Painkiller, Princess

by Chester Gattle

  Xiaolian raced around the house to the garage and grabbed a pistol, a silenced AR-15, and a nightscope from the SUV, then headed to Emmelia’s as well.

  She snapped the nightscope to the AR-15 and crept to a thicket of trees that looked in on the picture window. The standoff unfolded, culminating with the three sicarios dragging Jacob from the house. She could’ve followed, but something told her they’d be coming back, and within minutes, they did, Tiff having joined the procession. There was another argument, Jacob tried to run, and Rubén punched him in the ribs, dropping him out of sight.

  A sneaking advance of footfalls drew Xiaolian’s attention back to the driveway, where another figure, this one Gregory, came rushing the house. His pace slowed as he neared the back door, but after a short pep talk, he went inside.

  With everyone accounted for, Xiaolian had her opportunity. She sprinted past Jacob’s Honda and into the garage. Just as she found the circuit breaker box, gunshots erupted. Then an explosion. Something pressurized, maybe a propane tank, went off.

  She flipped the main breaker and rushed in. Through the nightscope, the hallway glowed green. There was a body (Maybe two?) on the floor. Rubén, Oscar, and David were standing just beyond the pile, almost invisible in a greenish fog. The room was filled with dust and mist. Xiaolian couldn’t see anything beyond the three sicarios.

  She took her shots and departed.

  Now, as she lay curled up on her side in the cargo space of the hatchback, she only had to wait. The canvas hockey bag she’d crawled into enveloped her in a foul, rancid smell of dried sweat that was stifling, but it also masked her own scent. The pug sitting on the backseat was oblivious. Jacob and Missy, in the front of the Honda, were equally clueless.

  She’d left the AR-15 in Emmelia’s garage—a parting gift beside the hockey gear—but the pistol she had kept. It was now pressed against her chest, its slide touching the edge of her nose.

  As the Honda left Emmelia’s house, she listened for sirens. She wouldn’t have expected Emmelia to have called the police (or allowed Jacob or Missy to call them), but there was a house down the street near the turnaround, and in the dead of night, the sound of gunshots and an explosion would surely have carried. They must’ve heard something. But the sirens never arrived.

  Just a bit longer, then, Xiaolian thought as Jacob went about chauffeuring her to his death.

  XXIII.

  Day Fourteen, Wednesday

  Eight Seven Dead

  The neighbors at the turnaround didn’t hear anything for a few reasons. One, Beth slept with a white noise machine, and two, her husband, Nils, had gotten up to check on a barking that definitely wasn’t their golden Lab. When the commotion down the road had started up, Nils had paid it no attention. He was waking his wife, the purple dog cradled in his arms.

  Beth threw off the covers and called her mother. “You won’t guess who showed up at our house!”

  Beth’s mother had a guess but still didn’t believe it. “Billy Jack?”

  “Yes! Billy Jack! Isn’t that amazing?”

  Nils sat on the bed next to his wife and set the dog between them. For the first time in days, Billy Jack wasn’t growling or snarling or making the slightest sign of agitation. He lay on the pale-brown comforter with his head rested on his paws, smacking his lips a few times.

  “How did Billy Jack end up all the way out there?” Ellie said.

  Beth turned to Nils, who shrugged.

  “He was at the back door, barking,” he offered, giving the dog a pat on the head. Nils hadn’t noticed, but there were a few red stains on his pajamas that had rubbed off Billy Jack. They’d dry and turn dark, not looking like blood, by the time he noticed the next day.

  ~

  Xiaolian was counting the minutes. They’d been on the road for about forty and were well outside Duluth. If she had to guess, she’d bet Jacob and Missy were heading back to Minneapolis. So much had happened in Duluth that they were desperate to get back to some familiar, comfortable streets. The fact that they were still being hunted was secondary; the allure of their home city was too great to ignore.

  Of course she wouldn’t let them get there. Forty minutes outside of Duluth put them somewhere between Sturgeon Lake, population 406, and Willow River, population 211. (She’d studied the map before her arrival.) They were in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Their dog was sleeping. Missy was sleeping. The only sound came from the wind rushing through the broken window and the tires rolling over the road.

  Xiaolian unzipped the canvas bag and rose. She inspected the passing road signs. There was a rest stop coming up in three miles. That works.

  Leaning over the backseat, the pug curled up below her, Xiaolian called to Jacob. His eyes shifted to the rearview mirror and widened, but nothing more. That was all the reaction he gave. Apparently the appearance of a stranger holding a gun in the back of his car didn’t elicit much of a response these days, but that was fine with her. She pressed a finger against her lips, then whispered just loud enough to be heard over the wind, “Pull over. There’s a rest stop in a few miles.”

  Maybe he didn’t hear. Maybe he didn’t care. Either way, he started easing the car to the shoulder.

  “The rest stop,” she whispered with force.

  He just nodded and kept creeping over. When the tires hit the rumble strips, he reflexively jerked the car back onto the interstate. The sound and the jostling woke both Missy and the pug. The dog opened its unpatched eye, spotted Xiaolian leaning over him, and tumbled over the edge of the seat.

  “Jacob, careful,” Missy whined. “Quincy, come here.” She patted her leg without turning around.

  The pug hopped over the luggage, maniacally squeezing between the front seats, and into Missy’s lap.

  Xiaolian gave up on the rest stop plan. “Pull over,” she yelled.

  Missy jumped, and the pug started barking.

  “Pull over,” Xiaolian repeated. She pointed the gun at Missy, who’d finally turned to look. Xiaolian couldn’t see much of Missy’s reaction, but she caught the exasperation and slump of her shoulders.

  “Okay, okay,” Jacob assured Xiaolian.

  The landscape was flying by in a blur of shadows and halogen highlights. The car crossed over the shoulder line. They were going too fast. They were likely to blow a tire. But before Xiaolian could tell Jacob to slow down, pay attention, and watch the road, a dark lump emerged up ahead out of the darkness.

  The headlights touched upon the massive mangled shape and its single unblinking eye. Xiaolian dropped to the floor as the subcompact Honda Fit struck the deer carcass and bounced up on two wheels.

  Jacob screamed.

  Missy gasped.

  Xiaolian went airborne and slammed against the roof.

  The Honda came down on its wheels, and the front tire blew with a boom, sending the car veering from the pavement and into the dirt. The shredded tire, mostly the rim, caught the soft soil, and the Fit was tossed, rolling and rolling in an expanding cloud of glass and earth.

  It eventually came to rest upright beside a narrow stream that ran into a culvert under the interstate.

  Xiaolian awoke with a start and a choke, staring at the buckled, wrinkled ceiling. She’d been momentarily knocked unconscious. She’d also lost her gun. And her left arm felt funny—she couldn’t quite move it—but she was alive.

  What about the others? She didn’t know. Everything was quiet.

  She managed to get to her knees despite her arm’s uncooperative nature, which she now realized was broken. The bone near her elbow hadn’t pierced the skin, but it was trying, stretching it to translucency.

  She could tend to that later; Jacob and Missy were her focus.

  The back hatch, warped shut, forced her to climb out the shattered window and drop to the freshly upturned dirt. A semi was approaching, and by the sound of its brakes rumbling across the surrounding farmland, it was coming to help. She had maybe thirty seconds.

  Xiaolian lumbered
around the car, tripping over weeds and dirt. She rested against the side door and looked in. Amid the slowly deflating airbags, Jacob and Missy were unmoving, lifeless. Quincy was awake, shaking atop the center console after having apparently bounced harmlessly around among the airbags.

  Had Xiaolian held on to her gun, or had she the time to go look for it, she would’ve shot Jacob just to be sure he was dead, but she had no gun nor time. The semi was fifteen seconds away. He was dead anyway.

  She stepped into the stream and followed it into the field that stretched on for miles.

  ~

  Neither Jacob nor Missy were dead, but at that moment, they could’ve fooled almost anyone. The truck driver, a thirty-year vet named Bernie who’d seen his fair share of wrecks, peeked in. He too thought they were goners. The lack of blood wasn’t the issue. In fact, blood could sometimes be a good thing. Head wounds, for instance, were profuse bleeders, but they weren’t much to fret about. It was the internal damage that got you. And if you wanted to assess internal damage, you examined the vehicle. And this one was a doozy. Rolled and crumpled like the fast-food wrappers he tossed with precision from his cab into open dumpsters. These two youngsters had insides, he imagined, that were beaten and blended more than a McFlurry.

  The dog was okay, though, which was strange. They often got it the worst, faring only better than the wild animal that’d been hit, which in this case was a deer a hundred yards back. That thing was vulture casserole.

  Figuring he ought to do something, since he hadn’t just come to gawk, Bernie tried the door. It required a little elbow grease, but he got it open. And once the side airbag was out of the way, he reached in and checked for the pulse he expected not to find.

  “Well, shit,” he muttered. And it was a rather strong pulse at that. He didn’t dare move the man—he’d leave that to the professionals he’d called as he’d rolled up—so he went around to the passenger. She appeared dead as all get-up too, but nope; she was quite all right.

  Bernie watched over the two until the state patrol arrived, then he went to lay out some hazard lights behind his truck.

  When the EMTs arrived a minute later, the officer joined Bernie and set out a few flares of his own to keep the late-night traffic well into the left lane. The two of them then talked about what Bernie had seen, but that hadn’t been much.

  He said the car had passed him a few minutes earlier going about seventy—seemed okay—then, when the taillights were just a dot on the horizon, they blinked out. At first blush he’d thought the interstate had just dipped into a valley, but he’d driven this route for the last fifteen years and knew this segment was as flat as an ice rink (which it sometimes became in the early months of the year, but never mind that). The lights blinked out, and he’d started to slow his truck.

  As Bernie finished the rest of his story, two local cop cars and a fire truck arrived. Figuring he was just in the way at that point, he picked up his hazard lights (the officer’s flares were enough) and went on his way.

  He’d also already lost the equivalent of one glass of wine (for the missus) and one beer (for himself) at the supper club in driving time. While he brought the truck up to speed, a bit of nostalgia hit him for when he could’ve made that up by just staying on the road a little extra into the early-morning hours, but the damn regulations and GPS trackers meant it was gone forever. Didn’t matter, though. He’d had to stop. He always stopped.

  ~

  Jacob awoke as a fireman and an EMT were lifting him from the mess. He asked for Missy (“She’s doing okay. She’s in the ambulance.”) then Quincy (“Your dog’s fine.”) then himself (“You seem fine too.”).

  That last comment matched his own assessment. Just a bit sore and tired. He probably could’ve extracted himself from the car, but it was easier to let someone else do it. He got hoisted out and laid on a stretcher, then carried through the weeds and across the drainage ditch.

  Glancing around, he half expected to see the woods around Emmelia’s house, but the landscape was utterly flat and cleared. He couldn’t remember what had just happened. In the ambulance, he asked the EMT, “Where are we?”

  “Outside Moose Lake. We’re heading to Mercy Hospital. Your passenger too. She’s in the ambulance up the road.”

  “Quincy?”

  “One of the officers is taking him to an animal shelter for the night.”

  Jacob closed his eyes, and a few random snippets popped into his head.

  Someone in the back…

  A blown tire…

  Airbags…

  Who was that someone? He wanted to blame the cartel. They’re dead, though. They were killed at Emmelia’s house. Or was that a dream? Did that happen? Who’s dead? He couldn’t find the answers, and before he knew it, he’d drifted off to sleep.

  The next time he opened his eyes, he was in a hospital room, and it was daylight out. Things weren’t much clearer, though. Regardless of the short-term memory loss, the doctor said he was fit leave (only a moderate concussion and a bruised rib), so he went to find Missy in the waiting room. She remembered the evening’s events fine and filled him in.

  After listening to five minutes of his life that he couldn’t recall, Jacob said, “They really didn’t find her?”

  “Nope.”

  He stared at the television in the corner. The Price Is Right model was showing off a new washer-dryer combo. Jacob suggested, “Maybe she just crawled off and died somewhere.”

  “I don’t think it matters.”

  “But she could come back.”

  “I think she thinks we’re dead. Why would she go through all that and then leave us?”

  As the contestants made their bids (some obviously wild guesses), Jacob said, “So do we still go home?”

  Missy chewed her fingernail for a moment, then said, “I think we go home.”

  “Should I let Emmelia know about this? She should know, right?”

  “She probably already knows. Or she will. She’s the DEA,” Missy reminded him. “Someone will tell her what happened.”

  Jacob nodded. “Yeah, true.”

  Missy stood and held out her hand. “Let’s go home.”

  While the one-dollar bidder cheered his win, Missy and Jacob walked out.

  They rented a truck from a U-Haul dealer down the street (Moose Lake didn’t have a car rental in the town), then retrieved Quincy from the Arrowhead Pet Clinic and hopped back on I-35 to resume their journey south.

  ~

  Gregory’s back was killing him. Absolutely killing him. Emmelia had helped him haul the bodies, one by one, to and from her CR-V, but after that, he’d been on his own. He’d dug the gigantic hole. He’d rolled the stiffening Rubén, Oscar, David, and Tiffany into it. He’d shoveled the dirt over top of them. He’d packed it down tight.

  The problem wasn’t that he was out of shape. It was that he hadn’t paced himself. He’d dug like a fiend until dawn.

  What the hell had he known, though? He’d never buried a body (or four). Emmelia should’ve warned him to slow down.

  By the time he’d filled in the mass grave (marking it with nothing other than the weeds he’d set aside), he himself had smelled like the dead or, equally as disturbing, the inside of Randy’s truck after a deer hunt and celebratory wank. The animal.

  He’d thrown out the clothes—unsalvageable—and showered until his fingers pruned, but he was still catching whiffs of rancid cottage cheese and hard-boiled eggs every time he scratched his head. The weirdly creamy liquid that’d seeped from the holes in ROD had done an amazing job burrowing into his scalp, and with each fingernail disturbance, it came out in a gentle puff of offensiveness.

  To distract himself from the smell and the muscle pain, he thought he could go out and get a few Uber fares, but he hadn’t even shifted into drive before he was sent back inside, hunched over like Quasimodo.

  The pain was a lesson to be learned. But what lesson was that? What was the takeaway in all of this? What had he learned as a good
student of life?

  Damned if I know.

  Maybe if he was forced to say something it was that he needed more training. He was perfectly adept at handling the people of Duluth, but the cartel? They were the big leagues, and his first leap from the minors hadn’t gone all too well; in fact, he’d gotten his ass kicked, if he was truly being honest. So maybe his back trouble was a way to motivate him to get better, to watch some more YouTube videos of his favorite combat instructors and ramp up his game.

  But holy hell, he couldn’t focus. After descending into his basement lair and sitting at his desk, this stringy muscle halfway down his back was being a real sharpshooter, getting him good with a pointed twinge. And when he tried to give the area a rub, his shoulder and neck muscles seized up like a bitch.

  Why it took him until then to remember relief was within arm’s reach in a pile on the table was beyond him, but when the realization came, he jumped from the chair (as best he could, yelping as the pain spiked) and rushed for the pills.

  Sure, they were laced with fentanyl, but he probably needed only one. He wasn’t going to OD off just one. And he’d been mixing the shit out of them ever since that girl had died. It’d be doubly harmless.

  He’d actually promised Emmelia he’d dump what was left in the toilet, but given that there was decent money (and time) wrapped up in the pile, that probably wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t want him selling it, so he wouldn’t, but he’d find some other use for the pills besides freely sharing them with the sewer gators of urban lore.

  So why not take one himself right now?

  He pinched one between his fingers and examined the surface. He had to give himself credit for his workmanship. The pill looked damn good.

  Hopefully it worked as good as it looked.

  He’d read an article during one of his stakeouts at Days Inn about how fentanyl calmed the nerves (among other things). Poker players in Vegas were starting to take some (the teeniest, tiniest bit) before hitting the card tables. It put ice water in their veins and made them invincible—mostly. There’d always be those random bad beats.