15 Seconds

by Andrew Gross

  That smile. “You and me, we stay happy, we get along fine,” he says.

  Oh, outstanding, Sonny. Until I look the wrong way or say the wrong thing out where we’re headed, and you feel it’s your duty to cap me to keep your Mistah Kim bright and content. But right now my Buddha pal lets himself settle even deeper into his chair, sighs once or twice. As the Master said, in serenity lies virtue. He’s asleep in less than a minute.

  I am lacking in virtue, apparently. Sleep eludes me, even after I dominate the throb in my temples, even though I’m so tired my eyes are scratchy. I have the most unsettling sensation of being a stranger inside my own head, seeing and feeling extraordinary things that are happening to someone I do not know. Or I’m watching a movie starring an actor who looks remarkably like Luther Ewing, from the very last row in an utterly deserted mall cineplex with a very small screen.

  There are a few facts I’ve grasped. Mister Kim, he is some kind of business tiger. That’s why I’m armed and airborne in his corporate jet. Not a Gulfstream, or any other normal private plane. His very own 747, like none other flying. Kim bought it from some failing airline, maybe Swissair or Pan Am, and had it transformed into something that resembles a yacht custom-fitted for a man whose name repeatedly appears on the Forbes annual billionaire list. What had been the first-class section and the hump above it are Kim’s private lounge and bedroom. I haven’t been in there, but it’s no challenge to extrapolate what it must be like from the main compartment, where Sonny’s low snoring is beginning to sound like the first warning growls of some jungle beast.

  Pure luxe in every detail. If the sycamore-and-brushed-steel sideboards, the maple burl tables, the twelve matching Saporiti chairs weren’t discreetly bolted to some light, synthetic, but completely convincing imitation of sixteenth-century marble flooring—which, in turn, is a display for antique Tabriz and Isfahan carpets—you’d be certain you were in the VIP lounge of a five-star European hotel. The bulkheads, front and rear, are paneled in pale sycamore. The paintings hanging there— contemporary work by artists I can’t identify—are almost certainly museum-grade.

  Aft of the lounge there’s a galley that looks like a kitchen straight out of Architectural Digest. And beyond that, at least a half-dozen private cabins, each with a bed and full amenities.

  A slim Japanese girl, with a face that would be exquisitely beautiful if it weren’t lifeless as a porcelain doll’s, materializes at my side. In a whisper that sounds like a love song she asks if I require anything. I don’t. She bows, makes Sonny’s beer bottle disappear, and fades back to the galley, the rustle of her kimono scarcely audible. She leaves only the faint scent of some flower I can’t name.

  The scale of this wealth is much too great for me to absorb. Kim is some big tiger. Beyond imagination, even though I’ve been briefed by my employer. I’ve also been educated and made over so I’ll pass as a tiger’s assistant, had a smooth and stylish veneer laid over this ex–Special Forces slob with offensive habits. I applied myself to the process. Most any observer, checking out my clothes and manners and demeanor, would take me for an experienced member of a major corporate entourage. That is what Kim demands of his assistants. Most especially those like Sonny and me, whose job descriptions have nothing at all to do with business.

  Security cannot look like security. That is Kim’s nonnegotiable requirement. He’s a tiger, after all. It is a matter of face for him. But I wonder if he knows he may presently be taken for the ride of his life on the back of a much larger, meaner, tiger.

  And suddenly I’m hearing approximate lyrics from one antique Talking Heads song looping over and over—something about how you may say to yourself: This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, this is not my large automobile. And you may ask yourself: How did I get to this place? . . .

  It’s not a question, really. I can call up every encounter, every move in the four-month trip that put me here. I can hear Westley, pitch perfect, stating the contract. Feel how his eyes, more than his words, seal the deal. Remember every detail of the prep that follows. It’s all hi-rez in my memory bank. No confusion, nothing vague or shadowy about any of it.

  Except why I did it.

  I’d done it before. I’d sworn never again, after the first time. I’d even refused a second offer a few years back. But my past somehow keeps bleeding into my present.

  When this first started happening, I believed I’d figured all the whys and wherefores, most ricky-tick. Simple cause and effect, I’d concluded: a lifetime of training, informal and formal, followed by some fairly ferocious real-world action, and what was basically only downloaded software mutates to something permanently embedded in your frontal lobes, something that ignores or overrides conscious commands when it wants to. Add a head wound, the plate in my skull, the meds I’ll have to drop four times a day every day for the rest of my life—unless I dig unpredictable, sudden seizures that put me thrashing wildly on the floor, eyes rolled back and foam bubbling from my mouth.

  No wonder there’s some leakage.

  So. You’re leaking? Pressure bandage works, usually. Everybody knows this very, very well, as Sonny would say. But my friend Annie, who’s a psychologist as well as the woman who knows me better than any other, started wondering out loud after she saw one or two of those bandages get so saturated I had to toss them and slap on new ones. She says I’m going to hemorrhage one day. Past and present, all one deep-red arterial surge flooding my brain, leaving me unable to distinguish between what I’ve done and what I’m doing, what was then and what’s now, who I was and who I am.

  “Don’t go. Please don’t go. You need some serious intervention. You need it this minute, Luther. Or the real you may not make it back,” Annie’d said to me just before I left. I didn’t listen. Maybe I should have.

  Too late. Change the bandage again. Press hard. Stop the time leak, for the duration of this job anyway. But first just let it bleed a while. I can do that. I can rewalk my own twisted trail, find the the sense of it.

  two

  GO LOUD.

  It’s high summer. There’s scarcely time for Agent Francesca Russo to’ve settled into her grave before she comes around to haunt and harrow me.

  Not as a soul-shadowing spectre with a lovely, unmarked face above a gaping hole where the tender skin of her throat should have been. Not as stop-action eyelid replays of her own attack dogs ripping that throat out and leaving her corpse twitching in the dust. Not as nightmares of blurred, bloody fury that yank me awake, sweating with fear and the horror.

  I’m immune to—or numbed beyond feeling—that sort of torment.

  No, she does it with bureaucracy. From the cold, cold ground she gets payback, using the system she’d been trying her best to subvert in life, relying on rules she’d casually broken or ignored. And I can almost hear her familiar “Luther! You punk!” followed by clear, untroubled laughter.

  She’s handed me over to Internal Affairs, or IA.

  “You’re surprised or something?” my partner, Ice Box, says one morning in our usual place of business—the narc squad room at Baltimore County Police Department headquarters in Towson, where for the last four or five years I’ve been punching the clock before going out undercover, hunting dopers and dealers. It’s maybe a week after Internal Affairs started squeezing me—including, besides intense chats, close examinations of my spending patterns, my bank account, and all my financial records.

  “Like, this is some mystical event?” IB goes on. “The finger of God pointing down from a dark cloud, big deep voice booming, ‘Luther did it, Luther fucked up again!’ Major phenomenon like that?”

  He shakes his head. “Man, you begged for it. Did I or did I not advise you to walk away from Russo? Didn’t I say be patient, let her own people get wise to her?”

  “Yeah, I heard something along those lines.”

  “Didn’t register, though. Oh no, it did not. Luther Ewing never listens to advice. He never needs to, he’s so totally smart.”r />
  “Thanks for the encouragement, IB,” I say. Not fifty feet away, the IA dick is locked in an office with my boss, Captain Dugal, deciding my future. “Appreciate your support.”

  “Least I can do, considering all the wonderful law-enforcement adventures I’d have missed without you. Like getting shot at by Russian smack dealers and redneck meth merchants, other thrilling stuff.

  “And don’t worry, bro,” he says. “I’ll be there for you too while the IA rips off all your fingernails one by one with needle-nose pliers. Or whatever really awful, painful punishment they’re planning.”

  Neither of us wants to mention that the punishment might very well be job chop: instant dismissal from the department.

  Nobody’s blaming me for Francesca’s death. The Maryland state troopers did the usual crime-scene routine, asked me the questions, cop to cop, over crullers and coffee, and finished their investigation rapidly. Russo’s employer, the Drug Enforcement Administration, efficiently moved to conclude its own subtler but deeper probe. Deeply ironic, I figure, since it was me who turned those Doberman–pit bull crosses she’d bred and trained herself on her and her best hit man. Which, at a particular and highly lethal moment down on her Eastern Shore farm, was a desperate maneuver to keep myself alive.

  But the troopers and the DEA agree: the hitter wasn’t Francesca’s employee, only a mean ex-con drug dealer who, feeling heat from Russo and me, moved first and fast. Came to the farm to kill us. Got her, but got dead in the process.

  And that should have been that—except Francesca, ruthlessly clever, left behind a few notes and one goddamned tape I never knew she’d made. Which the DEA reviewed, adroitly edited, and thoughtfully passed on to the IA chief of my own employer, the Baltimore County Police. The IA dick was delighted, since he’d considered me borderline at best almost since I made my first drug bust.

  Nobody—not our IA, certainly not the DEA—wants truth here: that agent Francesca Russo was mad, bad, and as bent as they come. That she was well on her wicked way to creating and ruling a crystal meth empire. At least ten executions behind her, probably more on the agenda, since major drug trafficking isn’t a forgiving sort of trade.

  The DEA, for all I know, may’ve already had some suspicions about her when she was killed. But they’re revealing nothing. They never will. Fed Rule Number One: do not permit anything—anything—to tarnish your agency’s image, no matter how massive the lies that must be told, how broad the deceit that must be sustained. So the DEA very publically lets it be known that Francesca was a stand-up, dedicated drug agent who died tragically in the line of duty.

  The local cop who was there and survived? No hard proof he’s dirty, but fuck him anyway.

  So it’s been one grilling after another, getting tighter and meaner with each interrogation. Must be pure sadistic pleasure for the IA dick, because I admit from the first moment that, yes, I did take some crystal meth from the BCPD evidence locker without authorization and plant it in Russo’s Corvette. Seems clear enough to me, though, that I had excellent reasons to bend the rules a little. There was some urgency involved. The IA dick doesn’t quite see that. His conception of rules is that they’re brittle as glass, no pliability at all. He buys the DEA hint of impure motive because it suits his ends.

  I’m confined to desk duty until the inquisitors hand down a verdict, which is why I’m sitting around wasting IB’s time instead of out chasing drug dealers. Not cool. Not cool at all, the way this Russo matter worked out.

  Like so many other things in my very uneven life. “Might as well have ‘Born to Lose’ tattooed on my forehead, right, IB?” I say.

  “Somebody already did that in invisible ink or something before your mother took you home from the hospital. You got a very special talent for attracting troubles. Troubles love you, man. Any bored trubs just hanging out with nothing to do, they say, ‘Hey, there’s always Luther. Let’s go see him. Luther digs us.’ “

  “Probably genetic,” I say.

  “I don’t care what it is, long as it’s not contagious. I wake up with a pain in my gut every morning already, just from knowing I’m going to be spending most of my working hours next to you. It’s high-risk even being in your general vicinity, mostly.”

  “Worst case, you’ll never be in my vicinity again once IA’s done with me.”

  “Aw, man, don’t go there.” IB suddenly looks forlorn, regretful.

  “I mean I’ll probably be back in uniform, instead of undercover with you,” I say, for his sake. Knowing I’ll do the job chop myself before I’ll accept that. “Down in the cage on graveyard shift, booking recovered stolen property. High-end mountain bikes, DVD players, super laptops, all that good loot.”

  “Yeah, it’d have to be that,” he says, brightening back up. “They definitely ain’t going to let you anywhere near evidence. Especially seized-drug-type evidence.”

  Just then Dugal’s office door opens, the IA dick and his two senior acolytes exit. So stiff with rectitude their knees don’t bend when they walk. All three wear identical dark gray suits and white button-down shirts (the acolytes do risk differently striped ties, though), and their usual ecclesiastical faces. But the IA head doesn’t look as righteously satisfied as I imagined he might. I’m expecting at least a sneer of muted jubilation from him. He doesn’t even glance my way.

  I don’t want to read too much into impressions like that, though.

  “Feels like lunchtime, IB,” I say. “I’m booking.”

  “Right, man. Best to leave a decent interval for Dugal’s blood pressure to drop forty or fifty points, so his brain’s not swelling so much against his skull. Vanish for a while.”

  The sun’s blazing, it’s humid as the Panamanian jungle where I trained back in my army special-ops days, but the sprinklers are whirling on the County Courthouse’s green manicured lawns, creating split-second rainbows, once each revolution. My shirt’s sticking to my skin by the time I make the hundred meters or so over to Flannery’s, a pub I favor because almost no other cops ever go there. The blast of super-cooled air that hits me as I walk inside tightens the muscles in the back of my neck. A headache’s likely to follow, but I figure that’s a reasonable price of admission. I take a seat at the end of the bar, well away from anyone else.

  “Hey, Luther, what’s going down?” Frank the bartender says when he wanders over.

  “Steak sandwich, bloody. If that retarded quadriplegic you got in the kitchen can manage it. And two Cokes. Cans, not from the taps. If you can manage that.”

  “Hoo-ah,” Frank says softly, holding my eyes a little longer than usual. Former Marine lifer, like my father. He’s never said how or why he came here. Probably just wise enough to know anything’s better than joining the creaky legion of Corps retirees bunched on the drinking side of cheap bars in cheap towns around Camp Lejeune, boring themselves and each other with bitter bullshit about how exciting life used to be, before that thirty-year clock stopped. “HOO-ah.”

  “One of those days, Frank. Sorry.”

  “Sorry-ass excuse. So instead of letting that steak even touch the grill, how about I have the quad give it to you raw?”

  “I’m good with that.”

  “He’ll be pleased. Hates that grill, since he has to flip everything with his teeth.” Frank goes off laughing. He reaches into a cooler, slides two cans of chilled Coke down the bar. Little bit after that, he puts a thick white plate before me. The steak’s perfect, charred outside and nicely red and juicy in. “Chow down, hog,” he says.

  I do. For two or three savory bites. But then I can’t help it, I start thinking options, outcomes. No matter how I try to twist and turn and rearrange them, they still form up as poor to truly shitty. My lunch starts heading in that direction, too. It was a certifiably insane move, trying to burn Russo the way I did. I knew it, did it anyway, so what’s that make me? Now I’m facing double trouble. No matter what the IA rules, I know I’m going to be on the DEA’s radar for the rest of my life. No way to get un
der it, no way to slip off their screen. Goddamn Francesca. I never wanted her in my life, never wanted her working my case, and I absolutely never wanted her dead. Just wanted her gone. Away from me. Someplace far away.

  But not the place she wound up.

  I’d had enough of putting people there, well before she came along.

  It seems like I spent most of my adult life doing it, first as a special-ops soldier and then as a narc. No regrets and no guilt. At least none my conscious mind will admit to, since most of the fucks deserved it and I was only doing my job. I’d got trained for it and I’d got paid for it. A profession, and me an enthusiastic practitioner. But sooner or later—unless you’re a homicidal psycho, a personal possibility that haunts me worse than Russo or anyone ever will—you hit the wall. You do not want to do that kind of work anymore. You begin to feel you cannot.

  You tell yourself to get out, get into something fresh, clean. Wipe the past.

  Easy to say. Much harder to do. All sorts of complications, some real-world, some purely mental. Memory’s a major player. Memory has its ways of evading all orders. Soon I’m spiraling deep into dark regions I’d really rather not revisit. Soon I’m so far away on that joyless tour I’m oblivious to my surroundings. For God knows how long I’m not even aware someone’s slipped onto the stool right next to mine. Some instinct finally clicks, much later than it should have. Bad lapse. A quick peripheral check then: just another suit on that stool. Okay, I decide. Ignorable. Flannery’s is always full of suits—lawyers and civil servants from the courthouse. They never bother anyone, they’re too concentrated on selling whatever they’ve got to whoever they’re lunching with.

  So I fall right back in. My spiral tightens. I’m no longer eating that sandwich, just staring at it. But seeing something else entirely. Scenes appear, play out, others start. With no regard for the real chronology in which I lived them.