6
Dying to Get Out
Every night Joe opened a door and across the room was another door, also opened, and a man leaning into the room between them. The man’s head was large, cartoon large. Joe recognized the absurdity of this but also knew that it didn’t matter. The man brandished something, a device, a tool. Joe knew what it was though he could not explicitly acknowledge it at first. But the gesture went on and on until Joe granted that it was a gun that the man waved. The gun was aimed directly at Joe and the man almost immediately fired it. It either happened very quickly or agonizingly slowly. Sometimes it never really got to the point of the gun being fired, but sometimes it was as if all this had already happened when the dream started. Usually, however, the bulk of the dream was taken up with the flight of the bullet.
The bullet traveled with enormous, impossible slowness. It hung in space, revolving smoothly, but it moved directly toward Joe with inexorable deliberateness. He always thought, as the bullet was so slow, that he ought to be able simply to duck away from the path of it. But that proved impossible. When he tried to move he found that he could only move rather more slowly than the already impossibly ponderous bullet. He could think quickly, like lightning, it seemed. And he could endure this eternity of waiting, as if he were in a much faster state than the sluggish bullet. He could actually see the bullet rotate, a smooth, machinelike rotation that was fascinating, even beautiful. But horrible.
What agony! He ducked and it took him forever. He could not escape the bullet, even though he had an eternity to observe its passage. He could meticulously examine the interior of the room—which he was not actually in, just thrusting his head within, as the shooter was similarly not in it, the two of them standing outside the room on either side, looking at each other through the doors. Joe peered about, even out the great window, looking out onto grassy slopes, odd-looking funereal trees of a dark color that Joe knew was black-green although there was no actual color in the dream. He also observed the room’s curious equipment: wheels, dials, knobs, compartments, benches, handles—all arrayed low on the wall below the great window.
The room was familiar to him and yet not familiar. It belonged to him, but it didn’t. And sometimes it changed. Sometimes it was more cavernous, almost a great hall, and the assailant so far away that he was no more than a figure with a pale blob of a face and arms and legs. He never recognized the assailant, but just sort of knew who he was. The assailant, the shooter, was just an agent, one sent to do a job.
And finally, when the bullet was upon him, in his face, as it were, he turned his head, slightly, and took it. And then he woke up.
The dream was unbearable at first. Well, bearable, obviously, since he bore it, but so frightening that he feared he would not be able to bear it next time. Yet as time went on, he bore it more easily and the intensity eased without him noticing. It seems one can get used to being murdered, but it may have been that he was more absorbed with daily events.
The crucial daily event was to determine who would deliver him from captivity. Very early on, within a week or so, he had singled out his man. At first he hadn’t even bothered with the various men who came and went in the ward. He had concentrated on the women, as usual. They were the most likely, he felt. Only these women were remarkably invulnerable. As nurses, they had no deficiency of concern and interest in him as a patient, but they were remarkable for no interest in him as a man. He wasn’t used to this. He was ill, he’d had a serious brain injury. He wasn’t sure how long he had been unconscious, but he didn’t think it could have been too long. He didn’t think he’d been in a coma, although he admitted to himself that it was possible. He could have been “out” for weeks, he supposed. Maybe he looked like hell. He couldn’t tell.
When last seen in a mirror, Joe Service had been a slim, fit young man. He was not quite thirty years old, below average height but with a large head that made him seem bigger. He had the sleek, smooth-muscled build of a swimmer. He’d had a beard, but someone had shaved it.
The ladies weren’t interested, so he quit thinking about them. The guy he settled on was a cop. Tall, not bad looking, about Joe’s age or a little older. Joe didn’t say anything for days, just listened. His guy was named Kirk. He was a county cop, a sheriff’s deputy, assigned to this boring guard duty at the hospital because he was being disciplined for some mistake. Over a period of days, Joe pieced out from Kirk’s intercourse with other officers, nurses, and aides that Kirk had wrecked or damaged some superior’s car.
“They told me to take the car,” Kirk complained. The others laughed. “They didn’t tell you that car,” they said, and, “They didn’t say run a light.” Kirk had screwed up before, obviously. He seemed on the verge of something.
Soon, Kirk noticed that Joe was listening. Joe would catch his eye and make a slight movement of his head. It was very subtle, not really a look of commiseration, but at least neutral, willing to listen. Kirk began to air his gripes. It wasn’t the screwup, that wasn’t the real trouble. It was the lack of promotion, the fiddling with benefits, the lack of camaraderie, and his wife. All that and more, going back to his parents, his teachers, bankers who had turned down loan applications, even grocery-store clerks who refused his checks until the assistant manager came to okay them.
Kirk was one of those people: he didn’t trust others and they didn’t trust him. He looked more intelligent than he was, and pleasant and amiable, at first. Then you noticed he wasn’t so bright, wasn’t accommodating or efficient or careful, wasn’t genuinely friendly but guarded and suspicious. And he seemed to know something was wrong but riled easily if he wasn’t shown respect. In Joe’s eyes, Kirk was ideal.
Joe had met people like Kirk. They didn’t get along very well. He soon knew with near certainty that Kirk was not going to be a cop for long, that this was probably the fourth or fifth minicareer he had blown, that his wife was leaving him. Joe was happy with him. A guy like this was a cheap guitar: he could be tuned, after a fashion, and a melody or two could be picked out, as long as it was a well-known air that anyone recognized in the first few notes so they mentally helped you out when a fret didn’t bite or the tuning slipped.
The problem, Kirk said to Joe one day—by now he was given to spending most of his free time in Joe’s corner, sipping coffee and staring blindly out the window with its bars, talking over his shoulder softly, occasionally glancing back to see Joe watching thoughtfully, understandingly—the problem was bosses. All bosses, any boss. A man was never getting anywhere as long as he had a boss. That was obvious.
Joe sometimes wondered if Kirk was putting him on. He didn’t think so, but the guy seemed too good to be true, too dumb. Joe couldn’t afford to, however. By now, Joe was occasionally replying, tersely. This itself had taken a leap of confidence, for if Kirk were to mention to anyone, a nurse, another guard, that Joe was talking, was alert, he’d be transferred to the security ward. It was very important to Joe that this not happen. As it was, he had his three guards a day who were supposed to sit by the door and check everyone who came in or out. Joe was presumed to be, if not comatose, then barely out of that state and certainly incapable of moving. Definitely not talking. But somehow, Joe had perceived that Kirk wanted to stay, wanted this private audience for his gripes. And maybe something further.
Joe whispered, weakly, “Everybody’s got a boss, Kirk.”
Kirk shrugged. Well, yeah, he allowed, in a way. Maybe. Somewhere up the line. Even the entrepreneur, he’s got backers, shareholders, regulators of one kind or another—too damn many, in fact. But really what Kirk meant was a boss boss. Some bastard you had to answer to or he could fire your ass.
Joe managed to look sympathetic, conceding the point. “Marry a rich woman, Kirk,” Joe whispered.
“Don’t I wish,” Kirk said, devoutly. “Me, I got the reverse: Phyl could break Trump. She went out the other day and bought a trash compactor. What the hell we need a trash compactor for? On credit. Now I got to pay for a tr
ash compactor.”
“How much is ’pactor?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know. Too much. A hunderd’n fifty, or something. Where’m I gonna get that? I need tires on the pickup for Chrissake. She think of that?”
Money is nothing, Joe told him. Kirk didn’t agree. Money was everything. With money you were free. Without money you were somebody’s slave. And money was hard to come by.
“No,” Joe assured him. “Money … no prob. Money’s free. The prob is … be free. Not free … do nothing.” Or words to that effect.
Kirk was wary. He knew Joe was trying to bribe him. Joe knew he knew. The problem now was to move the dialogue to a point where a bribe could be offered, and accepted, without it being felt to be a bribe. It was an interesting situation, Joe thought, one that could be explored endlessly, right up to the moment when a doctor would say that Joe was physically able to leave the hospital, to be taken to a jail, and tried. Joe didn’t have much time, he knew. You could fool the doctors for a while, the nurses for less, but very soon their training and knowledge and their instruments would tell them that Joe was ready to be thrown to the prosecutors.
So every day, every hour, every waking minute, Joe worked Kirk. He had just about got him to the point where he could present the bait when the woman showed up.
Her name was Schwind, which she pronounced shwin, like the bicycle. Dinah Schwind, special agent. She strolled in one day, showed her credentials to Kirk, and asked him how the patient was doing. Kirk shrugged, said the patient was in dreamland.
“Still out?” she said. “I thought I heard voices.”
Kirk smiled guiltily. “I talk to him. I don’t know if he hears anything, but it helps pass the time.”
Agent Schwind nodded as if that was a good idea. Then she asked if he could step outside. When he was gone she pulled a chair up next to the bed where Joe lay with his eyes closed, not moving.
“I know you can hear me, Joe,” she said. “Don’t bother to nod or blink. It’s not important. You won’t be here much longer, so we have to move fast.”
She told him the agency she worked for, but Joe didn’t believe her. She described it as a liaison between various other federal agencies, such as Drug Enforcement, Securities Exchange, Immigration, even Central Intelligence. She didn’t exactly belong to those agencies, but she worked with them. She was—she smiled self-deprecatingly—a superagent.
Dinah Schwind might smile but she didn’t really laugh, ever. She was five feet, six inches tall, weighed about one hundred and thirty pounds, had brown hair cut short enough to show her ears, in the lobes of which she wore little gold studs. She had a square face, a square jaw with a wide mouth. Not very thick lips but a strong, straight nose; didn’t wear much makeup; brown eyes and thick, straight dark-brown eyebrows below a high, smooth forehead. She was not pretty, but not homely either. She could doubtless be attractive, if she wished, but clearly she didn’t wish. No one would call her nice looking. She didn’t look nice. She looked determined and serious. She also had a faint suggestion of a mustache. Another woman would easily have effaced that—it wasn’t really very visible—but Dinah Schwind couldn’t be concerned.
She had a compact build and wore her blue suit well, with low heels. She also packed a gun—the shoulder-harness strap was visible when she reached into her inner coat pocket for a pad and pen—though she wouldn’t have brought it onto a security ward for prisoners.
She had been to see Sergeant Mulheisen, a Detroit police detective, who had told her about Joe. Mulheisen had arrested Joe, although the arrest had taken place here in Colorado, which is where Joe was lying in a hospital bed. Mulheisen had obtained a special warrant.
Agent Schwind told Joe she was not concerned about Mulheisen or his interest in him, whatever that was, she explained. She was interested in a man named Echeverria, who was lying in a Salt Lake City hospital, slowly recovering from severe burns. To be exact, she was interested in Echeverria’s friends and associates, some of whom were in the international drug trade, others who were in organized crime in Detroit.
Joe didn’t know Echeverria, although he soon surmised that Echeverria was one of the men who had tracked him down in Montana, after the initial hit attempt had failed, the one he still dreamed about. Echeverria would have been after the money Joe had lifted in Detroit, the take from a drug scam. Joe wasn’t at home when Echeverria got to his country retreat. Joe had thoughtfully booby-trapped that house when he’d left. Echeverria had been one of those caught in the ensuing blast.
Joe didn’t say anything about this, or anything else. He was still playing semicomatose. But he didn’t want to disappoint the lady. He had a feeling that his long courtship of Deputy Kirk had been blown, so Special Agent Schwind was now his fallback position. It was time to speak.
“Etch,” Joe whispered faintly. “Heard of him.” Which was true. He’d read about Echeverria’s plight in the papers in Salt Lake. A friend in Montana had told him more. He knew where Echeverria was coming from: Humphrey DiEbola. Joe knew plenty about Humphrey. He supposed that was who Agent Schwind was really after. But all he said was that he’d heard of Echeverria.
Special Agent Schwind was not a woman to play games. “They won’t stop looking for you, Joe. You’ve been working for DiEbola for a long time,” she said. “Him and several other racketeers, in New York, Miami, Las Vegas. You have a reputation. They haven’t forgotten you, either. I don’t have anything on you, Service. I can’t hurt you, but I can help you.”
Joe thought about that one. He thought so long that she stood up and said, “I’ll see you later.”
“Going?” he asked, surprised.
“You think about it. I’ll be back.” And she left.
Joe Service pondered. He was an independent investigator who specialized in service to the underworld. He had grown up with close connections to the mob, particularly in the East, and at one point it had seemed that he would make his way in that world. But very early on he had realized that he didn’t like the way the mob operated. He had no moral scruples, or not many, about the nature of their business, but there were many things about the way they functioned that he disliked. The mob was very big on loyalty, yet it was based on deception, brutality, and corruption. Inevitably, the mobsters cheated one another, or made serious mistakes in their interface with the general public. Normally, they had no one they could trust who could address these problems. That was where Joe came in.
It was a perfect role for a man like Joe Service. He was of the underground culture, familiar with its ways, on good terms with its practitioners, but he wasn’t in it. For some people this would have been uncomfortable, but for Joe it was ideal. He liked living fast, liked the excitement, and he liked the money. In order to function, however, he had to hold himself apart. He couldn’t take sides. He had to assess the situation, see where the virtues lay, such as they were, and implement to a limited degree the sanctions. It wasn’t easy, but generally he could stay out of the internecine struggle. He could investigate, report, and recommend. Once in a while, if the price was right, financially and in terms of avoiding compromise of his own status, he could carry out the sanctions.
What was crucial, of course, and this was what was giving him these long thoughts, was that he had to operate in as great confidentiality as was possible. So. How was it that Special Agent Schwind knew who he was and what he did?
If he had never reckoned it before, he now knew just how greatly he had compromised himself when he fell for Helen Sedlacek and agreed to help her assassinate Carmine Busoni, the Detroit don who had ordered the death of her father. Obviously, to the criminal community that he had once served so ably he was now seen as just another rogue mobster. He had sacrificed an extremely valuable thing.
But—he sighed—no doubt it was inevitable. Even his vaunted special status would not have kept him immune forever from their suspicions, their paranoia, their treachery, endless devious plotting, and basic villainy. He reflected that the whole situati
on had devolved from Carmine’s petty cheating on Joe’s fees.
That special status, he reckoned, could never be restored. But that didn’t mean that some viable similar status couldn’t be achieved. He’d have to work on it. Maybe this lady could help.
But what help could she offer? She’d said she couldn’t hurt him but she could help. Presumably, that meant help with Mulheisen. Well, no. He felt certain that she couldn’t help him with Mulheisen. But maybe she could shield him, at least temporarily, or, at least, spring him. On his own, out of Mulheisen’s clutches, he thought he had a better chance.
She returned the next day. He’d hoped it would be sooner; the doctors were starting to look at him speculatively. When no one was around, say on a night shift when one of the other guards was off chatting up the nurses, he could get out of bed, walk around, do squats, even push-ups, but when anyone but Kirk was about he lay as still as a corpse, his breathing as shallow as he could make it, his pulse as erratic as he could try.
Dinah Schwind wore the same blue suit. It looked the same, anyway. Maybe she had a dozen of them. It was well tailored. She wasn’t exactly slim, but athletic looking. Good color. He was sure that she didn’t smoke. No stained fingers, no dental problems, evidently; clear-eyed as hell.
“Okay, Joe,” she said briskly, drawing up her chair when Kirk had discreetly vanished, “drop the possum act. We don’t have time for it.”
Joe opened his eyes, raised his head, and glanced about. He smiled. “Shoot,” he said.
“Imagine,” she said, “that you knew a private airstrip in, say, Idaho. Say that you had learned that a private jet would be landing there at a specific time. Say that you had the means to destroy that plane.”
Joe imagined. “Just destroy the plane? Not a hit?”
“Just destroy the plane.”
“Get a cowboy from a saloon,” he said. “Boise’s full of cowboys.”
La Donna Detroit Page 8