Worst Case (Michael Bennett 3)
“That anorexic bitch can pound sand,” my boss said angrily. “Internal police records are strictly confidential, and if she wants information, it’ll come from me personally. This case couldn’t be run more professionally. Don’t you worry about her or anyone else as long as I’m around. Get some sleep, Bennett.”
Wow, I thought after I hung up. A boss who had confidence in me and who was willing to stick her neck out to protect me. That was a nice switch.
But about that sleep, I thought, walking out of the kitchen and staring at the wreckage that used to be my dining room table.
There were beakers, plastic tubing, stopwatches, food dye. Enough p
oster board to build a light aircraft.
Yep, it was that dreaded time of year again. Holy Name’s annual science fair.
Six of my ten kids were furiously finishing their projects. Jane was testing the soil in Riverside Park. Eddie was investigating the geometry of shadows. Brian was doing something on television watching and brainpower. Or was he just watching television instead of getting his work done? I wasn’t exactly sure.
Even my five-year-old, Chrissy, had been enslaved by the science police. They had her making a stethoscope out of toilet tissue tubes. The Manhattan Project had taken less work.
I reached out as a streak of tinfoil went past my head.
“Is this ball yours, Trent?” I said, handing it back to him.
“That’s not a ball, Dad,” I was informed with a groan. “That’s Jupiter.”
After I’d gotten in from work, I’d been immediately dispatched to our local Staples for some last-minute items. I hadn’t seen that many crazed-looking adults since April 15 at the post office. Didn’t the guidelines say that the students were to put together their own experiments? Yeah, right.
Ten minutes before midnight, I tucked in the last of the Edisons and Galileos and headed for the kitchen.
With glue-speckled cheeks and Sharpie-stained fingers, Mary Catherine was busy putting on all the finishing touches.
“Hey, Mary. I bet you never thought you’d have the pleasure of immersing yourself this deeply in the joys of science. Is your mind feeling as expanded as mine?”
“I have an idea for an experiment I’d like to run by those science people,” she said as she twirled a pipe cleaner.
“How much stress can people take before their heads actually explode?”
Chapter 35
IT WAS 2:20 in the morning when Dan Hastings exited Butler, Columbia University’s main library. Instead of heading toward the handicap ramp, the handsome blond freshman economics major smiled mischievously, zipped his iBOT wheelchair into stair mode, and rode the sucker all the way down the massive building’s Greek temple stairs.
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson, he thought as the expensive computer-balanced wheelchair bounced hard off the last step. His legs had become paralyzed in a mountain-biking accident.
He’d been on an extreme adventure trip to the Orkhon Valley in Central Mongolia with his dad. One second he was flying down a jeep track like the reincarnated Genghis Khan, and the next, his front tire got jacked between a couple of boulders.
His landing at the bottom of the ravine had pulverized his ninth, tenth, and eleventh thoracic vertebrae, but he wasn’t complaining. He still had his brain and his heart and, as a Mongolian parting bonus, the full use of his penis. With his iBOT, the so-called Ferrari of wheelchairs, he was putting the whole thing where it belonged. Behind him. He could and would continue to go anywhere he wanted.
Tonight’s late studying marathon was due to a mother of a stats test he had the next day. That, and the fact that his roomie was hosting a party for his Peace Studies group. He’d rather sleep in the stacks than hang with those tree huggers.
If truth be known, he was the biggest conservative he’d ever met. At liberal Columbia, that made him a spy, embedded deep in enemy territory.
His chair’s motor hummed as he opened it up across College Walk into Low Plaza. Usually, the area was filled with sunbathers and Hacky Sackers, but it was completely deserted now, the lit-up majestic dome of Low Library looking strangely ominous against the dark night sky.
Hadn’t the antiwar hippies taken over that beautiful building during the sixties? What a disgrace. What was even worse was that a lot of his fellow students still believed in that garbage.
Not him. He was an economics major. His original plan was to work his ass off, graduate summa, and get his ticket punched as an intern for one of the major Wall Street investment banks. But ever since Bear Stearns, Goldman, and Merrill had blown themselves up, he’d been thinking about trying to get on with a private-equity firm. He didn’t care which, just so long as it was big.
Go big or go home in a Med-Lift chopper was pretty much the Dan Hastings credo.
He popped in his iPod earbuds and scrolled himself up a little Fall Out Boy. That and My Chemical Romance were the greatest in wheelchair-cruising tunes.
He was passing Lewisohn Hall when he saw the light. A strange blue strobing coming from a doorway on its south side. Was it a cell phone? He slowed the chair and tugged out his earbuds.