Forever Odd

TWENTY-EIGHT

EYES CLOSED, PALE, UNMOVING, DANNY LOOKED DEAD. Only the throb of a pulse in his temple and the tension in his jaw muscles revealed that he was alive, and in the grip of dread.

He resembles that actor, Robert Downey Jr., though without the edge of heroin-addict glamour that would give him true star quality in contemporary Hollywood.

Past the face, the resemblance to any actor drops to zero. Danny has a lot better brain than any movie star of the past few decades.

His left shoulder is somewhat misshapen from excess bone growth during the healing of a fracture. That arm twists unnaturally from shoulder to wrist, with the consequence that it doesn't hang straight at his side, and the hand twists away from his body.

His left hip is deformed. The right leg is shorter than the other. The right tibia thickened and bowed as it healed from a break. His right ankle contains so much excess bone that he has only forty percent function in that joint.

Strapped to the hotel-room chair, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt with a yellow lightning bolt on the chest, he could have been a fairy-tale character. The handsome prince suffering under a witch's spell. The love child of a forbidden romance between a princess and a kind troll.

I closed the door behind me before I said softly, "Wanna get out of here?"

His blue eyes opened, owlish with surprise. Fear made room for mortification, but he didn't appear to be at all relieved.

"Odd," he whispered, "you shouldn't have come."

Dropping the backpack, zipping it open, I whispered, "What am I gonna do? There was nothing good on TV"

"I knew you'd come, but you shouldn't, it's hopeless."

From the backpack, I withdrew a fishing knife, flipped the blade out of the handle. 'Always the optimist."

"Get out of here while you can. She's crazier than a syphilitic suicide bomber with mad-cow disease."

"I don't know anybody else who says stuff like that. Can't leave you here when you talk that good."

His ankles were bound to the chair legs with numerous turns of duct tape. Bonds of tape wound around his chest, securing him to the back of the chair. In addition, his arms were taped to the arms of the chair at the wrists and at the crooks of the elbows.

I started sawing rapidly at the loops of tape that bound his left wrist.

"Odd, stop it, listen, even if you have time to cut me loose, I can't stand up-"

"If your leg's broken or something," I interrupted, "I can carry you at least to a hiding place."

"Nothing's broken, that's not it," he said urgently, "but if I stand up, it'll detonate."

Although I finished freeing his left wrist, I said, "Detonate. That's a word I like even less than decapitate."

"Check out the back of the chair."

I went around behind him to have a look. Being a guy who has seen a few movies as well as some weird action in real life, I at once recognized the kilo of plastic explosives held to the back of the chair by the same tape that bound Danny.

A battery, lots of colorful wires, an instrument that resembled a small version of a carpenter's level (with the indicator bubble measuring a perfect horizontal plane), and other arcane paraphernalia suggested that whoever had put the bomb together had a flair for such work.

Danny said, "The instant I raise my ass off the chair-boom. If I try to walk with the chair and the level measures too far off the horizontal-boom."

"We have a problem here," I agreed.