Only the Dead Know Brooklyn by Chris Vola

Author:Chris Vola
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

23

“This is completely unnecessary,” Ryan said, flinching as Karl forced the needle into the vein in his left forearm. He eyed the IV bag—sitting nearby on top of a giant cat scratch post—that looked exactly like the one he’d been hooked up to in James’s apartment.

He shuddered.

Karl ignored him and went back to work prepping the portable ultrasound equipment. He attached the wandlike device via USB cord to a laptop that he’d positioned on a massive cherrywood table. The gorgeous antique formed the centerpiece of the spacious apartment’s kitchen-slash-dining area, where Ryan was lying on a hospital-style cot, shirtless and scrubbed clean.

Vanessa was seated on a black leather love seat on the opposite end of the large, high-ceilinged space whose walls were covered by bookshelves, swirling primary-colored abstract oil paintings, a row of antique kabuki-style theater masks, and a spiral staircase leading to an unseen upper level. She was wrapped in a white bathrobe, her hair limp from the shower she’d just taken. She looked up from the MacBook in her lap and shook her head. “It’s just saline,” she said. “If you could see how you look right now you wouldn’t be arguing.”

Ryan grunted, lay back, and stared at the cream-colored stucco ceiling, still trying to process the situation he’d found himself in. He went over what he already knew. Vanessa, his first real fling, had been turned. How long ago he couldn’t be sure. What was clear was that she had carved up her face to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. She had a large enough role within the Manhattan tribe to be tasked with killing Derrick Rhodes, or maybe she’d taken the initiative herself. But why had she spared “Charlie,” someone she knew for little more than a month in the 1970s? Nostalgia? She didn’t seem surprised or shocked that he hadn’t aged. Maybe she somehow knew about his lineage. Maybe she was a social climber and he was her ticket to the upper echelon of Manhattan tribal society.

But then why wouldn’t she have taken him directly to her superiors? And why would she have this Karl guy pumping him with fluids and checking his vitals and internal organs? Who was Karl? He was human; that much had been made obvious when he’d struggled mightily trying to pull Ryan out of the SUV in the parking garage under Vanessa’s building. He clearly had at least some medical training. Maybe Karl was Vanessa’s donor, or maybe it was something more, closer to what Frank had had with Raj and Arianna.

Whatever the case was, Ryan didn’t like the way the man stared at him, like Ryan was some kind of living cadaver. The way Karl had been pawing and prodding at him, timid yet eager, as if he couldn’t wait to dig deeper and was only waiting for Vanessa’s command to do so. The way the rotten breath seeped from his crooked sneer.

“You have a lot of questions,” Vanessa said, making one of the most obvious statements of all time, Ryan thought.

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