Chemical Burn

by Quincy J. Allen

  “The hell I don’t!” O’Neil paused and then asked the obvious question. “Why keep them? You could have just dumped them.”

  “Well, the people who killed the other three, I still don’t know whose side they’re on, or what they’re after. I’m pretty sure they’re good guys, but you know I like to keep my options open. If it comes down to it, these guys are evidence.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “No, that should just about do it,” I said matter-of-factly.

  “Then goodnight,” he said, and I could almost hear the headache forming inside his skull.

  “Goodnight, O’Neil. And thanks.”

  “Oh, and Case?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I hate you.”

  “I know.”

  We both hung up.

  When we got back to the loft, I’d logged on and used my system to hack VeniCorp and replace the lobby images of us walking in and getting captured. Then I erased our User entry in the logs. If Al hadn’t been lying, then all anybody would know is that the three goombahs disappeared in the middle of the night. I had to hope that was the case, although it was unlikely DiMarco’s organization would ever call the cops.

  I escorted Xen and Rachel to Costa Rica, explaining that my father had taught me it was customary to kick back after a night on the town. Xen was grateful for the opportunity to get out.

  My loft was, as he put it, “Fucking hot in here.”

  As we left, I handed him a laptop with the VeniCorp data, and told him to start going through it. I needed to know how the whole thing worked as quickly as possible now that things were heating up.

  Rachel and I undressed, crawled into bed, and were asleep before we could even kiss. It had been a long day.

  ***

  Part Three

  School Day

  Rachel and I had spent the morning in the surf while Xen worked on the chemical data. At lunch, we put together a few edibles and a cooler full of beer. Rachel and I were dying to know what had happened to Xen when this whole thing had started off. When we finished lunch, we lit up three more cigars and relaxed.

  “So … uhhh … Xen?” Rachel pulled on a cigar, enjoying watching the smoke drift up into the trees.

  “Yeah?”

  “How’d you manage to fake your death, anyway?” She blew a smoke ring up into the air.

  Xen grinned at her, his lips stretched to their limits, and held it for a few seconds. Through clenched teeth he asked, “What do you see?”

  Rachel got a confused look on her face, wondering if it was a trick question. “Your teeth?” she said slowly.

  He gave her a victorious look. “Wrong.”

  “What?” she asked, perplexed.

  “These aren’t my teeth.”

  Rachel looked at his face, still perplexed. I stared at Xen for a few seconds and then smiled knowingly.

  “You kept them, didn’t you? Your teeth, I mean, and had the new ones installed some place abroad.” I turned to Rachel. “Those are implants,” I clarified for her. The truth dawned on her as she figured out what we both meant. “Tell us everything.”

  “The night I disappeared, I’d just finished up at the lab,” he said, “when this guy comes at me in the parking lot.” He took a long pull from his beer. He shifted a bit uncomfortably in his chair, trying to get out of the hot sun.

  I leaned back in my chair, moving further into the sun as monkeys screeched above us, and sized up my friend. To look at Xen, you’d never think that he’d be able to hurt a rabbit, let alone take out an armed killer.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Back up … to the beginning of that night.”

  “Tell us everything,” Rachel said, intently staring at Xen.

  So he did.

  O O O

  Xen logged off his computer and unplugged the external hard drive containing his finished research. Natalia had left the lab on her way to Sacramento only a few hours earlier. She’d apologized, since they normally went out on Friday nights, but she told him it was an award dinner for a co-worker … employees only.

  She had asked about his progress before she’d left and said she was very anxious to get a finished product from him. He could have told her he’d wrapped it up, but he wanted to surprise her with a printed and bound version of his work. He’d decided to hold out on her, saying he nearly finished. He’d kissed her before she left, the kiss turning into a short but intense round of lovemaking right there on his desk.

  They didn’t have to worry about spectators. His lab was tucked away in the back of one of the larger buildings at SolCon. Where he worked, only maintenance personnel came in after hours. The one chemist who worked in the lab next door was on vacation, so on a Friday night the place was a graveyard.

  He patted the drive and smiled, proud of what he had done, and in such a short amount of time. It represented some of his best work, even if the idea had come from someone else. He’d worked through the entire project mostly from his external PC. Every couple of weeks, when the SolCon checks cleared, he would upload large bodies of data to the location Natalia had given him and provide a status report to her. However, as one of his doctoral instructors had taught him, he always kept the last bit of the data until the last check cleared. He had certainly come to love Natalia, but business is still business … as is chemistry.

  He slid the drive into his backpack, added his folio and zipped the pack closed. His plan was to work on the final report from home for the next couple of days, finish the molecular modeling, and then have it printed up. He would give the bound, full color report to Natalia on the following Friday night at dinner.

  Slinging his pack over his shoulder, he got up and headed through the warren of pipes, tanks, and equipment that separated his work area from the rest of the facility. It was a long walk through SolCon, a truly massive facility, and after a few minutes of walking and waving to a few employees and security guards, he exited the building and made his way to the top level of the parking garage where he’d parked his Jetta. He always got lousy parking spots because he came in late, but he saved an hour or more a day on his commute, and he considered it to be one of the advantages of being a contractor. There were only a handful of cars left in the garage and only two others on the top level. A green, eighties-vintage Riviera he’d never seen before was parked next to his.

  Probably another contractor, he thought as he pulled his keys out of his pocket. He hit the button to open the trunk, and it lifted it up.

  He stepped up to the trunk and jumped when a skinny man in a black, hooded sweatshirt stood up on the other side of the Riviera. Xen froze as the man came around the back of the car and headed straight for him. A long knife gleamed in the stranger’s hand.

  Terror gripped Xen like a vice, and the copper taste of fear filled his mouth. His heart raced in his chest, and his breathing picked up to a rapid pant. Adrenaline pumped through his system. He felt hot and his face flushed red. He couldn’t move. The stranger approached and stopped just out of arm’s reach.

  “Wallet, asshole,” the guy said. Xen didn’t move, and his eyes went wide with fear. “Gimmie your fucking wallet!”

  Xen watched his free hand move of its own accord and pluck his wallet out of a back pocket. His arm lifted and held it out to the thief. The stranger reached out, grabbed the wallet, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  “Now the bag,” the stranger said with venom. Xen’s hand automatically gripped around the shoulder strap of the backpack, reflexively not wanting to give over his work.

  The guy sneered, his eyes shrinking to narrow slits. “If I have to ask you again, they’re carrying you out of here.”

  A few more heartbeats of paralysis passed, hammering at Xen’s chest. The guy cocked his head and raised an eyebrow expectantly. He raised his arm and held out his hand, palm up, waiting for Xen to hand the pack over. Slowly, Xen lifted the strap over his head and held out the pack. The man’s hand closed around the strap, and he set the pack at
his feet. His eyes never left Xen’s. Then a cruel, toothy grin appeared on his face.

  “Thanks … saved me the trouble of taking it off you.” Xen’s brow furrowed, and he got a confused look on his face, not really understanding what the stranger meant. “I wonder how long it will take for them to smell your body in the trunk up here,” he added and lunged with the knife.

  Xen’s still outstretched right arm moved exactly as he had been taught. It stiffened into a hard ridge, and the bony bottom of his hand came down hard on the guy’s swiftly moving wrist. The blade would have entered Xen’s mid-section, but the blocking blow hammered down, knocking the man’s hand into the lip of the trunk and sending the blade clattering down to the concrete. Xen reflexively spun around with the momentum of the block, swinging his left elbow hard into the man’s surprised face.

  “KIAI!” he shouted as his elbow struck home. The force of the blow knocked the man down, and the upper-half of his body slammed into the floor of Xen’s trunk. Stunned and nearly unconscious, the guy slid back out over the lip. Xen jumped up and brought the trunk down with all of his strength just as the guy’s neck crossed the lip. There was a sickening CRACK! The trunk bounced back up, and the man collapsed on the concrete in a heap, his head flopping badly.

  Xen stared down in horror at the corpse he’d just created. Gasping for breath and panicked nearly to the point of madness, his head swiveled around frantically as he looked to see if anyone had seen. He was alone on the parking roof. His mind raced as he tried to figure out what he should do next. Fear drove him … and shock.

  He bent over and searched the corpse. In a front pocket, he found an irregular lump that felt like keys. Grimacing, he flipped the body on its side, reached into the pocket and pulled them out. One of them had a Buick logo on it, so Xen rushed over to the trunk of the Buick and tried it. It slid in, and with a twist, the trunk came up. Inside, he spotted a black plastic bag and a small shovel underneath. Not thinking about the contents of the killer’s Riviera, Xen put the keys in his pocket and went over to the body.

  Grabbing it by the wrists, he dragged the body to the trunk and spent the next few minutes grappling and dancing with the cadaver, the head flopping wildly with every adjustment. Finally victorious, Xen plopped the whole body in the trunk with a thud. He looked down, pushed in the leg hanging over the lip, and stared down at his handiwork. A surprised look was frozen on the guy’s face, his eyes still wide open.

  A strange sense of pride came over Xen as he stared into his assailant’s lifeless eyes. A nervous laugh escaped Xen’s lips, and he slapped his hand over it to keep from losing it completely. “I guess they’ll be carrying you out of here, won’t they, asshole?” he said quietly.

  Using his elbow, Xen closed the trunk. A quick scan of the parking lot again showed that he was alone. A short wall ran behind him, separating the lot into two sections. Cars rarely had to park that far up, and an idea popped into his head.

  He pulled the keys out of his pocket and went to the driver’s side door, careful not to leave fingerprints. He unlocked it and slid into the seat. He stuck the key in the ignition and fired it up. Pulling his jacket sleeves down over his palms, he put it in reverse. Palms on the wheel, he backed out slowly and pulled the car around to the far corner of the lot in a slot up against a dead end wall. He cut the engine, pulled the keys, and made sure all the doors were locked. Stepping out, he closed the door, wiped off the door handle and walked back to his car.

  His heart pounded in his chest, but a strange sense of elation filled him. He tried to think of anything that might trip him up. The whole thing was clearly self-defense, but the American court system is less than perfect. And he was Asian, after all. The corpse was Caucasian. He’d seen too much just to take it on faith. He had just killed a man, and the possibility of prison terrified him beyond rational thought. He looked around the light poles of the parking lot and made sure there were no cameras. He hadn’t left any prints, and his skin hadn’t ever touched the guy’s flesh.

  A flash of fear hit Xen like a wave, and his hand slapped down against his butt where his wallet should be.

  “Shit!” he yelped. He ran back to the Riviera, opened up the trunk, and pulled his wallet out of the thief’s front pocket. Quickly closing the trunk, he jogged back towards his car. Along the way he saw an open storm drain at the corner of the wall. He pulled the Riviera keys out of his pocket and meticulously wiped every surface with his shirt, making sure he didn’t touch them again. Then, with the keys dangling over the welcoming black hole below, he looked back at the Riviera, wondering if he’d forgotten anything else. Certain he hadn’t, he dropped them in with a sigh of relief.

  There were several clatters as the keys bounced off the sides of the pipe and then a final clank as they hit bottom far below. He was in the clear. He went back to his car, picked up his backpack, placed it in the trunk, and closed the lid. His car started up smoothly, and he put it in reverse. Confident he’d thought of everything, he backed out and turned towards the exit. A glimmer of light on the concrete caught his eye. He stopped the car and stared. There, glinting in his headlights, lay the thief’s knife.

  “God damn it!” he shouted and slammed his fist down on the dashboard. He put it in neutral, set the brake, got out, and went over to the knife. With his jacket pulled over his hand again, he picked it up and ran back to the drain, adding the knife to the waiting oblivion with a loud thunk. He got back into his car and stared at himself in the rearview mirror. His eyes were wide, almost crazed, and he realized he was panting. He placed his hands in his lap, closed his eyes, and tried to calm down. Taking long, controlled, deep breaths, he forced his heart to stop racing.

  There was a tap on the window.

  “Shit!” he yelped again and leapt away from the window, his bladder giving way with the shock.

  “Oh, god! I’m so sorry, Mister Li. I didn’t mean to scare you … Are you okay?”

  So much for calming down, Xen thought to himself as he looked through the window at a familiar face. Jennifer. Jennifer Bates from accounting. She’s the one who handled his checks.

  Xen rolled down the window. “I’m … I’m fine. Just had a long day and was clearing my thoughts.”

  “I had a long day too, working late to get ready for the audit.”

  Xen smiled but said nothing.

  “Well, I best be on my way home. My cats are probably starving by now. You have a good night, Mister Li.” She turned towards her car.

  “You too, Jennifer.” Xen stared silently at her retreating back. He closed the window, put the car in gear, released the brake and drove home as slowly as prudence allowed without getting pulled over. His hands shook the whole time, and when he got home, he took off his damp pants and underwear, jumped into the shower, and stayed there for an hour crying like a baby.

  O O O

  “Don’t feel bad, Xen. Most people lose it like that after their first kill. And you did a hell of a job.” I nestled back in the sand and put the rolled-up towel over my eyes. The sound of the Costa Rican beach washed over all three of us.

  “Near as I can tell, you covered everything.… Not that you really needed to,” I added, smiling. “You could have just called the cops. If there was ever a clearer case of self-defense, I never hear of it.”

  “Yeah. I thought about that, but you’re not Asian, you know? I don’t have much faith in the courts, and can you picture me in jail? I was running on pure fear and adrenaline till I passed out at home.” Xen nodded to Rachel and held up his empty beer bottle.

  Rachel opened another beer and handed it to him, taking his empty and dropping it in the cooler. She took a long pull from hers and stared at him. “I’m really impressed, Xen. You’re hell on wheels when you get going, aren’t you?”

  Xen blushed and looked at the sand between his legs. “Yeah, I guess,” he said quietly.

  “Trust me,” I injected, “Xen took to fighting like a fish takes to water,” I said to Rachel. “And that cl
eanup was pretty tight.”

  “Who knew?” he added in disbelief.

  “It surprised me, I’ll tell you that for nothing,” I said, chuckling.

  Rachel slapped my leg, admonishing me, but we were all laughing. We sat in the sun, simply enjoying the day after the tension of the previous night at VeniCorp.

  “So what happened next?” Rachel asked.

  O O O

  The morning after the attack, Xen jolted out of bed at the sound of the man’s neck breaking. His dream was a replay of the previous evening. He sat there shaking for a minute, and then he threw back the covers and got out of bed. He jumped in the shower, took a quick rinse and brushed his teeth.

  As he put the toothbrush away, something popped into his head—body bag and a shovel. He closed his eyes and remembered opening the trunk of the Riviera. There had been a body bag and a shovel in there. Then he ran the whole thing through his head. The thought dawned on him that it wasn’t a random mugging. For starters, there was no reason in the world for someone to drive all the way up there, in the industrial sector of the city, just to mug a guy. And then, why mug Xen? If the guy was waiting for someone, why not wait for a small woman? Xen realized the guy never had any intention of leaving him alive.

  There were only three possibilities. One, the guy was there to kill Xen. Two, the guy wanted Xen’s work. Three, both one and two together. He hadn’t recognize the man, and it was unlikely he worked for SolCon, at least not at the offices. A sick feeling clutched at Xen’s guts, and he turned pale at the realization. Someone wanted him dead. An even worse thought crossed his mind. What if Natalia was in on it? She was the only person at SolCon he’d ever talked to about the project.

  He had to disappear, at least for a while, until he could figure everything out. He’d go to Justin as soon as he felt certain that no one could find him, but if they knew Xen well, they’d know about Justin, too. He wanted to disappear off the face of the Earth for a week in hopes they’d lose track of him. Then he could see about trying to figure out who wanted him dead.