My head goes light for a second when I think that, and I look at the hole in my arm. “What . . . did you shoot me up with?”
“A little cocktail. Not exactly sure what it’s called, but it will dull your reflexes . . . and, shall we say, enhance your senses? Your long slumber softened your system for it quite nicely. The effect will soon be permanent, I’m afraid, but we will have our time together. At least long enough for us to have a conversation without incident. The doctor kindly prepared your prescription before he expired.”
They’ve shot me up with something that will kill me.
I have to make them take it out of me.
I have to . . . have to . . .
“I have a gun.”
“Our guns are bigger than yours, Mister Coffin.”
“Go to hell.”
She pauses before saying: “Let me make my position perfectly clear. You have items in your possession that belong to me. The helicopter can perish in flames, for all I care. I want what you brought out of that vault. There were traces on your machine in the hotel room, but not everything. Our original contract was for two million. Your account has been adjusted. Now . . .”
She looks right in my eyes.
“. . . tell me where the disc drives are located . . .”
Right into my eyes.
“. . . and I’ll buy you a drink.”
“You’re going to let me die anyway, why should I talk to you?”
“Because you want to, Mister Coffin. You want to.”
When she says the word want . . . it seems right somehow.
I want to tell her what she wants.
I want that, don’t I?
No.
They’ve drugged me.
This woman intends to kill me.
“You always planned on killing me.”
“Not in the beginning, Mister Coffin. We had to re-evaluate things when you became difficult. You’ve been snooping around the edges just a little too much. You’re very smart. My organization has issues with very smart people.”
“You use them and then you kill them.”
“Only when they become difficult.”
“You’ve been working with Hartman all along. The whole damn thing at that toy store was a setup to scare me straight.”
“You’re half right. Hartman and I are former business associates. Unfortunately, we had a parting of ways not long ago and it became necessary to appropriate what he would not allow me to purchase from him.”
“You’re planning on stealing nukes. That’s why everyone’s running scared. That’s what this whole thing is about, right?”
“Nukes? You watch too many movies, Mister Coffin. Nuclear weapons are antiquated. They serve only as a deterrent and a smokescreen in this day and age. My organization requires far more . . . shall we say, practical means?”
“You’re full of shit. I saw what was on the discs.”
She makes a dim smile happen.
Shakes her head slightly.
As if to tell me I’m almost right. Almost, but not quite.
“This whole thing is about many things,” she says. “You’re only one part of it, Mister Coffin. And I never had anything to do with what went on at the toy store. That was all Hartman.”
“You would have done it anyway. You killed Alex Bennett without thinking twice.”
“Oh, believe me, I did think twice about it. Just like I thought twice about cutting you loose from jail, even after reading your psych report. An obsessed man is a dangerous man—but we’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we?”
My head swims now.
I fight the next wave of euphoria, focus on my hatred of this woman . . . but my rage slides away from me . . . like it’s oozing with a tide . . .
My rage.
All I have left to fight with.
Going away now.
The drug is taking it from me.
And words come out of my mouth that sound like this:
“You said you understood my obsession. I think you’re just a maniac. Like Hartman.”
“I’m nothing like Hartman. You know me only a little. I find that comparison insulting.”
“I don’t know you at all.”
“Fair enough. But David Hartman is a loose cannon and a rapist of women, with no vision beyond the here and now. A shallow, degenerate monster. If it hadn’t been for his disgusting theatrics, it never would have been necessary to force him out of our organization and pull you from prison in the first place.”
“So you cooked up a story about a human trafficking ring and dropped the seven of us in a meat grinder. There was never any chance of finding my wife at all, was there?”
“Oh, she’s alive, Mister Coffin. I can at least promise you that. But even if you were to walk out of here, you’d still never find her. She’s gone underground. Very much. And I wasn’t lying to you about Hartman’s operation. He’s quite obsessed with beautiful women. That was, ironically, one of the many reasons why we parted ways.”
Then who was that on the phone?
Baby, get the hell out of there. They’re going to kill you.
I hear the voice in my head, and it’s sweet, just like the word want.
Little fingers are tickling my belly, making me feel very good.
My rage, all replaced by hearts and flowers and . . .
Oh my God. I have to focus.
She just said something about my wife.
Said she was alive.
“Did Hartman tell you where she was?”
“Like I said, we were business associates until recently. But it’s a long story.”
“So David grabbed my father for some fun in the dark, and you went against him to bail us both out. Because you knew you needed us.”
“I needed you, not your father. But it’s all in the family, yes?”
“You’re full of shit.”
She uncrosses her legs, leans forward on her knees. “I have no reason to lie now, Mister Coffin. No reason to mislead you about anything. I used your talents and I ordered your execution, that’s all true. You and your father did your best to escape, and you did very well. You can go to your grave knowing that what you did for my people will be very, very important.”
Important.
So very happy, that word.
Someone else said that to me. Was it a lifetime ago?
Focus, Goddammit!
I have to keep her talking, find out more.
I want to talk to this woman.
The word talk is so very, very . . .
“So how did you find me here?”
“That’s a trade secret, Mister Coffin. Also, you should be more careful about who you sell an army surplus helicopter to on such short notice. Let’s just say a . . . woman like Kim Hammer doesn’t hold up well under questioning.”
Oh Christ. They killed her, too. They killed everyone.
Kill is such a friendly word.
“You underestimated my reach, Mister Coffin. My organization is all over Houston. All over the world, really. You’ve been dead game ever since you flew off into the sunrise with my package. We’ve just been waiting to see what your next move would be. You’ve been somewhat predictable.”
My voice is slurring now: “Dead game? Sounds like . . . an action . . . movie.”
“I enjoy action movies. Which is your favorite, Mister Coffin?”
“This one.”
She doesn’t laugh. Still looks like nothing. Says everything monotone. But that’s really nice, isn’t it? We’re just sitting here. Having a nice talk.
Yes.
I’m in my own favorite action movie.
Action and movie are such important words . . .
“I was always partial to Bruce Willis myself,” she says.
“Now who’s . . . kidding who?”
“I’m serious, Mister Coffin. I always enjoyed his style of machismo. It came with less branded stoicism than your standard Dirty Harry types. More of a regular guy. You boug
ht into him a little more when he jumped off a burning building with a gun.”
This is a nice conversation.
This is getting me nowhere.
I like this conversation.
Snap the hell out of this.
DO IT NOW.
“So we both like action movies,” she says. “I think you like many things, Mister Coffin. I think you want to tell me about what you hid before you came to this place. You want to tell me whom you’ve spoken with. You want to tell me where the seventeen disc drives are.”
No.
If I tell her, it will be my most terrible mistake.
I’ve let so many people die, even my father.
If I give up what she wants, millions more could die.
But . . . millions dying wouldn’t be so bad, would it?
“Come on, Mister Coffin. Let’s not forget why we’re here.”
Even more of her goons in the lobby. Three flanks of men. Six guys with guns. More on the exits and the elevators.
I only have a choice of how I will go out.
Can’t fight them all. They will kill me, regardless.
The drug will kill me, regardless.
“One last question,” I say, slurred and beaten. I want to make my voice stronger, but I can’t. I can almost visualize the words . . . I can hear them in my head . . . but they struggle out garbled and awful . . .
“Make it quick,” she says. “We have serious drinking to do.”
Waves hitting me now.
I hardly find my voice at all now.
But I manage it.
“Did you . . . mean . . . what you said . . . when we first met . . . about family being important . . . do you . . . really . . . have . . . a . . . daughter?”
“That’s two last questions, Mister Coffin.”
She just sits there, not looking like anything. I stare her down. Keeping my focus on her. Losing it every third second. Keeping focus. Losing it. Keeping. Losing.
“Yes . . . I do have a daughter, Mister Coffin. And she was also taken by David Hartman. That was not a lie. I want you to know that.”
She wants me to think that I like that.
That I’m cool with that.
But I say this:
“Go to hell again.”
She leans back in her chair.
For a whole minute, she smiles.
“Very well, Mister Coffin. Let’s have that drink anyway.”
She nods to her goons at the bar. They start towards me. The men in the lobby cover the area. A small platoon, now. She keeps her eyes on me. Knows they’re there, doesn’t even have to look. All the time in the world to round me up. It all swims behind a wall of happiness, my vision filled with an image of endless evil. I fight it with everything I’ve got.
I reach into my jacket pocket.
“Tell your . . . gorillas . . . to back off . . . I’ve got . . . a gun.”
“They’re not coming to kill you, Mister Coffin. They’re coming to bring you a drink. I hope you don’t mind whiskey.”
“I’m warning you . . .”
“You have nothing to threaten me with. Certainly not with the gun in your pocket. Would you like to know how I know that, Mister Coffin? Beyond the fact that you hardly even have control of your mind at this moment?”
The men surround us now. Two on either side. Even at my best, I couldn’t take all four, not from a sitting position, not with that many guns.
But that’s okay, right?
Sure it is.
One of the men hands me a glass full of ice swimming in amber liquid.
“Bottoms up, Mister Coffin. There is nothing to fear anymore. Nothing at all.”
Nothing to fear.
Nothing.
Have to try something.
Anything.
I flex my shoulders and realize I don’t want to.
All the bases are covered.
I take the drink. I want to drink it.
I fight the word “want” so hard . . . like it’s steel and flesh pushing against my mind.
“You still haven’t answered my question, Mister Coffin.”
“Question? You . . . asked me . . . a question?”
“Would you like to know why you have nothing to threaten me with?”
Threat.
Yes.
My hand touches the handle of the gun in my pocket, fingers trembling.
My other hand holds a glass filled with ice.
Both things that I touch are deadly. Both are things I’m fighting with everything I’ve got.
She knows.
“If I say the words, these men on either side of us will kill you right here in this bar, and they’ll do it without even considering the consequences. That is something you will not do, Mister Coffin. I know that about you. I know that you’ve never killed anyone in your life. It reminds me of a story. Something I’d like to share with you. Would you like that?”
Like that.
Yes.
Story . . .
She sees me contort, sees my struggle.
She leans back, and her voice is like deadly silk:
“When I was five years old, my father took me to see a dogfight. He was a hustler, my father. Dirt poor. But he taught me about the way things really are. It prepared me a lot for the legitimate business world. For politics and lobbying. For the organization I’ve been a part of for decades. Does that surprise you?”
I don’t say anything.
The men surrounding us have blast-furnace breath.
I concentrate on that—on the bad.
“My father brought me along on a lot of his scams,” she says. “A little girl laughing in your lap always makes the other guy less suspicious. That shouldn’t surprise you.”
Fight them.
“Anyway . . . a small-time bootlegger who also bred fighting dogs had us meet him at a location in El Paso near the border of Mexico one afternoon. We were delivering a bag full of chopped aquarium rocks and baby laxative dressed up as cocaine. He was a crazy man without any juice at all. A thousand dollars in cash was the score. That was a fortune back then. He put it in our hands without even thinking, then handed us tequila and said we had to see his boys fight.”
Fight it.
“We crossed the border, hiding in his truck, and walked into a room filled with sweaty, screaming men and the roar of simple creatures transformed into monsters—bottomless inhumanity disguised as grand sport. Like something in a nightmare. Two pit bulls in the center of the room, ripping each other apart until one of them couldn’t even crawl anymore. I wondered how they made those dogs hate each other so much. It left me with nightmares for years. Haunted me, really.”
She leans forward, with a victorious little grin right in my face.
“They called the loser dead game, Mister Coffin. The pit bull that has no idea when to quit, even after he’s crawling in his own blood, long after he’s lost the fight. That is what we are right now. Do you understand? We are, every one of us, fighting a losing battle against evil men who don’t care if we live or die. We are focused only on our own dead game.”
Her victory.
My death.
So close . . .
Her smile goes away as she leans even closer.
My hand is gripping the gun.
My hand is gripping the drink.
“And in your eyes right now I can see it,” she says. “I can see the look of that very same dog crawling in his own blood. A dog who doesn’t even know he’s dead already. The question you have to ask yourself now, Mister Coffin, is really very simple: How long do I want to make this last? How long do I want to crawl in my own blood? Ask yourself that.”
On her face, finally . . . the look of the devil.
Right on her face.
It’s good. It’s right. It’s complete truth.
“Ask yourself that.”
I let go of the gun. Take a sip of the drink. It doesn’t taste like anything. The grunts from the bar surround me. I’m okay with
this.
Everything’s cool.
“Now, Mister Coffin. I think we finally really understand each other, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me where the disc drives are located. All of them.”
I say the words she wants me to say.
It doesn’t matter anyway.
My rage is broken.
It’s all over.
The world is evil and we cannot be resurrected, not any of us.
Now, I see her face.
My love, my Toni . . .
I tell her what she wants to know.
Jenison smiles. The men from the lobby advance, pulling machine guns from under their jackets. And then a really funny thing happens.
They all start shooting at each other.
11
00000-11
THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY’S ENEMY
The first shots crack off in the lobby like a string of tiny bombs. I’m shaken momentarily from my trance, the drippy sweet ooze following me, pouring over everything in a neon overdrive, making it all look like a video game. It comes rolling on fast-forward, high-def in 3-D, and I get every detail. Everybody who isn’t a shooter throws themselves on the floor. I freeze, like the ice tinkling in my glass, and I catch a glimpse of Jenison still just sitting there in the chair in front of me, crossing her legs again with a bizarre expression that might be the shape of resignation, or might be a crooked grin signifying some sort of victory. The four guys surrounding me go for their guns, spinning on their heels pretty fast for meat puppets, and I can see that it’s an ambush from the rear flank of men in the lobby. There were three waves converging on the bar, two men each, and the third wave in back is the one picking the fight, ripping away with a scythe of what might be 35-caliber bullets from compact machine guns—though caliber is hard to get much of a real bead on with all that big-time reverb keening back across the walls and marble floor, blowing my circuits every other microsecond. It all turns into one giant, ear-thrumming megaphone blast of killpower running together over the screaming sounds as I bolt for the nearest cover, which is the couch I was sitting in a few seconds ago. I think I jump right over it. Whoom. My glass hits the floor and explodes there. Crash. The two guys near the back of the lobby take down four men instantly and the big guys over here readjust their target priorities as the bodies hit the marble. Their Glocks and Rugers rip muzzleflashes and create a lot of property damage—it’s all mostly panic shots—but a couple of bullets get a little more ambitious and blow holes in one of the shooters with a machine gun. The middle two flanks of men in the lobby are obliterated in the crossfire without a chance, but it doesn’t take long before the five or six other guys who were watching the exits get into the act and everything turns into a war zone. I can’t even tell who’s shooting who by about thirty seconds in—the shit’s hitting the fan with such velocity that the whole place is splattered and sloppy in a glorious rush, with stray shells hacking out pieces of the bar and shattering bottles and taking out the smoked glass and chumming the whole front desk into bits of shrapnel. I crouch low and keep my head down in a duck-and-cover, but I’m dead if this shitstorm gets any closer to me and I have to move my ass. You only get so much of a lifeline. I hear large men yell out just as their lungs take massive doses of lead poisoning, and their screams deflate as they fall over and die, like talking dolls cut short in mid-sentence. One of them kisses the glass coffee table just on the other side of the couch and a crackling shower of diamond dust and glittering crimson blood-beads does this incredible detonation thing, exploding in the air as the firefight seems to die off for just a few seconds . . . and that’s when I decide to run like a bastard. I was in a wide-scale gun battle once like this, with my father, and he got us through the gauntlet without a nick. I’ve played a lot of video games, too. The secret isn’t necessarily to stay low—the bullets can get to you wherever you are—but in a room with this many shooters firing all crazy at deflective surfaces and advancing on your position, you don’t want to stay still for very long. This is so easy to put together in my mind. So fast, and yet with all the time in the world. Vanilla ooze. The zing of funny little cartoon insects all about me. I’m scrambling around the couch, skittering like a spider, grabbing Jenison, who still seems like she’s just sitting there smiling with a cocktail in the middle of World War III, and I throw her in front of me. I find my rage again, like it’s a special power-up on the final level of a first-person shooter. My whole body becomes a burning, seething weapon. Let’s see if you care about my gun now, you bitch. Bruce Willis cheers me on. A fake crystal chandelier I never noticed before disengages from the ceiling just a few feet away and comes crashing down in a razor-slashing death-from-above surprise package—it makes a lot of noise and sends glass everywhere. Jenison tries to wriggle loose when my mouth yaps open at the spectacle but I jam a fist into her windpipe—a weak effort, but it has the desired effect. I think it does. It’s like pushing my hand into chewy taffy. She struggles to breathe. I drag her backwards on the floor, hoping she doesn’t get shot because I really think I need this woman alive for some reason, or maybe I just want to kill her later, all by myself. My head is spinning. I really don’t know what the hell’s going on here. The next wave of shooting busts out now and I see that the rear flank has taken cover by what’s left of the front desk. There’s blood everywhere, bodies all over the place. It all just happened so fast. Blinked my eyes and there it was. I have no idea which of these shooters are the good guys. Jenison thunks a limp elbow into my midsection and squirms, trying to get free. She’s not afraid of me, but I’ve got a pretty good hammerlock over her throat now, the power of some mad phantom whoopie spiraling in my bloodstream like corpuscles set on fire, injecting pure rocket fuel right into my heart and my hands. One of the last two meaty guys standing—the one who gave me the drink, I think, and wasn’t that damn awesome of him?—finally notices his boss being dragged off and spins to do something, and that’s the moment when a crisp fan of machine-gun fire stitches through his face like a jagged connect-the-dots tracer burn, blowing his right eye out, turning his personality into a thick pink-and-red ploosh! It splashes all over the face of his buddy next to him—a slightly smaller fellow who’s already down on one knee with three in the chest. The brainless, eyeless wonder on his right falls like an anvil in a cartoon and they both go down for good—piles of meat wearing cheap clothes. I hear footfalls behind me almost as fast as I react, the fire in my muscles spinning me in a weird sort of slow motion as a new push of euphoria hits me, two shooters coming into my line of sight. I forget about Jenison—what did I even want her for in the first place?—and I try to do something with the gun, but my finger won’t pull the trigger. The two shooters covering me have really inefficient weapons: Uzi 9-mils. Gangbanger junk from 1982. I see all the primitive little lever-action cogs on the slick metal of the two machines in their hands as another circuit in my brain flash-fries—and, holy shit, I get a really detailed memory flash about how my father said you never wanna go full auto with one of those because you only get about a second and a half of continuous fire and the eighth round or so almost always jams in the breech, causing your average dumbass to reach for the bolt on instinct, and that’s when your average dumbass will touch some part of the noninsulated metal and burn the hell out of his hand, causing him to drop his weapon . . . and the memory flash dies down . . . and I’m looking at my death, which comes in the form of really cheeseball weaponry purchased from a clip-out coupon in the back of some jack-off magazine for weekend mercenaries, and these men are going to kill me but that’s cool because everything’s a video game now and I’ll get an extra life and I can hit the reset button and . . . and . . . AND . . . the euphoria wave backs off me, and the world calms down again just for a second. And they’re gonna kill me. But that doesn’t happen. They don’t shoot at all. One of them opens his mouth and words come out that I don’t understand. All the sound in the room goes gooey again in the next second, my vision tilting and whirli
ng. The drug was time release—I realize that somewhere behind it all, the most logical part of my mind screaming at me in a room full of insane people. It’s dragracing my system now, hitting me hard. They never planned on having me under the knife—wanted me to talk, not bleed. She was going to sit in that chair and we were going to talk about betrayal and best laid plans and Bruce Willis movies until I was hallucinating that she was my best buddy and I’d tell her whatever she wanted to know. Did I tell her anything? What else did we talk about? I feel something writhe loose under my arms as the next wave crashes into me, and it feels terrific, something cold and warm and full of the best parts of being a child, the room all streaking by now, the shots from the guns behind me—all a fun little bit of nothing special, or maybe it is special, maybe it’s firecrackers on the Fourth of July, maybe it’s hands clapping for my latest triumph . . . maybe my brain is melting and that’s just fine . . . just fine and dandy . . . and here I go . . . under the goosh of it all . . . and I try to stand up . . . and the two shooters with Uzis are running towards me . . . and someone screams . . . I think it might be me . . .
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