It’s the drugs. I’m not as dumb as I look. The cat. It’s a Ragdoll cat. They’re nice cats. They breed them nice. Cats are killers, but with Ragdolls, they breed the killer instinct out of them so they don’t bite. You can’t breed people not to bite, but you can cut into their heads to make them not bite.” He smiled at her. “Nice cats can’t survive in the wild, you know. When you cut off a cat’s claws or breed a cat to be tame, you’re not doing it for the cat. You’re doing it for the cat’s owner.”

Antonio’s eyes fluttered. “I don’t bite anymore,” he said. “Except my own tongue.”

He went silent and started to breathe like a man asleep.

“Antonio? Tony? You asleep?”

“No,” Antonio said, rousing himself. “The cat was a test. A test to make sure Deacon wouldn’t kill any more cats.”

The article.

The article on the wall. What had it said? One of the kids Dr. Capello fostered compulsively harmed animals and children.