by Kim Oh
I let those bittersweet notions roll around inside my skull as I turned out of the strip mall parking lot and onto the street, heading back toward the freeway on-ramp. That way, I could take a break from worrying about what was going to happen soon as I was on my way again, heading north to my delivery point in San Francisco. Chances were good, just as Mason and I had talked it out, that the people who already had taken a shot at me were ready to do it again. Or at least some of them – I hadn’t witnessed close up what’d happened to the guy in the souped-up Challenger, but what I’d heard of the car getting rammed by the eighteen-wheeler indicated that he’d be out of the action, temporarily if not permanently. So that. at least. was one vehicle I wasn’t scanning for as I cruised along, looking for the signs to the freeway.
As it turned out, I didn’t have long to wait. Not for seeing the way to the on-ramp, but for finding out what was going to happen next. No sooner had I pulled up at the nearest stoplight to the strip mall, waiting for it to turn green, than I heard and felt the little burner phone going off inside my jacket pocket.
I fished the phone out and thumbed the answer button. I already had the helmet visor up, so I just had to wedge the phone past my cheekbone to hear who was on the other end.
It was Mason.
“Come on,” I told him. “I’ve gotta get on the road.” I was starting to regret being so kind to the old jailbird. “You can’t be calling me every five minutes.”
He ignored what I said. “We need to talk –”
“We just were.”
“This is important,” came Mason’s voice. “I’ve got your Plan B.”
† † †
There was a surprise waiting for me. After I’d turned the bike around and gone back and listened to what Mason had come up with. It was good – or at least good enough.
“How’s that sound?” He had ground out his cigarette butt under his heel, when he’d finished giving me all the details of the plan he’d concocted. “Think it’d work?”
“It might.” I’d nodded. “It just might . . .”
So I was heading out again, but not toward the freeway on-ramp. There was someplace else close-by, where I had business now.
That was when the surprise came. Out of the side of my new helmet’s visor, I saw some kind of van pull up alongside me. And not just any van – this one I recognized. Or at least I did – soon as I saw the word PARAMEDICS printed in big red letters on the side and the ambulance-style light bar mounted on the roof.
One of those guys, the fakes who’d tried to run that number on me back on the freeway, leaned out from the driver’s-side window. The baby-faced one who’d actually tried to clap the anesthetic gas mask onto my face – now he had one hand on the steering wheel, while he rested his elbow on the van windowsill.
“Hey –” He gave me a smile. “We need to talk.”
This time of night, with everything on the strip mall shut down, there was no other traffic on the street. Which was convenient for me, because I didn’t hesitate to take one hand off the Ninja’s handlebars, then reach inside my jacket. “Buddy –” I pulled out the .357 and swung it around. “Does this look like I feel like talking?”
“No problem.” He raised both hands from the steering wheel. “That’s cool.” All the blood had drained from his face, leaving him as stark white as the side of the fake paramedics van. “I can understand that you’ve got some issues with –”
“Issues? Oh, that does it.” Sitting on the bike, I was a foot or so lower than the van’s side window, so I had to angle the gun up toward his face. “I don’t have issues. But you’ve got problems. Major problems.”
“Jerry . . .” Past the driver, the guy sitting in the passenger’s seat was visibly sweating. “Let’s just go. It’s not worth it.”
“Don’t worry – I’ve got this.” Jerry – if that was really his name – managed to keep his nerves under control, even though his hands had gone white-knuckled on the wheel. “Look.” His voice hardly shook at all as he talked to me again. “I know we got off on the wrong foot –”
I couldn’t believe it. There was just no end to this guy’s bullshit.
Plus, eventually somebody else was going to come along. I didn’t feel like being spotted out here in the middle of the street, all visibly poised to blow some idiot’s head right off. So this weird little conversation had to be brought to an end.
Which, of course, I wasn’t going to do – blow his head off, that is. As much as I would’ve liked to. But enough havoc had gone down near here, with me in the middle of it, that I didn’t want to cause any more, at least while I still had a chance of a clean getaway and making my scheduled delivery up in San Francisco. If the police were looking for a young Asian female on a motorcycle, last observed in hot pursuit of a malfunctioning drone on the freeway, I didn’t want to make myself a higher-priority item on their agenda by leaving at least a couple of dead bodies in a phony paramedics van, their foreheads drilled through with .357 slugs. Obviously, if I iced this Jerry guy, I’d have to take out the witness sitting there on the other side, plus however many other members of the outfit were riding in the back of the van.
I could remember some words of advice from my old mentor Cole – Keep the body count down. Unless you’re wrapping things up. Some more wisdom from the guy who’d gotten me into this business – Just do the professionals. They’re the ones who give you grief.
Which was why I pulled the .357 back from the face of the van driver. As much trouble as this bunch had caused me back on the freeway, they were obviously way out of their depth when it came to pulling off an operation like this. I was dealing with amateurs here.
“Take off.” I nodded my head to one side as I gazed up at the one named Jerry. “Before I change my mind.”
“No, seriously.” He didn’t take the hint. Given the opportunity, most people looking at a pissed-off female with a gun in her hand – like me – would’ve hit the gas and disappeared into the night. “We really do have to talk. This is important. For all of us.”
Actually, he did seem serious. I raised an eyebrow in puzzlement as I studied him. For a nonprofessional, he really was hanging in there. “More important,” I said, “than this?” I held the gun up higher.
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded fervently. “Way more.”
I was still suspicious. “What exactly do you think you can tell me that I’d be interested in hearing?”
“How about if I tell you what’s going on?” He took a hand from the steering wheel and pointed. “And like what’s in that bag you’re carrying?”
Bingo.
If there was one thing this guy could’ve said to make me want to hear anything more from him, that was it. Even if I hadn’t already started out on the Plan B Mason had come up with, I still had some doubts running through my mind. All of which I might have been able to sort out, if I knew what I was actually carrying. If I could find out why these people wanted it so badly, and more important, how they’d known I was making the delivery, I’d have a better idea as to whether Mason had been right about Dalby setting me up, with some weird scheme for screwing me over on this job. That was the bit that would change everything, if it just happened to be true.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right – that could be interesting. So go ahead and tell me.”
“It’s kind of complicated.” Taking his gaze away from me, he scanned around in the dark on either side of the van. “Takes a while to give you all the info, you know? So maybe we should go someplace where we could have a little privacy. Instead of out here in the open.”
“And your idea for that place would be . . .”
“No problem.” This Jerry guy gave a shrug. “I’ll pull the van over to the side of the road –” He pointed to a section farther on, out of reach of the streetlights. “Then you can climb in the back. And we’ll talk.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” The suggestion was so annoying that the .357 rose involuntarily in my hand, back toward his face. “Ex
cuse me, Jerry – that’s your name, right? But the last time I was in that van, you and your pals tried to gas me unconscious. That’s the kind of thing I tend to remember. You really think I’m going to give you a second try at it?”
“No, no – that’s okay.” He raised both hands, palms outward – whether to try and placate me or screen the gun from his sight, I couldn’t tell. “We got rid of all that stuff. Here, take a look.”
Taking his foot off the brake, he let the van roll forward a little way past me, into the empty intersection.
“Hey, guys –” He called over his shoulder. “Open it up.”
Somebody turned the handles from the inside, then the van’s rear doors swung open. Leaning over on the bike, I could see all the way through, right up to back of the seats holding Jerry and the guy beside him. He’d told the truth – the van interior had been stripped, right down to the metal. The two other members of the crew, whom I’d last seen hauling out the drone and setting it aloft, sat on the van floor, backs to the side walls. They looked a little nervous as they gazed back at me. A gun the size of the .357 in my hand tends to get that kind of reaction.
“See?” Jerry spoke again. “Everything’s cool.”
It pretty much was. Even though there were four of these guys and one of me, they weren’t exactly the type I’d have much trouble with – even without the gun. They looked as though they’d spent most of their lives peering into one sort of computer screen or another. Most of their muscular development was in their forearms, from all that keyboarding. Still, though, their devious little minds could be trouble for me. All that elaborate scheme with the fake paramedic gear and the drone had to have come from somewhere.
“All right.” I swung my gaze toward the front of the van and nodded. “If you don’t mind, though, I’ll just keep this where you can see it.” I held up the .357 again.
“Not a problem.” Jerry leaned out from the side window. “If you need that to give yourself a sense of comfort – while we’re talking – that’s fine with us. Boundaries are important.”
Boundaries, my ass. This was the way people talk when they think they’re smarter than you. So they can pull something over on you, and you’ll even feel good about it, in some warm ’n’ fuzzy psychological way. But then again, if I let him believe he was so slick, pulling it off and all . . .
I gave him a little smile. “I gotta give you guys credit,” I said. “For persistence.”
“Now do you want to talk?” The one who seemed to be their leader set his elbow on the rolled-down window of the phony paramedics van. “Because, believe me, we can save you a whole lot of trouble.”
“If I’d really wanted to save myself trouble –” I lifted the helmet’s visor and looked back at him. “I would’ve killed you all when I first had the chance.”
“I told you,” said the guy in the passenger seat. “She’s not really the negotiating type.”
“You got that right.” I stashed the gun back inside my jacket. “You fellas have a nice night – I’ve got some work to do.”
“All right,” he said. “Maybe later.”
“Much later. If at all.”
He pulled himself back inside the van. The light turned green, and he drove through the intersection and toward the dark part of the street ahead.
† † †
I really don’t like hospitals.
It’s irrational, I admit it, but I’ve got a lot of negative history with them. More than most people, I figure. There are all the times I’ve been in and out of sterile, disinfectant-smelling spaces with my brother Donnie, and all the operations and procedures he’s had since he was a baby. He’s doing pretty good now, but I knew there were more hospitals to come – and then maybe there wouldn’t be any more at all. That was something I tried not to think about.
Plus, the last memory I had of our folks was seeing them in a hospital. Donnie really had been a baby then – he doesn’t remember any of that. At least I don’t think he does. And then there was just him and me.
And then there had been Cole – I’d seen him in pretty bad shape, lying in an intensive care unit bed. I don’t have to worry about seeing that again. He was long gone, through one of those cold doorways dug in the ground.
So those were the sorts of pictures running through my mind as I steered the Ninja into the hospital parking lot. Only the rows nearest to the main door, and over by the emergency entrance, had cars parked there. Light spilled out into the dark from the hospital lobby. Hospitals seem like strange islands in the middle of the night – you look up at the windows that are lit, and you wonder what’s going on in there. Probably not anything good.
I didn’t take the bike up close to the building. I found the darkest corner of the parking lot, killed the bike engine, and leaned it over onto its kickstand. I pulled off my helmet and set it on the back of the seat, then scanned across the lot and the hospital’s main entrance. There wasn’t anybody going to and from their cars, and the uniformed security guard inside was talking to the woman behind the reception desk – so nobody had seen me. At least not yet, and I meant to keep it that way as long as I could.
Mason’s prison buddy was waiting for me where I’d been told he’d be, smoking a cigarette out on the small loading dock at the rear of the hospital, where the food and linen services made their deliveries during the day. At night, there was no illumination except for the buzzing fluorescents on the other side of the access door that the guy had propped open with the handle of the mop stuck inside a wheeled plastic bucket.
“You Perry?” I emerged from the long row of shoulder-high oleander bushes along the hospital’s one doorless exterior wall, the one that had screened me from view as I’d made my way from the far side of the parking lot. “Mason sent me.”
“Crap.” The guy looked down from the edge of the loading dock. “I wasn’t expecting a girl.” He was all fidgeting nerves, taking a final long drag off the cigarette, then flicking it away. He was about half Mason’s age, still young enough to have a ratty ponytail that was only slightly streaked with gray. “He didn’t say anything about that.”
“Maybe he didn’t think it was important.” I brushed away some of the hedge’s stiff green leaves that had gotten caught in my jacket zipper as I’d squeezed past the building’s stucco. If I’d been any bigger, front to back, I wouldn’t have been able to make it – as it was, I’d had to unsling the backpack off my shoulders and keep it tucked it under one arm until I got to the building’s corner. Now I pulled it back, snugging the waist belt tight as I could.
“That sonuvabitch is a little too close-mouthed sometimes, you ask me.” Perry had that jailbird habit of leaving his cigarette pack in his shirt pocket and digging the next smoke out of it, rather than bringing it out. “Same way, back in the can.” Even just watching this guy for a couple of minutes, I easily could believe that he and Mason had done a stretch together.
Which was how my Plan B had come together. Both these guys had gotten out at about the same time, with Mason maybe a few months earlier. He and Perry had wound up with the same parole officer and living at the same halfway house – which enabled them to keep the same working relationship with each other, that they had formed while they’d been doing their stretches in prison. Mason had connived himself into a trustee’s gig, working in the kitchen, which had given him access to all the ingredients he needed for whipping up illicit batches of pruno, that rancid alcohol prisoners and sailors brew from raisins and sugar and yeast. Perry had wheeled the library cart through the cellblocks, which had made him the perfect business partner, taking orders and making deliveries –
Mason told me all this, when I turned the bike around and went back to the strip mall parking lot, to hear what he’d found out. And what he figured I could shoot for as my Plan B.
“I called my buddy Perry up,” Mason had said, showing me his own burner phone. “Over at the hospital. I asked him about anybody who’d been brought into the emergency room. And he went a
nd found out and told me.”
That’s the advantage of having one of those mop-and-bucket work-release jobs – this Perry guy could wander all over the hospital, and nobody would think twice about seeing him around. And snoop around and ask questions – all the doctors and nurses and guards would figure it was just one of the janitors, and what did he matter?
“Your guy from the freeway.” Mason had told me. “The one with the muscle car, who went chasing after the drone. He’s here at the hospital. They brought him in an ambulance, after he crashed into the truck, and you got away.”
And that was why I was at the hospital now. Because, as plans went, I like this a lot better. Any time I could get a chance to eliminate someone who’d come as close as the Challenger guy had to killing me, before he had another shot – I’d be a fool not to. Then I’d be able to get on my way again, without worrying about him coming up behind me once more.