Page 74 of Lovely Darkness

I look at the chart again. Flip the page. It’s like a family tree. A generational chart. But no names, just numbers. Which leads one to believe that this information describes animals.

But then Nick says, “Read off your first-generation numbers.”

I flip to the last page, the first crossing, and read off my numbers.

“Nope. Mine are different. Read the next line.”

I close my file. “We’re not gonna get anywhere like this. We need a database so we can cross-reference. And making a database is gonna take me some time. So my first question is—how bad do we need this information?”

“How do we know if we need it if we don’t know what it is, Merc?”

He’s got a point.

“And look at this.” He pulls a old vinyl binder off the pile of charts. Opens it up to a an eight-by-ten picture of a young man, and points to the date. “Nineteen ten.”

“OK. But I’m not following.”

“This is Gerald Couture.”

“He’s the… grandfather?”

“Yeah.”

I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t. So I say, “OK,” again. “So what?”

“Look how young he is.”

“Hmm. Didn’t he just die in that last take-down?”

“Yep.”

“Hmm. Yeah. He was an old fuck, that’s for sure.”

“No. That’s the point. I mean, yeah, he was old, Merc. But he didn’t look like an old fuck. Not like Doc, right? And he’d be much older than Doc. Gerald Couture was still running that island when they were raided seven years ago. He was not an old fuck.”

I don’t know what to make of that, so I don’t say anything.

“Megan Machette was doing rat studies,” Nick continues. “She was looking for the secret to eternal life—or, at the very least, extended life.”

“So why don’t we ask her? She might be able to take one look at this and say what it is.”

“I didn’t want to bring anyone else in on this, but it looks like we’ll have to.”

“Do you have access to her? Because if not, I can probably get a hold of her through a woman in Fort Collins.”

“I have access to Johnny. It’ll have to go through him anyway, so might as well start there.”

“All right. We’re gonna table this until we can get her eyeballs on it?”

He closes the binder and throws one of the folders into the box and then leans back against the headboard of the bed. “I was actually hoping you’d have answers.”

“Why would I have answers?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything. Just props his hands behind his head and sighs. “Nick?”

He looks at me, still silent. Then, finally, he says, “I want what you want, ya know that?”

“What do I want?”

“For your girls to be… free, right? Free of all this bullshit. I want to find Carter’s base, I want to find all his information, I want to find all the answers and I want to be able to say, ‘Your girls are good, Merc. They’re clear. They’re not gonna be a problem.’”