Brainboy and the Deathmaster Page 14

  “What’s this?” BJ asked, pulling out a paperback.

  “That was in her bag, too. Looked kinda juicy.”

  On the cover a brutish man with wavy, raven-black hair was holding a delicate blond captive in his arms.

  “She’s probably missed it already,” BJ said, tossing it back into the pack. “We better get out of here.”

  “Not till I get some cigs. Give me a five, willya?”

  Boris had seen BJ extract his GameMaster savings, a wad of over a hundred dollars, from his strongbox in the bottom of his fridge/closet that morning. But BJ didn’t even acknowledge the request, simply heading for the pay phone at the Exxon station across the street.

  When he got back to the Dumpster, there was no sign of Boris. But Boris soon came sauntering out of the 7-Eleven and lit up a cigarette.

  “Jeez, man, we got to lie low,” BJ hissed when he got to the Dumpster. “Did you take money out of Grimface’s wallet?”

  “Not all of it,” Boris said, gatling out a series of small smoke rings.

  “And that guy in the store sold to you?”

  “I gave him a tip. Hope he uses it to buy some zit cream.”

  As a squad car pulled into the station, BJ yanked Boris behind the Dumpster. Peeking out, he watched a policewoman walk into the store and emerge with a Styrofoam cup. She set it on the hood of her car and strode straight over to the Dumpster.

  “I thought I saw smoke. Aren’t you a little young for that?”

  “I’m older than I look,” Boris muttered, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out on the pavement.

  “Must’ve stunted your growth. What are you boys up to?”

  Luckily the cab BJ had called pulled into the parking lot at that very moment.

  “Heading home, officer,” BJ said. “That’s ours.”

  32

  The cabdriver had a turban on his head and a scary-looking scar on his cheek, but his voice, high-pitched and singsongy, wasn’t the least bit scary.

  “Hunt Point?” he said, craning his head around to look at the boys in the backseat. “Hunt Point way across lake. You got twenty dollar?”

  BJ yanked out his wad, whereupon the driver put the cab in gear.

  Once they were on the floating bridge, BJ pulled the GPS out of Boris’s pack.

  “Piece of cake?” he said, noting a sizeable dent in the top.

  “It had these weird screws that don’t screw,” Boris confessed. “I had to get the crowbar out of the trunk and give it a little help.”

  “Nobody saw you?”

  “Guess not.”

  “What happened to the toolbox?”

  “I ditched it under a bush on my way out. Figured we didn’t need it anymore.”

  BJ pushed a button—and a map of Lake Washington instantly appeared on the screen, Seattle on the west side, Bellevue on the east. A pulsing dot was crawling like an ant across the bridge connecting the two cities. When the pulsing dot, and the taxi, reached the east side of the lake, the cab, and the dot, took the Hunt’s Point exit. BJ had the driver head up Hunt’s Point Road.

  BJ rolled down his window as they pulled up to the guardhouse. “BJ and Boris to see Kit,” he told the mustachioed guard.

  The guard looked dubious as he ducked into the guardhouse, but when he emerged, he touched his cap politely and raised the gate. As the cab started up a curving driveway, the sun broke through the clouds. Or maybe not, BJ thought: maybe it was always sunny at Keith Masterly’s house. Out his window a vast rose garden appeared, the roses, still blooming away even though it was now September, in every imaginable color, from the palest yellow to a purple so deep it was almost black. There wasn’t a droopy or withering petal to be seen—thanks, no doubt, to the army of gardeners moving like guerrilla soldiers among the plants. Out Boris’s window a sloping lawn, greener than a golf course, undulated down to the glimmering lake.

  The driveway was longer than BJ’s street, but the taxi finally stopped, and a man in the same dark-red uniform as the ski-boat driver opened the door on Boris’s side. Even after BJ settled the fare, Boris didn’t budge. For once in his life Boris was looking a little unnerved.

  “Move it,” BJ said, giving him a shove.

  Grabbing the backpack, he followed Boris out of the cab into the bright sunshine and blinked at a surprisingly unimpressive house: a stucco structure, only one story high, not much bigger than his own house. Nothing like the spectacular showplace they’d seen from the lake.

  “Mr. Masterly is on the tennis court,” the uniformed man said, opening the dark-red front door.

  The two boys stepped inside—and found themselves at the top of a wide redwood staircase. It curved down four or five stories through a vast atrium to a reception room bigger than all of Garfield Middle School, with gigantic plate-glass windows looking out across a terrace and a lawn to the lake and the Seattle skyline. The little stucco house was just a pimple on the real house, a tiny penthouse to gain access to the floors below. On the way down Boris gawked, openmouthed, at the galleries to the left and right, while BJ wondered if this could be the stairway to Sirius he’d heard about for so long.

  He also wondered whether “Mr. Masterly” meant Keith Jr. or Keith Sr. The idea of meeting Keith Masterly Sr. filled him with excited dread. But when at last they reached the foot of the stairs, another uniformed man appeared and led them out to a wide terrace overlooking a grass tennis court, where Keith Jr. was about to serve to a beautiful golden-haired woman whom BJ recognized from photos as Keith Sr.’s second wife.

  Keith Jr. stopped in mid serve and came rushing off the court and up the terrace steps. “So it is you!” he said, shaking both their hands. “This is so great!”

  “We were in the neighborhood and thought we’d stop by to make sure you’re okay,” BJ said.

  “I’m fine, thanks to you guys. Can you stay for lunch?”

  “I could eat a horse,” Boris murmured.

  “Fantastic. I think we’re having Dungeness crab.”

  “Is your father here?” BJ asked.

  “This time of day? Never. He’s a total workaholic.’’ Keith Jr. turned and squinted at the helipad beyond the tennis court. “The chopper’s here, so he’s probably at MasterTech. I think he said something about the cinema division. Listen, just let me and Angie finish up. I’m letting her beat me. If you want to cool off in the pool, there’s extra bathing suits in the cabana.”

  “Thanks,” BJ said. “But you know what I’d really go for?”

  “What?”

  “To sit in that.’’ He pointed at the sleek helicopter. “Just for a minute. I’ve never been in one.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Keith Jr. said.

  33

  “For heavens sake, Darryl, its lunchtime! Are you sick?”

  Darryl sat up groggily in his bed and blinked at Ruthie Katz. Between his work on G-17 and his late-night chimney-climbing sessions with Nina, he’d worn himself to a frazzle, and since Mr. Masterly wasn’t around, he’d let himself doze back off after this morning’s pep talk.

  “I guess I slept in,” he said sheepishly.

  “Well, shake a leg. I need your help.”

  Darryl dragged himself up and joined the team in the dining hall for lentil soup and turkey sandwiches. After lunch, down on L, Ruthie pulled rank, pressing him into service on an experiment she’d set up in Chem. Her bright idea was to heat up a solution containing her personal favorite element—ruthenium, number forty-four on the periodic table—and shoot it down a tube at high speed into a solution of G-17 in hopes of stabilizing it. But Darryl couldn’t seem to wake up completely, and after watching the complicated process fail twice, he rested his head on the counter and dozed off.

  “Aren’t you getting enough sleep, Darryl?”

  It was Mr. Masterly’s voice. “I didn’t know you were at the lab, sir,” he said, conquering an impulse to squirm away as Mr. Masterly laid his hands on his shoulders.

  “Just got back. Do you doze off like this
often?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you eating well, taking your vitamins?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You sit up late watching movies?”

  “Well, sometimes.”

  “Hmm. I considered shutting down the audio and video systems at eleven, but there’s been so little abuse, I didn’t bother.”

  “But, Mr. Masterly, it’s just …’’ Darryl could hear Ruthie out in the octagon, giving Snoodles orders. “I guess the experiment bored me a little.”

  “Let’s see,” Mr. Masterly said, picking up a brown jar. “Ruthenium, eh. You don’t think it’ll work?”

  “Not really.”

  “Have you had any new ideas of your own?”

  “Actually, yeah.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was thinking how G-9 1/2 might be the problem. So I broke it down into two parts. Three in all.”

  “Did you make some compound?”

  “Uh-huh. Yesterday I injected one of the rats.”

  “And?”

  “Um, I forgot to check,” Darryl said, not wanting to admit he’d slept the whole morning away.

  He got off his stool and led the way to Bio, passing Paul, who was on his way out with a jar of fruit flies. Darryl walked up to the cage containing the crusty old rat he’d injected. The rat had fleecy fur. His eyes were no longer pearly. Instead of a scrofulous gray, his tail was a healthy pink.

  Darryl let out a low whistle as Mr. Masterly joined him by the cage.

  “Where’s the compound?” Mr. Masterly said, his voice hushed.

  Darryl pointed at the jar of murky turquoise liquid Snoodles had helped him mix up.

  “What dosage?”

  “I gave him three cc’s. Diluted, of course. One part compound per ten parts saline solution.”

  Mr. Masterly diluted the compound with saline solution and sucked three cc’s into a hypodermic. Then he opened the door to another cage and injected the rat there. He and Darryl stood side by side, their eyes glued to rat number two as Snoodles shuffled in and started sponging off counters.

  Long after Snoodles had finished cleaning up and left, Darryl and Mr. Masterly were still staring at the second rat. It must have been half an hour after the injection when Mr. Masterly nudged Darryl with his elbow. “Is it me, or is he getting a little friskier?”

  The rheumy old rat had climbed onto his wheel and started to jog. After a minute he stopped, as if to catch his breath. His eyes were clearer; his fur wasn’t so wiry and mangy; his feet and tail weren’t so discolored. Off he went again, this time at a run. The next time he stopped to rest, he looked as young and vibrant as the rat in cage number one.

  Mr. Masterly turned from the transformed rat to Darryl and again laid his hands on his shoulders. In spite of what Nina had said about it being impossible to hypnotize an unwilling subject, Darryl felt himself falling under the spell of the dark, gleaming eyes. Suddenly Mr. Masterly broke into a huge grin. It brought out crow’s feet and lines around his mouth, but made his face more appealing than Darryl had ever seen it.

  “You’re brilliant,” Mr. Masterly said, and then he hugged him harder than his father ever had. “Absolutely brilliant.’’ He released him and shouted: “Everyone, in here!”

  In a trice the whole team, Snoodles included, was crowding into Bio, Billy carrying a test tube of mercury.

  “Look!” Mr. Masterly cried, pointing at the denizens of cages one and two. “These bright-eyed young fellows were just like those”—he pointed at the decrepit old rats in the other cages—“till they were injected with a new isomer of G-17. And who do you suppose we have to thank for this breakthrough? This ingenious young man right here.”

  As everyone clapped, Darryl swelled with pride, no longer wanting to squirm out of Mr. Masterly’s grasp.

  “We’re going to have to add a wing to the trophy case just for Darryl,” Mr. Masterly said when the ovation ended. “But you’ve all been working hard. You all deserve a great deal of credit. Take the rest of the day off, everybody.”

  “Really, sir?” said Ruthie. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “It so happens I brought a new movie, straight from MasterTech’s cinema division. Get a little exercise and have some dinner, and I’ll pop it in for you.”

  34

  After a leisurely lunch on the Masterlys’ terrace, BJ and Boris got to ride back across the lake in a limousine. The passenger section was like a living room, with plush facing sofas and a TV and a CD player and a phone and a bar stocked with liquor and soft drinks. But what caught Boris’s attention was a big jar of macadamia nuts.

  “I wouldn’t eat that Dungeon crab if I really was stuck in a dungeon,” he declared, gobbling nuts. “You’d think with all that dough they’d get something decent like burgers.”

  “Well, we did what we came to do,” said BJ, who’d actually liked the crab.

  “That was pretty slick, I gotta admit.”

  While checking out the helicopter before lunch, BJ had managed to slip the GPS under the pilot’s seat. He flicked on the personal tracker now, and a map of the east side of Lake Washington appeared on the screen, a pulsing dot marking the Masterly estate on Hunt’s Point.

  Halfway across the floating bridge, the limousine stopped, and the driver lowered a tinted dividing window to inform them there was a jackknifed tractor trailer up ahead. BJ flicked off the tracker and flicked on the TV. Boris immediately grabbed the remote, and they spent the next forty-five minutes haggling over which show to watch.

  When they got home, at around four, Boris raided the fridge while BJ cleaned out the litter box and fed the cats. BJ then flopped down on the living-room sofa for a snooze, but Boris came in and blasted a cop show on the TV. Rolling over to give him a piece of his mind, BJ felt the personal tracker in his pocket.

  He pulled it out and turned it on. The map that appeared wasn’t of the east side of the lake, it was of the whole western part of Washington State.

  “Check this out.”

  “Jeez,” Boris said, scooting over beside him. “It’s way up in the freakin’ mountains.’’ The pulsing dot had migrated all the way from Hunt’s Point into the northern reaches of the Cascade Mountains. “Think it’s that lab place?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s just on a business trip.”

  “What kind of business they got up there? It’s just rocks and trees and them iceberg things, right?”

  “You mean glaciers?”

  The front door opened.

  “For goodness’ sake,” Mrs. Walker said, closing the door behind her. “What are you boys trying to do, wake the dead?”

  “Hi, Ma,” BJ said, pocketing the tracker and muting the TV.

  “Hey, Mrs. Walker,” said Boris.

  “For the long weekend,” she said, depositing some videos on the table behind the sofa. “Gosh, these shoes are killing me.”

  As soon as she went into her room to change into slippers, BJ dashed out to the Nova and fished a road map of Washington State out of the glove compartment. Down in the basement he and Boris compared the map with the much smaller one on the personal tracker.

  “There?” BJ said, approximating the position of the pulsing dot on the larger map.

  “Higher,” said Boris.

  After considerable arguing they managed to agree on where to put an X on the map.

  “What now?” Boris said.

  “We see where he goes next. Then we mark another X. Then another and another. If he goes back to the same place a lot, it’s probably the lab.”

  “Hey. It’s dead.”

  The screen on the personal tracker had gone dark. BJ picked it up and pressed the On button. Nothing happened.

  “Crud. Grimface must have called the cops. They’d call the dealership, and the dealership would call the satellite company.”

  “You mean after all that work all we get’s one lousy X?”

  “I guess.’’ After staring at the map for a considerable time, B
J added, “Too bad you left the toolbox at the shelter.”

  “How come?”

  “Might have been useful.”

  “What for?”

  “Breaking into the Kirbys’ house on Alder Street.”

  Boris snorted. “I don’t need no toolbox to break into a house.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Cripes, no.”

  35

  When Darryl steered his movie pod off to the right, the entire Milky Way came into focus, stretching out before him like an endless white-pebble driveway. Down and to the right, he discovered a spiral galaxy in the process of forming. Soon a couple of other pods crowded in beside him—Paul and Ruthie—so he moved off on his own and stumbled on a red giant in the final stages of collapse.

  The new movie, Mastering the Universe, was a feast. After witnessing the dramatic explosion of a supernova, Darryl entered a solar system with twin suns. He hardly knew where to turn. And fresh wonders kept replacing the old ones. When he guided the pod back through the flickering waters to reinvestigate the Milky Way, he found himself in one of the gaseous tides around a Cepheid. And the spiral galaxy had become the moons of Jupiter, all laid out for him to explore. And the collapsed red giant had become a black hole.

  But breathtaking as the spectacles were, Darryl’s mind began to wander. This might have been explicable if he’d been worrying about the planned escape on Monday night. He and Nina had only that night and two more left for training, and neither one of them had yet made it even halfway up the shaft. But he wasn’t thinking about the escape. He was reliving his triumph. He could feel Mr. Masterly’s fatherly hands on his shoulders, hear the applause. When he submarined through the blue pinwheel in the Triangulum constellation, the stars around him actually seemed to arrange themselves into the atoms of the G-17 molecule.

  Mastering the Universe was a hit with the rest of the kids. Once Abs let them out of their pods, they all stood around on the pod platform comparing notes, complaining about all the things they’d missed, wishing the movie would run again right then and there. It was well after eleven before they trooped off to their rooms. So Darryl and Nina couldn’t meet to train till after midnight, by which time even Hedderly had called it a night and gone to bed. They were so tired, they didn’t even attempt going beyond the second seam.