“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say, feeling the cheese on wheat work its way in a direction it shouldn’t be going. “Where are they?”

“In here.” He opens the door to a side room. It’s vacant, except for two gurneys and a rolling surgical table covered in an array of stainless steel implements I’ve seen only in pictures—pickups, retractors, forceps, something that looks like a melon baller. On the stretcher closest to me lies a four-foot-tall female chimpanzee, her scalp partially shaved on the left side. On the other stretcher is a five-foot-six life-form of a slightly lower order. Both are heavily sedated, their chests rising and falling in a steady rhythm.

Petroski succeeded in getting Morgan to the lab; Lorenzo finished the job.

“I think I like him better this way,” I say. “Which one first?”

Lorenzo points to the chimp.

“All right. Bad joke.” But I need the humor to get through this. As soon as I see the craniotomy drill with its irregular steel bit, a little like a malformed tooth, I rethink. I don’t need humor to get through this. I need a goddamned neurosurgeon.

“Gianna?” Lorenzo says. He checks his watch. “They’re not going to be out forever.”

I pick up the perforating drill and turn it on. It makes a low hum as the bit whirs around. There’s no way this tiny contraption is going to bust through skull bone.

“I can’t,” I say, putting the drill down. So much for being willing to do anything.

Chapter Seventy-one

SEVENTY-ONE

I don’t know how many times I’ve said “I could kill him” in my forty-odd years. Maybe a few thousand.

I could kill him for leaving the clothes in the washing machine. I could kill him for not calling to say he’d be late. I could kill him for breaking Mamma’s majolica vase. Could, could, could. Kill, kill, kill. Of course I never meant it. The words are as semantically vacuous as “I love you to death” and “I’m hungry enough to eat a horse” and “I’d bet my life the Sox are going to take a bath in this year’s series.” No one dies from love outside of a Brontë novel or eats entire horses or lays his life on the line for a baseball game. No one. But we say this garbage all the time.

The fact is, I don’t know whether I could have put down chimp Number 412, even while he was going apeshit.

I do know that I’m not taking a skull drill anywhere near either of the two sleeping hominoids on these gurneys.

And I don’t have to.

“Get Petroski,” I say to Lorenzo.

He stares at me.

“No. I’m not asking him to do it. I need the keys to Room One.”

Again, the stare.