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“Val. You checked him out for me.”
“The ex-CIA guy? Sure. Sure.”
Val offered his hand, but Chester only looked at it. “Sorry. I have this thing about skin contact.” He turned back to me.
O-kay.
Val gave no reaction as he casually began to explore the room, touching and lifting things.
Chester visibly bristled. “Hands off.”
Val raised a brow then opened his fingers; the piece of paper he was looking at, wafted down to the desk.
“If you just give me the info on those symbols, we’ll get out of your way.” I smiled to smooth the tension in the room.
“You said it was from a morgue?” Chester turned back to me.
“Yeah, out in Fairfield.”
“And you have no idea what they mean?”
I shook my head “No. I compared it to the first batch of symbols you sent me but got zilch.”
His eyes narrowed, his full concentration centered on me. “Nothing? Really? You’re sure?”
“Dead sure.”
“Dead sure?” He smiled, but it had none of the warmth that was there when I’d entered the room. “It’s up on the screens in the back room” His hand wriggled at the end of his arm as he pointed toward the room accessed by the keypad.
There was a fine line of sweat on his top lip.
“Are you okay, Chester? You look ill. I could call a doctor?”
“Hell no! I’m fine. Jesus. Fine. I’m fine.”
At the door, he covered the pad as he punched in numbers then pressed his thumb to a section below it.
This door made more noises than the first one.
“Finally I’m getting to see inside your lair.” NowIwas babbling. “You growing Mary J or something?”
“Hah-hah. No. No. The irrigation problems alone... It’d damage my computers.” He hauled on the door, grunting, and it swung outward, revealing a thickness of at least four inches of metal. “Please, after you.”
I caught Val’s gaze, and he tilted his head as if questioning if this was a smart thing to do. I shook my head with annoyance and stepped forward. Everyone was jumpy. We were jumpy because of the monsters, and Chester was jumpy...because I’d come here with Val.
Inside was another large room.
Tables in the center were loaded with display cases and inside them seemed a century’s worth of sci-fi memorabilia fromStar TrekandStar Warsto some superhero stuff. The walls were haphazardly masked with sheets that probably kept out the light. A single computer dominated a middle table. The see-through case shone in a menacing red with a clawed design in neon blue on the side of the plastic. Power cords ran across the floor like wandering snakes.
Nothing remarkable.
My shoulders relaxed, and I rolled my neck when I felt Val’s body heat behind me.
“Would you like to do the honors and pull that sheet down, Val? The one straight ahead first, please,” Chester said. “I’m just going to close this. I have a thing about keeping this room shut. You never know what surveillance the government is doing.”
A tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorist. Thing was, after what happened to me at school, Chester and I had bonded as the weird kids.
Val rolled his eyes at the drama but complied. The sheet fell to the floor.
