John Locke - Lethal Experiment

“You seen it?”

“I have.”

His face was flushed. He licked his lips. It was enough to make you sick. He said, “You’re gonna bribe the guard, just give him the naked pictures in the first place.”

“If I give him naked pictures, you think he’ll pass them along to you?”

“Hell, no! Not that degenerate bastard.”

“That’s why I’m printing pictures on top of the naked ones.”

I could see it in his pitted face: he was intrigued.

“She shaved?” he said.

“You want her shaved?”

“I want her shaved.”

“Okay, well she’s not shaved in this one, but I’ll make that happen next time.”

We worked out the logistics for getting him the money, and he gave me the name of his guard.

“How did it go?” Alison said.

We were in my rental car, heading to our motel room at the Quality Inn.

“For now you should be safe. That’ll change in a few days or weeks when he loses the power to decide.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Kill him.”

She’d been looking out the window, but when I said that, her head spun back to face me.

“Why? How?”

“Why? Because it’ll send a message to whoever takes his place in the gang. How?” I smiled. “I’ll tell you later.”

“We still going back to Dallas tonight?”

“Soon as I fi nish talking to Wolf ’s guard.”

“What time’s the meeting?”

“The guards get off at eight, so I’m hoping around eight-thirty. Wolf says his guard likes to have a few drinks at the titty bar on Euclid before going home to beat his wife.”

She looked at her watch. “That’s like, six hours. What are we going to do till then?”

“Nap. It’s a long drive back to Dallas, and neither of us got any sleep last night.”

“You only got the one room today.”

“One room, two beds.”

“What, you think I’ll run away if I have my own room?”

“I think it would be harder for me to protect you.”

“But I’m safe for now. You said so yourself.”

“I said you should be safe for now. You want to take a chance?”

Chapter 34

For five hundred dollars and the promise of more to come, the guard was glad to smuggle Alison’s photo into Wolf Williams’ cell. I gave him the picture and cash in the parking lot behind the titty bar, and Alison and I were finally flying back down the highway to Dallas.

“I didn’t pose for any nude photo,” Alison said.

“It’s only important that Wolf thinks you did,” I said.

“I still don’t understand. He’s going to get the picture, he’s going to rub it with his finger, then what?”

“The reason the picture is in the plastic baggie, there’s a coating on it, made out of snake venom. There are hundreds of microscopic glass shards imbedded in the coating. When Wolf starts rubbing the photo, he’ll cut his finger and create an entry for the venom.”

“You’re insane,” she said.

“Probably.”

She gave me a look of exasperation. “I’m supposed to hang my life on that ridiculous plan?”

“Trust me, he’ll be dead fifteen minutes after getting the picture.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“I have.”

“What kind of person imbeds broken glass and snake venom onto a photograph in two hours’ time?”

“Say it.”

“What.”

“You’re glad you’re on my side.”

She shook her head. “You are seriously fucked up, Creed.”

“And you’re noisy in bed.”

She looked at me. “Are you talking about last night? For your information, that was an act.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What, you think I actually wanted you?”

I didn’t respond.

“Someone sure has a high opinion of himself,” she said.

I sighed.

“Touching you last night gave me the creeps,” she said, and she was just getting started.

It was a long ride back to Dallas.

Chapter 35

I’ve lived my entire adult life by what I call the phone call theory.

The way my theory goes, you can be good, bad, or somewhere in between. You can be rich, poor, or middle class. A winner or loser, a builder or breaker, a giver or taker, makes no difference: we’re all just a phone call away from a life-changing event.

I’ve seen it a thousand times: you can abuse your body or nurture it. You can be the most honest, loving, generous person on earth—or the worst. You can live your life by strategy or pure chance, run with gangs or walk with kings, doesn’t matter. We’re all hostage to the phone call. And if there’s one thing in life you can count on, it’s that at some point in your life, you’re going to get one of these calls.

Like Ronald Goldman, a waiter, Mezzaluna Restaurant, LA: June 13, 1994, he got a call that Nicole Simpson’s mother, Juditha, left her glasses at the restaurant. It was a call that changed his life.

Not all calls are bad.

Herbert Plant, former homeless guy, Worcester, England: got a call he’d won five million dollars playing the Lucky Dip Lottery.

Happens to someone every day. A guy with a perfect life gets a call. His white blood cell count is off the charts. A woman with a perfect life gets a call. Her husband is cheating on her. Or he just died in a car wreck.

Want to live like me? Every time the phone rings I wonder if this is the call that shatters my life or saves it. Not saying my life needs saving. I’m just saying.

So I’m in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, waiting to catch a flight to Nashville, when my cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and saw Kathleen was trying to reach me.

“What time does your plane get in?” she said.

“My plane?”

“Don’t tell me you’re still in Dallas.”

“Sorry.” I wondered what she was expecting me to do that day.

She sighed heavily. “You’ll at least be here by dinner, right?”

“In New York City? By dinner?”

“Oh. My. God, Donovan. Please tell me you didn’t forget.” She sounded heartbroken.

Of course I forgot. My life was running at warp speed. Until that very moment I was planning to hit Nashville running, kill Trish and Rob to satisfy the requirements of Victor’s creepy social experiment, then rush to Boston to start hunting Tara Siegel, to talk her out of using Callie’s girlfriend for her body double.

“Of course I haven’t forgotten. How could you possibly think that?” I said, stalling while forcing my brain to rewind.

“Thank God. You had me scared there for a minute.”

Something big was happening today with Kathleen and I needed to figure out what it was. “Just a sec,” I said, “I’ve got to give my credit card to the counter lady.”

I covered the mouthpiece and started a brain backtrack. The day before, Alison and I had driven to Lofton, where I’d met Wolf at the prison. Later that night I’d bribed his guard to deliver the death picture. Then we drove back to Dallas, where I helped Alison get settled into her new hotel room. I spent the next four hours giving her a crash course in how to help Darwin set up the terrorists. Afaya should be contacting Alison soon. Until then, she’d continue her Dallas audit of the local Park ‘N Fly as though nothing unusual happened the past two days. Wolf Williams’ body had been discovered, and Augustus Quinn was guarding Alison until I could work a deal with whoever wound up replacing Wolf as head of the Texas Syndicate. Darwin would let me know when that happened, and agreed to set up a meeting between me and the new boss.

“Any clue who’s first in line for the job?” I had asked Darwin.

“Could be any of a half-dozen guys,” he’d said. “It’ll probably be a guy on the outside this time.”