Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [11]
“I’m not trying to blackmail you,” he insisted. “I’m trying to impress upon you how very hard I’ve worked to find you, and how serious I am about the importance of my case—and the discretion with which it must be handled. I told you I wasn’t an outcast, but I’ve confessed that I’ve lost my sight. Can’t you gather the rest?”
I said, “Don’t make me.”
With a sigh he said, “There is a large House in Southern California, and I was once a powerful member of it.”
Ah, I got it. So I interjected, in time to look like I was paying attention, “Powerful enough that you had challengers?”
He nodded. “After this happened, I stayed away as a matter of necessity. I wouldn’t survive until midnight if word got out that I was vulnerable … not even that long, if the reason for my infirmity were known.”
“All right, but blind or no, you tracked me down—and that’s something several international agencies have been working on for years, so don’t expect me to believe you’re harmless.”
“I never said I was.”
“Then are you going to beat around the bush all night, or are you going to explain the purpose of your business call?”
“I’m going to explain it to you,” he said grouchily. “I have to. I know what happened to my eyes, but I need to know how it happened. I need to get my hands on the paperwork that documented the destruction. There’s a doctor in Canada named David Keene who’s trying to help me. He’s sensitive to the particulars of my needs, and he’s performing some research that might give me much better vision. But he’s made it very clear that my chances of success depend on getting that paperwork.”
“And if you give it to him, he can fix your eyes?”
He polished off the last of his wine with one more sip and waved the server away when she noticed the empty glass. “Probably not, though he thinks the improvement could be significant. It would be wonderful to read again,” he said, and it was wistful and sorry. It made me feel like a heel for being hard on him.
But only for a minute.
I said, “Look, it sounds like you don’t need me. You need a good PI, somebody who specializes in problems that afflict people like us. Not to put too fine a point on it, but tracking down paperwork isn’t my specialty.”
“You don’t need to track it down. You only have to go and get it from a storage facility, where it’s been sitting for years.”
I shook my head and copied him by downing the last of my wine. “I’m missing something here. How about you start at the top and work your way down? Stop talking your way past the problem.”
I smelled fear, and I was a little shocked to realize it wasn’t my own. He lifted his empty glass as if to take another swig, then put it down again with a sigh. “I don’t mean to beat around the bush. It’s only … if you knew what a chance I was taking, telling you the tale—”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re going out on a limb here.” And all of a sudden, I understood—he’d learned so much about me in advance just in case he needed it later. If he was really this nervous about opening up, his request must be a real corker. “Keep talking, I’m listening. But find your way around to the point while the moon’s still up, if you please.”
He was impatient with my impatience. “Very well, the point is this: Ten years ago I was captured by the government. I was held for approximately six months in a maximum-security base that is so virtually unknown, I doubt even the president is aware of it. They performed experiments on me, focusing on my eyes. I escaped. And now I’m blind. I need to know what they did. And I want to know why.”
Twice in one night, he’d shocked the hell out of me. I hardly knew what to say, but that didn’t keep my jaws from flapping. “Wow,” I said. “I did not see that coming. I thought maybe you’d been in some kind of duel, or you’d lost a bargain with a demon from the wrong side of the tracks. But that? The government? Wait—this government, Uncle Sam?”
If I hadn’t annoyed him enough already, I was hopping up and down on his last