Mr Blank (Fill in the Blank)

by Justin Robinson

  “Jonah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We need to go, remember?”

  “Right.” I opened the door and headed left. The escape was going well: no security, no handlers, no caterers. I got to the back door, a double glass number that gave me a great view of the garden out back. And that’s when things went pear-shaped.

  I said, “We have to turn around.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s an Assassin out there.”

  There was, and he was coming up the back porch. The first thing I saw was the cherry on the end of his smoke. Even in the dim light in the garden, I recognized him. It would be hard not to. He was the only Arab I’d ever seen with dreads. He had a scruffy beard, but other than that was dressed pretty nicely, probably to blend in with the partygoers. It was Tariq Suliman. I could think of one thing offhand that could take him, but I doubted anyone brought a chupacabra to a fashion show. We had leash laws in this town.

  I grabbed Mina’s hand and pulled her back. “There has to be another staircase.”

  “I think there’s one in the kitchen. Come on.” She led the way now. We went through to the other side of the house, into the kitchen. Tariq would be coming in through the rear. Caterers gave us weird looks, and we got a couple “sir?”s and “ma’am?”s as we went.

  Of course. Stairs from the kitchen. I had to start hanging out with a better class of people if I wanted to think of these things—there were special stairs for the servants. Wouldn’t do to have them mixing with the “real” people, after all. We went through the pantry and up. Just as we cleared it, I heard the kitchen door open, and another round of “sir?”s. Sounded like Tariq had figured out the servants’ thing, too.

  Up the stairs, through the door. We were in the house proper, the part that had been cordoned off, the part that the party wouldn’t be in. Upside: Tariq couldn’t net us in the crowd. Downside: Tariq could pretty much kill us at his leisure. We needed to get out of the house. If Tallutto and Brizendine were still in the ballroom, that was a clear path to the front…

  …where the valets had my car. I swore out loud on that one.

  “What happened?” Mina whispered.

  “Uh… more bad news.”

  “This guy, he’s an assassin?”

  “Assassin. Big A.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a member of an Islamic cult that dates from the 9th century AD. They’re the original Assassins, so they get a capital A.”

  “There’s a thousand-year-old Muslim death cult after me?”

  “Well… one member currently. His name’s Tariq Suliman, but don’t introduce yourself.”

  I opened a door. An office. That would have to do. I pulled Mina inside, hit the flimsy lock on the door, and looked around. Desk. Books. Window. A couple other doors out. I locked them, too. Then I checked the window. It was on the side of the house, and it was a sheer drop onto a concrete path.

  “Jonah! He couldn’t have gotten weapons past security.”

  “He doesn’t use weapons. He likes to kill his targets with whatever’s in the room. Considers it a challenge. I heard that a target once decided to hide out in a room that was stuffed entirely with feathers. Once Tariq was done with the guy, he looked like Clive Barker’s pillow.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yeah. Shit.” I was looking at the door, where I saw two parallel shadows. Tariq was standing right outside, listening.

  Mina followed my eyes and hers got as big as Frisbees. The feet disappeared. On impulse, I went to the door. It would open inward.

  “What are you doing?” she mouthed at me.

  I counted to three and opened the door. Tariq’s foot sailed through the now-open doorway. I slammed it as hard as I could. I wanted to get his head, but instead caught his leg, mid-calf. He didn’t shout, but I knew it hurt when he yanked himself back through. I shut the door and locked it again, beckoning to Mina.

  I opened the door to the left.

  At that moment, I really hated anyone who ever had a hobby. This room was some kind of half-assed man cave, and this guy seemed to collect literally anything that could cause grievous bodily harm. There were swords on the wall, a signed baseball in a glass case, a model train with plenty of stabby bludgeony bits, a television that could easily be dropped on the head—I couldn’t look anywhere without seeing my imminent and messy death.

  The door to the office splintered behind me.

  I yanked a katana off the wall.

  Mina said, “What, are you kidding me?”

  I really wanted to roll my eyes at her, but I just didn’t have the time. Tariq was already on the other side of this door, and if I pulled the same trick, he’d be ready. I stabbed the doorjamb as hard as I could. The wood was strong, but the katana was stronger. The wood didn’t splinter, but it gave.

  Tariq kicked the door. The lock broke, but the door slammed right into three feet of folded steel.

  I exclaimed, “Come on!”

  I pulled Mina to the door out into the hall. A moment later, Tariq joined us, slipping out of the office door. He saw me, and his face broke into a wide smile. “What the hell? Don’t I know you?”

  Mina and I were backing away as he moved closer. In the hall: paintings, a fancy vase, an end table. Tariq could probably smother a guy with the Oriental rug that ran the center of the hall.

  “Yeah, I do.” He really did have a nice smile. Genuine. “Sure, you’re…” he snapped his fingers to remind himself. “Larry? Lenny?”

  He was closer to us than we were to the stairs down.

  “It’s always nice to see a friendly face,” he was saying. “But this contract is mine. You should fuck off downstairs or something.”

  I didn’t have to look at Mina to know that she was looking at me in horror. I’ll be the first to admit, it didn’t look good. “Yeah, sorry about that. You’re right.”

  He nodded. “Just like a school of fish. I’m the alpha fish, and you should know that.”

  “You’re thinking of wolves.” It was insane, but I was getting closer. He hadn’t tensed yet.

  “Right, yeah. Wolf fish. So here’s what we do. You go downstairs and grab us both some of those mini-quiches. I’ll kill her, I dunno.” He smashed the vase with his fist and picked up a shard. “Maybe cut her throat or something. I come down, we have some quiche, then get a real meal. I’m hella hungry.”

  Maybe it was that he threatened Mina’s life. Maybe it was that he said “hella.”

  The important thing was that he didn’t see it coming. As he was looking down at his foot from where I stomped it, bringing up the shard to slice me open, I head-butted him.

  It would have worked if it wasn’t Tariq Suliman I’d tried it on. He moved back, Thufir Hawat’s reed in the wind, and I was left off balance with Tariq ready to perform a makeshift appendectomy on me.

  Mina did the exact right and the exact wrong thing. It really depended entirely on what her goal was. She started to run at us. Suddenly, I was an afterthought to be knocked to the ground. Tariq surged past me. I kicked the table next to him, trying to bring it down right on him. He danced aside, turning to me.

  “Come on! You can’t want the contract this much.”

  “I really, really don’t.”

  That confused Tariq long enough to make him pause. He turned back to Mina. “Okay, Ginger, whaddya got?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said. And then she screamed. Loud. Piercing. Bloody murder, even. The exact word, I think, since I was trying to make it out through eardrums that felt like she took a cheese grater to them, was “Security.” But with that many additional vowels, it was hard to tell. She backed up, trying to get to the landing.

  “Oh, come on! That’s a bitch move!” Tariq said.

  I grabbed Tariq’s arm. He turned around, the shard raised. “Whoa!” I whispered. “I’ll take her out the front—go through the back and meet me on the west side, got it?”

  He nodded and bolted.
>
  I turned around to see Mina looking at me with a mixture of wonder, horror, suspicion, and something else that I was too much of a pessimist to ID.

  “We have to go, now,” I said.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “That I was going to take you to meet him on the west side.”

  “And we’re actually…”

  “Taking my car and getting the fuck out of here.”

  “I like this plan.”

  “Thought you might.”

  We hit the top of the staircase. Security was coming up the stairs. Mina pointed them down the hall. My eyes went to the door. I knew the guy leaving the house. Wasn’t security, valet, or waiter. Last time I saw him, I had been dodging the most terrifying DIY project outside of the Discovery Channel.

  “What’s wrong?” She followed my eyes. “Is he another assassin? Or Assassin?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Mine.”

  The Candidate glanced back to the ballroom and he went out into the night, still wrapped in that trenchcoat, and probably packing the flail. Apparently security here sucked.

  Still, two players, two killers, two people marked for death. Good party.

  -SEVEN-

  I pulled Mina down the stairs. “Where are we going?” she asked. “Somewhere safe?”

  There were eyes following us. Made sense. I was kidnapping the whole reason for them being there. If Mina had a good publicist, they could concoct some kind of story to spin this situation into fame. Maybe she was kidnapped by an international jewel thief and sold to a Saudi oil sheik, where she was imprisoned on a pleasure yacht for a week before enacting a daring escape. Or could be she was coming to the rescue of a young fan with a rare form of leukemia, the cure for which was the exclusive property of some soulless plutocrat, and Mina would have to use every ounce of brains and sex appeal to get it. Or maybe she was a costumed vigilante who had seen the Minasignal glowing in the night sky and was heading out to thwart the mayor’s assassination by a team of malcontents with primary-color fixations. My point was that publicists get paid for something.

  Instead of explaining this, I decided to keep it simple. I said, “The opposite. We’re tailing that guy that was just here.”

  “Why are we doing that?”

  “Because he tried to kill me this morning.”

  “Consider my previous question repeated.”

  “Because he’ll lead me to his handler.”

  “Until further notice, assume I’m answering everything you say with the same question.”

  I was trying to be patient. I really was. “He leads us to the handler, maybe the handler tells us why he’s trying to kill us.”

  “Or he tries to finish where his guy left off.”

  “You’re just stuffed with rainbows and kittens, aren’t you?”

  We got to the door, and the man was in his car, driving back down the gravel driveway. I turned to the valet. “Tell me you kept it close.”

  He smiled. “Ten bucks close.”

  I flashed the Hamilton at him. “You have a big future in organized crime.”

  He brought me my car and I paid him. I had to drive fast to catch up with the Candidate.

  On the stereo: “Peace of Mind.”

  The Candidate was in a beat-up Honda. There was a bumper sticker on the left side that used to read “MEAT IS MURDER. Tasty Tasty Murder,” but it had been selectively vandalized, getting rid of the “AT” in “MEAT.” The culprit was probably the Candidate himself, in one of his little fugue states. A cry for help and a little advertising all rolled into one. Kind of like a billboard for antidepressants.

  Mina said, “Are you planning on explaining yourself?”

  My mind was a blank. “I… uh… I eat a lot of lunches in the car and I don’t always have time to get to a trashcan?”

  “Not that. Although, wow, you could stand to put some of this in a plastic bag or something. Anyway, no, you need to explain what’s going on here. You show up at the lockers, then at V.E.N.U.S., now here. You said there was a Mason and a Satanist in the crowd, and then we get attacked by Bob Marley. I think maybe you need to sing me a little conspiracy Schoolhouse Rocks.”

  “Okay. Ask me questions. One at a time.”

  “You knew that Assassin?”

  “I met him one time. It was at a party… thing. Really just a bunch of guys sitting around and watching cartoons.”

  “Are you an Assassin?”

  “I’m what they call a rafiq. Think of me as an associate. They wouldn’t let me in on account of my not being Muslim.”

  “And how did you know about the Russian mob?”

  “They told me.”

  “I shudder to ask the next question that springs to mind.”

  I didn’t have to check to know the look that she was throwing at me. I decided to just get it over with and answer her. “Yeah, them, too.”

  “Masons and Satanists?”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I also work for the Vatican and a cult that worships the Greek goddess of discord.”

  She said, “What about vampires? You work for them, too?”

  “No. Vampires don’t exist.”

  “I heard…”

  “What the hell is it with vampires? Not real. Trust me.”

  “But those others. You’re working for all of them.”

  “Yeah.” I couldn’t qualify that, either. It’s not like you can say, “Well, yeah, I’m a Satanist, but they do a lot of great work in the community.” That kind of statement never goes over well, no matter the company.

  I simply said, “I work for all of them.”

  I watched her out of the corner of my eye. It wasn’t happening like I pictured it, when I finally came clean to someone. Not that I was coming clean. It was more like coming a little less dirty, which didn’t sound good in my mind. I always expected hysterics. Some breathless accusations. Maybe a slap, possibly a punch; could be a rake across the face. About half the time, I pictured my confessor jumping from the car. Mina didn’t do any of that.

  Why? Wasn’t that what normal people did? Normal people without ulterior motives?

  Instead, she just took a deep breath. “This guy was waiting for you at the locker?”

  I nodded. “He was the one that put that huge-ass dent in it.”

  “I was wondering about that. Are you sure he was there for you?”

  “What?”

  “Well, he was at my party tonight. He attacked you because you were at the locker. It’s possible he meant to attack me.”

  “I was just thinking how much you and I look alike.”

  She grumbled, “Don’t be a dick. What if the order he got was to off the person who went to the locker, and you show up late or he shows up early? They didn’t think that he’d go after you. I mean, we know for a fact there’s a price on my head, but what about you?”

  She was right. I hated that she was right. A fraction of the info I had, and she was cutting right through the bullshit. I was silent, and she took that the wrong way.

  “What, that’s stupid, right?”

  “No, I mean, I had considered it.” I really hated myself for that one. “I suppose it’s possible. He’s a Candidate, so he’s not going to be doing a lot of critical thinking.”

  “Candidate?”

  “As in Manchurian.”

  She got it right away. “A brainwashed assassin. Like the Sinatra movie.”

  “Exactly. The tech’s been out there to do this since the original Assassins—our friend Tariq Suliman’s cult—but it got rediscovered by the CIA in the ’50s and ’60s in a program they called MK-Ultra. They completely break these men down to their core, then build them back up from scratch, kind of how they do in fraternities and religious cults, only more extreme. These guys become complete OCD wrecks, hypnotizable at the drop of a hat, and dangerous as hell.”

  “You sound like you should be ranting on a street corner.”

  “That’s a good way to get yourself killed. Anyway, t
his guy, in the ‘Me is Murder’ car, is one of those. If someone activated him and released him, it is possible they just gave him the locker number.”

  “So this guy might be after one or both of us, and you think it’s a good idea to follow him?”

  I gave her what I hoped was a cocky smile. “Trust me. I handle this kind of thing all the time.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  I tailed the Candidate back through Beverly Hills and down into Hollywood. The traffic was getting good and homicidal: Hollywood on a Friday night. I put a couple of cars between the Candidate’s car and mine, keeping track of him by watching a whorl of dust in the back window of his car.

  We passed the crowds on the way to clubs and movies. Then we turned a corner onto a residential street, an old Hollywood kind of place where every Spanish bungalow had a bird of paradise planted right outside the front window. The street was divided into two lanes, each too small for a car. Everyone just drove down the center, weaving into driveway gaps to avoid oncoming traffic. The Candidate pulled into one of those driveways. I drove on.

  “Watch him. See which house he goes into.”

  Mina twisted around in her seat, which created the side problem of pushing her breasts right at me. I’ve heard that yogis can use sheer force of will to stop bleeding, ignore pain, and even float on thin air. Fuck them. Not staring at Mina’s chest showed real willpower.

  She said, “Got it.”

  “Now I just have to find a place to park.”

  There is a group out there that claims to harvest frustration. They’re a bit of a bogeyman in the information underground. They supposedly have links to all the usual suspects: CIA, Nazis, and the array of Protestant splinter sects. In my time, though, I’ve only ever met one person who claimed to represent them, and he was not exactly known for his trustworthiness. They’re behind every loose nail, every rotten board, and the DMV. The truly paranoid even suggest that they’re the reason that it rains whenever you wash your car. The parking situation in Hollywood is so bad, I could almost believe in them.

  The thing is, if they really existed, I’d work for them.

  The next twenty minutes were variations on this conversation: