by John Shannon
There was a screech in the hall so shrill it made his hair stand on end, and then a young woman leaped into the open doorway with her arms spread and wailed, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” She noticed Jack Liffey and clutched her blouse around her. “Ooh! Crash and burn! So sorry!”
Then she was gone, erased out of the air, and Michael Chen shook his head. “That’s just Pam.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jack Liffey shut the door and explained that he wanted Michael Chen to log into the computer that he’d left running in Milo Mardesich’s study and nose around to find out what he could. Just as he got that out, the door came open again. “Seen Pam running about? Well, stone the crows, look who’s here.”
It was Bruce Parfitt, the Australian who ran the company for the absentee Perth beer baron who owned it. He’d cut off his ponytail and put on a business suit since Jack Liffey had last seen him, but at the moment his nose was fluorescing and he was having a bit of trouble standing upright.
“Jack Liffey, as I live and breathe.”
“Hello, Bruce, how’s tricks?”
“Business is rubbished, to tell the truth, as you can plainly see. A gi-fucking-normous pain in the arse.”
His attention was drawn by a wave of giggles down the hall. He raised his eyebrows and pointed in that direction and then pushed off the door frame. “Gotta shoot on through, mate. Come say hello.”
When he was gone, Michael Chen got up and closed the door softly. “We were making five CD-ROMs for a big fascist suit-heavy company in Milwaukee, state-of-the-art games with movie tie-ins and lots of expensive graphics and video. They called Bruce back there two weeks ago and he thought he was going to get another big project, and they sat him down and said, ‘Sorry, dude, things are bad, no more work. And by the way, we aren’t going to pay you for the last three months, either.’ One-point-five mill outstanding. Brucie looked like the ghost of Hanukkah past when he got back and he was on the phone to his paymaster for hours. To save what he could of the company, he had to lay off almost everybody. The last group left this morning. We’re the skeleton crew, working for half pay. He’s a decent guy and he’ll make it up to everybody later if he can, but he feels like shit. That’s the short version. The long version includes a lot of alcohol and heads banging on walls.”
Jack Liffey nodded. “So I noticed.”
“Kinda takes the steam out of your enjoyment of life, but you know what computer people say? Ninety percent of everything is crap.”
The yen to say something smart in reply rose in him and then passed. He felt a kind of easing of all the sour-puss urges inside himself, a harshness passing away. “Sounds a little too high maybe.”
“Oh, fnord. Anyway, we’re only making games. We’re not saving the world.” He sat at the keyboard and then seemed to reconsider. “This first hack you want is Mickey Mouse. Didn’t you say something about a tough one?”
“Why don’t we complete the first task before you stub your toe on the second one.”
Michael Chen’s expression grew slowly into a grin. “Real soon now I’m going to be offended.”
“I know this guy, thought he was a pretty good hacker, thought he was invulnerable, and they reached back through cyberspace and wrung his neck. Virtually.”
They heard a burst of giggling down the hall. It sounded like Maeve.
“Did he take any precautions?”
“He routed his call through the switchboard of a department store and some other stuff he didn’t tell me about, and they got back to him and fried his computer. It didn’t even look like they’d worked up a sweat.”
“Well, let’s not underestimate them, then. Let’s see if they can find their way back through the CIA and the NSA and the Central Bank of Switzerland. Your friend thought he was good. I’m good.”
Jack Liffey told him about the Theodelphian Elect. All he really wanted now was confirmation that Jimmy Mardesich was with them and where he was.
“I’ll have what you want by morning,” he promised. “It’s when you get impatient that you get burned.”
“I am not bloody Pol Pot!” echoed along the hallway in a forlorn Australian wail.
“Poor Brucie. He hasn’t really got what it takes to be in charge.”
“In a world of bad things, it’s good to feel a little shame,” Jack Liffey said.
As Jack Liffey returned to the first room, the parrot squawked at him. It sounded like, “Oppose the eight-legged essay.”
He found Maeve working up a sweat, banging on a little red joystick in front of a busy monitor. She looked like she was having fun, but ten minutes later in the car she denied it.
“Boys!” she exclaimed. “They design a game to teach you grammar, and you know what they do? You know what happens when you put the wrong part of speech in a hole in the sentence? The verb rises up with a machine gun and blows it away! Or the adjective spins around with a sword and cuts it in two. It’s called ‘Full Combat Grammar.’ ” She barked a scornful laugh.
“You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”
“It’s sick, isn’t it?”
“Despite what your mom says, not everything that feels good is bad for you.”
8
BEHOLD A PALE HORSE
WHAT WOKE HIM WAS THAT OMINOUS DIRECTIONLESS GROWL Loco had, as if a ventriloquist were throwing a dog’s voice into the room. The gnarr opened his eyes to shapes and shadows so unfamiliar it took him a moment to remember he’d put Maeve in the bedroom and he was sleeping on the sofa. One of the shadows in particular still seemed wrong.
“Do you own this shithole or are you just renting?”
It was like a bolt of electricity through him and he made a little yelp and sat straight up.
“Neutralize your dog or we’ll kill it.”
He was wearing pajama bottoms in deference to Maeve and he was glad of that at least. The man was maybe five feet away by the TV. “We,” he’d said. Jack Liffey didn’t see anything suggesting a second man, but he didn’t want to take his eyes off this first one.
“I mean it. Now.”
“Loco. Sit.”
Fat chance he had of getting Loco to do anything by command. He got his hand on the collar and held tight.
“Shhh. Shhh.”
He heard the sliding-glass door to the patio come open behind him. There was indeed a second man.
“Put that thing outside.”
“C’mon, Loco.”
It took only a few seconds to drag the dog out the door. Loco barked once or twice ineffectually and swiped a paw at the glass. They pulled the curtains. Loco could take care of himself. Jack Liffey was a lot more worried about Maeve, and his eyes kept going to the hallway, but she usually slept the sound sleep of the innocent. The first man snapped on the Lava lamp by the TV that Maeve had given him as a joke birthday gift.
“Fuckin’ A, I ain’t seen one of these since Ike and Tricky Dick.”
It was the redhead all right, a tight brush cut and no facial hair, about six-one. He wore plain gray pants and a gray shirt buttoned to the neck, like a messenger from a far more austere universe, and he carried a 9mm Browning, the pistol all the cops were switching to, except this one had what looked like a soup can stuck on the barrel. It was the first silencer he’d ever seen in person. For some reason, the man just didn’t look like someone the Theodelphian Elect would have hired.
“So, you the owner?”
“It’s not a shithole.”
“It’s wall-to-wall nigger out there. That’s a shithole.”
Jack Liffey decided it was not a good time to argue about bigotry.
“God is in the whirlwind,” a deeper voice said. The second man came into sight, a stout man with red suspenders and a big revolver stuck in his waistband. He had busy tattoos all down his arms. “The end time is getting real close and the three sixes and all that stuff. You don’t wanna get caught up trapped with no mud people now.”
“Shut up,” the redhead said. “Sit down, Liffe
y.”
He sat on the prickly blanket on the sofa. The light in the room shifted. A big glob of yellow wax had risen to the top of the Lava lamp and sat there refracting its glow out over the three of them. He knew the glob would hang there for half an hour before it melted down and the lamp started cycling. He hoped he’d be around to see it.
“We gotta play a little catch-up here. You called the cops on us out on the street, didn’t you?”
“Sure.” He spoke as softly as he could without seeming to be suspicious about it. Just the thought of Maeve sticking her head quizzically out the door in the hallway gave him a chill. “You terrorized a friend of mine. You’re still way ahead of me.”
The redhead gave a broad shrug. “She happened to be here when we came to visit. We thought maybe it would help you get the message. Just in case you’re still not getting it, the message is our client doesn’t want to see any more trouble from your client.”
“Could we be a little more specific?”
The fat one moved into view and picked up one of the cigarettes Jack Liffey left lying around. This was the man who’d burned the hole in his bedroom carpet, Jack Liffey decided. The man studied the cigarette as if it were an omen of mysterious import. “Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
“Shut the fuck up, Schatzi. We’ve got plenty of stuff to do before the fuckin’ horsemen come riding out of the sky. Does the name Mardesich do it for you?”
“Who’s your client?”
“Well, if you can’t figure that out, my man, just tell your client not to give nobody no trouble for the next hundred years or so. I can work with that.”
The redhead sat on the coffee table only a foot in front of him, considering him like a big cat contemplating something in its food dish.
“Maybe we could talk about this tomorrow at my office,” Jack Liffey said.
The redhead snorted once, but instantly there was a faint throbbing sound. The man looked startled and his palm went reflexively to his shirt pocket. He took out a pager and read the number on it.
“Phone?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Watch him, Schatzi.”
Schatzi nodded and pulled out his revolver, but he only used it to tap his way along the bookcase. He looked at some old English literature texts, a movie guide, some plays, and then he stopped with the barrel resting on three paperbacks that lay on their backs with paper bookmarks hanging out. The phone came noisily off the hook in the kitchen.
“A book sealed with seven seals, that’s the only book for you to waste your time.” He held the top book up in the underwater light of the Lava lamp as if tilting the cover to a new angle would clarify what it was doing there. In fact Jack Liffey knew exactly what those books had once represented for him—The Long Goodbye, A Small Town in Germany, and Sympathy for the Devil, books he had read again and again during a troubled time in his life because they validated something deep inside him and did not require new thought. They were books about quiet, self-contained men who were faithfully carrying out what they saw as their duty in worlds that didn’t care.
“For indeed the days are coming in which you will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, wombs that never bore, and breasts which never nursed.’ ”
“I don’t have a womb,” Jack Liffey said.
The stout man looked at him neutrally. “It’s a quote from the Bible, heathen.”
“That’s just a bunch of bedtime stories for children.” He hoped to get somewhere by riling the man. “Jesus was a pussy. The devil wins every time.”
The man recoiled as if slapped. “Tim,” he called weakly. He started breathing heavily.
“The Holy Ghost is a homosexual.”
“Stop it.”
“God sucks my dog’s dick.”
The man swallowed heavily and his eyes went wide. “That’s blasphemy!” He was visibly trembling. The one named Tim mumbled away in the kitchen.
“Why would God care about a dumbbell like you? When the trumpet blows and the air catches fire around you, He’ll be laughing as hard as He can. Listen. I hear wings.”
The man’s face filled with horror, and he did everything but look around for the angels. Jack Liffey was about to hurl a drinking glass when his hair was yanked from behind back against the sofa.
“Schatzi, calm down.” The glass was removed from Jack Liffey’s hand. “And you just shut up. You two are really terrific. I go out for one minute and you can’t play like civilized children.”
The stout man was still advancing toward the sofa with eyes that seemed to have lost their guiding intelligence, the gun trembling and his free hand clenching and releasing in spasms.
The redhead reached over Jack Liffey’s shoulder and slapped his palm against the stout man’s chest to stop his forward progress. “Just sit down, both of you. Everybody’s getting a little too worked up here.”
“He said God sucks doggie dicks,” the big man bleated, but he backed a pace.
“Now, that’s not very nice. Did you do that?”
Jack Liffey could hear the suppressed laughter in his voice.
“I guess that gives us the right to chastise you some. By the way, Liffey, how come you’re sleeping out here? Should we have a peek in the bedroom?”
There was no point lying. “My daughter’s in there.”
“No kidding?”
“Don’t even open the door or I’ll make it a point of honor to take this somewhere you don’t want to go.”
“Be cool. Our business don’t run in that track. Maybe I’ll let the Angel of the Lord here soften you up for the great tribulation. Get you thinking about the Rapture and shit like that. Gimme the tape.”
Jack Liffey heard the rip of a short piece of cloth, then the fat man came around and sealed his mouth shut with a strip of duct tape. It panicked him a little until he satisfied himself he could breathe freely through his nose. They dragged him to the dining chair at the head of the table, the only one of the six chairs with arms, and taped his forearms to the wood. He thought of his daughter sleeping peacefully only a few feet away and wondered, irrationally, if his fear would invade her dreams.
The fat man knelt and taped his ankles to the chair legs. A panicky sensation of helplessness rose in him. He faced straight forward at a big blue abstract painting a friend had given him in college for deep-sixing a lot of library fines when he’d worked as a library assistant. The painting hadn’t been his purpose for tearing up the fines, just an act of charity, but the kickback was okay with him. Still, the painting was not something he wanted to be looking at just then. He could smell some flowery cologne on the redhead behind him.
“You’re maybe not such a bad guy, Liffey, but you got to play by our rules.” Something tightened around his neck and held his head back. “We forgive you for all your sins, we wash you clean in the blood of the lamb.”
The fat man whooped once, softly. He couldn’t tell whether the religious imagery tickled or offended him.
“Go forth and sin no more and tell your client the same. Go take a whiz, Schatzi.”
He heard the fat man go into the bathroom and turn the light on. It was becoming obvious that he wasn’t quite all there in the head, and he wondered what the relationship between the two of them was. He was a bit dissociated from his own body, with his mind wandering to and fro around the apartment all on its own, investigating points of concern—the bedroom, the patio door. He kept thinking for some reason of Mrs. Gradgrind in Hard Times saying, “There is a pain somewhere in the room.”
“What we’re gonna do now won’t be so bad, but it’ll help you remember us. Sort of a keepsake.”
The fat man came back wearing a blue windbreaker zipped up to the neck. He was carrying something that Jack Liffey couldn’t see, and when he turned a bit, gold letters on the breast of the jacket spelled out FUGITIVE RECOVERY AGENT. Great, Jack Liffey thought. They were self-styled bounty hunters, skip tracers, the nuttiest of all t
he varieties of human trash.
The fat man came toward him slowly with a smirk, a can of shaving foam in one hand and a yellow disposable razor in the other. Looking at the man made Jack Liffey sleepy.
“Hold still, pal,” the redhead advised. “Remember those doggie dicks, Schatzi.”
He saw a switch of mood on the big man’s face that frightened him as the razor hadn’t. He closed his eyes as they sprayed his forehead and he felt the bite of the razor at the front of his scalp and jumped a little. Even with the foam, the razor clawed and burned.
“You missed that bit.”
He flinched now and then when the blade nicked him but he tried not to struggle, figuring it would only make things worse.
“Man, you got a hell of a scar back here. Looks like you went and had a lobe out. What’s this?”
He felt a knuckle rap on the back of his head.
“You got you a plate under here. I knew a guy had one. Looks too recent to be from the Big ’Nam. They shoulda put in a trapdoor for a lube and oil change.”
Once the hacking at his scalp ended he opened his eyes. They stood in front of him admiring the job.
“Now when you look in a mirror, you just think of us and think of all the worse shit we coulda done. This is no joke, pal. Doggie dicks aren’t funny; what’s funny is a six-inch dick on a three-inch private dick.”
The fat man leaned in close to his face. “The Holy Ghost ain’t no homo.”
Then they were gone and he heard the door close. He heard one brief howl from the patio, where Loco must have detected them leaving, and then he ripped the right arm up off the chair. The furniture set was from his parents’ house and he’d disassembled and restored the pieces himself with a glue called Resorcinol that had never really worked. At least he didn’t have to sit there until Maeve woke up and found him like a trussed turkey. A bald trussed turkey.