Chapter #38The Durrases in Their Natural Habitat by: Seuzz   The fake Patterson and the real Patterson depart shortly afterward, leaving you to finish dressing. As you pull on the cotton shorts and muscle shirt Joe had donned for the surprise game of one-on-one Patterson had invited him to, you marvel over your amazing luck: Getting into Joe's mask before Patterson could; keeping him out of it; and, courtesy of Patterson himself, getting to step into Joe's life in a way that will make it far easier to take him and his brother out of commission. All while scarcely doing anything yourself.
But luck can't last forever. If you're going to keep yourself in the cat-bird seat, you're going to have to ruthlessly suppress any threats to it.
Your stride is loose and limber as you saunter across the gym floor and out the side door. But although Joe Durras is strong and quick and physically graceful, he isn't a quarter the athlete his adoptive brother is. Frank (originally Giuseppe) camouflages his gifts with misdirection as carefully as Joe does his; people at Eastman call Joe the jock and the Frank the brain, when it's actually the other way around, and you feel your eyes glint with concentration as you reflect on how difficult it will be to take care of the other Durras. He is strong, agile, and packs a punch that is, quite literally, otherworldly. Unless you can catch him unawares, he will make fast and brutal work of you.
* * * * *
"I'm hungry!" you bellow as you slam front door behind you. Dishes clatter in another room, and Frank's head appears as a dark blot against the backlight of the kitchen. "Bring me food, girly-man!"
"Go out and kill yourself a mastodon," Frank retorts. "Or a gopher, if you think you're man enough to take one down."
"Fucker, you ate without me!"
"I thought you were gonna get something with your play date. How was it, by the way?"
"I don't want to be uncharitable," you grumble as you yank open the pantry door to stare at the mostly bare shelves.
"So be charitable."
"Steve Patterson is a dickish, doltish, cock-sucking reprobate with delusions of humanity. He must eat through his asshole, because every time he opens his mouth shit comes out."
"And if you were uncharitable?"
You twist the top off a jar of peanut butter and scoop out a goopy wad with two fingers. "I'd smear this and a jar of honey over his face and bury him up to his neck by a nest of fire ants and wasps." You shove the mess into your mouth and suck hard on your fingers.
"Is he any good on the court?" You open your mouth and stick out your tongue, flashing the crap at Frank. He winces. "I hear Black is even worse."
"If he is," you mumble around the peanut butter, "we'll have found the instantiation of a hitherto putatively purely theoretical construct, viz., That Asshole-i-er Than Which Cannot Be Conceived." You pluck up a corner of Frank's t-shirt and wipe your fingers on it.
He stares down at the mess. You stare down at it. You raise your eyes as he slowly raises his. You watch him carefully, until you see the telltale spark of static electricity in his dark hair.
You dive out of the way as an invisible fist punches the wall behind you, then instantly reverse and jump the other way as invisible fingers brush by your torso. You scamper to the other side of the kitchen and out the other doorway, running hard into the front living room and thence back into the foyer. You grin to yourself as you stop and crouch, watching for pursuit. A shadow looms on the dining room wall, but you're not going to fall for that old trick, and instead of running away, you run toward it. Peeking around the corner, you see the kitchen is empty—Ha! Frank is so predictable. Grinning, you pull at the sliding glass door leading to the back yard.
But it's locked, and as you fumble at the catch something grabs your ankle and yanks your feet out from under you. "Fuck! Shit!" you laugh and cry as you're dragged back toward the front door. Humiliatingly, you're hoisted into the air, to hang upside down in front of Frank. Your shirt falls down to cover your face.
"Suck it off!" Frank roars.
"Mercy!" you cry. "Uncle! I'll clean it up! I'll do your laundry!"
"Suck it off!"
"I'll do your underwear!"
A pause. "Hand wash?" he asks.
"Uh ..."
"Hand wash my tidy whities, or you get on your knees and suck that shit outta my shirt."
"Alright, alright! Fuck!" He drops you to the ground with a crash, but you roll out of it to peer up at him with a grin. His eyes are narrow, but they twinkle. "Yeah, I'll do your underwear. Only 'cos I know if I put my mouth down there, you'd get an erection."
His smile fades a little. "You'd like it. You wanted me to catch you."
"You cheated. I just ran."
He grunts. "When was the last time you did your exercises?"
"This morning at school. I hit the weights."
"No, I mean the exercises Kali gave you."
"Oh." You make a face as you get to your feet. "Coupla days. Gotta be careful at school."
"We're not at school now."
You twist your hand as though unscrewing a light bulb. "There, happy?"
"What was that?"
"I did it too fast for you to see, and now I'm really hungry."
"I'm serious, Joe. You're not challenging yourself enough these days."
"Says the guy who keeps missing baskets intentionally," you grumble as you trudge back into the kitchen. You pull some crackers and a can of soup from the pantry. "Look, the school's clean. Whoever has the Libra has moved on. We oughta collect the stuff we found in that sub-basement and send it back to Dad."
"Whoever it is isn't going to abandon it," says Frank, who has followed you.
"He's got the Libra. Or maybe he fucked himself up. Survey says Sawyer is still our number one suspect."
"You didn't find anything at his house."
"I was busy with Belinda. Maybe I should ask her out again."
"Oh?" Frank says, and raises an eyebrow. "So you weren't as thorough on that search as you said."
"I guess not," you retort. "So I should try again with her."
He sighs. "You're paying too much attention to the girls."
"And you're not paying enough. Anyway, if you think I'm being distracted, then we should pull outta the school and start looking elsewhere."
"We need some idea of where to search," he says wearily.
"So I'll go out with Belinda again and do another search of her house."
"Oh, I give up," he says. "It's like arguing with a clock. Your hands always sweep around to touch the same spot, and it's always some girl's tits."
* * * * *
You wind up watching a movie as you scribble down half-assed answers to your homework. Around eleven Frank announces he's going to bed, and shortly thereafter you hear the sliding glass door as he goes outside. Even then, you kill another hour before going into the bedroom, changing into pajamas, and putting out the light.
You lay in the dark, eyes fastened on the ceiling, wishing the masks copied more than just memories and physical forms. You would really like to speed the clock up. Frank is a light sleeper, and it will be a few hours before he's slumbering deeply enough to make a safe ambush. So you have lots of time to lightly rub your thighs and think about the pretty girls at Eastman, and let your cock rise and bob and relax. Joe hasn't gone all the way with any of them, but you can change that.
Along about one-thirty you tire of the fantasies and return to some long-range planning. Your stumbling on Joe and Frank was both lucky and alarming. Lucky, because after you've dealt with Frank you won't have to worry that he and Frank will find you and end your fun. Alarming, though, because they are aware of several loose ends that neither they nor you can explain. They found a box in the Eastman gym sub-basement containing a notebook and other items that could only be part of the cache of Libra-related items they've been trying to recover. You didn't put it there, and the timing of their discovery means Patterson couldn't have put it there, either. They suspect it is related to Sawyer Harrison, a senior who fell into a coma just before the start of school, but can't prove it. Harrison's connection, if it exists, is another murky mystery. You also would like to know how the Libra—which, you've learned to your stunned surprise, was briefly at Salopek Engineering, where your real dad works—made its way to Arnholm's Bookstore. Joe is a quick thinker, but he needs data, and there just isn't enough data to make sense of things.
A little after two you decide it's safe to make your next play. You pull a blank mask from Joe's bag and quietly steal into the back yard. Moving quickly but stealthily, you approach Frank, who is lying on his back under the single tree in the yard. As you stoop next to him, he stirs.
If he has woken, you don't give him a chance to react, and with the speed of striking cobra you jam the mask onto his face. He goes quiet again. But you're still not safe. You tear Joe's mask from your face, fighting the urge to pass out; you fall heavily across Frank, and lay panting as a pain like a million licking tongues of flame recedes. Then, when the mask reappears on Frank's face, you drop Joe's mask onto him. His eyes gleam in the dark. "Asshole," he mutters.  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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