“It’s not up to her,” Terry said, his still-changing voice on man-sound now. “I know how I got my mother,” he said, reaching over to touch her. “And my father,” he said, bowing his head toward the Mole. “I know what you. . . did, Burke. Then, I mean. I’m in this too. Whatever you want to do, I want to do it too. If someone took my. . .”
He didn’t finish. Didn’t have to.
“There’s no way,” the Prof said. “He’s not gonna walk into a room. Motherfucker don’t take no risks. No way you’re gonna get a piece past whatever he’s got set up either.”
“Mole?” I asked.
“If he has the correct equipment, he could pick up any weapon, in any form, just from its composition. Even plastic explosive. Thermal-image scanners could. . . . I have. . . devices. Very small. But they would not be. . . invisible if he were properly equipped.”
Max leaned over, tapped each of my hands, spread his into a question. Could I kill him with my hands if I got close enough?
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. Max has been training me for years and years, but I never got that good at any of the techniques. I can hit pretty hard, and I can take a shot and keep coming. And if I got my hands on any vital spot—and focused hard on why I was there—maybe. But it could never be a sure thing.
“It will not work,” the Mole announced.
“Mole, I think I can—”
The Mole held up his hand for silence. “He will not let you get close enough. Remember?”
Sure. I knew what he meant. Like Wesley. This killer would keep a safety zone around himself. Wesley usually did it with an Uzi. I don’t know what this guy would use, but the Mole was right—he’d use something.
“We could put a tracking device on you,” the Mole said. “But you would have to discard it before you stepped into his zone.”
“Fair enough,” I told him.
“Not enough,” the Prof said. “This team needs a scheme.”
They all argued for a while. I just sat there, slumped in the chair.
When they ran out of gas, I told them how I wanted to do it.
“I’m not rebuilt yet,” Xyla said. “How could I—?”
“I need a message sent to him. I don’t care if you send it on this machine. Send it the same way you sent the first one. He’ll get it. I don’t need an answer. When he bangs back in. . . when you have this all back up. . . he’ll either go for it or he won’t.”
“I can do that,” she said. “Trixie has a little halfass Mac I could—”
“Sure,” I stopped her.
She grabbed a pen. I waved her away, wrote it down myself, and handed it to her.
not coming alone. bringing woman. she *direct* connect. she *only* one who can validate in certain areas. can *not* make it happen without her. not negotiable. you pick time, place, conditions. . . anything you want. but if can’t bring woman, no go.
“Jesus,” Xyla said. “He might not answer at all now.”
“That’s his choice,” I told her. “Just like this whole thing’s been since he started.”
“This is the only way,” I told her.
“You’re. . . serious?” Nadine asked.
“Dead serious. I’m keeping my promise. But this is the way I’m going to keep it. I don’t trust you. There’s only one way I can—”
“How do I know you’ll—?”
“You don’t,” I told her. “You don’t know anything. Take it or leave it,” I said.
“No!” I whispered to Strega. “No handcuffs. No chains. You have to keep her—”
“She’ll like them,” the witch hissed at me, glancing over at Nadine standing in the farthest corner of the white living room, her back to us. “If she tastes it herself, she’ll know how it feels when she—”
“No.”
“Burke, if I have to keep her for—”
“If you can’t do it, say so. But you can’t chain her, understand? No restraints.”
“How else could I watch her twenty-four-seven?”
“You know how,” I told her.
I didn’t feel guilty about leaving Nadine there. Poison wouldn’t have a chance against Strega—she drank it for nourishment.
I needed the time to get everything ready. And I needed Nadine with me when I went to meet the killer. Needed her to come when she was called, no hesitation. Once he opened the window, I knew it was going to be just a narrow crack. And if I moved wrong, a guillotine.
I kept thinking about my hands. I’d boxed in prison. I wasn’t really any good at it. The Prof got me started. He’d always wanted to train a fighter. Knew how to do it too. But it was a long time before I understood what I was really being trained for. When I first started, I’d be fine until I got hit with a good shot. Then I’d go off. Take three to give one. All I—finally—learned from boxing was self-control. Staying inside myself even in battle. I did learn that much. Max tried to teach me too. And I learned some of his stuff. But I never worked at it. Never. . . got it, I guess. I don’t know.
I don’t like fighting, maybe that’s the problem. I can’t see hitting someone to hurt them. And if someone’s going to hurt me, I can’t see hitting them at all. Wesley told me he once killed a guy in the joint when he was just a kid. The guy was part of a crew, and they’d told Wesley he had a choice: give up some head to one of them, or get gang-banged by them all. Wesley picked the easier one. That made sense to them, but they didn’t know what “easier” meant to Wesley. He got on his knees, but then he rammed the guy in the stomach and got his hands on his throat. And held the guy’s head in place while some anonymous guard at the other end of the tier threw the switch that racks the bars on all the cells. The guy’s skull crumbled like it was papier-mâché.
The reason Wesley did it that way was because there’d been a shakedown, and the hacks had taken the shank he had stashed in his cell. Didn’t matter—he always got it done.
So I thought about dying. But even if I could get enough explosives past whatever security he’d have set up, I couldn’t be sure.
My hands, then. All I had. But not for his throat. To push a button.
I hit the post with a perfect two-knuckle strike, driving through it, not at it. . . the way I’d been taught. I hardly felt my hand. My mind was right.
“That’s mine,” Strega said. “Don’t touch it.”
I turned and saw her in the corner of the shadowy basement. “Where’s—?”
“In the bathtub,” Strega said. “With no towels. And if she steps out of it wet, she’ll fry like an omelet.”
“Jesus,” I said, looking down at my hand.
“I said don’t touch it,” Strega ordered, coming toward me. She was naked, her hair tied back with a black ribbon. She grabbed my hand. It was bloody around the knuckles. “Mine!” she said, like a two-year-old just learning the word. She licked the blood off. Then she squeezed my hand, hard. Some new drops blossomed. She pulled my knuckles into her mouth, sucked until she came, spasming, me with one arm around her to keep her from falling.
The bathroom door on the second floor was standing open. Strega stepped in. I looked over her shoulder. Nadine was in the tub, lying back, her eyes closed. Strega pulled a pair of plugs from their sockets, disconnecting the red-coiled heaters which were standing sentry on the soaked tile floor. Then she tossed a heavy black mat down, dropped to her knees, and started gently rubbing Nadine with a bar of soap, crooning to her.
Nadine’s eyes never opened. I couldn’t tell if she even knew I was there.
After a minute, I wasn’t.
I spent a lot of time waiting, some of it at the joint where Xyla had her war room in the back. I watched Rusty draw, wondering how he could do that and scan the room at the same time. Listened to the table-talk around me. Drifted. Knowing the answer was somewhere in me. Knowing I couldn’t force it out.
I went back Inside. When we were all doing time together. Maybe not together. I mean, Wesley was in there with us, but he wasn’t with us. Wesley wasn�
��t with anyone. But we were close enough so that we wired anything back to him that he’d need.
That’s when we found out this guy was looking to take Wesley off the count. Tower. I don’t know if that was his name or his handle. Didn’t matter—his true ID was tattooed on his forearm, the swastika dripping blood. That was years ago, before they announced their kills with the spiderweb on the elbow. He wanted a shank, and he wanted it from Oz. That’s because Oz made the best shanks in the whole joint. Only problem is, he wanted it for five cartons of smokes, and the going rate was ten. Oz was a very pale guy. Not prison-complexion pale, his natural color. Even his hair was almost white. He was some kind of Scandinavian, about as Aryan as you could get, but Tower didn’t see him that way. Tower wasn’t bargaining—although that’s what it would sound like to you if you only heard the audio and didn’t get the implied threat in the way he loomed over Oz. That’s when the Prof stepped in:
“Where you been, chump?” the little man asked Tower. “You know nothing’s on sale in the jail. You want a shank, you tap your bank. Far as I’m concerned, ten crates for one of my man’s pieces—hell, that price is nice, Jack.”
Tower looked down at the Prof, making up his mind. Big mistake. I was in position by then. And I’d already paid my ten cartons. “Tomorrow, motherfucker,” Tower said to Oz, saving face. “Bring the best you got.” Then he stalked away.
Oz was there the next day, but Tower never showed. That stirred the whisper-stream, but it wasn’t until later that I learned the truth.
“Damnedest thing I ever heard of,” Doc mused in his office. He liked an audience. And I liked to listen. “They find him dead in his cell. Looked like he went in his sleep. Not a mark on him. But the tox was bad—I mean, deadly bad.”
“So he OD’ed?” I asked.
“Not on curare!” Doc snorted. “But once they saw that, then they really did the job. They found it in his ear.”
“What?”
“A little dart. Beautiful piece of work, fluted and everything, like you’d make in a lab.”
“Somebody threw—?”
“No way, Burke. It was deep. Cruz said he recognized it. You know what he said it was? A fucking blowgun dart! Can you believe that? Last time I checked, we didn’t have any rain-forest pygmies here.”
“So how come the Man didn’t shake down the whole place?” I asked him. That’s what happened every time there was a stabbing and the weapon wasn’t recovered at the scene.
“What would be the point?” Doc responded. “It was weeks old by the time they found it. Whoever did it certainly got rid of it by then. Or took it apart, turned it back into whatever he made it from. Who knows?”
“Who cares?”
“You got a point,” Doc agreed. “No way this’ll kick off a race thing—Tower locked in H Block.”
I just nodded. H Block was all white. Not all AB, true, but all white, for sure. Everyone in there didn’t have the same politics, but they had the same color.
Same color as Wesley.
And when I’d sent “blowgun dart” to this super-killer, he’d just nodded from his cyber-hideout. He knew. So I had to play it like he knew it all.
I was going to get close to him soon. But there’d be bars. Some kind of bars. My hands wouldn’t do it.
A muscular guy with deep-glazed eyes staggered past us. He bumped into Rusty, knocking the big man’s drawing tablet onto the floor. Rusty didn’t say anything, just bent to pick it up.
“You got a fuckin’ problem?” the guy asked, speech slurred but fists clenched.
“There’s no problem,” I told him.
“I wasn’t talking to you, motherfucker,” he said to me, eyes only on Rusty.
Before he finished, Trixie was standing next to him, off to the side. “What’s he been drinking?” she asked the waitress.
“V and V,” the girl said.
“You’re out of here,” Trixie told the muscular guy.
“Fuck you, butch.”
“Step off!” she warned him.
“I’ll fucking step—”
Rusty shoved the heavy wood table he was sitting at right into the guy’s knees, driving it so hard you could hear bone snap. The drunk dropped.
“Goddamn it, Rusty!” Trixie yelled at him. She reached down, hooked the guy’s belt, and dragged him off somewhere. The waitress went with her.
“What’s a ‘V and V’?” I asked Rusty.
“Vodka and Vicodin,” he told me. “Lots of fools taking that now. Really gets you wrecked.”
Freddy Fender’s “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” mocked me from the Plymouth’s speakers as I headed back to my place.
When I got upstairs, I saw Pansy had Max’s singing bowl on the floor. She was just nosing it around with her snout, not biting it or anything. But she must have worked hard to get it down from the shelf where I’d put it.
“You like the sound, girl? Is that what you’re trying to do?” I asked her.
Pansy just looked at me.
I sat on the floor next to her, worked the wooden whisk until the bowl began to sing.
And then I went into it.
When I came back, I had the weapon. A bomb. A bomb built in hell. I knew it was there. I knew I could bring it with me. But I didn’t know if I could detonate it.
And then there was nothing left.
I wasn’t worried about walking out of there alive. Without me, the killer couldn’t be.
“She knows what we’re doing,” Strega whispered at me from her silky bed.
“So what?”
“It’s part of her. . . discipline. She has to know.”
“All right,” I said softly, knowing I was near the edge, dancing with a witch.
“Now she has to have more.”
“What?”
“She has to watch. I’m going to bring her in here. And make her watch us.”
“No.”
“Yes. You know how I hold her? How I keep her here?”
“No.”
“I love her,” Strega said. “And she loves me. I let her. . . here,” she whispered, guiding my hand to between her legs, a moist soft trap.
“Because you—?”
“Because she,” the witch said. “Understand? We’re the same. . . some ways. The same. She wouldn’t let a man. . . either. But me. . .”
“I already know she’s gay.”
“She’s not,” Strega said, dropping her face, nipping at my cock. “Me either.”
“Look, I don’t care what you—”
“She has to watch,” Strega hissed at me, nipping harder. “And, if you want, we could all. . .”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t let her hurt you, my darling. I’ll be right here.”
“I don’t want her near me—not like that.”
“Oh, yes you do, baby. My baby. But you’re afraid. You never have to be afraid when I’m here. When I’m alive. Even when I’m not, I’ll always be with you.”
“Strega,” I asked her, sitting up, tugging at her hair to pull her face away from my cock, “did you ever meet the Gatekeeper?”
“She has to watch,” the witch said. Like the Gatekeeper herself; always a price.
“Just. . . watch, right?”
“If that’s all you—”
“Just watch,” I told her, surrendering. Hating a piece of myself but staying within the circle surrounding my life. Everything costs. Everybody pays. . . and I’d paid so much to learn even that.
“Hmmmm. . .”
“And then you’ll tell me?” I asked, telling myself it would be over soon. And then I’d know. Not why Strega did things, but what she knew. What I needed.
“Yessss. . .” she whispered.
Strega disappeared. I lay there, my back against some propped-up pillows, smoking and waiting. Knowing it wasn’t about giving in to Strega, or doing what she wanted. No, whatever it was, she was doing it for me. But she was a witch, and she couldn’t work without her charms.
N
adine walked in. Nude. I couldn’t see her face in the shadowy light Strega seemed to bring with her as she followed the bigger girl into the room. Strega stood next to Nadine, her right hand somewhere behind the other woman.
I watched them watch me.
Strega crawled onto the bed between my legs. Then she stopped, well short of reaching me. “No closer, understand?” she said.
I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. Strega was a witch, not a tease. And I was. . . limp, anyway. Frightened. Strega always frightens me. This was worse. There was lightning in the room. No thunder, just the soundless pressure of electricity ready to crackle into life. Or take it.
Strega got up, went back to where she had been standing. Then Nadine crawled onto the bed. I was frozen. If she. . .
Nadine stopped, right where Strega had. And stayed there, arching her back as Strega knelt on the floor behind her and took her. Nadine’s eyes gleamed, but they weren’t seeing me. She made a throaty sound. Strega hissed into her. I couldn’t not look at them.
Nadine let go, exploding inside. Even her overdeveloped arms wouldn’t hold her as her shoulders dropped and her face hit the bed, only inches from me. Strega slithered across Nadine’s back until her mouth was on me.
“It works now, doesn’t it, baby?”
I didn’t want it to, but it did.
Nadine never moved, staying face-down on the red silk sheets. Strega gulped hard—but she didn’t swallow the way she always did. She yanked hard on Nadine’s hair and when the bigger girl’s face came up, Strega kissed her. Deep and long.
“You’re in her now too,” Strega said when she was done. “I washed your blood. It’s mine. I can give it to whoever I please.”
I couldn’t move. My spine was frozen. But I’d paid the tolls.
Trixie approached my table, telling me it was time without saying a word. I got up and followed her to the back room.
“Incoming,” Xyla said, over her shoulder.
I watched the screen.
>>Meet. Now.<<
where?
>>ground rules: (1) no “friends”; (2) no weapons<<
understand
>>pay phone. corner 23rd and 1st. go there now. one hour. no more. await call. follow instructions.<<
bringing woman, remember?
Choice of Evil b-11 Page 31