The real question was why had he gone and fucked it all up? I had only borrowed him, and paid for the inconvenience. That was standard in America—cash absolves. I returned him to where I got him in more or less intact condition. There was absolutely no sane reason for him to try to fox me.
But now he was going into shock. Some beaten animals fight to get in that one last slash or bite, to take a piece of their tormentor into the next world. Others just lie there tharn, resigned to more pain. That was Elias now, glassy-eyed, breathing shallowly, unresponsive. He was not going to utter another syllable.
Which pissed me off even more, that he would not protest.
I was so close I didn’t need a two-handed combat grip on the Kimber—handguns were never originally intended to be shot that way, but everybody picks up bad habits from the movies. I needed my free hand to shield my own face from backspatter because hollow points tend to be unsubtle. I took one step forward. He was going to die gibbering in a puddle of his own shame.
Something penetrated my right eye in the dark.
There was a brilliant white flash of impact lightning inside my head and I instinctively jerked backward to prevent the offending protrusion from sinking deeper into my soft tissue. I dropped the gun. My flailing arms swept the counters clear as I fell on my ass, immediately thinking—
—You just put your eye out.
Panic did the rest.
I clutched my face and roared like a savage, more scared than hurt but the idea of what just happened nearly immobilized me with that fear, that pain. I had a lifelong terror of screwing up my eyes or hands. Now that terror flooded me, and made me a child again.
I could already feel some kind of wet dribble on my cheek.
I spread my wounded eye wide with my fingers, absurdly trying to force it to see. There’s a blurry wash of vague color and knifing pain; when I looked at my fingers with my other eye—my good eye, I was already thinking—I saw dots of watery blood.
This was bad.
I couldn’t wear a pirate patch or have a vacant hole in my face for the rest of my life.
I couldn’t see Elias, couldn’t find the gun, couldn’t deal with the ominous lancets of pain in my head, and had to grope my way toward the door like a retard. My plug had been kicked out well and truly, surely as Achilles’ own heel did him in.
I was thinking, Ice pack wet cloths boiling water telephone. Kill him.
I got halfway to my feet and my viscera plunged as though I was going to puke. I fell into the inner curve of the darkroom door—I had to deduce this by touch alone—and started punching my way through the fiberboard. Every time I blinked it felt as though a cube of razor-edged glass was buried in my eye. Something was flopping around beneath the lid. Sliced nerves, ripped cornea, whatever; it blanched the shit out of me to even consider it.
And Elias had gotten away, or was getting away. I couldn’t see so I didn’t know.
It felt better to vent my panic in violence, so I kicked my way through the rest of the darkroom door. I could already tell by the room ambience that Elias had fled. I had to evacuate this area myself, posthaste. Get out while not being able to see; retrace my entry path while blind.
I pawed out my mobile, trying to think of who to call. Mal Boyd? Not a good choice. Friends? I didn’t have any.
I knew some doctors, dentists, veterinarians and busted paramedics, though, and I fought to imagine what keyboard patterns their numbers might form. 1-2-3 was A through F. The right-hand side of the keypad was 3-6-9-#.
I couldn’t let anyone find me. I had to get out and far away. I couldn’t see a damned thing.
* * *
Crouching in a pool of water, I knew not where, shivering with the potential for the damage done, I tried to punch numeric sequences on my mobile and got them wrong because I was incapable of watching what I was doing. I had to be self-sufficient in this. Finally I reached a guy who could get a doctor, off the record, and that doctor got a specialist. Circumstances and security dictated that I wait more than an hour to be picked up, and it was very possibly the worst hour of my life.
* * *
The first doctor was named Albright. I had used him once for a gunshot wound. My last memory was that he looked like Falstaff, from Shakespeare. Round spectacles, neat gray beard. I couldn’t confirm any of this. But his voice sounded the way I remembered. He acted as though he had been treating this exact injury all night and I was gushingly thankful for his businesslike efficiency; his patter was intended to impress and reassure, and that racked great points with me because he said things I wanted to hear—past the horror show in my head, that is.
“There’s a triangular flap of your cornea sticking out,” he told me after droppering Alcaine into my eye to anesthetize it, then adding UV-sensitive fluid and locking my head into a metered steel gadget for a close-up inspection. All this was going to cost me a fortune, which is maybe why he was so avuncular.
The pain, the flinchy horror of my eyelid exacerbating the damage every time I blinked, magically evaporated for a few precious minutes. He tried packing my eye in antibiotic salve and taping a dressing over it. No go; the pressure was worse than the pain. He jabbed my arm with a tetanus shot and referred me immediately to an ophthalmologist whose office would not open for another eight hours. A third of a day ahead of me, during which I could barely see enough to stagger to the bathroom, gulp painkillers in an attempt to remain semicomatose, and try, try not to think, every second, about tearing, blinking, or being practically blind.
Oh, and I couldn’t lie down. I had to sit upright in a chair with my head between two pieces of duct-taped foam, and “try not to look at anything,” and avoid blinking if I could, and seek counsel in my own thoughts for the next eight hours. Rising to recharge the curative gunk in my eye (from two bottles and one tube) proved a bit more difficult than Dr. Falstaff’s prestidigitation; he just shot it in there and it somehow stayed. When I tried to do it, my eye teared instantly and flooded out all the medication. I finally smeared lines of ointment on my lower lid and dragged my upper lid over it to transport the salve onto the surface of my eye. I could see in the mirror that the sclera was totally crimson. The goo had the fringe benefit of cementing my eye shut, a microscopic blessing for which I was nonetheless thankful.
Falstaff planted me in his living room until the drop-off time. By now, if Elias had called the cavalry, policemen were checking the hospitals. I could not even tell you what Falstaff was wearing, or what his living room looked like.
I was extremely grateful to Dr. Falstaff, miracle worker, until the Alcaine wore off.
I was very tired—exhausted—but knew I’d never capture anything like sleep.
“The good news,” as I was told by an impeccably manicured and groomed Dr. Frankenfelder in a significantly more upscale medical environment, “is that corneal tissue repairs comparatively rapidly.”
The subdued light in his examination bay was much easier on my headache—my imagined pain, so I hear, from the trauma, because like the organic brain itself, the eyes possess no nerves to transmit pain signals. The “optic nerve” is a signal carrier akin to coaxial cable, uninterested in broadcasts not having to do with visual information. Hence soldiers on the battlefield could reinsert their own eyeballs, popped out under combat duress, feeling (one presumes) only such “imaginary” pain. My imagination had gotten pretty explicit, though.
I went ahead and asked for the bad news, since Dr. Frankenfelder was still waiting for his cue.
“The bad news is that until then, it’s going to hurt like hell. I can bump up your scrip for painkillers, but it is vitally important that you do very little over the next couple of days. Apply the meds religiously. Be back in here day after tomorrow unless there’s an emergency; you’ve got the number for that.”
I just couldn’t see it very well was all.
I blinked. Flip-flop. The protruding, pie-wedge shape of gouged cornea opened and closed its yawning mouth, feeling like a cockleburr t
rapped under my madly flapping eyelid. This boded to be a whole amusement park full ‘o fun. Perhaps the pasty consistency of the antibiotic would help glue down this ocular hangnail?
Good news is always bad news for somebody else, and vice versa.
There was really nothing I could do apart from waiting for it to get better. Memory of the real world, prior to the accident, seemed a week or more distant, but it had only been a few agonizingly protracted hours.
Nervously, I asked if I’ll have to wear glasses from now on.
“Maybe. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
Glasses. Goggles. A helmet with a visor. Anything, so long as it got better. From this point until the end of my life, I would be jumpier about objects near my head. Treasure your eyes, and for fuck’s sake, take care of them. For this first time ever, there was a difference between my two eyes. Smoke, cold, allergies, pollution have all assumed an amplified status of threat. Just what I needed—a reason for being more paranoid.
The first day of sitting in my modified chair, like Frankenstein’s monster waiting for a jump-start, completely sprung my back and neck. Add an orthopedist and masseuses to the menu. Poor old monster; nobody ever got his name right; he was hounded and abused; he wanted a girlfriend and that didn’t work out; then he educated himself and kicked the ass of his own highborn “creator” … which is more than humankind has managed to date, as a species. The Frankenstein monster should be on our currency as an example to emulate.
He didn’t ask to be here.
I stupidly attempted to go online and within seconds tears were coursing down my face (rinsing out the medication) and I won a very unimaginary migraine. I ate tasteless food and eliminated it. I became one of those stock-schlock brains in an aquarium, the kind in black-and-white movies that bitch about having nothing to do but think.
I had never felt so thoroughly neutralized, and would have willingly taken several bullets to avoid all this.
I requested and got enough powerful meds to keep me asleep through most of the waiting. There was literally nothing else I could do, except perhaps listen to music, or maybe books on audio. And wait. Wait for an entire week to pass as my laggard cornea tried to heal itself.
Frustrating, it was. I ate essentially nothing but soup and lost five pounds.
The sole advantage was that nobody knew I was in Hidden Hills, especially not Mal Boyd. Any attempt to track my cellular movement was doomed to be shunted into tail-chasing frustration, which is why you always sweep for bugs, especially after job meets.
If I contacted Mal Boyd now, he would merely advise that I keep as far from him as possible. If Mal Boyd held back and played it smart, he would begin to perceive my architectural pattern: Ozzy Oslimov overdosed, Cognac simply vanished (as hookers often do), and Nasja Tarasova had been a clear suicide. There were no connection among them, and the window for theorizing such links was shrinking.
Similarly, if Elias McCabe stuck to a fable about interlopers and murder, he would be nakedly available. If he ran, he would graduate to being a Person of Interest in Dominic Sharps’s disappearance. It was very possible this here photographer fellow had just snapped and trashed his own place, say, prior to becoming a fugitive.
I wondered if Elias would wise up and cut his cellular leash as I reviewed the data from his phone chip—or tried to. My left eye kept hanging up like a shopping cart with a bumpy wheel. The only position that felt neutral came from rolling it upward all the way. Every movement of my good eye brought a parallel movement of its injured twin, and another stab of pain and phantom light, just as the doctors promised. If I tried to ignore this very real handicap I was adding wear and tear that would delay healing. Try it sometime: try looking at something with one eye while prohibiting the other from following. It cannot be done unless you were Marty Feldman, Kevin Pollak, or a chameleon.
Elias’s top five contacts included the blond lady, CHAR, who had seen me, JOEY, his gofer, NASJA, who didn’t matter anymore, somebody named BRADY, and at the top of the list, CLAVIUS.
Char and Clavius had left for New York, which did not put them high on the list of informants. Mal Boyd wanted a total slate wipe—his usual response to compromise, a downside I had never presented to him before—which meant Char had to be checked off, definitely, and Clavius, maybe.
Then there came Blackhawk and Bulldog, both utility subcontractees. Three options there. Mal Boyd would have them killed independently. He would wait for me to kill them as part of our new deal. Or, most practically, he would aim us at one another, send them to kill me, and deal separately with the last man standing.
This disaster was still containable. I hoped Mal Boyd could see that. I hoped I would not have to take Blackhawk and Bulldog out, because they were essentially blameless.
I was functionally blind, but at least I was not hospitalized, IVed, and sedated. That’s sitting duckery.
It was crazy-making. I could do nothing except watch time elapse, and I had people to kill.
Blackhawk and Bulldog showed up to kill me on the third day.
* * *
A word on the topic of security: Never assume you’re safe.
I watched my exterior perimeter system go passive on the little readout screen as somebody de-lased it outside. Okay: my uninvited visitors were aware of the system and outfoxed it without a noise. They couldn’t lick the motion sensors, though, and came in hot, front and rear, simultaneously.
How they found me … well, I just assumed they would.
I had to keep wiping tears away from my left eye. It was devilish, constantly baiting me. It acted completely normal one second, then went “chunky” the next—that’s the only way I could describe it. It was hypersensitive to cold, allergens, air, every goddamned thing, responding like a jumpy point man sending his fear back to infect an entire patrol. I could not depend on my vision for split-second options. My answer was stealth and overkill.
Blackhawk worked frontally—of course—and Bulldog handled the rear. They each had a backup man with them, and I marveled at Mal Boyd’s cold-bloodedness. My own guys had come to wax my sad crippled ass … and then get killed by their own backup. I wondered why Blackhawk and Bulldog had not seen this. Then again, I had no idea of what they had been told. A survivor might be informative if I could make the idea of a double cross clear. That would be sweet if I could manage the more urgent task, which was keeping my head on my own body.
God, they were good to watch. Both teams came in high-low with maximum coverage of unknown space, and they were immediately aware of the trespass sensors, which one man would fog on a clear signal from the other. Light by telltale light, I watched my sensor grid go to sleep.
Good thing I wasn’t in the house. Not technically. I wasn’t in any part of the house they could see.
The false wall built by my late Afghani contractors? It was right behind my gun safe, and it would stop a speeding car, so I could not be shot through it. The only vulnerable spot was a horizontal firing port, built so as to be invisible until actual gunfire had to commence as a last resort.
Which was pertinent since the backups both had shotguns—cut-down Benelli SuperNova smooth-bore shorties, from the ugly profile they presented. With no stocks, sights, lasers, or any real way to aim, they were abbreviated weapons strictly for close-quarter carnage, and I knew on discharge they’d kick like a kangaroo with a shock stick up its ass. Probably loaded with fletchettes encased in sabot rounds to spear right through body armor, which all of us were wearing.
I had a fish-eyed view of them via pinhole camera as they rallied in the living room near the fireplace after checking and clearing all suspect space. They seemed a bit befuddled, almost disappointed.
“Nice place,” said Blackhawk, taking in the framed print of Targets #5 above the fireplace. He gestured idly with the gun in his hand, which looked something like an old Beretta M951R because of the wooden front grip and extended mag. Another close-quarter lead-sprayer.
Bulldog had his tru
sty SIG. In concert with the shotgunners, they were going for a rapier-and-mace combo assault. “Gun safe,” he said, pointing down the hall toward me, or rather, the room I was hiding behind.
“Booby-trapped, I bet,” said Blackhawk.
“So?” said Bulldog, wiping his face. The first jittery flush brought on by their armed breach was past already. “Aren’t you curious?”
“You open it, then.”
In fact, there were stacks of cash in there. To attract the greedy eye long enough for a directional mine to detonate.
“Where’s our boy?” said one of the shotgunners.
Blackhawk shrugged and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maybe he went out for a burger. Maybe he’s banging that high-priced whore, whats-her-name, Saki, Chardonnay…”
“Cognac,” said Bulldog.
“Yeah, whatever. Well, we fucked up the security system already so it would be stupid to just leave for nothing. There any brew in the fridge?”
“I’m not going to open it. You can.”
“Dog, it’s a fridge. Jesus fucking christ.”
Not bad—I should have thought of putting a mine in the fridge.
Together they drifted toward the kitchen. Blackhawk selected a bottle of Amber Bock and decapped it with his gun.
“Maybe this is sign,” said Bulldog. “Nobody home.”
“Ain’t no sign,” said Blackhawk after a long pull. “Maybe he’s just flown. I would.”
“It’s not right, amigo.”
“I hate it too, but it’s him or us. Pick one now if you’re not decided. This is a real nice kitchen, ain’t it?”
“You thinking panic room?”
“Yup.” Blackhawk finished the beer. “Gun safe.”
Before, they had merely cracked the door for a sneak-and-peek. This time they came into the gun safe room ultra-hot. One of the shotgunners kicked the door full open for a clean field of fire.
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