Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “I’m midstream, Frank. And the bad guys threw shit on me. I can’t go back, and the mission’s out front.”

  “It ain’t the glory days anymore.”

  “I’m not looking for glory. I’m looking to do a job that needs doing. Will you help me?”

  “How?”

  “I need a team—for recon. To cover a six-square-block area in Los Angeles. All they’re doing is looking.”

  “For the guy you lost.”

  “For his motorcycle.” Wes passed him the notes he’d made from the LAPD computer search detective Rawlins grudgingly provided. “This bike, with that license plate, picked up six parking tickets in that neighborhood in the last four months.”

  “He live around there?”

  “No, but somebody does. That’s Westwood, not far from UCLA. Mostly apartment buildings, service stores. Some of those are night tickets, so he’s not just there shopping.”

  “Got a picture of the guy?”

  Wes handed him a Wirephoto of Dean Jacobsen’s driver’s license.

  “What about Mike Kramer at CIA security?”

  “He’d rather nail me,” answered Wes. “He’s out of it, completely. Everybody’s out of it. Officially. No files opened, no designations, no mission. Nothing.”

  “Wasn’t nothing that beat the dog shit out of you.”

  “I need people, Frank. Off the books, or at least off the official ones. Budget’s not a problem.”

  “Budget’s not a problem? Then you must not be working for Uncle Sam anymore.”

  “He still signs my paychecks. Can you help me?”

  The ex-cop shook his head. “You are in the world, aren’t you, Wes?”

  The digital clock on the desk blinked off three minutes.

  “You’re my friend,” said the master of this house. “The Admiral and Commander Franklin ordered us to provide what assistance to you in your new duties as we can. But you game me, I’ll burn you. Burn you down. I’ll have to. It’ll be my job. And it’ll by my ass.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Tonight, I can order a surprise crash drill-training mission out of the NIS L.A. region. Search and locate one motorcycle. That should cover us for twenty-four hours. What if we get a hit on the bike or the guy?”

  “Observe, follow, report: to me. Especially if he meets another man.”

  “You won’t be in any shape to hear anything pretty soon. I’m taking you home.”

  “I can get a cab.”

  “Your place is on the way to the Yard. I need to go in to make the calls, get this ‘training mission’ on line. The agents in L.A. just love bullshit training drills out of HQ.”

  “Sorry to ruin your night.”

  “Not the first one.” Frank waited, but Wes made no effort to stand. “What else?”

  “I need a gun.”

  When Greco didn’t comment, Wes said, “You’ve seen me in uniform: Pistol Expert badge. Tomorrow, I can get the Commander to authorize me to carry a weapon. But I don’t want one of the NIS six-shooters.”

  “Figured you had your own.”

  “I always figured the Corps would give me what I needed.”

  Greco grunted, left the room. Wes closed his eyes. The pounding in his head was terrible. His stomach churned. Every place on his body hurt.

  Something clunked on the desk. Wes opened his eyes.

  A blunt, black metal automatic lay on the scarred wood.

  “That’s a Sig Sauer P226,” said Frank, sitting down. “A nine mic mic. Fifteen rounds in the magazine, one in the barrel. Two spare magazines. You need more than that, you need a squad. Those green dots on the sights? They’re radioactive tritium. Glow in absolute darkness so you can see which way you’re zeroed.”

  Frank put two boxes of shells and spare clips beside the gun.

  “One box of wad cutters for target practice. I’ll set up the range when you’re ready. The other box: Hydra-Shoks, hollow points. You hit him, you’ll get him.”

  “Remember, it’s the same paperwork for emptying a clip as it is for shooting once. If you’re a fatalist and only fire once, what might be fatal is what you miss.”

  The ex-cop took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his prints off the gunmetal. “This is a clean gun. Sanitized.”

  “It’s been retooled. The trigger pull is only three pounds. You think, it shoots. Faster rapid fire, steadier aim.”

  Wes opened the briefcase of money.

  “I wasn’t supposed to see that,” said Greco.

  “Neither was I.” Wes put his new gun on top of the money.

  Midnight. Halfway up the stairs inside his apartment building, Wes wished he’d let Greco help him. He was dizzy and the briefcase weighed too much to carry. He sat on the stairs, sagged against the railing, and tried to gather his strength to walk the rest of the way.

  Couldn’t. He crawled, dragging and bumping the briefcase up the stairs.

  Beth’s apartment. Beth’s door.

  Couldn’t let her see him like this.

  He slid across the hall to his door. Caught his breath, grabbed the doorknob, and pulled himself up. Knocked over the briefcase with a loud thud. Fumbled with the keys. Got the right one half in the lock. Dropped them.

  Behind him, a door opened, and he heard Beth laugh and say, “What’s the matter? Did you forget how to knock?”

  He turned to look at her and she was wonderful.

  “Oh, Jesus!” she said.

  “Had trouble, gettin’ you, souvenir this time, too.”

  She ran and caught him as his leg shook. Got him inside his apartment.

  “Don’t talk now,” she said. “Tell me later.”

  They made it to his bed. She stretched him out, undressed him. Sighed when she saw the bandages over the two baseballs on his left shin; found the tape on his ribs. She made an ice pack out of a plastic bag and a washcloth, braced it against his shin, and disappeared. It felt so good to be here, to be home, in bed. With her. Falling, Wes remembered falling, and he trembled, his eyes teared up, and then he made it go, let it go.

  When she came back, she brought a glass of warm milk, three aspirin, and a Valium from her apartment. Wes wondered what the emergency room doctors would say, swallowed all four pills with the milk while she held his head, the glass.

  The sheets, the cool sheets were around him, her light but warm quilt on top of his linen. The washcloth was damp and cool as she wiped his forehead, dried it with her shirtsleeve. She kissed his forehead and her hair brushed his cheek.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Go to sleep. You’re safe.”

  LAST TRICK

  Jud and Nora sat in the warm evening sun, a couple of old cats in lawn chairs outside her house, the empty highway off to their left, the café in front of them closed for the day. The sky shimmered pink and purple. Their eyes were shut, faces tilted up.

  Nora sighed. “This is how I like it these days. Quiet.”

  The sand on the desert was still.

  “Don’t have to be anybody,” she said, “don’t have to do anything. Just sit. Breathe in. Breathe out. Smell the sagebrush. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Jud. And it felt good. So good.

  “’Course, I wouldn’t mind seeing New York again. But not for a while.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” said Jud.

  “I don’t want you to either.”

  They let that discovery lay at their feet, unnamed. But the silence was easy, and they both felt that. Their eyes stayed closed.

  “Unless,” she said, “you happen to be thirsty for some lemonade in the pitcher on the top shelf of my refrigerator.”

  “Contingency adaptation,” he said.

  “Whatever. That is, if you happen to be thirsty.”

  “For lemonade. On the top shelf of your refrigerator.”

  “Yeah. Just for instance.”

  “Oh,” said Jud. He sighed. “No, I’m fine.”

  Nora laughed.

  A minute went by. />
  “I’ve got an idea,” said Jud.

  “What?”

  “There’s some lemonade in a pitcher on the top shelf of your refrigerator. Why don’t I get you a glass?”

  “If you want,” she said. “Nice idea.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and she heard him go into the house.

  Eyes closed, she chuckled, called after him, “Why don’t you have a glass, too?”

  The air around Nora tingled with the change from daylight to dusk. She felt the sun’s heat still trapped in the sand and rocks, the adobe walls of her house.

  Ice-cold, wet glass pressed against her neck.

  “Jesus!” she yelled, bolting upright in her chair.

  “No: Jud,” he said, handing her a tall glass of lemonade, sitting down with his and a shit-eating grin.

  She scowled at him, but they both knew it wasn’t serious.

  “I suppose you didn’t bring the cigarettes,” she said.

  “Lord, spare me from a never-satisfied woman,” said Jud.

  “Climb down off the cross, hon,” she said. “We need the wood.”

  His laughter echoed over the tumbleweeds. When he stopped, he took a drink of lemonade. Made a sour face.

  “Not quite that old firewater kick, huh?” said Nora.

  He shrugged, sighed. Reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter.

  “God, you never make anything easy!” she said as he shook a cigarette out of the pack, handed it to her.

  “No, but I share.”

  One click of the Zippo lit both their habits.

  “Ah.” She looked around where she lived now. “Not bad. Nice day. Enjoy it while you can. Soon, heat’ll come. Which reminds me: remind me to call the phone company tomorrow, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “Somebody screwdrivered the shit out of the pay phone by the road. It’s busted all to hell.”

  “I didn’t know,” whispered Jud. “When?”

  “Beats me. A guy came in while you’re dumping trash yesterday. He went to use it and found it pried apart. They even busted the receiver.”

  “Damn kids,” she added. “You think they could come up with more original crimes.”

  “I hadn’t noticed it,” he said. “Hadn’t … I should have been checking it every morning at six, I got … I’ve been …”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s not your job.”

  From this distance, the glass phone booth looked fine. His guts felt empty, his mind hollow.

  “No accounting for everything in life,” said Nora.

  Can’t change it now, thought Jud. Can’t let it matter. It won’t matter. It doesn’t. Move on to something important.

  “Why did you quit being a prostitute?” he asked her.

  Nora took a drag on her cigarette, shifted in her chair, her eyes on him, her eyes far away.

  “My last trick,” she said.

  “When?”

  “Nineteen seventy-eight,” she said. “August. I was living in Vegas, few but big-time clientele. Raking in the dough. Hadn’t admitted yet that it was the booze drinking me and not the other way around.

  “I had this customer, regular when he was in town, used to fly me around to meet him. Big shot, picture in Time magazine.”

  “He flew me to Philadelphia. First-class round-trip, best hotel. Twenty-five-minute date. Ten thousand dollars.”

  The sky was gray, shadows gaining substance.

  “What did you do?” asked Jud.

  Nora looked at the glowing tip of her cigarette. “I set him on fire.”

  They said nothing until the light was gone from the sky.

  “After that,” she said, “I felt this … good part of me crumbling. The kind part. The part that could still love. I’d had to think of … more exotic, more original things for him each time. After Philly, I knew that where that kind of stuff was taking me, I wouldn’t be able to stay me. So I quit.”

  “Then?”

  “Then I got kissed by the tax man. His plan was to make me an example, fine me up the ass. Would have been my ass, too, except for the one decent lawyer in Vegas. He convinced the tax man that if they hit me with everything they could, they’d make me become a criminal again, and that wasn’t very smart. Instead, they just took all I had. And I went to dealer’s school.”

  “You don’t get to keep the money,” he said.

  She frowned, but said nothing. The night chill descended on them. They couldn’t make out the lines on each other’s face. Their cigarettes glowed orange in the dark.

  “When did you start drinking for real?” she asked.

  “Didn’t happen all at once,” he said.

  “But the first time,” she said, “not the first time you partied or got toilet-hugging drunk, but the first time, the first time it meant something.”

  “What is this?” he said, making it mostly a joke. “AA?”

  “You’re not anonymous,” she whispered. “And there’s always a first time.”

  A cricket chirped, a trucker barreled past and blew his air horn at the lights of the house by the side of the road. Then he was gone, roaring off into the big nowhere.

  “Long ago,” Jud said. “Far away.”

  And as he sat smoking in the cool desert darkness, Jud heard the echo of a man named Willy in a Santiago, Chile, hotel room: September 11, 1973.

  “This is an ungood,” said Willy. “In the minus zone.”

  It was four in the afternoon. There were three of them in the Santiago hotel room:

  Jud, standing at the edge of their fifth-floor window, watching the smoke billowing into the sky from the Moneda Palace.

  Luis, or whatever his real name was—they’d been strangers when they rendezvoused in Miami, and Jud assumed everyone else was also using a work name. Jud claimed to be “Peter.” Luis was a gray-flecked Cuban who couldn’t be as old as he seemed. He was stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, the phone resting beside him. Waiting to ring.

  Willy was a brown-haired, bad-skin-under-his-beard, wiry guy. He was midtwenties, and his syntax said Vietnam, but they all knew better than to ask each other any true questions.

  Rifles cracked somewhere up the street, answered by a burst of machine gun fire.

  Jud looked toward the corner where he’d seen a tank a half hour before, but that street looked empty.

  Willy drummed his fingers on the table with one hand while the other turned the dial on the room’s AM radio. He got static. He was the commo expert. Such primitive fiddling was far beneath his expertise, but there was nothing else for him to do.

  Waiting.

  For the fourth man on the team to show up. To call. Waiting to go, waiting to do, waiting to say sayonara, South America, adiós, Chile, it’s been good to know, better to go.

  The fourth man was Braxton, sandy-haired, slow-talking side-of-beef Braxton. He was the boss. Jud was number two. Willy was commo, and Luis was the indig expert, the Spanish speaker backing up Braxton’s Tex-Mex fluency. Luis was good with a gun, a bullet counter schooled in the Sierra Maestra with Fidel, then given graduate studies at the CIA’s Guatamalan training camp for the 2506 Brigade fighting Fidel.

  Their guns were in watertight bags in the toilet tank. Made it hard to flush. The toilet had been getting a workout since they’d gotten the word at ten P.M. the night before. They ordered up the last meals served by room service, popped dex pills, and made Jud’s room command center. Willy set up his long-range transmitter that had been hidden in a turista portable AM/FM unit, but they were in radio silence, no one who’d call them, no one who’d respond. Shit, Willy’d said, so much for advanced technology.

  Braxton was sixteen hours gone, thirteen hours overdue from a rendezvous out there, in the city.

  Santiago, capital of Chile. An old city of low-slung colonial architecture, surrounded by the pablaciones, slums, and offset by la cordillera, the mountains. Almost three million people. Rampant poverty, but a
country rich in poets, artists, and musicians, a country beloved by Anaconda and Kennecott Copper companies, which found billions in the mines of Chile, and by the International Telephone and Telegraph company, which owned 70 percent of Chile’s phone company. In Chile, politics were passionate. Three years before, a Marxist named Salvador Allende had been elected president, a personal political triumph for this man who’d been campaigning for that post since 1952; in 1964, the CIA funneled $3 million to his successful political opponents.

  Allende’s 1970 election victory sent shock waves through America. Nixon and Kissinger were furious; ITT had spent almost half a million dollars to stop Allende’s 1970 election. Executives from multinational companies and high American-government officials wrung their hands and bemoaned a new Marxist regime in America’s backyard. ITT pledged $1 million to the CIA efforts to control Allende; in the Watergate era, ITT would become famous for such political pledges, including the $400,000 the company pledged to the American President’s political party.

  After Allende’s election in 1970, the American President loosed his spy hawks and diplomatic dogs.

  Those men compartmentalized their crusade.

  Track I was an anti-Allende propaganda and economic program and diplomatic efforts by the ambassador to keep the Chilean Congress from confirming Allende as president. Although Track I’s effects were often visible, its dynamics were kept secret from the American people.

  Track II was kept secret from the American ambassador, the State Department, even from the White House-level 40 Committee that supposedly oversaw American foreign policy and intelligence operations. CIA agents using forged passports were sent to infiltrate Chile, contact extreme right-wing military officers, and encourage them to stage a coup if Allende successfully rode his popular election into the president’s chair. Track II personnel were allowed to provide direct assistance to any such coup, but it was to be a Chilean affair.

  Track III did not exist.

  Jud and his team, the Track III group, had been in Santiago for nine days, flying down on documents they’d long since burned showing them to be a film crew for a television company, with delicate cameras that bored customs agents had no desire to unscrew. As he’d gone about his business in this capital city of a country torn by strikes, 300 percent inflation, and political street fights, Jud was struck by the overwhelming sense that this nation was on a train, gathering speed, racing toward some unknown destination.