“That’s self-evident,” I said. “I was looking for something more specific. Like what region of the country, or even what country in general. I just want to know how to dress for the occasion.”
“You needn’t worry,” he said. “We’ve made all the arrangements.”
“Uh-huh. Hope you have a lot of cash.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A lot of cash,” I said. “This thing gets what? Twelve miles to the gallon? For a cross-country drive, it’s just not very practical.” John recognized a clumsy fishing expedition for what it was and didn’t answer. So I continued. “Not to mention dangerous for the environment. You know, I’ve been reading up on these—”
“Hey, Adam,” Jerry interjected, “was she good or what?” He was examining the photograph of Clara and doing things to himself that I’m willing to bet the designers of the baby seat never envisioned.
“You like that, do you?” I was decidedly unhappy with my erstwhile friend. “You like to have them tied up like that?”
“I’m more of a handcuff guy myself,” he admitted. “Crashed a women’s prison once? Un-fucking-believable. You know what I mean?”
I took the photo from him.
I guess you’re probably wondering how I ever ended up trusting something as unpleasant as Jerry in the first place. You may have also noticed that while I have some fascinating tales about various other uncommon beings—vampires, pixies, demons—I haven’t told you any about iffrits. This is because there are no interesting stories. Iffrits are completely and utterly useless. They have never, to my knowledge, done anything particularly brave or particularly evil. Or anything at all. No iffrit has made an impact that I know of on history in any way whatsoever. Evolutionarily speaking, I believe their specific niche in the world is to serve as excellent drinking partners, which is exactly how I’ve always treated them. I trusted Jerry in that capacity and never anticipated betrayal from him because betrayal would just be too much work for an iffrit.
“So how’d this play out, Jerry?” I asked him.
“How’d what play out?”
“How did you get involved with all of this?”
“Yer pissed, ain’t-cha?” he observed.
“However could you tell?”
He popped the harness loose and scampered out of the seat. Another thing the designers probably hadn’t counted on. “Awww, don’t be that way, Adam,” he said, leaning across my knee to try to look me in the eye. “It’s just money, is all.”
“Just money,” I repeated. I really wanted to strangle the little prick. “When did iffrits ever care about money? You don’t even have any pockets to put it in.”
“I’m getting entrepreneurial.”
“I’d be amazed if you even knew what that word meant.”
“I figure with enough cash I can maybe buy my own beer truck or something. Or a bar.”
Now that sounded more like an iffrit.
“You’d sell me out for a beer truck?”
“So it’s not the best thing I ever done. Look, somebody who knows somebody tipped me off that you were worth some money, okay? That’s all.”
“Who?” I asked.
“You don’t know the guy. Turned up in Sully’s one night asking about you. I told him to fuck off, course, but then I got to thinking about it and decided it might be worth looking into. So I followed him and stole his little phone thingie. And the guy on the other end told me what was what, gave me his private number, and here I am. Guess he figured since I knew you I’d be good to keep in touch with.”
“Uh-huh. And when was this?”
“Couple of months ago.”
“A couple of…” Sonofabitch.
I couldn’t help it. I grabbed him by the neck and held him up. This caught the attention of my cheery driver.
“Please don’t do that,” he said. “I’d rather you weren’t spotted throttling our baby.” Not “don’t kill my partner,” just “don’t blow my cover.” I wondered if Jerry was even aware how expendable he’d made himself. Probably not.
I picked my bag up off the floor and tossed it on the seat beside me, shoved Jerry down where the bag had been, and put my foot on his throat.
“Is this better?” I asked John.
“Much better, thank you.”
“Hey!” Jerry complained.
“Shut up,” I said. “Two months ago, Jerry? You led these people to me in Boston, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he choked.
“And to the apartment. You called him from Gary and Nate’s apartment and do you know what happened then? Rather than contact one of his bounty hunters, he sent a demon to save himself some cash. A demon, Jerry.”
He was starting to get my point. “Hey, now c’mon, those guys were dicks!”
I stepped harder. He made a gagging noise and then something that may have been a hairball spat out of his mouth and narrowly missed my pant leg.
“They’re dead now, you little asshole.”
He tried speaking but found it too difficult until I eased up. “You were supposed to be there!” he complained. “How was I supposed to know you was gonna leave?”
Had I crushed his windpipe at that moment, I doubt it would have elicited much more than a thank-you from the driver for doing his job for him. But I had more questions saved up, so I released Jerry. He sat up, coughing and hacking and surely disappointed to have lost his erection, while I returned to the view outside the window and entertained happy thoughts about iffrit dismemberment.
Based on the road signs, it appeared we were still heading south. I don’t know a lot about state highways, but I do know driving to Seattle—which was where Robert Grindel last resided—would involve heading west. So maybe we weren’t driving there.
“Is she safe?” I asked the driver, of Clara.
“Of course,” he said. “We’re not cruel people. Just insistent.”
“You guys must have finally figured out you need to work together, huh?”
“I don’t understand your meaning, friend,” he said cheerily, as if we really were friends. Did he think being personable would keep him alive longer?
“Somebody had to get Clara to wherever it is we’re going. I left her less than ten hours ago. So unless she’s in the trunk, you have some help. Other than the iffrit, I mean.”
He didn’t feel like talking any more. I tried a different question. “When will I see her?”
He sighed heavily. “After you have been delivered,” he said. “All right?”
Now, if you’re paying attention, that was a mistake. Up until then I wasn’t sure Clara was being brought to the same location as I was. John figured there was no reason not to tell me that because I couldn’t possibly know where we were going or how to find out. He was wrong on both counts, and had he bothered to search my bag, he would have known that.
“How will I know you’ll release her?” I was just killing time now.
“As I said, we are not cruel people. She’s an instrument to facilitate your delivery.”
“Can’t you use hostage and blackmail like everybody else?”
He smiled. I could tell because the sides of his face twitched upward.
Jerry, in the meantime, crawled off the floor and sulked his way back to the baby seat. He seemed to be under the impression that I was mad at him. Either that or he was pissed I’d taken away the photo of Clara.
Up ahead I saw a small plane descending, to the left of the highway. We were near an airfield. So that was how he was taking me west. A private plane.
That wouldn’t do.
I lifted my bag from the seat and made like I was slipping the photograph of Clara into it. I was, but more importantly, I was removing the arm strap. (It was the kind that clipped on, the kind airports always make you remove beforehand.) Since Jerry was sulking and John was watching the road and making the proper turnoff toward the airfield, nobody noticed.
The off-ramp led to an overpass, which fed a two-lane road that ran perpend
icular to the highway. Then we hung an unexpected left onto a private road that barely qualified as one lane and quickly devolved from marginally paved to mostly dirt covered with a crust of snow. With the poor traction John had slowed to fifteen. Honestly, he was making this much too easy.
Conveniently isolated from potential witnesses, I waited until a decent pothole and then leapt forward. Being a very conscientious motor vehicle operator, John was focused entirely on maintaining control of the car when we hit the pothole, so he couldn’t do much other than take note of the fact that when he settled back down in his seat he had the strap from my bag wrapped around his neck. I yanked back hard.
“Better ease off the gas there, John,” I suggested.
“You idiot,” he muttered, managing to keep the car on the road despite the imminent threat to his life. In fact, he picked up speed. Impressive. I yanked tighter.
Jerry, not real quick on the uptake, finally noticed his ride was about to get a lot bumpier. He went into attack mode—such as it was—and launched himself at my face, but I warded him off with my free hand. He clung on and sank his teeth into my forearm.
“Ow!” I exclaimed. You would, too. I took my eyes off the driver just long enough to swing Jerry against the side of the baby seat, stunning him into letting go.
The distraction Jerry provided was sufficient for the driver to get his hands on his gun and raise it over his shoulder. I saw it just in time to duck.
He fired. The bullet put a good hole in the roof but fortunately not in me.
Unwilling to see if he could improve upon his aim, I gripped the strap with both hands and tugged sharply back and to the right until I heard John’s neck snap.
We were up to twenty miles an hour. Spotting a turn ahead that we were definitely not going to make, I threw myself on the floor and curled up in a fetal position. Impact with a decent-sized tree came shortly thereafter.
I didn’t hear the car hit the tree, the airbags deploy, or Jerry’s scream as he was thrown forward. The gunshot had temporarily deafened me. But once things were settled I could see that I was okay, the driver was still dead, and Jerry was decidedly unhappy. He was lying on the back seat—he’d bounced off the back of the passenger seat—looking dazed and resting awkwardly on his arm, which appeared broken. I left him where he was, pulled myself up, and let myself out.
The minivan had a tree-shaped dent in the front. It wasn’t totaled, but it also was no longer a viable transportation option in the immediate future. I had hoped to avoid that, but walking away intact was still a pretty good result, all things considered.
Opening the driver’s side door, I pushed over my friendly ex-captor and searched him, finding a wad of cash, a spare clip for the gun, a regular cell phone, and his satellite phone. I took each item, plus the gun itself from the floor of the minivan, then reattached my extremely useful bag strap. I would have to send a thank you note to the manufacturer. (“This strap is very sturdy and makes for an excellent murder weapon…”)
My hearing returning, I turned my attention to the injured iffrit in the back seat.
“Adam, man, you fucked up…” he whined, prone on the seat and looking up at me.
I pulled him out of the car and dropped him unceremoniously onto the smoking hood. He yelped in pain.
“Did I?” I asked. “Tell me how.”
Wincing from the broken arm I had dropped him on, he said, “Whatta ya gonna do now? You don’t even know where to go!”
“Let me worry about that. Did you really see her?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The red-haired woman. You said in Boston that you’d seen her.”
“Oh her… of course I did…”
He was lying. I held the gun to his head to emphasize my feelings regarding his veracity.
“Okay, okay!” he cried. “I needed an excuse to be there, all right? Plus, you get even more shit-faced than usual every time you think about her, and I figured that’d make you stay put until they came to take you away. But I tried to warn you!”
“Warn me? When?”
“I told you to stay away from her.”
“That’s not a warning.”
“Best I could come up with and still get paid.”
Iffrit logic.
“You described her eyes to me,” I said. “How did you know what color her eyes were?”
“What?” he laughed. “You told me that yourself, you stupid prick. Jesus, do you have any idea how much you talk about yourself when you’re drunk? You act like this whole immortality gig is one big fucking secret, and then you go tell anybody who’ll buy you a bottle. Half the fucking western world knows your deal by now. Are you really surprised at all this shit?”
I almost pulled the trigger, mainly out of spite. He was right though. I hadn’t been careful for a very long time. It used to be it wasn’t a big deal to spout off in a tavern somewhere, because odds were, nobody of consequence would be within earshot. But, it also used to be true, that a boat trip across the Mediterranean would be an effective way to disappear and that it was possible to change your name just by deciding to call yourself something different. The world had changed, and I’d lost track again. Eventually something like this was bound to happen.
“Okay.” I slipped the gun into my bag. “You can live.”
“Geez, thanks,” he muttered. I started to walk away, toward the air field.
“Hey, Adam,” Jerry called out after me.
“What?”
“Why’re you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“The girl. You were already done with her. Why do you even care?”
I smiled. “Because I’m the hero.”
Chapter 22
I’m a little worried. I deliberately led Ringo closer to the second cell this morning. The last two times we did this, the creature in that cell hit the door hard. Since Ringo hates it when that happens, I can only do this once in a while because otherwise he’ll figure out it’s intentional. Anyhow, it’s just about the only way I can check to make sure it’s still alive in there. And today, nothing. The door didn’t rock at all. And the late night booming noises stopped some time ago. Hope it’s not dead. That would mean it’s not what I thought it was, which would screw up everything.
* * *
I followed the snow-covered dirt path the rest of the way to the airfield. It wasn’t much of a walk. Had I waited another thirty seconds to pounce upon my driver, it might have been too late. One does not want to get into a life-or-death struggle in a careening minivan on a landing strip with multiple witnesses and multiple gas-filled and grounded airplanes for targets. This much I have learned.
Actually, the multiple witness part was something I just made up. It turned out this was a very small airfield, clearly privately owned, with a total of three airplanes standing in front of a hangar that looked barely large enough to accommodate two and a single plowed runway. (I would love to tell you what kind of planes they were, but I’m only just past the “man was not meant to fly, Mr. Wright” phase.) So rather than there being a gaggle of potential witnesses, there was exactly one.
Sitting in a Jeep next to the building was what I at first took to be a smallish man with short hair in a bulky flight jacket, but who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a normal-sized woman. She had flight jockey-type mirrored sunglasses on. As she was facing me, I could only assume she was also watching while I made my way close enough to hold a decent conversation.
“Hello,” I said.
“Good morning,” she answered, unmoving.
The hangar behind her was attached to a small, windowed office. I could see a radio inside and gathered that if one wanted to take off from this airfield, one must first radio in one’s intentions using this. (I learned this by watching movies, so who knows if it was true. Sounded good though.) The door was padlocked and on the door was written the legend “Patti’s Chartered Flights.” I made an inferential leap.
“You must be Patti,” I s
aid.
She nodded. “You must be my twelve-fifteen.”
“I must be.”
“Except,” she went on, “You can’t possibly be my twelve-fifteen.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Because I was contracted to take two men.”
“The other guy couldn’t make it,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” She looked over my shoulder at the road I’d just emerged from. “Must have been a long walk from the highway.”
“I like walking. Very healthy.”
“It’s thirty degrees out, there’s snow on the ground, and you have no coat.”
“Well, sure,” I agreed, “it’s a little chilly.”
Patti repositioned herself uneasily in the Jeep. I wasn’t winning her over with my world-class charm. “Sounded like there was some kind of accident up the road there,” she said. “Should I call an ambulance? Or just skip on ahead and phone the police?”
“That depends,” I said. “What’s your position on guns?”
“Pardon me?”
“Let’s say I have a handgun in my bag here. Would you take my word for it, or do I have to pull it out and show it to you?”
She thought about it. “Honestly, I think you’d have to show it to me.”
“All right.” I produced the gun from the bag. “Do you need for me to point it at you, too, or shall we just proceed to the next step?”
She stared at the gun for a few seconds. “No, that’s fine. What can I do for you?”
“You were chartered to take two men?”
“Yeah.”
“By whom?” I asked.
“Guy named John Filcher. Blond, moderately handsome, forgettable personality.”
“Sounds like the right guy. Where were we going?”
“He said he’d file a flight plan before takeoff. I usually don’t do business like that, but his money was good and there was a lot of it.” She seemed remarkably unconcerned about the gun, all things considered.
I looked at one of the planes. “What’s the range on these?”
“Full tank, I could take you as far as the Keys.”
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