by Hines
Good old Mom.
“I’m sorry about Grandpa,” he said suddenly, not sure why. He hadn’t spoken to her about his grandfather since she could actually hold up her end of the conversation, hadn’t spoken to any of the therapists or counselors or social workers about it ever. “I figured it out after him, you know. Why it happened. How it happened. Too late, I know.”
The cat abruptly gave his leg one last brush and ran out into the hallway again. His head still down, Stan heard a scribbling sound. He lifted his head, saw his mother writing something on a napkin with the pen. It was a number: 1595544534.
He took the napkin, looked at her. This was the first human movement he’d seen from her in . . . months. Had Janna started her on the new drugs, secretly?
Within moments, she had returned to her usual statue state. Her dry eyes stared straight ahead, as if taking in something she found slightly disappointing.
Stan ran a hand through his hair before he stuffed the napkin into his pants pocket. So she’d scribbled on a napkin. Like that meant anything. Probably just the misfiring of a brain warped by disease, numbers left over from some scrambled past.
Still, she had moved. On her own. He pulled his chair toward her, leaned in close, close enough to smell the scent of her breakfast. Oatmeal, he guessed. Grain mush, as Janna might call it.
She stared, a bit of drool pooling at the corner of her mouth. He wiped at the drool, the wetness of it feeling odd through the latex gloves, like gelatin.
“You even alive?” he asked, whispering. He licked his lips, then: “Am I?”
She didn’t answer.
Yeah, he was doing all this to keep his mother in the thin, hovering zone between life and death. And really, how much of a line was it?
For that matter, how much of a line was it for him? He’d been a zombie for a couple years now, allowing himself to be controlled by his own pity and a Russian mobster starting to build a network on the North American continent.
He could kill himself, avoid killing other innocent lives. If he wanted his own mother to die. Or at least finish dying.
But he couldn’t do that. Even now, so many years after his grandfather, so many sleeping pills and painkillers later, he couldn’t dull that gnawing hole deep inside. Not now. Not ever.
He’d killed one person he loved. And God knew he couldn’t repeat it.
This was his circle of hell, and he was confined to it until the bitter end. No magic tricks to make him disappear, no easy way to slide off this mortal coil.
His thoughts returned to Janna. Maybe she was telling clever lies. Or maybe, just maybe, Janna did know something of his situation, and was offering a way out.
In either case—devious turncoat or a naive dreamer—Janna was dangerous. He liked her, but he’d have to make some calls, see if he could get her removed from the staff. He could do that, through the Organization. Make things like that happen. Maybe it would even be a smart move. If she were working for Viktor, he would immediately see that Stan wasn’t going to fall for any poisoned bait.
He stood, turned to the door, and left without looking back at his mother.
Yes, he was a zombie. And zombies fed on the living. Always.
8.
The flight to Seattle was uneventful enough, and this time his Handler met him at the airport. Always much better that way. It wasn’t the end of the world when he met Handlers at restaurants or bars or other locations after checking in at the hotel, but it was always much . . . cleaner . . . to just start the whole job from the airport. The dynamic didn’t shift that way; the Handler felt comfortable being a driver, and Stan felt comfortable being a rider. Meetings in other places led to small talk and conversations, which led to the Handlers asking questions, which led to people seeing things no human should.
They called him Bleach, after all. He liked things clean.
Clean or not, though, he was also tragic. Who was that mythical Greek guy? Well, yes, Midas; he was obvious, and Stan had read many accounts and translations of Midas’s exploits over the past couple years. (Reading was one of the things you could reliably do while hiding in hotel rooms. When you weren’t otherwise occupied chugging sleeping pills, that is.) But he was now thinking of the guy who constantly rolled a rock uphill. Sisyphus, maybe? Always he moved uphill.
His Handler was quiet, simply nodding when he recognized Stan coming out of the Jetway. The Handler didn’t offer his hand for a shake. Good. Even with his gloves on, it made him uncomfortable, itchy, to touch the skin of others.
He rarely had to search for his Handlers, he knew, because the Organization gave them photos of him ahead of time, along with explicit instructions on where to take him and when. Ignore those instructions, and the Handlers would receive a visit from less savory members of the Organization. Maybe even a return visit from Stan himself.
He followed the Handler to a white sedan double-parked outside. They opened the doors and slid inside without a word. As the Handler wheeled onto the street, Stan saw a newspaper folded on the dash. He picked it up, looked at the Handler.
“Thought you might like something to read on the way,” the Handler said without taking his eyes off the road. “Your first time in Seattle, I’m guessing.”
“Yeah, thanks.” He unfolded the paper to look at the front page. August of 2001 Hottest on Record, the headline said. He glanced at the article, scanning the various atrocities August had inflicted upon the fine Seattle landscape.
“Even the weather’s going down the drain,” he said, not fully realizing he’d spoken out loud until the Handler answered.
“Just twenty months late. Or eight months late, depending on your point of view.”
He looked at the Handler. “I don’t follow.”
“Y2K. Everybody thinking the world was going to end when we rolled to a new century. ’Cept it wasn’t really the new century—2000 was the last year of the twentieth century. New century didn’t start until this year.”
Stan smiled. “Well, we still have four months left in 2001. World might end yet.”
The Handler turned and looked at him for the first time. “I’m starting to think that would be the best news we could get,” he said.
Stan sighed, folded the newspaper again, and threw it on the dash. “Amen, brother. Amen to that.”
9a.
His target was holed up at a ratty old hotel in an area the Handler told him was called Fremont. They passed through a bit of a historic district on the way. Stan noticed faded paint on the sides of brick buildings: ads for nonexistent drinks, signage for meat packing plants that were now homes for shops and restaurants.
The Handler wisely parked in an alley around the corner from the hotel, and Stan got out to walk. This Handler, whatever his name was, didn’t follow. Good. No replay of the incident with the kid.
Humidity and heat combined to make the air feel heavy, and after the quick walk to the front door, he felt his longsleeved shirt clinging. He liked to wear long sleeves, because they drew less attention to the gloves—thin driving gloves, unless it was an assignment day like today. Then he switched to latex. They were disposable, and that was important for these projects; the thought of reusing gloves after an assignment seemed wrong. Backward. Sickening, in a way.
At the front door of the hotel, he retrieved the small envelope he’d folded and tucked away in a back pocket. The envelope, which held two keys, had been part of his most recent delivery packet.
He picked one key at random and tried it in the protruding lock of the oak door. No go. He fished out the other key and tried it, feeling it slide home and turn as a bird twittered from one of the floors above. Birds in the city—not pigeons, but real songbirds of some kind. Maybe seeking shelter from the oppressive heat in the shade of the eaves. He liked that.
Inside, he moved confidently, striding across a lobby that smelled oddly of limes and urine. The decay inside said it wasn’t just on the wrong side of the tracks, but nowhere in sight of them.
H
e passed the elevator doors and took the stairs. Always, he preferred the stairs.
On the fifth floor he surveyed the area for a moment before walking down the hallway. Ten yards down, he came to the door marked 534.
Odd to get keys. Usually, he didn’t have such quick access to his targets. More often, he was simply given an address and trusted to find a way inside. Maybe an unlatched window or an inadvertently unlocked door, maybe a scheme as a deliveryman, maybe a tail that let him follow the target to an office or location away from home. But he almost never had keys or other means of easily getting into homes. Or hotels, as was the case here.
He placed his head against the door of the room and listened to a conversation on the other side, recognizing it immediately as a daytime television program. He sighed, considering. Take off the gloves now, or wait until he was inside? Tough choice, but he decided not to think too much about it and peeled the gloves off his hands, taking care to make sure the latex didn’t snap, and stuffed them into his pocket with the other key.
Fingerprints weren’t a worry. They were never a worry, because he’d never had his prints taken. For that matter, the scenes of his hits were never treated as homicides, because his victims seemingly died of natural causes. If you wanted to call it that.
Stan put his right hand on the doorknob as he slid the key into the deadbolt. In most movies and books, people breaking into homes always moved slowly, creeping into the place without being noticed. Stan knew better. This wasn’t a game of stealth, but of power. You made less noise, created more surprise, by moving decisively.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds, took a deep breath, turned the key in the lock, and swung open the door. Without pausing, he closed the door behind him and walked in, past a short wall that opened into the main room on the left. A couch sat on the far wall as he walked into the room.
And on the couch sat a dark-haired man, nervously pointing a gun at him.
Stan continued walking toward the man, as if this were the most natural thing in the world for him. And maybe it was.
“Stop!” the dark-haired man said, his voice rising a bit.
Stan was skilled at picking out changes in voice inflection, what those inflections meant. He’d had a couple years of practice at reading people in extreme situations.
The man narrowed his eyes, turned off the television with the remote he held in his left hand, put both his hands on the stock of the revolver.
Stan stopped, waited. The man’s hands threatened to start shaking, but remained steady for the moment. Stan noticed his bare feet, his black, thick-soled shoes neatly sitting beside the bed even though the man was fully dressed in a suit and tie. Maybe a bit of a neatnik, didn’t like people wearing shoes inside his apartment. Stan could identify with neatniks.
“Viktor sent you?” the man asked.
Now Stan was able to pick out an accent in the man’s voice, an accent that sounded eerily similar to Viktor’s.
“He did,” Stan said, holding his hands up in the air to show he was unarmed.
“Who are you?”
“Nobody important.”
The man grunted. “I know this feeling well.”
They stared, regarding each other, for a few seconds.
“So what now?” the man on the couch said. His voice wavered a bit as he said it, almost as much as the tip of the gun he pointed at Stan.
Stan shrugged, partly because he himself didn’t know what was going to happen. Not that it mattered. The end result would be the same. He’d been through this kind of thing too many times to worry much about the details.
The man pointed his gun toward a single wooden chair across from the couch. “Take off your shoes,” he said.
Stan cocked his head to the side, unsure he’d heard the man correctly. “What?”
The man motioned to the chair again. “You will sit down and take off your shoes.”
Stan stared for a few moments, then went to the chair and sat. He bent and began unlacing his shoes. Okay, this guy really was way too worried about dirty shoes in his apartment.
“Aren’t you going to ask why?” the man said. His voice was cracking a bit, but Stan pretended not to notice.
“Why?” Stan said, humoring him.
“You’re American. You know the phrase ‘die with your boots on.’”
Stan removed his first shoe, set it to the side. He looked at the man, shrugged. “Yeah.”
“This—this is one thing we have of America, Viktor and I, when we are young. Our mother wants us to learn English, yes? So she smuggles illegal things to teach us. Mostly books. We love torn books about cowboys and Indians.”
“Dime novels?”
The man seemed excited by this. “Yes! Yes! In these books, the cowboys say to die with your boots on, and that becomes—what would you say?—something special between two people.”
“A pact?”
“A pact, yes. We promise we die with our boots on.”
Stan glanced at the man once more. “Viktor’s your brother,” he said, although he’d meant it as a question. Viktor had obviously practiced his English a bit more.
“Viktor does not tell you this?”
Stan shrugged, shook his head. Killing his own brother. Hell probably had its own circle reserved exclusively for Viktor Abkin. Right below his own circle. Or maybe they’d be roomies, which would be oddly fitting.
“Those aren’t boots,” he said, jutting his chin at the man’s black-soled shoes on the floor.
“And you are no cowboy. But Viktor understands. I take off my shoes, because I do not die without my boots on, you see?”
“Kind of a superstition, then.”
The man’s eyes narrowed for a moment, and Stan saw a bit of anger flare. “No superstition. It just is,” he said simply. He gestured with the gun again. “Other shoe, please.”
Stan bent and began untying his other shoe. “So you’re making me take off my shoes as a message to Viktor.”
“Yes. He finds you dead, with no shoes, he knows I send a message. He knows he cannot decide to remove me simply because I make problems for him.”
Stan nodded, continuing to stare at his now-untied shoe. He knew what his next move was, had known it ever since he’d been told to take off his shoes.
He slowly slipped off his second shoe, stood and hurled it at the man’s face, then dropped to the floor and rolled, coming up in a crouch even as Viktor’s brother ducked and slouched on the couch. He saw fear in the dark eyes as the man tried to swing the gun back around toward him, but Stan was already grabbing the wrist with his hand.
His bare hand.
A very good thing he had decided to remove the gloves before entering the hotel room.
Instantly the man’s eyes rolled back into his head and he went into convulsions. The gun dropped, allowing Stan to step back and release his grip. Viktor’s brother, his body still heaving with tremors, slid to the floor in front of the couch, a bit of foam escaping his mouth.
Stan stared for a few seconds, watching the man’s hand spasm as it tried to grasp one of the black-soled shoes he’d neatly placed in front of his couch. Only minutes before, probably.
Like most of his victims, the man wasn’t dying quickly; usually, it took a minute or two of thrashing and convulsing, and Stan had to stand there and watch. It was part of the curse.
Stan gave a deep sigh. Well, what of it? Was there any real harm, letting the man die with his shoes on? He could do that, couldn’t he? A small act of rebellion against Viktor.
He dropped to his knees, picked up one of the shoes, noted the tag on the inside of the shoe’s tongue: an oddlyformed letter that looked like a reversed numeral 3. Beneath the three he saw other characters he guessed must be Russian. Made sense. This guy, Viktor’s brother, was wearing shoes from Russia, or Eastern Europe, or wherever they were from.
Kneeling beside the quivering form, he began to put on the left shoe. No skin-on-skin contact. Not that it mattered; he’d already tou
ched this man, already killed him.
The man’s limbs were stiff, the muscles of his legs quivering as he convulsed, so Stan had to concentrate to get the shoe on the inflexible foot as he—
“Hello?” a woman’s voice blurted from the short hallway behind him.
Stan stood and half turned, looking at the woman who had spoken.
Her eyes flickered, looking first at Stan’s face, then at the shoe he still clutched in his hand, then at the form of Viktor’s brother, half on the couch, half on the floor, body quieting from heaving convulsions to mere twitches.
He tried to think of something to say, but really, what could he say that would make sense of this scene? And in the end, what did it matter? He’d done what he came here to do. His target was dead (okay, dying), and he could simply move on to the next hotel or apartment, sequester himself for a few weeks with a few bottles of painkillers, kill the dreams that tried to seep into his conscious world.
He let the shoe fall to the floor, put his hand in his pocket, feeling the latex of the gloves brush against his fingers. All he had to do was get these gloves on, get to the door, and get away. No need to explain anything to this woman.
She moved quickly, coming across the floor and dropping to her knees next to the man on the floor. Viktor’s brother. Didn’t even know his name.
Stan paused for a moment, pulled the latex gloves from his pocket, pulled one of them on, lifted his foot and stepped over the man’s legs.
But as he did so, the woman did something unexpected. Without looking up, she grabbed his hand—his bare hand—and began pulling. “Come on,” she said, her voice sounding eerily calm. “He’s gonna die if you don’t help me.”
That statement might have made him smile in other circumstances, the irony of it all (he’s gonna die if you don’t help me), but all he could concentrate on was his hand. Her hand.
Touching.
(You got the dead blood, child) And nothing happening.
The mild electrical itch was there, but the words were new, something he’d never experienced before.