“I need water,” Jenks said petulantly. Dandine let him reach for one of the plastic bottles on the bar. Jenks rinsed his mouth and spat on the floor. Then he focused on what he could see of me—the reverse angle on my own mirror point of view. “You,” he said. “You caused all this.”
“Worry about me, not him,” Dandine said.
“To hell with it,” said Jenks. “Your days are numbered. Turns out your little à la carte op didn’t fly so well. You’re running out of time, aren’t you?”
“What’s he talking about?” I was trying to divide my attention between the road and the revelations Jenks might provide.
“You, you asshole.” Jenks dabbed his chin with a cocktail napkin. I could almost smell him building resistance, and Dandine, preparing to shut him down. He pointed at Dandine. “This man’s job was to develop and turn a civilian asset—a total stranger—feed him a completely fabricated story, and within a few days, convince him to murder another total stranger.”
“Complete horseshit,” said Dandine.
“Is it? Consider all the casualties of your last couple of days. You certainly strewed a lot of corpses around, getting to one simple target.”
“Who was the target supposed to be?” I said.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“He’s talking about Alicia Brandenberg,” said Dandine.
“And you did it, too, didn’t you . . . you repulsive little shit.” Jenks was talking about me. “And you let this . . . this assassin sweet-talk you into it.”
“Negative,” said Dandine. He let Jenks see the gun again, then jammed it into the hollow of his chin, nearly lifting the bigger man off the leather seat. “I threat-assessed that bitch myself, per contract. So you owe me. Bit of a conundrum, for you.”
“You didn’t do Alicia,” said Jenks, with no verve, as though his neat cosmic order had been plunged into partial gray.
“Yes. I did.”
Both Jenks’s eyeballs rolled and refocused. He was trying to see the hidden trapdoor in what Dandine said. “No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did!” Dandine shot me a look that said can you believe this guy?!
“No. No, that doesn’t suss out, at all.” Jenks seemed legitimately confused. “All the others—Varga’s soldiers, Choral Grimes, Ripkin’s watchdogs—they were all rookies, seconded to your team. They were told it was a training op and played dead when you needed them to. Guess they washed out when you decided to use live ammo, eh, sport?”
The whine in my head was subsumed by all my skin alarms, shrieking. Say what?!
“It doesn’t matter who stamped Alicia paid in full,” said Jenks. “That usurious cunt died right on schedule, just like her pocket boyfriend. I signed off on both of them. They had outlived their value. But the local laws were supposed to scoop you two idiots, but that didn’t work out because you keep fucking around with the program!”
Dandine was shaking his head no.
Jenks made a hissing sound of dismissal. “Hey, driver? Don’t believe me? Read the goddamned dossiers. I’ve got them in my office. Interested in how this creature selected you as his patsy? Guess what: It involves somebody you work with, at Kroeger.” He snorted. “At least one of us already knows what Katy Burgess looks like, all naked and sweaty.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“My office gets you proof.” Jenks was positing one of those lady-or-the-tiger propositions. “NORCO just gets you body bags.”
Dandine pegged his temple with the pistol. Jenks yelped, collapsed to one knee, and saw his own blood again; too many times for one day. He shouted at me, enraged, imploring.
“Don’t you get it, you moron? You’re supposed to die! You take this man back to his buddies at NORCO, and you can smooch your brainless ass goodbye!”
I couldn’t arrange the facts in my mind, and Dandine could already see doubt polluting my expression. Jenks was wresting control. Even beaten and bloodied, he sounded like a man telling the truth, because there was nothing left to lose, and he knew it. He hadn’t begged or tried to bribe us. He hadn’t acted like a politician at all. But I knew why his claims struck me as a symphony of false notes . . .
. . . because I was a professional liar, too.
“What about your little buddies at NORCO?” I said.
“That’s what I’m telling you. We worked a straight-across swap deal: They get Alicia out of my hair; I get the gunslinger, here, out of theirs.” (Pretty surreal, considering that most of Jenks’s hair was on the floor.) “Deliver me intact to NORCO, and I’ll prove it’s the truth. Deliver him to NORCO, and you’ll suffer what we used to call ‘death by friendly fire.’ ”
“He just added the part about how his competition could also get incidentally neutralized,” said Dandine. “Kind of like an extra dessert, not on the bill.”
Jenks drew what might be his last breath, and made sure I noticed. “Well, what’s it to be? You can believe this man if you want to, but let me remind you of how many people are already dead, because of him.”
Dandine, as thoroughly fed up as I’d ever seen him, sat back in his seat. “Yeah, Connie—what’s it to be?” He sounded the same as a smooth lover, saying have I ever lied to you?
The First Interstate Bank building was within sight, within moments.
I couldn’t find my voice anymore.
“Get that fucking gun out of my face,” Jenks said. “Don’t you know who I am?”
“I know one thing you don’t, G. Johnson,” said Dandine. “Ripkin is alive. Think about that, very carefully.”
I witnessed Jenks’s cocksure expression melt into horror just as I rolled the privacy shutter back up. I heard the gunshots (muffled, three more tightly packed bangs in a row), but did not see them. Somehow, that helped keep it unreal.
In the fifteen minutes since we had escaped Park Tower, massive deployments ensued, and I still believe, to this day, that Dandine knew precisely what would happen. This wasn’t a “plan”; it was an antiplan, as graceful as callow youth, rushing in, gung ho, bang-bang. The velocity of what had taken place kept my brain stunned and detoured enough that I couldn’t see how hopeless a frontal assault would be. In the end, it did the one thing it was designed to do: It got us noticed.
The persistent, high-pitched whine now living in my right ear hadn’t helped my logic processes, either. So, when the stolen limousine I was driving took the first hit, it scared the starch right out of my bones because it seemed to come from the ether, from nowhere, a total shock.
I knew from the moment Dandine buzzed the security partition down that I was going to squander valuable minutes, just yelling. I couldn’t help it. I had to get it out of me, or at least throw it somewhere else, because my composure had been gnawed down to a ribbon of shredded nerve endings, and the bite of small, sharp teeth on my stability now had little objective, apart from the delivery of more pain, and more . . .
G. Johnson Jenks, political hopeful (the former Garrett Stradling, corporate ramrod for big oil), was facedown in a pile of himself on the cabin floor, no longer soiling his lungs with our polluted Southern California air.
“What’s the best way to sell bullshit, Connie?”
“We’re fucked. We’re doubly-fucked. That guy was supposed to walk us into NORCO,” I said.
Dandine had dots of Jenks’s blood on his face. Before he had rolled down the partition, he had lit up a cigarette. “The best way to sell bullshit is to eat a big scoop yourself, and go yum, yum! right in front of the disbeliever’s eyes.”
“You killed him,” I said. “You let him get under your skin, and you just fucking killed him.”
“Yeah. Shooting that dick was a pleasure.”
“But you don’t kill people. You demote them. You neutralize them. You take them out of the game. You make them subpotent. You ‘unplug’ them. But you don’t get anybody killed—including me!”
“What are you talking about?”
Nervous stomach and all, I felt all the symptoms of an itchy em
ployee girding to piss in his superior’s face. “You’re the only one who ever walks away.”
“Connie, watch the goddamned road, would you?”
“Stop telling me what to do!”
“Listen: Jenks was as skilled in his bullshit specialty as you are in yours. He was making that stuff up to save his hide.”
“Yeah, like those dossiers,” I said, teeth clenched. “Yours may be in fantasyland, but mine is sure-as-shit real, because I saw it on Zetts’s computer!”
He snorted smoke and looked away. “Look, goddammit, I know you’re upset, but look at all the live ammo that’s been thrown at us in the past couple of days, and think about this: I’ve been on the hide for a solid year from these motherfuckers! So what, exactly, are you trying to get off your chest, here?”
“What was all that crap about your ‘mission’? ‘Developing an asset’?” Pegging all the deaths on me?! Is that what I’m for?! The designated scapegoat?”
Was that how Dandine could slip, wraithlike, through the world of the walking dead? Because innocent bystanders would never do anything ‘in the moment’? It was as useful as plausible deniability. Normal people react on time-delay, and only take action if they think they might get on the news, or collect a cash settlement. Otherwise, they’re blind, and sometimes, they got in the firing line and became anonymous ex-people. In the moment, they freeze to see what everyone else is doing. I’d seen it at the airport. And the other kind of people—people like Dandine—existed in the spaces between those moments. Which is how this kind of madness could transpire on public streets, in broad daylight, and you or I would never hear or read about it . . .
. . . which meant that I wasn’t one of Dandine’s ilk. I was one of them, a single-use, disposable asset no different from a vial of hotel shampoo.
“You were going to throw me to the wolves at NORCO,” I said. “That’s why the handcuffs.”
“Pretty close, but not completely . . .” He made a conscious effort not to shout me down. He was attempting reason. “Look, there’s nothing hidden under the First Interstate Bank building.”
“Then why are we driving there?!”
“Because for some reason, Jenks believed NORCO was there. Take it from me, they’re not.”
“You’re saying the Sisters had it wrong?”
“I’m saying the Sisters had outdated information. If you’ll just calm down for a second—”
He maintained his placating tone to the end of our conversation, still trying to get me to buy his product. Our duel was postponed by a huge vehicle veering in from the left and ramming the limousine, driving us up onto the sidewalk midway across the Sunset overpass to the 101 Freeway. We obliterated a bus stop bench and a litter basket, then got wedged between a streetlamp pole and the concrete berm that looked down to the freeway. It felt as though all my teeth had been pried loose with pliers, rearranged, and shoved back into the wrong sockets. I banged my upper lip hard on the top of the steering wheel, and Dandine shot halfway through the divider window, like toothpaste spurting from a dropped tube.
I got an impression of a big truck, or an armored courier transport with a snowplow on the front, bumping onto the sidewalk and angling in front of us. Then another of the same type of vehicle, a wingman we hadn’t seen, piled in from behind, hoisting the tail of the limo off the pavement and cranking us hard right. The rear glass starred but did not burst. We fell from one side of the cabin to the other. My face mashed hard against the passenger side window and I got a close-up view of the hurricane fence above the berm, all that separated us from an ungainly plummet to the busy roadway fifty feet below. We were damned close to where Dandine had sacrificed a previous Town Car to the van shoot-out—about half a block. Through the canted, Dutch angle of the windows, I could see many men. Men in uniforms, men with guns. Cops and plainclothesmen. Shotguns and automatics. The jet-wash of a helicopter shuddered the limousine as it thundered above us, near enough to make loose parts trickle off the car. We were completely surrounded.
“You okay? Connie!”
My lip ached and my front teeth felt wobbly. My peripheral vision had become a nimbus of dust. Dandine hauled head and shoulders through the divider. An errant line of blood from his nose made a rivermap pattern on his face.
“Those slugs can’t pass through this car,” he said. “Not even the glass. They’ll have to crowbar us out of here. What do you want to do?”
“I think . . . we should fight ’em,” I said, sounding like a drunk.
I have a faraway impression that I threw up, then, tasting breakfast stuff, made vile by my stomach juices. As the dust cloud irised shut across my vision, I thought, there aren’t any innocent bystanders out there, not one.
THE DAY AFTER NEXT
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the gag where I turn out to be in a lunatic asylum, having made all this up; a benign, nondescript life, thrust headlong into adventure and danger. As Andrew Collier would say, what, all violence and no sex? You just lost half your audience. Put the girl back in.
Strictly speaking, from a sales standpoint, I understand the option. If this was my movie, I’d be screaming about studio interference. But it was never mine, I’m not even the protagonist of my own first-person narrative.
When the biggest lies are laid down, the liar usually says, may God strike me dead if I lie, or I swear to God, and the biggest liars are all atheists, anyway. Remember that when somebody swears fealty to you based on their dear departed mother’s soul, or the lives of his or her dent-headed, mutant children, “God” is merely a useful expletive. It conforms nicely with “dammit” to put enough consonants in your mouth to indicate how piqued you are.
Dandine had never sworn he was telling the truth. He didn’t care. Whether the walking dead believed him or not was inconsequential.
“Mr. Maddox? Conrad? I see you’re back with us.”
Someone was using my name, trying to goad me into some kind of revelatory flashback. No, thank you.
“Conrad? Come on, open your eyes just a little bit. I’ve pulled the blinds so the light won’t hurt your eyes.”
Steady beeping. The dial tone in my skull had subsided to a vacancy, an absence of sound in my right ear.
A woman’s voice, “Don’t be like that. The machines say you just woke up.”
My eyes slitted. Sterile white linens. TV set. Vital signs monitors. A food tray. Hoses and IV tubes. Good. I could skip the part where I asked where am I?
“Who are you?” The cold engine block of my voice stalled out.
“My name is Vanessa.” The ID tag on her nurse’s uniform read Strock. I was flatbacking it in a semiprivate ward with my privacy curtain drawn. I was wearing a hospital johnnie and my feet were cold. The television burbled faintly, aimed at whoever shared the room with me, on the far side of my curtain. Some old black-and-white show, regularly interrupted by color commercials at a substantially higher volume. Right before we fell into the twenty-first century, the Federal Communications Commission had shattered the so-called “15-minute ceiling” by sanctioning a total of 15 minutes, 44 seconds of advertising per broadcast hour. More than a quarter of each hour now equaled ads. Good for me, not so good for you.
“Vanessa Strock,” I said. “Nice.”
“Good, you can understand me.”
“What happened?”
“I’m here to fill you in,” she said. She was willowy and long, that is, tall. Thick brunette hair pinned up. An appealing shape, for her length. She smelled wonderful. “You’ve had a rather gnarly concussion, and it’s not the first in the past few days, is it?”
“I hit my head.” Not a lie, exactly, nor the full-disclosure truth.
“Mm. A lot of shattered capillaries in your forehead.”
“I hit my head.” My mouth was extremely dry. She had a paper cup of water all ready.
“Just sip,” she said. “Don’t gulp. Now let me do the flashlight thing, okay?” Penlight beams knifed into each of my eyes as she check
ed my pupils. “We might be able to risk giving you a painkiller. You hurting?”
“Head feels bad.” Another partial lie. My body felt fresh off the torture rack. My neck muscles had turned to molten lead. I was wearing a foam collar. I was glad they hadn’t locked me in one of those radar-dishes vets put on animals, to keep me from licking myself or gnawing at stitches.
“You’re going to be a bit disoriented for a while,” Nurse Vanessa told me.
“What else?”
“You have two cracked ribs. Good for you for wearing your seat belt, otherwise the steering wheel would have caved in your chest.”
So far, so dire: The anvil weight on my chest, crushing my breath to a rasp, was a stabilizing wrap of tape. “I was in an accident.” It wasn’t a question; it was a summation of my past few days. “How long?”
“Yesterday,” she said. “We were afraid for a moment that you might not wake up and talk to us.”
Demon thoughts of coma and vegetation jabbed my mind. “What happened to the man I was . . . driving?”
“I don’t know about that. I do know they brought you in, solo.”
“Who brought me in?”
“Fire department paramedics. Don’t try to move that left arm too much, because your wrist is fractured. I’m more concerned about that one-two blow to the head. We’re going to take it very easy at first. A light Demerol drip, just so everything doesn’t ache so much. The plastic shield on your front teeth is just to stabilize them. You’re lucky; you didn’t lose any.”
“Where are we?”
“Cedars-Sinai.”
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