and said, “I accept. Thank you. I accept.”
He crept cat-swift, cat-silent through the house and quickly found the master
bedroom. Sufficient light was provided by another digital clock with green
numerals and the soft glow of a night-light coming through the open bathroom
door. Dr. and Mrs. Hudston were both asleep. Vince killed her first— Ssssnap.
—without waking her husband. She slept in the nude, so after he received her
sacrifice, he put his head to her bare breasts and listened to the stillness of
her heart. He kissed her nipples and murmured, “Thank you.”
When he circled the bed, turned on a nightstand lamp, and woke Dr. Hudston, the
man was at first confused. Until he saw his wife’s staring, sightless eyes. Then
he shouted and grabbed for Vince’s arm, and Vince clubbed him over the head
twice with the butt of the gun.
Vince dragged the unconscious Hudston, who also slept in the nude, into the
bathroom. Again, he found adhesive tape, with which he was able to bind the
doctor’s wrists and ankles.
He filled the tub with cold water and wrestled Hudston into it. That frigid bath
revived the doctor.
In spite of being naked and bound, Hudston tried to push up out of the cold
water, tried to launch himself at Vince.
Vince hit him in the face with the pistol and shoved him down into the tub
again.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Hudston spluttered as his face came up out of
the water.
“I’ve killed your wife and your son, and I’m going to kill you.”
Hudston’s eyes seemed to sink back into his damp, pasty face. “Jimmy? Oh, not
Jimmy, really, no.”
“Your boy is dead,” Vince insisted. “I blew his brains out.”
At the mention of his son, Hudston broke. He did not burst into tears, did not
begin to keen, nothing as dramatic as that. But his eyes went dead— blink—just
that abruptly. Like a light going out. He stared at Vince, but there was no fear
or anger in him any more.
Vince said, “What you’ve got here is two choices: die easy or die hard. You tell
me what I want to know, and I let you die easy, quick and painless. You get
stubborn on me, and I can draw it out for five or six hours.”
Dr. Hudston stared. Except for bright ribbons of fresh blood that banded his
face, he was very white, wet and sickly pale like some creature that swam
eternally in the deepest reaches of the sea.
Vince hoped the guy wasn’t catatonic. “What I want to know is what you have in
common with Davis Weatherby and Elisabeth Yarbeck.”
Hudston blinked, focused on Vince. His voice was hoarse and tremulous “Davis and
Liz? What are you talking about?”
“You know them?”
Hudston nodded.
“How do you know them? Go to school together? Live next door at one time?”
Shaking his head, Hudston said, “We. . . we used to work together at Banodyne.”
“What’s Banodyne?”
“Banodyne Laboratories.”
“Where’s that?”
“Here in Orange County,” Hudston said. He gave an address in the city of Irvine.
“What’d you do there?”
“Research. But I left ten months ago. Weatherby and Yarbeck still work there,
but I don’t.”
“What sort of research?” Vince asked.
Hudston hesitated.
Vince said, “Quick and painless—or hard and nasty?”
The doctor told him about the research he had been involved with at Banodyne.
The Francis Project. The experiments. The dogs.
The story was incredible. Vince made Hudston run through some of the details
three or four times before he was finally convinced the story was true.
When he was sure he had squeezed everything out of the man, Vince shot Hudston
in the face, point-blank, the quick death he’d promised.
Ssssnap.
Back in the van, driving down the night-draped Laguna Hills, away from the
Hudston house, Vince thought about the dangerous step he had taken. Usually, he
knew nothing about his targets. That was safest for him and for his employers.
Ordinarily he didn’t want to know what the poor saps had done to bring so much
grief on themselves, because knowing would bring him grief. But this was no