[Alex Vane 03.0] The Mockingbird Drive

by AC Fuller

  Police have reported that the shooting was committed by Baxter Callahan, a reclusive political activist living just outside Las Vegas. But the audio suggests two gunmen, possibly more, and may also indicate a different chronology than the official police version.

  The story was total amateur hour. But when news this big breaks, it's often a matter of minutes until you get scooped, so you just throw something up on the web. In italics at the bottom of the story, I read: Details unfolding by the minute, watch CNN for live updates.

  Only three people on earth could have leaked the audio, and I was one of them. The other two were Innerva and Quinn, and there were decent reasons to believe it had been either of them. If it was Innerva, it meant that she was somewhere safe and was sick of waiting for me to break the story. But that wasn't like her. She never sent information to reporters herself. James had always handled that. I guess in this case, she could have used an intermediary, but I doubted that she had someone else she trusted who could be reached so quickly. The other consideration was who the story had been leaked to. In ten years together, James and Innerva had never leaked a story to CNN. When you're out to smash the system, you don't give massive scoops to TV stations that are part of one of the biggest media empires the world has ever seen. Of course, they leaked to corporate newspapers from time to time, but never to a TV station.

  Quinn, on the other hand, had no contacts, no idea how the media really worked. Furthermore, she was on the run. I could see her sitting in a parking lot of a Starbucks, hopping on their free Wi-Fi and uploading the audio to CNN's online tip forum. What I didn't understand was why she'd only leaked the first ten minutes of the audio. If I remembered correctly, the ten minutes covered the shooting, but not the voices of the shooters in Huang's office.

  I scrolled back up to watch the video. But, as I was watching the ad—a commercial for the new line of Fords, of all things—I felt a hand on my forearm. When I looked up, I saw a big beefy face, too tan to be natural. Just behind the face, I saw Holly's bright red hair. She was leaning out of the window of a silver SUV, idling in the bus stop.

  "Alex, there you are," she said. It was her voice, her real voice, and it was just like I'd imagined it would be back in the airport. A beautiful Irish accent. Half leprechaun, half mermaid, like a gurgling brook on a moonlit night.

  But I didn't have time to savor it.

  The beefy man was gripping my bicep, and the last thing I felt was a sharp sting as he stuck a needle in my arm.

  Chapter 30

  "Up!"

  I came to with two large men standing over me, one white and one black, and the stench of cheap minty aftershave. The white one was the beefy guy from the street, but, looking up at him, I was mostly aware of his bushy mustache and abundant black ear hair. His head was bald, doughy, and bright white, the rest of his face soft and clean shaven. His face was only a couple feet from mine and he kept saying "Up" in a stern, booming voice.

  I had no idea where I was.

  I stood, but immediately tumbled into a wall. The black man grabbed my arm and held me for a few seconds as my gelatinous legs established themselves. He had long dreadlocks tied into a neat ponytail and a thin, angular face that didn't match his hulking body. We were almost exactly the same height, and he looked like he wasn't just "in shape," but might be an amateur bodybuilder or professional athlete. He had one of those bodies that assaulted you with its symmetry and definition, even through his black suit.

  I felt right away that neither man would hurt me, and I looked around as I felt the energy and control returning to my legs. I'd been lying on a cot in the corner, one of only five objects in the room, the others being three swiveling office chairs and a desk that looked like it belonged in a college dorm room. The walls had been painted an ugly off-white, the carpet was thin but new-looking, still emitting a chemical stench that reminded me of the adhesives in Quinn's house.

  The men watched me but didn't say anything. When I'd gotten my legs, Dreadlocks walked me over to the desk and pushed me down into one of the chairs. Ear-hair nodded at him and walked out.

  "Where am I?"

  I said it more as a statement to myself than a question. The sound of my own voice scared me. Somehow it made the whole thing real in a way I wasn't ready for. Like when you see a photo of yourself posted by someone else on Facebook, and then the memories of last night come flooding back.

  A minute later, Ear-hair returned, but I wasn't focused on him. Holly's bright red hair was peeking out from around his thick shoulder, and, a second later, she appeared as he stepped to the side of the desk. Behind Holly, another woman. Like Kenny back at the airport, I couldn't tell her nationality, not that it mattered. She had black hair pulled up in a tight bun, so tight it was like her forehead was being lifted and stretched back. She looked like the "After" photo in a Botox ad. She was short, maybe five foot two, and thin. Contrasted to Holly's affable face, her look could best be described as severe.

  Holly and the new woman sat in the swiveling office chairs across from me while Dreadlocks and Ear-hair stood sentry on either side of the desk. Holly said, "Well, Alex. This is unfortunate, isn't it?"

  I wish I'd said something sarcastic and awesome. Something like Mel Gibson would have said in Lethal Weapon or, for the older folks, like Clint Eastwood would have said in pretty much anything. Something like, "Unfortunate for you, maybe," but cooler than that, and with a better accent.

  But I didn't. I said, "Your name's not really Holly, is it?"

  "Sure it is."

  "And who's that?" I asked, nodding toward the other woman.

  "My name doesn't matter," the woman said.

  Holly smiled. "She's right, it doesn't. What matters is you, Alex. You've been on quite a road trip."

  "Why'd you drop the accent?" I asked.

  "Amand said you could be trusted. Your friend, not so much."

  "Where is Quinn?" the other woman asked.

  "At least give me something to call you," I said, trying to sound light.

  "You can call me Bonnie."

  "Do you all have names ending in y or ie?"

  She ignored this. Said, "Alex, look around you."

  I thought she meant it metaphorically, but she didn't say anything else so I glanced around the room again.

  "Do you know where you are, Alex?"

  "No."

  "Do you know how long you were sleeping?"

  "No." I usually have a pretty good internal clock, but the sleep had been a blackout. Might have been a few hours, might have been a day or more.

  She continued, "This is either going to be one of the best days of your life, or one of the worst. We aren't into long, protracted interrogations here. We prefer to just access the information we need, do the job, then move on. If you were someone else, we might be using other methods, but you're not. I think you can understand that, right?"

  "I can."

  "So where is Quinn?"

  "I don't know. You guys must have looked into her background. She's crazy. Unstable, unreliable. I didn't want to go with her in the first place. At the security place in Oregon, she freaked, she bolted. She's paranoid."

  "We know about your talk with Amand," Holly said.

  "And?"

  "It's clear from that conversation that you don't want to do anything stupid. That you're willing to let this whole thing go, not to press it."

  "I am." I was lying, and assumed they knew it.

  Bonnie leaned across the table. Her eyebrows were perfect black arches and I could see that they were touched up. "So, where's Quinn?"

  "Why do you need Quinn?"

  "Do you know what she did yesterday?"

  I shrugged, but Bonnie wasn't buying it.

  She slid my phone across the table. "Swipe it," she said.

  I did, and it opened to the CNN article I'd been reading the day before. This wasn't a situation I was going to be able to talk myself out of.

  "Here's the deal," Bonnie said, standing and walking
around the table. She stood right behind me and I looked back, but my muscles still felt weak, too weak to keep my neck craned back. I stared at the table in front of me as she spoke. "We had a job to do. It was to destroy the drive and any copies of any data that might be on it. From the time you met Holly and her associate in the Las Vegas airport, that's been our only aim. Once we learned what was on it from that freak—Turdaylapi—or whatever its name is."

  "Tudayapi," I said.

  "Once we learned what was on it, the matter was closed. Your friend has caused…complications."

  "She's absolutely screwed you over," I said, relishing the fact a little too much. "Why didn't you just kill me there, or when you found me at Quinn's house, or outside ARDS?"

  "Be quiet," Bonnie said. "Let me finish. You and Quinn were going to be free to go. Now it's too late for her."

  I swiveled my chair just a little so I could stare into her black eyes. She squinted at me, grimaced, then looked away. I don't believe in all the stuff Greta says, stuff like hate just being congealed animal aggression in people. But I did feel like I could feel the hate coming off Bonnie's body. She genuinely wanted to hurt me.

  Holly stepped between us. "Some of our performance has come into question recently. We're on a tighter leash than usual. Alex, you can trust us. If we were allowed to kill you, we would have."

  She was trying to sound reassuring, and I bought it. Between Bonnie's clear frustration and Holly's warm smile, I was convinced that, for some reason, they weren't being allowed to dispose of me as they normally would. "Amand? He's your boss?" They didn't respond, so I said, "It's because you screwed up the job at The Gazette, right?"

  It was a gamble. I assumed they already knew that I knew the official story was bullshit, but I wanted to be sure.

  "We had nothing to do with that," Holly said.

  Bonnie was pacing behind me. I swiveled all the way around and she stopped. I said, "You want to tell me the truth, right? You want to tell me why and how you did it. But you can't."

  "Shut up."

  "It pisses you off that you can't brag about it. You know what pisses me off? That you killed six people to protect an asshole like Dewey Gunstott."

  Bonnie was staring at me, blank faced. But I was on a roll. "And it pisses you off even more that somehow you botched the job."

  Holly said, "Alex, we—"

  "Don't say anything more," Bonnie interrupted. "He doesn't need to know anything."

  A silence hung in the room, and I needed a minute to think. "Can I have some water?" I asked.

  Holly nodded at Ear-hair, who walked out.

  Something was feeling off about this whole situation. Not that I knew much about security operatives or interrogation practices, but this had an amateurish vibe. An informality. The suits the two goons were wearing didn't match. Holly's accent was fading in and out.

  And then there was Bonnie herself, who was clearly the ringleader, but also seemed to be at odds with Holly, and not just in a good-cop/bad-cop kind of way. They almost seemed to be competitors.

  I was playing it as cool as I could, but I doubted they were buying it. Remember when I said that to read people you need to be really present in yourself? I was having a hard time reading Holly and Bonnie, but I don't think it was because they were especially good at concealing their thoughts. I was rattled. Besides the lingering effects of whatever drugs they'd given me, I was nervous. And I knew it was showing.

  But I also knew something they didn't: that there was more of the recording than Quinn had leaked to CNN. I decided that my best chance to stay alive was to let them know what I knew, to use it as a bargaining chip.

  Ear-hair returned and set a little paper cup in front of me, one of those four-ounce deals that comes in stacks of 100 and goes in the rack attached to a bottled-water dispenser. I drank it in one swig and said, "I'm still thirsty."

  Ear-hair looked at Bonnie, who nodded toward the door. He returned a minute later, and I drank again. "Another, please."

  Again Ear-hair walked out, but this time he left the door open behind him.

  "Shut the door," Bonnie called after him. She swallowed the "or" in "door," so it sounded like, "Shut the dough."

  I'd suspected it, but that's when I knew for sure. Bonnie was the second shooter.

  When Ear-hair returned, I just left the water in front of me.

  "Aren't you going to drink it?" Bonnie asked.

  "Not thirsty anymore."

  "Alex, it's not a good idea to mess around with us. We'd really like to kill you."

  "But we don't want to do that," Holly said. "We really don't."

  "I do," Ear-hair said. "I'd love to."

  "Shut up," Bonnie said to him. Then to me, "Where's Quinn?"

  I met her eyes and made my voice hard. "Were you the one who shot James?"

  She just stared at me.

  "Were you holding Baxter's shotgun or his handgun?"

  Nothing.

  "You're smaller than Holly, so I figure you had the smaller gun, though you're more insecure than her so maybe you needed the larger gun to, you know, feel like somebody."

  "Shut up," she said again, putting her tiny, cold hand on my forearm. "Shut. The. Fuck. Up."

  "The first shots came from the back alley," I said. "From the back alley."

  Her grip tightened on my shoulder and the two meatheads inched closer to me, probably anticipating that I'd do something stupid. As it turned out, I already was. Something much stupider than I knew at the time.

  "From the back alley," I repeated. "Esperanza didn't die first. Baxter did. You shot him before you even walked through the door. Or was it Holly? Doesn't really matter, I guess." I paused, letting it hang in the air. Holly's face was blank and pleasant, but I knew she was thinking hard.

  I glared at Bonnie. "I'd like to think that Holly had the shotgun, that she killed James, not you. I'd like to think that Holly's was the last face my friend saw, not yours."

  Her fingers were digging into my forearm, her long fingernail breaking the skin. "Not because she's prettier than you. Just because she's more…I don't know…pleasant."

  I felt her move behind me and noticed a glint in Ear-hair's eye just before he slugged me on the cheek. My head shot back and struck Bonnie. "Again," she said.

  This time, Dreadlocks hit me across the other cheek, and much harder. His fist was like a brick dropped from a tall building onto a marshmallow. I lurched sideways, only staying on the chair because Ear-hair held me up.

  Bonnie said, "Alex, stop making up stories."

  "I heard your voice," I said. "You were in the room. With Holly. Amand wasn't there, was he? Was he in the car? Waiting outside? A two-woman team. Very progressive of you."

  "Again!" Bonnie shouted, and a fist came down on the back of my head, smashing my face into the desk.

  "You were in the room," I said again. "I have the recording, and a dozen of my journalist pals will share it if I die."

  My head was pounding, like it was being compressed from all angles at the same time and fighting to expand outward. I heard movement but didn't look up. A few seconds later, I peeked out and saw that Holly and Bonnie had left the room.

  Ear-hair said, "That was a bad idea."

  I was about to ask why, but, the next thing I knew, I was woozy. Everything faded to black.

  Chapter 31

  I didn't know how long I'd been in the box. Could have been an hour, could have been a day.

  I woke up sitting in the most compact position my body would take, chin over my knees, arms along the outsides of my legs, hands taped to my ankles. I jerked my arms to try to rip the tape, but my head immediately hit a hard ceiling. I leaned to the left and the right. On each side, I hit a wall within a few inches. The only light came through a dozen small holes on each side.

  I was in some kind of a box, roughly three feet square and made out of smooth plastic or acrylic.

  Next, I noticed the pain. It started in my lower back, a dull aching. A throbbin
g on the right side of my neck that ran down into the shoulder blade. I felt nothing in my legs. Maybe because they were asleep.

  But beyond the pain was the discomfort, the claustrophobia. It was like my whole body was an itch I couldn't scratch. Like my skin was crawling from the inside.

  I panicked.

  I pulled my arms out as hard as I could. Nothing. I scooched all the way back, pressing my back against the box, then thrust my legs forward as hard as I could. But I only had a few inches to move and couldn't generate any thrust.

  Finally, I screamed. It started as a deep, animal groan. Pure pain. But my mind raced and raced and the scream got higher and higher until it faded out as a pathetic squeak.

  I collapsed in on myself for a few seconds, then bashed my head against the top of the box until I passed out.

  The process repeated itself a few times. Wake up, pain, terror, panic, smash around, pass out. My pants were soaked with urine, too, having no other choice but to relieve myself where I was.

  These episodes alternated with brief periods of strange lucidity. I thought of my old friend Camila Gray, who'd helped me break a couple big stories over ten years ago. For a while, I'd also been infatuated with her, but we weren't meant to be, and she'd been back in Des Moines for years, writing books about the media and teaching at a small college. When we'd drifted apart, I told myself we'd just lost touch, as people do. But, in the box, the truth came all at once: I was ashamed of where I'd let my career take me. I feared her disapproval.

  And, of course, I thought of Greta, dancing through a crowd of people like a woman possessed. Imagining her was the only thing that brought me any comfort and, for a few seconds at a time, I even forgot that she'd filed for divorce. Then, I'd remember in an agonizing jolt. Hunched over in the box, body screaming in pain, I began thinking that I'd done something to deserve it.

  When I awoke, a blinding light was streaming through the top of the box, which had been opened. The first thing I saw was Holly's bright red hair and freckles.

  Then the light hit my brain, causing a coursing pain like a high-pitched screaming on the morning of your worst hangover. I blinked furiously as my eyes adjusted. Dreadlocks and Ear-hair were back, lifting me out of the box into a small room with bright white walls and three simple oak chairs.