by Andrew Post
Brody glanced away from Spanky for a few seconds to watch Seb struggling with his cubie door.
A shot rang brightly throughout the parking garage.
Brody whipped around and saw Spanky crumpling to the concrete between the parked cars. Bits of shattered skull and pink crumbs of brain tumbled out onto the fur collar of the man’s puffy satin coat.
Thorp, with a sweaty strip of hair pasted across his forehead, switched his gun’s safety back on, impenetrably indifferent.
Brody stared at the corpse, unable to form words.
Seb got one look at Spanky facedown on the floor, a majority of the back of his head made into a crater of ruptured pink and red, and gaped at Brody and Thorp. “You … you said you weren’t going to kill us.”
“Get back in,” Brody ordered, deciding to take care of the matter at hand before asking Thorp why he had murdered Spanky.
Clearly rattled, Seb ducked into his apartment. Brody pulled down the door before the giant’s sorrow had a chance to shift into anger. He threw the lock on the cubie door and turned back to Thorp who stood with his gun at his side, glancing up the shadowed corridor.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Brody snatched the gun from Thorp’s hand.
Thorp let the Franklin-Johann go without a fight, seemingly too mesmerized by the slow river still pumping from Spanky’s vacated head and crawling toward the storm drain to get upset.
Down the way, Brody spotted some figures at the far end of the parking garage looking toward the source of the gunfire, inquisitive but keeping their distance.
“He was going for this,” Thorp said, pointing at a pearl-handled pistol tucked into the waistband of Spanky’s boxers.
Brody grabbed the derringer and held it in his palm, unable to avoid noticing that the metal was still warm from being pressed against Spanky’s flesh. “It’s not even a .22. If he shot it at us, it’d probably hurt your ears more than anything.”
“How was I to know?” Thorp shrugged.
The sight of death before him, the smell of burned cordite on the already stinking air—completely unnecessary. He pocketed Spanky’s pistol, as well as Thorp’s. When he dropped the Franklin-Johann into his pocket the barrel was still hot, the heat easily soaking through his coat’s wool to his side.
“Get in the car,” Brody said.
With nonchalance, Thorp went around the back of the Fairlane, got in, and closed the door.
Brody looked at the body, the widening pool of blood under the dead man’s face.
A series of heavy bangs came from the door of Seb’s cubie accompanied by muffled and unintelligible shouting.
Brody popped the trunk on the Fairlane and, with some difficulty, gathered the overweight thug in his arms and dropped him in. Getting some blood on his clothes was unavoidable. There was a metallic splash as the keys fell from Spanky’s loose grip.
“You killed him. You fucking killed him.” The sound of a bolt snapping in the cubie doorframe sang out like a rock falling into a metal pail.
Reacting to the sound like it had been a starter pistol, Brody slammed the lid on Spanky, unsuccessfully avoiding his inert if still accusatory gaze, and got in. He double tapped the ignition, but before putting it in reverse he turned to Thorp.
He was still blandly indifferent. The blond hair atop his head rode the gentle breeze, undulating like a dozen golden and miniscule antennae. He blinked down the length of the hood at the cubie door and its series of metal bubbles popping up across its surface, unaffected. “Shouldn’t we go? I don’t think that thing will hold him for very—”
Brody interrupted, “Tell me. Did you get anything out of him at least before you killed him?”
“We didn’t talk,” he muttered.
Brody dropped the Fairlane into reverse. “Well done. Really. Good work.”
23
“Why did we bring him with us?” Thorp asked.
“The better question might be why the hell did you shoot him?”
Thorp dropped his hands to his knees. “I told you—he was going for that gun. Would you have preferred that I just let him fucking kill you?”
They drove a few blocks and came to a red light. A plow came thundering the other way, washing the two men in the haggard Fairlane with pulses of yellow. The salt crystals being thrown from its rear as it passed rained against the side of their car, a momentary hailstorm.
“What now?” Thorp asked after the truck had passed, his voice meek.
Brody checked the rearview mirror. He caught a glimpse of the bull testicles hanging from the mirror that were perpetually swaying into his line of sight. He ripped them off and tossed them out. They hit the asphalt with the clack of two billiard balls colliding. “I don’t know.”
“He didn’t know where we can find Shandorf?”
“Nope,” Brody said.
The light turned and they pulled forward.
“And where are we going now?” Thorp asked.
“That last cup of coffee at the truck stop didn’t cut it,” Brody said. “And as you pointed out before, we should probably try to avoid disaster by keeping our equipment in decent working order. My brain doesn’t work for shit without some caffeine in it.”
Brody had to look closely to make sure the server behind the counter at Noodle Shack was actually breathing. When she caught him leaning forward and leering at the collar of her uniform, she gave him only half a cup of coffee before backing away to the kitchen. He tried to apologize, but she was already out of earshot, too far back into the steam and Latin music that filled the kitchen to hear it.
“Maybe I should be the one asking you if you’re all right,” Thorp said from the stool next to him.
“I’d rather not speak right now if that’s okay with you.”
“Is this because … ?” Thorp received a withering look, nodded, stared at his hands cradling his coffee mug. “At the time I thought it was the right thing to do, and I just figured—”
“Stop. Just stop. Just … no.” Brody looked around them again, glanced at the kitchen door. “What’s done is done.” He lit the final cigarette from Seb’s pack, then crushed the cellophane packaging and deposited the crackling knot onto his plate. He didn’t remember smoking an entire pack today.
For a few moments, they said nothing.
“Tell me something. Do you think it would be hard for someone like me, who isn’t exactly what you’d call simpatico with gizmos and gadgets, to break into Alton Noel’s ordi?”
Thorp folded a piece of buttered toast in half and said before biting into the corner, “Do you mean like a hack?”
Brody glanced around the dining area. Save for an octogenarian couple in a far booth, they were alone. “Yeah.”
“I can do it,” Thorp answered. “No problem.”
“I think we really need to put the pedal down here. It won’t be long before word gets back to whoever has Nectar what we’re up to. We need to cover as much ground as possible. We need to get proof and get it quick. Especially now with that cargo we’re carrying.”
02:59:59.
“I take that back,” Brody added, “We really need to make use of our time here.”
Thorp, chewing: “Should I just go back to the house, then?”
“No, I think we should do what you suggested before—split up, get more done, and regroup, say, in a couple of hours. The YMCA is right up the street.” On the counter between them, nestled against the chrome napkin dispenser, was Thorp’s ordi. Brody navigated the holo, seeing the blue dot denoting where they were on the map and where they had to go.
“Is that where you want me to go?”
“I’ll go there.”
“So where do you want me to go?”
“Take the car and find a suitable place to deposit the contents of the trunk, if you know what I mean. Because that junker out there is already a magnet for the cops, and I’d hate to try and explain what’s back there.”
“Excuse me but you can’t smoke in here,” the
waitress curtly informed them, giving both men a start. She pointed to a No Smoking sign above the counter.
Brody apologized and got off his stool. “I’m going to finish this outside. You settle up; this one’s on our friend.” After depositing Spanky’s jigsaw into Thorp’s hand by disguising the exchange in a handshake like he’d seen people do in several movies, Brody headed outside.
There was still some light traffic, even around midnight. The same sodium lights found in every city lit up the entire strip of road that the Noodle Shack was on.
Brody stood outside smoking with the cigarette tucked into the corner of his lips so he could keep his hands in his pockets. It was then that he inventoried all he had on him, just to make sure he hadn’t lost anything in the scuffle with Seb. The lens charger, the sonar in its case, two cell phones, Seb’s ring of keys along with his own ring of keys, the knuckleduster, his lighter. And, of course, who could ignore the presence of not one, not two, but three guns? One in each side pocket and one tucked into the interior pocket by his chest. It was the heaviest his coat had ever been.
He glanced through the tinted glass of the restaurant. With his wide back posted atop the stool, Thorp continued to finish his breakfast, hunched over his plate.
Brody took a stroll down to the end of the restaurant, then around the corner to a Dumpster. When he lifted the lid the carnivalesque stink of fryer grease jumped out at him. Brody let the pearl-handled derringer and the phones that weren’t his fall in with a hollow bang. After he removed the key for the Fairlane, Seb’s ring of keys went in as well.
He gave pause, for he still felt as if he hadn’t unloaded it all. Where were Spanky’s keys? He had heard them drop out of his hand at the cubie lot, and then … He looked at the Fairlane. Of course, Spanky’s keys weren’t the only thing of his that required dropping off. Brody zeroed in on the trunk.
Never. Dead.
He turned away.
Into the Dumpster went Thorp’s handgun. He was going to throw his own in too but thought better of it. They still had a while before the end of the night. Nonetheless, he had it in his hand, trying the slide time and time again to ensure it wasn’t loaded. He took the magazine out of the left pocket and checked it against the streetlamp glow. He put it away and checked the chamber of the handgun—everything was in its place.
The front doors of the Noodle Shack jingled.
Brody returned his gun to his coat and eased the lid of the Dumpster shut, wiped his hands off on his pants, and headed back, nearly running into Thorp as they crossed paths at the corner of the restaurant.
Thorp let fly a yell and clutched his chest. “Don’t do that.”
“You snuck up on me,” Brody said.
“The hell were you doing back there, anyway?”
Think fast. “Taking a piss.”
“They got bathrooms inside, you know.”
“I was out here already, and with our waitress yelling at me I wasn’t about to go back in just for that.”
Thorp watched him, nostrils flaring, still riled. “Whatever you say. Let’s get going. I don’t want the sun coming up while I’m still driving around.”
Thorp drove without flipping on the wipers—or wiper, since only one worked anyway. The patchwork plastic on the windshield developed sinking pockets where the snow collected. Each time a pocket threatened to pull the whole thing down Brody gave it a push to empty it, sending the snow out ahead of the car in a brilliant puff, but soon another spot would begin to fill.
“I really wish this thing had auto drive,” Thorp complained when he had to slam on the brakes at a stoplight.
They slid halfway through the intersection, saw no reason to stop when they were pretty much already on the other side anyway, and kept right along.
Brody turned the dome light on.
“What are you doing?” Thorp asked.
Brody reached into the backseat for the shoe box with Alton’s transparencies. He held the swirly, grayscale sheets of plastic—some were warped and crunchy from only partly surviving the arson attempt—against the light with one hand, and with the other, he used his phone to photograph them, utilizing the dome light so all the detail could be captured.
“I’ve started e-mailing myself what we’ve collected so far,” Brody said, taking a second and third snapshot of the transparency. In the second one the image was more skewed, the gray matter within the oval of Alton’s head a fraction more warped. “I’ve got Abigail’s fingerprint analysis sent to myself and now a copy of all the scans.”
“Good thinking.”
They made a turn where the Fairlane’s GPS suggested.
“All right, so there’s no easy way to ask this,” Thorp began.
Brody took another photo of the third transparency, his neck craned to get a clear shot of the plastic sheet held directly on the dome light’s bare bulb. “Ask what?”
“Can I have my gun back?”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Brody said. He returned the transparencies to the shoe box and replaced the lid—all photos taken. “I threw it away.”
Thorp kept his gaze on the road as they crossed the North State Street Bridge. “You threw away my gun.” It wasn’t a question. “When?”
“Back at the restaurant, along with that peashooter that cost Spanky his life and their other stuff. All I could see was future exhibit A when I felt it move around in my pockets.”
“That gun was a collector’s item.”
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You already have an entire museum’s worth of guns back there. You could go to war against a few dozen of Seb’s friends with what you have in that bag.”
“Yeah, but that Franklin-Johann was an antique.”
Brody groaned. “You know as well as I do that the Franklin-Johann was a terrible weapon. Cheaply made, more often than not the sights were off—swing by the Two-For-One after you drop me off, I’m sure they have a bargain bin dedicated to the Franklin-Johann semiautomatic.”
Thorp made a sharp whistling sound through his nostrils. Brody had heard the noise only once before when Thorp had fallen victim to a prank on the barracks in Cairo. Someone had filled every one of the handyman’s socks with cheese from a can.
“Look. You like to go into things unprepared; that’s fine. You want to bring brass knuckles to a gunfight, fine. That’s you. But as long as we’re in this, running against dangerous people, one of us needs to be armed at all times. Needs to be.”
The GPS informed them, “You have reached your destination.”
“I don’t think what you’re going off to do requires a gun. He’s not dangerous anymore.” He looked over at Thorp, cast under the harsh, unshielded glare of the dome light. Anger still polluted his eyes.
Thorp had no response.
“One hour,” Brody said. “Meet me back here in one hour.”
Standing on the slush-strewn sidewalk, Brody couldn’t help but check the address on his phone against where he stood. The YMCA on Dearborn Street wasn’t like any Brody had seen before. It was tall, for one, and set centrally in the city, clearly visible from the sidewalk. Most he had visited as a youth for swimming lessons were in tucked away, old-looking buildings. Even the community center in Minneapolis was off the beaten path—across the street from the recycling center and up the block from the meatpacking district.
This YMCA had a definite art deco finesse to its architecture, and inside it smelled like a comfortably musty old hotel. He was expecting a throat-blanching chlorine and locker room reek.
Approaching the front desk while shaking the snow from his hair, Brody asked the T-shirt-clad young woman, “Excuse me, but would you happen to have a room for the night?”
“Do you need it just for the night?” the girl asked. She had fiercely red hair that was bunched into angry, defiant curls. Her face was a scattershot of freckles. When she smiled, it made Brody think of motherboard innards—so much metal.
“Yeah, just one night,” Brody said.
“Do you happen to be a member of the armed services?” she asked.
“Yeah. What gave me away?”
“This is a pretty frequent stop for veterans,” she said, “and I’ve sort of worked it into my routine whenever anyone comes in asking for a room.”
He handed her the military ID.
She looked it over and blushed. “Uh, I’m sorry but this is expired.”
“I don’t have any money,” Brody deliberately blurted as if having this room for the night was a matter of life or death. He imagined when Alton came here, he probably thought it was. “I’ve got probably a buck to my name at best. I just need a place to get out of the cold for a while.”
The girl bit her lip. “The lock on room number eight is broken. If you don’t mind the lack of security, you can stay in there …”
“That’s fine,” Brody said.
“It’s perfectly safe. Everyone here gets along really well. A few months ago, someone got into trouble and … long story short, he locked the door before he left and took the key with him, and since he was in no shape to bring the key back … Never mind. I’ll just show you the way before I freak you out any further.”
“Try me.” He smiled. “I love a good horror story.”
She bit her lip again. It was plain to see she wanted to tell him but was hesitant. “You heard about that guy who shot all those people in a mall in Minneapolis last month?” She cocked an eyebrow, apparently in complete rapture over divulging the lurid details of horrible events.
“Yeah?”
“This is where he stayed while he was apparently planning the whole thing.” She leaned back in the afterglow of the story being told. If you want to change your mind, I can give you a different room.”
“No, no. Call it a morbid curiosity. I want to see it.”
She came around the counter and escorted him to the head of a staircase but didn’t accompany him down it; she simply pointed and said it was down there on the left. Then she clicked on the stairwell light and handed him a few folded tissues.