“And?” Gabriel said.
“And there’s nothing out of the ordinary about them.” He fished out page after page, turned them so Gabriel and Cierra could read them. Not that they could understand the details—they weren’t chemists. But the conclusions were clear enough. The scientists had run every test they could think of and concluded that what Gabriel and Cierra had brought back from the Well of Eternity was plain water. Clean, drinkable; no parasites or impurities; no unusual minerals or trace elements. It was clean enough that you could bottle it and sell it, and who knows, maybe you could make a buck or two doing so—some companies had done nicely peddling water from the world’s remote rain forests. But there was nothing whatsoever about the water that would produce any unsual effect.
“I guess whatever mineral deposit gave the water its power must have finally been exhausted,” Cierra said.
“If it ever existed,” Gabriel said.
“What, now you don’t believe?”
“I believe that was General Fargo; I believe he lived a century and more. We’ll never know if it was the water that did it. Maybe it was something else down there.”
“Well, what ever it was is gone now,” Cierra said.
“If only Fargo had decided to reach out to us sooner,” Gabriel said, “maybe we could have done something—”
“Or maybe someone like Esparza would have gotten control of it. You don’t know. Things could have turned out a lot worse.”
“And on that note,” Michael said. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a small brown bottle with a cork stopper in it. “Here’s the last of the samples you brought back,” he said. He held it out to Gabriel. “The scientists didn’t need it. The others were enough.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“I thought you might want it,” Michael said.
“You just said it’s an ordinary bottle of water. You can get one like it at any corner grocery store.”
“Pour it out if you like,” Michael said. “I just figured it should be your choice.”
Grinning, Gabriel took the bottle and pulled the cork. “Or maybe we should pass it around and each take a little swig? Just in case? Nothing like a little eternal youth to spark up an evening.”
Cierra shook her head. “No, thank you. I don’t want anything more to do with the Well of Eternity.”
“Michael?”
“Thanks, but no,” Michael said.
Gabriel took a deep breath. “Well, then…bottoms up.” He lifted the bottle to his mouth.
He stopped before it touched his lips, though, and sat there like that for a heartbeat before lowering it. “Hell with it,” he said with a shake of his head. “If living and dying is good enough for the rest of mankind, I guess it’s good enough for me, too.”
He walked across to the potted ficus that stood in the corner of Michael’s office and emptied the bottle into the soil at its base.
“Now,” he said as he tossed the bottle back to his brother, “if you’ll both come with me, I know a place where they serve some single malt scotch that’ll make you feel like you’ll live forever.”
Gabriel led Michael and Cierra out of the office, closing the door behind them. The ficus was cast into shadow as the door swung shut.
Its leaves had never looked hardier or more resilient.
Enjoy these other Gabriel Hunt adventures:
HUNT THROUGH THE CRADLE OF FEAR *
HUNT AT WORLD’S END *
HUNT BEYOND THE FROZEN FIRE *
HUNT AMONG THE KILLERS OF MEN *
HUNT THROUGH NAPOLEON’S WEB *
* coming soon
Copyright
A LEISURE BOOK®
May 2009
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 2009 by Winterfall LLC
Cover painting copyright © 2009 by Glen Orbik
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0671-8
GABRIEL HUNT was created by Charles Ardai and is a trademark of Winterfall LLC.
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