Bad Radio

by Michael Langlois

  The bell chimed and the doors slid open. Elevator guy was wearing a windbreaker, jeans, and cowboy boots. He looked a hell of a lot more like a real hospital visitor than the thug in the stairwell, as long as you didn’t count the bulge under his left arm.

  I came out of the elevator at a fast walk and sat down next to him on the visitor’s couch as he looked up from his magazine. His eyes went wide with surprise.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” I said loudly for the benefit of the two night nurses at the desk behind us.

  He answered me in a much quieter voice. “Mr. Griffin, you need to return to your room. There are still thirty minutes left on the clock.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  He went for his gun. I clamped down on his forearm as it went into his jacket. He strained against me to get that last few inches to the holster, but it was pointless. He might as well have been a small child for all the good it did.

  “Be still, or I’ll break your arm.” I had to squeeze until he gasped to make my point. I ignored the thrill that small sound gave me and forced myself to stop increasing the pressure.

  I reached into his coat with my other hand and pulled out his gun, careful to keep it lower than the back of the couch. It was a blue-steel .38 revolver, a workman’s tool, reliable and lethal.

  “Time to stretch our legs.” I guided him up off the couch and back to the elevator, keeping him in front of me and the .38 between us.

  We rode up to the fifth floor, which was the top. I nodded pleasantly at the night nurse on duty, but it was a wasted gesture. She never looked up from her work.

  Elevator guy was quiet and cooperative as I herded him into the stairwell at the end of the hall and up the last flight to the roof entrance.

  I was grateful for the cooperation. I had managed not to kill the guy in the stairwell, but I didn’t want to test myself again so soon.

  We pushed out of the last set of doors and into the cool, breezy night. Our shoes made scraping noises on the gritty concrete of the roof.

  “You’re doing good. This is almost over. Just help me out with one more thing, and I won’t have to do you any permanent damage.”

  “You’re not going to do me any permanent damage no matter what I do. You fire that gun up here, and people are going to come running. So you can go to hell.”

  “You’re right about the gun.” It went into my pocket.

  I hit him in the gut hard enough to lift his feet off the ground. I stepped to one side to keep from being splattered as he threw up all over his feet. My breath quickened, but stepping back helped me stay focused on what I was doing.

  I pulled his wallet out of his jeans while he was catching his breath and flipped it open to read his ID. Jesse Smith. No doubt fake.

  He put his hands on his hips and sucked air through his teeth.

  “Son, I’ve been doing this a long time. If you think roughing me up a little is going mean diddly-shit to me, then you’re in way over your head. Just walk away, and I’ll make sure you don’t suffer when the time comes. Last chance.”

  I hit him again. He grabbed my arm as he doubled up, and then he showed me how overconfident and stupid I was. With his other hand he stabbed me in the stomach.

  21

  The blade was cold in my guts but hot against the edges of the wound as it came out. I grabbed his wrist before he could plunge it into me again and squeezed until the bones cracked. The knife clattered to the concrete.

  I kept hold of his wrist, but I stopped squeezing. He glared murder at me and sweat popped out on his brow, but that was the only sign that he was hurting. Tough son of a bitch.

  I clamped my other hand over the wound in my stomach. The blood was a warm thread dribbling out between my fingers. An image of myself crouched over the man’s still and bleeding body tantalized me for a second, pulling at me, but I resisted with everything I had. Animal need crested inside of me, but I held on and it receded.

  Nonetheless, the pain was a constant goad weakening my self control. I needed to end this quickly.

  “Use your other hand to take out your cell phone, and tell your friend in the car to come up to the roof. Tell him you have a problem and you need everyone up here right now. Say anything different, and I’ll kill you before you can hang up.”

  “I’m not … doing shit. You want to kill me? Better do it quick before you bleed out. Getting dizzy yet?”

  My guts were on fire and my legs were starting to feel distant. Worse, I was having trouble remembering why I was fighting so hard not to tear bloody chunks out of this guy with my bare hands. The only way I could think to save his life was to shock him out of his bravado-fueled sense of control.

  I let go of his wrist, leaned forward, and drove my fist into his left thigh. Thigh bones are far thicker than any of the bones in your hand. For anyone else, this would have resulted in one shattered hand and one bruised thigh.

  But I’m not anyone else. His thigh snapped with an ugly crunching sound and the leg collapsed, dumping him onto the ground. I knelt fast and clamped the hand that wasn’t on my wound over his mouth to muffle the screaming. His face was red and his eyes wild where they showed over the top of my hand.

  It hurt like hell and one of my knuckles was already swelling up, but at least I hadn’t killed him.

  When the screaming stopped, I pulled my hand back and dug the phone out of his jacket. He was breathing hard and blinking tears out of his eyes.

  “Call now. Say you’re hurt and you need help up on the roof.”

  He grabbed the phone out of my hand and dialed with his thumb. It took a minute, since his good hand was attached to a broken wrist and his other hand was trembling. I could hear it ringing faintly, and then quit as someone picked up.

  “It’s me. I’m hurt. You need to get out of here right now and …” I slapped the phone out of his hand, but it was too late. I could already hear a car starting down in the parking lot.

  “No!” If the man in the car got away, Leon and Henry were dead.

  I let go of my stomach, grabbed elevator guy with both hands, and ran to the edge of the roof. Five stories down, I saw headlights flick on.

  The third man was parked right next to my car, about fifteen yards away from the side of the building. A white flash flickered through the wash of red brake lights as he threw the gear selector past reverse into drive.

  I no longer cared about the lives of the two hit men. I lifted Elevator Guy over my head with an inarticulate roar and hurled him downward with everything I had.

  His terrified shout stopped abruptly when he impacted the windshield in an explosion of safety glass. Small glittery pebbles rained down through the car’s headlights as the nose dove down on its springs.

  The car idled slowly forward until it bumped into the rear of the car across the parking lot aisle.

  My heartbeat pounded in my ears. I clamped my teeth together to keep from screaming out in triumph over my kill. Laughter bubbled out instead. It took long seconds for me to calm down and realize how wrong that was. How wrong I was. I dropped to my knees and concentrated on my breathing until I could think clearly again.

  I rode down the elevator and hurried out of the building to check the car. One nurse stopped me before I left the main lobby, concerned about the mess on my clothes, but I just smiled and lied that it wasn’t my blood. She gave me a sympathetic nod and walked off.

  I walked around the side of the building to the now demolished car. Both men were dead.

  From the looks of it, the man in the car died from a broken neck when the roof caved in on him. The side windows in the front of the car had blown out when the roof had partially collapsed, so it was easy to reach in and grab Car Guy’s wallet.

  I then wiped down the guns I had taken as best I could and tossed them into the car. There was no way I wanted to be caught with the guns of professional killers in my possession.

  I moved my car to a spot across the lot so that it wouldn’t get c
aught in the inevitable police cordon, grabbed my clothes bag from the trunk, and went back up to Henry’s room.

  Before I went inside I tried to collect myself and shake off the giddy sense of euphoria that was still with me. I tried to concentrate on the pain from my wound. That helped.

  I entered the room and closed the door behind me, then tossed my bag of clothes on the floor. “There were three of them, but we’re clear now.”

  Henry fixed me with a cold stare, taking in my blood soaked shirt. “You killed them.”

  “The first one is fine. I left him in the stairwell with nothing a little first aid and some traction won’t fix.”

  Anne frowned at me. “Traction? He’s in the stairwell with broken bones?”

  “He’s alive.”

  “What about the second one?” asked Henry.

  “He was fine until he stabbed me and tipped off his buddy in the parking lot.”

  “And then?”

  “He stabbed me!”

  “And?”

  “And then I had to throw him off the roof.”

  “And the third guy?”

  “Second guy landed on him.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “I had no choice, he was getting away.”

  Anne crossed her arms and looked sick. My friends seemed to care a lot more about three hired killers than they did about me. I tried to remind myself that they were just worried about my state of mind, but it still stung.

  “Henry, I swear to you that I didn’t kill them because I wanted to. I tried to be reasonable.”

  “I believe that you tried. I also believe that you couldn’t help yourself and you failed. Everyone told you to let them go if it came down to it.”

  “They were going to kill you and Leon both. I avoided any killing until they forced me into it. I wasn’t even going to kill the guy that stabbed me. Speaking of, are there any bandages or anything in here? You know, for where I got stabbed trying to save everyone’s lives?”

  Anne rummaged through the drawers in the room and found a plastic tray wrapped in plastic full of supplies. Among the other items inside the package were a box of Steri-Strips used to close wounds and some antiseptic swab sticks. She brought them over to me and said, “Take off your shirt.” When she spoke to me, she avoided looking me in the eyes.

  My hand was stuck to my stomach and shirt by congealing blood, but I managed to pull it away without too much pain. Peeling the shirt off was much worse, as the fabric wanted to tug at the wound as it came free of my skin.

  The top of my pants were soaked with fresh blood by the time we got my shirt off. She took the gruesome article of clothing without reaction, wadded it up, and dropped it in the red bin in the corner of the room marked “Biohazard.”

  “You’re a mess. Hold still and put two fingers over the puncture.” Setting the medical supplies on the bed, she pulled out a fistful of paper towels from the dispenser and wet them, squeezing out the extra water until they were just damp. Then she carefully cleaned the blood off of my stomach, working around my fingers. Then she knelt down in front of me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m unbuckling your pants so that I can get the blood off of your waist. The wound is right over your belt, and I need it to be clean for several inches all around so that the Steri-Strips have a clean area to stick to. These pants are going to have come off.”

  I grinned down at her. “I should get stabbed more often.”

  “Just stop it. You just killed two people, not to mention seriously injuring a third, and you’re making jokes. It’s not funny, it’s creepy.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m trying to control it. This isn’t how I normally am.”

  “I know.”

  She finished cleaning around the wound and had me take my fingers off of it. The edges were pretty clean and the whole thing was only about an inch and a half wide. It was barely seeping blood at this point. I wondered how deep the blade had gotten.

  I didn’t know if I could survive having my guts punctured. Sepsis from a gut wound was far more likely to kill you than the bullet itself, back in the war. I was in a hospital, but seeking treatment would mean sticking around for the cops, as well as losing time. I decided to trust in my altered physiology.

  Anne swabbed the area, leaving yellow-orange smears on and around the wound, and then taped it shut with the Steri-Strips.

  “Not bad. Ever work as a nurse?”

  She shook her head. “No, just one more thing Patrick forced me to learn instead of going out on dates or seeing my friends.”

  There was nothing to say to that, so I grabbed my bag and went into the bathroom to change clothes. I came out in time for Leon’s nurse to chide all of us for hanging around in his room and disturbing him.

  We made polite small talk for a few minutes until she left, and then I dropped the three wallets and two cell phones that I had claimed on the edge of the bed.

  “I know you don’t approve of what I’ve done, but that doesn’t change the fact that the altar pieces are still on their way to Piotr. The guy in the stairwell said that Dominic does business out of a phony real estate office in Boulder called Coyote Realty.” I pulled out all of the ID cards and fanned them out next to the wallets.

  Henry and Anne crowded around to look. “They’re obviously fake, but you’ll notice that they’re all Colorado licenses. My guess is that Dominic and his crew really do run out of Boulder.”

  Henry picked up a cell phone and flipped through it. Then he went to the phone next to Leon’s bed and dialed 411.

  “Yes, can you tell me if Boulder Colorado is in the 303 area code? Thank you, and could you give me the address of Coyote Realty in Boulder? Thanks, again.” He hung up. “Almost every number in this phone is a 303 exchange, so I’d say that you were right.” He scribbled an address down on a pad next to the phone and handed it to me. “Better get out of here before the police find your victim in the stairwell and the dead guys in the parking lot.”

  “Yeah. You have Anne’s cell number, keep in touch.” I shook his hand and he looked at me very seriously. Anne stood up and walked to the door.

  “Abe. One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Think hard about what you’re doing.” His eyes flicked to Anne and back to me. “Be careful that you don’t become more of a danger to her than the man you’re hunting.”

  22

  We spent another restless night in sterile airports and uncomfortable airplane seats as we raced across the country on my dwindling funds, landing hungry and exhausted. I entered the men’s restroom shortly after landing and checked my wound. It was still tender, but the skin at least had healed over. I threw the bandages away in the trashcan.

  We rented the cheapest car they had, a tiny blue econobox, and minutes later were headed out into the pre-dawn gloom towards Boulder.

  Anne slept in the passenger seat for the entire hour-long drive, not even waking when I stopped for coffee and a map. She looked lovely and peaceful and heartbreakingly vulnerable. I thought a long time about what Henry had said.

  The horizon was just beginning to lighten when I finally located the right office park.

  The entrance to Coyote Realty was an unremarkable door in a willfully bland stone cube, surrounded by carefully tended generic landscaping. The parking lot was deserted, so I pulled around back to avoid being seen from the road. Perfect silence descended when I turned off the car.

  I shook Anne gently on the shoulder. “Hey, wake up.”

  “Mmf. Sleeping. You go in, I’ll wait here.”

  “I need you to come with me.”

  She peeled her eyes open and glared balefully at me. “Why? It’s completely deserted. Just go in and snoop around, you don’t need me for that.”

  “Well, what if the drop-off location is on a computer?”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t know jack about computers. I’ve been living on a farm with one TV and a rotary dial phone for the
last twenty years.”

  “What, not even one of those senior citizen classes on e-mail?”

  “Being sleepy isn’t making you any funnier.”

  “Fine.” She groaned and got out of the car, looking like she felt my age. I tried not to notice the way her clothes slid and stretched across her body as she yawned and reached for the sky.

  I turned away and grabbed my combat baton from the trunk and then trotted over to the building. I would have liked to have armed Anne as well, but unfortunately all these trips on airplanes was making it difficult to keep both guns and ammo available on short notice.

  Coyote Realty’s rear entrance was easy to find, as each of the gray-painted steel doors behind the building was stenciled with the appropriate suite number. As I expected, it was locked.

  Anne thumped a fist against the door. “Steel doors. Now what?”

  I rapped the door a few times with my knuckles. “Luckily for us, steel doors aren’t solid steel. They’re actually two steel sheets separated by a few ribs, or even a foam core.”

  “Yeah, that’s really lucky. I was just thinking, if only this giant steel door was only a couple of sheets thick.”

  “There’s still some coffee in the car, if it’ll make you less cranky.” She made an unladylike gesture. “I said lucky because, if it were solid steel, I couldn’t do this.”

  I leveled my baton and aimed it at the door, about a foot to the left of the deadbolt. Then I drew it back, sucked in a big breath, and slammed it forward with enough force to flip over a pickup truck.

  The end of the baton went through the door like tissue paper. The impact sounded like somebody hitting a dumpster with a sledgehammer, but that didn’t bother me. In the middle of a commercial district at dawn, there probably weren’t many folks around to hear it.

  Gripping the baton with both hands, I began to work it back and forth, and then when I had a little room, I started rowing it in a circular motion until I had a hole big enough to stick my arm through. Which I did. I then unlocked the deadbolt from the inside. I opened the door and stepped in, flipping the light switch on as I did so.