Cost of Life

by Joshua Corin

“Keep going. Tell Elvis Dundee what you’re sorry for.”

  He tossed the apple core into the nearest bin. A teardrop of juice dribbled down his jaw.

  She spoke again:

  “I’m sorry for your mother.”

  Dundee frowned. “Come again?”

  “How she must suffer, every day, knowing she’s responsible for birthing into this world such a self-centered, chauvinistic asstard.”

  Jim sighed. “Xana…”

  “I give you mercy and you throw it back in my face?” Dundee put his knife down on the desk and unhooked his handcuffs. “Pride goeth before a fall, woman. And you just fell for good.”

  As he turned her around and snapped the bracelets on her wrists, Xana found herself face-to-face with Jim Christie. The ten-ton look of disappointment in his eyes said it all.

  What she didn’t know—what she couldn’t know—was that the disappointment Jim felt was mostly directed inward. How could he be upset with a wolf for behaving like a wolf? No. He was to blame for thinking he could get a wolf to be a lapdog.

  At the very moment Lieutenant Dundee opened his apple-wet mouth to recite Xana’s rights, Marshal Kramer appeared, with Giant Nezh behind him and Officer Chiles bringing up the rear. Like Xana, Giant Nezh had his wrists bound behind his back; unlike Xana, his wrists were bound with nylon zip-ties. And perhaps it was the sight of this shrew of a woman who had badgered him not too long ago or perhaps it was the sight of this shrew so absolutely incapacitated, but whatever the case:

  Giant Nezh charged toward Xana like a bull, yelling at a thunderous volume as he advanced across the tiled floor, ready to ram his head through her shirt and through her rib cage and then straight through her shrewish heart.

  Jim Christie pushed Xana aside and stepped into the path of the violence and felt the Chechen’s skull cannonball into his soft fat belly. Both men were knocked windless and stumbling. Giant Nezh backed into a nearby desk and then was shoved to the floor by the tall, angry marshal.

  Meanwhile, Jim coughed up a handful of coffee-colored bile.

  “Jesus, Jim,” said Xana, “are you OK?”

  He gave her a thumbs-up and then coughed up another handful of coffee-colored bile. Dundee and Chiles scabbarded their sidearms. Jim coughed again and Xana implored Chiles to get the man some water.

  “I’d do it myself,” Xana added, “but some asstard cuffed me. What are you smiling about?”

  Because the asshole who cuffed her was smiling. In fact, Lieutenant Dundee appeared positively sunny.

  “Don’t you get it?” he said. “You chatted with the prisoner for five minutes. Five minutes! Think about that. Only five minutes was enough to send this guy’s blood boiling so hot that he tried to kill you in a room full of armed men. Lady, if you can’t see the moral in that, you’re even worse off than I thought.”

  Jim swallowed down Chiles’s water in one gulp and gratefully exhaled. She asked him if he wanted more. He shook his head.

  Xana turned to Jim. She wanted to give the big man a hug, but with her wrists bound she couldn’t even pat him on the shoulder. The best she could do was look him in the eye and once again ask him if he was OK.

  “Yeah.” His eyes were still watery from his coughing fit. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You didn’t have to do that, you know.”

  Jim shrugged. “It seemed like the chivalrous thing to do at the time.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “Chivalry usually is.” His grin faded. “Anyway, listen, I know a lawyer—a friend from high school—he works probation cases all the time. He might be able to help you out with this.”

  Xana thanked him.

  But she didn’t believe him.

  She was fucked.

  Dundee the Chauvinistic Asstard had been dead-on about her pride. With years in prison on the line, it would have been the simplest, most sensible thing in the world to be contrite, but not her, not the great Xana Marx, no. Simple contrition was beyond the grasp of her vast talents.

  Although speaking of vast talents, Dundee the Asstard was now walking a slow circle around a nearby desk. Why the man was doing this was beyond her comprehension.

  “Up we go,” said Kramer. Officer Chiles helped him raise Giant Nezh to his feet. “Next time you try something like that, you get Old Sparky.”

  “I don’t think he speaks English,” Chiles mentioned.

  Kramer patted his holstered Taser. “Everybody speaks Old Sparky.”

  Meanwhile, Jim Christie felt awful. His throat was clogged with acid and his stomach was sore to the touch. Eventually he would have to check the bruise out. He hazarded to guess which exact shade of yellow-blue the skin around his belly had become.

  But it was a small price to pay for chivalry.

  Stupid, yes, but to have been able to do that, and for her, for Xana, well…he would be floating on that cloud for weeks…provided he didn’t die first from internal bleeding. Yeah, after the press conference, he really needed to get himself to a hospital. And speaking of the press conference, it was just about time to hit the road…

  Except there was Lieutenant Dundee, on his knees, peering under the desk, utterly clownish.

  “Jesus Christ, man,” said Xana, “what are you looking for? Your dignity? Your balls? It better not be the key to these handcuffs…”

  Dundee glared up at her. “Did you take it?”

  “Did I take what?”

  “My knife. I know you saw me put it down right here…”

  The knife.

  Officer Chiles had been correct. Giant Nezh didn’t speak English. But he could read expressions and he recognized the dawning expressions on the two federal agents’ faces. Giant Nezh had wanted to wait until he and the marshal were on the road before acting, but he had already slashed his nylon bonds with the knife he had filched after head-butting Jim Christie.

  The head-butting had been a ruse anyway to retrieve the knife, although how much sweeter it would have been to cause pain to that shrew who spoke his language, who claimed to know him but who knew nothing, nothing at all, and would be dead in a few seconds anyway—but first, Giant Nezh had to upgrade his choice of weaponry.

  So before the feds could shout a warning, he plugged the knife into the major artery under Marshal Kramer’s ear while, with his free hand, snatching Marshal Kramer’s pistol from its leather pocket.

  Ooh, a Glock 22. Fifteen rounds.

  That would work.

  The shrew had chided him for using a high-caliber weapon to kill that traffic cop but as a football player walked around with weights in his shoes to increase his leg strength, so too did Giant Nezh carry that hand cannon for moments like this. The Glock felt so light, so easy to handle. He had no problem shooting Officer Chiles in the forehead, Jim Christie in the chest, and then Lieutenant Dundee in the left eye, and all on the same breath.

  The shrew had ducked behind one of the desks. So what. Giant Nezh had already taken out everyone in the squad room who was armed and even if she reached one of their guns, it wasn’t as if she could make any use of them with her arms tied behind her back.

  Ha!

  As he advanced toward her shelter, he wondered what sort of idiocy led her to being arrested. She had probably assumed that being arrested would be the low point of her day.

  Ha!

  But then a dozen or so Georgia National Guardsmen from the other side of the stationhouse’s glass doors perforated the glass doors—and Giant Nezh’s organs—with a hundred or so cylinders of copper-colored iron.

  Chapter 39

  In the course of an hour, Philips Arena had transformed from a grief clinic to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Mothers and fathers and grandparents and friends were now traders, one and all, talking a mile a minute and with passionate conviction to whomever was on the other line of their phone call, and the subject was money. Wire transfers, credit limits, PayPal, Visa. Escrow. Second mortgages.

  Sometimes the phone calls became threatening and nasty, an
d it took everything in Del Purrich’s willpower not to intervene. These were empty threats born of frustration and desperation. Hopeless men and women were always full of empty threats.

  Del had seen it before.

  One of his first major cases had been the robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Well, the attempted robbery. The perpetrators had done almost everything right. They had chosen nighttime over day. They had managed to kill both the building alarms and the vault alarms and they had managed to do so without tripping any of the built-in alerts to law enforcement. They knew which vaults to attack and which to avoid. They had done almost everything right.

  Except turn off their cell phones.

  And so, when one of the miscreants got a call at 12:44 A.M. from an ex-girlfriend looking for a booty call, the bank’s fail-safe internal sensors reacted to the unauthorized transfer of data accordingly. All doors sealed themselves. The on-duty guards, who had until then been expertly circumvented, notified local authorities and rushed to the scene. By the time Del arrived, the three robbers had been trapped inside Vault B23 for just under ninety minutes.

  But it was what happened next that the current chaos on the floor of Philips Arena, this sad chemistry of anger and supplication, so reminded him of. Jim Christie took charge as lead negotiator and tried to convince the three trapped men that the only way the vault door was going to open was if they first laid down their weapons.

  The robbers had responded by trying to shoot out the vault’s cameras, but that just got one of them shot in the throat during the ricochet. Once their luck had turned on them, it had really turned on them. Now there were only two robbers left, but did they give up? No. They started asking for a helicopter. Safe passage. They asked Jim to have the fifty SWAT team officers lay down their weapons.

  Or else what? This was the part that bewildered Del. These men had no leverage. What were they going to do? Destroy the contents of the vault? The contents of the vault, aside from the three—scratch that, two—of them was a pyramid stack of gold bricks. How exactly did they think they were going to destroy five thousand pounds of solid gold?

  In the end, they never said what they would do. They left that to the imagination of the cops. Del, in his limited imagination, couldn’t think of any option these men had other than surrendering.

  But Jim knew better and that was why he didn’t open the vault. That was why he waited another two hours until the SWAT team was able to access the vent system and flood the vault with tear gas.

  As the two men were finally rounded up and carted away, Del sidled up to Jim and asked him why he’d hesitated. After all, if it was a shootout he feared, the SWAT team had plenty of body armor and far more ammunition. Why wait?

  “Everyone’s got a right to some dignity,” replied Jim.

  Del hadn’t agreed with Jim then and he didn’t agree with him now. If everybody had a right to dignity, where was it? Where was it now, here, amid this mob of frenzied civilians? No. They had been reduced to talking about their loved ones in terms of numbers. Dignity was an illusion and all efforts to maintain it were as futile as trying to stay in the air after jumping off a bridge. It was arm-flapping. It was disgraceful.

  This, Del knew, was what lawlessness bred, and the lawless needed to be excised from the rest of the population. And they knew it, too. And for one of the lawless, for Xana Marx, for one of the diseased to try to encroach upon the inoculated…

  But that was why he’d joined the FBI. He would be the wall to keep them out. He would maintain order.

  But dignity? Leave that to the purview of the rosy-eyed.

  Chapter 40

  How nice, thought Jim Christie. Two Guardsmen were trying to stanch the flow of blood currently irrigating his chest into a red lake. What good soldiers they were. And so young. Only young men could offer such dedication and energy to such a lost cause.

  “I think I may have internal bleeding,” Jim whispered to them. “I was head-butted by a Chechen.”

  No? Not even a chuckle? Ah well. How funny to be funny now. He wasn’t usually a funny man. Perhaps the philosophers were right. Dying really did change a man.

  Jim let his muscles go loose. He felt a bit chilly, but other than that he wasn’t in much pain. Adrenaline was a miracle drug, and by the time it wore off he would be dead anyway, so win–win, really.

  “Boys, tell me true: You think it’s too late for me to put on the bulletproof vest?”

  One of the two young men—Jim wasn’t sure which one—replied with a reassurance that everything was going to be OK. And that was undoubtedly true. In a universe resolutely intent on equilibrium, OK was a necessary given. What a sap of a species humanity would be if OK ever sufficed. He thought about Hayley O’Leary and the physical struggles she faced daily and he had still phoned her up on a Saturday morning of a long holiday weekend and she had still come in. OK may have been good enough for the universe, but it wasn’t good enough for Hayley.

  He thought about Xana.

  Now, here was a woman who had baptized herself with the toxic tincture of a thousand bottles in a quest—a quest!—to find equilibrium and had failed every time to achieve it but, like that poor fool Sisyphus, she continued at it, day after day until the last syllable of her car hitting a house. Had Jim ever met anyone so vehemently at odds with the universe? Was that what he found so enticing?

  In his peripheral vision, he could see her sitting several yards away. Someone was questioning her. No, she hadn’t been hit. Yes, the attack came without warning. And what was that last question? Why the handcuffs?

  “He did it to her,” Jim called out. “The Chechen. He put the cuffs on her.”

  Silence.

  Had he been heard?

  Had he even spoken? Maybe he had imagined it just now. If the conscious mind was capable of self-deception, who knew what feats of subterfuge the semiconscious mind could reach. He moistened his tongue with what he assumed had to be at this point more blood than saliva and tried to repeat his sentences but his body vetoed his wishes, deciding instead at that moment to contort into a soggy convulsion.

  Oh, but he hoped his words had carried. These words, possibly his final words, the final words of a staunch man, an honest man, would be lies.

  How terribly funny.

  OK.

  Maybe it was a trick of the nerves, but Jim’s lips appeared to curl into a half smile, and such a half smile it was, so very red with blood, as if he’d just received the most wondrous kiss from the petal of a rose.

  Could he hear the murmuring as National Guardsmen discussed the matter of the key?

  Could he hear the rifling through fabric as Guardsmen searched—with respectful caution—through the pockets of the recently dead?

  Could he hear the click of the tiny key, finally found, as it winked inside the tiny lock inside Xana’s cuffs?

  She immediately scuttled to her boss’s side.

  “Jim,” she said, “Jim.”

  But he couldn’t hear her.

  No.

  “I’m sorry,” said one of the young men who had tried to administer CPR. His face and hands and uniform were smeared with blood. Xana’s mind suddenly flashed on the image of Yuri’s face and hands and clothes after the beating she’d delivered to him and she barely made it to the nearest wastepaper basket before vomiting.

  She might have sat there by the basket for the rest of her life had she not heard Jim’s phone announce itself from his jacket pocket. She looked to the Guardsmen to do something. They looked to her. By the third ring she found the phone. By the fourth ring she answered it:

  “Hello?”

  Silence, then:

  “Xana?”

  “Angelo?” She brushed a stray strand of hair from her eye line. “What’s going on?”

  Around her, the senior Guardsmen shouted orders. They had done all they could here. All further decontamination of the crime scene needed to stop. The area needed to be contained and cordoned off.

  “We need
to talk to Jim,” said Angelo. “It’s about your list. We think we may have a lead.”

  “Who’s ‘we’? Is Hayley there?”

  “Hi,” said Hayley.

  “You’re on speaker,” Angelo added.

  “Hi, Hayley…” One of the Guardsmen snapped his fingers in her face. She needed to get up. She waved him away. “How are you doing?”

  “I…I’m fine…I guess…”

  “That’s good. That’s really good.”

  “Xana,” said Angelo, “what’s going on over there? Are you at the press conference?”

  “The press conference? Oh. No. No, we’re not at the press conference.”

  “Then can you put Jim on, please?”

  “No, I’m sorry, Angelo. I can’t do that.”

  This time the Guardsman, whose general scruff and scar-wrinkled cheeks gave him the face of a scrotum, simply reached down with one of his sinewy hands and grabbed Xana under her arm to heft her up, hoist her over his shoulder, and carry her out of the crime scene.

  Xana did not like that at all.

  On impulse, she balled her right hand into a fist and launched an uppercut at the Guardsman’s actual scrotum. The Guardsman awkwardly staggered back, legs apart, as if he were riding an invisible horse.

  Xana whispered an apology to Jim. She knew he would not have approved of her reaction. She squeezed his fingers. Then she heard Angelo call her name from the phone.

  “Yeah,” she said to him. “Jim can’t come to the phone right now. So what did you and Hayley find out?”

  Why not tell him the truth about Jim? Could it be that the moment she said the words, the moment she transmitted the information, the information left her control and became real? If a tree fell in a forest and only she was there to report it, well…

  Or it could be she was simply still in denial.

  “One of the names on the list, Bislan Daudov—we were able to connect to a recently incarcerated Chechen separatist named—”

  “Zviad Daudov.” Xana shifted her legs until they were crossed. “Fuck. Wait, what do you mean ‘incarcerated’? Zviad’s the invisible man. The Russians caught him?”