Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

I made no move to take the gun, an automatic-ironically, the twin to the fake one I kept under my desk. “I don’t like guns.”

“You probably wouldn’t like a geek, as you label us, putting you down like a rabid dog. Only in a far more inventive and painful way. Take it.”

“Let me rephrase. I won’t use a gun.” Not again. No matter how deserving of a bullet someone might be.

He frowned. “This could be your life. I’ll do everything I can, but someone got to Charlie. They might be able to get to you. I’m going to get the bastard, don’t doubt that. Get him and make him pay, but until then, don’t you want to live?”

“What I want is to stay sane.” I cut my finger on a letter opener once, badly enough to gush blood and require a few stitches. When I smelled the blood, tasted it when I automatically put my finger into my mouth to suck it clean, I saw it all again. I lived it again. Screaming. Blood. Brains. Gobbets of fat spilling on the floor. A genuine posttraumatic flashback-so the used college psych textbook from my shelf said. If a little blood did that, what would shooting a man do?

Nothing good.

“Give me a stun gun or a Taser. Or I’ll keep this.” I hoisted the bottle in my hand and finished it off. “I’m good at improvising. But no guns. I guess an ex-soldier like you can’t understand that.”

“There’s no such thing as an ex-soldier, and no one who understands it better.” He returned the gun and shrugged back into the jacket, hiding it from sight. “I’d put someone outside your door, but I don’t know who I can trust now that I know you’re the real thing. I can’t be sure if they’re my men or someone else’s.”

“I hope Thackery is on your list.”

“Just because he’s a sociopath and an asshole? Or does a good imitation of both?” He moved to the door.

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor. I know. People tell me that all the time.”

“Working with you makes it self-defense,” he said. “So, tomorrow at eight?”

Bemused, I leaned back on the bed, resting on my elbows. Good old Hector had asked this time. He hadn’t told me; he’d asked. Charlie would’ve been proud. That wasn’t my usual sarcasm, either. He honestly would’ve been. He’d raised Hector up right. The man had manners when he wasn’t too full of darkness over his brother to remember them, which put him one up on me. I’d never learned to have them at all.

Manners or not, eight was eight. “Nine,” I countered. I thought about adding that Meleah could bring me breakfast again, but Hector’s manners might end there. Charlie and Meleah had ended their relationship before he died, but I doubt that mattered to his brother. It shouldn’t have mattered to me, either, but it would have if I let it. I didn’t. It was another thing that floated through my Charlie memories, fading but still there. He wanted Meleah for Hector. He’d figured out that Meleah realized she had chosen the wrong brother, and Charlie being Charlie, he’d planned on making that right.

But then he died, and nothing can be made right by a dead man.

“Eight it is,” Hector said, ignoring my counter-offer. Ex-military trumped manners every time.

• • •

It was eight in the morning when we left, but this time it wasn’t just Hector and me. That son of a bitch Thackery came along for the ride. Not in the same car, of course. He didn’t want to be contaminated by something science couldn’t measure. Or he was the murderer and playing it safe. He had Dr. Fujiwara with him. Fujiwara, whose eyes were sadder than previously. After my seizure, I’d gone from a sympathetic little lab mouse to a damaged one. He looked down the one time I met his gaze, but not before I saw the lines of pained regret creasing his forehead.

In contrast, Thackery’s expression was one of unconcealed disdain. His desire to have space between him and me went beyond the possibility of being a murderer. He was actually repulsed by me personally. It wasn’t hard to see in his stony regard and the tight line of his lips. Contamination, a freak, right in his clean hall of science. Maybe you could back my freakdom up with theories, and as science progressed, maybe evidence and proof that could be measured by a machine would rain down from the sky, but I was still a person, not a process. An unpredictable person, and Dr. Thackery didn’t like unpredictable, I was sure. It didn’t fit into his narrow, tight world-his results-driven, money-driven world. If only I’d been a process, if only I’d fit into a computer program or a test tube, I was sure I’d have been all puppies and sunshine to him.

It was fine by me having him follow in a car behind us. That early in the morning, I didn’t want to see anything, and definitely not Thackery’s rigidly disapproving face. Hector had the sense not to talk to me until I’d put away two coffees. Cafeteria coffee, utter crap, but with enough caffeine to have my fingers tingling under the gloves and a few words spilling from my lips in a cranky mutter. “Where?”

Well, one word. I was a man who got to the point. It was one of my better qualities.

“A take on Lizzie Borden. A son beat his parents to death with a chunk of firewood in 1853. And to commemorate the occasion, they turned the place into a bed-and-breakfast. Have a few cold chills with your honeymoon. The proprietor says it’s a popular spot.”

“Ain’t that grand? Nice to know my faith in humanity is right where it should be-the basement.” Outside, it was drizzling. Sun hot enough to sear and a sticky rain the next day. That was Georgia for you. “Seems high-profile enough to have had the newspapers cover it. You shouldn’t need me. Reliving murders isn’t like cable, okay? It doesn’t make for a good morning. In fact, it makes for a pretty shitty one.”

“Have my coffee. I don’t think yours has kicked in yet.” Hector turned on the wipers. “The mother and father disappeared. When he was sober, Seth Miles stated that his parents ran off and left him with a worthless farm and a stack of unpaid bills. When he was drunk, he said he killed them. Their bodies were never found, and nothing was ever proven. Suspected, yes. But a drunken confession and no bodies didn’t make it to court back then. It is possible his parents left Miles. He was an alcoholic troublemaker most of his life and a drain on their resources.”

“And if wishes were horses, it wouldn’t be rain falling from the sky right now. It’d be a storm of horseshit.” I took his coffee and gave a tired, mulish stare out the windshield. Being used as a Geiger counter for terror and death managed to erase a fraction of the beer-buzz camaraderie of the night before.

“I’m sorry, Jackson.” He did sound sorry, but that helped me exactly zero. “But you’re the only one who can do this. Of all your colleagues, you were the only genuine article. You’re rare.” I thought I sensed a fleeting regret. “Which isn’t so great for you, I know, but the sooner this is over, the sooner you can get on with your life, you and your sister.”

Hector didn’t mention getting on with his life. It would be hard to think about if I were in his shoes. He’d spent so much time running around trying to free Charlie that he probably hadn’t had time to genuinely come to grips with his brother’s death. Near death. Whatever the hell it was. He had that ahead of him; he wasn’t a fool, he knew that. It wasn’t precisely something to look forward to.

Been there, repressed that.

The Miles farm was long gone. The neighborhoods that now covered it were older. Early nineteen hundreds, houses with character and so much gingerbread trim that I expected to see Hansel and Gretel any minute-I hoped not pursued by a man with a hunk of firewood and a crazed, wild light in his eye.