Fade To Midnight (8 page)

Kev tried not to smile. “That's funny, coming from a guy who just picked all my locks. Get out, Bruno. I'm working.”

Bruno grabbed a chair and straddled it. “I'll leave when you eat.”

Kev sighed. “It'll be hours,” he explained. “My stomach's fucked up. No digestive fluids. I'm not being difficult. It's a timing thing.”

“So I'll wait til you're better,” Bruno said.

Kev rubbed his throbbing forehead. “Thanks for caring, but no. I love you, man, but I'm busy now. Fuck off.”

“Make me,” Bruno said.

Kev exhaled slowly, dismayed. He'd managed this badly, out of exhaustion. Now there would be no getting rid of him without a fight.

He looked at the challenge in the younger man's eyes, the set of his jaw. He looked like Tony, with that expression. Scary thought.

Kev had taught Bruno to fight. Consequently, Bruno was lethally skilled, with the advantage of being ten years younger, buff as an Olympic athlete, and not currently recuperating from going over a waterfall. Kev's bones were still knitting. He was far from a hundred percent. He might prevail, but he'd pay a price he couldn't afford.

He decided to suck it up. “Whatever. Be bored, then.” He put the sunglasses back on. “Don't bug me, though.”

Bruno stared at Kev's face, trying to see past scars, skull, into the brain inside. Bruno was persistent. And ferociously intense. Two things Kev loved and respected about his adopted brother. They were also huge pains in the ass. But life was like that. Full of trade-offs.

“Tony's been asking about you,” Bruno said.

Kev stopped in the act of lifting coffee to his lips. He took a sip, not breathing so as not to smell the stuff. “Oh, yeah? And?”

“He worries about you,” Bruno said. “He's your family, too.”

Kev stared at the screen, but did not see what was on it. “Ah.”

Bruno cursed under his breath. “C'mon, Kev. Tony didn't take advantage of you on purpose,” he said gruffly. “He was just, you know. Being Tony. He can't help himself. And besides, he thought he was doing you a favor. Keeping you out of sight.”

“While doing unpaid menial labor for him, for years? Yeah. He's a real prince,” Kev said. “Tony doesn't do favors, Bruno. Nothing's for free. Not even for you, and you're his own flesh and blood.”

Bruno didn't deny it, since he couldn't. “He worries about you,” he repeated. “He really does. He's a mean old son of a bitch, but he does.”

Kev's silence was more eloquent than words could have been.

Bruno's mouth hardened. “What the fuck do you think he should have done for you, anyway?”

“Nothing,” Kev replied. “He was under no obligation to do anything. I have no reason to complain. If he hadn't saved me, I would have died. If he hadn't given me a place to be, I would have been homeless. I would have frozen to death on the streets that first winter.”

“So why are you so pissed?”

Kev shook his head. “I'm not pissed,” he said wearily. “Sure, I owed him. I owed him big. But I think I've worked out my indentured servitude by now, in sweat and blood.”

“He never thought of you that way,” Bruno said. “And fucked if you're not pissed. You're mortally pissed.”

Kev didn't have the energy to deny it again. He thought of those miserable, stifled years. Lying on a cot in the narrow, smelly room behind the restaurant where Tony had parked him during off hours. Freezing in the winter, roasting in the summer. Steeping in smells of stale boiled vegetables, and the reeking Dumpster in the alley behind. Washing with a plastic bucket and rag because the squalid bathroom back there had no shower. Splitting headaches, night after night, so bad they made him vomit. Nights filled with horrific dreams.

Crying into the dingy, flat pillow every night. So fucking alone. Unable to speak, but wanting to so badly, it made him want to explode. A big rock was sitting on top of his mind, squashing him flat. He knew he did not belong there, but he couldn't get any grip on where he did belong. He couldn't think a straight thought through from start to finish. Couldn't focus, or orient himself. He was locked in a purgatory of tedium and fear. Tony had shoved a dishrag in his hand, pushed him in the direction of a pile of greasy plates, and there he stayed. For years.

Until Bruno came to stay with Tony and Rosa. He was their grandnephew. Tony and Rosa's niece, Bruno's mother, had begged Tony and Rosa to take her son for a while, to get him away from his abusive stepfather. Just until she sorted things out and got free of him.

As it turned out, she'd sent Bruno away just in time. She hadn't sorted things out, or gotten free. She'd died right after. Badly.

As soon as he arrived, Bruno started following Kev around, talking incessantly. The fact that Kev was incapable of replying hadn't mattered to Bruno. He'd had enough talk for two. Twelve years old, traumatized by his mother's murder, jerked around by his hormones, bouncing off the ceiling. He'd desperately needed someone to listen, and Kev was the perfect listener. The quintessential captive audience.

Bruno's nonstop chatter and intense emotional need had been the first chink in the wall that closed Kev inside himself. Bruno had started the long, slow process of Kev's healing. It was no thanks to Tony.

He wasn't complaining. He had Tony to thank for his life, his skin, and a place to start healing. It was a lot. He had no reason to expect more. He couldn't blame Tony for not doing more, or caring more. There was no point. People were what they were. They cared, or they didn't. He was just damn lucky to have had Bruno.

This line of thought was making his gut cramp up. Who the fuck needed it? He turned his attention back to the computer.

After a while, Bruno got up and sprawled onto one of the couches, flipping channels until he found some sports event he liked. The squawk of the TV audio soon faded from Kev's consciousness as he systematically searched the vast pseudo-space of the Internet.

His current mode was to find data on all male Ostermans between the ages of fifty and seventy. He'd ruled out most of the ones in the Northwest. One still interested him; Christopher Osterman, research scientist, recently deceased. There were thousands of references to his cognitive research, but he hadn't found a photo yet. Many references were to “the Haven,” a mysterious research facility dedicated to optimizing brain function. Reading between the lines of the promo material, he concluded that the Haven was a think tank for rich kids whose parents wanted high-achieving offspring to feed their egos. The project had been dismantled after Osterman's death, three years before.

Many of the young people who had participated in the Haven had since gone on on to brilliant careers in medicine, science, or business, or so the promo material said. Further research appeared to back this claim up, but that could be more a function of wealth and connections than it was a result of Osterman's brain massages. Who knew?

Kev was currently browsing some Haven alumni he'd found on Facebook. They archly referred to themselves as “Club O,” and liked to reminisce online, exchanging pictures, memories, bragging and self-congratulation. In fact, he found them oddly repellent, as a group.

He was startled when Bruno spoke up from behind him. “It's been hours,” his brother said, belligerently. “Hungry yet?”

He'd forgotten that his body existed. He located his stomach in time and space, assessed its condition. Not optimal. “Not yet,” he said.

Bruno harrumped, and peered over Kev's shoulder. “Facebook? What, cruising for chicks now? Is it the lust thing, kicking your ass?”

Kev snorted. “I'm looking at online photo albums. Alumni of this place called the Haven. Dr. Christopher Osterman ran the place. He did cognitive research. Brain enhancement. Big network of alums.”

“How did you get into these peoples' Facebook pages?”

Kev gave him a look, and Bruno rolled his eyes. “OK. Stupid question. Never mind. Cognitive research? Brain experiments? So you've been altered. Ah! Yes. That would explain what a whack job you are.”

“It would,” Kev agreed, unoffended. “This guy died a few years ago, though. A fire in his lab, they say. I want to see a photo of him.”

“Excuse me? You want to look at a picture of this freak? The last time you saw someone you thought looked like this Osterman, you went into a fugue state and practically killed an innocent neurosurgeon!”

“Shut up, Bruno,” Kev said absently, still clicking. “I'm busy.”

Bruno subsided, grumbling. “If you freak out and attack me, I'll kick your sorry ass to hell and back,” he warned. “I won't hold back just because you're a pathetic bag of bones. Be warned.”

Kev clicked on yet another photo. His eyes flashed over faces, his hand already clicking to magnify them as a name in the caption registered.

The illustrious, late, great Doctor O explains it all for us.

His hand froze on the mouse. It was set to increase magnification by ten percent at each click, but with no new activity, it defaulted to one magnification per second, the center being at the cursor. The picture zoomed in on the guy in a white lab coat. Close-set dark eyes. His arms flung over the shoulders of two teenagers. Mouth open, in a big laugh.

Kev couldn't move. His muscles were frozen. He couldn't even blink. Switches were flicking on and off inside his brain, he could not control them. He observed, as the power grids in his brain started to go dark, that the guy really did look like Patil. Patil was darker, being Indian. Dr. O looked like the Greek or Italian version of the same man.

The pressure built in his brain. He struggled to breathe, to move.

Kev? What the fuck? Kev, what's the matter? Hey! Kev!

It was Bruno's voice, faraway. He couldn't answer. Couldn't look at the other man. Muscles frozen. Falling back, into the dark oubliette.

Oh fucking shit, man, no! Don't do this to me again…

Bruno's frantic voice faded into the distance. The photo got bigger. The face filled the screen. The mouth. Bigger and bigger.

Pop, pop.
Something gave way in his eye. A hot rush of liquid down his cheek. Broken blood vessel. A haze of red obscured his vision. That red, toothy mouth stretched wider and wider, hungry to devour. The image widened still more, into a meaningless checkerboard of pixels.

Lights out.

“C
ome on, you geek freak son of a bitch. It's me, Bruno. Not that Osterman turd, so don't try a fucking stress flashback when you open your eyes, or I'll rip your throat out. This bullshit is pissing me off!”

Bruno yelled the words, leaning over Kev's hospital bed, but there was no response. Kev looked like a marble statue. It made Bruno's stomach hurt. Over twenty-four hours, and no sign of waking. Another coma, or something like it. The doctors were baffled.

Fuck this shit. Fuck it in every orifice.

Tony grunted from the other side of the bed. “Ain't you just a charmer,” he said. “Whisperin' sweet nothings in his ear.”

Bruno blew out an explosive breath and sprawled back in his chair, drumming his fingers on the plastic table. “We tried nice last time he woke up,” he said sourly. “He didn't respond well. He liquefied Patil's face. It's safer to be rude. That way, there's no mistake about who's busting his balls.” He leaned over Kev again. “Not the Osterman motherfucker, hear me? It's that pain in the ass, Bruno! Anybody home in there?” He tweaked Kev's nose. “Hey! Butthead! Hello! Anybody?”

Kev's face did not change. Bruno flung himself back into the chair, muttering. Tony sat on the other side, like a stone monolith, his slablike face grim. But Tony's default expression was always grim. He was a Marine, an ex-drill sergeant, a Vietnam vet. Habitually pissed off. Most of what Uncle Tony saw around him annoyed the living shit out of him. Bruno and Kev impartially included, for the most part.

Kev in a coma again? That pissed old Uncle Tony off bigtime.

Kev looked so pale and still. Like Mamma, in her coffin. The funeral parlor guys had been creative in covering up the damage Rudy had done to her face. She'd looked weirdly peaceful, lying there.

But unlike Mamma, Kev genuinely was weirdly peaceful. Even before he relearned how to talk, Kev was super mellow. He never lost his temper. Unless someone fucked with him, of course, at which point, he morphed into a demon dervish, and kicked that unlucky someone's ass to hell and back. Karate, kung fu, judo, aikido, jujitsu, all of them were mixed into in Kev's unique fighting style. He was un-fucking-beatable.

In fact, his fighting skills had inspired Kev's chosen surname. After the incident at the diner, Tony started calling him Kevlar. It stuck. And when Kev was talking well enough to want a surname, he went with Kev Larsen. It was Kev's weird, quirky idea of a joke, though it was also a bland, under-the-radar nordic name that fit him well enough. He could be a Swede, or a Dane. Tall, sinewey, lots of dirt-blond hair. A yellowish cast to his skin, rather than nordic skim-milk white, but with that stoic expression, he was a classic, battle-scarred Viking warrior. All he needed were braids, a horned helmet, and a mantle of shaggy fur.

So Kev Larsen it was, though Bruno took pains to point out that only a narcissistic pussy would tattoo his own name on his own leg. He'd once tried to bust Kev's balls by insisting that Kev had been a gay boy before Tony found him, and Kev was actually the name of his lover.

But Kev never responded appropriately to ball busting. His grin pulled weirdly at the scars on his cheek as he grabbed Bruno's ass and made smooching sounds til Bruno ran for cover.

Teasing about Kev's gayness had ended abruptly there.

Bruno lifted the hospital sheet, stared at Kev's leg. His calf was furred with dark blond hair, sinewy and bulging with hard muscle. The tattoo was very small. The three irregular letters were a crooked, blurry bluish smudge beneath his body hair. It looked like a bruise.

He flung the sheet down. It made him twitchy and rattled. His own vulnerability, staring him down, scaring him shitless. Kev was the pillar in the center that held up the roof of his whole life. More so than Uncle Tony, more so than Aunt Rosa. Kev had saved Bruno's ass. Kev had given payback for what Rudy had done to Mamma. Some, anyway. It could never be enough. But it was a shitload better than nothing.

Kev couldn't die. Life would be unthinkable without him. Bruno didn't usually think in those squishy emotional terms, but seeing how similar Kev looked right now to the way Mamma had looked in her coffin, after Rudy got through with her—it got to him, deep inside, in places he preferred to ignore. And being aware of it made him aware of his other stupid, irrelevant feelings, too. Like, for instance, how jealous he was of this hypothetical fucking family that Kev might or might not find. No, amend that.
Would
find. If they were out there, Kevlar would find them. The guy was as focused as a freight train.

Kev's real family. Bruno could never be part of that, if it existed. This perfect family would enfold Kev to their bosoms and overwhelm him with their wonderfulness, at which point Kev would forget that the wiseass pain in the ass punk Bruno Ranieri ever existed. There would be a pie-baking mamma, wielding a wooden spoon, a benevolent dad with a pot belly. Brothers and sisters who looked like him, understood him, knew things about him that Bruno would never know.

Take a fucking pill.
Families like that didn't exist, except on TV. Families were, by definition, fucked up. But blood was blood.

It was a stupid thing to be worrying about, though, since Kev hadn't even woken up yet. He still looked like a goddamn corpse. In fact, Kev's blood family was the least of Bruno's current worries.

He hadn't felt like such hammered shit since Mamma's death. Every muscle hurt. He had a headache, from grinding his teeth. He hadn't gone into Lost Boys since Kev's episode, yesterday morning. They were managing fine without him, thank God. He'd be useless anyhow. All he would do was snap, growl, and criticize.

Truth was, he was not terribly surprised by the recent series of events. There had always been something precarious about Kev's very existence. A sense of lurking danger. The unknowns, the questions, the bizarre violence wreaked upon him. Bruno had been waiting for the other shoe to drop since he'd met the guy. It had finally dropped, over a three-hundred-foot waterfall. And the sky was coming down along with it.

Even Kev's inexplicable flashes of genius were unnerving. Just when Bruno thought he knew the guy front and back, whammo, he'd discover that Kev had some new freakishly overdeveloped skill, or rocket scientist body of knowledge. Kevlar, International Man Of Mystery, strikes again. Maybe the guy was actually a stranded space alien.

Huh. Actually, that hypothesis would explain a whole lot.

Too bad that trip over the waterfall hadn't knocked some plain old common sense into his head. It was the one thing Kev lacked. So far, Bruno filled the gap, but only because Kev didn't care enough to stop him. Like with money. Kev sincerely didn't give a flying fuck about it. He'd invent some ingenious marketable thing on some sleepless night, play with it for a few hours, toss it in the closet and forget about it.

Kev's gizmos had given Bruno the idea for Lost Boys Flywear. They'd opened seven years ago as a stunt kite outfit, to exploit some of Kev's kite designs, and branched out from there into quirky educational toys. Kev provided the brilliant ideas, artistic designs, manufacturing plans. Bruno took care of the business, the marketing. The scut work. Everybody had his gift. His was for making money.

The venture worked. He'd arranged for Kev's designs to be patented, to significant profit. Lost Boys was going strong. Neither of them was hurting for dough, or had any reason to hurt for it for the rest of their lives, if they were careful. And minimally practical, of course.

But Kev just wasn't. He was as likely, today or tomorrow, to give it all away to a stranger he met on the street.

Bruno figured he should cut the guy some slack. He was brain damaged, after all. Something had to give. But it was like watching somebody set hundred dollar bills on fire. It made Bruno's ass twitch. It came from growing up on the uglier side of Newark. Bruno liked a big, wide safety net. Lots of soft, puffy financial cushions under him.

Kev was happy to dance on a wire over the lion cage.

Like those poker winnings. Tens of thousands of bucks every night, stuffed through the letter slot of whatever charitable organization happened to be on his walking trajectory. Crazy shit. But he loved the guy. Goddamnit. Right now, he wished like hell that he didn't.

“He's barkin' up the wrong tree,” Tony said heavily.

The words startled Bruno out of his unhappy reverie. “Huh?” he said, grumpily. “What tree?”

“Looking for this Otterman fucker,” Tony clarified.

“Osterman,” Bruno corrected.

“Whatever. Looking for some lily-white scientist prick is a waste of time. Brain experiments, my hairy old ass. He was tortured by a professional. It takes practice and a hard stomach to do what they did to him. That says career criminal. That says mafia. Believe me, I know.” He glanced sidewise at Bruno. “So should you, kid.”

Bruno shrugged that off. He disliked references to the mafia turf wars his mom's boyfriend Rudy had been embroiled in when Bruno was a kid. Bruno's Mamma, too, by association. Thinking about it made him feel like shit, so he tried hard not to. Tony had run away from the life himself, decades before, to the war in Vietnam. He'd never gone back.

“A scientist could hire career criminals to do his dirty work,” Bruno argued. “The mafia aren't the only ones who can figure out how to hurt somebody.”

Tony waved that away with a big, bolt-knuckled hand. “He should be looking through military records of special forces troops reported missing in action in August of 1992. Or checking out mug shots of mobsters operating in Seattle. I'm tellin' you, he was special ops, undercover on a domestic mission. He got on the bad side of some big criminal organization, and they decided to take him out. Simple.”

Bruno grunted. “Nothing about Kev is simple. I saw what happened when he saw that photograph.”

Tony made a hawking sound in his throat. “Fuckin' coincidence.”

“Kev was a scientist,” Bruno asserted stubbornly. “Ever seen his bathroom books? Biochemistry, aeronautic engineering?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Come on. Give me a fuckin' break. A fuckin' scientist, trained in eight different styles of martial arts?”

This was a decade-old argument, and totally pointless, but Bruno's innate cussedness made the words pop out. “I know you think any guy who ever went to college is a pussy, but the opposite is just as improbable. It's as likely that a scientist would learn martial arts as it is that a Navy Seal or a Ranger would study theoretical physics for fun.”

Tony shook his head. “That kind of fighting ain't for fun,” he said darkly. “A guy doesn't train like that unless he has to, to survive. Kev ain't no fuckin' dilettante. He was a career fighter. Remember Rudy?”

Goddamn Tony. Like Bruno's mood needed another crushing blow. The last thing he needed to think about was the day Rudy had gone after Mamma. He'd gone after her a lot. But that day, he hadn't stopped.

That time, she'd died. Head injuries, a ruptured liver, a broken rib that perforated her lung. Other stuff he couldn't even bear to think about. And Rudy got away with it, on a bureaucratic technicality related to how the evidence was collected. Rudy had connections with the local don. He was protected by corrupt police. He was untouchable.

But Bruno had witnessed him hitting Mamma on countless occasions, and Bruno was set to testify at the trial. So Rudy and two of his mafioso henchmen had flown out to Portland, to simplify things.

They'd concluded that the best time to nab Bruno was early morning, at his uncle's diner, where he went to eat breakfast before school. Nobody on the streets, the uncle asleep in the apartment upstairs. Just the kid, eating his eggs with the fucked up retard who lived out back. The guy who mopped floors and washed dishes for Tony. The one who couldn't talk. How fucking convenient was that.

Bruno remembered every minute of that morning with weird clarity. He'd pounded at the door of the diner at five in the morning, until Kev got up and let him in, like always. He'd perched at the counter, talking a mile a minute while Kev cooked and served breakfast. Three eggs, over medium, with lots of pepper, grilled ham, white bread toast with big, gluey globs of grape jelly.

Then Rudy and the two other guys burst in. They grabbed him off the stool. Rudy wrenched the locket Mom had given him off his neck, the one he wore day and night. He dragged Bruno toward the door.

What happened after was like an action film sequence, viewed from an upside down artistic angle, bent over, arm torqued, screaming bloody murder. A dinner plate hit one guy with lethal precision on the bridge of the nose like the fucking Frisbee of death, and the man smashed into the curved glass of the pastry counter, ass wedged into the cream pies. Blood, glass, rice pudding, coconut custard everywhere.

Then Kev flew out, transformed. Bruno was dumped when the storm hit. He rolled under the table and watched. Big eyed. Slack jawed.

It wasn't a fair fight, even with the knives the other guys held. Those guys couldn't land a blow. Kev ducked, swerved, evaded every assault with casual grace. Sent Rudy spinning back with a kick to his face that sent him reeling over a table, arms flailing. Seized the other guy who was rushing him, flipped him like a doll. Sent him flying headfirst through the front window. Rudy's bellow of challenge blended with the shattering crash, but his headlong rush ended just like the other attacks. A flurry of motion, a flip, a twist, a thud, and Rudy was on the ground on his side, arm broken, his own knife protruding from his ass. The fork Bruno had used for his eggs was stuck in Rudy's groin, standing up grotesquely. Rudy curled in on himself, screaming and pawing at the red spreading on his crotch with his uninjured hand.

Tony heard the window. He came running down in his shorts and undershirt. He looked over the carnage, yanked the weeping Bruno out from under the table, looked him over and gave him a whack upside the head. He gave the wheezing Rudy an unfriendly nudge with his toe. He gave Kev an assessing look.