by Julia Derek
“What do you mean?”
“The hybrids will end up ruling the world because they’ll be smarter, more beautiful, healthier, and more talented than most regular humans. We won’t have a chance when competing with them in any field. We will inevitably become the underclass.”
I had a sip of my water. “If you say so. Do you think there are any hybrids out in the world already?”
“You mean if they have let any hybrids leave the labs? Probably, given they’ve been doing this for many years already. Decades. If not, it’s only a matter of time before they start trying to integrate them with society. That’s the idea after all.”
I nodded. “Where do you think they would be in that case? The hybrids, I mean.”
“Anywhere. You could be walking past one on the street right here on Manhattan. And that is why I’m so sure the rapist is one of them. Someone who can climb skyscrapers like Spider-Man. These beings have all kinds of special powers, so it makes perfect sense. This one’s a hybrid that either got away or was already released into the world to function on his own.”
“Wouldn’t they—whoever is in charge—have figured out that the rapist killer who’s running amuck here in the city might be one of their… products? I’m sure they’ve heard about what’s going on by now and what a hard time the cops are having finding any leads.”
“Not necessarily. And if they do suspect it, they’re probably just trying to find the hybrid on their own so they can destroy it.”
“Well, in that case, it’s only a matter of time before they catch him, right?”
“We can only hope. But who knows how long it will be until they catch him? Maybe the hybrid has found a way to outsmart his creator too. That is, if they’re looking for him. We can’t count on that. Which is why you and I have to try to find him.”
My head had begun to spin now. It wasn’t only because of all the craziness Ian was telling me, but the manner in which he was telling me. His intensity was exhausting.
I suddenly felt in desperate need of fresh air.
I removed my napkin and put it on my plate.
“I will have to think about all that you have told me tonight,” I said, not sure how else to deal with the situation. I still didn’t believe what Ian was telling me could actually be true, but I wasn’t about to refute him in his own home.
I got to my feet. “Thanks for dinner. I have an early client, so I’m gonna have to leave now.”
Ian nodded and stood as well. “I understand. Would it be possible to do tomorrow’s session on Thursday instead? I might need another day to recover.”
I smiled. “Sure. Same time?”
“That would be great. Thanks.”
We walked to his front door together. As we reached it, I faced him, feeling awkward. What was the appropriate way to say goodbye? A hug? Yes, that seemed most natural. Certainly not a handshake. But the tension between us as we stood there, looking at each other in his hallway, was so palpable I was scared to lean in and hug him the way I would do with any other friend of mine. My body wanted to feel his against mine a little too much.
“Well,” I said and cleared my throat to break the tension that just kept building and building. “Thanks again for making me dinner. It was great.”
“Thanks for coming,” he replied softly, a little smile dancing over his lips.
His mouth was only a few inches away from mine and I found myself wishing he would shorten the distance to zero, grab me and pull me toward him. Kiss me hard with those enticing lips. I looked into his eyes, which had turned a dark bottle green in the dimness of the hallway, and lost myself in them.
It took all I had to put my hand on the doorknob and take a small step toward it. I would do nothing of course. No hug, no handshake, certainly no kiss. How could I have even entertained such a thought? So we had some chemistry going on between us; I could see he felt it as much as I did. Lots and lots of pheromones connected us. That didn’t mean we would do anything about it. It would be very, very stupid to give in to it only because I suddenly felt like having sex with the man before me like I couldn’t remember having ever felt, not even with Nick.
The thought of Nick had the sobering effect on me I needed to be able to open the door behind me. Surely I had felt more with my husband than I was currently feeling with the nut job next to me!
I gave Ian one last look and managed to mumble “See you Thursday.” before I left.
I dashed down those long, steep stairs as quickly as I could. I never heard him respond I moved so fast. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe the words got stuck in his throat and stayed there the way they had wanted to do in mine.
A minute later, I was down on the street, inhaling the mild spring air deeply into my lungs, my heart still pounding much, much too fast.
Chapter 7
The following afternoon I was standing behind the fitness desk during my floor shift, going through members with an executive membership on the computer there.
So far, I had gone through all members who had a last name that began with an A or a B and I had found no one who was a politician of any kind. At least not one I recognized and, being a news junkie, I was quite familiar with most senators, governors and congressmen in the country and Ian was only interested in the big shots.
When I got to the first page of the letter C I finally found someone who could be of interest—Damon Chatterly, the current governor of Massachusetts. Did Massachusetts have unlimited terms for their governors? Unlike senators and congressmen, I was well aware that several states had term limits for their governors. I quickly Goggled this and was able to determine that Massachusetts governors did in fact enjoy unlimited terms. Ian would be pleased when I told him about Mr. Chatterly.
I considered the photo of the man on the computer screen, at first thinking it just had to be a different person. Governor Chatterly was a handsome man in his fifties, a former underwear model who, like George Clooney, only hit his prime as he entered his senior years. The headshot of the man here didn’t look like the governor at all he was so mediocre. Then again, I had soon come to notice the cameras used to take photos of the members down in the club’s membership offices weren’t very good, turning most of its objects ugly. Maybe this was another case of club camera failure.
Surely it was the same person.
I went to the tab on the screen that said “visits” to view the last time he had been at the club and with which frequency he visited it. The last visit was on March 31th of this year, at 1:53 p.m.
What date was it today? Wait, March 31th was today. I checked the time and saw that it was two thirty. Unless Chatterly was one of those people who only came to eat in the cafeteria, the chance was great he was somewhere on the gym floor, working out, right now.
I looked up from the computer and out over the vast floor before me in which there were rows and rows of treadmills, stationary bikes and elliptical machines. A lot of the cardio machines were in use even though it was the middle of the day and you would think most people were at work. Not so on the Upper West Side in New York City. This upscale neighborhood contained a large percentage of entrepreneurs and consultants who ran their own schedule as well as lots of housewives with kids in school and lots of time on their hands.
I couldn’t spot the governor anywhere from my current vantage point. I decided to take a stroll throughout the floor and see if he was in one of the many hidden nooks and crannies the way many members often were, working out with weights, stretching or meditating.
He was nowhere to be seen on the entire fourth floor, so I took the stairs up to the fifth where many men were, using the vast area with the heavy free weights and bench presses.
I spotted him almost as soon as I stepped inside this testosterone laden space.
Wearing a plain T-shirt and athletic shorts that reached down to his knees, he was standing next to a workout bench doing bicep curls with big dumbbells while staring at himself in the mirrored wall. I had been right;
the club camera had not done his good looks justice. The man was as handsome as I remembered from having viewed him on TV a few times over the past year. It also looked like he was as fit as in his modeling days under his workout attire.
Since I was on a floor shift, I might as well swoop by him and try to strike up a conversation even though Ian hadn’t demanded that I actually befriend any of the politicians. This one I didn’t mind having a little chat with, though, see if he was as charming as he was hot.
I walked closer and stopped a couple of yards away from him where there were a few dumbbells on the floor that someone had used and then left. Because they were fifty pounds each, I picked them up one by one and re-racked them.
I gazed in the governor’s direction, using the mirrored wall. He had just completed his set of bicep curls and was re-racking his weights. He caught my eyes on him and smiled. I instantly smiled back.
“Hello, Governor,” I said. “Great to have you in town with us.”
“It’s great to be here. There is no city like New York.”
“So true. You guys have had a rough winter this year. You must be glad it’s over.”
“Yeah, it’s been a tough one for sure.”
“You come here a lot?”
“Not as much as I’d like to.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught my manager Rolf walking in our direction. He had soon reached us and there was a tiny but definite change in the governor’s body language. The two men nodded at each other.
“We’re still on for two tomorrow?” Rolf asked Chatterly.
“You got it.”
Rolf continued throughout the gym floor and then exited into the other part of the vast area where there were weight machines instead of free weights.
The governor seemed preoccupied suddenly, a deep wrinkle having appeared on his forehead. He picked up another set of dumbbells that he began doing shoulder raises with. Since I didn’t get a sense that he wanted to keep talking, I wished him a good workout and moved on, all the while wondering what their meeting tomorrow was supposed to be about. A late lunch? Were these two old friends? I didn’t think so, even though it was clear they knew each other. There had been no smiles, even warmth between them, which suggested more of a business relationship. That would make most sense. What would the governor of Massachusetts have in common with the fitness manager at Nikkei?
I couldn’t imagine they moved in the same circles.
I hung around in the same area, however, just to see what he was doing next, if maybe I’d get another chance to speak to him. If I did, I’d try to find out how Chatterly knew Rolf, at least get more of a sense of their relationship. Before Rolf had shown up, he had seemed more than happy to talk to me.
There was plenty to do on the fifth floor—lots of weights to re-rack and handles to weight machines that were misplaced, towels to pick up from the floor, and, of course, other members I could talk to that made my stay up there unsuspicious.
I never got another chance to speak to Chatterly, who left the room twenty minutes later. I left as well shortly thereafter. Instead of following him, I went back to the fitness desk and the computers there to keep going through the membership database. I was hoping to have gone through at least a quarter of the club’s executive members before training Ian next to have something substantial to report to him. If I could find one or two more politicians, I thought I was good to go.
I did manage to find one more person, a female senator from North Carolina who was a member, before I was interrupted by an older woman. She needed me to show her how one of the stationary bikes worked. After I was done with her I was scheduled to train a couple of clients, so I called it a day on the research. I would continue early the next day to hit the quota I’d set for myself before seeing Ian.
When I was done training my clients, I worked out myself using free weights for an hour.
Drenched in sweat, I showered and switched into regular clothes, then left the gym to go have dinner somewhere near my apartment.
There was a Mexican place a few blocks away from my house that I had checked out and thought of visiting at some point. Tonight was a good night for this. I entered the place and as I was about to pick up one of the menus on the counter to see what I wanted to eat, a dark-haired man of medium build in his late twenties, early thirties came out of the little restaurant’s bathroom. He had pasty white skin and raisin-colored eyes. Nothing about him really stood out to me—except the fact that he had lots of white rope tied around his waist like a belt to hold up his worn cargo pants.
I took a closer look at the rope as he passed me to leave the restaurant and noted that it was the same rope I had seen used on the latest rape murder victim—thin but strong rope made out of expensive-looking white silk.
I decided that I would eat later and instead see what this man was up to. He looked just the way the two victims had described—which was the way thousands of men looked in the city—but the rope tied to his waist like an odd fashion statement made my radar go off. I waited for him to get halfway down the block before I left the little eatery.
I followed him uptown for many, many blocks. We had reached 91st street when he finally stopped outside a coffee shop that he walked inside. I could see through the shop’s floor-to-ceiling windows that he ordered a coffee and some kind of bakery and then took a seat at a table. The sight of him eating the pastry reminded me that I had yet to have dinner myself, my stomach gnarling quietly.
I checked the time on my phone. Almost nine o’clock. Was I wasting my time stalking this guy? So what that he had some rope tied to his waist? That didn’t mean he was the rapist murderer the authorities had been searching for but failed to find for the last month. He could just be an oddball.
But the way my stomach twisted as my eyes kept going back to him—it wasn’t just hunger that made it so—suggested otherwise. It told me I needed to remain next to the bus station where I was hovering and see what this guy was up to. Something was not right with him. So I stood there for the next hour, walking back and forth in the same spot, my stomach gnarling more and more. It was light inside the coffee shop whereas night had fallen outside, so I wasn’t worried about him having spotted me even though I wasn’t far from the window where he sat gazing out into night.
I bought a black Red Sox hat from a street vendor that I stuck on my head after having bunched up my hair at the nape of my neck, tying it up with the hairband I always had on my wrist. It had struck me that maybe it was best if I kept a lower profile. My red hair was pretty striking.
Finally, when it was almost ten thirty, the man stood and left the coffee shop.
I hid behind a thick tree as he walked out onto the street just in case he was about to head in my direction. But he didn’t. He continued north as before and when he’d gotten ten blocks farther up, he took a turn to the right. There, he walked behind one of the tall, boxy pre-war buildings.
What was he about to do there? Take a leak? I couldn’t think of a better reason anyone would squeeze himself in between two buildings like that.
I paused, wondering if I should follow him back there. The space between the tall stone building and the one next to it was so narrow that he would instantly notice me if he stood next to the building.
Slowly, slowly, I edged closer to the corner behind which the man had disappeared. As I reached it, I carefully peeked around it. I couldn’t see him anywhere. With my hand on the gun in my purse, I slipped between the buildings and went after him. He had to be there somewhere.
But as I was halfway to the other side of the building, I still couldn’t see him anywhere. Where the hell did he go? The backyard I had entered wasn’t large at all and there were only a few small boxes lying around, so he couldn’t be hiding behind anything. I didn’t think he had climbed the chain-link fence that cut off the other end of the backyard. It was the first thing I’d seen as I’d entered because of the streetlight immediately next to the fence; I
would have noticed him climbing it had he been there. Unless he had gone invisible all of a sudden, there was only one way he could have gone—and that was up the building.
