Unloaded

by Eric Beetner

  The pair walked over to the Lincoln and bent down to stare at her face mashed against the driver’s window. “Huh,” said Shrake. “Is she sleeping?”

  “No, you idiot,” said Do-Rag. “Her eyes are open.”

  “Then let’s see if she wants to come out and play.” Shrake popped the door. She spilled out against his legs, forcing him to catch her by the shoulders.

  “Leave me alone,” she bleated, sounding impotent even to herself.

  “What’s wrong with her?” said Shrake. “Why isn’t she moving?”

  “Maybe she’s playing possum,” said Do-Rag. “Let’s find out.” He squatted beside her and put a grease-stained hand on each breast, kneading them like so much dough. When she did nothing but curse him, he laughed. “Must be an epileptic.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means she’s having a spaz attack. She’s lost control of her body.” A beat went by. “Let’s take her behind the men’s room.”

  “Ya think?”

  “Yeah, I think.”

  She stared at a gold-capped incisor in Do-Rag’s fetid smile. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m a cop.”

  Shrake laughed. “A cop? Nice try, bitch.”

  “Look in my purse. You’ll find a shiny gold badge. I’m a lieutenant with the LAPD.”

  Do-Rag glanced up at Shrake, the slightest bit of doubt on his face. He straightened and ambled over to the passenger door, yanking it open. He snatched the purse from the seat and began rummaging through it. When he didn’t immediately find a badge, he upended the bag and shook out all the contents. “I knew it,” he said, after sorting through the detritus. “You’re bluffing. Shrake, pull her out of there.”

  Nerve tone to her extremities had returned as soon as the transceiver had hit the seat, but she waited to make her move until Shrake pulled her limp body from the car and was hauling her toward the men’s room. She twisted out of his grasp and stepped back to deliver a kick to his midsection. He bent over the blow with a surprised grunt. She kneed him in the face then came forward to cradle his head in her stomach. She yanked his jaw up while twisting the back of his head over. Snap was too clean a word for the grinding, popping sound his neck made as it broke. She let his body drop to the asphalt with a rubbery thump, not giving a passing thought to the irony of the manner in which she had dispatched him.

  Do-Rag rushed her, taking her down with a chest-high tackle. He didn’t realize it, but it was the worst mistake he could have made. The transceiver system slowed her reactions, so she was not as effective in a stand-up fight where there was a need to parry or dodge blows. Wrestling was another matter. Since she never felt fatigue in her muscles, she trained relentlessly with weights and cardio exercises, often as much as six hours a day. Her hand, arm, and leg strength were off the scales for a woman, and she had practiced self-defense techniques to channel that strength in the most effective manner.

  Do-Rag got on top of her and locked his hands around her throat, squeezing while he called her a “psycho skank.” She watched him with clinical dispassion then reached up to take the index finger of his right hand, bending it as if it were a pipe cleaner. He howled in pain, his grip on her neck slackening. She rose to head butt him and then slapped both of his ears with her open palms. She scrambled out from beneath him and took hold of the knot at the base of his do-rag. She slammed his forehead into the edge of the curb. After the first impact, he slumped to the asphalt. After the second, his legs convulsed, and his hands twitched open and closed. After the third, he voided his bowels and lay still.

  She stood to survey the wreckage. She would have shuddered if she were able to. The Winemaker had done this to her, the Winemaker and the horse-riding accident that had severed her spine when she was fourteen. The accident had stolen her adolescence, her puberty, the chance to have any sort of a real relationship with a man.

  Being selected as the guinea pig for the neurostimulator technology offered salvation. It held out the promise of a normal life; it led to an unhoped-for marriage with charismatic Ted Valmont, the venture capitalist who had founded the company to commercialize the technology. But the Winemaker had snatched it all away. He had ambushed and killed Ted, and sent her on the run. Her grief and rage at Ted’s murder—and her subsequent struggle to avoid capture—had ground the humanity out of her.

  She stepped over Do-Rag to the Lincoln, dropping into the seat to put the shifter in reverse before she pulled the door closed. She backed away from the buildings and sped out onto the highway, not sparing a glance at the rearview mirror.

  Chapter 2 - Winnie

  She found Riordan in a trailer park in the northwest corner of the city, nestled at the base of Mount San Jacinto. His trailer had started life as a single-wide, but at some point had been encased in wooden sheathing that extended from both sides like wings to form a pair of carports. It was better than some in the park, but worse than most. The sheathing and the trailer itself were painted pink, and the concrete in the carports was stained forest green. The “lawn” in front consisted of a semicircle of dirt that extended out from the dented aluminum skirt of the trailer. River rocks, weeds, and a half-buried truck tire were the only things that broke the chalklike surface of the dry desert soil.

  Riordan stood beneath a floodlight in the carport on the right. Around him was a mismatched collection of dumbbells and barbells and a wobbly-looking bench and power rack. He loitered shirtless in cut-off sweatpants and tennis shoes by a table with a bottle of whiskey and six shot glasses. Invisible in the gloom across the street, she watched as he threw back a shot then got down to work on the bench to press what looked to her practiced eye to be around 350 pounds.

  He did five reps with relative ease, but strained to finish a sixth, grunting and tensing the muscles in his neck as he barely managed to bring the barbell into the holders at the top of the uprights. He lay on the bench for a moment to catch his breath then levered himself upright and shambled back to the table, where he downed another shot.

  Once again, she reassessed her decision to seek him out. Her late husband had thought him a drunken buffoon. Riordan took stupid risks, was a complete Luddite—he didn’t even own a cell phone when she had known him—and he ran his mouth when he shouldn’t. He wasn’t even a good detective in the conventional sense. Yet somehow this buffoon made things happen and, more important, he had saved all of their lives.

  Standing in the dark by a palm tree, she shrugged. She shrugged even though no one could see her and even though shrugging required a level of conscious thought from her way beyond what most people gave it. She knew she really didn’t have a choice. She knew she needed his help, and she knew she owed him. If she didn’t warn him, the Winemaker’s thugs would find him as surely as she had. And if there was one person the Winemaker hated more than her, it was August Riordan.

  As she crossed the street, he returned to the bench and maneuvered his torso under the barbell. He lifted it from the uprights and let it drop to his chest. He worked to complete a shaky repetition—just barely finding the strength to lock his elbows—and hesitated with the weight balanced above him. Just when she was certain he would realize it was time to call it quits, she heard him say, “Fuck it,” and he let the bar down again.

  She stepped into the circle of light and approached the bench from behind. Riordan’s face was contorted under the barbell, but she could see that he had aged. Wings of gray sprouted from his temples, and the scar at the corner of his mouth seemed deeper and more pronounced. The skin at his throat had lost elasticity.

  She watched as the bar dropped lower. Riordan groaned and squeezed his eyes closed, unaware of her presence. In another moment, he risked fracturing his sternum—or worse, choking himself to death.

  She reached a hand between the uprights and took hold of the barbell at a spot between his grip. She pulled. He seemed not to understand what was happening at first, but eventually he opened his eyes and strained his head back to see above an
d behind him.

  “You,” she said, as she yanked the barbell onto the uprights, “need a spotter.”

  Chapter 3 - Riordan

  I slid off the bench and stood at the end, taking in the attractive woman who materialized out of nowhere to save me from wearing a 360-pound bow tie. “A spotter?” I said. “What do you mean? I had it under control.”

  “Sure you did. You had it under control the way the French had the blitzkrieg under control.”

  I grinned and nodded, suddenly very self-conscious that I was shirtless. “You live around here?”

  “I save you from bench-press suicide, and now you’re trying to chat me up? You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  I squinted at her through the glare of the floodlight. She wore a dark tracksuit over a body that managed to be curvy and muscular at the same time. If you told me she was an elite-level sprinter, or even a competitor in a field event like discus, I would have believed you. Her skin was pale with peach undertones, her eyes a startling green. Her jet-black hair didn’t seem to go with her complexion, so I put it down for a dye job.

  I snapped my fingers like I’d figured it out. “Of course, you’re my third ex-wife.”

  “There’s no way you convinced three women to marry you. Here’s a hint—think Napa Valley.”

  I thought about Napa Valley, and I thought about all the bad associations the place had for me. Then the dime dropped. Her hair used to be longer and strawberry colored—and she had bulked up considerably—but it was the same woman. She had been a human guinea pig for a device to help people with spinal-cord injuries walk again, but some bad guys had tried to steal the technology from the start-up where it was being developed. The final showdown cost me a two-month stay in the hospital—and two life sentences for the bad guys.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Last I heard you got married to your venture-capitalist friend and were living happily ever after. What are you doing here?”

  She took hold of one of the hundred-pound plates on the barbell and spun it idly. “Did you read about our company going public?”

  “No, but I don’t follow that kind of stuff.”

  “How about how our technology was improving the lives of thousands of spinal-cord patients?”

  “No, I didn’t. To tell you the truth, that whole episode was like a bad dream to me. There were times I couldn’t believe it really happened. That a technology could really do—could do what it does for you. I didn’t go looking for further developments.”

  “If you had, you wouldn’t have found them. The company never got off the ground. We were never able to replicate the success I had with the prototype device.” She gave the plate on the barbell a final, violent spin. “And then the Winemaker broke out of prison.”

  “He couldn’t have got very far.”

  “Think again. He got clean away—and now he’s out for revenge.”

  I walked over to the table where I’d laid out a half-dozen shots of whiskey and picked one up. I offered it to her, but she waved me off, so I tilted my head back and threw it down the hatch. I snagged my shirt from the carport floor, pulled it on, then turned to face her. “Who’d he get? That geeky mad scientist guy who invented the technology? What’s his name, Niebuhr?”

  “Dead.”

  I hesitated. “Valmont? I mean, Ted—your husband?”

  “Dead.”

  “Jesus, I’m—”

  She waved me off again, seemingly no more affected than when she passed on the whiskey. “Keep the party going. Who else?”

  “His brother?”

  “Dead.”

  “There’s no one else but you and me.”

  “He also killed Breen, his old partner, who was imprisoned in another state.”

  I took a moment to absorb all of this. “Why hasn’t he come after us?”

  “They’ve sent five teams after me so far. I think they want to take me alive, but I’ve never been able to confirm it. None of them lived long enough for me to question them. On the other hand, I think he just hasn’t found you yet—or possibly he’s saving you for something special.”

  “Special? I only met the man once.”

  “But, oh, what a meeting. You put a knife through the throat of his employee and then shot and beat him senseless with a phone book. It tends to make an impression.”

  “I suppose it does.” I gunned the final whiskey shot, not bothering to offer it to her. I remembered now that she couldn’t drink: Alcohol scrambled the signals from the device to her central nervous system. “You’re here to warn me, then. I appreciate it, but you didn’t have to come personally. A phone call or a letter would have sufficed.”

  “That’s vintage. I could never tell whether you were stupid or just saw an advantage to acting that way. No, I’m not here to warn you. I’m here to get your help. If we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately. A saying from one of your Founding Fathers.”

  I nodded, remembering that she was British, although there was nothing left of her accent. “Yeah, Ben Franklin. Where’d you park?”

  “Where’d I park?”

  “If you parked in the carport by the front gate, you’re gonna get towed. May already be towed. That’s for residents only. Mrs. Grenshaw watches those spots with an eagle eye and calls the wrecker whenever she sees a car she doesn’t recognize.”

  “That’s where I parked.”

  “Give me your keys. The trailer’s open. Wait in there and we’ll concoct our plan for world domination when I come back.”

  She looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one.

  “I’m not going to steal your car. You’ll never find the visitor lot. It’s way in the back and it’s not even lit.”

  “Okay,” she said, and pulled a set of rental-car keys from the pocket of her warm-up. “It’s a black Lincoln.”

  “Pretty cushy for you.”

  She passed over the keys and I started toward the front gate. “Hey,” I said, turning back to her. “What do you call yourself these days?” She had a phony name when I had met her, and I’d never learned her real one.

  She smiled for the first time, and pronounced dimples appeared in her cheeks. I remembered those, too.

  “Winnie,” she said.

  “Winnie? As in Winnie-the-Pooh?”

  “No, not as in Winnie-the-fucking-anything. Just Winnie.”

  It was my turn to grin. “Winnie. How sweet.”

  I found the Lincoln at the front of the complex as advertised. I glanced over at Mrs. Grenshaw’s trailer and saw her face pasted to the glass of her kitchen window, hand cupped against the glare. I was half convinced that she received kickbacks from the towing company, and the nasty look she gave me as I opened the door of the Lincoln did nothing to change my mind.

  I started the car and pointed it toward the back of the trailer park, mulling over Winnie’s story as I navigated the labyrinth of streets. I decided it was mostly bullshit. I didn’t doubt that her company had failed, but the business about the Winemaker’s escape from prison and his subsequent efforts to get revenge was hard to believe. Maybe her husband had left her—maybe he had actually died. The story had to be a deluded coping mechanism.

  That a person in her position could come unhinged didn’t surprise me. She was like the operator of a construction crane. She sat atop an elaborate machine, controlling it without any direct connection to or feedback from the mechanism. She was estranged and isolated from the physical world in ways I would never understand.

  I parked the Lincoln next to a white van in the visitor’s lot. Three-quarters of the park residents had left to spend the summer away from the 110-degree heat, so I was mildly surprised to find even one other car there. I trudged back to my humble abode. A block from my place, I cut through the yard of a neighbor I knew was in Minnesota and came out across the street from my trailer. Two guys were standing in front. One was pulling up the cover on my vintage 1968 Galaxie 500 to look at the license
plate, and the other was watching him do it. My pulse jumped up a notch. Maybe Winnie was onto something after all.

  The interlopers heard the crunch of gravel from my footsteps and turned to look at me.

  “Hello,” said the one who wasn’t monkeying with the cover, a Lurch-like giant whose bald head gleamed dully.

  “Hi there,” I said. “You a friend of August’s?”

  “Yes, we are. We didn’t get an answer when we knocked and we wanted to make sure this was his place. Have you seen him around?”

  “I saw him earlier in the day. We made a date to work out together.” I gestured at my attire and then at the bench press, where I noticed something puzzling. “But I’m a little late.”

  The guy by the car let go of the cover and straightened up. He was short and sleek, and was wearing too many clothes for the desert. “Is Winnie visiting him?” he asked.

  “Winnie?” I said, in what I hoped was a puzzled tone.

  “His old girlfriend.”

  I started across the street. “He never mentioned her. How do you guys know him? Fraternity brothers?”

  A pause. “That’s right.”

  I came to a stop in front of them, standing slightly closer to the larger one. I had moved the Lincoln key to my left hand, positioning the notchless shank between the fingers of my closed fist like a tiny dagger. I smiled. “So the frat publishes the license plates of its members, does it?”

  Lurch started to smile back, but realized halfway through that I was calling their bluff. Whatever expression he would have assumed next was lost when I hit him in the mouth.

  I felt the key lacerate his cheek and he fell against the trailer, reaching instinctively to staunch the blood that was already spurting from the wound. I turned to face the short guy just as he fumbled a police Taser from the pocket of his windbreaker.

  He jerked his arm up, the laser sight glowed red, and there was a pop like a lightbulb exploding. One of the two Taser probes bit into my thigh. The other spooled past me, the copper wire that ran from it to the gun shimmering with reflected light. I heard the rapid-fire crackle of voltage being sent down the wires, but with the second probe lying on the cement behind me, very little juice was being conducted across the gap.