Blackjack Messiah

by Ben Bequer

  “Listen,” I said, but she was doubled over, crying away. “Armada, listen.”

  “I don’t need your help,” she said, her voice dripping with venom. “You’ve already ruined my life.”

  “How exactly?” I said.

  “What?”

  “You said I ruined your life, then tell me; how exactly?”

  She shook her head as if she thought I wouldn’t understand. “The visions,” she said.

  “Visions? Come on.”

  “Don’t mock me,” she said. “They showed you and me together - naked.”

  I laughed, “Trust me, that’s not going to happen.”

  “It will,” she said. “I don’t mind the company of men. I rather enjoy it and prefer it to women. But I never thought I would stoop so low as to let you inside me.”

  “I’m telling you,” I said. “I’m not seeing it.”

  “I saw it.”

  “I mean, I don’t imagine it happening. I’m halfway across the planet from you.”

  She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “It’s going to happen. I saw us in a bed together. I see it now, more clearly than ever.”

  “Where are you?”

  She recoiled in disgust. “You think I need help?”

  “No, I’ll just-”

  “I don’t want you here,” she said, looking around. “Besides, my vision was different. Not some Brooklyn hotel.”

  “You’re in Brooklyn? Listen, let me call-”

  “I said I don’t need your help, dammit!”

  How did you reach someone that was as panicked, as rabid as Armada? She was a danger to herself and anyone else around her. I had to go there, to help her somehow, didn’t I? Or at least call Ricky or Jeff to send someone to retrieve her.

  “Tell me where you are,” I said, but she was off on a rant, ignoring me.

  “I can’t understand what is happening to me, why you trouble my dreams. I am a warrior and I’ve been with hundreds of men - better men than you by a thousand - but I can’t stop this. It’s some sort of evil twist in destiny. I’ve seen it, and my dreams are never wrong. Never. We’re together, and we’re...making love.”

  “Listen!”

  “And you’re next to me, naked...and it arouses me!” she said, grabbing her breast. “And I’m horrified because my body wants it. It...looks forward to it. To you inside me, thrusting me,” she finally paused, crying again. “And now these people are following me…”

  “Following you?” I said. “What are you-”

  Then in a fit of rage, she brought the phone close to her face.

  “I hate you Blackjack. I want you dead!”

  The phone died in a jarring crash, and I could envision her throwing the phone just as I had. It was like being in the middle of a tornado, then having it dissipate in an instant. The sudden silence of the room was uncomfortable. “Crazy bitch,” I said, shutting down the iPad and reaching for the phone. Might as well call Madelyne before she expected my call.

  I started to dial, but then thought of Armada. Something had to be done. She was crazy, that’s for sure, seeing visions of me - sexual visions - and that was bad, but she was also imagining people following her.

  And that we needed to take care of.

  I dialed Epic, but the call went straight to voicemail.

  “Ricky, it’s Dale. Sorry to bother you, but it’s about Lady Armada. First of all, I’m cool with the whole thing. Please don’t overreact on the girl. She’s confused and doesn’t know what she’s doing. And believe me, if anyone deserves to get stabbed randomly, it’s me.”

  I paused, not knowing how to verbalize the rest of what I wanted to say.

  “I know you have your reasons, but it’ll make me feel better if we can all resolve this in a friendly way. Anyway, that’s what I called to say. Oh, and...okay, she called me to apologize, and I’m cool with it, but...Ricky, she sounded a bit paranoid. I’m worried. Call or text me when you can. She’s in some Brooklyn hotel and it looks like she’s been drinking - like, a lot of drinking. Anyway, I have the weekend, so I can go pick her up if you need me to, but I figured since you are East Coast-based anyway…”

  I was rambling. I hated rambling, but the girl had talked about us in a way that kind of rattled me. Sure, she was gorgeous, but I was with another girl. Still, these were her visions and she saw us fucking. Was I going to cheat on Apogee? From what little I understood of her precog powers, what she saw always happened.

  “Anyway, let me know what you want to do,” I said, hanging up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Soft Sell

  Scheduling calls on an eight hour time difference was one of the challenges of doing business overseas, especially when the principals had to coordinate all the details. Graydon Chase had assistants who had assistants, and those assistants had interns, and they all worked their asses off to make sure that when Chase picked up the phone, the correct person was on the other end. Bubu and I didn’t have near that luxury, and it was a pain in the ass.

  Most of that irritation was mitigated by the fact that he was a friend, and the generous amounts of money that magically appeared in my accounts on a consistent basis smoothed over the rest. In a world where half the planet wasn’t invested in my being either dead or imprisoned, I would call the office, but we both decided that was an unnecessary risk. He had a special phone and video setup that connected us securely. The U.S. government would pick it up if they were looking, but the origin point was in Bucharest where Bubu carpet bombed the local government with money. They would hide the moon if he asked it.

  The face staring out of my television was not Bubu. Anica Arcos was slim and pretty, her face bearing the tired eyes and frown lines of a woman who had grown up hard. With the money Bubu was pulling in, I’m sure she made better face while strolling the streets of London, but it was late, and based on the upturned eyebrows and blooming frown, something was wrong.

  “Anica, hey, how are you doing?” I said, trying to strike a light tone. She knew who I was, and it made convincing her that Bubu was doing legitimate business impossible.

  “Have you talked to Bogdan?” Bogdan was Bubu’s given name. She hated the nickname and rarely used it.

  “Not recently, I tried calling him a few days ago, but our connection was bad. Is something going on?”

  “I don’t know. He left to Romania to check on the progress of the latest building and nothing. No phone calls, no emails, no texts. We talk every day. Every day.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Three days. A lot of time for something bad to happen.”

  Tired words of comfort came to mind at that moment, the same cliché shit you said to anyone who was rightfully worried about a loved one. Her entire mien took on a new flavor for me. She didn’t hate me. Well, she did, but she was also terrified enough to call me. “I’ll look into it today.”

  She nodded grimly. She already thought he was dead. Romania was a tough place with a brutal underbelly. One brave moron with a bad idea and a gun could write your ending for you. Anica was asking me to find his corpse.

  “And Dale,” she said, her use of my first name shocking me. I was “him,” or the person whose name was not used. Before this, I considered an aggressive nod of the head to be friendly. “If it turns out that someone has...killed him…”

  “Their own mothers won’t recognize what’s left of them.”

  She nodded at that, and I took it for the thanks that it was and killed the connection.

  Swiping my way through a file in my watch computer, I came to a list of phone numbers. Turning off the video option, I made my first call. Sebastian was one of the first outside people Bubu had brought in to work on the software. He was ok, but more a maintenance guy than a real engineer. He was honest and reliable, attributes which made him valuable in a business where the proprietary tech was unpatented.

  He answered the phone with a greeting in Romanian. The background was noisy with the sounds of laughter, cheering,
and general yelling. I knew a bar when I heard one and suddenly yearned to sit at a table, drown myself in beer and play some pool.

  “Sebastian, it’s Mr. Black, can you hear me?”

  Mr. Black was the only name Sebastian and the few others who knew I existed were given. The background noise distorted a bit, and there was scratching in the phone speaker, but after a minute it all died down. “Sorry, it was too noisy in there. Mr. Black, is that you?”

  “Yeah Sebastian, am I coming through ok?”

  “Yes, sir. What I can do for you?”

  “I need to talk to Bubu. You seen him?”

  “I saw him Monday. He come to the local office and we talked about the apartments we are building near the old neighborhood. You see the blueprints?”

  I hadn’t seen any of the blueprints since I finished coding the software to build them months ago. Bubu had snatched them out from under me and gone to the races. Sebastian and the others thought I was financing the company, similar to what I wanted from Graydon Chase, a charade Bubu and I created to place him firmly in control of operations. “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “Monday night. We went out, had drinks, talked about the old neighborhood. We shared a taxi to his place. I saw him go inside.”

  My guts clenched around a pit nestled deep in my stomach. Scenarios sprang to visceral life in my mind’s eye. Bubu dead in a pit somewhere. Bubu being brainwashed by some vengeful asshole. Bubu hanging by his own intestines from a crossbeam in a very nice hotel room. I boxed them up for later. “Ok, Sebastian, I need to trust you. Can I trust you?”

  There was a long pause, and I thought he might hang up, but he said, “Sure, bro. I mean, yes, sir.”

  “Bro is fine Sebastian. I need you, tonight, to go anywhere Bubu might have ended up if he stayed in town. If you find him, call me immediately. I don’t care about the time or what state he’s in. You get me?”

  Another, longer, pause. When he spoke, there was a sudden quiver and his accent was heavier. “Yes, sir. Bubu didn’t go back to London?”

  “It doesn’t look that way.”

  “Bro, you should call Dorin.”

  It took a minute for the name to register, but when it did I scowled. “What does Dorin have to do with it?”

  “Bubu, you know, he pays Dorin a lot of money. For protection and to help move things along.”

  “Call me if anything, Sebastian,” I said and ended the call. Moving down the list, I found Dorin’s name near the bottom, my scowl deepening. The phone rang enough times that I thought it might go to voicemail when a deep voice grated out a Romanian greeting.

  “This is Mr. Black. I need to speak to Dorin. Now.”

  The line was silent, mumbled conversations in quickly spoken Romanian going on just past my ability to comprehend, but the voice on the other end of the line was the same one who had answered the call. “Dorin says to ask you who you are.”

  Summoning up all the malice I could muster, I said, “Tell Dorin that he can either talk to me now, or I will find him and see if he can, in fact, fly.”

  The phone changed hands, and the voice changed with it. “Mr. Black, it has been too long.”

  “I disagree. I have some questions, and you are going to answer them honestly. Otherwise, we’re going to pick up where our last conversation left off.”

  In our last conversation, Dorin’s boss, a man named Mihai, thought it was a good idea to shoot at me. He died for his trouble. Dorin supplanted him after a short conversation involving super strength and the pitfalls of achieving low orbit without vehicular assistance.

  “I don’t think that is necessary,” he said.

  “I’ll decide. When was the last time you saw Bubu?”

  “Did you lose him?”

  “Do not fucking test me, Dorin.”

  “He came Monday afternoon. We shared a bottle and he showed his gratitude.”

  “Gratitude for what?”

  “Mr. Black, you know for what.”

  “And what happened with Mihai? That doesn’t bother you?”

  “Unfortunate to be sure, but I told Mihai not to challenge you. He was a proud man.”

  “All water under the bridge, then?”

  “For what Bubu is paying, you could throw ten men into the sky and I wouldn’t care.”

  Dammit, Bubu, it wasn’t supposed to like this. Above board, all the way. That’s what you promised. How could you be so stupid? “So you shared a bottle, and he paid your extortion fee, then what?”

  “Then he went away, and I don’t know.”

  It was my turn to be silent for a long time, and Dorin spoke. “Do not blame Bubu, Mr. Black. All the people he wanted to buy? I already own them. Your money was always going to end up in my pocket. I also charge less. A friends and family discount.”

  “If I find out you did anything to him,” I said.

  “I remember that day well, Mr. Black.”

  “So you don’t mind putting out some feelers for me then?”

  “Not at all. Bubu is an important client and more than that, a friend.”

  “Call me first thing you hear.”

  “Are you coming to Romania?”

  “I can’t now. Busy in the States.”

  “I will have something for you soon,” he said, and though he tried to hide his relief, I picked it out easy.

  “Fine,” I snarled, careful not to slam the phone and smash it into powder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Now The Hard Work

  It was early afternoon, and though the sun spilled in through the windows, it was still disorienting. I was well adjusted to Mali time, and in Mali, I’d be winding down a little. Digging into the wall, I took an hour and reviewed the camera footage from inside my new home. It turned out to be a whole lot of nothing with the exception of Powermaster and his family visiting. They came while I was sleeping, Esther lugging a big casserole dish that she held onto despite the girls using her as a barrier to run around and play tag.

  Terry meandered through the bottom floors, his body language veering towards uncomfortable. He didn’t touch anything, didn’t peer through the cupboards or the fridge. The older girl, damn, I had to learn their names, knocked one of the easy chairs askew and he scolded them both. They lingered a little longer and left. By the camera timer, their visit took less than ten minutes. Shaking my head, I erased the footage and replaced the memory card. My vigilance was looking like paranoia, but it had only been a few days.

  I hadn’t received a call to check in at the firehouse since leaving the hospital a few days ago, and Terry hadn’t checked in on me at all. I was under the impression that he was going to be my de facto parole officer, but it seemed that was not the case. I flirted with the idea that he might be watching me by other means, but he didn’t seem to have that kind of guile.

  I took another inventory of my gear and thought about moving it all to the firehouse. I had a locker waiting for me, and it felt weird keeping a ton of firepower in a residential neighborhood. Even when I was a villain, I kept the really bad stuff underground in a reinforced bunker. Altogether, it amounted to one big case and two duffel bags. It was tempting to keep some stuff stashed at home, but it was time to dive in with both feet. I called Terry, and he answered on the first ring.

  “Dale, good morning! I was just about to call you. Time to go to work.”

  “Sounds good. I was wondering if we could haul my gear to the firehouse in your van.”

  “We sure can. Give me fifteen and head over.”

  “Should we wait until after dark? The neighbors might think it’s weird.”

  “Hate to break it to you, buddy, but you’re six and a half feet tall, and you look like you can bench press a tank. You already stand out around here. No use hiding.”

  I wanted to take offense, but there was nothing in his voice that suggested insult. He was stating facts, and there was nothing wrong with that. I searched for a disingenuous tone, a patronizing timbre that wasn’t there.
The guy was either really nice or an evil mastermind. I didn’t know which scared me more. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”

  “Perfect! Don’t bother knocking, door’s unlocked.”

  My gear fit in the van with zero trouble. The girls and Esther watched us load, her hand lingering just a little too long on Terry’s forearm as she said goodbye. Classic rock played loud on the radio, which was tuned to the local station. I couldn’t remember the last time I let someone else decide what I would be listening to. There was a certain freedom in surrendering to that chaos, minute as it was.

  Roy gave us a bleary-eyed wave as we walked into the heart of the firehouse, a huge mug of coffee in one hand. He looked every day his age, salt and pepper scraggle pricking out from his cheeks and chin.

  “Anything to report,” Terry said.

  “Damage control. Five more of the injured died overnight. Downtown is a DMZ, but services should be back up in a day or two.”

  “How’s Nina,” I said.

  “She likes her doctor,” Roy said. “Says she’s going to divorce you. The concussion was fair bad, but she’s a fast healer. She says they might cut her loose tomorrow.”

  “That’s good,” Terry said. “We’re going to need her for the other thing.”

  “What other thing,” I said, eyes rolling between the two men.

  “We’ll get into it later,” Terry said hesitantly.

  “Why can’t you tell me now?” I said. “Don’t trust me?”

  “Calm down, boy,” Roy snarled. “We do briefings when the whole team is gathered. Everyone is going to have a job, including you, so just hold your damn horses.”

  Terry stepped into a dangerous place between myself and Roy. It was a space full of tension and electricity, and if Roy understood that I could squish him into a football and kick him into space, he didn’t show it. There was nothing aggressive about his stance, but the cup of coffee looked downright intimidating as if it were one step from being weaponized.