Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  I wanted my Kimber back. No way this coward was going to die easy, without my recovering the totem that had somehow started this whole opera.

  “It’s not here,” Elias wheedled. “I don’t have it. You’re here to kill me, then kill me. I’m ready for that. Just don’t harm anyone else.”

  Amazing—he had finally worked it out. And he still felt as though he was in a position to call shots. I wanted to smash his head until it was no longer a head. Fourteen hundred pounds. But in dissembling, he had given me leverage: the others present, the still-living audience to our conflict. I had enough ammo to kill them all.

  The point needed to be made, quickly. I put a round into one of the midgets; child’s play at this range. She fell down and everybody in the doorway shied back.

  The other midget’s voice came out in a bray of loss. “Please don’t hurt us any more!” he begged.

  The spidery chick was peeking around the door frame. I heard her say, “He got bit.” The gravity with which she said it indicated that an encounter with Gator Guy’s dentition meant more than just a panic snap.

  What if Gator Guy was venomous? That meant I had even less time. Everybody would stand there and wait while I got woozy and tipped over. Then they would all gang up on me.

  Unexpectedly, Mason Stone chose that moment to become the voice of reason. He told the group to step back from the door, to clear the way for whatever came next. He called me a nut bag.

  What did he mean? Like, a scrotum? A squirrel’s food stash? My brain felt dosed with ammonia. I should have blasted him into mixed meat, but my gun was starting to feel like an anvil grafted on to the terminus of my arm.

  Elias was my primary. I had to focus on him. Much as I wanted to bulldog him through the world naked, that would attract the wrong kind of notice, so I had to allow him to shuffle into shirt and pants. No shoes. Barefoot, he would remain more limited and vulnerable. There was blood all over his face. Not his. He mopped it away with a corner of bedsheet, visibly anxious not to incur my wrath further, or amplify the rich mix already fueling me.

  We backed out the way I had come, the long nose of the SIG bench-rested on Elias’s shoulder. Dick Fearing’s corpse was exactly as I had left it in the twenty-sixth-floor foyer. We stepped over it together. Elias barely noticed it, or rather, he failed to lend it the awe or fear that an ordinary citizen would express when confronted with a dead body. Not even fake outrage. He was past all that now, and seemed drugged himself. For the next few moments it would be easier to herd him, but that window would not last.

  He was learning.

  To refresh his fear and keep him on the defensive, I fisted up his recently dyed hair with my good arm and smashed his face into the wall outside, without preamble. Then I did it again, to surprise him. And again, to make him think I would keep doing it. His face came back sooty and cross-eyed from the bricks, blood on his nose and lips. Good. Let him feel what was happening to him. Make him think he was helpless, with no walls of discorporation to insulate him. Asshole.

  I made sure he knew Arly Zahoryin was the final link in my trail of squealers. Scared and newly bloodied, Elias assumed I’d mowed Arly down as well.

  But I had not, and it still felt odd. Unclean, somehow. Not definitive.

  Like a Marine MP with a drunk prisoner, I hustled him across the street to my waiting rental car. My shoulder was already throbbing worse than an abscessed molar. Any moment now, Elias would start jabbering “just kill me,” and I had to keep him wobbly in order to recover my lost Kimber. That meant I had to keep him talking during the trip, much as I loathed the idea of conversation.

  “Ran me ragged,” I said, making it sound accusatory, not complimentary. “But you’ve got to be as sick of this as I am.” I had to hold steady on him with the silenced SIG, left-handed. Every crank of the wheel with my right kicked fresh fishhook pain up and down my arm. I could not let him see it. He might misinterpret it as some kind of advantage to be taken.

  “You killed my friends.” He sounded five years old.

  Good opening. Use it. “You don’t have any friends, sport. Your friends all despise you.” That would cause him to flash-review all the disappointments of his coddled life, and realize it was true. Then he’d bring up his gofer, the amateur porn star with all the tattoos and piercings.

  “Not Joey,” he said. Sure enough.

  “You probably warned him to stay away from your loft. He went back there anyway, to shoot some porn film, after he knew you’d be gone.” We were halfway through the Lincoln Tunnel.

  “I wish he hadn’t,” said Elias. Excellent. He was larding himself with guilt over Joey, penitent. I wished he could have actually seen it happen.

  Prior to the company move for Vengeance Is, the airplane hangar in Jersey was mostly the site of residual breakdown activity. The tractor-trailer truck Elias specified as the location of my Kimber was grouped in a huddle of other shut-down trucks a safe distance from the hangar itself, which offered the complications of warm bodies working, and light. At this distance we could move as shadows and not be overheard.

  The armorer’s truck, a cache full of weaponry, had its own middle-of-the-night watchdog.

  The floor of my mouth tasted tarry, and the fishhooks of distress were starting to flower open and shut all along my spine. I had to Zen this pain away; stash it somewhere else for five more minutes.

  I needed Elias as a front to deactivate the sentry. But my damaged eye was yowling, and first I had to hold my gun on my captive while administering Alcaine, the numbing eyedrops. It was a display of vulnerability I did not want him to see.

  “He’ll have some kind of red flag word,” I said, knowing that if the guy checked in on a radio or mobile while we were walking toward him, we’d be made. If he recognized Elias, he would be less alert. “Something innocuous. A code word for trouble. I’ll know it if I hear it. No check-in is itself an alert.” We had to make haste before someone else’s clock doomed us.

  Elias looked at me strangely, as though I had given him the lowdown in Yiddish. The SIG reminded him to stick to the task at hand. He would play along for another minute, another two, in the mistaken idea he might be able to save the life of the sentry, whose name turned out to be Burke.

  Burke was strapped, but not wearing body armor. Good enough—a single headshot stamped him filed. A nice display to keep Elias rocky. For added distress, I popped off the shot right next to Elias’s ear.

  It felt as though my lungs were filling up with snot. Or shrinking. I recovered the late Burke’s keys and threw them at Elias, which would compel him to pick them up off the ground. Keep him submissive.

  I could smell him getting ready to blow. A last act of defiance. He did not pick up the keys.

  “Get it yourself. If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me. Get this over with. I’m done.”

  The little bastard had made peace inside his own head. He was prepared to die, or so he thought. All broken and noble, a tarnished hero from some simpleminded movie.

  Not.

  I hurt too much to endure this pointless bravado. I was only one down on a fresh mag, so I plugged a shot into his thigh to remind him he was not dead yet, and dying could take a very long time indeed. Thighs are meaty—a lot of tissue with a lot of nerves. A flesh wound there could make a point directly. The hardball round rocketed clean through his leg, and I saw the expression I wanted.

  He thrashed around a bit, but he picked up the keys like a good boy. My jaw was getting numb and my right ear was flaming hot. Gator Guy had done something to me, all right.

  “Does my voice sound funny to you?” It was like battering him with words. He flinched. “Keys. Truck. Now.” Dead Burke had an engineer’s kerchief poking from one pocket; I tossed it to Elias so he could bind his latest wound.

  I was fully aware I was letting Elias precede me into a dark trailer full of weapons. This was intentional. I motioned him up the metal steps to the side door. He kept his hands in full view. “Lights,” I said.
The word went to taffy in my mouth.

  We had to hurry.

  I came up as he switched on some tiny work lamps and put my boot firmly into his butt to dump him to hands and knees, for crawling, for begging.

  “Now go for it, you fucking loser.”

  He scrambled away toward the darker end of the trailer like a lizard singed by a blowtorch. Back there, he would acquire a weapon—most likely, the Kimber. And I would prove what I already knew.

  People who know nothing of weapons waste lifetimes with “if only.” If only I’d had a gun, things would have been different. If only I had acted, I could have saved … something. If only. All bullshit.

  “You got it?” I called out. “Good, good. About time. Now take your fucking shot, big man!”

  Elias opened fire on me from a distance of about ten feet. By the third shot he was yammering incoherently, which meant he was not targeting worth a damn. He wanted to rinse me from the world in a cauterizing shower of bullets. Armed confrontation is not target practice, not when the target can shoot back. Amateurs think point-blank range is close enough.

  Elias missed all seven shots. That is, presuming a jump-load on an empty gun. Call it eight if the pistol was already loaded with a prize in the tube. That Elias accomplished any such functions reliably in the dark, under duress, was admirable—he had been practicing. But it did not matter. He spent his mag and every shot was at least a yard wide of me.

  Now I could put him down like a rabid weasel.

  I sighted instinctively on his muzzle flash and engaged my SIG. The light in the trailer shifted to a weird bluish tint, and I realized my glasses were … glowing.

  Glowing blue.

  My eyes shifted, just for a fraction of a moment. In that millisecond, they shut down completely. Both eyes. Blinded.

  I fired anyway, trusting vector, putting down a pattern that anticipated which way Elias might duck. I’d fired with my eyes shut before. Even blindfolded—it’s all part of the discipline.

  Just as with the audio on black box recordings salvaged from the wreckage of a plane crash, my penultimate thought was moronically normal. Prosaic.

  Oh, shit.

  Then something hit me in the side of the neck, with the impact of a rusty nail in the fat part of a ballbat at the end of a home run swing. The opposite side of my neck exploded. Decapitation would have been gentler.

  Ballistic force yanked me sideways and earthward in a grand, godlike smite. I had taken bullets before; it had been one of the passage-to-adulthood rites I had in lieu of getting married or having children. Right shoulder rear, dead center back, both arms winged, right thigh, upper chest, most defense calibers. A variety of flesh wounds, to make the list sound more impressive. Not that there was anyone to whom I could brag. A couple of hits—not as many—from knives and edged weapons. But this was different, new, and fatal, so traumatic that most of my nerve endings clicked off and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, my extremities iced into distant uselessness.

  Probably a boat-tailed Lapua .338 round, if I knew my snipers. A full metal–jacketed military round, super-Magnums with a muzzle energy of nearly 5,000 foot pounds. Flat trajectory. It could have been fired from as far away as 1,500 meters.

  My eyes were broadcasting static, but I knew Elias was standing over me, probably with a forlorn expression, thinking he had done this.

  I had to say something, even through the glottal hash made of my throat. I owed a death, and it turned out to be mine. I had to tell Elias something. Whisper it, as though to a friend or lover. Two words. A name.

  Not mine.

  PART FOURTEEN

  ELIAS

  I took Gun Guy’s shoes. Dead man’s shoes. They fit. I was in no condition to walk anywhere, with my leg gunshot and my feet bleeding. When the Vengeance Is overtimers rushed to Cap’s trailer at the sound of my gunfire, I was pilfering his first aid box. They were followed by cops, and eventually, Cap himself.

  He looked at me as though his own baby daughter had just tried to cut his throat. He stood down when it was deduced that I had not shot or killed anyone. Not yet. He had poor Burke to deal with. When Cap finally left the scene, hours later, I knew I would never see him again. I hoped I had not destroyed anything of value in the trailer with my wild salvo of missed shots.

  Elias McCabe came clean to the authorities—so RIP, Julian Hightower—and there came a great many authorities in a fast, frenetic pageant.

  The Kimber vanished into evidence, also never to be seen again. I think it was assumed to be part of Cap Weatherwax’s inventory (there were photos to prove it), and Cap, as it turned out, apparently never told anyone differently.

  Vengeance Is wrapped out to its Arizona location with a minimum of fuss. There were incomplete accounts of a mishap, probably courtesy of Arly Zahoryin. But it had not occurred on-set, involved no celebrities, and was adjudged peripheral to the movie, since nobody was interested anyway, because there was no buzz, no stain.

  As far as I knew, the movie got finished. The End.

  Which left me doing interviews with investigators. Weeks’ worth. During one of these, in an anonymous cubicle in an equally anonymous courthouse, Tripp Bergin rang me on my newest mobile phone and advised me not to talk to him for a very long time.

  In essence, my story was so crazy that most of it had to be true. More than one detective said, “You just can’t make this shit up.” From what I heard, they twigged to Gun Guy’s hotel room in the city, but nothing there led anywhere else. The only thing they really had me on was a couple of firearms violations, and I swatted them back with self-defense under duress. I told them I was in fear for my life, not rational, scared shitless, impulsively panicked. Then I told them again, and again, while they assembled puzzle pieces, strange and disturbing, but pieces that fit.

  Back on the Left Coast, my loft remained tainted and spiritually unclean. Too many ghosts there, after the spoor of dead bodies and malice had been scrubbed away and repaired. Now the place begged me to forsake it. I took a hit on the lease (or rather, Clavius did), but scored a bargain on a house in the hills due to the real estate crash. “Saved” money is imaginary anyway, if you’re still spending.

  My new space felt naked and blank, too far white, unseasoned, not broken in yet. Too many windows. Most realtors thought California buyers loved windows and sunlight. I covered half the windows with Dubateen (a trick I had learned from the movie’s gaffers, who frequently slept days in odd locations, and used the thick, black metal foil to cover windows as well as mask lighting rigs). More important, I supervised the installation of the security system. I had plenty of time, because I had to wear a house arrest ankle bracelet for four months. There were a thousand Web sites with advice on how to outfox it, but I played nice.

  I used the time to block out which walls would come down and how my new studio would go up. I drew diagrams on grid paper. I monitored the progress of the Salon campaign begun by Serpentine Clothing.

  On the phone, Kleck said, “You bartered your life for us.” His voice still held that slight asthmatic wheeze I remembered.

  I told him, “I brought it all down upon you.” The success of the Serpentine rollout was a better way to give something back to the Salon. A couple hundred thousand dollars, in fact, for starters.

  “You saved us,” he said, determined to let me off the hook. Good fellow.

  “I damned you.” Most of our conversations were destined to be like this, for the foreseeable future.

  Erik lived, despite stopping nine powerful slugs and spending six months in a wheelchair. Klia survived, too—hit in the left breast, she had needed a respirator for a while. Uno was still dead, as were Davanna, Joey, Varla, Char, Nasja, Dominic Sharps, and Burke. Nobody had any way of knowing what the real tally might be.

  Clavius did not return my calls. I was free of him at last.

  On my first day as a free citizen, I felt a need to go out into the world, searching for whatever I had lost, although I could not specify w
hat. I wanted to talk to some stranger in a bar. To laugh. To flirt. To feel marginally human. To hang out; something grown-ups almost never do.

  I got the first part of my wish.

  It was not a sex partner I sought, somebody to batter me silly with fuckstuff. Davanna had ruined all that for me.

  But my newest friend certainly was considerable. Five-ten, easy, not counting the boot heels. She could have been one of the endless parade of fashion models, but her face was too stern. Too much nose for Vogue. More compact and contained than willowy. Blond hair in a kind of rag cut; careful disarray that would never get in her eyes. Strong hands, tapered fingers, no jewelry. Eyes of a deep espresso brown that read as translucent black, like onyx. She instantly brought Char to mind.

  “Don’t tell me—Elias, right?”

  My mind stalled. Searching … no files found.

  She had already brought me a refill on my J&B, rocks.

  I thought I had it: “You’re not a reporter, are you? A law enforcement officer of any kind?”

  No and no.

  “Law enforcement officers aren’t supposed to drink on duty.” She sucked on a black electronic cigarette, three puffs of water vapor at 1 percent nicotine. The blue tip lit up when she drew on it. “I love these things. You should be able to smoke them in airplanes, but it makes everybody too nervous. Cigarettes are messy. Before you know it you’ve got ash in your hair, on your clothes.”

  She had already seated herself across from me in the green leatherette booth. “Only problem with an electronic cigarette is, they never go out.” Her approach was deft, diversionary, but she was inviting my interest.

  “And you know me … how?”

  “I didn’t say I knew you.” Another puff. A sip. “I just wanted to get another look at you. In the light. See if you were worth all the fuss.”

  I should have been eyeballing her for a concealed firearm. She seemed to sense this and dealt me a tiny smile, not too much teeth.