Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗

Hospitals. Most people begin and end their lives in the same building. Were it not so creepy, it would be slightly poetic.

With absolutely no sleep in me, everything going on around me buzzed on the edge of my attention. I felt like a tree stuck in time while the world evolved and moved around me, sitting in a hard plastic chair while Special Agent Rubino talked into his cell phone, Amy was still in the ER, her dad on the way, and none of it made any sense. I watched Rubino across the waiting room, pacing back and forth in his cheap black suit. Even though I was pretty sure he was probably somehow involved in my father’s death, I felt like he was one of the few people I could count on. All the acquaintances I had in school had fallen off the map after I’d become dead-dad-kid. In the past few weeks the only people I’d been able to talk to were Amy and my two FBI tag-alongs.

The longer I sat still, the more the gravity of the situation sank in. I’d become rather comfortable with the idea that there are actually hitmen in the world, a fact I’d have argued as fiction a month or so ago, and it didn’t seem to faze me that I’d killed one of them and another was trying to kill me. Strychnine in the tea, what is that? If he wanted to kill me, why didn’t he just stand outside the hotel room door and shoot me in the face as soon as I came out? It was illogical.

I wanted to be doing something. I wanted a weapon in my hand and bodies at my feet. I wanted to pry the truth from dying lips. I’m not, though; I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room while Amy struggles for oxygen.

“They picked up all the food from your hotel room and are testing it now,” Rubino said as he walked over and sat in a chair across from me. “If that’s what was poisoned, there may be some latent prints on the packaging.”

“Is that likely?” I asked, wondering what the handful of people seated around me were making of this conversation.

“No,” Rubino said plainly.

“And my mom, she’s all right?”

“Yeah, Bremer’s there with local police and a few lab guys now. He says she went downstairs for breakfast.”

I was glad to hear that, though I hated that she had to go through even more of this nonsense. I hadn’t even really talked to her since I’d found out any of this, just a few fragmented conversations to pass the time. I didn’t know what she thought of me anymore. I don’t know what I’d think of me.

“Any progress in finding out who’s behind this?” I asked.

Rubino met the glances of the other people waiting, warning them away with his eyes. He finally turned to me and said, “Some. That, uh, profession isn’t exactly my or Bremer’s department so we’ve had to bring in some guys from DC. They’re starting with Dingan and working backwards, trying to see if his name and fingerprints solves anything. They’re also trying to find out where he keeps his money.”

“So nothing really useful right now,” I said.

“Right. It seems that we both know Schumer’s the man at the top of all this, though.”

Right, Schumer. The guy my dad worked for. The guy with the idea to use infertile hopeful parents to grow a crop of unwilling lab rats.

“Do you think this guy is coming after me for personal reasons or as part of his contract?” I asked, a bit quieter.

Rubino shook his head. “This is all uncharted waters for me, Chris.”

“He could come right through that door,” I said, “pop me between the eyes. Do you think I should have protection?”

“Do you think you need it?”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “If this guy’s a pro, he wouldn’t do something like that unless he was desperate. The name of their game is untraceability. Anybody can walk into a room and pull a trigger. People hire these guys for more personalized service.”

“Personalized like, ‘I want them to suffer’?”

“Could be.”

Lovely. Whoever wanted Comstock dead, be it Schumer or whoever, clearly wasn’t a fan of his. He could have gotten a shot in the head with that .22 and not known what hit him, instead of a lethal poison that kills you by either making you break your own back, crush your own lungs, or die of exhaustion from the uncontrollable muscle spasms. That could have been Amy. Pangs of guilt shot through me once more. What she must be going through, I hated it. It should have been me. Maybe the death would stop with me.

The poison was meant for me. If it weren’t for me, Amy would be fine now. But if I hadn’t known about activated charcoal and diazepam, she would probably be dead. She’d be better without me, obviously, but here I am saving her all the time.

No, it’s not me saving her, it’s the other me. I’m just the one getting her into dangerous situations, and soldier-Chris always has surface to get her out. So it’s not that she’d be better without me, it’s that she —both of us — would be better off without half of me; the boring, everyday-teenager half.

It was odd, though, that I’d known how to treat Amy’s poisoning in the first place. That’s not something the average soldier would need to know. If the whole purpose of Schumer’s program was for people to bypass boot camp or basic training with hypnotic training, all I should know how to do is shine my own boots and climb a rope. Where in standard Marine training does one learn how to bypass a security bar lock on a door, or interrogate someone with a tape recorder, or con his way into a hotel room, or field-treat a strychnine poisoning?

Schumer must have lied about something, but what?

“You know a bit about Schumer’s program, right?” I asked Rubino, who’d taken to reading messages on his phone’s screen.

“Some,” he said. “We were hoping that sometime you could fill us in on the rest.”

“Why would I know how to treat strychnine poisoning?” I asked.

“What?”

“When Amy went down and I realized it was probably strychnine, I knew exactly what to do. Activated charcoal and diazepam. Why would I need to know that?”

“I don’t know what you…”

“The only reason I can think that I’d need to know how to treat a specific kind of poisoning is that I’d also know how to administer the poison. You don’t teach someone how to arm a bomb without teaching him how to disarm it…”

“Okay, well…”

“So part of my program must include strychnine use. But why would I need to know something like that?”

Rubino looked confused. “I thought you knew about that.”

I tried to figure out what that meant, but I heard the doors behind me slide open and a man’s feet pounding against the floor. I turned and saw Amy’s dad stop at the entrance for a moment and look around, then he spotted the desk and headed toward it.

“Man…” I said.

“What?” Rubino asked.

“What are we going to tell him?” I asked.

“Is that the girl’s dad?”

“Yeah. How do I explain that she was poisoned by a guy who’s upset that she stabbed him in the leg last night?”

“I’m not sure. Did you call him?”

“No, they must have gotten her home number from her cell phone,” I said.

“Someone will tell him that you were with her. Does he know you?”

“Just as a guy who hangs around his daughter. He was in the Corps, we think he might have been Special Forces. He could kill me.”

“And that’s saying something.” Rubino smirked, then ran his hand through his hair. “We’ll see,” he said before standing up and walking over to Mr. Westbourne, still frantically trying to get information out of the nurse behind the front desk.

I sat alone in a hard, plastic chair in the sparsely populated waiting room. The lack of sleep was catching up to me, pressing down on my mind like wet blankets. I tried to fight it off.