Terrific; I could order a cheeseburger from the Hard Rock Cafe.
“Mind if I ask you a question?” she asked. “You were wearing a shoulder holster. Are you a detective or something?”
“I keep my cigarettes in it,” I said. How embarrassing: I’d been collected while wearing an empty shoulder holster. Somebody playing tough guy.
“Who sent me flowers?” There were several carded bouquets on the bureau against the wall.
“Well, let’s see . . . Kroeger Concepts . . . this one is from someone named Katy [she pronounced it “Katie”] . . . lady friend?”
Katy. My dream solution, my much-missed potential soul mate. Far in the background but never far from my thoughts. And, if Jenks was to be believed, some kind of player in the whole NORCO fantasy. I had shared cock tails with her, obsessing about the briefcase. If she was in on the whole deal it would cause me to seriously revamp my definition of irony. If she was not innocent, then about a hundred reasons for her to keep her distance lined up in an orderly fashion. It was a paranoid’s worst wet dream.
“My head is cold.”
“We have an ice strip up there for the swelling.”
“Oh. Got a mirror?”
“All you’ll see is bandages.” Vanessa seemed mildly perturbed that I wouldn’t just take her word for everything. She retrieved a hand mirror from the bureau.
I had a clear plastic tube feeding into my left nostril; a bite wing, making my speech mushy. Big, gauzed, Frankensteinian forehead. Whiplash collar. Two black eyes, from the drainage. I looked like a fearful Cretaceous mammal peering out of a cave. More hoses, for waste, and a saline drip. I was catheterized. Left forearm encased in a fresh plaster cast. Visible contusions on my chest, above the tape mummifying my rib cage. I coughed and felt an ice axe drive into my sternum.
“Try not to do that,” she admonished.
“Okay. Good idea.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No, not a bit.”
“Maybe later. We’ll try again later, how’s that? Now, I’m here to keep an eye on you until eight A.M. The call button is on the rail next to your right hand if you need anything, or feel any distress. Otherwise it’s bed-rest for you, mister. You’re not going anywhere for a while. You should feel that Demerol sneaking up on the back of your head about now.”
I tried to grab her arm with my good hand and the motion sent hot coals cascading down my back. Nerve pain, muscle spasms. “Eight o’clock?”
“No sudden movements. It probably hurts, right?”
I slumped back to neutral; that hurt just as much. “Yeah. You’re here till eight in the morning? What time is it now?”
She didn’t wear a wristwatch. She consulted a vintage railroad watch, tucked into her smock on the end of a fob chain. It was deeply charming. “Ten at night. Ten-oh-six, precisely.”
God, the limousine with me and Dandine inside had been rammed yesterday afternoon.
“Nobody else came in with me, or at the same time?” She’d already answered this, I knew, but I was hoping I had been delirious, and misheard.
She shook her head. Nope. “But it’s nice to have you back with us.”
“Nobody named Dandine?” That was hopeless, but I ventured it, regardless.
Another negative. She had to go do other stuff. “Remember—call button’s next to your right hand.”
On the television, two mad scientists were apparently exchanging brains, through the intermediary of a tarted-up lab full of blinking lights. Remember, she’d said. As I floated into a rather luxurious, chemically enhanced doze, I tried to remember.
“Ever notice that?” Zetts had said. “In movies, like when there’s a lot of action and chasing around? Like nobody ever stops to eat. They just keep, y’know, actioning.”
Ever notice, in thrillers, how the hero can be on the run for days without a snack, and how they’re so cool they can get hit in the face with a shovel, and keep right on chasing the bad guy?
I mean, have you ever been hit in the face with a shovel? It would flush your whole day, minimum. You’ve got trauma, bleeding, fractures, concussion, maybe a busted nose. Boxers shrug off busted noses, sure, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel them. You’d think taking a home-run swing in the face with a large metal garden implement would at least give you a heartbeat of pause. You’ve got to be an alien (or have a shitload of animal tranquilizer in your system) not to feel that. Hell, if I stub my toe in the morning, I think about that all day. You walk funny, your shoes hurt, you’re leery of stubbing it again. Even a fellow the likes of Dandine could only Zen away so much of that inconvenience. I’ve never met anyone totally inured to physical pain, and if I have, they’re probably dead now.
Essentially, I had stubbed my whole body . . .
And I was alone in this hospital, insofar as fellow casualties were concerned. No Dandine. Maybe he was under another name. But no one had come in the same time as I had. I already knew in my gut that he wasn’t here, and my brain was too fatigued to worry about proof.
My wife, Sophie, was the most important thing that ever happened to me. Don’t laugh. I know I said “thing.” Life, I found out, was something that happened to other people, while I was busy selling them . . . things. Facts and figures are things—quantifiable data that can be formed into lists. What the lists of things cannot encompass (and indeed, what dossiers kept by the minions of NORCO could never assess) is the emotional tone of those statistics. The coloring, the shading, the important stuff, which cannot cohere to the militaristic dominion of ones and zeros. So, while certain nefarious conglomerates might have bunches of numbers about me, they didn’t have a hope in hell of knowing anything that was truly vital. I suddenly felt cushioned, remarkably safe.
I didn’t wake up until lunchtime.
THE FOLLOWING DAY
The older you get, the more you know, and the less you’re sure of. Selected shoot-outs and vehicular entanglements never make it onto the news—ever notice that? You come home to find your neighborhood cordoned off by police, and after they withdraw there’s no update. Nothing really happened. Terribly unlikely, but no one ever says anything.
I needed to fill my blanks with bigger and better blanks, and once Katy Burgess visited me, I wound up knowing considerably less than I had scant days ago.
“Burt would have come, but . . . you know Burt,” Katy said, finding a chair and dragging it close enough to hold my good hand. My god, she looked spectacular; my ingrained boy-coding made me watch her sit, watch her skirt ride up over silk hosiery. It made a heartbreaking sound. “My god, Connie, what the hell is going on in your life?”
“Thanks for making that call when I was . . . you know.”
“In the slammer?” She grinned and her blue-gray eyes sparkled. “Your message was so cute. You acted like I was the last person in the world who would know the number of a bail bondsman.”
“I couldn’t think of anyone else to call.”
“Should I take that as a compliment, or a sad assessment of your personal character?”
“Talk about something else,” I said, my spine and legs throbbing from so much horizontal time. “Anything else. Talk about work.”
“Maggie’s baby is due. Burt gave her French time off, practically.”
“Which means Burt has got to repurpose three warm bodies from the hottie pool to cover Maggie,” I said. Maggie was Burt’s executive assistant. The hottie pool was a rotating corral of incompetents Kroeger kept hiring with something like endless optimism, giving them about a month each to burn out. Maggie was also Burt’s hit woman; if you were getting married and Burt didn’t show for the wedding, you’d get a voicemail from Maggie explaining why and tendering all regrets.
“Okay,” I said, “I meant talk about your work.” I was trying to pick up from where we left off . . . before.
“Boring. I’ve been doing vendors and designers ever since we had our not-quite-a-date. Know how much G. Johnson Jenks has in his campaign fund? Over f
ive mil, nonapplicable to the matching fund. That means major—”
“Katy!” I almost jumped too fast. Bad idea, to jolt things loose, inside and out. “Sorry, but . . . when was the last time you saw Jenks?”
“Day before yesterday. He’s out in the world somewhere, pressing the flesh and minting the cash.”
No, he’s supine on a slab in the morgue that might otherwise be needed by a real, dead human being, I thought, if NORCO hadn’t taken his body and simply mulched it into cat snacks. I didn’t want to ponder what had become of Dandine. Nor did I want to bring up to Katy the way that sonofabitch Jenks had talked about her . . . but I chose the lesser of two rotten options.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “Please. I don’t mean this to sound like it does. But did you have anything going on with Jenks, I mean, besides the business relationship?”
She arched one contrail eyebrow. “Connie, I do believe you’re blushing.” She put her fist on her knee, her elbow on her fist, her other fist on her chin. She appeared to be puzzling out an intricate math problem. “You mean, like a relationship?”
“I apologize. It’s stupid. I don’t have any right to—”
“Shut up. You’ve already stepped in it, and it ain’t apple pie. All you have to do is look at the guy. He’s half a century older than me. He wears a for-god-sake toupee. How much class do you think I don’t have?”
“You’re right, I—”
“Shut up,” she said. “I’m talking. Now, I think the only reason an otherwise sane man might ask an obnoxious, insulting, prying question such as that, is if said man perhaps felt threatened, in some way.”
Threatened, by Jenks. Oh Katy, I thought, you have no friggin’ idea.
“No, more like unbalanced by an overdose of unreality,” I said. I tried to find ways to encapsulate the past few days for Katy’s benefit and could conjure no explanation that would not sound completely insane. Not only was I stuck with my story; I was stuck with it alone.
Gesturing was tough, so I had to push out words: “Katy, when this madness is done, I promise I’ll regale you with a tale such as you’ve never heard. You alone. I owe you at least that much, and I guarantee you will not get the minimum consideration. You took a chance on me. You went to bat for me. Nobody else did. And that gets you in deeper than most of the walking dead out there. But not until it’s over, and I promise, also, that I’m not just trying to be mysterious.”
“You forgot rule number one.” She smiled. “Never try to hustle a hustler . . . and you’re laying it on with a trowel.”
“Blame the meds.” I felt myself sinking into the adjustable mattress. Tar, trying to engulf me. “Okay. Very shortly now, you’re going to find out that G. Johnson Jenks is out of the running, permanently.” At this point I would have raised my hand for dramatic emphasis, to cut short her protest. I had to give it to her no-frills, sans semaphore. “Don’t ask. That’s the ‘later’ part. Yes, it is for your own safety. I’m serious. Here’s what you can do: Find Ripkin, if you can. The Beverly Hills cops have got him squirreled away somewhere because Jenks tried to have him killed. I found out, and that’s why I’m here, convalescing.”
To her credit, she did not immediately call for the psycho-ward orderlies. But her aura of tolerant humor had dissipated. “You’re saying that you’re not finished, yet, with whatever it is?”
I nodded, practically immobilized, strapped into a bed, full up with thoughts of continuing a battle against phantoms, even after I had been so definitively benched. I could return to my apartment, now; show up for work after a brief sick leave, and it would all be as Dandine had told me—my life, spackled over, refinished and painted, leaving no evidence whatsoever of mishap. And right now, I hated that inevitability. I was furious for my glimpse behind reality and angered that I was now supposed to ignore what was real.
Then, after that first day back at work, once I’d gotten up to speed on my job and my obligations, I was supposed to have cocktails, recreations, and dalliances, and return home to my security building, lock my door, put down my briefcase . . . and then what? Look at myself in the mirror and confirm the truth: You are one of the walking dead.
And then, one day down the line, I quite incidentally get clicked off like a switch and nobody notices.
I couldn’t do that, and I think Katy saw that I couldn’t do that, which said a lot for her as an ally. I did not have to ask her, what would you do?
(Perhaps you are shaking your head at this point, and thinking, What the fuck is wrong with this guy? Give it up, for christ’s sake, before they pummel you into mud. Haven’t you learned anything? You don’t stick your dick where it isn’t wanted. You indulged your wild, fancy abandon and look where it landed you; and it could have been lots worse. Cut your losses, fool. Play the game the way you’re supposed to. You got a get-out-of-jail-free card and you’re just squandering it. Keep your high-paying sinecure, your toys and fancy ladies, and stop messing about with the system. You’re eating, and millions aren’t. God, you’ve got it made, and you’re bitching about how it’s not enough because the “truth” is wobbly. Who cares?
(Or perhaps you can understand why the same simple list of items kept reverberating inside my head: [1] It’s not enough. [2] It’s not finished, and [3] I hate being forced, to do anything. Period.)
“Therefore,” she continued, “what you are really saying is that I shouldn’t ask, and you can’t tell. But you will.”
“I promise.”
“You’d better, if you know what’s good for you.”
I had no idea what was good for me, other than staying alive.
Katy was standing at the closet where my street clothes were stashed. My shirt was bloodstained. She held up the shoulder holster as though she’d discovered a strap-on dildo amongst my stuff. “Is this part of what you’re not telling me?”
“Call it a bad idea.”
“That’s a good nonanswer. You packing, now? A taste of urban paranoia?”
“It belongs to a guy nobody will admit exists.”
“Your imaginary friend?”
“Katy,” I said, trying to act more like an invalid. “Not right now, okay?”
“Then what do you want me to do?” she said. Her tone was clipped; all flirtation was cancelled, and she resented being left out. I wanted to tell her, but I did not want to watch the resultant vacuum suck her into a black hole.
“Find Ripkin if you can,” I said. “Play everything normal. It won’t be long, now. Bring back some folding cash, if you can. And above all—assume you’re being watched. Don’t act paranoid or alter your routine. Just . . . know. Okay?”
“I’d better get a hell of a dinner for this. Two dinners, at least. It’ll take you that long to make up a good story . . . so I can pick it apart.”
“Thank Burt for the flowers; I know how gay he thinks that is.”
“You have another admirer, too,” she said, examining the cards on the bouquets. “DMZ? Lady friend?”
Funny, Nurse Vanessa had said almost the same thing, but I could not gauge how long ago.
“Not nearly,” I said. “And far from competition with you.” I was aware that while I was enjoying Katy’s company and the sound of her voice, I was trying to repel her, to get her out of my range in case something drastic was scheduled to happen inside the hospital. At least I’d gotten her to stand, as a prelude to exit. But she kissed me on the cheek before she departed and it caused my heart to ice up with sorrow. Rotten timing, I thought. Rotten all around. All my fault.
My mind had become a sieve. I reviewed benchmarks and came up lame. My memory could not approximate a likely location for Rook’s eyrie, west of Laurel Canyon. The Sisters no longer existed. Varga’s crew would have run to Earth and erased their tracks. My pal Andrew Collier would wink at me . . . and deny everything to anyone else. The too-tempting First Interstate address given for NORCO had been a blind, according to Dandine. Everyone else who might help me or clear away clouds was d
ead or under deep cover. I couldn’t guess at where Zetts’s house had been, and even if I could, it might not be there now.
My memory was behaving almost as though I had been given a drug to obliterate precise types of recall.
And while I was at it, what about Dandine? What solid proof did I possess that he wasn’t, in all boring predictability, my own version of Mr. Hyde? Was there some impartial third party I could use to verify his existence? People I loved? People I trusted? None, none, and none.
Dandine was the sort of creature who ceased to exist between missions. But that did not mean he stopped existing altogether. You had to know how to tune your perceptions, to tilt your vision so you could perceive him there in the background, blending unobtrusively, where he’d been all along. Kind of like those moments where you enter a room and immediately forget what you were looking for; that doesn’t mean you weren’t in the room in the first place. Or those times when you have to concentrate away from something, in order to call up some vagrant, lost fact.
Ripkin, I thought, again. Supposedly the police still have him. That was not for me, but something on which I could reasonably sic Katy.
“One last thing, Katy, and this is important: Do you know about, or have you ever heard of, an outfit called NORCO?”
She thought about it. “Other than a drug company, I don’t think so. You know—pharmaceuticals.”
“Also known as the North American Consultancy?”
“No.”
And then, out of the ether, out of pure nothingness, I came up with someone else to ask, someone who had nothing to do with Dandine. My own resource. Mine.
Life is a bottle of wine. If you don’t sip with deliberation, you slurp blindly. Connoisseur versus addict. Or, like me, you try to float above it all because you want to put up a good front, without actually knowing or caring about chapter and verse on vintages and “nose.” I even faked Dandine out. I even impressed the Sisters, right before they died. That’s me, a dusty, respectable-looking bottle of Faux de Merde. Sip with me, and try to ignore the earthy afterbite of the merde. Everything in life boils down to this sort of blind corner-turning—your pivotal event is not intrinsically momentous or earth-shattering; most often it simply happens and you feel no tingle, no vibration indicating the world is about to change. Consider, then, how rare and special it is when you are fully aware of an apocalyptic course-change in your life in the moment, as it befalls you. (Consider, also, how many people you know only perceive the best days of their lives in retrospect, with the insulation of time. Some sainted wiseass said that once.)
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