“Mark—!”
“I said calm the fuck down.”
She stops.
“I was leaving because I had to,” Mark says. “Because of what I had to do. But I don’t know how those guys zeroed me so fast. It’s just impossible. Unless—”
“Unless what? Tell me, Mark.”
Unless those guys he hit during the sale weren’t all dead when he left them. Unless someone ratted out Mark Jones and the House of JAM. The sick slime doing all the talking back there knew that he and Jollie and Andy were the one percent ruling class of the Kingdom—Marnie Stanwell used those exact words. He knew that the three of them were royalty. It’s why they didn’t just kill the Boy Prince like all the others back there—when he said his name was Andy and not Mark.
Whoever survived told them everything.
And that could only be . . .
Jackie.
How? He was shot six times.
But everything was a blur in that backroom.
And now Mark remembers that he never checked any of those men for pulses, never gave Jackie the head shot for insurance. Two bullets is usually enough. It didn’t even take one bullet to kill Brandon Lee—just a plug of smoldering paper wadding, jammed in the barrel of a prop gun.
Jackie survived.
And Jollie can never know about that.
Already, she’s looking at him like he’s a monster.
And guess what?
“Was it some deal that went bad? Jackie always wanted you to go bigger—was that it? Did somebody hurt him, Mark? Jesus Christ—”
“I never wanted any of you to get hurt.”
“So that makes it okay to mess with our lives like this? I don’t even know who you are, Mark!”
“That makes two of us,” Andy says, still seemingly mesmerized by the contents of the Black Box. “This is all professional gear, dude. We’re sitting in a safe house right now. And he wasted five guys back there in, like, three seconds.”
Jollie’s face drains white. “He did what?”
“He’s some sort of trained assassin. He did it all while you were sleeping. Those guys had me on the floor and they were about to take my fingers off, and he turned into the Tasmanian Devil.”
Andy heaves a half-smile, aims a thumb-and-forefinger pistol at Jollie.
With his good hand, of course.
Booyah.
• • •
Jollie can’t even find the words now.
That’s a genuine first for her.
Mark just looks at his feet. “Eleven,” he says.
“What?” Andy says, looking up from the Black Box.
“I killed eleven guys back there. Four in the room, one in the hall, one in the bathroom. And five cops.”
Jollie shakes her head, her mouth gaping wipe, almost laughing. She can hardly remember the bodies in the house, and none of it even seemed real then. It still doesn’t seem real now. She looks at Andy desperately, her whole body trembling: “Is he serious? Are you two guys fucking serious?”
Andy scratches his head with his bandaged hand, the fresh cast scraping against his sweaty hair. “Just look at his toy box, Jollie. It’s all pretty obvious. He’s a spook or something.”
Mark sighs. The truth hurts when you tell it, he thinks. Because people are liars. They live in lies. They live in denial. Live in it forever.
Jackie.
She can never know or she’ll hate me forever.
“The Kingdom’s been my cover for years,” Mark says. “But you two were never supposed to get hurt. It was never about either of you. It was about Razzle Schaeffer.”
“Then why are we here?” Jollie says. “Why did those people want to kill us?”
“They knew you were important to me. I had something they wanted. They were going to do whatever it took to get it back. I was supposed to do the job. Get on a plane and disappear. Nobody was ever supposed to see me again.”
“And what about Jackie?”
“He was never supposed to see me again either.”
“What happened to him?”
Mark lowers his eyes. He was hoping she wouldn’t ask again.
She starts shaking her head again, wide-eyed now. Incredulous. “Why, Mark? Why would you let them hurt Jackie? That kid never did anything to anybody.”
“His father . . . would have hurt him eventually.”
It’s almost like a lie. He tells himself it isn’t.
Damn me straight to hell.
“Mark, if you let something happen to that poor kid—”
“I didn’t. I mean . . . I think he’s okay.”
Now that’s definitely a lie. But it’s also the truth.
From a certain point of view.
Jollie sags her shoulders. “Why did you come back? You must’ve known it would be scorched earth with us.”
“I didn’t care.”
“Because you love us? Because you couldn’t bear leaving without saying good-bye? How do I know that’s not just more bullshit, Mark? How do either of us trust anything you say now?”
“I guess you can’t. But I do love you. I love you both. That love was never supposed to happen. They . . . teach you not to . . .”
“Who’s they?” she says, looking unimpressed. “We talking FBI, CIA? Some other deep-paranoia agency I’ve never heard of?”
Mark takes another deep breath. “It’s never about whether you’re paranoid, Jollie.”
She almost laughs again, because this is an old bad joke between them. “Are you fucking kidding me, Mark? Our lives have boiled down to some tired mid-eighties pun about the Cold War and my best friend is a black-ops super assassin by way of the Austin drug/kiddie-porn mafia? For fuck’s sake, it just isn’t happening. It just can’t be real.”
But it is, isn’t it? And here they are, strung out on revelations and bad secrets and 100% Real Fruit Juice, sweetened by 100% Real Fruit Juice.
It’s about whether you’re paranoid ENOUGH.
“Fuck me running,” Andy sighs.
“I’m still calling bullshit on all of it,” Jollie says. “Not until I hear something that makes even a little bit of sense. You said back there that you were Mark, that you’ve always been the same Mark. But what I see isn’t Mark. All this gun talk and death and shit—it just isn’t you at all. How can a super assassin get high like you do and sell weed and wash dishes for a living while he writes horror stories? I’ve known you for six years, Mark. I’ve looked right into your soul. Nobody can lie that well—not to me, not to anybody.”
“It wasn’t all lies,” Mark says, fingering the joint in his hand.
“So,” Andy says. “Are we, like, officially on the lam now or whatever?”
Mark sighs. “Yeah, pretty much. I had to deal with a very connected player back there. A guy named Marnie Stanwell. His brother will be coming after us, even if his bosses tell him not to. It’ll be personal.”
Jollie gives him a dead stare. “Will Marnie Stanwell’s brother find us?”
“Not if we’ve been careful. The problem is, you never know how careful you’ve been when you have to run like hell on short notice. I smashed the camera they were using, but it could have been streaming video to a remote location. There’s just no telling, really.”
“That was your plan, Mark? Run like hell on short notice?”
“As you can guess, I was improvising.”
Andy lowers his head, smiling in a strange way. “That’s almost a relief.”
“Why?” Jollie says. “What could possibly be relieving about any of this?”
“Well, I kinda had no idea how I was gonna pay the rent this month. I quit my job yesterday.”
“And you were planning on telling us that when, exactly?”
“Whenever, Jollie.”
“You worked at
Kerbey Lane for years, man,” Mark says. “They loved you there.”
“Eh, it was a shithole. I was serving hippie food to greasy old housewives and their annoying kids. I dunno . . . I just had to get out of there. I walked out right in the middle of a shift.”
Good for you, Mark thinks. Stick it to the man, man.
“That was your plan?” Jollie says. “Just walk out and worry about the rent later? You two guys are fucking unbelievable!”
Andy shrugs. “No, actually, my plan was to walk out of there and spend my last fifty bucks in tips on as much booze and dope as I could find, spend about two weeks out of my mind—then worry about the rent.”
Jollie leans down from the couch and punches him in the arm.
She instantly feels bad about it.
Mark finally lights his joint. Takes two strong hits off the good hydro. Offers it pathetically to Jollie, who just looks at him funny.
So he takes another hit.
The rush is good and comforting, his survival senses sharpening.
“We can’t ever go back there,” Mark says, suddenly very serious. “The House of JAM really is scorched earth now. You understand that, right?”
“My whole life was in that house,” Jollie says. “My computer, my files—seven years’ worth of research and development on all my projects.”
“There’ll be other projects.”
“I didn’t even get my phone or my wallet out of that mess, Mark. I’m completely cut off from my life. You’re acting like none of this is a big deal.”
“That’s not what I’m acting like at all. I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.”
“I’ve been paying damn close attention. You’ve blown into our lives and righteously screwed everything. And here’s the really funny part—I don’t even know why. What was so important that you had to turn my whole world upside down and leave me with nothing but the clothes on my back, Mark? What’s the explanation?”
Mark shrugs. “Whatever it is, it can’t be good enough.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s not even funny.”
“I did what I had to save your lives. There wasn’t any choice. Anyway, your life isn’t really blown up. You still have your cloud, your contacts.”
“And you’re still an asshole,” she says.
But yeah, he’s right. Jollie Meeker is no idiot.
Nearly every important spec of her shit is culled and backed-up in several remote cyber-locations, and she’s the kind of girl who can access everything from a pay phone, tons of important numbers and codes burned into her memory like snapshots. You plan ahead like that. For doomsday and all.
But shit, man.
“I think it’s a little exciting,” Andy says, not sounding serious. “Do we get to go in the Witness Protection Program now?”
“We didn’t witness anything,” Jollie says.
“Maybe you didn’t,” Andy says. “But I saw some shit back there, man.” Then he laughs. Gallows humor.
Like It’s all over and I know it because I saw some shit back there.
One hundred percent, dude.
• • •
After almost a minute of silence, Mark snubs out his joint on the side of the Black Box and says: “Okay. I’ll tell you at least enough so you understand a few things.”
“A few things?” Jollie says.
“I’ll tell you enough. There’s a lot I don’t know, actually. It’s a big thing I’m a part of. But I can tell you my role in it. I can tell you where I came from.”
So that you know the last five years weren’t bullshit. So that you know you’ll be safe with me. So that you’ll know how I really love you.
He has to let them know that now, while they still have time. Before they are forced to move again.
So he tells them a story.
The real thing, the whole thing.
As much as he knows anyway.
4
november 12
He never really has a childhood, but tough shit, kid—the world’s a very unfair place, in case you haven’t heard. We’re lucky if we get one shot to be normal.
And what the hell is normal anyway?
His normal life starts in the womb of a teenage girl who gets knocked up on the night of her high school graduation, then gives the kid up for adoption when she realizes she has no money, no prospects, no future. She commits suicide two weeks after having the baby. That happens in Fairview, Oklahoma, where the sky is blue and the traffic is easy, and there’s a factory that closes, leaving damn near everybody right up shit creek. Our boy never knows about any of that. He doesn’t see the sky there turn black. He doesn’t feel the air in town go from cold to colder to deadly. He never knows the agony of the locals who become bums, the tortured cries of the families who go belly up, the slow starvation and the mass migration to bigger cities. That’s if you are one of the lucky few who make it out alive. Some of them go back to school, upstate. Some of them become strippers in even smaller shithole towns. Most of them become became career criminals, if they aren’t killed during the learning curve by other career criminals. Families with bought-and-paid-for securities and business owners who were strapped into suits of armor the day before become melodramatic punch lines to jokes told years ago. What remains of Fairview’s economic infrastructure is gobbled up by the mob, and everything left over is collateral damage—right down to the shops on the main drag, the stores in the mall, the seat covers on the stools of the last bar that never closes, even when the storm finally calms down and reveals nothing but a wasted ghost town full of zombies.
This happens around the country more than you can possibly imagine.
It happens every year.
There are entire sections of America that simply don’t exist anymore.
What usually happens next is an elaborate chain of corruption and consequence involving land deals and insurance scams, all orchestrated by smart lawyers and mortgage experts and mob lieutenants who have advanced degrees in finance. The land is renamed and reborn again and again on paper and in the real world. Deeds and trusts and futures are sold to greedy land developers, houses and buildings are scalped one at a time to ghost companies, then resold until the market value triples. And then it gets complicated. Then, they start building something else there and call it the future. Gated communities. Exurbs. Model for new world order. Everybody parachutes out a bazillionaire.
Again, our boy sees none of that.
That’s the part of the story he knows nothing about.
The rest is history.
His history.
• • •
As the little town he was born in begins to crumble in those first agonized stages of self-destruction, he is shipped from a tiny hospital upstate to a way station in Arkansas. The kid becomes a hot commodity for a few years, bouncing between nurseries and adoption agencies. He’s like a movie star with high-class representation in the industry, and they try to sell him to a lot of interested parties. At first the buzz on the street is great, but then it trickles off. He goes from being two years old to three years old, and then almost five, when the agents throw up their hands and stick him in the Has-Been File. It’s just bad luck, really. A healthy baby boy on the open market usually burns up the charts at this agency—the kid would go right to a nice rich family in Washington or Oregon and grow up spoiled and privileged. Families with lots of money are the ones who usually adopt, because they’ve made themselves sterile by being assholes. You know, career people. Or trust-fund brats. The poisoned one percent ruling class. It’s easy to lose track of the things that really matter when you have worlds to conquer, and then you realize one day that you’re shooting blanks and the doctor says something weird and half-informed, like It’s the stress that did it, or Be thankful that you can correct the problem in other ways and it’s, like, what the hell are the
se people even talking about? Truth is they’re selling you something. That’s what everybody is doing, all the time. Selling you a car, a house, a life with a precious new baby boy, bought and paid for by the state and baptized in the blood of his own mom.
And again, our boy never knows about any of that.
He never wants to find out because it never seems important to him. Never finds out where he came from because that place just doesn’t exist anymore. He never even questions the why of living inside the walls of an institution for abandoned and underprivileged children—it’s just the way things are. He is silent and invisible. He is frumpy and not exactly attractive—but not an ugly kid either. He is well-behaved and doesn’t cry at all. He learns to read and write. He blends right into the generic white-walled world of hallways and classrooms and play areas and lunchrooms and snack times and jungle gyms. He is not anonymous, but nothing special.
That’s the quality they look for.
They, being the people who finally take him away from there.
He is almost six years old when they send a man to meet him.
The man has white hair and a young face, but our boy doesn’t know what young really is, not yet. Our boy is a blank slate, waiting to be filled. They haven’t taught him anything yet.
The man with the white hair sits across from him at a table in the conference room, which is white on white on white—that’s how our boy remembers it now, and he remembers it well—and the man says that our boy is special. He is not like other children, not like anyone else in the whole wide world. Most people have no idea they’re special, the man says. Most people are born into a society that wants to tell them how awful and ordinary they are, how much like everyone else they have to be. They are funneled through a school circuit and a system of government that is corrupt and absolutely unconcerned with what they really are on the inside. Our boy is still only a child and doesn’t really know what most of these words actually mean—but the man with the white hair seems like God to him. Seems like truth, like deliverance.
They take our boy away from the institution that very afternoon, and in the car they tell him that his birthday is tomorrow.
November 12, 1980.
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