Doc Ford 19 - Chasing Midnight (21 page)

We did.

Ignoring Kahn’s threats, we ran across the croquet court to the lodge, where I followed Umeko into the main room. There, instead of waiting for her to finish untangling the tape that bound my elbows and wrists, I yelled, “Tomlinson! Get your ass in here!” because I was furious.

We didn’t have to wait long. We heard footsteps, then a short man, pudgy but not obese, dragged Tomlinson into the room, left
hand knotted in his long hair, right hand holding a pistol that cast a familiar red dot on my friend’s throat.

Sounding disgusted with himself, Tomlinson told me, “I picked up on the vibe too late, Doc. Sorry, man. Thought I could warn you later, but the whole mess just spun out of control.”

Tomlinson’s hands were bound behind his back, his left eye was swollen closed and there was blood around his mouth. But he still managed to force a fake smile as his eyes warned me
He’s insane. Be careful—he’ll kill us all.

No, Tomlinson was warning me about
both
Neinabors. Because just then the second brother appeared, a half-moon grin on his face, head bouncing to the heavy metal cadence of his earbuds.

With a wave of his pistol, he ordered us into the next room.

B
ecause he was listening to his iPod, the twin doing most of the talking yelled when he spoke as if everyone in the room was deafened by the music reverberating through his skull. He yelled at Umeko now, saying, “Which one you want me to offer up first? It doesn’t matter to me. The blood’s on your hands. Hey, Geness, what’s Abraham say?”

Offer.
A euphemism for “murder,” but with religious overtones because Odus Neinabor was swinging his pistol at the women who had come to Vanderbilt Island for a girls’ weekend but had stumbled into a nightmare. And Abraham—that must be the dead triplet. Did that mean that Odus could not speak to him directly, only Geness? Interesting.

The twins must have returned to the lodge soon after Kahn and Trapper had left, from what I saw. It would have taken them at least half an hour to do all that they had done. And they’d done a lot—some of it absurd, all of it cruel. The way they were treating the three most harmless people in the room was an example.

The women were still in their tropical party dresses, like three wilting bouquets sitting with their backs to the wall, their faces clown-streaked with eyeliner because they had been crying. The abuse had been going on for a while. The twins had wired the ladies’ hands behind their backs, then tossed their designer shoes into a pile in the middle of the room as if in preface to playing some weird party game.

I knew one of the women by name, Sharon Farwell. She was a successful restaurateur, an over-forty beauty who was business hardened but now displayed symptoms of shock because of what was happening. Her eyes had brightened when I entered the room. But then when she saw that my arms were taped behind me, her chin sank toward the floor.

Pitiless.
That described what the twins had done. There was no way the women, or anyone, could have anticipated such crazed behavior.

Odus was Exodus, a mean little bastard, according to Trapper. But the quiet one, Geness—Genesis—was the more dangerous of the two, in my estimation, because I’d be willing to bet he used the dead triplet, Abraham, to manipulate brotherly decisions and as a scapegoat for their viciousness.

Genesis and Exodus, two biblical names given by nomadic hipsters whose sons had lived a caravan life in the desert. The names had no sinister overtones so fit the twins perfectly—two brothers who were benign in appearance, even comical, which effectively disguised the truth that they were both dangerous.

I’ve encountered killers, both amateurs and methodical pros, but there were only three true sociopaths among them. One was a brain-damaged mercenary who became infamous in Central America for hunting only at night, like a werewolf, then burning his victims alive.

The man, known as
Incendiario
to the peasants of the Maya
Mountains, was Praxcedes Lourdes. He had a grotesque physical presence that warned of the danger he represented. In a lesser way, the other two sociopaths were physically repugnant as well—a freak with an Oedipus fixation and a necromancer witch who believed she was a succubus.

Geness and Odus Neinabor, though, could have been the chubby, wholesome sidekicks in a TV sitcom. They were plump, rosy-cheeked, with wide mouths and weak jaws. Both had feminine qualities: balding, shoulder-length blond hair, breast tissue that bounced beneath their black crewnecks when they walked, delicate, stubby fingers.

Odus was the talkative one, Geness, the introvert—normal for identical twins, normal in appearance. Normal in every way but for their behavior, and the wild glassy eyes that shielded them from reality rather than connecting them.

Insulation and isolation—true sociopaths construct barriers as complex as any maze. Like the heavy-metal music that thrummed from Odus’s earbuds, loud enough to resonate through his eye sockets. Like the dead brother who spoke through Geness’s mouth.

Aberrant behavior can be ascribed to many factors. What is impossible to explain, though, is the pleasure that sociopaths derive from inflicting pain on others. It is, in my experience, the defining behavioral deformity that links mutants with their monstrous behavior. I had met three sociopaths in my life. Now, though, I could count five. Odus and Geness, who took visible pleasure when they inflicted pain on people. Especially the three attractive middle-aged women from nearby Captiva Island.

No one bullies with more ravenous expertise than those who have been bullied, and it was sickening to watch. Soon, it would be impossible. Arms taped behind me or not, I would have to do something. Tomlinson, standing on the other side of the room, was reaching his breaking point, too. I could tell by the way he closed his eyes,
seeking some inner peace that was impossible to access, and so began banging the back of his head against the wall.

“Leave them alone!” he yelled finally. “If you want to hurt someone, try me!”

Which got Odus’s attention but only caused him to grin before he looked at Umeko and me and yelled, “If you two don’t do what we say, they’ll all die!”

Do what?
If the lunatics had some plan that included Umeko and me, they hadn’t said a goddamn word about it.

Behind us, Geness was thinking the same thing because he surprised everyone by speaking for the first time, saying too softly for his brother to hear, “Odus. You didn’t tell the slavers what we want them to do. Odus?
Exodus!
”

Odus responded with a confused expression that asked
Huh?

Geness raised his voice above a whisper, “Your iPod. Turn down your iPod.” Then he repeated what he’d said. “Once the things understand, you can kill one. But until then—”

Nodding, Odus finished his brother’s sentence, saying, “Until then, it makes no sense. Okay, okay, but here’s the deal, Geness”—the twin’s face reddened—“I want to shoot one of them
now
, goddamn it! I’m sick of waiting!”

Geness had his eyes closed, which could be something he did when communicating with the dead triplet, or pretended to communicate—no telling what was happening inside his head—then he translated in a voice that was flat, emotionless. “It is not time yet, Exodus. Later, shoot the blond thing. But not now.”

The blond thing was Sharon Farwell, who turned to me, eyes pinched. I winked, trying to reassure her, which is when the front door of the lodge opened and Kahn and Trapper came charging in, ripping their ski masks off before greeting the Neinabor twins. I expected locker-room laughter and high fives, but Geness retreated
instantly into some silent sphere while his brother became guarded but willing to do the talking. It was repellent to watch, a reunion of misfits, but I took in every nuance as they exchanged information.

When Kahn told the twins that Bohai had been shot, he did it in a way that insinuated he and Trapper had killed the man, then flashed Umeko and me a look, warning us not to contradict him.

A minute later, Kahn ordered Trapper to the balcony to stand guard, then I listened to Odus Neinabor describe how he had attacked two men at the marina, saying, “I hit one of them for sure. Maybe both. I think they were Kazlov’s men—maybe Kazlov himself, I don’t know. I hope so, because Geness took a shot at that Russian leech when the power first went out but missed. Didn’t you, Geness?”

Geness didn’t bother to respond because his brother was already explaining, “It’s so dark out there, man, it was hard to score—even with my laser sights. I caught these two guys at the dock and they were, like, firing back two rounds every time I pulled the trigger. But finally, I took my time and—
whap!
—one of them went down in the water. After that, though, they snuck off into this sort of swampy place, probably hoping to ambush me. Like I’m
stupid
or something.”

I’d learned something. Despite the lie that Vladimir and I had returned fire, it confirmed who had attacked us, and also provided a couple of surprises. Kazlov
hadn’t
been shot during the first minutes of the power outage? I looked at Tomlinson, who shook his head in reply, which seemed to be good news, until I realized he might have been telling me
No, the twin didn’t miss.

Either way, the news wasn’t as bad as it could have been. After all that gunfire, Third Planet members could boast of shooting only one, possibly two people—both Russians. And Odus hadn’t finished the bodyguard with two shots, as I’d guessed, or he would be bragging about it now.

The bloodbath I’d feared had yet to happen. Maybe there was still a way to turn the night around.

As I listened, though, my optimism faded. I became convinced of one key dynamic: the Neinabor twins actually were insane. Maybe temporarily because of whatever drugs they were on—something potent enough to cause hand tremors and a diaphoretic sweat that made their baby-pink faces glisten like boiled hams.

More likely, though, the brothers had repressed so much rage for so many years that some fragile thread had finally snapped. Now a pair of monsters had been set free into a virtual world of their own making and they’d brought the ghost of their dead brother to guide them. These two were the type who strapped on bandoliers and trotted down high school corridors shooting at their classmates.

As Third Planet members traded stories and bragged, they all also confirmed their cowardice. Odus told Kahn that he’d scouted Talas’s end of the island, but the gunfire was “wicked.” Kahn lied and said the same was true of the north end of the island, and that he and Trapper had decided Lien Bohai’s corpse was proof they’d taken enough chances for one night.

“I shot him—hit him the first time,” Kahn told the room.

To me, the men were only proving the obvious: they wanted to believe they were gunfighters but knew secretly they were incapable of taking the risks that shooting an armed enemy required. If the twins had a plan that included Umeko or me, my guess was that their own cowardice was the source of the plan’s creation.

I also began to suspect that the Neinabor twins had another hostage, maybe more, who they’d isolated in a nearby room. Odus was making veiled references to his “private trophy room.”

If there was another hostage, I hoped it was Vladimir. Irrational, maybe, but that’s the way I felt. He had tried to kill me, true, but the man had proven his toughness and professionalism when we were on
the run. And he was certainly more admirable than the man-child who had shot him. But the prospect that Vladimir had been allowed to live was unlikely because the twins were so eager to prove themselves killers.

I held on to the possibility, though, until Densler stumbled in from the dining room so drunk that she slurred her words when she complained, “The man just pissed his pants, for God’s sake! You expect me to clean it up?”

A few minutes later, I found out the truth when Geness shoved and prodded me down a hallway to the manager’s office, then nudged open the door.

Inside, a gigantically fat man dwarfed the swivel chair in which he had been bound and gagged. When he recognized me, his facial expression changed in a way that reminded me of the hope I’d seen in Sharon Farwell’s eyes.

Cowards or not, the Neinabor twins had somehow managed to take down another one of the Big Four.

I was in Odus’s trophy room. The trophy was Darius Talas.

Stashed beneath a desk, I also noticed, was a red-and-green computer bag, the first three letters of Super Mario visible.

I
was impressed by how remarkably calm the fat man remained as he listened to Odus argue with Kahn, the twin red-faced and screaming, “It’s our plan, he’s our hostage! So just keep your mouth shut and let me dictate the goddamn letter!”

From the doorway, behind me, Geness spoke for only the second time that night, which caused the room to go silent. “We don’t listen to you anymore,” he said to Kahn. “We’re too strong for you now.”

Kahn and Geness glared at each other through the candlelight. It took several seconds of silence before the twin’s craziness won out; a silence dominated by his lingering certainty and metronomic way of speaking. It was the voice of someone who hears voices and records them with the indifference of a computer chip or an android. There was no fakery or theatrics, which was unsettling in itself, but it was Geness’s confidence that, at once, was repellent and chilling. Finally, it was confirmed that the chubby blond twins—once the butt of Kahn’s jokes—were now in charge.