“What the fuck does that mean?” the man in the nice suit asked.
Klinger didn’t know, so he thought hard. “I don’t have them here . . . I’ve got them at the Witness . . .”
The man holding him let him fall, and as Klinger lay on the floor he felt—as if it were happening to someone else—his lungs pulling at wet air in a cage too small for them. The man by the door gave him a moment to catch his breath.
“You haven’t made a delivery yet?”
“No.” Something was drooling from his mouth. He wiped at it with his good hand.
“We’re in a hurry, John,” the man in the suit said. “You understand.” Below the insectlike eyes of the goggles there was a grin.
He couldn’t get up. He was sliding back down the wall, taking forever.
“I . . . buried them,” he said.
“We’d like you to dig them up.”
What scared him most was that they might see the pillowslip, how fat it was, and he would get sick, and, as he got sick, having found what they wanted, they would simply kill him or put him in the hospital for a long time and he wouldn’t be able to do it. What he needed to do.
He was sitting up at last.
“There’s a pickup . . . the day after tomorrow.”
“We don’t understand, John.”
“At the station . . . the Mojave station . . . At ten A.M.”
“The buyer will be alone?”
“That’s . . . what he said.”
“Who?”
“I don’t . . . know. I was contacted by phone . . . by telephone.”
The man with the leather jacket was moving toward him.
“Jesus Christ,” Klinger heard himself say. “He told me he’d pay . . . I didn’t care who he was.”
The man in the leather jacket looked at the man in the nice suit.
The man in the nice suit sighed. The man in the leather jacket didn’t move.
“We really hope,” the man in the suit said, “that you’re not fucking with us.”
Klinger shook his head, the pain making pretty explosions.
“If you can keep our little meeting a secret, John,” the man in the suit was saying, “we’ll have fewer problems, John.”
They were turning to leave.
“They teach you this in law school?” Klinger heard himself say.
The man in the leather jacket looked at the man in the suit. The man in the suit looked back. The man in the leather jacket walked over to Klinger where he sat on the floor and hit him in the nose, which was suddenly heavy enough to pull him into a darkness where there was no woman, no blue eyes, no brush of his fingertips on her soft breasts to make her hold him tightly against the pain of the world.
When he awoke, it was night. He didn’t want to move but he made himself get up, find the bathroom, and, fumbling, relieve himself. He took three extra-strength Excedrin IB—stuff with caffeine—and somehow got into his car and drove to the emergency room at Corona Community.
When they asked him how he’d gotten it, he told them a mugger on Tyler Avenue. When they asked him if he’d filed a police report, he told them yes. They called his HMO for approval of the treatment and took two hours to bandage his nose.
He filled the prescription for codeine in the pharmacy at the hospital and went home, setting the alarm for noon.
His face felt huge, as if two people were wearing it. He drove to Sheriff’s Aviation fighting the edgy dreaminess of codeine, and when he arrived, McKinney took one look at him and laughed:
“Jesus Christ, who worked you over?”
“I need a gun, McKinney.” He could still taste the blood, though there shouldn’t be any. He wondered if his gums were bleeding, a tooth, a tooth turning gray as it died. “I drive out to the Witness last night because Davis asks me to and some ethnic asshole jumps me at the gas station. I need a gun.”
“No reason we can’t arrange it, Klinger,” McKinney said at last.
He had him in the snack bar, showing him off—bandage and all—over their usual cup of coffee. Everyone was looking, even the veterans who’d seen a lot worse. McKinney was having a great time. “God Almighty. The Justice Department of this fine nation tells us we’re supposed to give you boys whatever you need, and, as it happens, my boy, I’ve got a personal weapon—a beautiful Colt Phantom—sitting gathering dust in a case. No paperwork. No fuss. How does that sound? A gift from your old friend McKinney to his best friend Klinger . . .” Less loudly, he asked: “Did Davis see you like this?”
“No . . . I phoned him.”
The old man shook his head, whistling. “You got the Phantom as of fourteen hundred hours today, Klinger, but try not to grease anyone. Just wave it at them. When are you going to get that nose fixed?”
“Davis gave me two days off.”
“That was white of him.”
“I want to see your mini-cannon do its thing, McKinney,” Klinger said.
McKinney sat back and frowned. “You sure got a fucking weird sense of timing, Klinger.” He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know . . .”
“You’re always talking about it, McKinney. I’m in the mood, now.”
McKinney squirmed a little.
“Me and the old lady are supposed to go to Lake Perris with her brother’s six kids and I’m supposed to get off early. She’s not going to like this at all.”
“Talk’s cheap, McKinney. You want to show me what it can do—I may not be in the mood later.”
McKinney stared at him and grinned finally. “You want to get it out of your system, right? Every jackrabbit some ethnic son-of-a-bitch, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. We take the Huey. And get that nose fixed. It’s enough to make a person puke.”
McKinney laughed. Klinger laughed, too, though it hurt.
The sky was clear as crystal and Klinger wasn’t paying much attention to the rabbits two hundred feet below. The distinctive sound of the Huey filled the air and the Vulcan was a mechanical belt-fed canister that fired a hundred M-60 rounds a second. When they weren’t knocking rabbits away like rag-dolls, the rounds were raising little plumes of dust, sand, and gravel. The rabbits kicked and kept kicking, lying on their sides, becoming specks as the Huey flew on. McKinney made him listen to stories about “the highlands,” the “offensive of ’68,” “armor at Lang Vei,” and “black syphilis.” Klinger asked him every question he could about the Vulcan, and McKinney answered every one. When Klinger asked if he could fly, McKinney said sure. When he asked if he could fire the Vulcan—why were they up here if he wasn’t supposed to fire the thing?—McKinney stalled, but said yes at last, and Klinger felt the gun roar like the biggest zipper in the world. He had to fly with his one good hand, but the grip and trigger for the Vulcan fit his prosthetic crab perfectly. Even McKinney was impressed. They got back at five on the button, Klinger took another codeine for his face, and McKinney handed him the Phantom proudly. Klinger thanked him and slapped him on the back with his good hand. The old man seemed sorry—truly sorry—that their little adventure was over.
Driving ten miles up the Santa Ana wash, Klinger parked the Honda in a stand of eucalyptus, the backpack with its PC and Osterizer and the pillowslip full of its paper on the seat beside him. The sun would wake him at dawn. It always did in the desert.
He didn’t dream about her.
He knew he wouldn’t until it was over.
He got to Sheriff’s Aviation at eight the next morning. McKinney never arrived until nine. The vehicle-release sergeant at the helipad looked at his nose as if wanting to ask, but only said: “You want the Huey, Klinger?”
“Yes, sir. We took it out yesterday with the Vulcan. Someone in Bidwell’s office has this theory, McKinney’s supposedly testing it, but I don’t think his heart’s in it. He wants me to make the run for him today . . .” Klinger sighed—as if to say, This is what you do for a good friend—and forced a smile.
The man nodded, unsure. He picked up the phone, pushed
the buttons, waited, and set it back down slowly. “You’ll be needing a cartridge belt . . . ?”
Time seemed to stop. It was the belt. McKinney and all his eccentricities were one thing, but a belt to a kid? Klinger sighed again and said:
“Why do I get the feeling McKinney didn’t get the paperwork done on it?”
“Because he didn’t,” the sergeant said, but the confiding tone was there: We both know what McKinney is like, don’t we.
“Shit.” Klinger sighed again.
The sergeant looked at him for a moment and finally sighed, too.
“All right . . . I’ll consign you a belt, but make sure he fills out the A-202 sheet when he gets in.”
“Thanks, sir.”
“Have a good run,” the man said, and then added: “Just don’t shoot anyone.”
It was the best joke the man could think of that early in the morning. Klinger laughed at it.
As he left, he knew she had been there with him again. Even this—the belt—had gone too easily.
As he neared the Witness, backpack and pillowslip beside him, the sun blinded him for a moment to the east and he banked, pulling over the access road that drove for ten straight kilometers across the Mojave floor. It was 9:45. Two minutes later he spotted the car below him—the gray-blue paint job and black tire walls of a Justice car. He pulled ahead, squinting toward the Witness, and when he was almost on top of it saw the second car—a big white Seville parked behind the shack, front and rear license plates missing.
Two figures were visible, standing beside it.
Banking south, he watched the two closely, and when he was sure they had seen the Huey, he nosed toward them just as McKinney had shown him to, firing.
The sound of the gigantic zipper filled the air.
He let it chew the sand and gravel ten meters from the car for three full seconds while the two men dove, scrambled, looking like roadrunners with absolutely no place to go.
When he zeroed in on the car at last, it took only a second. The car collapsed, the doors blowing sideways, the roof disappearing, fragments of metal flying after the men wherever they tried to run.
He banked, circling them, and knew at last why McKinney liked those jackrabbits on the desert floor.
He chased them. He sent short bursts every couple of seconds right behind them and the faster they ran, the slower they seemed to go, tiring, circling back toward the shack because there was really no other place to go. One of them fell as he fired. The figure jerked. Little plumes rose around it. The figure began to crawl on its hands and knees, stopped, fell over, jerked some more, and finally lay still.
Klinger wondered what the man would transmit over the next few days, weeks and months, what word or phrase a Witness somewhere would pick up in the neutrinos and transcribe.
And then the bullets hit me?
I tried to crawl, but couldn’t, and then I died.
Just like her: And then I died.
Klinger thought of the message he had composed—the one for her, the big-boned girl he could only meet in dreams, because that was what life—and death—had dealt them. He repeated it to himself for the thousandth time as he tracked the other running figure, firing until it, too, was down, and, without looking at the body, flying on, putting the Huey down at last not far from the shack.
When the rotor wash had died away and he could see again, he watched the cloud of dust from the company car getting larger on the access road.
The car stopped. None of the doors opened. With the backpack and pillowslip under his bad arm and the Colt Phantom in his good hand, he got out of the Huey, stood for a moment, and took aim. Gravel flew a few meters in front of the blue-gray car and the car shot into reverse, fishtailing wildly until it had turned and was speeding back down the access road. Stopping about a kilometer away, it turned back around to face him like a bull. They were probably radioing for backup.
He went inside.
With the PC reconnected and the handwritten pages and the Xeroxes—all he had of her—laid out on the floor, he propped open the door, sat down at the card table, and waited.
There was one transmission—only one:
. . . but when I waked I saw that I saw not cold in the earth and the deep snow piled above thee come live with me and be my love John who knows me so well. . . .
He did not understand. How could she be answering him? He had never sent the message. And now he never would.
He wanted to cry, but found he could not.
He heard the bullhorn before he heard the choppers. And then the choppers drowned the bullhorn out and he got up to go to the door.
A black-and-white sat a few hundred yards down the access road, doors open, a bullhorn—what he assumed was a high-powered bullhorn—peeking around one of them.
For some reason they imagined he could hear the thing over the noise of the choppers and he had to point at his ear again and again—standing in plain sight in the doorway—before they got the idea and radioed for the choppers to stand back.
“Klinger!” the bullhorn said. It wasn’t Davis. “We know what you’ve got and we know what you can do. This is as far as it needs to go. If we can reach some agreement before the SWAT boys get here, things will go a lot easier. Signal if you understand.”
Klinger waved the Phantom.
“We see the weapon, Klinger. We’ve received your signal. We want to know what you want—we want to hear what’s on your mind.”
He wondered if it was too soon for the marksmen to be there. He didn’t have hostages. He wasn’t even in the Huey with the Vulcan. They actually had, he realized, no idea what he really “had” or what he wanted. They really didn’t.
“I want to talk to Davis,” he shouted.
The words were lost in the wind.
Someone had binoculars. He could see them. He could see something shaped like a dish, too.
“We can’t hear you, Klinger,” the bullhorn said.
“Davis!” he shouted. “I want to talk to Davis.”
“You want to talk to Mack Davis?”
The dish was a directional mike.
“Yes!” he shouted.
They were talking to each other now. One of them had to be a negotiator.
“Davis is a good man, Klinger,” the bullhorn said at last. “He’s treated you well—just like a father. He’s a true friend.”
Davis was with them. That was obvious. The negotiator knew what he was doing.
“Yes. He’s the one I want to talk to.”
“What?”
“Davis is the one I want to talk to.”
There was more talking behind the open car doors, figures scurrying. He could see Davis stand up, two uniforms shielding him.
“Davis is your one true friend, Klinger. Remember that.”
“Yes, he’s treated me well!” Klinger had, he discovered, started to cry at last.
Everything fell silent at that moment. The wind was gone.
“Davis is the only one I’ll talk to,” Klinger said again, sure that they could read his lips—even if the mike couldn’t pick him up. They had a lip-reader. With binoculars. They had to.
Then, because he thought he heard the ID alarm go off on the printer, he went inside again.
He’d been staring at the printer for what seemed like forever—it hadn’t been the alarm at all, but something else, a sound from somewhere in the desert—when he heard Davis’s voice on the bullhorn.
Stepping outside, wondering if a rifle round would hit him in the forehead before he could say a word and he would join her where words didn’t matter—he shouted: “I can’t talk like this, Davis. You gotta be in the shack. I’m not going to hurt you, but you’ve got to be in the shack with me.”
More discussion behind car doors and then, through the bullhorn, Davis answered: “I’m coming in, Klinger. I am not armed and I really don’t think you want to hurt me. I think you care about me as much as I care about you.” More negotiator words. “I think this is somethi
ng that’s simply gotten out of hand. We’re good friends and I’m coming in because I think you want and need a friend right now.”
“I won’t hurt you,” Klinger found himself saying. He said it quietly. His eyes were blurred. He didn’t want them to be.
When the big man, sweating in the heat and his own nervousness, was inside, Klinger couldn’t look at him, couldn’t keep the Phantom aimed at him. He was looking at the printer instead, while the big man—he could hear him doing it—sat down slowly and carefully on the old cot. He was, Klinger was sure, looking at the hand-copied pages and the dark Xeroxes laid out so neatly on the floor.
“Klinger?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want? People have gotten hurt, but I think I know who they are, and the people out there in the cars and choppers are willing to agree. They just need to understand. If they aren’t able to understand, Klinger, and understand soon, they’re going to have to come in. If they have to come in, they’re going to have to view this as a hostage situation.”
“I want to stay here,” Klinger said, his back still turned. It wasn’t what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t think.
“That’s what you want to tell me?”
“No . . .”
“Did you make those dupes, Klinger?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you wanted me here—to tell me why?”
“Yes . . .”
“I’d like to listen—”
“I didn’t want to lose her, sir,” Klinger heard himself saying. “You don’t know what she is like.”
He could hear the big man shift his weight on the cot, searching for the right words—his own, or someone else’s.
“She’s dead, Klinger,” Davis said at last.
Klinger looked at him. “No, she’s not, sir. She’s been answering me.”
The big man was shaking his head, blinking. Klinger could see it.
“She’s dead and she’s sending, Klinger. That’s all. That’s what we do, Klinger: We listen to what the dead send us.”
The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories Page 18