“He wasn’t alone,” I said. “Did anyone bother to tell Esmerelda you and Watson and Madame Sing were so cozy?”
“Nesto made an end run,” Elron said. “Thought he’d lock down Bairn and deal himself in for more than just his day rate. But you can ask him how’s that working out when you see him. You and Freddie are going for an ocean cruise.”
“Which ocean?”
“Seriously, Mr. Walker, does it matter?”
I looked at the woman. “I’m hoping for the Pacific. I’m always on the wrong side when we fly over the Grand Canyon. Also I have a gun.”
“Which as Elron and I pointed out is useless.”
There was a control panel on the wall inside the hatch, mounted flush with an LED reading forty degrees. I figured it belonged to the refrigeration unit. I took aim at it.
Elron advanced a step. I shifted the pistol back toward him. “You first,” I said. “Then I throw a log on the fire. I’m getting a chill.”
“You won’t shoot.”
I moved the gun again and fired. The bullet passed through the end of a cooler on a shelf and traveled through two others lined up next to it before coming to a stop.
“Jesus!” Elron shrieked.
Madame Sing said, “That was an expensive point. You have no idea how much human organs bring on the international market.”
“None,” I said. “But I can always ask you for the latest quote. Let’s hike it up a little. What’s the expiration date when you turn on the heat?” I took aim again at the control panel.
“Stop!” she shouted.
It wasn’t meant for me. Wilson Watson had come running to the hatch in response to the shot. He was back in ghetto mode, with a Chicago Bulls warm-up jacket, baggy carpenter’s jeans, and a helmet liner on his head. He stopped his momentum with a hand on the arch. Victor Cho’s face appeared over his left shoulder.
“Release him,” Madame Sing told Elron. “We’ll finish this in the cabin.”
“Better make it quick,” I said. “Didn’t your old man ever tell you what happens when you leave the door open to the ice box?”
“He left when I was three, after setting my mother on fire.” But he knelt at my feet.
The cable attached to my leg was fastened to a steel staple in the floor, part of a system built in to secure cargo. Elron took hold of the turnbuckle key in both hands. He had blisters on his right. He tightened his grip and took in his breath. His neck bulged, a vein in his acre of forehead stood out. The key turned a quarter inch. He exerted himself a few more times and it came loose. I pulled my foot out of the collar. I gestured with the Takarov and he rose and stepped back. A shudder racked my shoulders when I got up. It was warmer in the compartment with the hatch open, but my circulation was just getting started. My head hurt all over, not just where Elron had hit me with the Russian ordnance. Dr. Cho mixed a mean cocktail.
“Seat belt light’s on,” I said. “Everyone return to your seat.”
Cho was the first to move. His hand gripped Watson’s shoulder and the labor lug turned away from the hatch. Charlotte Sing touched a button on the control panel, lowering the temperature to thirty-six, and followed him into the cabin.
Elron started to back out, facing me. I made a twirling motion with the gun. He filled his chest, emptied it, and turned around to walk out forward, his shoulders up around his ears. He knew what was coming. I snapped on the safety catch, took the pistol all the way back, and swung it at an oblique angle to avoid hitting the low ceiling. The barrel caught him on the occipital bulge. He hit the floor hard enough to jiggle the plane.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Was that necessary?” Charlotte Sing watched me change hands on the gun and shake circulation back into my hand. It had been like hitting a steel post with a lead pipe.
“Apart from the pleasure involved, it helped even the odds. I kind of liked him when I met him. Then he turned into a company man.” I shut the hatch behind me, found the lock mechanism by touch, a spoked wheel six inches in diameter, and turned it tight.
“I lowered the temperature. He could die of hypothermia.”
“Doubtful,” I said. “It takes a couple of days to freeze a side of beef.”
“I underestimated you. You looked too real to be authentic. But the odds are far from even.”
“I’m not through chipping.” I raised my voice. “Weapons on the floor, everyone. Kick them my way down the aisle.”
Cho said, “I’m not armed.”
Watson said, “Same here. I let Elron do my carrying.”
“I’ve never owned a firearm,” said the woman. “You can search me if you like.”
“Maybe later, when we know each other better.”
I decided not to search any of them. Patting people down requires time and close contact, and a gun is hard enough to hold on to without someone wrestling you for it. Anyway, if any of them were packing, another gun would have made an appearance when my shot had brought them running. It was a theory I had little faith in, but I was understaffed and out of my element.
Something crackled and a tinny voice came on over a PA system. “Everybody okay back there? I thought I heard a noise.”
“What about the pilot?” Charlotte Sing asked.
I said, “A pilot with a gun is redundant. Give him the high sign.”
She hesitated, looking uncertain for the first time in our acquaintance.
“Tell him what you like,” I said. “What’s he going to do, radio for help?”
“That would be awkward. This flight doesn’t exist.”
Heavy blue curtains separated the cabin from the cockpit. She went that way, touching seats for balance, slid one aside, and leaned through the gap. A minute later she was back with me.
The plane was a twelve-seater turboprop. The passenger cabin was no larger than the cargo hold. That made it a courier vessel. That reminded me of something, but I didn’t bring it up until we were all seated. Watson and Cho raised the arms on seats opposite each other and sat sideways on the cushions. I directed the woman into a window seat and perched on the arm of the one next to it so I could keep all three covered. We weren’t as high up as I’d thought. Through the window showed the same checkerboard pattern of fields and forests you saw everywhere in the country. At least we weren’t over water yet. I was becoming a full-blown hydrophobe.
“San Francisco’s west,” I said. “We’re heading east, unless that bash in the head and the stuff in Cho’s needle screwed up my internal compass.”
“Sweden,” said the woman. “With a stop to refuel in upstate New York and Scotland.”
“Sweden, is that where the market is?”
She said nothing, profiled against the window with her chin on one knuckle. She looked like an ancient Chinese coin.
“Seeing that liver made me hungry for onions,” I said. “It also answered the question that’s been eating my lunch for days. Hilary Bairn worked in the accounting department of a medical courier service. That’s what made him worth all the fuss. You wanted him to juggle the books to put your hands on transplantable human organs and laboratory paraphernalia. That’s big money on the black market. It could finance an alien-smuggling operation on the grand scale for years. No wonder he ran scared.”
She sat back and turned my way, crossing perfectly lathed legs sheathed in glistening black hose. She was a well-preserved specimen in her own right. I wondered how much time she spent in refrigeration.
“It’s a squeamish subject for many,” she said. “The scientific community deals in it like scrap. I don’t bother with microscopes and serums; equipment is too bulky to transport for what it brings, and chemicals too volatile. You’d be surprised how many respected professionals, Nobel prospects, don’t ask questions they don’t want to know the answers to when it comes to raising money for research. That liver you spilled is worth two million in cash to someone who can afford to have himself placed at the top of the list of qualified recipients. Your own Mickey Mantle got a boost, in
spite of the fact his condition was self-created.”
“He was your Mickey Mantle too,” I said. “You’re a citizen.”
“You wouldn’t know that by the way I used to be treated in stores. Of course, that was before I began making purchases in hundreds of thousands.” She opened a hand as if to let something fly away. “Sweden is beautiful, but it’s dark six months out of the year. Swedes consume more alcohol per capita than all of Europe, including Russia—which is our next stop after Stockholm. Cirrhosis kills more people in both countries than traffic accidents. Then there are corneas in Israel, kidneys in India, bone marrow in South Africa. In Sydney, Australia, a healthy heart would buy you twenty thousand acres of pasture in the Outback.”
“I’m allergic to wool. If it’s a bribe you’re offering.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you with your gun. You won’t leave this plane alive.”
Watson said, “She’s fly, Walker. We’re just passing the time on account of Elron forgot to bring magazines.”
“Stop talking like Shaft or I’ll put you on ice too. That was a nice fishing expedition at my place. You didn’t want to find out who killed Esmerelda; you gave Madame Sing your okay on that because he tried to set himself up in independent business and you’re a closed-shop kind of guy. When you found out how much I knew you tried to buy me off. That call I made to her was unnecessary. I already had the black spot out on me.”
“She wasn’t pulling your chain about the money. I put the screws to Bairn but good, for my cut. How’d I know he’d wind up offing his bee-yotch?”
I let him have that one. He was a cartoon.
“You’re sure Elron didn’t pay her a visit?” I asked. “Just to make sure the screws held? He likes hitting people on the head. Then comes the madame to offer Bairn a way out of the frame. Is Cho a lawyer, too? Maybe a sushi chef?”
Charlotte Sing said, “That was racist, and ungrateful. He chose merely to sedate you when others suggested a fatal overdose. Victor defected from North Korea, bringing with him a medical breakthrough from the hospital where he was head of research to endear him to your—pardon me, our State Department. He was given asylum, and later citizenship, but predictably the government back home was unwilling to release transcriptions of his qualification to practice medicine. He was delivering mail when I offered him a more respectable position.”
“Spinning the wheel in Detroit Beach. I thought you only owned the property the casino stood on.”
“No one can prove otherwise. About anything.”
I scratched my chin with the gun sight. Three hours’ growth of beard scratched back. That gave me a fair idea of the time I’d been in the Phantom Zone. I wondered if anyone was missing me. “On a second pass, Bairn got too notorious too fast because Deirdre Fuller was a secondhand celebrity. It made sense for Violet Pershing to save his butt when she saved it, but when the cops tied him to Esmerelda’s murder and Loudermilk sprang him from me to keep him from talking, he became a two-time fugitive and hotter than a tin skillet. Back to Violet Pershing to mop up.
“So who stocked the refrigerator?” I jerked my thumb toward the locked hatch.
Madame Sing made a sound deep in her throat. “I had a backup. He looked less promising than Bairn, but he came through in the end. People generally do when there’s so much money to be made.”
“There’s a lot of money in gambling too,” I said. “There’s a lot of a lot more in parting out the human body over two hemispheres; enough to buy up all of Australia, with New Zealand for a winter getaway. Not enough for you, though. The profits from the ready-to-assemble line are just startup to import the finished product into the U.S. What’s next?”
She said, “People respect money. The more you have, the better the respect, and no one cares about the color of your skin or how many brothels you worked in when you were young and didn’t know the language or the culture.
“I’m unique among the Fortune Five Hundred,” she went on. “It’s top-heavy with rags-to-riches stories, but mine is the only one that started with the rags on my back belonging to someone else, and me with them. When a slave becomes a queen, it’s more than human interest in The Wall Street Journal. It’s biblical.”
After she stopped there was no sound in the cabin but the droning of the engines and the air whistling over and under the wings. We were over a large patch of water now: Lake Erie, if what she’d said about putting down to refuel in New York State wasn’t some kind of blind. I switched the Russian pistol to my other hand, working my fingers as if I had a cramp, but really air-drying my palm. The weapon had grown clammy in my grip.
“Not about making money, then,” I said. “Just keeping score. You’re not the first foreigner who taught herself English reading clichés.”
“Don’t believe my press, Mr. Walker. I’m not made of ice. The numbers are shifting, didn’t you notice? Hispanics are the largest minority in the country, well on their way to becoming the majority. Dearborn—Henry Ford’s town, the birthplace of history’s most infamous xenophobe after Adolf Hitler—shelters the largest population of Arabs outside the Middle East. They’re streaming into western Europe as well; in London, the wailing from the mosques drowns out the bells from Winchester Abbey. Not so long ago, your own government—your government; I don’t vote—became so alarmed at the hordes of Asians crossing its borders it established a quota system designed to reduce immigration of that one specified race to zero. I’m just balancing the scales. When I’m finished, we’ll learn whether a yellow majority treats the dwindling white race any better than when it was the other way around.”
I laughed. “Lady, you’re nuts. I never figured to hear the Yellow Peril speech in my lifetime, let alone from an Asian.”
“Amerasian,” she corrected. “I’ve just enough of the devils’ blood to borrow their methods.”
Wilson Watson said, “Shit. I thought I had issues with the Man.”
My stomach sank, but I wasn’t afraid of Charlotte Sing, or even of the water now. The second smallest of the Great Lakes had slipped out from under us and we were over the patchwork quilt of New England, or New Amsterdam, or New Spain, or whatever the long chain of earlier immigrants had chosen to call it, beginning with the Indians, who’d crossed over from Siberia with no thought of conquest or wealth, just mammoths and mountain bison and new material for arrowheads. They were the only true minority left. The engines had changed pitch. We’d begun our descent.
I put the pistol back in my working hand. I was about to lose the biggest part of my advantage. In a little while, if it hadn’t happened already, the temperature would rise dramatically, the pressure would become equal inside and out, and I’d have to shoot all three of them to maintain status, not just threaten to punch a hole in the plane. They realized it, too; I could feel it as surely as the change in altitude. And I wasn’t alone.
Something heavy struck the cargo hatch from the other side, hard enough to jar the plane from nose to tail; a shoulder, with 280 pounds of steel-tempered body behind it. The pull of gravity had revived Elron, in the hold with all those glands and eyeballs. The gasket held, but it squeaked. He’d back up for another try. I stood and backed across the aisle to widen my field of fire. I could feel the others bracing themselves for the rush.
TWENTY-EIGHT
But Charlotte Sing’s first concern lay elsewhere. “You must let him out,” she told me.
Elron hurled himself against the hatch a second time. Something cracked. She flinched. She was made of something softer than polished granite after all.
I said, “I guess it would take a lot of time to locate another plane with cold storage if he breaks this one. You might wind up with just a load of sweetmeats.”
“What’s the difference?” Cho asked. “You can’t land safely with that going on.”
“Okay, unlock it. Not you,” I told Watson when he got up. “You two are a bad influence on each other. We’ll let the doc do it.”
Cho rose. His expression was tragi
c. “Please don’t call me that. Without credentials it’s just taunting.”
“Sorry. Sensitivity’s the first thing to go when you’ve been held down and drugged.”
“I had no choice.”
“You could have stayed a mailman.”
“I’m a scientist!”
“You’re a kidnapper and a smuggler. Open the damn door.”
“Victor,” Charlotte Sing said.
That trumped him. He crept down the aisle, took hold of the wheel, turned it, and backed away hastily to avoid being struck when it swung open from inside.
Elron paused with one hand on the hatch while he waited for his pupils to catch up with the light in the cabin. Then he saw me and charged. I fired at his feet. A hole opened in the floor. New York State whistled.
It stopped him, but it was obvious to everyone now that depressurization was no longer an issue. I spoke fast. “Sit down and strap yourself in, all of you. Ladies first when the shooting starts. No boss, no payroll.”
Elron hovered, clearly in the no-man’s-land between complying and drawing my fire. I didn’t know how many the foreign piece held, or how many it would take to stop him.
“Go for it, Elron,” Watson said.
The big man was fast from a standstill, blocking out the woman as a target as he pounced. My finger flexed on the trigger.
Then the floor tilted forty-five degrees and I snapped one off that missed Elron and shattered a window. The glass striated, then caved in to the wind pressure from outside. The engines yawned with the sudden change in course. I grabbed for the back of a seat, missed that too, and fell sprawling across that seat and the one next to it. I didn’t know if the maneuver was prearranged between Madame Sing and the pilot or if he was reacting to the sound of the earlier shot, but he dipped the other wing just as sharply and I tumbled to the floor, hitting my elbow and numbing my arm and hand. The gun sprang free, struck the carpet, and skidded between the seats opposite, thumping against the side of the plane.
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