Skullcrack City

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Better call a press conference and clear things up.

  Dara turned to me. “Last chance. Here goes.”

  Huey Sheppard called himself a psychic energy adjustment agent, and saw himself as a healer, repairing chakras, auras, and like, freeing consciousness, man. Which was all semi-tolerable, considering he was also a hell of a drug dealer.

  “You’ve reached Megaton Consulting. May I ask who’s calling?”

  I could hear the voice on the phone, clearly the kind of forced falsetto a man would put in place when trying to sound like a woman.

  “Huey, it’s Dara. You know voice rec software would still pick up your audio signature, right?”

  Huey cleared his throat and came back with an even higher voice, some kind of chipmunk/dolphin hybrid. “My dear, I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Wait, are you supposed to be southern now? Goddamn it, this is serious. How much longer do you need me to talk?”

  “A moment more, dear.”

  “Alright. A moment’s about all I have to…”

  “Okay, okay. I’ve gotcha.” Huey returned to what I assumed was his regular voice: low, male, scratchy and worn, the sound of a larynx run ragged by too many nights of shouting acid-head epiphanies.

  “You know there’s better software now. You could have picked up my voice in a couple of seconds.”

  “I know. My voice rec is fast. It’s my new tracking system that takes a minute. You guys are near my hood. Why?”

  “We need a favor.”

  “What? I just delivered Ms. A.’s dry cleaning last week. I told her the next round is going to take a while longer to tidy up. The amount of laundry she wants done, it’ll take some effort.”

  He sounded exasperated. I knew we’d been running through the mission’s perphenadol stash at top speed, and I guessed the theft at St. Mercy wasn’t making it any easier to come by.

  “That’s not it, Huey. I’m up in the air right now, and I need an emergency landing.”

  “Any other passengers with you?”

  “Only one. And a turtle.”

  “Cool. What kind?”

  I spoke up. “He’s a red-eared slider.”

  “Whoa. Who’s that?”

  “I told you, I’ve got another passenger.”

  “Put him on.”

  “Hello?”

  “The alphabet, pal. Get going.”

  I made it to Q before he cut me off.

  “Okay. Can you give the phone back to Dara please?” I passed it to her, my eyebrows raised, hoping I hadn’t blown it.

  “You trust this guy? News says he’s involved in some serious shit.”

  “The news is lying. Come on. You know better than to buy their line.”

  “I know, I know. But it’s the brain stuff. I like my brain. I’m fond of it, right where it is inside my head.”

  “That’s not him. Trust me, it can’t be. He’s just a guy who got caught up in a bad habit and made a few mistakes at work.”

  “He’s clean now? What am I saying? He’s with you, he’d have to be. Any chance you guys are still in possession of some of his, uh, workplace mistakes?”

  We can buy this guy.

  I’d never felt that sensation before, the thrill of money turning into real power.

  “We are, and we’re in the mood to be rid of them.”

  “Then I think I can help you with your problem. The runway is clear for your emergency landing. Ring through when you’re near the rear service elevator and I’ll make sure Orwell takes a nap.”

  Dara hung up and set the phone in her lap. She smiled at me, but it was half-hearted and she quickly laid her head back on the seat. She shouldn’t even have been out of bed. How was I going to care for her wounded socket? How did we know there wasn’t some tiny shard of the bad eye retreating from the surgery and corkscrewing into her brain?

  “I need some sleep. Once I introduce you to Huey, I’m crashing. You guys can work on setting up the radio and contacting your mom. I think the two of you will get along fine.”

  “Yeah, how’s that?”

  “He’s fucking crazy, too. His paranoid fantasies have paranoid fantasies. Speaking of which, if he asks you if you can cross your eyes, say no. Otherwise, he’ll think you’re part of the Atlantean Underground, and you’ll have to undergo electro-shock testing to prove you’re not half-fish.”

  “Seriously?”

  “He made Tim go through an hour of testing. He threatened our connection if Tim didn’t submit. Ms. A. asked him to bite the bullet for the sake of the mission. He took hundreds of shocks. It was brutal.”

  “How did it turn out?”

  “At the end of the day it was decided that Tim was not a fish. We were all very relieved.”

  Dara pointed ahead. “Take that next left and park in the dirt lot behind the red building. And I have to warn you about one other thing.”

  It turned out that all first-time visitors to Huey’s hyper-secure penthouse apartment had to undergo a full body scan in the dual-locking chamber he’d installed in his foyer.

  Huey’s full body scans were executed by a vintage CorTec Guardian Bot 3.0.

  Yes, that’s the version which requires you to strip naked.

  Yes, that’s the version which was reviled by human rights groups and ultimately recalled by the government for its faulty lubricant secretion valve.

  No, I don’t want to talk about my experience with the CorTec Guardian Bot 3.0.

  Ms. A.’s radio device did nothing for us. Maybe Ms. A. was supposed to charge some energy field inside of the thing. Maybe it needed the tower of copper circuits I’d seen back at the compound. Maybe I was supposed to fill the interior with magical beetles and jam the receiver down my throat. I had no idea how her gear worked.

  Dara was finally passed out on the long side of a sectional couch in Huey’s living room. She’d sipped on a cup of steaming chamomile tea, pulled a large gray and black afghan blanket over herself, and started snoring. Even in my panic, I couldn’t bring myself to wake her. The sooner she recovered, the better. I was rudderless, veering wildly between angry and afraid. And Huey wasn’t much help.

  “How long has it been since she left that message?”

  “More than a day now.”

  “You couldn’t get through to her after that?”

  “No. And we knew her line was tapped, but Ms. A. told me we could stay off-grid if we used this P.O.S. to contact her. But then Dara got sick, and the Vakhtang attacked…”

  “Wait, did you say Vakhtang?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So they are real. I knew it. I fucking knew it. Ms. A. would never say what you guys were actually up to, but I had a funny feeling. Have you seen any of them transform into wolves? Or do that thing where they ride around on lions eating poor people?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “What about their undertongues? Have you seen one of them use their undertongues to hypnotize somebody?”

  “Where did you get this information about the Vakhtang?”

  “Sources. I’m not going to tell you.”

  “The internet?”

  “Maybe.” Huey looked down, a slight frown on his face. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll tell you what. You help me reach my mom, and I’ll tell you all the real things I know about the Vakhtang.”

  “Nothing’s real. It’s just the things you think you know. Perception is a web of lies that helps our bodies float through space.”

  I think he was jockeying, trying to take back some kind of intellectual upper hand. It gave me a headache.

  “Okay then. I’ll tell you all the lies my brain thinks it knows then.”

  Somehow he viewed that as a win. His eyes brightened. “I have an idea. I could make you a poultice of lark root. If you dry it and then smoke it, that should put you in contact with your mom.”

  “What?”

  “Sure—it’s what the Ordu tribes used to speak to their ancestors.”

 
“My mom’s not some spiritual ancestor. She’s here, in town, and someone else is tracking her, and it can’t be anybody who means her well, and it’s sure as shit not going to help her if I’m tripping balls on fucking lark root in your apartment.”

  “That’s ethnocentricity, man. That’s ugly. No bueno.”

  “I need to find my mom. I need a real, immediate solution.”

  “Oh…wait a minute. Wait a minute. I think I’ve got it.”

  Huey grabbed his laptop, executed three fingerprint scans, a retinal scan, and connected a device which unleashed a four hundred character password after he turned a small gold key in its side. Then he stared at the screen for a full three minutes without pressing a key and finally said, “There we go.”

  I tried to look over his shoulder and he rotated away. “I just met you. Back it up.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “It’s cool. Now I wouldn’t say that I have access to the gridtracking system, but if I did, I might be able to tell you that there’s a guy named Desmond three blocks from here, and he’d definitely be the go-to if you were looking for less than traditional communications.”

  “Can you tell me what he looks like?”

  “Yup—about six feet tall, rocking a zebra head hoodie. Looks like he’s drinking a bottle of Sternwheeler. Corner of Gatlin and Oates.”

  I jumped to my feet.

  “If you use a phone to call your mom, it’s tainted no matter what. You can’t bring that shit back here. And it won’t be cheap, Doyle. Tell him it’s for Megaton Consulting and maybe you’ll get an employee discount.”

  Five grand for a cracked phone. I don’t think I got the discount.

  I hopped in the blue sedan and drove around the city. If they did manage to trace my phone down through three satellite hook-ups and towers in Germany and Japan, at least they’d only capture me.

  Each time I dialed mom’s number there was an agonizing five minute pause before the ring.

  Then four more rings.

  Then voice mail.

  Fuck.

  I thought of all the times I’d dodged her calls, and how much I only wanted to hear her voice right now.

  I turned on the A/C to kill the flop sweat.

  There were no buttons on the dash which could help with overwhelming guilt.

  I called again. Ten more times.

  Pick up, mom.

  Nothing.

  I left a message: “Mom, if you get this, call back right away. I love you.”

  I scanned the streetlights and rounded the corners looking for blind angles. Found a small alley with thick awnings obscuring the entrance. Hopped out of the car, ducked into the side street, and looked skyward for roaming eyes. Buried my new phone under a pile of abandoned engine parts and prayed there’d be a message soon.

  “You were gone for a long time. We’re going to need to do a full body scan again.”

  I pressed the intercom button and leaned into the mic. “No fucking way. Fuck that. Tell Dara to grab our shit. We’re out of here.”

  Suppressed laughter from the other end. “I’m kidding. Only joshing you. I’ll beep you through.”

  Huey was waiting for me on the other side of the entrance. “Didn’t know you were so el sensitivo. You have to laugh or they win, right? Anyway, even if you go now, I’m still getting paid for the heat you’re putting on my place.”

  I pushed by him and ran to Dara on the couch. I grabbed her hand and rubbed her shoulder. She woke, just barely.

  “Wha….”

  “We have to go after them.”

  “Who?”

  “The bank. Delta MedWorks. They’ve got my mom. I know it. She’s not picking up.”

  “But if they had her, wouldn’t they use her to draw you out?”

  “Maybe that’s their plan, but how would they know where I was? I barely know where I am, and I’m me.”

  “They’d pick up her phone calls, though. That’s how they’d find you.”

  She was probably right, but I needed her to be wrong, because if my mom wasn’t leverage she was something worse: a loose end. An externality. How would they know how little I’d told her? They might even think she was in on the bank fraud.

  “Where do we start? If your hypothesis is right, Delta MedWorks has been eliminating the bankers who knew about the business with Dr. Tikoshi. Do you even know the name of anyone at Delta who would be involved in the cover-up?”

  “No. I don’t think any of the names in my bank’s wire records were real.”

  “So do we start by shaking down the mostly dead batch of bankers, or do we go after the totally nebulous medical company hierarchy first?”

  “I don’t know. We have to do something.” I looked over at Huey. He was rapt, taking notes, probably performing the mental gymnastics to fit everything we were saying into his pre-existing theories about the Reptilian Illuminati’s plan to raise Atlantis and create a super-race of humanoid fish-snakes.

  Dara raised her hand and placed her palm against my jawline. “We barely have any resources now. One side of my face feels like somebody smacked me with a brick, and my eyelids are doing something really weird and sticky under this bandage. When’s the last time you slept? I don’t know if we can make any good decisions right now.”

  It was the truth—I hadn’t felt this exhausted since right before my Hex implosion—but it wasn’t a truth I could accept. All I could think about was my mother: the way she’d held me and hummed lullabies, the way we survived the shock of my father’s death together, and how she always meant it when she said she loved me, even when she could tell I was totally fucking up.

  Then I realized what we needed to do.

  “What if we find Dr. Tikoshi? We get him, we’ve got our own leverage. He knows exactly what Delta is doing. I can link him to them and the bank, and they know that. We have Tikoshi, we can negotiate.”

  “Tikoshi went underground. Or he might actually be in the Bahamas.”

  “No, I saw Shinori’s face when we asked about Dr. T. He thinks Tikoshi is still in town.”

  “I don’t know—that wasn’t communication’s finest hour. How do we know what he was saying?”

  “He was adamant. He kept pointing at that picture of Buddy the Brain. That’s the connection.”

  “So, that’s our lead? You want to hop on a plane to L.A. so we can ask some reality show dimwit to help us find Dr. Tikoshi? Even if that would work, you’re all over the news—they’d pop you in the airport.”

  “Guys!” Huey interrupted. He was excited, barely able to sit still. “Guys, you are not going to believe this. I mean, this is some serious cosmic serendipity manifested consciousness shit. We are literally making the world with our collective perceptions right now, I think.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you’re talking about Buddy the Brain, right? The League of Zeroes guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so this might go outside of doctor/patient confidentiality laws…”

  “You’re not a doctor, Huey.” Dara was sitting firmly at zero patience. “But please continue to your point.”

  “I beg to differ about the doctor thing, but my main point is, Buddy uses my services as a healer. He’s had all kinds of problems since he put his brain in that box, and not all of them are conditions traditional western medicine is ready to deal with. Plus, he has to change out the cerebrospinal fluid in his box every couple of months. He says the stage lights thicken it, like old oil or something. And CSF isn’t easy to come by, for most people. I have to work with the black market in China and let me tell you, those guys…”

  “How does any of this help us?”

  “Well, I don’t know if Buddy’s primary surgeon is really this Dr. Tikoshi you’re talking about, but I can tell you that Buddy calls me all the time for supplies, and we deliver them locally. So my best guess is that Buddy flies into town each weekend to have his mods maintained.” Huey grabbed his laptop and started pecking. “Here…let me check…my
courier records…and…BINGO. There you go. It’s what? Thursday? So by tomorrow, Buddy the Brain will be lounging in his luxury condo at the Haversham Towers. And…” Huey hesitated.

  “What?”

  “Well, Buddy is a good client. A very good client. And I know who you roll with. You guys can be kind of rough. I don’t want to lose business. That being said…if you guys were to make me some sort of compensatory offer to brace against potential losses, I could probably make sure you were in the right place at the right time. You rough up my courier, unbeknownst to me of course, and then you make his delivery. Buddy the Brain opens the door for his medicine, and there you go.”

  I looked at Dara, “There you go.”

  We prepped.

  Buddy’s order came in close to midnight. We had until four the next afternoon to make our delivery—a concerning assortment of painkillers, one vial of powdered rhino horn, and twelve fluid ounces of somebody else’s cerebrospinal fluid.

  We crossed our fingers and hoped that Buddy’s celebrity cash cow status and exclusive contract meant he’d still have a line on the location of the elusive Dr. T.

  We sifted through the remaining loot I’d gathered when we abandoned the compound. Huey got his payment, nearly destroying our bankroll. I searched for extra cords that might make Ms. A.’s ancient radio work, but found none. Dara pulled the anti-face rec masks and two pistols from the car, cleaning both sets and reloading the guns.

  While Dara was handling the tactical gear I let Deckard out for a constitutional and carrier cleaning. He clearly relished stretching his legs after so much time in his shitty transitory home. I watched him crawl across the floor for a moment but found myself suddenly overwhelmed and had to look away.

  Was he all I had left of my old life? Had I ruined everything else?

  I was relieved when Huey asked me questions about Deck. He even picked him up for a moment, surprisingly hiss-free, and looked him in the eyes and said, “What a good little guy.” I realized that whenever I left Deck now, I was doing so believing I might die and leave him an orphan. Huey seemed like he’d be willing to bring an abandoned turtle into his life. Though I was also fairly certain Huey was the kind of guy who would let a turtle share his hallucinogens. Still, I felt like Deck had a place to land, and that gave me the oddest sense of courage.