The other one starts crying. “Wife . . . have wife and kids . . .”
His accent is thick and makes him hard to understand, but a man begging for his life tends to sound pretty pathetic no matter what country you were born in. I grab his face and make him look in my eyes. “We won’t kill you if you tell us what we want to know. Comprende?”
They both nod and use the Spanish word for yes, but it comes out like weird snakes in blasts of bad breath.
“Don’t confuse my friend,” Franklin says, stabbing one of them in the gut with the barrel of his Uzi. “You’re in America now—speak English.”
The guy almost says “yes” in Spanish again but catches himself.
I get right in his face. “Is this Resurrection Express?”
His eyes are glazed and terrified.
Franklin stabs him again with the gun. “He asked you a question.”
“Don’t know nothing,” the guy rattles. “Please . . . I just make the pickup . . .”
“What about the layout of the place,” Franklin says softly, right in his ear. “What’s inside the door? How many men?”
“I just make the pickup . . .”
I crack a smile. “These men will shoot you both in the eyeballs. You are going to die, get me?”
“Please . . . please . . .”
“Tell me about Resurrection Express.”
He says the word please again, and then it all blubbers into some weird mess I can’t understand. The other one keeps quiet, shivering. If these guys really are lying about not knowing anything, they both deserve Academy Awards.
I nod to Happy. “Check the van. Let’s see what they were picking up.”
Franklin pulls them away and readjusts the gun against the back of the chatty one’s skull. “Give up the keys, taco head.”
“Not locked. Please don’t kill me . . .”
Happy hears the good news and quickly throws open the doors. I realize in that moment that we’ve just made a very stupid mistake—could be anything, anyone, inside there. We’re playing this whole thing by ear. Nobody leaps out with guns to cap us off.
Happy takes a look at what’s inside and mutters:
“God fucking damn, man.”
• • •
At first I can’t tell what they are, but Happy knows right off. He’s seen this sort of thing before. It’s easy to tell by the look on his face.
And then the stench hits me and my heart falls to the pavement.
The van is piled with them, all bound with duct tape. They look like bundles of garbage, their arms behind their backs, eyes like shining copper coins, catching the dim light in a strange way that reminds me of that dreamlike moment when you see the second sight of a cat in a dark room. Dead eyes, all of them. Dozens of dead eyes. They’re all women, every single one of them. Franklin doesn’t flinch when he sees the bodies, but he orders the two Mexicans to their knees.
The chatty one begs us again not to kill him. I still can’t understand most of what he says. Please don’t kill me, just here to make the pickup, something like that.
I hiss at him to shut his mouth, looking for something familiar in any of those eyes. Anything at all. Toni could be staring sightlessly back at me and I might not ever know it. I want to cry, but I don’t let myself. Happy checks the other two vans. They’re both the same as this one. Full of dead girls.
Happy says the words “God fucking damn, man” again and I see him cross himself.
I notice for the first time that the second Mexican on his knees—the one who hasn’t said a word—has a tool belt around his waist with several rolls of duct tape hanging from it. He sees me notice that and closes his eyes, like he’s ready to die.
Garbage men.
That’s all these guys are.
I can see these poor ladies in the last tortured moments of their lives, the same way I’ve seen so many others. I can see them watching helplessly while it happens to a roomful of other victims. Like gerbils tossed in a snake aquarium, scrambling to escape while their sisters are squeezed and eaten, one at a time. Did that happen to you, Toni? Did Hartman make good on his promise?
Every day you’re on the street, people will die.
Maybe someone close to you.
Was I too late to save my wife?
I want to kick the shit out of these two assholes, but I settle for something a little more poetic. I grab the duct tape off the one guy’s hip and wrap them both up tight, just like the girls in the truck. We cover their mouths, too. The quiet one starts screaming under the gag when he figures out what we are going to do. I find the keys to the van in his pocket. I lock the door on both of them, leaving them with their handiwork.
• • •
Through the back door to the loading dock is a small corridor that smells like motor oil and recent construction. Places like this always have the essence of sawdust and industry. No cameras. As low tech as it gets. Franklin gets a text from the Weasel’s team that tells us they’re inside the gate and nobody’s home. He tells them to stand by, stay out of sight. We may need backup in a few minutes.
The door at the end of the corridor is locked, but that doesn’t matter. I get through it in ten seconds. It opens into a big dark room, which is split into a maze of dirty curtains hanging from steel frames. You can hear coughing echo off the high ceilings. Low crying. Voices that pray to God, all just out of earshot. We’re in the nerve center now.
I slide back one of the curtains and I see three women on ratty cots. They are still alive, but only by default. Franklin covers me as I go past the partition and get near the three. Two of them don’t even see me. The other one shrinks away and brings up her arms, palms out, like she’s defending herself from something.
“Please don’t,” she says.
I say my wife’s name. She looks at me and says nothing, keeps her hands up. She smells like womanhood defiled, soaked through with opium. I can see the fresh track marks on her arms. I stare at her for almost five minutes before I realize this isn’t Toni, and she has no idea what the name means. Her hair is long and black, and it blends in with the darkness in this evil little room. I can hardly see what she used to look like before the drugs and the cruelty claimed her.
We move to the next section.
The same phantoms in there, squirming and muttering, lost in a sea of blackness.
All of them women.
All very beautiful under the muck.
Strong lines and lean bodies, full breasts and lips, drugged-out smiles that give me a rough demo of what their old lives used to be like, how they were admired by men, how they still might be admired by the right set of eyeballs. They were chosen for their beauty, like my Toni was.
But this is a shantytown, the last stop on the train. This is where they go when they’re used up, just before they get shipped out the back door and hauled off in an unmarked van. God only knows what happens to them after that.
Happy, stating the very obvious: “This place is fucking evil karma, man.”
We move slowly through the maze, checking behind every curtain, saying my wife’s name again and again. Nobody speaks back to us. I look at each woman carefully, searching for traces, taking in their scents. Happy keeps telling me to hurry my ass and I keep telling him to shut up. Ten minutes stretches to twenty minutes in the dark. I am lost in a labyrinth of sweaty perfumes and hopelessness. There are no men with guns in here—no men at all. I hope none of these women are Toni. None of them seem to be her. But he wouldn’t have her here, not just yet, would he?
Not unless he caught her and—
Something explodes just to my left, and I hear a woman scream. I only have the fleeting impression of Happy stumbling around with his face half blown off before I get punched in the shoulder by a big steel fist. For a second it feels like someone shot me, as I hear staccato pulse-rattles of machine-gun fire break out across the maze. But the stinging pain never hits my nervous system. It was a piece of shrapnel from one of the steel curtain rods.
Bounced off my arm.
I dive for the floor and stay down, inside one of the partitions. The two women in here are blondes who look like they used to be strippers. They are screaming their heads off and it sounds like a symphony of panic, mixing with the dull clatter of Franklin’s Uzi. He’s on his feet just outside the partition, opening up on gunmen I can’t see. Happy is lying dead just inches away from me, his abused brain put all the way out of its misery on the floor in a gory splatter. The enemy gunfire is coming from fifty feet ahead of us in this pathetic little tent city—it sounds like heavy-caliber handguns. Maybe Smith and Wesson. Automatics, not revolvers. Enough grim caliber to take off a man’s head with one shot. Franklin keeps shooting back at them but I can’t see anything in here. I crawl on my arms and elbows towards the sounds of enemy fire. My eyes adjust to the dim light as I get closer, and I see the boots of two men outlined in the muzzleflashes from their guns, just visible below the curtains, and through them, too. Like the urgent, flashing glow from a couple of panicking fireflies.
They never see me coming.
I sweep the right one’s leg as I lunge up from behind them. The moist snap of his ankle thumps my ears as he screams and my foot plunges into his midsection, stealing everything he’s got in his lungs. His gun hits the floor and the hair trigger fires it one last time, which puts a bullet in his friend’s foot. That gives me a head start on him, just as his gun arm swings around, and I catch the wrist fast, blocking the shot while his big toe explodes. My next move is a combination that puts his face in the center of a shitstorm, then cracks both arms behind his back like lobster claws. His buddy is already on the ground, unable to breathe. I drop him there, and he goes down hard, screaming that I broke his arm. This guy’s not Mexican. Sounds just like one of Hartman’s old-school thugs. It might even be the asshole who shot me in the head three years ago.
Franklin is spinning to cover us with the Uzi when the lights come on.
Five more guys are streaming into the room from several different entrances at the edge of the maze, all with big goddamn automatic weapons. Franklin has his Heckler off his shoulder in a hurry and while they’re all telling us to freeze, he’s opening up on them full auto with both guns. It lasts for about three seconds and sounds like one long thunderclap in the chamber—and two guys go down fast, the other three jumping behind what looks like a heavy forklift.
Bad cover, dumbasses.
Franklin never flinches. He’s like a robot. Spends another two seconds calmly tossing away the Uzi and reloading the Heckler, then walks straight at the men behind the forklift and opens up. Bullets spang off the metal and smash through the glass. I hear one of the gunmen scream as he gets perforated and the other one stays quiet for about a second before he jumps out and makes a run for a white hallway just beyond one of the open doors. Franklin thumbs his weapon to semi-auto and fires the last two shots through the back of the runner’s skull. His head splatters ahead of him in the white corridor and he goes down like a twisted scarecrow. No alarms. No more men.
And that’s when I hear her voice.
Calling my name.
Ahead of us.
• • •
It’s the same voice I heard on the phone.
I run for the open white corridor, pulling the Colt Python from my satchel, and I tell Franklin to get behind me. We step over the brainless body of the scarecrow, our feet sloshing in blood and pink gore. But I’m not thinking about that.
I’m following the voice.
She’s just ahead of us . . .
The white corridor opens into another huge chamber full of looming shadows that turn out to be big machines. Construction equipment. Giant steel arms and bulldozers. Oil drums. The place has a high ceiling and hanging latticework, like catwalks. Real dark in here. Smells like dried blood and gasoline. Rows of curtains in this room, too, but not as many—a labyrinthine zigzag of shadows eating shadows. The voice is coming from behind one of these curtains. Just ahead of me. Right behind me. Bouncing off the walls and slapping back in my head like some terrible accusation. Everywhere and nowhere. Echoes and shapes, slithering now, the shapes of more men with guns, black ghosts moving long across the curtains, surrounding us. On all sides.
The voice comes closer.
Calling my name.
Franklin freezes when he sees the guns. Twenty men now, oozing into view among the shadows. Assault shotguns and pistols with laser sights. Little red dots dancing all over us. We walked right into it and I don’t care. The gauntlet tightens as we stand in the center of the room, me and Franklin back to back, and I don’t care. I hear the sound of a million billion automatic weapons clunking and clacking and clicking and I just don’t care . . .
The voice calls my name one last time before she’s thrown through the curtain directly ahead of us.
The scent of her hits me, just before she lands on the ground like a broken puppet.
The scent of roses and gunmetal.
She looks up at me and her face is beautiful.
So, so beautiful.
It’s all that matters in the world.
Her eyes are like something in a dream I forgot about a million years ago.
My God . . . has it been that long?
Her cold stare freezes me right there, even in the center of this deadly noose, now that she’s this close to me—the smell of hard things and soft flowers wafting out of nowhere to sock me right in the face. I stagger back and drop the gun and it clangs on the dusty floor.
And I just don’t care.
It doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters.
Just this moment.
Just my wife.
An icicle picks itself into the worst spot in my head—the bad spot where everything was lost—and a hard wave of sour heat comes down across my senses, smothering me. I force myself up through it and pull myself toward the memories, the faceless shapes, those awful missing things that have mocked me for so long.
And as she reaches out to touch me, I see devastation in her eyes. I see worlds destroyed. I see her lips shivering and her whole body rumbling with pain.
I see a version of Toni that terrifies me.
“Elroy,” she says. “I waited so long . . .”
Her voice, stabbing me worse. Her scent, reminding me of everything I couldn’t see in my mind’s eye until just this moment . . .
What has he done to you?
I move to embrace her and something in my head blows like a bomb. No, wait . . . that’s not my head. It really is an explosion. A gunshot, right near me. It spikes through the chamber hard, receding to leave me frozen there with my arms around her, my ears ringing . . .
Then, silence.
And a thick roll of sadistic laughter, coming right at me.
The man who destroyed my life steps out from behind the curtain, his white suit spackled with bright red blotches.
His eyes flare like cruel diamonds.
His smile is disgusting and final.
“Ain’t she a sexy thing,” he says.
13
00000-13
MANIACS LIKE US
Hartman stops laughing and cocks his head skyward, the pistol smoking in his hand. It’s aimed into a dark corner of the wide chamber, not at my heart. I look at him over Toni’s shoulder, my hands holding on to her. The warning shot still echoes long.
“Sorry to spoil the moment,” he says. “Why don’t you be a good boy and let go of the merchandise?”
“What have you done to her?”
“I said let go of the lady.”
He aims the gun at me now, getting a bead on my next thought.
I’ll never let you go, Toni.
Never.
The next shot cracks just past my head. I hear the slug hit the floor behind me, bouncing back into the room. The thunder staggers me on my feet, and I lose my grip on her. In the same second, a pair of rough hands grabs my arms, pulls me back—and then more hands. I can’t fight these guys. Too much pain in my head
, the crashing of angels and devils on all sides. The smell of roses, contaminated by sweat and grime.
Toni, just out of reach now.
The world tumbling and turning.
She is dressed all in black—silk pants and blouse, buttoned up the front, revealing just enough of her, like she’s peeking out at me from beyond my ruined, black dreams, her form delicate and overpowering, her long dark hair almost hiding her face. She bites her bottom lip, then lets it go, her face defaulting into a quivering question without words.
Hartman holsters his gun under his giant suit jacket, rolling towards us.
The room is dark and frozen, the same way it was ten seconds ago, Franklin standing in place, aiming his HK at the ceiling in surrender. Me and Toni, facing each other, shot through with pain. Two dozen men with guns, making sure nobody goes anywhere.
All of us, right up shit creek.
Hartman strikes a pose, the master of the universe.
“She smells sweet, don’t she, boy? Like steel roses. She always did, didn’t she?”
I take a breath and I am full of her.
My vision almost blurs, and my legs almost go.
He laughs again.
“You’re right on time, buddy-boy. I expected you and the old man to come in with a lot of firepower, but it wasn’t really necessary. You could have just walked up and knocked.”
I hardly find my voice through the buzz, through the scent, through the dark ice that freezes the room. Through Toni.
“We tried that once,” I tell him, and the memory stabs me.
“Yeah, those were some good old times, weren’t they? How’s your head these days?”
I don’t answer him.
I want to run at him.
I want to break every bone in his fat body.
I tense up and the goons grab me harder, the muscles in my legs coiling like some mad beast programmed to eat and destroy and be full of violence. And in this moment . . . the rage finds me . . .
. . . first in the pit of my stomach . . .
Resurrection Express Page 22