Shut up, David. Just shut the hell up.
I look at Franklin. “Once I put a hundred large into your hands, you and me are square. But I’ll have a little left over. Just how dangerous is this scary Death Ray guy?”
“Depends on how you come at him. You’ll need backup.”
“That’s what I had in mind. Say, a five-K bonus?”
“Ten.”
“Done.”
“Always a pleasure doing business with you.” He lets out a tough sigh, then settles back in his seat, rubbing his chin. “I think I might know where to look. I’ll make a few calls.”
This could be suicide.
But I have to know for sure about Resurrection Express and I have to know about Toni. I have to know if I’m crazy or if she’s a liar.
And there’s a missing piece, still nagging in my skull somewhere.
Do I really know where Jayne Jenison lives?
Am I searching for a ghost?
For a strange moment I’m reminded of Jimmy Stewart in the movie Vertigo. About that kind of obsession. About wanting a woman back so goddamn bad, you make it happen, in spite of yourself, in spite of everything. And then it leaves you, because it can’t stay. Because it was artificial, something you created yourself. Even if she loved you all along.
Am I Jimmy Stewart?
Toni, is that really you, sitting right there?
Or is the lie true, this one time?
And the evil men who want to put us all out of business . . . what about them?
Resurrection Express.
She doesn’t say anything. Her gears are working, too. All of this is triggering something. Memories. Traces. She keeps it to herself and I don’t press it.
Not yet.
• • •
We get up to leave and I tell them to hang by the back. I get Ellie Mayhem’s attention as I move casually toward the bathroom alcove. She follows me over with her tray empty in front of her. I slap a fifty on it. Bitch insurance.
“You never saw us,” I tell her, palming another two hundred in one fist, making sure she can see the crumpled green. “We understand each other?”
“Mollie’s dead,” she says, not chewing gum. She’s real serious now, almost whispering the words. I can see all sorts of cruelty etched on her face, up this close in the new dim spill of light from the bathroom corridor. There’s a couple of fresh scars running along the right side of her forehead, just covered by the bad makeup. Blood almost cracking through the base application.
“I know he’s dead,” I say. “You need to forget you ever saw us. Understand?”
She nods, grim. Like, I can’t make any promises. But she doesn’t say that out loud. What she says is this:
“I couldn’t help but overhear.”
“About what?”
“You’re looking for someone. He’s real bad. I want to hurt him.”
I look at the scars again, and I can see there are bruises on her face, too, hardly covered. The whole scenario comes real clear now:
She’s one of Kim’s whores. Whoever killed the Hammer slapped this little lady around and told her who the new boss was—left her alive because she was valuable merchandise. That means it wasn’t Jenison who did the deed. It was a contract hit. Someone street level, who plays by street rules.
“Death Ray,” she says. “I can give him to you.”
15
00000-15
DREAMS IN THE DOLLHOUSE
Ellie Mayhem gives us a number to call tomorrow. Six P.M. sharp. She says to drop Mollie’s name and tell Ray she’s working for me now. The guy’s real big on keeping what belongs to him, apparently. She won’t come in to work tomorrow because she’s hitting the road tonight—heading out to Dallas to stay with her mom. Says that Ray will freak out if he thinks one of his ladies has gone AWOL with another player.
It’ll totally get his attention, honey.
Just promise you’ll hurt him when I’m gone.
Hurt him bad.
She doesn’t say anything else and I don’t ask any more questions. I can tell she wasn’t with Kim when the shit went down, and she probably doesn’t even know if her boss is still alive—but she wants Ray’s head. I see it burning in her eyes and under her skin, even without the sting of her words. She is red with the lust. For payback.
It’s my one link back to Jenison.
Back to Resurrection Express.
I don’t ask any more questions.
It’s a hell of a thing when the planets line up like this, and you’re always really damn amused when it happens to you. But if it hadn’t been Miss Mayhem, it would have been Mollie, and if it hadn’t been Mollie . . . well, I would have worked something out. Hartman had it right—I’ve always been real good at following the bread crumbs.
We leave the bar and go house hunting.
• • •
There’s a neat trick you can still pull these days, when you’re on the wrong side of a job gone bad. When motels are too hot and you need a place to hide—yesterday.
It was one of the last things Axl Gange taught me.
Always go in with confidence, but prepare yourself for the worst.
Part of preparing for the worst is the ace I’ve been holding in my shoe since we went into the vault: three tiny pieces of steel. The most important components of Remo’s manual lockpick set. Not enough to open a car with keyless entry and get away clean, but enough to jack something made in the nineties. And you can also usually find a mom-and-pop hardware store or a pawn shop in a neighborhood like this with ancient locks. That’s after you pick up your old-school ride to go cruising in, and there’s lots of those in the alley behind Blythe Spirits.
We’re on the road fast.
It’s a 1997 Acura with a huge dent in the passenger’s side.
Ten minutes later I’m inside E-Z PAWN, blowing through their cheap SERIO-SYSTEMS alarm system by entering a row of sixes into the keypad just inside the back entrance. The beeping in the room stops and the police have no idea there’s a thief in here. I wipe everything I don’t steal with a paper towel, just to be on the safe side.
I grab a duffel bag and stuff it with the tools I need.
Franklin and Toni wait outside with the motor running.
• • •
It’s almost four in the morning when we cross from the Montrose ghetto into the River Oaks area, where rich people live on the border of everything scummy. That’s another weird thing about Houston: it’s a giant melting pot of degenerates and oil tycoons, and they all live across the street from each other. You have very interesting neighborhoods where falling-down crack houses face freshly built Victorian-reproduction town homes from less than twenty feet away. Some of those crack houses are ready to be torn down—just so much rotten wood hanging in a frame. The other places cost more than a high-end drug dealer makes in six months. We cruise a main drag just on the River Oaks border and find a street that hovers somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. We look for nice houses without any cars in the driveway—but not too nice. Toni spots a three-story colonial job with elegant French windows and a lawn that looks like it hasn’t been mowed in two weeks. The mailbox is stuffed, no newspapers on the front steps. People who don’t worry about money don’t read newspapers anymore. It’s all on the net these days. We pull into the open driveway. There’s no fence. A garage in back. Nobody’s home.
I get to the power box with my bag of tools and start working the leads and connections. No matter how far in the future we go with our handy-dandy technology, some things never change: you can scope a ghetto-rich family on vacation just by looking at the front lawn, and you can bet anything they haven’t spent too much money on a security profile. I cut the balls of the alarm system by rerouting the power to a grounded circuit, and then I reboot the breakers. The older the lock, the easier it is. You just need a screwdriver and a soldering iron.
We’re secure inside of fifteen minutes.
I break out gloves from the duffel bag—three
sets of blue rubber dishwashing gloves that will keep our fingerprints off the grid when we leave this place and the owners discover they’ve been burglarized. Axl Gange was a really smart housekeeper.
The keys to the garage are in the kitchen. We get our new car hidden fast.
Inside the house, we’ve got high-speed Internet, flat-screen TV, hot showers, and even a wine cellar. Not much food in the kitchen, though. Some Popsicles and frozen meat. A few jars of condiments. Cheerios and shredded wheat. I have a feeling these people eat out a lot.
Twelve hours before we make the call.
I tell Franklin to watch the front door. He flips on the big TV and thumbs the remote to a news station. Nothing local at half past four in the morning. Not sure what he expected to find. I tell him to shut it off because the glow from the screen will seep through the drawn blinds. That could give us away while it’s still dark out, if one of the neighbors has insomnia. You take your chances on a block like this.
He nods and kills it.
“We should get some sleep,” Toni says. “We’re blown, all of us.”
“I’ll be okay,” Franklin says.
She sits down in the chair across from him. “What are our assets?”
I smile at her.
Always in charge.
Always my Toni.
Even if she isn’t.
• • •
Our assets:
Ruger Centerfire pistol, the gun Toni killed Hartman with.
The compact revolver and the dull gray Glock 30 Franklin took off the dead guy.
Not much, man.
The Ruger is a 40S, not an SR9, but they look almost exactly alike, with the same shiny silver slide and black plastic handle, no rounds in the clip. Twelve bullets in the Glock, three in the revolver, which looks like a Charter Arms Bulldog special, snubnosed with rubber grips, a tiny little thing—the kind of close range weapon you walk up behind someone with. Gangbangers keep them in their cargo pants pockets.
We put our guns on the glass coffee table and I stare at them for a very long moment.
“Okay,” I finally say to him. “A baker’s dozen bullets to take down a really scary guy. You think you can handle it?”
“One bullet is all it takes,” he says.
“There’s a lot of heat out there,” Toni tells him, like he needs to be reminded. “The cops are going nuts right now. All the shooting that’s been going on.”
He almost laughs. “You ever been to Houston before, lady?”
She looks insulted. “Of course I have.”
“This place has the highest concentration of gangland shootings outside of Los Angeles. The police don’t give a shit about who gets killed if they were scum to begin with. It’s like trying to call ‘time out’ on the beaches of Normandy.”
“That may be true,” I say. “But Kim Hammer was a major player. She would have had contacts inside the Houston Metro divisions. Somebody has to be curious. And that’s not even counting what happened at the hotel last night.”
Franklin shrugs. “Those people were all scumbags, too.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But you can’t blow up the lobby of the Sheraton and walk away clean. Not for long. That kind of property damage paints a big red bull’s-eye on your forehead.”
“You think the cops have any idea it was you and me in there?”
“Jenison told me her people had the place locked—but she couldn’t have covered all the bases. I mean you guys got in, right?”
“That took a lot of doing, man.”
“Someone had to see the security recordings. The cameras in those places all stream to offsite locations now.”
Unless the cameras were shut down by the bad guys.
That makes a lot of sense—but it also scares the hell out of me.
“Kim wouldn’t be the only one with friends in the police department,” I say. “Jenison’s foot soldiers are everywhere—that’s what she told me. They’ll be using every dirty trick they know to track us.”
Toni leans forward in her chair. “Then what’s the plan?”
“That depends,” I say.
“On what?”
“On what Death Ray has to tell us.”
Franklin makes a resigned sound that could be a laugh. “One thing I’ve learned in these situations, kid. Never ask too many questions, because everyone’s got a different answer.”
“And God against all?”
“There ain’t no God, just like there ain’t no hell.”
“Maybe. I still have things to do. You should come with us. I could use your help, even after we’re done with the scary guy.”
“No thanks, kid. I figure I’ll retire after this.”
I still can’t tell if he feels any remorse at all about his buddies. He’s cold and efficient—a man of war. You don’t make friends on the front lines, his stare tells me. You run from score to score and live off the profits. Street mercenaries are all the same.
“Your people died,” Toni says to him. “Every damn one of them.”
“No hard feelings about it. You roll the dice when you’re in close combat. If the kid comes across with what he owes me, we’re square. I’ll help you guys one last time, then we go our separate ways. No more adventures for this old man. I’m gonna get myself out of the world. Drop out of sight for a while.”
“That might be a good idea,” I say. “But . . .”
My words freeze into silence between us.
He hovers on the edge of an uncertain laugh. “But what?”
I take a deep breath. “What if the world isn’t there anymore when you decide to come back?”
Toni cocks her head. “What are you talking about?”
“This whole thing . . . everything I’m figuring out about it . . . it’s all adding up to something crazy. Hartman knew Jenison’s plot. So Hartman was stockpiling women. There’s something else, too. Something underground. Groups of people all over the world, holing up in fortresses.”
Franklin shrugs again. “People have been doing that for years.”
“What if there was a reason for it all along? What if some of those people were organized?”
“You sound like a crazy conspiracy guy now,” Toni says.
“Something started the rumor,” I say.
Franklin settles back in the couch and dismisses the whole idea. “Shit.”
I don’t let him off that easy. “Whatever’s going on, it was enough to scare the hell out of a monster like David Hartman, and that has to be really big. Maybe bigger than all of us.”
He tosses his hands up. “So, what, you think it’s some kinda nutty doomsday plot?”
He doesn’t sound straight-up when he says that.
The nut jobs and the above-ground mainline hot-weather crowd have been crying about the end of the world for years.
But.
“The stuff on those hard drives is really sophisticated,” I say. “Texas Data Concepts does government contracting for Strategic Air Command. They could have developed some sort of new defense application. Something state-of-the-art that nobody knows about. If Jenison is really planning on using it for whatever reason . . . then maybe her people have figured out some way to survive what happens next.”
Toni loses a breath. “Jesus, Elroy. You’re not serious.”
“It’s serious enough for these jerks to send shooters into public places and kill innocents in broad daylight. Serious enough to keep us all in the dark about what they were really doing.”
“Starting a global nuclear war, though?” she says. “That would make the whole planet toxic.”
I don’t smile. “Yeah.”
She starts shaking her head now. “It wouldn’t work. Even with a hundred giant bomb shelters. If all your primary and secondary targets were hit on both sides, it would be a soup for decades. All the fallout and everything. It’s the kind of cosmic stuff you see in movies.”
“These are pretty cosmic people we’re talking about.”
Frank
lin laughs. “She’s right. It just ain’t possible. Jenison would inherit a world of shit. Someone inside her organization would wise up sooner or later and go against her. They can’t all be that crazy.”
No, they can’t.
Not if it wasn’t a nuclear war they were plotting.
Not if they knew exactly what they were doing.
Not if they had their apocalypse mapped out with surgical precision.
“Someone did go against her,” I say, looking right at Toni. “And I saw it in his eyes before he died.”
“You mean Hartman,” she says.
“He was terrified.”
Franklin laughs again. “Yeah, well, everyone’s terrified when someone’s about to kill them.”
I shake my head. “It was something else. Big fear.”
“How would you know?” he says. “Have you ever killed a man before?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.”
I let a sigh roll out. Maybe he’s right. Maybe Hartman was just looking death in the eye and being a pussy.
And maybe he wasn’t.
“My father was a killer,” I say. “It was easy for him.”
“It’ll be easy for you too,” Franklin says. “When the time comes.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone.”
“You won’t have any choice.”
“I wasn’t able to do it before, even when there was someone aiming a gun at my head. Remember back at the toy store? You had to take the shot. It saved my life.”
“You’re welcome, by the way. But that doesn’t mean anything. It was just your life on the line when that went down. Had nothing to do with making a real choice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let me put it to you this way: how many decisions have you made that involved someone getting wasted?”
“A lot, I guess.”
“Then you’re already there. Don’t kid yourself.” He sighs in that macho Zen way he’s got, and leans forward in the comfy chair. “See, there’s this big lie in the world that the hardest kill is the first one. I’ve heard some people say it’s like falling down a well, like you lose your soul in that moment or something. It’s bullshit. Guys like us, we get people snuffed just by making a phone call. Every animal on earth kills because they have to. We’re the only species smart enough to call it a sin.”
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