Death Glitch

by Ken Douglas

  “ Doesn’t sound like she kept her mouth shut,” Peeps said.

  “ I offered her a lot more. Besides, there doesn’t appear to be any love lost between the daughter-in-law and Eisenhower. The woman doesn’t believe Eisenhower will pay. She thinks it’s a trick of some kind, but she couldn’t afford to take the chance, so she agreed to keep Amy hidden.”

  “ And you’re telling me, why?”

  “ I want you to go and get her, of course. I’ll have a couple of my people pick you up. They’ll also have the money I promised the woman.”

  “ Why do you need me?”

  “ You’re a police officer. You’re older. You look believable. All qualities my men, good as they are, lack.”

  “ So, you’re thinking Amy might not come peacefully, that it?”

  “ That’s right. So it’s your job to see she does.”

  “ Alright,” Peeps said, but he didn’t sound enthusiastic.

  “ Oh and, Peeps,” Mansfield said. “You bring me that girl and I’ll see you get more money than you’re able to imagine.”

  “ Yes, sir.” Peeps perked right up. “But having your guys pick me up isn’t going to work very well, I’m in Medford, Oregon.”

  “ What?”

  “ We were with the FBI. We almost had the Eisenhower woman, but she got away, in large part thanks to Lila Booth.”

  “ Say again.”

  “ Lila Booth. She’s helping Eisenhower. Looks like they’re a team.”

  “ Does anybody else know this?”

  “ No, sir,” Peeps said. “I recognized her straightaway, but I kept my mouth shut. I’m not stupid.”

  “ Did your partner see her?”

  “ Yes, but he doesn’t know her. He doesn’t have a clue as to who she is.”

  “ Alright.” Mansfield clenched his teeth. “I’ll give you the address. My guys are driving a white Escalade and they’re leaving from Reno now. They’ll be there in about an hour and a half. I’ll call the Medford airport and arrange a plane for you. How quick can you get there.”

  “ Straightaway,” Peeps said.

  “ When you land at Susanville, wait at the airport. My men will find you. They’ll give you the cash. Pay off the girl’s stepmother, then bring me the girl.”

  “ I won’t let you down, Mansfield.”

  “ I know you won’t,” Mansfield said, only half believing it. He sighed, then hung up.

  Mouledoux was having a cigarette with one of the Medford plainclothes cops as Peeps took his call. At first Peeps looked agitated, but he seemed to settle down. The guy was a bundle of nerves, this business was maybe too much for him.

  Peeps put his phone in his pocket, waved, then approached.

  “ I gotta go, wife’s sick,” he said. “One of the locals is letting me take his ride, said it was cool as long as I left it in short term parking.”

  “ Cool, he actually said it was cool?”

  “ I guess that’s the way they talk in Oregon. They’re very friendly.”

  “ And he’s letting you take his unmarked?”

  “ He cleared it, but why wouldn’t his chief okay it? They’re friendly, like I said.” Peeps smiled, but it didn’t look real. “You’ll need to be here for a couple days getting this all straightened out. I’ll be back.”

  “ Alright, I’ll see you then.” Truth be told, Mouledoux was glad Peeps was going. The last thing he wanted was Peeps bumbling everything up with the feds. If he was going to find Eisenhower, he needed their help. And if she wound up in their custody, so be it. He just wanted to know what was going on, how she got to be the way she is.

  “ Thanks, partner.”

  “ Don’t mention it.” He took a final drag on his Marlboro, then stubbed it out as Peeps hustled across the parking lot toward the car. He turned toward his smoking pal. “You all think anybody’ll mind if I go over to the Carl’s Jr.” He pointed. “Get something to eat, then go back to my room, get a shower and change.”

  “ How long you think you’ll be gone?” the man said.

  “ Forty-five minutes, an hour tops. This circus is gonna go well into the night.”

  “ Yeah, go ahead, go. I’ll cover for you, just like you’re gonna be covering for your partner.”

  “ I’m not the fuck up he is,” Mouledoux said.

  “ I can see that.” He smiled. “Go ahead, go.”

  Peeps Friday checked the GPS application in his iPhone. He loved that app, didn’t know how he’d ever gotten along without it. He got on the freeway, heading north and got off on the next exit, making a right at Biddle, where he got the surprise of his life when he saw Lila Booth and Isadora Eisenhower blow past in Lila’s black Jag, heading south, away from the airport.

  He pulled into the left lane, but there was a divider and it was impossible for him to make a U turn.

  “ Damn.” He thumped a hand on the steering wheel. By the time he got turned around, they’d be long gone. Still, he had to try. He swung the unmarked left, jumped the divider, making as close a U turn as possible as the undercarriage scraped the divider.

  A horn blared. A tow truck was bearing down on him. Peeps accelerated, almost lost control in the turn, barely avoided sideswiping a white minivan, which was going about fifteen miles an hour under the speed limit. He had to brake to avoid hitting it, instead of accelerating and swinging into the left lane. He could’ve made it. Braking was instinctive and stupid, because had not the honking tow truck’s driver been as fast on his own brakes, he’d’ve plowed into Peeps. As it was he got his truck stopped inches from Peeps’ turning vehicle.

  And for reason’s unknown the slow going minivan screeched to a stop, smoking rubber, locking Peeps between the minivan in front and the tow truck behind. He hit the horn, wanting the mini van to get out of the way, but instead of moving, the door opened and a woman old enough and heavy enough to be his grandmother climbed out.

  “ Are you crazy?” she shouted, marching toward him like a samurai warrior, cane in hand.

  The tow truck driver was out of his truck, too.

  “ Police officer,” Peeps shouted as he shut the engine off and got out of the car. “I’m in pursuit.”

  “ Bullshit!” the tow truck driver said.

  “ Really.” Peeps pulled his badge from his inside coat pocket.

  “ Is that how they taught you to drive at the police academy? You should watch where you’re going,” Granny said.

  “ Sorry,” Peeps said. “I saw a felon and didn’t think.”

  “ You could have killed someone.”

  “ He said he was sorry,” the tow truck driver said, voice and tone deferential, now that he’d seen the badge.

  “ Can you just move your car out of the way?” Peeps said.

  “ Sure.” Granny started back toward her van, completely unmindful of the fact that she’d not only stopped traffic, but that she’d aided a couple felons in their escape. And escape they had, because they were long gone, without ever knowing they’d been spotted.

  He got back in his unmarked as Granny was climbing back into her minivan. Behind the wheel, he started his car, pulled around Granny as he reached for his iPhone to call it in. But then he stopped himself. If he called it in, he wouldn’t be getting on that plane anytime soon, wouldn’t be picking up Amy Eisenhower in Susanville, wouldn’t be collecting more money that he could count from old Manny Wayne.

  Better to let it alone, he thought. Better to pretend he never saw them. Besides, maybe he’d imagined it. At the next light, he made an illegal U turn and headed back to the airport and that waiting plane.

  As Lila piloted her Jag into a used car lot on Riverside, Izzy was struck with the thought that they made a rather odd couple. Izzy had spent her whole life working to save lives and Lila had spent hers taking them. In any other set of circumstances, she’d run from someone like Lila as fast as her feet could fly, but these were no ordinary circumstances and Lila was no ordinary woman. She was a killer, yes, but she was something more. Iz
zy couldn’t quite nail it down in her head, but there was something to Lila that just plain made Izzy like her.

  “ There, I want that car there.” Lila pointed to a sleek looking black car as they were driving by a place called Tommy John’s Pre-Owned Vehicles.

  “ It looks like something Darth Vader might drive.” Izzy said as Lila swung the Jag into a quick left.

  “ It’s a Dodge Charger. It’s the other car the cops drive.”

  “ Other car?”

  “ Yeah, most of them either use Ford Crown Vics or Dodge Chargers.” She pulled into the car lot. “There’s sunglasses in the glove box. Not much of a disguise, but better than nothing.”

  Izzy popped the glove box, pulled out the glasses, put them on as Lila got out of the car.

  “ Hello, ladies.” The voice came from a big man, sporting a Yankee’s baseball hat and a Yellow Hawaiian shirt that was bright as summer on this bleak winter day. “Tommy John at your service.”

  “ What’s a car like that doing on a lot like this?” Lila pointed at the Charger.

  “ There you go, right off the bat, disrespecting my place of business.”

  “ It’s a valid question,” Lila said. The car lot seemed to be one of those places that sold repos and the kind of cars dealers took in trade that weren’t up to the quality one would expect of a new car dealership.

  “ What, I can’t have a new car on my lot?”

  “ It’s not new,” Lila said.

  “ Almost.” Tommy John smiled. “It belongs to my son. He bought it six months ago. Now his soon to be bride is pregnant with twins, so they want something more practical.”

  “ Fifteen thousand cash, if you can have us on the road in less than ten minutes.”

  “ There’s rules.”

  “ Seventeen.”

  “ Paperwork.”

  “ Twenty and I drive the car out of here. You pay off your son’s loan and keep the difference. I get clear title, because you gave it to me. No record of the money.”

  “ And I explain how I got the cash to pay off the loan, how?”

  “ Twenty-five and I don’t care.”

  “ Thirty.”

  “ Done,” Lila said.

  “ Then we better hurry,” Tommy John said, “because we’ve already wasted half a minute negotiating.”

  “ You can drive a stick?” Lila said to Izzy.

  “ Who do you think you’re talking to?” Izzy said. “I learned to drive in my dad’s ’54 Chevy. Do you think it had an automatic?”

  “ Oh, yeah,” Lila said. “I wasn’t thinking.” She smiled. “I’ll drive the Charger, you can follow. We’ll be right back.” She turned back toward Tommy John. “I just used up another half minute, so now we really gotta hurry.”

  “ Follow me to my office,” Tommy John said and in less than ten minutes they were back. Tommy John opened the driver’s door for Lila, who tossed some papers into the back as she got in the car.

  “ It was a pleasure doing business with you Mr. John,” Lila said.

  “ Come back any time,” Tommy John said as Lila started the car.

  Izzy followed Lila to the hotel, where she parked four spaces away from Lila. She got out of Lila’s Jag with a smile on her face. It was a fun car to drive.

  “ Hold it right there, Dr. Eisenhower.” The voice was male, authoritative. A policeman. “Turn around slowly and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Izzy turned, saw a handsome man in a grey sport coat that looked like it had been slept in. For slacks, he wore faded Levi’s. His shirt was white and his tie was loosened at the collar. All this Izzy took in in a heartbeat. She also took in the revolver in his right hand. He was the policeman they’d faced down back at the Fred Meyer store.

  “ No, you hold it.” Lila, still wearing her duster, came up behind the rumbled looking plain clothes policeman and from the look in the man’s eyes, Izzy guessed she had a gun at his back.

  “ I saw you in the Suburban with the feds,” Lila said as she went to the Jag and got her bag. “You’re not one of them, so who are you?”

  “ I thought you didn’t know cars,” the man said.

  “ I lied. Again, who are you? And please don’t try my patience and don’t lie, I’ll know if you’re lying.”

  “ Detective Bob Mouledoux, Reno PD.”

  “ Any you’re here, why?”

  “ Specifically, I’m here to change and get a quick shower.” He holstered his weapon. “I’m in Medford because of the youthful Dr. Eisenhower. And, of course, because of the trail of dead bodies she’s been leaving behind.”

  “ Dr. Eisenhower,” Lila said, “we need to get out of this parking lot.”

  Izzy took the short walk to the back door of the hotel, slid her key card through the device on the door, opened it and Lila led the policeman into the hall. She followed, closing the door after herself.

  “ Your room?” Lila said to Mouledoux.

  “ One twelve.”

  “ Close, that’s convenient,” Lila said. “Let’s go.”

  Mouledoux went to his room, slid his card key through the slot. Lila and Izzy followed him in.

  “ Now what?” he said as Lila closed the door after him. “And what’s that?” he said, looking at the strange gun in Lila’s left hand.

  “ This’ll put you out for a few hours.”

  “ I thought you’d just shoot me and be done with it.”

  “ I could do that, but if you give me your word you’ll forget about us, pack up and go home when you come to, then I’ll trank you and in a few hours you’ll have your life back. Besides, why should I kill you, if I don’t have to?”

  “ Didn’t seem to bother you, killing those feds.”

  “ No it didn’t, but then I didn’t have much choice, did I?”

  “ You could’ve surrendered.”

  “ Man had a gun and he was coming at me.”

  “ He was doing his job.”

  “ Yeah, well he wasn’t doing it very well.” Lila smiled. “Know this Bob Mouledoux, a few days ago, I’d’ve shot you dead and not cared a wit. But for reasons I don’t understand, I’m going through some kind of change.”

  “ I’m glad of that, I guess.”

  “ So, give me your word you’re out if it and it’s the dart and not a bullet between the eyes.”

  “ You have it. I’m done with this. You have my word on it.”

  “ Okay, sit on the bed, better you wake up there, then the floor.”

  “ Right.” He did as she said.

  “ Please don’t make me regret not killing you.” She shot him in the thigh.

  “ Ouch.”

  “ You owe me,” she said.

  “ I’ll try to remember that.” He grimaced, fell back onto the pillows.

  “ I think that went well.” Lila said.

  “ Maybe you’re not as bad as I thought,” Izzy said.

  “ Maybe not,” Lila said. Then, “Let’s go get Black and the dog and blow this place.”

  “ That’s got my vote.” Izzy went to the door, glad Lila was on her side. She slid the card key through the lock, pushed open the door and both women gasped.

  On the bed, sitting up with a bewildered look on his face, was a much younger version of Black. He looked beautiful in a devastating sort of way. He was also swimming in his clothes, because he was about a foot and a half shorter. He was also several pounds lighter. He was lean and muscled like an athlete.

  “ Holy shit!” Lila said.

  “ Yeah, holy shit!” Izzy said.

  “ So this isn’t a dream?” Black said.

  “ No, it’s not a dream,” Lila said.

  Hunter barked.

  “ Hey, you’re supposed to be quiet,” Izzy said.

  “ Wanna tell me what happened?” Most people would be in shock, but Black seemed to be taking in what had happened to him in stride.

  “ You got shot in the back,” Lila said, “and were very close to dying until Dr. Eisenhower laid hands on you,
well actually, she mingled your blood with hers and here you are less than an hour later, shorter, but alive and very much younger.”

  “ Yeah, my skin’s lighter, too.” It was true, his black coffee skin had turned into a light cafe au lait brown. “I can live with all that, it’s this other thing that’s a worry.”

  “ I can see that,” Izzy said.

  “ Yeah, me, too,” Lila said.

  “ You have blue eyes,” Lila said.

  “ I haven’t seen a mirror yet,” Black said. “Been afraid to.”

  “ I can understand that.” Izzy sat on the edge of the bed. Lila sat on the other bed.

  Not only was he younger, shorter and more fair of complexion, he was female.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Izzy hadn’t known exactly what would happen when she mingled her blood with Black’s, but she hadn’t expected this. Black healed and younger, yes, because that’s what had happened to her after she mingled blood with that pregnant woman in Reno. She’d been thinking that had to be the cause of her miraculous recovery and sudden youth. That was confirmed now, as far as she was concerned.

  But this, this was impossible and she said so.

  “ It’s happened,” Lila said. “So it’s possible. Besides, look what happened to you. If you can accept that, you can certainly accept this.”

  “ I don’t think I can,” Black said. Her voice had sort of a melodic ring to it. “How do we change it back?”

  “ I don’t know,” Izzy said. “I don’t think we can.”

  “ Christ.”

  “ You’re a chick now, sister,” Lila said. “Get used to it.” She smiled.

  “ Not funny,” Black said.

  “ How about we call you Blackie.” Lila’s smile got bigger. Clearly she was amused.

  “ Don’t like it,” Black said.

  “ Tough shit,” Lila said. “You’re Blackie now and I’m guessing Blackie you’re going to stay.”

  “ No, I think I’ll just stick with Black.”

  “ Suit yourself,” Lila said.

  “ It could be worse,” Izzy said.

  “ Yeah, how?” Black said.

  “ You could be dead,” Lila said. “You would’ve been if Dr. Eisenhower hadn’t healed you.”