Captain Quad (31 page)

Sam free-fell into unconsciousness, the blows against his body perceived only as a patter of raindrops on a rooftop overhead.

Rhett tramped on the go-pedal, causing the Caddy to torpedo dangerously over the greasy snowfall. He grinned at the throb of aging pistons, imagining his dear departed daddy twisting miserably in his grave. The Caddy had been the old man's pride and joy. This would be the first winter it'd seen since Gord Kiley drove it new off the lot back in 1951, eleven years before Rhett was even born.

Ignoring the stop sign at the top of the street, Rhett careened through the poorly lit intersection, narrowly missing an elderly woman in a green Volkswagen Rabbit. Whooping in spite of the ache in his balls, he reached over the seatback and grabbed the bottle of Jim Beam, which had begun making the rounds again as soon as they'd piled back into the car. He guzzled a liberal dose, then handed it over to Jerry.

In the backseat, Bobby was enthusiastically recapping the trouncing they'd given Sam Gardner. When he got to the part where Jerry had popped him with the tire iron, Jerry grabbed the heavy twist of iron from the floor mat and cracked himself on the bean with it. This struck Bobby as hilarious, and he howled until he almost puked.

A few minutes later, swinging onto Paris Street, Rhett spotted a cop car in the lot fronting the Plaza 69 pharmacy.

"Stash the bottle," he barked, and Jerry stowed it under the seat. Cruising at a respectable thirty, Rhett rolled past the lot and away. The cop didn't bat an eye.

Rhett sighed, sobriety trying hard to reclaim him. His brain was beginning to work again, and deep down, even though the jacked-up little cunt had really creamed his kid brother, Rhett felt a stab of guilt over the Gardner kid. They'd left him in the middle of the street, bloody and unmoving, and if that porch light hadn't come on when it did. . . well, Rhett guessed they might have killed him. Maybe he should've left the half-breed out of it. After all, vegetable or not, Peter Gardner had once been his best friend. . .

Rhett leaned a little harder on the accelerator, an unwelcome cloak of remembrance settling over him.

Yeah, those had been the days. As far as Rhett was concerned high school could've gone on forever, especially the senior years. Those had been Rhett Kiley's glory days, though it had taken him a few extra semesters to get there. Quite a few, actually. Football, chicks galore, that special breed of companionship you just couldn't find outside of a team sport. . . and Gardner had been the best of them. Poetry to watch him play ball. Utter fucking poetry.

But they were dead days, Rhett reminded himself. And the intervening years—six of them, although it might just as well have been sixty—had worked on him hard. At twenty-seven, Rhett looked like a man twice that age. Uncountable gallons of beer had slung an apron of fat around his middle, three packs a day of unfiltered Players had played hell with his lungs, and a total lack of exercise, combined with an atrocious diet of sweets, french fries, and burgers, had given him the bloated, puffy look of an aging Elvis. Bearing grease and engine oil had worked their way into his skin, and there was the permanent dank odor of sweat, smoke, and internal combustion about him.

Dead days, all right.

Unmindful of Rhett's ruminations, Jerry jabbed him in the ribs with the bottle. "'Nother hit, Rhe—"

Rhett batted the bottle aside, sloshing some of its contents onto Jerry's grease-spotted jeans. "I told you stunned fuckers to stow that!"

Jerry, who'd always admired Rhett Kiley—and feared him—stuffed the bottle out of sight. They were downtown now, rolling past the City Center.

In the backseat the big Indian said, "Let me out here," and Rhett swerved into the taxi lane fronting the shopping concourse. He was glad to see the back of Billy Moon. The guy was a psycho.

As they merged back into traffic, a gloomy silence settled in the car. Rhett had remembered something else about Peter Gardner, and now his knitted brow darkened with an old, undying grudge.

Gardner had stolen Kelly Wheeler from him. Rhett had never dated the girl, but he'd seen her first, had even pointed her out to Gardner in the halls. The greedy prick could've had any other pussy he wanted, but no, he had to go for the Wheeler bitch.

High-pockets whore thinks her shit doesn't stink.

Rhett's grip tightened on the wheel, and he tramped down spitefully on the gas, bulleting through the intersection at Elm and Lorne on the yellow, fishtailing dangerously. A city bus gave him the horn and Rhett leaned hard on his own, flipping the driver the bird. They were headed for Highway 144 now, and the lunar plains of the Copper Cliff mines.

There'd been some bullshit scuttlebutt about the bitch asking Gardner to the Sadie Hawkins dance, but Rhett had never bought it. That wasn't how it had played. His fucking friend had gotten a sniff of that sweet little stinkhole, and he'd just had to have her for himself.

Well, Rhett thought, uttering a stunted chuckle. Not only can the sorry schmuck not get it up, he doesn't even know where to find it anymore!

It served him right. Too smart. Just too fucking smart. But another, smoldering part of Rhett Kiley knew that Peter had quite simply been a better man, in every respect. No one had offered Rhett a football scholarship, but Gardner had turned down three of them. Kelly Wheeler would never even have given him the time of day if he hadn't been a friend of Peter's. Christ, the one time he'd gotten up the nerve to call her after the accident, hoping to catch her on the rebound, the snotty bitch had chewed him out over the phone, told him he had a lot of nerve and what kind of friend was he anyway?

Yeah, Kiley thought now. What kind of friend?

"Fuck it," he said aloud, bringing the Caddy to a sidelong halt on the roadside. They'd left the city behind, a faint parabolic glow in the congested night sky. Now, ice-scabbed Precambrian rock stretched out for miles on either side of them.

"Yeah," Jeter mimicked. "Fuck it."

Rhett smiled, showing a shiny gold tooth. "Let's get shitfaced," he said.

All and sundry agreed.

THIRTY

The intruder is still around. And she's wearing his ring. Oh, fuck, that makes me furious! And what's worse, I can't seem to touch her anymore. Not since Xmas. Trying to only makes me crazy. As melodramatic as it sounds, I think her feelings for the guy are protecting her somehow, insulating her.

It isn't fair. Kelly's mine.

But I'll get her back. It's just a matter of time. I'll get back inside. Then we'll see who she really loves. . .

Peter stopped typing and listened, his heart suddenly triphammering in his chest. The sound he'd heard came again—a voice, drawing nearer—and Peter tapped the Save button, exited his secret file, and switched the computer off. He tasted bile as he let the key striker drop from his mouth.

It was Dr. Lowe, marching toward Peter's room with his usual entourage, and the sound of his voice—cool, dry, imperious—gave Peter an unexpected shock; it was the first time he'd heard it in three weeks. Lowe had been away on his annual vacation in Florida—in previous years Peter had looked forward to this break almost as much as Lowe did—and in the delirium of the past weeks Peter had almost forgotten his feelings for the man.

From the sound of it, the time off hadn't diminished Lowe's enthusiasm for torment. Stationed outside Peter's door, he slipped automatically into his pre-visit sermon, modulating his voice so that to his students he appeared a paragon of discretion, but to Peter his words were plainly audible. He rambled on about Peter's "increasingly frequent bouts of torpor, characterized by deathlike paleness, near total cessation of autonomic functions, and a decrease in blood pressure which, under normal circumstances, would barely be compatible with life."

Peter let the words rattle the chains of his rage.

Turns you on, doesn't it, Lowe.

"His body temperature drops precipitously," the doctor lectured, "and his respirations become undetectable. Were one to fail to examine him minutely—his pupils continue to react, albeit sluggishly, and he does maintain a recordable blood pressure—a diagnosis of death might result."

Peter tuned the man out. In another few minutes he'd come flouncing in with his followers, oglers on a medical midway, fresh from eyeballing a cirrhotic liver and hungry for a glimpse of the talking head.

If the stupid little shits only knew what he was really capable of—

Why don't you show them? a persuasive voice cut in. Eh, bonebag? Why the hell don't you?

"Maybe I will," Peter answered with a whispered savageness that startled him. "Maybe I will."

Without knocking, Lowe strode into the room, students in tow. His smug smile slipped when his eyes met Peter's—the impotent anger he'd expected to find there had been replaced by something else, an amused secret light that danced gleefully—and the doctor looked away, giving the impression to his students of a child who has accidentally intruded on his copulating parents. The doctor tried to shift back into academic mode, but the transition was sloppy, and now the students looked ashamed, too.

"Come ahead in,"
Peter said, bugging his eyes. "I'll see if I can't go all catatonic for you."

Lowe stood silent, crimson creeping into the bronze of his Florida tan.

"I think we've picked a bad time," said one of the students, an attractive young woman in a starched white intern's jacket. Her gaze met Peter's with an open but compassionate frankness. "I'm sorry, Mr. Gardner," she said. Then she turned and walked out of the room. The others followed.

Still off balance, Lowe only stood there, his gaze flicking from his feet to the door and back again. Words perched on the runway of his tongue, but he seemed unable to get them airborne. In the silence, Peter realized this was the first time in years that he'd been alone with his doctor.

"I know about you," Peter said with a taunting half smile.

Lowe's doughy face jittered up—and now he was the child again, only this time caught with both hands stuffed deep in the cookie jar. A thin shine of sweat broke out on his brow. His pupils telescoped
madly.

"What do you mean?"

"I know about you, Harry," Peter said again. "I know what you're into." His head levered up like the business end of a catapult. "And I am going to kick your lardy white ass!"

Lowe clutched the foot rail in a shoddy display of indignation. The doctor wanted very badly to dismiss Peter's words, to sling them back in the cripple's smug face. . . but he'd been caught so completely off guard by them that any meaningful response eluded him. Paranoia was like that.

He stood there a moment longer, gaping like a fish out of water. Then he scuttled out of the room.

"And so, ladies and gentlemen," Lowe said to the members of the Medical Advisory Committee, his composure on the verge of landsliding away on him, "I trust you'll agree that, armed with this proposal, we can approach the board with confidence."

He smiled at the enthusiastic applause, but the smile was a brittle fabrication, on the brink of dissolving into a panicky grimace of need. He'd needed his fix before—the night his wife had walked out on him, her last word as she climbed into his Mercedes—"Half!"—clanging in his ears like a fire bell; that had been bad—but the craving had never been this colossal, this totally overmastering. His hands, which had shaken so badly during his hour-long presentation he'd had to stuff them into his pockets, kept wanting to fly up and tear his hair out in big bleeding handfuls. Lunatic laughter hunkered on the curb of his teeth, just waiting for a chance to go vaulting out of his mouth.

And through it all, one thought rattled menacingly in his brain: What did that gimp fucker mean?

(I know about you, Harry.)

What did he know? He couldn't know about the drugs. How could he? He was bolted to his bed like an anvil to a blacksmith's block. Sure, he tooted around in his wheelchair from time to time, but it was damned hard to remain inconspicuous—

"Fine presentation, Harrison."

Lowe cranked his eyes into focus and tried to disguise his startlement. It was Dr. Javna, chief of staff, grinning through his neatly cropped beard, one hand extended and waiting to be shaken. Lowe dragged his hand out of his pocket, doing his best to rid it of sweat. "Thanks, Chief," he said, pumping the man's hand. He noted the sudden shift of Javna's eyes and felt himself shrinking inside.

"You coming down with something?" Javna said, releasing Lowe's hand and rubbing his palm on his suit vest. "You're as clammy as a corpse."

"Could be," Lowe said, thinking, Let me out of here! "Feel fine, though." He raked his papers into his briefcase.

The chief leaned closer, green eyes twinkling. "Well, you look like hell."

Lowe's gut cramped. Christ, do they all know?

"Maybe you should go easy for a couple of days. The project is in the hands of the MAC now. Kick back a bit."

Javna clapped him on the back. The sensation thundered through him. "Good advice," Lowe said. "Maybe I will." He smiled, barring back a scream, and dragged his briefcase off the table. "If you'll excuse me?"

Then he was bustling out of the room, trying not to run, forgoing the elevators for the echoey solitude of the stairs.

Shawna Blane scooped up a forkful of niblets and aimed them at Peter's mouth. Peter accepted the offering and chewed it dutifully. Three floors up, the MAC meeting was still an hour away from convening. It was six o'clock, a cold clear January evening.

Shawna had tried to palm this duty off onto one of the students, but they'd had a lecture to go to and Shawna ended up saddled with the job. She hated coming in here. Peter made her nervous, and he just went on getting weirder by the day. Little wonder when you thought about it, which Shawna tried to do as little of as possible. If you dwelt on this kind of god-awful luck for too long, you ended up imagining yourself in the same cruel shoes.

Shawna shifted back from the tray. She kept getting the unsettling impression that her charge was about to sit up in bed.

"If you move any farther back," Peter said, amused, "you're gonna have to pitch that shit at me."