Choice of Evil (15 page)

The chopped-down Jeep the Mole uses for a shuttle rolled up on the other side of the gate, its unmuffled growl blending with that of the pack. Terry was at the wheel. He took one look through the Plymouth’s windshield and jumped off his seat so fast he almost stomped on a couple of the dogs.

“Mom!” he called out, running toward us.

Simba was there by then, but he didn’t challenge, just stepped back and watched mother and son embrace. I couldn’t tell anything from his wolfish grin, but he looked safer than he usually does. I stepped out while I waited for Terry to open the gate so I could stash the car inside.

“Go ahead, Burke,” the kid called over to me. “Take the Jeep. Mom and I’ll walk over, okay?”

The kid wanted to spend some time with her alone, I guessed. I took off quick. Let Terry deal with Michelle trying to walk a quarter-mile of junkyard in four-inch heels.

S
imba trotted alongside the Jeep, easily keeping pace—anything over ten miles an hour was a life-risking move on that terrain, and the trail was marked so faintly I had to steer mostly with my eyes anyway. When I got to the clearing near the Mole’s bunker, I saw the cut-down oil drum he uses as a lounge chair was empty, so I sat down on it myself and lit a smoke.

“Mole?” I asked Simba.

The beast knew the word. But he gave me another close look, not moving. I got it then. He wasn’t a sight hound, couldn’t be sure it
was
me. Only thing to do was let him hear my voice some more.

“Simba,” I called out softly. “Mighty Simba-witz, Lion of Zion. You remember me, boy? I sure remember
you.
Such a valiant warrior you are. Come on, Simba. Go get the Mole for me, okay?”

The big dog nodded his head, accepting me, aural memory kicking in. Then he took off, a rust-colored shadow in a city the same color. I wasn’t even done with my smoke by the time the Mole appeared. Like he always does, without a word.

“Mole!” I greeted him.

And he returned the greeting the same way he answers the phone—silently, waiting to hear whatever you have to say.

“Can you take a look at something for me?” I asked him.

Again, he was silent. But he moved close enough for me to show him what I’d brought: a blow-up of the little icon from the top of the handle of the killer’s ninja spike. “You know what this is?” I asked him.

“Terry. . .” he started to say, just as the kid himself walked up, Michelle on his arm.

“Look, it’s Mom!” the kid practically shouted. The Mole’s only reaction was to blink rapidly behind those Coke-bottle lenses of his, standing rooted to his spot. Michelle closed the ground between them, wavering a bit on the spike heels, but making progress. The Mole didn’t move, just watched her, his mouth open in the same amazement he always shows every time he sees her.

Michelle planted a chaste kiss on the Mole’s cheek and he turned a dozen shades of red. “Well?” Michelle demanded, doing a spin in front of him to show off her outfit.

“You look. . . beautiful, Michelle,” he finally said.

“Yes, I do. And you can tell me all about it later,” she said, her head nodding toward the opening to the Mole’s underground bunker. That about finished the poor bastard, and I knew I had to move fast if I was going to get mine before he got his, so I said, “Mole, what about this?” and practically shoved the photocopy under his nose.

“Terry knows about that,” the Mole said.

Which, of course, got Michelle interested. “What
is
that? Some kind of dinosaur?”

“It’s a velociraptor,” Terry said confidently, looking over her shoulder.

“A what?” I asked him.

“Wait, I’ve got a whole book about them,” the kid said, taking off like a shot.

“He’s a genius,” Michelle gushed. “Just like his father.”

The Mole looked everywhere but at Michelle, back to total silence.

“Terry’s interested in stuff like that, Mole?” I asked. “Dinosaurs and all.”

“He is interested in everything,” the Mole replied, unable to keep the love-pride from clogging his voice. “His CD-ROM library is. . . extensive. And I. . . help too.”

Sure. Terry was probably the only kid in America home-schooled in a junkyard, but his tutor was light-years ahead of anything walking around a university. Terry wouldn’t be there much longer. College was coming. And when they weren’t fighting about where he’d go—Michelle wanted him
close
—they were caught up in that proud sadness when your child turns a major corner. And moves another step away.

But now the Mole and Michelle weren’t moving, they were waiting. Another couple of minutes and the kid came bounding out the opening to the bunker, his arms full of books. “It’s better on the computer,” he said, “but I thought. . .”

He didn’t have to finish—Michelle and the Mole were already on their way downstairs, and spectators weren’t what they were going to need for a while. The kid slapped together a desk from wooden milk crates and assorted planks, then he laid out his stuff for me.

“Mongolia’s got the best fossil beds,” Terry told me. Not a trace of officiousness in his voice, just the facts. Like his old man. “In the Gobi Desert. Near the Flaming Cliffs. That’s where they found the first one. About seventy years ago.”

“The first. . .?”

“Velociraptor,” the kid said. “It means ‘swift plunderer.’ It was maybe about the size of a turkey, but it really packed a wallop.”

“I thought raptors could fly,” I said.

“They can
now,
” the kid said patiently. “There’s a system—it’s called cladistics—to identify extinct animals and group them according to the characteristics they share. Scientists usually only have skeletons to look at, so they concentrate on stuff like a certain bone in the wrist, a hole in the hip joint. . . even the number of toes on a foot.”

“And this. . . velociraptor was like a bird that way?”

“Sure. They both have three primary toes on their hind feet. And necks that curve into an S shape. And, see here,” he said, pointing, “velociraptor has long arms, and a wrist bone like a bird’s wing. There’s other common characteristics too: like how nerves travel from the brain, the air spaces in the skull, and the construction of the hips and thighs. It may even have built nests like birds and tended its eggs and all.”

“But not fly?”

“Not in that. . . stage. We don’t know if it disappeared, or just evolved into something else. Like the eohippus into the horse, see?”

“Sure,” I said. The kid was already talking like his father—what I really needed was a translator.

“Look at the skeleton,” he said, pointing again. “From the sizes of the various bones, and the light, delicate structure of the limbs, you can see it was probably a fast, nimble runner. It wasn’t huge or anything, but it was well armed. See this?” he asked, pointing to a large, hook-shaped piece coming out of the toe joint. “They call it a ‘killing claw,’ so it was probably used to hunt other animals, not to dig in the ground or anything. Velociraptors had more than
eighty
teeth, some of them over an inch long, and each with a sharp, jagged edge. Awesome, huh?”

“Were they. . . I don’t know. . . smart?”

“Probably,” the kid assured me. “The brain was large and complex. That means that they were probably intelligent, with good hearing and eyesight, and even a good sense of smell.”

“So they were like predatory birds—hawks and all—but they worked the ground, right?” I asked him. Thinking how human vultures never have to fly to feed.

“We really don’t know,” the kid said solemnly. “Only one truly great specimen was ever discovered—a fossil. And it shows a velociraptor and a protoceratops locked in deadly combat.”

“But nobody knows who started that one?”

“Or who finished it either. Like a movie where you have to leave before it’s over. But, from all I read, it seems like velociraptor was a great hunter. And a great fighter too. The evidence. . . I mean, what they found. . . it had characteristics of both birds and crocodiles—that’s those rows of teeth and all. And those are both still around—birds and crocodiles, I mean. So I don’t think it died out, the way the bigger ones did—it was too well adapted to its environment. It probably just. . . evolved into something else.”

Was that his message?
I thought to myself.
That he hadn’t died, just evolved? That he was a perfect predator for the times, and he’d move along once his work was done?

“Which do you think?” I asked the kid.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you said it had characteristics of both birds and crocodiles, right? So it had to go in one of those directions if it was going to survive.”

“Birds,” the kid said, unhesitatingly.

“Why? Crocs are ancient. I mean, they go all the way back to. . .”

“They both build nests, right? Birds and crocodiles. But only birds take care of their babies when they’re born. When the baby crocs are born, they’re on their own.”

“And you think that’s the key to survival?”

“For the higher life-forms? Sure. It makes sense, right?”

“If it does,” I asked him, “what the fuck are
we
still doing on this planet?”

The kid—this kid whose bio-parents had sold him like a used car—looked at me for a long moment. Then he said: “We’re not all like. . . that.” And then he glanced toward the bunker where his real parents were being with each other.

I nodded, agreeing. But not believing. The human race
is
a race. And I’m not sure parents like Michelle and the Mole are winning it.

“Would anyone be likely to recognize this?” I asked the kid, showing him the icon again, working for a smooth transition, moving as far away from the other as I could get.

“Sure, if they knew anything about the subject. Like a paleontologist. But not from the name.”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Velociraptor’ was the name they used in
Jurassic Park.
You know, the movie? But the ones there were nothing like the
real
ones. If you said ‘velociraptor’ to the average kid, he’d never think it looked anything like
this.
”

I lit another smoke. “You did great, Terry,” I told the kid. Thinking maybe I had something to make that polygraph key really sing, now that I had lyrics to go with the music.

M
ichelle was quiet on the drive back, and I knew better than to break the silence. She could dissect my sex life for hours without batting an eyelash, and she’d turned every kind of trick there was before she took herself off the streets and went to the phones to make a living, but even mentioning her and the Mole together was total taboo.

Terry was always a safe topic with her—she loved that kid way past her own life—and she would have been proud about how he’d helped me out. But she was so inside herself that I didn’t even tap on the door. Just took her absentminded kiss on the cheek before she slipped out in front of her place and then motored over to Mama’s.

Red-dragon tapestry in the front window. Maybe Lorraine had found Xyla already. Or maybe not. I pulled around the back, flat-handed the metal slab of a door, and waited. One of Mama’s crew opened the door, a guy I hadn’t seen before. I could swear his face was Korean, but I knew how Mama was about things like that, so I kept the thought to myself. He said something over his shoulder and one of the guys who knew me answered him. The new man stepped aside to let me pass, his right hand still in the pocket of his apron. Whatever was out front wasn’t
that
dangerous, anyway.

It was Xyla. Sitting in my booth, facing toward the back, working her way through a plate of dim sum someone had provided. Good sign. Mama served strangers toxic waste—her real customers never came for the food.

“What’s up?” she greeted me. “Lorraine said you were looking for me.”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down. “Be with you in a minute.”

It was less than that before the tureen of hot-and-sour soup was placed before me. I filled the small bowl myself, drained it quickly. I glanced toward where Mama was working at her register, but I couldn’t risk it—had two more bowls before I waved at the waiter to take the rest away. I didn’t offer any to Xyla, and she seemed to understand. . . just sat there, chewing delicately on her own food, waiting.

“What kind of name is Xyla?” I said, my tone telling her I really was interested, not putting her down. I wanted to start cutting her out of the herd if I could, form my own relationship, just in case Lorraine’s old hostility flared up and she tried to cut
me
out first.

“My mom gave it to me,” she said, chuckling. “It comes from ‘Xylocaine.’. . . Mom said if it wasn’t for Xylocaine my old man never could’ve lasted long enough to get her pregnant.”

“Damn! That’s cold.”

“It was a joke,” she said, watching me carefully. “The kind you tell your daughter when she’s old enough to ask where her father is. . . and you don’t know the answer.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah,” she said, dismissing it—an old wound, healed. But it still throbbed when the weather was wrong.

I’d made a mistake. My specialty with women. So I switched subjects as smoothly as I could. “I got the word I want you to use,” I told her. It’s ‘velociraptor.’ Can you—?”

“Like in
Jurassic Park
? Sure. How do you spell that?” she asked me, pulling a little notebook from the pocket of her coat.

I did it, thinking how on the money Terry had been.

“Okay,” she said. “But why would he—?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “It’s just a word. One he’ll recognize. You got a secure address? For yourself, I mean. One he could go to with an answer if he wanted?”

“I can make one,” she said confidently. “Take about a minute. No problem. What do you want me to do, exactly?”

“Look, I’m no pro at this stuff. You said a couple of things, remember? One, people are looking for him on the Net, right? And two, he could be out there. . .”

“Lurking.”

“Yeah. Lurking. He could
see
the traffic. . . but without him banging in, nobody would know he was there?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. So I want to send him a message too. Only I don’t want to make it public. And I don’t have his address. You could post like a. . . I don’t know. . .
general
message for him, only put it into encryption, so he’d need a program to open it and read it?”