Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  Christ, Klepsky. Try to remember, you’re one of the good guys, which means you marshal these unhealthy impulses if you can’t extinguish them, as opposed to making them your master.

  Klepsky had gotten so distracted running the tape in his head about how things might play out between him and Gorman that he had to rewind the recording on the cellphone. The more he listened to Gorman’s voice, the more he really did sound like the dutiful lover that would have him covered in all the areas Klepsky couldn’t take care of himself. He was starting to feel guilty for not using and abusing Gorman the way he used and abused Adrian. The boy was begging for it. The twenty-eight-year-old man-boy. Klepsky wasn’t particularly proud of the fact that all his relationships came with strings attached, but those were the times in which they lived. If you just needed someone to love and love you back, you got a dog.

  The tape rewound all the way and stopped automatically. Klepsky pressed play and Ed’s voice commenced almost immediately. “David Clancy, age twenty-one, started distinguishing himself from the age of three by immersing himself in his parents’ medical books. Father specializes in synthetic biology. Mother in genetic enhancement.”

  “Shiiiiit! Your alter ego does a lot better at not wasting my time, Gorman.” Klepsky cut off the rest of the adlib so he could keep up with Gorman’s data dump.

  “By age nine they had to take David to work with them because he’d consumed everything they had at home, despite having a collection to rival the library of congress. They set him to playing over in the corner. He soon realized that the only way to get their attention was to help them advance their research in some way. By the time he was twelve he was solely responsible for supporting their flagging careers. Both parents published their findings in prestigious journals taking all the credit for their child’s work, and becoming quite famous in the process.”

  “That had to create some resentment,” Klepsky adlibbed.

  “The kid’s resentment grew less out of their not sharing credit for his work than out of their not wanting to pay him any attention or show any excitement around him except for when he was handing over some new breakthrough. They had little love for the boy, and even less time. By all accounts, the Clancy’s should never have had children; they were far too career-obsessed.”

  “So what happened to the kid?”

  “I guess that’s up to you to find out.”

  It was weird how Gorman had paused for him to make the predictable adlib remark before answering him. It added that extra layer of intimacy between them. The way lovers know each other so well they know what the other person is going to say before they say it.

  Klepsky let the tape roll over hissing dead air as he continued to play the game. “So how is it you came by this information anyway?”

  “Easy. The FBI has had their eyes on the kid for some time. So have a handful of other agencies—that we know of. You don’t get to be this bright without being on someone’s radar. You might want to keep that in mind when you interview him. This kid would have to know he’s being watched and would have to be good at playing the innocent rube not just if he’s actually innocent, but if he’s guilty.”

  Klepsky nodded. “And the parents?”

  “Both dead. Mysterious circumstances.”

  “Who’s looking after the kid?”

  “Emancipated from the age of fifteen. He has legally been his own guardian since then. The Feds rushed through the paperwork in his favor on the condition that he solve cases for them that hinge on dicey forensic evidence. Seems to not demand enough of his time for him to care enough to object.”

  “Thanks, Ed.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Klepsky had been driving a while, forgetting to pause the tape so that another suspect wouldn’t queue up before he was ready for it. That’s when he heard, “So, you referring to me by my first name… does that mean?”

  Klepsky snorted, realizing that he was indeed having a live conversation with Gorman, and not listening to a taped voice. Gorman must have had a hidden camera in the car to keep an eye on him, replete with audio.

  “You know where I live?” Klepsky said.

  “Is that a trick question?”

  “Yeah, of course you do. Have my full-size bed downstairs swapped out for some gym mats and a boxing ring. You okay with me pummeling you to within an inch of your life as a form of foreplay? I’ll fuck you after I finally knock you out. Don’t worry, I’ll still be fucking you when you come to.”

  He heard Gorman come over the line, long, hard, and loud. “I’m so sorry, sir. I’ll never do that again without permission.”

  “You were beating off the whole time you were briefing me on Clancy?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, is that another trick question?”

  Klepsky grunted and smiled wearily. “You sure you want to be this useful to me, Ed? I tend to lean on people who are closest to me the hardest. You know what that means?”

  “I’m going to be working from home a lot while I nurse my bruises? Not to worry, sir. Most of my work is done over the internet. I can have whatever equipment I need moved to your apartment, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Yeah, Ed, that’s fine.” Klepsky pulled the car to the curb. He was at David Clancy’s. He was wondering how smart of an idea it was to go in there without backup.

  “Don’t worry, sir. I’ve got your back. I’ve got surveillance on you from the car all the way into Clancy’s flat. And I have black and whites rolling to your location now. If they’re needed they’ll be inside before…”

  “I like that you read me so well, Ed, you’re practically living inside my head too. I’ve been a loner all my life, and it’s kind of a nice feeling. It’s certainly not one I’m used to.”

  He swore he could hear Ed smile as he got out of the car. “I do have to ask, though, why David Clancy? If he’s no longer a child, he doesn’t really fit our profile exactly, does he? Speaking to Adrian’s point, I mean, about how fantasy and reality are harder to tease apart in a kid’s mind than it is in an adult’s. Hence these surreal murders.”

  “I don’t know, sir, speaking for overgrown kids everywhere, I’m not sure we ever grow out of that. I’m way more keyed to my X-Box than to the real world. In fact, if it weren’t for the FBI-FD…”

  “Ok, Ed. I’m sold.”

  Moments later, Klepsky knocked on Clancy’s door.

  ***

  David Clancy opened the door on Klepsky dressed in nothing but his gym shorts and a pair of sneakers. He had all the body definition of a kid who played a lot of sports. He was sweating up a storm as if he’d been playing a round of basketball. As it turned out, he was. His flat was spacious enough, and the ceiling high enough, to accommodate a half-court, if not a full one, and he went back to playing his game. He did so without asking who the hell Klepsky was, why he was here, or why a strange man wanted inside his apartment.

  He seemed content to play basketball so long as Klepsky was content to watch. But when Klepsky’s eyes wandered to the bank of computers to one side of the basketball court and he got caught up with playing with a mouse attached to one of them, the kid came over and took a seat. It seemed Klepsky was only welcome here so long as David was the star attraction.

  “It’s what I’m working on right now,” he said.

  “And what is that?”

  “An anti-aging solution, of course. I’m twenty-one. If I can’t stop the aging process there, it’s all over. Already, I can no longer maintain an erection for more than ten orgasms a day. If things get any worse… Who can live like that?”

  Klepsky smiled despite himself. Stood up from leaning over the monitor; it wasn’t doing anything for his lower back or his neck. He rubbed the back of his neck, figuring the lower back could take care of itself. No way was he keeping both hands occupied standing in a room with a potential killer. “So tell me, kid, how did you kill your parents?”

  David twitched his eyebrows playfully, like it was all a big joke, and said
, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Klepsky turned his back on the kid and started giving the place a closer going over with his eyes. The teen rushed around in front of him before he’d taken a few steps, bounced the basketball off of Klepsky’s chest. “Can’t stand to have my eyes off you, can you?” Klepsky said.

  “As a matter of fact, no. What do you think that means?” He kept bouncing the basketball off of Klepsky’s chest and backing up as Klepsky kept pushing forward.

  “That you’re another emotionally needy adolescent who craves attention. Get in line, kid. I don’t get enough either. Nobody gets enough. It’s these sucky times we live in. You want to make the world a better place? Figure out how to fix it by using your God-given talents. Maybe you shouldn’t be working on anti-aging. Maybe you should be working on love potions, or love stories if you fancy being in the movies, things that encourage people to get closer to one another.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” he said half-heartedly.

  He brought his eyes back up to meet Klepsky’s, and after starting to retreat into himself shoved the ball with both hands harder than ever at Klepsky’s chest. “Hey, I thought you wanted to know how I killed my parents?”

  “And I thought you promised to try to focus more on giving instead of getting as a cure to your emotional neediness.”

  “What, you think I’m making up a story about how I killed them just to keep your attention on me and to get you to stay a while longer?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Hey, not even I’m that desperate for attention, okay.”

  “Yes, you are.” Klepsky pointed to all the pictures. “They’re all of you. Not one of your parents.”

  “As you might have guessed from me killing them, I really didn’t like them.”

  “No, these are shots of you celebrating your life, all the highpoints, the way you wished your parents did.”

  “Hey, you can stop trying to prove you’re a detective, okay? I figured that much out before I let you in the door.”

  When Klepsky moved his pointing finger as if he were going to lay another revelation on him, the kid bounced the ball off him and said, “Come on, play a game with me? Bet I’ll wipe the court with you.”

  Klepsky craned his neck to take in the upstairs loft that had been added last minute, and not really incorporated into the design of the house. No doubt to make up for the space eaten up by the basketball court. “Upstairs where you keep the photos of all the people you encourage to come in and play with you? So you can imagine them as your friends and family members?”

  “Hey, stop it!” the teen said, slamming the ball against his forehead. If Klepsky didn’t have such a hard head, the kid would have knocked him out. Klepsky cracked one of those walnuts in his trench coat pocket in one hand, before letting go of the tension. He didn’t do so well with disrespect, especially coming from adolescents, who ought to mind their elders better.

  “You’re getting older now, young man, turning into quite the item. You keep inviting people in to play with you, they’re gonna give a whole other connotation to the word ‘play.’ Maybe it’s time you let go of the hurt. Everything you’ve done so far,” Klepsky gave a nod over to the games, toys, and athletic gear stashed against one of the walls, “you did to give yourself the life a kid should have had. You’ve learned to love yourself as your parents couldn’t. That’s all good. That’s all therapeutic. But you need to let go of the rest of the hurt now, before the next time I pay you a visit, it’s to investigate a dead body, yours. That’s a hell of a way to get attention from me.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever works.” He sounded emotionally abused by the truth.

  Klepsky turned back to face him. “Make you a deal. You forgive yourself and your parents for your getting less than your share in life and maybe I can be your friend. Maybe I can find you some other friends too.”

  “How? Why?” The tone was every bit as testy and suspicious as the words.

  “You’re smart at science. You love doing investigative work. You probably have the equivalent of a few PhDs by now. The FBI field office I work in is always looking for people like that. We’re a pretty tight group, being as we’re largely locked up with one another the livelong day, and our jobs take so much out of us we have no choice but to be family to one another to get around the families we don’t have time for. Best of all, we like our ad-hoc family, which is more than most of us can say for the families we were born with.”

  “So what you really want to do is use me, like my parents did? No thanks.”

  “Yeah, I want to use you. I’m ashamed to say it’s become a nasty habit. Need my friends to be useful, you see? But if I made it all about me, I wouldn’t have them for long, would I?” He took the ball from him. “Well, we gonna play a game of basketball, or not?”

  The teen smiled. Suddenly all the doubts were gone, replaced by a thousand or more wishes and hopes. He had no idea what an easy mark he was. “So, what is it you guys do at work?”

  “We’re futurists for the FBI. It’s our job to keep bad people from inventing next-generation tech that can be used for anything but the good of mankind.”

  “Keep pandemics from wiping us out? That kind of thing?”

  “Yeah, that kind of thing.”

  “Hell, you want to stop the future from happening. For me, it can’t happen fast enough.”

  “I think we’re talking about different futures, young man.”

  “I don’t know.” From David’s tone, Klepsky could tell he meant he didn’t know about the offer he was being made.

  “The guy who heads up the department is even smarter than you.”

  “Now I know I don’t want to be a part of it. I kind of like being the star.”

  Klepsky snorted. “He’s the greatest futurist in the world. And he’s gotta retire someday. He’ll need someone to replace him. You want to be the star for all time, you could do worse than apprenticing under that guy.”

  “I’ll think about it,” David said, dribbling the ball. “We gonna play or not?”

  “Did I forget to mention that we’re working on a case right now? We’re trying to apprehend the guy who created the first unkillable man.”

  The kid lost control of the ball. It went rolling toward the center of the polished hardwood floor. When he finally got his unhinged jaw working again, he said, “Whoa! If I had my hands on that tech, not only could I be the biggest star on the globe, I could be that forever.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to play it.”

  “Yeah, I’m in.”

  Klepsky snorted. “Like I didn’t have you eating out of my palm at the door.”

  David laughed, uttered a feeble, “Yeah, right,” and ran to center court and picked up the ball.

  Klepsky took his trench coat off, and then his jacket, then his shirt.

  “Holy shit,” the kid said. “Glad this is basketball and not boxing.”

  Klepsky took the ball from David and dribbled it, thinking, in truth, he didn’t have enough to rule out Clancy. But his gut told him this kid wasn’t bad news. And he was one hell of a judge of character. Besides, that was why he had a department full of junior futurists. They would continue to run down every loose end on David, including the anti-aging stuff on his computer to see if it bore any similarities to how golems were coming to life. And last but not least, they’d check into whether he actually killed his parents or not. Klepsky was nothing if not thorough.

  He had been right, he thought, moving towards the basket. This was going to be a long day. But at least it wasn’t going to be entirely depressing. The morning was already off to a brighter start than he was anticipating. True, he was down a suspect without being any closer to finding his perp. Then again, maybe he was. The kid’s skill set, added to the team, might just help them narrow the gap between the horse riders and the fox.

  NINE

  Dion Sanders’ eyes were affixed to Adrian. He was lying on the couch, facing her. He was trad
itional that way. It was a shrink’s office, she was a shrink. That meant she should be on the chair and he should be on the couch. Dion altered her practice and her therapeutic approach to suit her clients, so if the Freudian method worked for Adrian, she had no problem with that.

  “So what do you think it means?” Adrian said.

  “You know that’s not how this works.”

  “Thought this once you might make it easy on me.” He jumped off the couch and padded over to one of her statues, the bust of David. “You should really dust this guy’s curly locks. It’s been driving me crazy the whole time I’ve been here.” He ran his fingers into the recesses to help scoop out the accumulated debris. Dion just threw him an amused expression out of the corner of his eye.

  “What do you think it means?” she said.

  “That’s just it, I tell you. There’s no pattern to the killings, short of going after bad guys. Our perp’s into vigilante justice. As far as I can tell he’s not about using his breakthrough tech to bring the world to its heels. He’s happy to go after one bad guy at a time. Just impossible to tell which bad guy next, that’s all.”