by Jude Hardin
This chick was something else. Mad skills, my daughter, Brittney, would have said. I wondered where Di had gotten her training. I went up against a navy SEAL one time whose powers seemed almost magical, but as far as I knew they still weren’t allowing women into that elite force.
“I’m impressed,” I said. “So what do we do now?”
“Wait. They have the advantage at the moment, and they’re hoping to flush us out. We just have to be patient and wait for them to make the first move. Eventually they’ll either have to come down here after us, or give up and drive away. If they come after us, we’ll nail them with everything we have all at once. OK? Don’t hold back. Just keep pulling the trigger until you’re out of rounds.”
“I think I have seven left,” I said.
“That should be plenty. I have two extra clips, so I’ll keep firing back occasionally while they’re still up there on the embankment. Save your ammo for later.”
“OK.”
After several more bursts from the Uzis, and several more return blasts from Di’s nine millimeter, everything got quiet. Eerily. Ominously. I was happy they hadn’t shot my windows out, or my tires. It might have been hard to explain that kind of damage to my insurance agent. Or to Juliet. The windows and tires were OK, but my poor old Jimmy wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It was hopelessly stuck in the furrowed earth. All four wheels up to the lug nuts.
We waited. Crickets singing, frogs croaking, mosquitoes biting. There was still snow on the ground in some parts of the country, but it was definitely springtime in Florida.
I was wearing shorts and a polo shirt and topsiders with no socks. It had gotten a little chilly, and I wished I had a jacket. I usually kept one in the backseat, a boar suede zip-up with Native American fringes accenting the yoke. It was a hell of a nice jacket. It looked like something Dwight Yoakam or Josey Wales might wear. I wished I had it, but I had taken it to the cleaners the other day. I’d been to a party where they were smoking in the house, and I wanted to get the cigarette stench out of it. Now I was cold. Di looked comfortable in her black hoodie and black fatigues and combat boots. She looked comfortable, and at that moment I wanted to choke her for getting me into this mess.
I felt some sort of insect crawling up my leg. I brushed it away. The Mustang’s doors were still open, but I couldn’t tell if the gangsters were still behind them or not. It made me nervous. Every couple of minutes I looked to the left and to the right and behind us, thinking they might be planning an ambush.
We waited another fifteen minutes, but nothing happened.
“Are they still up there?” I said.
Di reached into her backpack and produced a pair of night vision binoculars. She pushed a button, and I heard a muted chirp as the electronics hummed to life.
“I don’t see them,” she said. “Maybe I got lucky and hit one of them. Or both of them. I’m going up there to take a look.”
She pulled a silky black mask out of her pocket, took the sunglasses off and pulled the mask over her head. She replaced the glasses and then pulled the hood up on her sweatshirt. Even from ten feet away, I could barely see her. She reminded me of Catwoman, only her entire face was covered and she didn’t have any pointy ears.
“I thought we were going to wait,” I said.
“We can’t wait forever. If they were going to do something, they would have done it by now. I think I got them.”
“Want me to come with you?” I said.
“No. I doubt if they’re still alive, but if they are they’ll see you coming from a mile away. You stay here. I’ll fire once in the air if they’re gone, twice if they’re injured or dead. If you don’t hear anything within five minutes, it means they got me. If that’s the case, I want you to run away from here as fast as you can. You don’t stand a chance against them. Do you hear me? If I’m captured or killed, I want you to retreat. Do not attempt to engage with these assholes.”
“I hear you,” I said.
And with that, she was off. She duck-walked, stayed low, moved toward the road in a line that would take her a hundred feet or so to the right of the Mustang. It was a smart thing to do. If she had gone straight at them, they might have heard her coming. I doubted they would see her, not with the stealthy costume, but they might have heard her. I tried to track her as she made her way across the field, but it was no use. She was as invisible to me now as she was to them.
Five minutes passed. Ten. Still no signal. She had told me to run away, but I couldn’t just abandon her. The guys who’d chased us off the road were obviously some sort of serious threat to the security of the United States. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been following Di, and she wouldn’t have known it was THEM. I wasn’t going to just leave her to be tortured and killed. I couldn’t do that.
The whole thing was insane, when you got down to it. If it hadn’t been for the blood tattoo—if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes—I still would have assumed Diana Dawkins had a screw loose. But that thing between my toes was real, so I had to assume everything else was real. It was blowing my mind. I had to fight to stay focused.
I tucked my .45 into the back of my waistband. Crouched down and scooped a handful of soil and started smearing it onto the areas where my skin was exposed. It was cold and moist and dark. It wouldn’t be as effective as Di’s getup, but maybe it would help. I wished I had clothes and boots like hers, and I wished I had some of her toys. Night vision binoculars would have definitely been nice.
I headed out, following the same path she had taken. I could see her footprints in the starlight. I wasn’t cold anymore. I was sweating. The scent of the eighty-proof bourbon on my breath mingled with that of the rich fecund soil on my skin. When I got to the ditch, I grabbed my pistol and made sure the safety was off. I crossed the culvert and struggled up the embankment, thick black mud oozing into the sides of my deck shoes.
There was a pine forest on the other side of the road. I crossed over and followed the tree line toward the Mustang, creeping quietly and trying to stay as invisible as possible.
I was about halfway there when I felt the cold steel of a gun barrel against the back of my neck.
The guy standing behind me told me to drop my weapon. I dropped it. It landed with a thud. He told me to get down on the ground. The fucking ground, he said. I complied. I figured it was in my best interest. I figured the Uzi was a bit more accurate at this range.
“Where’s the woman?” I said.
“Shut up.”
Footsteps. Goon Number Two walked over from the road.
“You take care of her?” Number One said.
“Yeah. Fucking bitch didn’t want to die. Had to stab her eighteen fucking times.”
“Did you get the chip?”
“You think I’m stupid or something? Of course I got the chip.”
“What should we do with dickweed here?”
“Shoot him,” Number Two said. He said it in a casual tone, the way he might have said pepperoni if someone asked him what he wanted on his pizza.
“We need to see how much he knows,” Number One said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Hurry the fuck up.”
They needed to see how much I knew. This was a good thing, because it would buy me some time. It was a bad thing, because their version of seeing undoubtedly involved excruciating pain. They weren’t going to take me to a nice quiet room and offer me a cup of coffee and a donut. They weren’t going to turn on a tape recorder and tell me a joke or two, try to make me believe they were on my side. They weren’t going to interrogate me in any sort of legal or ethical way. They were going to make me hurt. Bad.
I tried to decide which was worse: dying quickly now, or dying slowly later. Either way, I was toast. I told myself that it’s always best to keep breathing as long as possible. As long as I was alive, there was still hope. I told myself that, but I was having a hard time believing it.
Number One came back with the Mustang. He popped the trunk, left the engine
running while he carried over a roll of duct tape. He tore off a slice and slapped it over my mouth. He wrapped my wrists and ankles while Number Two stood there holding the Uzi on me.
“You ready?” Number One said.
“I still say we shoot him.”
“Come on. Help me load him in the car.”
“I need to put my gun away.”
“All right. Take his too.”
Number Two picked my .45 up off the ground and walked over to the Mustang. I heard the door open and then close. He came back unarmed. They lifted me and carried me over and folded me into the trunk and slammed the lid shut.
Total darkness, but it was clean in there and surprisingly roomy. It had that new-trunk smell. I heard them mumbling and then laughing about something, and a couple of minutes later we were moving. En route to whatever hell they had planned for me.
I wondered who they were. Di had said they were the enemy. Whose enemy? Her organization’s? If the organization was such a big secret, how did these thugs even know about it?
If you’re trying to keep out of sight, exposure is the worst thing someone can do to you. If I were a spy—an enemy of what Di had touted as the ultimate clandestine agency—I would just start tweeting about it or something. All this killing and abducting business seemed a little old-fashioned.
We slowed and turned onto a dirt road. I knew it was dirt because it was giving the Mustang’s suspension and my intracranial space a major workout. There was a little construction worker inside my head trying to jackhammer his way through my eye sockets. I could see him. He wore a yellow hardhat, and there was a fat stub of an unlit cigar sticking out of his mouth. He was covered in dust. Shortly before the smoking-hot steel blade of his pneumatic tool fully penetrated my skull, before my eyeballs exploded in a shower of blood and viscous goo, the car rolled to a stop. The trunk popped open and Number One and Number Two climbed out and walked back and looked at me. Number Two was holding the Uzi.
“I’m not carrying his ass all the way into the house,” Number Two said. “Make him walk.”
Number One unwrapped my ankles and told me to get out. It was an effort without the use of my hands, but I finally managed. My knees buckled when my feet hit the ground, but I didn’t fall. I staggered forward with Number One leading the way and Number Two jabbing my right kidney with the barrel of the machine gun.
It was an old house, concrete block with a low roof. Probably built sometime in the fifties. It was in the middle of nowhere. No neighbors, no streetlights, no white picket fence. It was a depressing little place, with peeling paint on the gutters and a rusty transmission in the yard and the word FUCK written in huge red letters on one of the exterior walls. Number One opened the door and we walked inside.
A cockroach scurried across the floor when Number One switched the light on. There was a ratty old sofa and some other furniture that looked as though it might have been salvaged from a dumpster. The place smelled like dirty laundry and cigarette smoke.
They led me into the kitchen, which apparently had been updated sometime during the Nixon administration. Wood paneling, avocado-green appliances, fluorescent overhead. The long rectangular dinner table had steel legs and a Formica top that was supposed to look like wood, and on the counter there was a ceramic cookie jar that looked like a clown’s head. It was surrounded by crumbs, which probably didn’t help with the insect problem.
Number One unwrapped my hands while Number Two held the gun on me. They forced me to lie on the table, flat on my back, and then tied my wrists and ankles to the table legs with lengths of clothesline. Number One walked over to the electric stove and turned one of the burners to HIGH. He reached into a cabinet and pulled out a black skillet and placed it on the burner.
Number Two peeled the duct tape away from my mouth and secured it over my eyes. He grabbed the lower hem of my polo and wriggled it up to my chest, exposing the skin on my belly. By that time the air had filled with the stench of burnt grease and red-hot iron from the skillet on the stove.
“What’s for dinner?” I said. “Steaks? I like mine medium rare.” Apprehension always brings out the smartass in me. It’s like some sort of condition. I can’t help myself. But somewhere under the surface, somewhere beyond the stoic wisecracks of a middle-aged man in deep, deep trouble, there was a quivering little boy who just wet his pants.
“Here’s the deal,” Number One said. “We’re going to ask you a few questions. If you answer truthfully, we’ll drive you back to your car and let you go. If you refuse to cooperate, we’re going to start searing various parts of your body with that skillet. Your choice.”
I knew they weren’t going to let me go, no matter what I told them. I’d seen their faces. I could identify them in a lineup. They’d murdered Diana, and I was the only witness. They weren’t going to let me live. No way.
“What was the nature of your relationship with Diana Dawkins?” Number Two said.
“Fuck you,” I said.
“You need to answer our questions, or this isn’t going to go well for you. Not at all. Let’s try again. What was the nature of your relationship—”
“Fuck you. Go ahead and do what you’re going to do. I’m not telling you a damn thing.”
“All right. If that’s the way you want it.”
More bad dialogue from bad TV. I half-expected them to start saying things like Now you’re going to get it, wiseguy.
But they didn’t. They didn’t say another word. I heard a pair of footsteps cross the kitchen, and a few seconds later I felt the bottom of the molten hot iron skillet descend on my lower abdomen. For a moment it felt as though a fiery meteorite had fallen from the sky and was burning a crater into my gut. I shouted and thrashed and writhed, and then something changed.
Suddenly, I didn’t feel much of anything except the weight of the frying pan on my belly. It had scorched all the nerve endings there and had rendered them numb. That’s what I thought.
One of the goons gently peeled the duct tape away from my eyes. The two of them were standing there with their arms folded across their chests, looking down at me and smiling.
Number One lifted the heavy skillet from my abdomen. It was full of ice cubes. They’d tricked me. The other iron skillet was still on the burner. Still smoking, but cooling now. One of them had turned off the heat under it.
There was a third set of eyes, a woman’s, watching me from the end of the table where my feet were tied. I squinted her into focus.
It was Di.
“Now I know I can trust you,” she said.
I lay there in astonishment as Number One and Number Two loosened my restraints. Di was still alive. She’d put me through the wringer, and it had all been some sort of test. An elaborate hoax to challenge my loyalty.
A wave of rage coursed through me. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. I stood and stomped over to Diana and grabbed her by the shoulders.
“I don’t appreciate being fucked with!” I shouted.
“Take it easy, pal,” Number One said.
“Who are these jokers?” I said to Di.
“Friends,” she said.
“Somebody could have gotten killed,” I said.
“Back at your house, before you came outside, I loaded your pistol and mine with blanks. They made big booms, but they weren’t going to hurt anyone.”
“Those Uzis weren’t loaded with blanks,” I said. “I heard the incoming rounds thudding into the dirt in front of us.”
“Rubber bullets,” Di said. “They sting, but they won’t kill you. And the guys were instructed not to aim close, so it wasn’t likely anyone was going to get hit anyway.”
“Can we go now?” Number Two said.
“Yeah, take off,” Di said. “Thanks, guys.”
Number One and Number Two exited through the back door. I heard them laughing as they walked around the house toward their car. The Mustang’s engine rumbled to life, the throaty growl fading as they drove off into the night.
“Friends?” I said.
“It was important for me to test your loyalty.”
“Yeah, well, you almost gave me a heart attack.”
“Sorry. Come on, let’s go.”
“How are we going to get back to my car? And if we do, how—”
“It’s parked outside. I paid a guy with a winch to pull it out of that field. I even stopped at a coin-operated car wash on the way over here and sprayed all the mud off for you.”
“So thoughtful,” I said. “Now what?”
“Now back to your place. You can drop me there. I have a car parked nearby.”
We didn’t talk much on the drive back, other than me asking which way to go and Di telling me. She said the squalid little concrete block bungalow was a safe house, and that we might be meeting there from time to time. I made a mental map of how to get back there if the need arose.
I steered into my driveway, killed the lights, shut the engine off.
“I don’t know about all this,” I said. “I think it might be out of my league.”
“Remember what I told you before? Once you commit, there’s no turning back.”
“I just don’t see how I can be of any help to you.”
“Don’t worry. I have a plan.”
“Think you might want to share it with me?”
“Not now. I need to go.”
I’d passed my little test with flying colors, and Diana still wouldn’t reveal the details of her plan. She was starting to piss me off in a big way. Not that I could really do much about it. She had me by the short hairs, and she knew it.
She grabbed her backpack, climbed out of the car, and disappeared into the blackness. I checked the glove compartment. My .45 was there. It had been cleaned, and there were real bullets in the clip now.
I rinsed my shoes off and washed my feet at the hose spigot outside. The house was dark and quiet. I didn’t want to wake Juliet. I’d been gone for hours, and there was no way to explain my absence. I could have come up with something, but better if I didn’t have to.