The Mirror Man, стр. 78
“Are you insane? You’re not going to cut off your own finger! Besides, your friend won’t have any reason to think you didn’t just cut off a finger from each hand.”
“No, this will work,” Jeremiah told him. “If we cut off the same finger—he ought to be able to tell. The fingerprints will match up. As far as I know, the prints are the same for me and the clone. It will be two of the same finger. Last time I checked, it’s not very common for someone to have two left index fingers! This will work. It’s our best chance.”
“You’re crazy. I’m not going to sit here and watch you cut off your finger.”
“You’re not going to watch—you’re going to have to do it.”
“Absolutely not,” Brent said. “No fucking way I’m doing that!”
“Brent, I can’t do it myself. I won’t be able to do it. I know my limits.”
Brent’s phone rang again. “I have to take this,” he said. “It’s Mel.”
Jeremiah listened as Brent’s voice quickly became agitated. “What do you mean Charles Scott is coming to see you? At work? He’s coming to the museum?”
Jeremiah gestured for him to put the call on speaker.
“No, to my studio,” she said.
“Mel, where are you? Are you there now?”
“Yeah. Like I told you, I’ve been here all night, since I dropped that weird old guy off like you asked me to. And where the hell are you?” she asked. “Your boss, Dr. Scott, was asking all kinds of questions.”
“What questions? What did you tell him?”
“Like when I saw you last, whether you’d left town. You told me you were working through the next two days. Why wouldn’t your boss know that? What’s going on, Brent? Where have you been for the past two days?”
“Mel, what did you say to him?”
“Nothing! I told him I haven’t talked to you since Sunday. That the last time I saw you was when you asked me to help out with that friend of yours. And he was asking all about that, too. What’s going on, Brent? But he made it sound like there was some kind of problem or something. He made it sound like he thought you were at home. Where the hell are you?”
“I can’t tell you, Mel. Everything’s fine, but I can’t tell you.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No, nothing like that, there’s no trouble,” he said. “But, Mel, you have to listen to me. You have to listen carefully. Get out of your studio. Right now. Don’t meet with Charles Scott. You can’t meet with him. Just trust me on this. Don’t go anywhere near him.”
“What do you mean? What’s going on?”
“Mel,” Brent pleaded, “just listen to me. Get out of there. And don’t go back to the museum. Don’t go home, either! Look, just go somewhere else, go to the mall or something. Take a drive somewhere. Go to your sister’s in Rhode Island. Just don’t let him find you.”
“What the hell is going on? What are you talking about? I have to go back to work. I can’t just take off. You need to tell me what this is about. You’re scaring me, Brent.”
“There’s nothing to worry about, Mel. I just need you to do this, okay? I need you to stay away from Charles Scott. I’ll explain it all, but not now.”
“Brent...”
“And turn your phone off, Mel. Turn it off and keep it off, you hear me?”
“What if you need to reach me?”
“Call me tomorrow,” he said. “By tomorrow this will all be over. One way or another.”
Brent hung up on her before she could say anything else and looked at Jeremiah with real desperation in his eyes.
“There’s no other way, Brent,” Jeremiah told him. “We have to do this. We have to do this now.”
“I can’t cut off your finger!”
“I didn’t think I could stab you in the shoulder, either, but I did it. You have to.”
“This is going to hurt a hell of a lot more than that did.”
A little more than an hour later, they were in Brent’s car, parked in the service area behind a strip mall, hidden between two trailer trucks. Brent had gone to three different stores to buy several packages of dry ice pellets, two large bath towels, four nips of vodka, an insulated lunch box, a large assortment of bandages, gauze and first aid supplies and a small ax.
Fifteen minutes after that, Jeremiah had fainted outright in the front seat and Brent was vomiting behind one of the trucks.
Chapter 39
By the time Jeremiah came to, Brent, his face a ghastly, grayish white, was visibly shaking as he attempted to bandage Jeremiah’s hand.
“Jesus, there’s a lot of blood,” he said, tearing at a strip of gauze with his teeth. “We need to get you to a hospital. This was a stupid idea.”
There was a blood-soaked towel in Jeremiah’s lap and another on the floor by his feet. He didn’t even remember seeing the blood. He figured he must have blacked out the instant the ax went down. His only recollection was of a sudden white-hot pain that seemed to engulf his entire body all at once.
“No, it’s fine,” Jeremiah managed, his head spinning. “Just use more of the gauze. Get it good and tight. It’ll be fine. God, Brent, you look worse than I do.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve never cut off someone’s finger before. And you should look in a mirror. You’re not exactly going to win any beauty contests, either.”
Jeremiah had downed two of the vodka nips before the amputation and opened a third one now with his teeth, hoping it would help to dull the fiery pain in his hand. He gave the last bottle to Brent, who drank it down without hesitation.
“Where is it?” he asked. “What did you do with my finger?”
“It’s in the lunch box with the dry