Chimera

Chapter 5

“I hate you, you son of a bitch.”

Unimpressed, I kept the night-vision goggles up to my eyes and replied absently, “No one held a gun to your head, Skoczinsky.”

“Bullshit.” Beside me, he shifted on his stomach and with a snarl swatted at a buzzing mosquito. “It may as well have been and you know it.”

He was right, even if I hadn’t known it at the time. The amount of money I’d offered Saul had made it almost impossible for his mercenary soul to refuse, but almost is just that—almost. What carried it beyond that was the question I’d asked, a simple one: What if it were your brother? It was a fairly desperate attempt on my part, and I hadn’t expected it to do much good. Some people don’t give a damn about the brothers they do have and some don’t have any at all. But sometimes those desperate attempts work best of all.

It wasn’t a gun to his head, that question, but to Saul, combined with the money, it had been every bit as convincing. I’d seen it in the tightening of his jaw and the ice behind his glare . . . a brittle ice running with cracks in all directions, ready to break. If you were a bodyguard, reading people was a crucial skill. I didn’t know exactly what had changed Saul’s mind, but he had changed it and that was all that mattered. I wasn’t going to waste time feeling guilty about it, I thought obstinately, doing my best to promptly squelch the supposedly nonexistent emotion. After all, with the chunk of change I was giving him, he could stock up on plenty of long spoons for the next time he supped with the devil.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll cry for you later.” I needed Saul for this. If that meant manipulating him, I would do it. I would do it and deal with the consequences to my questionable conscience later. I would also give anything I had to get him on board. That anything came to pretty much every penny I had to my name and then some, but I didn’t have any doubt it would be money well spent. “Make yourself useful. Take the east side, and check back in fifteen.”

With another grumbled curse, he slithered off into the night with an alacrity that would’ve done any soldier proud. It might be a job he regretted taking, but he would do it to the best of his ability nonetheless. His morality might reside on a level far more shadowy than that of your average upright citizen, but Saul did have principles he followed rigorously and questions he wouldn’t answer. The principles might always come back to that bottom line, the almighty dollar or euro, but they did exist. And because they did, he had led me personally to the “school” he’d followed the children to two days before.

He’d been on the nose with his description of the place. If this was a school, then Stalin was the headmaster. The compound, and it was that without a doubt, was smothered in concealing gloom. There was none of the garish orange glow that blanketed the sky over Miami to lighten the night. The lack of moon or urban lights led to a blackness as thick as the depths of a tar pit—thick, sticky, and virtually impenetrable. Despite that, the NVGs provided by Saul let me see the details of the place. In fact, I could see them clearly enough that I swore silently.

Walls topped with razor wire and a twisted iron monstrosity of a gate that belonged at Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, it was one goddamn impressive setup, I was forced to admit. Nearly three hours from the city limits and on the edge of the Everglades, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more inhospitable spot if you had years to search. With sand, scrub, and low-lying water filled with creatures more ill-tempered than my boss, it didn’t make for a real estate agent’s dream. More important, it didn’t bode well for a fast escape.

Exhaling, I dropped the goggles onto the ground and rubbed my eyes with a thumb and forefinger. The sand gritted under my elbows and aside from the croaking of frogs, it was the only sound to be heard. This wasn’t a job for two men; hell, even the ATF would’ve been screwed. Not that that was saying much.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t have the ATF. I had Saul, myself, and a set of balls that would’ve impressed even King Kong. It would have to be enough. Saul hadn’t bothered to ask why we didn’t just call the cops and have them investigate. He was smarter than that. Lukas was still listed as a missing child, true. And if we’d gone to the police with our information, skimpy as it was, they would’ve looked into it. But by the time they made it past that massive gate, I seriously doubted there would be anything left to find. I had no idea what we were dealing with, not one goddamn clue, but it was safe to say the police might be every bit out of their depth as we were. It was a risk I wasn’t about to take. If this teenager was Lukas, I wasn’t giving any advance warning that might lead to a second disappearance. I had one chance to pull this off . . . one chance to save him. I wasn’t going to blow it.

Not this time.

Grimly, I took another look at the place. Normally the resources needed for a place the likes of the one before me would’ve made me think government, but Saul had already discounted that. They had to be private, but that didn’t tell me a damn thing about who they were and what they were doing. Regardless, sitting spinning my wheels trying to figure it out wasn’t going to get me any closer to getting inside the walls. What we needed was a good measure of boldness and a shitload of luck. And there was no time like the present to get started. Doing a little slithering of my own, I headed down the slope for an up close and personal look at the walls of Jericho.

The walls didn’t fall that night. They didn’t quake; hell, they didn’t even shiver, but at least we’d taken stock of what we were up against. That was something, right? I knew because as we had walked back to the car, Saul kept telling me so—repeatedly. I think he was concerned that I might have a psychotic break and try to scale the wall with my bare hands. Maybe it was an exaggeration, but truthfully he wasn’t far off the mark. All those years. I clenched the steering wheel until my knuckles blanched bone white. All those years, and the best I could manage was slinking around in the dark. Lukas was there; he was right there. But he might as well have been on the moon . . . distant and unreachable . . . solitary and untouched . . . untouched. One could dream anyway. Jesus.

I rested my forehead on the wheel, exhaled once, twice, then straightened. “So, daylight surveillance tomorrow?” I asked mildly. The calm was hard won, as I tucked every bit of despair, frustration, and rage into a mental box and closed the lid tight. That box had been with me a long time now. Born on a windswept beach, whelped on the blood and pain of child and horse, this box had teeth. Considering what I fed it, it needed them.

The car in which Saul and I sat was a good two miles from the compound; a safe distance we’d thought, and so far we’d been right. The whites of his eyes glimmered in the darkness as he considered his answer. Fiddling with the volume control of the silent radio, he finally sighed and leaned back in his seat with a snort of self-disgust. “What the hell was I thinking? There is not enough money in the world for this cluster fuck.” Jerking impatiently at the seat belt, he fastened it, then drummed the dashboard with his fingers. “You and your stupid questions. I didn’t have a brother. I had a sister. Rosemary. Rosemary and Thyme, only she didn’t have a lot of time. We grew up poor as hell.” He rubbed his face. “I grew up anyway. We shared one room. I made her teddy bears out of old clothes. Ripped them to pieces and tied them in knots. They didn’t look anything like a damn bear, but . . . she was little. She didn’t know differently and she loved them. Loved me. You take that for granted when you’re a kid.” He looked out the window at the night. “She died of meningitis when she was five. Our parents were useless. They didn’t care or just assumed she’d get better. They wouldn’t even stay with her in the hospital. I did. It was my hand she held when she was sick. It was my hand she held when she died.”

And he didn’t have to look for her, because he knew where she was . . . which plot of grass she lay under. Fuck. At least I’d had some hope all these years, not much, but Saul had nothing. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to come, but the cold, hard truth was if he didn’t, Lukas might end up like Rosemary . . . or lost again. And Saul, money or no money, Saul with his Rosemary living only in his shadow and in his memories couldn’t let that happen.

Resigned himself to his fate, he went on. “So, tomorrow it is. You bring the sunblock; I’ll bring the strippers and margaritas. It’ll be a party.”

It’d be a festival, all right—no lights, no music, no dancing. But if we managed to walk away unshot, I’d still consider it nothing but gravy.