Vishous pushed open the door, reached into the doc's mind, and froze him up good like a side of beef. "You got pictures of my heart, Doc, and I need them back. Where are they?" He shot a suggestion into the man's mind.
The guy blinked. "Here… on my desk. Who… are you?"
The question was a surprise. Most of the time humans had no independent reasoning when they were put down like this.
V walked up and looked at the sea of paper. "Where on the desk?"
The man's eyes drifted to the left-hand corner. "Folder. There. Who… are you?"
Jane's motherfucking mate, my man, V wanted to say.
Hell, he wanted to tattoo the shit on the guy's forehead so Manello never forgot she was totally taken.
V found the folder and cracked it open. "Computer files. Where are they?"
"Gone. Who… are—"
"Never mind who I am." Damn, the SOB was tenacious. Then again, you didn't get to be the chairman of surgery 'cause you were a laid-back Barca-lounger kind of boy. "Who else knows about this picture?"
"Jane."
The sound of the name leaving the bastard's mouth did not put V into his happy place, but he let it slide. "Who else?"
"No one that I know of. Tried… to send it to Columbia. Didn't… go through. Who are you—"
"The boogeyman." V searched through the surgeon's mind, just in case. There was nothing really there. Time to go.
Except he needed to know one other thing.
"Tell me something, Doc. If a woman were married, would you hit on her?"
Jane's boss frowned, then shook his head slowly. "No."
"Well, what do you know. That's the right answer."
As V headed to the door, he wanted to lay down a minefield of triggers in the guy's brain, forge all sorts of neuropathways so that if the bastard thought of Jane sexually he'd feel dread or nausea or maybe burst into tears like a total sissy. After all, adverse impulse training was a godsend when it came to deprogramming. But V wasn't a symphath, so it would be hard to pull off without a serious time commitment, and besides, that kind of shit was likely to drive someone to madness. Especially someone who was as strong-minded as Manello.
He took one last look at his rival. The surgeon was staring up at him with confusion, but not fear, his dark brown eyes aggressive and intelligent. It was hard to admit, but in V's absence the man probably would have made a good mate for Jane.
The bastard.
Vishous was about to turn away when he got a vision so crisp and clear that it was like it had been before his premonitions had dried up.
Actually, it wasn't a vision. It was one word. That made no sense whatsoever.
Brother.
Weird.
V scrubbed the doctor good and clean and dematerialized.
Manny Manello put his elbows on his desk, rubbed his temples, and groaned. The pain in his head had its own heartbeat, and his skull seemed to have turned into an echo chamber. Just as bad, his brain's radio dial was spinning. Random thoughts bounced all around, a tossed salad of little importance: He had to take his car in for service, he needed to finish going through those residency applications, he was out of Sam Adams, his Monday-night b-ball game had been switched to Wednesday.
Funny, if he looked beyond the swarm of nothing special, he had the sense that all the activity was… hiding something.
For no particular reason he had an image of the mauve crocheted throw blanket that hung on the back of his mother's mauve couch in his mother's mauve living room. The damn thing was never used for warmth, and God help you if you tried to pull it off. The thing's sole purpose was to hide a stain from when his father had spilled a plate of Franco-American spaghetti all over the place. After all, there was only so far you could go with a spray bottle of Resolve, and that canned shit had red dye number five in it. Which was so not a look on a mauve canvas.#p#分页标题#e#
Just like that blanket, his scattered thoughts were obstructing some kind of stain in his brain, although damned if he knew what it was.
He rubbed his eyes and glanced at his Breitling. Past two A.M.
Time to go home.
As he packed up, the sense that he'd spaced on something important, and he kept looking at the left-hand corner of his desk. There was a paperless stretch there, the grained wood showing through in what was otherwise a snowbank of work.
The empty space was the size of a file folder.
Something had been taken from there. He knew it. He just couldn't figure out what, and the harder he tried the more his head pounded.
He walked over to the door.
On the way past his private bathroom, he popped in, found his trusty bottle of five-hundred-count Motrin and took two.
He really needed a vacation.
* * *