Chapter 14 - The Dead Father
"Hello, son," Richard Miller said, taking another sip of his drink as he reached the bottom of the staircase.
My vocal cords seized. The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
"Dad?" The word tasted like poison in my mouth.
"You've grown into quite the stubborn man," he said, setting the glass on the credenza with a soft clinking sound. "Just like your mother. Always complicating simple transactions with moral indignation."
"You died," I whispered. "I went to your funeral. I buried your casket."
"You buried an empty mahogany box with fifty pounds of lead weights inside," he chuckled quietly. "Evelyn was very thorough with her public relations. When our company developed the synthetic gene patent, she wanted to keep the rights exclusively for your lineage. She thought I was too reckless. So, we reached an agreement. I took fifty million, vanished to Zurich, and let her play suburban matriarch."
"Then why are you here?"
Richard’s smile vanished, replaced by an expression of cold, predatory hunger. "Because fifty million doesn't last thirty years, Mark. And the patent portfolio matures today. Three hundred million dollars converts to liquid bearer bonds the moment Toby’s biometric sample verifies the inheritance chain."
"You're using your own grandson as a key," I said, my hands tightening around Toby's blanket.
"He won't feel a thing," Richard said, stepping forward, leveling his pistol at my forehead. "A simple bone marrow aspiration from his hip. Then Elena administers the neural stabilizer, and you three can go live happily ever after in some little coastal town on a generous monthly stipend. Refuse... and I take the sample from a corpse."
Beneath the wool blanket, Toby’s small hand suddenly moved.
His fingers dug into the fabric of my shirt, squeezing with surprising strength.
He looked up at me through hooded eyelids.
"Daddy," he whispered, so faint only I could hear. "The pocket."
May you like
In my jacket pocket, the red auto-injector was cold against my ribs.
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