Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  “What’s going on?” said Mark again.

  The pump ahead of them finished with a thunk, and the mustachioed pump jockey retracted pump’s nozzle, spun the gas cap, and took two bills from the driver. The car eased out the Kearney Street exit.

  Wait three minutes. Then proceed eleventh couch instructed the phone.

  “What’s the eleventh couch?” Leila asked Leo.

  “That means Eleventh and Couch Streets. We pronounce it ‘Cooch’ here, for the street. I don’t know why.”

  She was smiling at the word. God, she has a nice smile, thought Leo.

  They crept out of Radio Cab.

  “Are you guys taking me somewhere? I mean, other than my hotel?” Mark was getting nervous. Now Leo was glad to be in the back, directly behind him.

  “I just want you to meet someone,” said Leila.

  Leo thought he saw Mark glance at the door handle. He slid across the backseat to be able look his old friend in the eye.

  “You have to quit working for the people you’re working for, Mark,” he said.

  “What?” Mark tried to sound annoyed, but not before some little breath betrayed that he knew what Leo meant. He recovered quickly, though, and said, “You suggesting I take career advice from you?”

  The real meaning hid in the few extra grams of weight Mark had put on the word you. He was calling Leo a failure; he was saying that Leo had made a hash of a luck-filled life.

  Maybe he had. But in the moment, Leo’s grasp on life was better than Mark’s, and both men knew it. “Come on, Mark. You don’t even want to climb to the top of that heap. You wouldn’t like anyone up there.”

  “What do you know about it?” said Mark.

  “Are you asking me what right I have to tell you what to do, or are you asking how much I know about the evil shit that your employers are perpetrating?” Then he looked at the phone again and said, “It says we’re being followed.”

  “Fuck off,” said Mark.

  “I’m serious,” said Leo.

  Leila sped up again. “But the thing at the gas station. That was to shake whoever, right?”

  “Maybe it didn’t work,” he said. “Take a left on Ninth.”

  “Left on Ninth,” she repeated.

  “Okay, how about What do you know about it meaning how much do you know about the evil shit that my employers are perpetrating?”

  “Not right now, Mark,” said Leo. “Look behind us. Who’s following us?”

  Mark at first gave him a scrunchy, what the fuck? look. But Leo ignored it. “Seriously, Mark. This matters to you too.”

  Mark scanned the street behind them.

  “And a right on Couch,” said Leo.

  “A right on Cooch,” repeated Leila, smiling again at the word.

  “Any suspicious vehicles back there, Mark?” he asked.

  “Negative. No suspicious vehicles,” said Mark. “Or they’re all suspicious. There’s a maroon Subaru and a Jeep Wagoneer that have both been there for the last two or three turns.”

  Leo held the Nokia delicately, like a divining rod. He figured they were probably being directed to Burnside, from where they could access a knot of highway options. I-5 in two directions was five blocks away. Or a straight shot down Burnside and then cut to I-84. The phone luminesced again.

  “Left here. Left here,” Leo said.

  That left put them into crawling traffic. Greenpeace canvassers and smoothie carts clogged the sidewalks.

  “Okay, and now a left into here,” Leo said. “Mark, you spotted him?”

  “The Subaru is a lady with an Akita,” said Mark. “I don’t think it’s her.”

  “What is this place?” said Leila.

  “It’s the parking garage for Powell’s. The bookstore.” Leo hadn’t tried to use this garage in years. It had a too-tight corkscrew ramp and stingy spaces. Leila slowed to interact with the guy in the pay booth, but the crossbar lifted in front of her before she could roll down her window.

  “Go,” said Leo, without prompting from the phone. “You kinda gotta gun it to get up this ramp.”

  Leila gunned it up the ramp.

  “Okay, it’s the Wagoneer,” said Mark. “But the bar didn’t go up for him.”

  Just when they’d reached the top of the first full screw, the phone said to stop the car and engage the handbrake.

  “Stop the car,” said Leo. “Engage the handbrake. It says to get out here.”

  They all three moved swiftly from the car to a metal door in the concrete wall of the garage. They heard the Wagoneer begin its roar up the ramp. But when its big chrome nose edged around the central pillar and encountered the rear of Leila’s Toyota it stopped short, then they heard the ratcheting sound of a handbrake being levered. The Wagoneer was blocked on the ramp, at a severe incline, the kind of incline seen in disaster movies and presumably no longer allowed for parking-garage ramps. The driver was talking on a cell phone, but talking into it like a walkie-talkie. Then he released the handbrake and started to reverse the huge vehicle down the ramp. He had to do it in herky little jerks.

  Leila had the Nokia now. “It just says Go through door,” she said. But the door before them had no handle or lever, it was some sort of fire door, and it was flush to the wall it breached. But then Leo noticed that there was a paperback book wedged into the top corner of the frame. He tried to get his fingers into the crack around the door but couldn’t. He spotted a pen in Mark’s breast pocket. “You mind?” he said, snatching it swiftly. “Hey” was all Mark managed before Leo had jammed the clearly expensive pen into the crack of the door and used it as a tiny lever. Leila got a few fingers behind the door and then Leo could too. The door opened. The wedged book fell from the top corner: An old Mad magazine paperback: “Spy Versus Spy.”

  They were somewhere inside the huge bookstore. “Where are we?” asked Leila.

  “We’re in the Red Room,” said Leo. “Travel guides, atlases, other religions. Coffee-table erotica over there.”

  “You work here or something?” asked Leila.

  “No. But I wanted to. I cased it for weeks before my interview.”

  “They didn’t want you?” said Mark. He sounded perturbed on Leo’s behalf. “But you know all about books. You owned a fucking bookstore.”

  “Ran it into the ground, as I believe you’ll recall,” said Leo. “What do we do now?” Leo asked Leila.

  She consulted the phone, but it must have been mute on the point. “I don’t know,” she said. “Browse?”

  “Where are the magazines?” asked Mark.

  “Follow me,” said Leo, and he led them through the huge and busy store to the bright corner room with its racks and racks of magazines. When Mark made for the magazines, Leila conferred with Leo.

  “You think he’s with us?”

  “He’s not running,” said Leo. “He could, I suppose.”

  “Do you think they want to meet us in this store? Dear Diary, I mean?”

  “I think they were the ones following us.”

  Leila squinted her eyes. Her thinking-hard look.

  “The phone just said You’re being followed,” said Leo. “It didn’t say by whom.”

  “But why? We’re on their side.”

  “I’m not in Dear Diary. He’s not in Dear Diary. From what you told me, this isn’t even really an HQ-approved operation. They may be worried that Mark is some sort of bait. Or maybe you’re like the rogue agent who goes off the reservation and they have to treat you as potentially compromised. They got you to give up your car.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “My overnight bag’s in that car.”

  The phone luminesced again, like kryptonite.

  “They’re outside,” said Leila. “Let’s go.”

  “You go ahead. We’ll be right there.” He gave Mark a small urgent wave.

  Chapter 25

  Portland, Oregon

  Mark wasn’t even into the meat of his hangover yet. That would come in the afternoon. He was g
oing to feel like barf on a day that mattered. Leo Crane and the Mysterious Girl knew something about the Committee’s nefariousness and wanted him to quit working for Straw? Me too, he could happily, easily reply to Leo, but there’s a little more at play here.

  “Where’d your partner go?” he asked Leo. But then through the big plate-glass window behind the magazines, they could both see Leila, leaning in the driver’s-side window of the big Wagoneer, the vehicle they had supposedly been trying to lose.

  “Okay, Leo,” said Mark. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “You’re getting a chance to redeem yourself.”

  “Redeem myself?”

  “This is what you’ve been waiting for, Mark.”

  That such a chance was just what Mark had been waiting for was beside the point. The point was that you shouldn’t let people talk you into anything. So he just said evenly, “Actually, I meant more like, what’s this little scheme you and Scheherazade have cooked up?”

  “Big scheme, Mark, big scheme. Just come with us. You’ll understand soon.”

  “Tell me I’m in no danger, then. That dude in the Jeep looks serious.”

  Leo looked out the window to where Leila was still conferring with the driver. He did look tough, the Wagoneer guy. “I guess I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Jesus, Leo! Promise me something.”

  “I promise you that if you don’t come with us now, you’ll have missed your last chance to be on the right side of history. And you’ll regret it.”

  History? Mark was just wondering how to get himself out of a bad spot.

  Leila came back in the bookstore to summon them. She was buzzing. Still he hesitated. “Come on, Mark,” she said. “Please? I helped you with the Jumble.”

  Outside, the Wagoneer was idling in a loading zone.

  “Let me see the driver,” said Mark.

  As if he had heard that, the driver zizzed down his window.

  “What’s your name?” Mark said to the man.

  “Trip Hazards,” said the man.

  “Sure. Is it just you in there?”

  “Yup.”

  Mark did a once-over of the vehicle. It was a dinosaur, a Grand Wagoneer from maybe the early 1980s, deep green with plastic wood paneling down the side and a roof rack on top. There was a rich kid at Mark’s high school who’d shown up in one of these senior year. All the windows on this one were tinted, but only slightly. It wasn’t really a tint, he saw when he looked closer. It was a kind of smearing effect.

  “Where’re we going?” he said.

  “To a meeting,” said the guy.

  Mark made a show of considering his options. He looked toward his hotel; scruffed some fingers around his chin; checked his watch. Then he crossed in front of the big car and got in on the passenger side.

  Trip Hazards tapped at a phone Velcroed to the dash, then he nosed the Jeep back out into traffic. He was paying keen attention to the streets around him and checking three mirrors constantly. A bicycle messenger slotted in on his right flank, outside Mark’s window. The messenger kept even with them for a block, then fell back. But then Mark saw the same bike messenger slip up on their far side, and another one assume the wingman position on his side. He torqued around. Yeah, they were sort of boxed in by bicycle messengers.

  “What up with the bicycles?” he asked Hazards.

  “It’s okay. They’re mine.” They made three lefts and they were now headed downhill, toward the river and the Burnside Bridge. The bikes stayed with them in the thickening traffic. Once they were nearly over the bridge, the bikes fell behind and slowed. They were throwing some sort of interference, tying up the lanes behind them. Trip took a hard right, gunned it for a block, and then took another hard right, then another. He pulled the Wagoneer into a scrub lot two stories below the bridge they’d just come over, right beside a sort of construction around which teenagers were gathered in a Mad Max–like fashion. The scrape and grind wafted into the car. What place was this?

  “It’s a skate park. The Burnside Skate Park,” said Leo, who must have sensed Mark’s curiosity.

  Trip zizzed up Mark’s window from his driver’s armrest, which lifted Mark’s forearm with it.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” said Mark.

  “Listen,” said Trip to all of them. “I need your full attention.”

  But Mark couldn’t provide it, because a trio of skateboarders had climbed down from the undulating concrete moonscape of the park and were coming toward the car, with intention. They were dragging a machine behind them.

  “…I have no idea what’s so important that they had us come into the city to get you, but we scrambled a lot of resources for you, quickly. So do me the favor of cooperating—and go easy on the chat—while I get you to the meeting.”

  The favor of cooperating? thought Mark. “Um, Mr. Hazards,” he said. “Skaters want a word.”

  Dressed in layers of frayed T-shirts, the three dudes outside were arrayed around the car in a sort of menacing flanking fashion. Trip zizzed down his window and spoke to the Chief Skater. “Skin us down,” he said. “Take the rack and switch the plates.”

  “You got it,” said the dude.

  Trip zizzed his window back up. The three skaters outside went to work. The plastic wood panels came off first. The machine they’d been dragging turned out to be a pressure washer. One of them switched it on and began swiping the powerful spray across the hide of the car. It growled over the metal and roared on the glass. Mark could see that the green of the car he was in was sluicing off the roof and hood and washing down into the nearby storm drain. Their car was shedding a skin; it was changing color. It was gunmetal gray beneath the green.

  “We need to take certain precautions with you,” Trip was saying. One of the skaters was working on the roof of the Wagoneer with an impact driver.

  “I’m not wearing a blindfold,” said Leila.

  “You don’t have to. You’re a Diarist. These guys, though.”

  “Look, can’t we just have this meeting at a Starbucks?” asked Mark.

  Trip ignored him. “It’s got to be a blindfold”—he indicated some sleep masks hanging from the rearview—“or one of these pills,” and he lifted a little enamel pillbox from a concavity of the Wagoneer’s wide dash.

  “I’m in recovery,” said Leo.

  Trip handed him a sleep mask.

  “What’s the pill?” asked Mark.

  “It’s like a benzodiazepine,” said Trip, as if he were saying lemon–poppy seed.

  “I’ll take the pill,” said Mark. “Actually, fuck it. I’ll take the pill and the sleep mask.” He liked benzos. He popped the little capsule in his mouth and made that head-throwing-back motion of the pro pill taker. “You’re on point, Leila or Lola or whatever. You and Nancy Reagan here are responsible for me.” He rolled his seat back.

  “You really want to do this?” Leo asked Leila.

  “Yeah. I do,” she said.

  “As you wish,” said Leo and slipped his mask over his eyes.

  The skaters had finished and were dragging the power washer back to the skate park. Trip handed the chief skater an amount of cash and a thumb drive. Three of the bike messengers pulled up beside them; one of them had Leila’s bag, and he tossed it into the back of the Wagoneer.

  Dripping wet, and now gunmetal gray, with no roof rack and new plates, the Wagoneer crept out from beneath the grotto under the bridge.

  Mark slipped on his own little sleep mask; it was the kind you get in business class. “This is really a very niii…” he began, but then found he couldn’t say anything else.

  Chapter 26

  Leo’s blindfold let in a tiny bit of information—he could just make out large shapes, and patches of light and dark. He should try to figure out where they were headed. There was a 3-2-1-Contact with a similar setup, he dimly recalled—the Bloodhound Gang was trapped in the back of a windowless van, but they determined their location by listening to something? Or timing something? Or fas
hioning a periscope?

  Okay. Plot device of long-ago PBS children’s drama not important at this moment, Leo reminded himself.

  Trip Hazards must have been confident of the vehicle’s new costume, because he drove at a normal speed, and in more or less straight lines; no more lane-cleaving rights. They were headed north on MLK. When they took a right on what felt like Columbia, Leo figured they were headed to the airport, but by the back way. Trip must know Portland, because a stranger to the city would have taken 84 to 205, which on a bad day might be jammed-up. They drove east on Columbia; past the Humane Society and the heavy-machinery rental yards. Then Leo felt them take the left that was almost certainly into the dinky golf course; the whine of a nearby golf cart confirmed it. They would take a left now. They did. Then there would be the bump-bump of crossing the MAX tracks. There was. Now a wide left onto the terminal approach? Yes.

  But then they pulled right, shy of the terminal building. They were leaving the main trail. Leo began to worry. What if this guy was not who he claimed to be? Or would that be whom?

  “What did you say your name was?” Leo asked.

  “Trip Hazards.”

  “And you’re from Dear Diary?”

  “That is correct.”

  Are you sure? Leo mouthed the words at Leila, or at the shape and smell of Leila.

  “Trip, I’m taking this stupid mask off Leo,” said Leila, and she put her hands on the back of his head. It was the second time she’d touched him.

  “Don’t do that, Lola,” said Trip sharply. The Jeep swerved as he twisted in the driver’s seat.

  But it was too late. She’d taken off the mask, made him see. They were in the business-aviation part of the airport, approaching a huge hangar.

  “You don’t have to worry about Leo,” said Leila, tough as tacks. “Anyway, he’s with me.”

  At first it seemed like Trip was going to call bullshit on that; his shoulders looked pissed off. But then he surveyed them both in the rearview, exhaled in a way that conceded the point, and said, “Very well. This was a pretty unorthodox extraction anyway. Leo, can you move your friend?”