The Last Christmas: A Repairman Jack Novel

by F. Paul Wilson

  “You were dying of cancer.”

  Another nod.

  “According to Hess, whatever they’ve been doing to you cured the cancer. Did you know that?”

  A nod.

  Jack leaned back. What a bloody mess. David Quinnell had considered himself a dead man, and so he’d sold his dying body to those two devils to let them do whatever they wanted in exchange for half a mil for his wife and daughter. And now he was cured but no longer David Quinnell.

  “You’ve got to go back. You know that, don’t you?”

  Vigorous headshakes.

  “David, you’ve gotta see that there’s no place for you out here. They’ve turned you into a…” He’d been about to say “freak” but thought better of it, even though Quinnell was every inch a freak now. “I don’t know what you’ve been turned into, but the only place for you is Plum Island.”

  The headshakes became continuous.

  “You could be the answer to cancer.” Damn, he hadn’t meant for it to rhyme, but why not go with it? “Think about that, David. The answer to cancer. You could be it. And who knows? Maybe someday down the line Cilla might need the cure you’re carrying. Think about that.”

  The headshakes stopped for a few heartbeats, then resumed.

  Poor guy. He’d thought his days were numbered so he didn’t care what they did to him. But now he was going to live and he wanted what he’d had. But that could never happen. He’d traded his humanity…

  Wait.

  Hadn’t Abe said the Quinnell mortgage was in arears and the bank had started foreclosing? That didn’t jibe with Mrs. Q receiving a half-million-dollar windfall.

  Unless…

  “Oh, shit. Oh-shit, oh-shit, oh-shit, oh-shit, oh-shit.”

  Quinnell gave him a questioning look.

  The sons of bitches. Had they kept the money for themselves?

  “I don’t think Jelena ever got the money.”

  Jack instantly regretted his blurt. But the mendacity, the sheer, unalloyed, unabashed avarice had propelled the words past whatever filters he possessed.

  Quinnell stared at him, mouth agape for maybe a full fifteen seconds, then went into a wild, thrashing, roaring, full-tilt berserker rage. Looked like the neuromuscular agent was wearing off. To the cuffs’ credit—and the pipe’s as well—they all held. No doubt the residual effects from the muscle relaxer helped.

  When Quinnell finally ran out of steam, Jack said, “I’m going to find out what happened to your money.”

  A questioning look: Why? Why do this for me?

  Good question. Jack didn’t have a good answer.

  Okay, yeah, he did. Hess and Monaco…that they could do something like this—that anyone could do this—offended him beyond all reason. His fingers itched to close around someone’s throat.

  And old mentor’s words echoed from the past: There are certain things I will not abide in my sight.

  “I have a few questions of my own for Doctor Hess. I’ll add in one about your money. And I’m not talking about tomorrow or the next day. I’m talking tonight. Now. Because I have the fucker’s address.”

  16

  “If he got on a plane we’re royally fucked,” Poncia said.

  “But he didn’t.”

  “Oh, and you know that how?”

  “Because JFK’s been shut down most of the day.”

  “But we should still check it out. He might have a ticket and be sitting there waiting for the storm to stop.”

  “Big ‘might be.’”

  “Mister Apfel will want to know that we checked everywhere for this guy, Tonto—everywhere.”

  Number seven. Keep it up.

  Strange how little it bothered him now that he knew Poncia was a dead man.

  They were making their way through Ozone Park where Woodhaven Boulevard renamed itself Cross Bay Boulevard. Aqueduct lay off to the left, Howard Beach straight ahead. The trip down from the LIE had taken longer than Tier ever could have imagined. And to no avail. No pings.

  Where was Jack?

  Here was what he knew: Jack had been heading west on the LIE and then he’d turned south onto Woodhaven. No chance that he was playing them with misdirection because he hadn’t known he was being followed at the time. As far as he knew, he’d ditched his tail on a snowy side street in Queens.

  Because of all that, the best odds placed Jack’s destination south of the LIE and either along Woodhaven or west of it. JFK Airport lay in that quadrant.

  Tier wanted to cover all possibilities, but the chances of Jack renting a Jeep just so he could leave it in one of the JFK lots seemed slim to none. But what if he had? It wouldn’t take them long to do a circuit of the long-term and short-term lots. If the Jeep was anywhere on the JFK site they’d get a ping. He just wouldn’t hold his breath.

  But on the plus side, Howard Beach was down by JFK. After running around the airport, he could use the opportunity to check it out.

  “The airport it is,” Tier said.

  “Good thinking. Otherwise I’d have to rat you out to the boss. You know, as my duty.”

  Tier followed the JFK arrows onto the Belt Parkway where the going was slow.

  “We could be out all night at this rate,” Poncia said. “You got a squaw waiting up for you?”

  Tier decided to count that as a “Tonto.” Number eight.

  17

  The address Abe had given him for Hess was a mile or so south of the Southern State Parkway in Freeport which, though in the next county, wasn’t all that far from Aqueduct—maybe 20 miles west. A half-hour trip in good weather along the Sunrise Highway, miles to the south, but Jack didn’t know how much plowing had been done down there. The Southern State was bigger, busier, and more important. But even so, only two of its three lanes were drivable. Took him almost an hour to reach the West Seaman Avenue address.

  The Freeport sanitation department was doing a better job on the local streets here than New York City was doing for its outer boroughs. But then, NYC had more streets.

  Hess’s place was a side-by-side, two-family Dutch colonial with a mansard roof. Both halves were lit. His street looked like it had been plowed recently—not down to the pavement by any means, but enough to offer solid footing for the Jeep’s four-wheel drive. His driveway was untouched and the plows had built a solid berm along the curb. Jack parked in the street. He couldn’t see the plows coming back anytime soon.

  He climbed the berm and slogged through a good eighteen inches of snow on the lawn to the double doors located front and center. The one on the right bore the number 922A, with 922B on the left. Hess’s address had an “A,” so Jack tested the storm door on the right and found it locked. A quick twist of the blade of his folder knife fixed that. He hated to treat his Spyderco that way, but when Hess opened the inner door, he needed to believe he still had a barrier between him and whoever was on the front steps. Jack rang the bell and a few seconds later saw a silhouette peek through a front window. Could have been Hess himself, or maybe his wife if he had one. If Hess himself, he wouldn’t recognize Jack in his hoodie.

  Jack rang the bell again and this time the door opened. The shock of recognition was just lighting Hess’s expression through the storm-door glass when Jack pulled it open and pushed him back into his living room.

  “Jack! W-what are you doing—?”

  “Who else is here?”

  “No one.

  “No wife, kids?”

  “I’m divorced, no kids. Look—”

  Excellent. Okay, down to business…

  “Where’s Quinnell’s money?”

  His eyes widened. “Have you gone insane? Quinnell…” Jack could almost hear Hess’s mind racing. “Quinnell is dead!”

  “Cut the crap. I’ve got him.”

  Now Hess’s eyes went from merely wide to double wide, verging on Tex Avery bug-out. “Here? You brought him here?”

  “No. But I can go get him if you want.”

  “No-no!” Then the eyes narrowed. “Wait�
� you pulled this on me already. Fool me once—”

  “He told me about the money. About everything.”

  Hess relaxed and managed a laugh. “Now I know you’re lying. He can’t talk.”

  Jack stepped closed. “You just told me he was dead.”

  “Well, I…” Sputter-sputter, then, “Yes, well, of course: Dead men can’t speak.”

  Enough of this. Jack pulled out the Spyderco and used the thumb hole to flick open the four-inch blade. “You’ve heard of the Death of a Thousand Cuts, right?”

  A shaky laugh. “Oh, come on. You don’t have it in you.”

  Hess was right. Well, probably. But Jack was pissed enough to get started. He remembered something Burkes had told him when they’d met in Julio’s the other day.

  “Didn’t Burkes warn you about me? About collateral damage.”

  Hess shook his head but his expression said otherwise.

  “I’m thinking I should change your name to ‘Collateral.’ And if you think I won’t damage you after seeing what you did to David Quinnell—”

  “He knew what he was getting into! Full disclosure—we told him exactly what we were going to do—or try to do—and he agreed!”

  “But not for free, right? He wasn’t doing it for the sake of humanity or the advancement of science. He was doing it for his family—for half a million dollars to go to his wife and daughter.”

  The wide-eyed look again. “How can you know this?”

  “He told me.”

  Hess’s voice rose to a shout. “But his hyoid bone regressed to nothing. He can’t speak!”

  “No, but he can still write by scratching letters.”

  Hess’s expression said he’d never thought of that.

  “Okay, okay! But we paid his wife. We gave her half a million in cash—a whole suitcase packed with stacks of hundreds.”

  “Really? Then why’s the bank foreclosing?”

  After years and years of fixes Jack had learned that there comes a point in any battle, whether of wits or bullets or fists, when one side senses that the momentum has shifted the other way, never to return. Jack saw that in Hess’s face. He’d run out of lies.

  “Tell me the story from the beginning,” Jack said. “The abridged version. And no lies.”

  Hess let out a sigh that could have come from his toes. He backed into an easy chair and sat hard.

  “We’d hit a wall injecting the human stem cells. We’d get impressive physical alterations but all the animals would die before we could test their intelligence.”

  “That lysis thing you mentioned.”

  “Yes. Cellular lysis. Agent Greve was getting impatient and—”

  “He’s your Defense Department handler?”

  “Was.”

  “Was? The one Quinnell killed?”

  Hess shook his head. “That was Monaco’s fiction. H3 didn’t kill anyone on Plum Island.”

  “You call him ‘Quinnell’ now. No need to continue that ‘H3’ fiction either.”

  “H3 was his official designation and, as he began to change, we both found it easier to call him that. It became uncomfortable—at least for me—to think of him as ‘David’ and ‘him.’ So he became ‘H3’ and ‘it.’”

  “‘It rubs the lotion on its skin.’” Jack singsonged.

  Hess looked genuinely confused, but Jack didn’t want to get into a sidebar on Jame Gumb.

  “Not important. So, this Greve guy…?”

  “He was our DIA overseer. He held the purse strings and we were afraid he was going to cut off our funding if we couldn’t show some results soon—real soon. For years Monaco had been itching to reverse the protocol: inject animal cells into a human. He mentioned it in passing at one of our monthly meetings with Agent Greve, and—”

  “And he jumped on it.”

  “With both feet.”

  “Sounds like a swell fellow.”

  “A scary fellow. But he became all excited. Human intelligence would already be onboard. If the treated stem cells could confer animal properties to make the subject a more effective warrior or scout, we’d have what he called ‘a home run.’ The problem was finding a volunteer. Our candidate would obviously need to be someone desperate, say, terminally ill, with nothing to lose long term.”

  “Seems like a waste of time. If you make changes in someone who’s already knocking on death’s door, what use can they be to Defense?”

  “We needed an initial trial just to see if the process had any effects at all on a human. You know—a feasibility test. If the human subject’s immune system rejected the stem cells, there’d be no point in going any further. But if we saw changes—any changes—then we’d design a whole new protocol.”

  “But still…a tall order finding someone.”

  “Greve thought otherwise. He said the Federal penitentiaries would make an excellent source. The max security pens are full of murderers and rapists and terrorists and other human detritus who’d be mourned by no one. He started researching potential subjects and came up with David Quinnell.”

  “Who had cancer, right?”

  “Yes. Advanced pancreatic cancer for which he was refusing treatment. He preferred to die rather than stay a prisoner. He was perfect. So Greve made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and he volunteered.”

  Sure, Jack thought. Help his family and maybe do some good with his death. Hard to refuse.

  “Did you tell him you were going to turn him into a wolfman?”

  Hess made a supplicating gesture. “How could we? We had no idea this would happen—we didn’t know if anything would happen. We sure as all hell didn’t know the stem cells would be killing off the cancer cells within months of starting therapy. He’s cancer free now. That’s why it’s important we get him back.”

  “You cured him of cancer?”

  Hess shrugged. “As scientists we can’t say that. We can say that Quinnell’s cancer went into remission during the stem cell therapy, but without a clinical trial we can’t say it caused the remission.”

  “And no clinical trial is going to happen because curing cancer isn’t on the Defense Department’s agenda.”

  “No. But it might be on our agenda.”

  “You and Monaco?”

  A vigorous nod. “A couple of more successes like H3—I mean Quinnell—and we can take it to NIH. And from there the sky’s the limit.”

  “Meaning you become famous.”

  “Right. But not necessarily rich.”

  Ah, Jack thought. Here we go.

  “And there’s the rub. That’s why you stole from Jelena Quinnell.”

  “It’s not stealing! She never had it—didn’t even know about it. And Greve gave it to us, not Quinnell!”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he didn’t want any of his men involved with Quinnell’s family. The money was in a suitcase. We were supposed to present it as airline luggage that had been found in a storage area. It would have Quinnell’s name and address on it. We were to have it delivered to his wife as lost property and then vanish.”

  Not a bad plan.

  “So Greve gave it to you with the understanding that you’d funnel it to Quinnell’s family. But you didn’t. I don’t get it. I mean, half a mill isn’t a life-changing amount for two federal employees.”

  “It’s a start. With Quinnell’s success, we could see more suitcases coming down the line. And hey, we can do a lot of good with that money. Quinnell doesn’t deserve it. If anything, he owes us for making him cancer free. He’s alive because of us.”

  “But he has to live as a wolfman. And his wife and daughter get kicked out of their home.”

  “A home that was bought with money Quinnell made in whatever illegal scheme he was involved in.”

  That did it. Jack suddenly had his fill of this self-righteous bastard. He was still holding the Spyderco. He didn’t allow himself to think about it. He raised it and plunged the blade well into Hess’s leg. He put a good amount of force behind it. H
e had to go through his slacks and his skin, and human skin is tougher than most people imagine. But Jack kept his blades honed. Stabbed him mid-thigh—through the center of his quadriceps, far away from any major artery, but down to the bone.

  Hess cried out, twisted in his chair, and tumbled to the floor. Not Jack’s idea of fun, but he hid his reticence as he watched Hess writhe on the rug, clutching his thigh.

  “Hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

  “Are you crazy?” Hess said through pain-clenched teeth.

  “No, Mister Collateral. I’m simply pissed off. Make that very pissed off. That’s cut number one. Nine hundred and ninety-nine to go.”

  “No!” His expression said he was a believer now. “What do you want?”

  “I want the money. And don’t tell me it’s in a bank, because that won’t fly. No way you could go on record with that kind of cash. The DoD would know. Which means you’ve hidden it. Where?”

  “Monaco has it.”

  “Really? Why am I not surprised? That means you’re gonna call him and tell him to bring it over here. Now.”

  “But he won’t bring it! He won’t give it up, no matter how you threaten me!”

  Jack wiped the blade on Hess’s slacks. “Then I guess that means you’ll have to find a way to convince him. And to provide inspiration we’ll start with cuts number two and three and—”

  “Wait!” That defeated look had invaded Hess’s features again. “He’s next door.”

  “What?” Jack hadn’t seen that coming. “You guys share the place? Are you a couple or something?”

  Hess gave his head a quick shake. “Me and Monaco? Are you crazy? Nothing like that.”

  “Then why?”

  “Once we decided to keep the money, like you said, we knew we couldn’t spend it without Greve getting wind of it. We also knew we had to stay close.”

  “Why don’t you just come out and say it: You don’t trust each other.”

  “Would you trust Monaco?”

  No love lost there, Jack thought.

  “My Trust List is very short.”

  “Yeah, well, as Monaco said, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”