Resurrection Express

by Stephen Romano

  Ringo Coffin, the old-school machine-gun bandit.

  His boy Elroy, the high-tech future of criminal enterprise.

  She also knows about everything before that—my bust when I was seventeen, my two years in the army, the muay-kwon martial-arts training in Nacogdoches, my honorable discharge, my four-year apprenticeship in Dallas with Axl Gange, the smartest goddamn thief that ever lived, just before he was killed by David Hartman. Big-time shit kicking. Major blood and guts.

  Hartman, the Monster.

  God damn him.

  The woman on the other side of the glass knows about the seventeen jobs I did for that bastard—me on the laptop, my father on the stick. Vaults filled with folding cash.

  And, of course, she knows about Toni.

  Who could get any man to believe she loved him.

  Toni, our one-woman intelligence squad.

  Who went with Hartman finally because men like him get what they want, one way or another.

  Because Hartman told her I was dead if she didn’t.

  I didn’t care, though—she was still my woman and I wouldn’t sign the papers. In Texas, you can’t get a divorce unless both parties come to terms in front of a judge. She begged me to do it, told me they would kill me. Said she was saving my life. I didn’t care. I would have saved her from him, just like she thought she was saving me, by being his woman.

  Hartman, the pig.

  God damn him.

  I was circling his assets like a shark. His bank accounts and his foreign trust fronts and his contracts with government defense. If you see the leads, all laid out carefully, it all comes together. If you follow the rules and don’t get stupid, revenge can be yours. The rules are what kept my father alive for so many years, even after his fall. You go through channels. You plot it all with precision. You don’t get caught.

  But then . . .

  Two hundred pounds of meatball muscle stuffed into jogging sweats tried to kill me in my own house—a very ugly man with a red neck and a big gun, one of Hartman’s semi-pro gorillas. The kind of thug you only hire when you’re crazy and cheap. The guy’s name was Fred Rogers—Mister Rogers, no kidding. I broke both of Fred’s legs and dumped him in a parking lot while he cried like a little boy. I told him I was sorry about this. Actually apologized to the son of a bitch. He just kept crying. He smelled like beer and mud and gutter trash. Disgusting.

  In Mister Rogers’s wallet, I found a picture of my wife with her throat cut.

  That was the end of best laid plans.

  That was when the rage took me.

  I started by kicking Mister Rogers all over that parking lot, the whole world falling from under my feet in one blazing moment of absolute despair and hopelessness, all good things blown away and replaced with unreason and straight solutions—the kind that fill your eyes with water and your face with blood, your entire life boiled down to one primal scream as you pound and pound and pound. Mister Rogers was almost dead when I left him. He swore to me that Hartman was the one who did Toni and I believed it. Dumb grunts like that never lie well when their bones have all gone south.

  So I walked right up to David’s house empty-handed.

  Broad daylight, no alibi.

  I was going to kill Hartman with my bare hands.

  To hell with the plan.

  To hell with the rules.

  To hell with it all.

  A gang of his gorillas were watching a game in the living room when I kicked in the door. I could have taken all five of them easy, but one got the drop on me from behind, a lucky shot. My head still hurts when it’s cold outside. I smell gunmetal and roses when I think too hard about it. When I try to remember Toni’s face.

  Toni was the last thing I was thinking about when they got me, the smell of her and the cold slash of the bullet overloading my sense memory channels like awful white noise on a psychotic feedback loop, as the gorillas dragged me out of Hartman’s house, half-conscious and screaming.

  They kept me under guard in the hospital, held me with no bail. I didn’t know anything about it at first. My heart stopped twice on the operating table. The bad mixture of drugs they gave me cooked what was left of my brain, almost turned me into a vegetable. It took me weeks just to uncross my eyes. As soon as I knew who I was again, I tried to escape from the ward, but that only made things worse. They cuffed me to the bed, gave me more drugs. I sat there for days, hallucinating my life and my talents and everything I ever cared about into some endless black hole. I almost never came back from that.

  I can still smell the gunmetal.

  Still smell the roses.

  The scent of my ruined memories, like faint traces of ammonia and flowers, in the place where Toni used to be.

  Her face, lost forever.

  God damn them all.

  The trial came and went quickly. I couldn’t buy my way out, they made sure. Hartman smiled across the courtroom and gave a little shrug, looking like some kind of fat demon in an expensive white suit. That crooked, greasy smile mocking everyone beneath his weight. His mean eyes, full of perverted genius. Even then, I hated looking into his eyes, because of the secrets he kept there, the things I’d seen him do. You only ever meet a few people in an average lifetime who are capable of anything.

  And anything is a pretty scary word.

  So I was up the creek. A washed-up thief with a steel plate in his head, a permanent reminder of that copper-jacketed 9-millimeter buddy that came and went—a magic bullet, they called it. They said I was lucky. I could have lost half my vision and my motor reflexes and everything that went along with it—my life, my profession. Everything. They showed me pictures of what happened to Gabby Giffords—that congresswoman who almost got killed when some random maniac took a shot at her in a parking lot—and the doctors said her bullet was magic, too, but not like mine.

  Magic bullets.

  Real cute, assholes.

  Dad set things up with the Fixer when I went inside, kept what was left of my own money safe. By then, I was back to near 80 percent with my hands and my mind, but so many things were still lost. I still couldn’t see Toni’s face. The most important face of my whole life, shot to hell in one terrible moment, my mind blown away and patched back together, the sickness that robbed me of damn near everything, leaving me with nothing.

  And then it got worse.

  Dad stopped coming to visit me in the joint.

  That was six months before one of the hacks delivered a package to me in solitary. A bright pink box wrapped up in ribbons with three of my father’s fingers in it. There was a note in the package that said this:

  You’re all alone now, buddy-boy. How does it feel?

  They were more right than they could have known.

  The downward spiral took me again. My last lifeline to family, cut off forever.

  In the dojo, they teach you guided meditation, how to find peace with what you lose and can never have again. That fighting with your hands is a last resort, that the mind is the most powerful weapon. You find that the rage is your best ally. You go down lower and lower, reconstructing the traces, finding what you’ve lost. It was enough in the beginning to save me from the gangbangers and the skinheads. It was enough to bring back my skill set. I’m almost 100 percent now. I’ve been able to have anything I want on the inside, just by taking myself there.

  But Toni.

  That last 5 percent.

  I can’t resurrect her memory.

  I will, though.

  In three more years.

  That’s when David Hartman will die. That’s when I’ll silence the failure that mocks me. My last, most terrible mistake.

  The woman on the other side of the glass sees the hidden rage.

  Sees everything.

  Anything.

  And she says:

  “Your wife is alive. My daughter is with her. I can get you out of this place within two weeks if you agree to help me find them.”

  • • •

  This is bullshit.r />
  Just can’t be true.

  She sees that I don’t believe her. Goes into the briefcase and comes up with a photo printed on a slick sheet of letter-sized paper. Holds it to the glass so I can see it. In the picture is the man who destroyed my life, sitting in a nightclub with a pretty blonde on his left arm, bodyguard on his back, a blizzard of beautiful ladies all around them. One of the ladies is a tall brunette, standing closer to them, outlined in disco strobes. My wife was a brunette, under her disguises. I remember that much.

  Toni?

  Is that her, right there in the picture?

  It seems like her . . . but hurts my head to concentrate on the image. The sharp stabbing smell of razor blades bathed in ammonia hits me, freezing the tiny plate in my head like ice.

  There are no photographs of my wife anywhere, just like there used to be no photographs of me or my father. We never allowed them. Part of the rules. You stay invisible, walk in shadows. Forget about owning a driver’s license or a photo ID. Before I went into prison, I even managed to hack my army records and doctor the mug shots. It’s harder to remain a ghost in the machine when you go up the creek for armed robbery and attempted murder, but Toni stayed hidden. I’d made sure of that for years.

  But this . . .

  The photograph is grainy and fuzzy. She’s got her arm hooked around the blonde’s. There’s an expression on her face I can’t read. I could never read Toni, even when things were good. She was my teacher before she was my one true love.

  Would I even know her now, if I saw her?

  “That’s my daughter, Mister Coffin. And your wife next to her. The picture was taken in a private club, by an undercover police officer who was working for me. He was killed a week later, most likely by the man in the photograph.”

  “Hartman.”

  “Men like him disgust me, Mister Coffin. Texas-sized rhinestone cowboys who make a lot of noise and think they can get away with anything. Ignorant mob operators disguised as oil millionaires. They’re always fat and foul and doused in cheap cologne.”

  “David never wore cologne.”

  “That’s even worse.”

  I look at Hartman’s face: the triple chin and gap in his front teeth, buzzed hair and sleepy eyes mashed back into pale red rolls of sweaty dough, all stuffed into that pinstriped suit jacket. The lady is right, of course. He’s the kind of maniac who wears what’s left of his soul right there in front of you while he rattles on and on about the power and the glory, the rules of being a pervert, all that other stale macho crap that gets far less powerful criminals killed in the street. The kind of maniac who invents new reasons to exist moment-to-moment, crazy and deluded and bloodthirsty. Some people are scared of men like David, and they are right to be, but usually for all the wrong reasons. You have to stand there and take it. You have to listen to them rant and pretend it’s profound wisdom, trying to keep your sanity in a room filled with blood. All those men and women who got in his way, all battered and smashed. While I learned the facts of life.

  While I learned that love cannot stay.

  The concerned citizen sees my eyes, and tries to read what I’m thinking. It probably isn’t hard. I’ve always worn my soul on my face, just like Hartman did. It almost makes her smile, but she only speaks softly:

  “Your old friend has been involved with some very serious people in the past year. Lately he’s been on the payroll of Texas Data Concepts in Houston as a consultant. Are you up on what that company is all about?”

  “That’s a silly question to ask a guy like me.”

  Every good hacker knows TDC, especially the ones who operate in the Lone Star State. They’re into everything. Computers, applied sciences, rocket technology. Hell, N.A.S.A. is right up the block.

  “Fair enough,” she says.

  “Hartman is no rocket scientist, that’s for goddamn sure.”

  “That’s true also.”

  “So what’s he been up to with smart guys like that?”

  “That’s a really good question, Mister Coffin.”

  She makes a grin set in steel, withholding the information. Guess that’s what I get for calling her silly. I’ve never been all that tactful in situations like this.

  I stare her down for a long second. Then, very slowly:

  “Why do you need me?”

  “You’re one of the best. Seventeen robberies under major electronic security, and not a shot fired.”

  “Those are the ones you know about.”

  “We know about a few of the other ones, too.”

  “I was learning then.”

  “We all make mistakes.”

  “So you need me to steal something.”

  She shifts her weight. Considers her next answer carefully.

  “Your father says there’s no one else on earth who can pull off what we have in mind, Mister Coffin.”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “No. He’s with my people. Has been for a long time. I can’t be any more specific than that, not in this room. I need an answer and I need it right now. Are you in?”

  Is that really my wife?

  Could I see her face again?

  Am I in?

  I nod to her quietly and she buzzes Merrick to take me back to my cell.

  2

  00000-2

  A PISTOL FOR RINGO

  There’s a ritual when you get out that involves a lot of people in uniforms asking you questions, putting your name on papers, an orientation about seeing your probation officer. They strip you down, shine a flashlight up your privates, grab your sack and tell you to cough. You’ve seen those movies where they hand you back all your personal effects, too, right? That part is bullshit, at least in a joint like this one. If you’re not in city jail or county, they confiscate everything when you go in except the clothes on your back, and if you were wearing a belt, they take that, too. You’ll never see that stuff again, so don’t even ask. They also take your shoes and let you keep the cheap lace-ups you lived in while you were inside, throw in a pair of fresh socks. They don’t let you take anything out, either. Pity, that. But I planned ahead.

  The gate rolls open at exactly nine in the morning and I smell free Texas air for the first time in twenty-four months. The cold sharp wind blows through my hair. I wear it longer than I did back in the day, to cover up the nasty scars where they sewed my head back together.

  T-Jay told me when I first met him that long hair in the joint was a cardinal sin—it gives you that vaguely feminine look that the functionally homosexual want to know better and it’s easy to get ahold of in a scrape. They call it your “love locks.” T-Jay gave me that bit of wisdom ten minutes before I kicked Mentor’s ass. Nobody ever tried to grab my locks after that.

  I pull it back and feel the scum of two years.

  You never really get clean inside.

  October sure smells damn fine when you’re not in prison anymore.

  • • •

  Two giant men in gray suits and black shades are standing just outside the gate, waiting for me. One of them has bleach-blond hair like a surfer, a thick moustache that makes him look old and weird. The other guy is black and young like a football player, balding on top. The football player extends a hand and introduces himself as my bodyguard. Says his name is Washington. The surfer’s name is Franklin.

  Franklin and Washington.

  “Sounds like a law office,” I tell them. “Or a California roll.”

  They don’t laugh.

  The surfer looks confused.

  Washington tells me to step this way.

  A black GS Lexus hybrid with tinted windows waits on the curb, just a stone’s throw away in the visitors lot. Franklin the Surfer opens the passenger’s door and I see a man sitting inside. His long hair is white, pulled back in a ponytail. He’s thinner than I’ve ever seen him, like a skeleton. Too much drinking. I always gave him grief about his whiskey, even when I was a kid. I sit next to him and the door shuts behind me.

  I can
’t believe I’m really looking at him.

  “Son,” he says.

  “Dad,” I say.

  We embrace, at the end of a lifetime.

  • • •

  The car is brand new and makes no sound.

  It’s three hundred miles from the Frederick T. Summer Correctional Facility in Laredo to the city of Austin. Not exactly a long drive, but we have lots to talk about. Neither of us says anything for a while. I’m staring out the window when I break the silence, watching the highway streak by, not seeing the highway at all.

  “You look good for a dead man.”

  Then I look at him—for the first time, really look at him.

  He holds up his right hand.

  A permanent thumb and forefinger pistol, aimed right to heaven.

  “Bang,” he says silently. “It’s a little joke David Hartman played on me. Said I’d never work again when they were done. He was half right.”

  The joke is terrifying.

  Goddamn.

  “I’m sorry, Dad. It’s my fault.”

  “The funny thing is . . . you’re probably right, kiddo. But I owe you first. And I’ll never be able to pay you back, not really.”

  “Hartman did that to you. It wasn’t karma points for my bad childhood.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m still sorry, Dad.”

  “You did what you thought you had to do. I would have had your back no matter how crazy you got. You’re my son.”

  “You think what I did was crazy?”

  He takes a deep breath. Then speaks, even softer now:

  “Elroy . . . you have something inside you I’ve never understood. It’s always frightened me. I’ve been afraid of it since you were a child. But it’s my responsibility because I gave it to you.”

  “That’s not true. It just happened.”