Brainboy and the Deathmaster (17 page)

Ms. Grimsley looked up from some paperwork on her desk. “It’s not Saturday, is it?” she said. “If you’re here to visit Mr. Rizniak, we haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in over a week.”

“I’m just looking for a book that’s overdue.”

“What book?”

“Um, it’s called
Paradise Lab.
”

If the name meant anything to her, she certainly didn’t show it. As for her own paperback, she wasn’t
reading it today, but her handbag was hanging off the back of her chair as usual.

“Are the kids in their rooms?” BJ asked.

“I think most of them are outside playing.”

Though BJ knew this, he drifted over to the window anyway. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, flicking open the lock on top of the sash before turning back. “Could you help me find it? Ma says three people have it on reserve at the library.”

Ms. Grimsley reluctantly got up. On the second floor they went from room to room, BJ making an elaborate show of hunting for the fictitious book. By the time they got up to the third floor, Ms. Grimsley’s patience was fraying.

“It can’t be in here,” she said, following BJ into the familiar room with the ruddy-barked tree out the window. “The only person who’s used this lately is Boris, and he’s certainly no reader.”

Nevertheless BJ looked under the beds and behind the curtains. The last straw was when he opened the window and leaned out.

“Squirrels didn’t steal it, for heaven’s sake! Come on, young man, I’ve got a lot on my plate today.”

BJ could see Boris’s legs disappearing through the office window two stories below. Ms. Grimsley came over and tugged his arm.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, closing the sash.

BJ traipsed downstairs in her wake. On the lower staircase he moaned and plopped down on one of the carpeted steps.

“What in the world?”

He winced, massaging his left ankle. “I think I twisted something, ma’am.”

“Is this some sort of setup? If you have ideas of suing us, I’d advise you to think again. Mr. Masterly has an entire law firm at his beck and call.”

“I sprained something. Honest.”

“Can you stand up?”

As he pulled himself slowly to his feet, he peered over the banister. A hand appeared in the office doorway, thumb up.

“Okay, lean on me,” Ms. Grimsley said grudgingly, positioning herself beside him.

He put just enough weight on her bony shoulder to be convincing.

“Well, I suppose I’ll have to run you home,” she said when they reached the foot of the stairs. “Wait here—I’ll get my car keys.”

“No!”

“No?”

BJ tested his ankle. “It’s better.”

“Already?”

“It must have been that darned pinched nerve. Skateboard injury. It acts up sometimes. But I appreciate the offer, Ms. Grimsley.”

He turned and fake-limped out of the shelter. As he crossed the gravel circle, he didn’t so much as glance toward the garage. He didn’t look at the kids playing football, either. Eyes straight ahead, he limped down the driveway and turned right.

He and Boris had agreed to rendezvous at the 7-Eleven two blocks west of the shelter. BJ waited in front of the store till the pimply guy at the front register started shooting him dirty looks through the glass doors, at which point he moved over by a Dumpster in the side parking lot. The sky was looking more and more ominous, and with each passing minute he got more and more agitated, till he was as jumpy as one of Quadros’s fleas. But just when he was about to head back to the shelter, a scrawny, ponytailed figure ambled into the parking lot.

BJ had worn good clothes and insisted Boris wear his new hand-me-downs, but the knees of Boris’s khakis were now stained and there was a rip in his shirt sleeve.

“How’d it go, man?”

“Piece of cake.”

Boris swiveled around, and BJ unzipped his pack.

“Way to go!” BJ said, seeing a GPS and a personal tracker like the ones in the showroom car.

“Lucky they don’t make a personal tracker for the personal tracker, huh?”

“What’s this?” BJ asked, pulling out a paperback.

“That was in her bag, too. Looked kinda juicy.”

On the cover a brutish man with wavy, raven-black hair was holding a delicate blond captive in his arms.

“She’s probably missed it already,” BJ said, tossing it back into the pack. “We better get out of here.”

“Not till I get some cigs. Give me a five, willya?”

Boris had seen BJ extract his GameMaster savings, a wad of over a hundred dollars, from his strongbox in the bottom of his fridge/closet that morning. But BJ didn’t even acknowledge the request, simply heading for the pay phone at the Exxon station across the street.

When he got back to the Dumpster, there was no sign of Boris. But Boris soon came sauntering out of the 7-Eleven and lit up a cigarette.

“Jeez, man, we got to lie low,” BJ hissed when he got to the Dumpster. “Did you take money out of Grimface’s wallet?”

“Not all of it,” Boris said, gatling out a series of small smoke rings.

“And that guy in the store sold to you?”

“I gave him a tip. Hope he uses it to buy some zit cream.”

As a squad car pulled into the station, BJ yanked Boris behind the Dumpster. Peeking out, he watched a policewoman walk into the store and emerge with a Styrofoam cup. She set it on the hood of her car and strode straight over to the Dumpster.

“I
thought
I saw smoke. Aren’t you a little young for that?”

“I’m older than I look,” Boris muttered, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out on the pavement.

“Must’ve stunted your growth. What are you boys up to?”

Luckily the cab BJ had called pulled into the parking lot at that very moment.

“Heading home, officer,” BJ said. “That’s ours.”

T
he cabdriver had a turban on his head and a scary-looking scar on his cheek, but his voice, high-pitched and singsongy, wasn’t the least bit scary.

“Hunt Point?” he said, craning his head around to look at the boys in the backseat. “Hunt Point way across lake. You got twenty dollar?”

BJ yanked out his wad, whereupon the driver put the cab in gear.

Once they were on the floating bridge, BJ pulled the GPS out of Boris’s pack.

“Piece of cake?” he said, noting a sizeable dent in the top.

“It had these weird screws that don’t screw,” Boris confessed. “I had to get the crowbar out of the trunk and give it a little help.”

“Nobody saw you?”

“Guess not.”

“What happened to the toolbox?”

“I ditched it under a bush on my way out. Figured we didn’t need it anymore.”

BJ pushed a button—and a map of Lake Washington
instantly appeared on the screen, Seattle on the west side, Bellevue on the east. A pulsing dot was crawling like an ant across the bridge connecting the two cities. When the pulsing dot, and the taxi, reached the east side of the lake, the cab, and the dot, took the Hunt’s Point exit. BJ had the driver head up Hunt’s Point Road.

BJ rolled down his window as they pulled up to the guardhouse. “BJ and Boris to see Kit,” he told the mustachioed guard.

The guard looked dubious as he ducked into the guardhouse, but when he emerged, he touched his cap politely and raised the gate. As the cab started up a curving driveway, the sun broke through the clouds. Or maybe not, BJ thought: maybe it was always sunny at Keith Masterly’s house. Out his window a vast rose garden appeared, the roses, still blooming away even though it was now September, in every imaginable color, from the palest yellow to a purple so deep it was almost black. There wasn’t a droopy or withering petal to be seen—thanks, no doubt, to the army of gardeners moving like guerrilla soldiers among the plants. Out Boris’s window a sloping lawn, greener than a golf course, undulated down to the glimmering lake.

The driveway was longer than BJ’s street, but the taxi finally stopped, and a man in the same dark-red uniform as the ski-boat driver opened the door on Boris’s
side. Even after BJ settled the fare, Boris didn’t budge. For once in his life Boris was looking a little unnerved.

“Move it,” BJ said, giving him a shove.

Grabbing the backpack, he followed Boris out of the cab into the bright sunshine and blinked at a surprisingly unimpressive house: a stucco structure, only one story high, not much bigger than his own house. Nothing like the spectacular showplace they’d seen from the lake.

“Mr. Masterly is on the tennis court,” the uniformed man said, opening the dark-red front door.

The two boys stepped inside—and found themselves at the top of a wide redwood staircase. It curved down four or five stories through a vast atrium to a reception room bigger than all of Garfield Middle School, with gigantic plate-glass windows looking out across a terrace and a lawn to the lake and the Seattle skyline. The little stucco house was just a pimple on the real house, a tiny penthouse to gain access to the floors below. On the way down Boris gawked, openmouthed, at the galleries to the left and right, while BJ wondered if this could be the stairway to Sirius he’d heard about for so long.

He also wondered whether “Mr. Masterly” meant Keith Jr. or Keith Sr. The idea of meeting Keith Masterly Sr. filled him with excited dread. But when at last they reached the foot of the stairs, another uniformed man appeared and led them out to a wide terrace overlooking
a grass tennis court, where Keith Jr. was about to serve to a beautiful golden-haired woman whom BJ recognized from photos as Keith Sr.’s second wife.

Keith Jr. stopped in mid serve and came rushing off the court and up the terrace steps. “So it is you!” he said, shaking both their hands. “This is so great!”

“We were in the neighborhood and thought we’d stop by to make sure you’re okay,” BJ said.

“I’m fine, thanks to you guys. Can you stay for lunch?”

“I could eat a horse,” Boris murmured.

“Fantastic. I think we’re having Dungeness crab.”

“Is your father here?” BJ asked.

“This time of day? Never. He’s a total workaholic.’’ Keith Jr. turned and squinted at the helipad beyond the tennis court. “The chopper’s here, so he’s probably at MasterTech. I think he said something about the cinema division. Listen, just let me and Angie finish up. I’m letting her beat me. If you want to cool off in the pool, there’s extra bathing suits in the cabana.”

“Thanks,” BJ said. “But you know what I’d really go for?”

“What?”

“To sit in that.’’ He pointed at the sleek helicopter. “Just for a minute. I’ve never been in one.”

“Knock yourself out,” Keith Jr. said.

“F
or heavens sake, Darryl, its lunchtime! Are you sick?”

Darryl sat up groggily in his bed and blinked at Ruthie Katz. Between his work on G-17 and his late-night chimney-climbing sessions with Nina, he’d worn himself to a frazzle, and since Mr. Masterly wasn’t around, he’d let himself doze back off after this morning’s pep talk.

“I guess I slept in,” he said sheepishly.

“Well, shake a leg. I need your help.”

Darryl dragged himself up and joined the team in the dining hall for lentil soup and turkey sandwiches. After lunch, down on L, Ruthie pulled rank, pressing him into service on an experiment she’d set up in Chem. Her bright idea was to heat up a solution containing her personal favorite element—ruthenium, number forty-four on the periodic table—and shoot it down a tube at high speed into a solution of G-17 in hopes of stabilizing it. But Darryl couldn’t seem to wake up completely, and after watching the complicated process fail twice, he rested his head on the counter and dozed off.

“Aren’t you getting enough sleep, Darryl?”

It was Mr. Masterly’s voice. “I didn’t know you were at the lab, sir,” he said, conquering an impulse to squirm away as Mr. Masterly laid his hands on his shoulders.

“Just got back. Do you doze off like this often?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you eating well, taking your vitamins?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You sit up late watching movies?”

“Well, sometimes.”

“Hmm. I considered shutting down the audio and video systems at eleven, but there’s been so little abuse, I didn’t bother.”

“But, Mr. Masterly, it’s just …’’ Darryl could hear Ruthie out in the octagon, giving Snoodles orders. “I guess the experiment bored me a little.”

“Let’s see,” Mr. Masterly said, picking up a brown jar. “Ruthenium, eh. You don’t think it’ll work?”

“Not really.”

“Have you had any new ideas of your own?”

“Actually, yeah.”

“What’s that?”

“I was thinking how G-9 1/2 might be the problem. So I broke it down into two parts. Three in all.”

“Did you make some compound?”

“Uh-huh. Yesterday I injected one of the rats.”

“And?”

“Um, I forgot to check,” Darryl said, not wanting to admit he’d slept the whole morning away.

He got off his stool and led the way to Bio, passing Paul, who was on his way out with a jar of fruit flies. Darryl walked up to the cage containing the crusty old rat he’d injected. The rat had fleecy fur. His eyes were no longer pearly. Instead of a scrofulous gray, his tail was a healthy pink.

Darryl let out a low whistle as Mr. Masterly joined him by the cage.

“Where’s the compound?” Mr. Masterly said, his voice hushed.

Darryl pointed at the jar of murky turquoise liquid Snoodles had helped him mix up.

“What dosage?”

“I gave him three cc’s. Diluted, of course. One part compound per ten parts saline solution.”

Mr. Masterly diluted the compound with saline solution and sucked three cc’s into a hypodermic. Then he opened the door to another cage and injected the rat there. He and Darryl stood side by side, their eyes glued to rat number two as Snoodles shuffled in and started sponging off counters.

Long after Snoodles had finished cleaning up and left, Darryl and Mr. Masterly were still staring at the
second rat. It must have been half an hour after the injection when Mr. Masterly nudged Darryl with his elbow. “Is it me, or is he getting a little friskier?”

The rheumy old rat had climbed onto his wheel and started to jog. After a minute he stopped, as if to catch his breath. His eyes were clearer; his fur wasn’t so wiry and mangy; his feet and tail weren’t so discolored. Off he went again, this time at a run. The next time he stopped to rest, he looked as young and vibrant as the rat in cage number one.