Free Dead Simple by Jon Land

like he was going away. “You have any idea where your son Damon is right now?”
    Othell felt his knees wobble. “What, Jack, what ?”
    Tyrell took something from his shirt pocket and shook the water from it. “Let’s play hide-and-seek. I hide your son and you seek him.”
    Othell came right up to the edge of the pool. He realized it was a prescription pill bottle that Tyrell was holding in his hand. “Where is he, Jack? What have you done?”
    Tyrell popped the top off the pill bottle and it plopped into the pool. “I gave him some pills, Othell, quite a few pills. Shit, you might say I poisoned your boy.”
    “No, Jack! No!”
    “Calm down, old friend, ’cause these pills I got here will counteract the others, like an antidote, if you’re following me.”
    Jackie Terror shook the topless bottle, and Othell Vance watched the tiny white spheres bounce dangerously close to the rim, clacking against each other.
    “Please, Jack, tell me where he is.”
    Jackie Terror took one of the pills out and flung it into the water. “I wouldn’t squander too many of these if I were you, Othell.”
    “Jack, what you’re asking me—I can’t do it! I haven’t got that kind of security clearance! Nobody has that kind of security clearance!”

    “Too bad,” Tyrell said, and dropped another pill into the pool.
    Othell Vance snapped a hand out, as if trying to reach for it. “Hold on, there might be something … .”
    “Now you’re talking, old friend.”
    “But there’s a problem: it’s lost.”
    Tyrell poured a pile of pills into his palm. “You’re trying my patience, Othell.” And he extended his hand over the water, stopping just short of dropping them in.
    “No, wait! I can help you find it. Get you every scrap of information in existence, in the goddamn world!”
    Tyrell brought his hand back. “This stuff you lost, it’s good?”
    “If Satan sat down to shit, this is what would come out,” Othell Vance said, in a voice that sounded like somebody else’s, somebody he had done his best to forget.
    Jackie Terror turned his palm sideways and let the bottle suck the pills back up. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me more.”
    “The stuffs called Devil’s Brew … .”

NINE
    “ W hatcha think this is,” Buck Torrey said, a foot prodding Blaine’s shoulder, “a fucking hotel? Get your ass up!”
    Blaine stirred and sat up in the first of the dawn light; Torrey’s porch had become his permanent sleeping place. Took all the hours he could steal from the night just to cool down from the long hot days of training. Going on four weeks now, and the differences were striking.
    Years of religious weight lifting had added rippling slabs of muscle to Blaine’s frame. He had worked out obsessively, trying to cheat age and fool his muscles into thinking they were younger. But all those months in the hospital had taken both bulk and tone away, leaving soft layers of flab in their place. Now, after only a month with Buck, the flab was gone. He was thinner and leaner than he had been in years, trading muscle for speed while sacrificing only minimal strength in the process. The change was especially kind to his hip, since it was carrying twenty fewer pounds now than it had last year.
    Blaine couldn’t pinch fat anywhere on his body, and best of all, he could pinch with two hands. The restricted motion of his shoulder had vanished, the mobility back. He could pivot and twist now almost as well as ever, no longer doubting his hip could take the strain.
    Blaine ducked under the porch railing and dove into the water, a daily ritual. Every morning he’d swim under Buck Torrey’s stilt house and paddle
around underwater as long as he could, trying to stretch the seconds each day.
    “How’d I do?” he asked, heaving for air as he splashed back above the surface.
    Torrey looked up from his watch. “Minute forty-five. Best yet, you son of a bitch, your new fucking record. But don’t even think about leaving