The Chemist Part 39

Alex did manage to get a little bit of sleep, maybe thirty minutes by the time the alarm sounded. Just enough that she was completely dragging as they set off. Daniel was more alert, so he took the first s.h.i.+ft and she reclined the pa.s.senger seat as far back as it would go. The seats were much more comfortable, the suspension smoother, and it was easier to doze. The dogs seemed happy in the back, as if they appreciated the new ride, too.

She was herself again by the time they got to the dog-boarding facility north of Atlanta. It was after nine thirty; they were running a little behind, thanks to some construction delays on I-65.

Daniel stayed with the car as she carried Lola into the front office. It was a casual place, homey, with lots of fenced acres lining the road in. The dogs that ran alongside the car as they pa.s.sed looked happy and healthy. Of course, Lola wouldn't be running anywhere for a while.

The man behind the desk was all sympathy as Alex came in. He obviously had linked her to the reservation before she introduced herself as Ms. Wells. She followed patiently as he showed her the s.p.a.cious kennel Lola would occupy and explained the visiting vet's schedule. She thanked him and paid him for a month in advance, then gave Lola one last hug. As Kevin had promised, the man never commented on Lola's injury in a specific way, and he didn't mention Alex's face. Twenty minutes later, she and Daniel were back on the road. Alex was glad it was her turn to drive. She needed something to concentrate on so she wouldn't think about leaving Lola behind.

She thought Daniel would crash, but he was still bright-eyed and in a talkative mood. Or maybe he could see how she was trying to fight off the sadness and wanted to help. Knowing him, that was probably it.

"You know almost everything about me from that stupid file," he complained. "But there's so much I don't know about you."

"I've actually told you most of it. When my life wasn't bizarre, it was pretty boring."

"Tell me something embarra.s.sing about you in high school."

"Everything about me was embarra.s.sing in high school. I was a huge nerd."

"Sounds s.e.xy."

"Oh, really? My mother cut my hair at home and I had the most outrageous bangs the nineties had ever seen."

"Please tell me there's a picture."

"You wish. When my mother died, I burned all the incriminating stuff."

"Who was your first boyfriend?"

Alex laughed. "Roger Markowitz. He took me to senior prom. I had the most totally awesome puffy sleeves on my dress. Electric blue, naturally. Roger tried to slip me the tongue in the limo on the way to the ballroom, but he was so nervous that he threw up on me. I spent the whole dance in the ladies' room trying to clean up. I broke up with him that night. One might describe it as an epic romance."

"What a tearjerker!"

"I know. Romeo and Juliet had nothing on us."

Daniel laughed. "Who was your first serious relations.h.i.+p?"

"Serious? Wow. Hmm, I don't know if anyone would qualify besides Bradley. First year of med school at Columbia."

"You went to Columbia med?" he asked.

"I was a very brainy nerd."

"I'm impressed. Back to Bradley."

"Do you want to hear something really and truly embarra.s.sing?"

"Very much."

"The reason I was first attracted to him..." She paused. "Maybe I shouldn't admit this."

"It's too late to turn back. You have to tell me now."

She took a deep breath. "Okay, fine. He looked like Egon. You know, from Ghostbusters? Just exactly like that, bouffant hair, round gla.s.ses, everything."

Daniel worked to keep a straight face. "Irresistible."

"You have no idea. So hot."

"How long were you together?"

"Through that first summer. Then I won a scholars.h.i.+p in my second year. We both applied, and he thought he was a shoo-in. He didn't take it well when I, as he put it, took it from him. He went in and demanded to see our scores. Something I noticed multiple times throughout my wild and crazy romantic period: lots of guys don't like girls to be smarter than they are."

"That must have really limited your dating pool."

"Right down to zero."

"Well, rest a.s.sured, I've never had a problem with a woman who is smarter than me. I wouldn't want to limit my pool by that much. I think that kind of childishness usually goes away when men grow up."

"I'll have to take your word for it. I never dated anyone outside of school. I didn't get to explore the adult stage of the human male. Well, till now."

"Never?" he asked, shocked.

"I was recruited while I was still in school. I told you what it was like after that."

"But... you must have met people outside of work. You got vacation time, didn't you?"

She smiled. "Not very often. And it was hard for me to talk to people outside of the lab. Everything was cla.s.sified. I was cla.s.sified. I couldn't be myself in any way or talk about any part of my real life with a person on the outside. It was too hard being some imaginary character. I preferred isolation. It embarra.s.sed me to try to play a role. Ironic, isn't it? Now I have a new name every other week."

He put his hand on her knee. "I'm sorry. It sounds horrible."

"Yeah. It frequently was. That's why I'm so backward when it comes to interpersonal relations. But on the plus side, I got to do some really cutting-edge work with monoclonal antibodies-I'm talking about sci-fi stuff here, the kind of thing people don't believe exists. And I had essentially no limits on my practical research. I got everything I wanted in the lab. My budget was amazing. I'm responsible for a larger chunk of the national debt than you know."

He laughed.

"So was your ex-wife smarter than you are?" she asked.

He hesitated for a moment. "It doesn't bother you to talk about her?"

"Why would it? You didn't get jealous over the eternal flame I will always carry for Roger Markowitz."

"Good point. Well, Lainey was very bright in her own way. Not book-smart, but clever, shrewd. When we met, she was so... vivid. She wasn't like other women I'd dated, easygoing girls who were content with easygoing me. Lainey always wanted more-from every aspect of life. She was a little... contrary. In the beginning, I thought she just had very firm opinions and wasn't afraid to disagree. I loved that about her. But then, over time... well, she wasn't really opinionated, she just loved the drama. She would argue if you told her the sun rises in the east. It was always exciting, at least."

"Ah, so you're an adrenaline junkie. This all starts to make sense now."

"What makes sense?"

"Your attraction to me."

He stared at her, blinking owlishly the way he did when he was surprised.

"Admit it," she teased. "You're just in this for the thrill of the near-death experiences."

"Hmm, I hadn't considered that."

"Maybe we should forget this gig in DC after all. If I eliminate my hunters and life gets all safe and boring, you'll be out the door, won't you?" She sighed theatrically.

She couldn't tell if he was serious or playing along when he answered, "I was never fond of this plan to begin with. Maybe it is smarter to run."

"On the other hand, if I do a bad job in DC, it's going to get a lot more dangerous. You'll love that."

He gave her a bleak stare.

"Was that over the line?" she asked.

"A little too close to home."

"Sorry."

He sighed. "Your theory is incorrect, though, I'm afraid. See, I got over my love of drama early on. It was still exciting, but so is drowning in quicksand, I'd imagine. Exciting is not the same thing as enjoyable."

"But you didn't leave."

Daniel stared at his hand-curled tensely around her thigh now-as he answered. "No. I thought... well, this makes me sound like a first-cla.s.s sucker. I thought I could fix her. She had a lot of issues from her past, and I let those issues be the excuse when she did things to hurt me. I never blamed her; I always blamed her history. Cliff-that's the man she left me for; what a fantastic name to be left for, don't you think?-Cliff wasn't her first fling. I found out about the others later." He glanced up at her suddenly. "Was that all in the file?"

"No."

He stared out the winds.h.i.+eld. "I knew I should give up. I knew I wasn't holding on to anything real. The Lainey I loved was just a construct in my head. But I was stubborn. Stupidly so. Sometimes you cling to a mistake simply because it took so long to make."

"It sounds miserable."

He looked over and smiled at her weakly. "Yes, it was. But the hardest part was just admitting none of it had ever been real. It's humiliating, you know, to be duped. So my pride was hurt worse than anything else."

"I'm sorry."

"And I'm sorry, too. My stories are so much less entertaining than yours. Tell me about another boyfriend."

"I have a question first."

He stiffened a little bit. "Go ahead."

"That story you told the hooker, Kate, what was that about?"

"Huh?" His eyebrows pulled together in confusion.

"The one who was supposed to plant your tracker. Kevin said you told her your divorce wasn't final. But he also said this conversation happened two years after you split. You didn't contest the divorce, it went through in months. So why did you say that?"

Daniel laughed. "Thank you, seriously, from the very bottom of my heart, for not voicing that question in front of Kevin."

"You're welcome."

"Yes, the divorce was ancient history by then. But this girl... girls like that did not wander into the dive bar where I used to hang out. And if one happened to, I would not have been the guy she approached."

"What was she like?"

"If memory serves, she was stunning. And predatory. And oddly... frightening. I never believed for an instant that she was really attracted to me. I could sense there was an agenda, and I didn't want to fall for it. I was a little sensitive, at that point, to the idea of being duped again. But of course I didn't want to be rude, so I went with the politest refusal I could think of."

Alex chuckled. "You're right. Never, ever tell Kevin that you were afraid of the stunning hooker."

"Can you imagine?" He laughed with her. "Your turn. Another boyfriend."

"I'm running out... Let's see, I dated a guy named Felix for a couple of weeks in undergrad."

"And what extinguished the flames of your pa.s.sion?"

"You have to understand, the only place I ever met boys was in a lab."

"Go on."

"Well, Felix worked with animals. Rats, mostly. He kept a lot of them in his apartment. There was a... smell problem."

Daniel threw his head back and howled with laughter. The sound of it was infectious. She couldn't help chortling along with him. It was not as out of control as that first afternoon in Kevin's secret lair, but it was close. All the stress seemed to drain out of her body, and she felt more relaxed than she would have thought possible in light of where she was headed.

Eventually, Daniel fell asleep, midsentence, as he described his fifth-grade crush. He'd been fighting his droopy eyelids for a while, and she suspected again that he'd been trying to keep her mind off the negatives.

It was relaxing to have him sleeping peacefully next to her. Einstein was snoring on the backseat, a nice counterpoint to the even sound of Daniel's breathing. She knew she should be thinking of a variety of plans, ways to get to Carston without exposing herself too greatly, but she just wanted to enjoy the moment. Peace was going to be a limited commodity in her near future. If this was the last moment that she got to be entirely content, then she wanted to experience it fully.

She was in a rare state of calm when she woke Daniel a few hours later, as they were entering the outskirts of DC. The last time she'd pulled into this city, she'd been furious and terrified. She probably had even more reason to feel that way today, but she was still enjoying the time she had left alone with Daniel, and she wasn't going to let that go before she had to.

Daniel read the directions to her as she got closer to their target. As she'd originally thought, this was a nice neighborhood, and it was only getting nicer. Wasn't that like Kevin, to hide somewhere so incongruous? She circled the building with the matching address twice, doubting whether this could be the place.

"I'd better call him."

Daniel handed her the phone. She hit Redial, and it rang once.

"You're late," Kevin answered. "What's wrong now?"

"Traffic. Nothing. I think we're outside, but... this place doesn't look right."

"Why?"

"We're hiding out in a fancy art deco high-rise?"

"Yeah. A friend of mine is letting us crash. There's parking under the building. Go to the fourth level down, I'll meet you." He disconnected.

She handed the phone back to Daniel. "Just once, I want to hang up on him first."

"You did the very first time he called, remember? Fairly spectacularly."