Metro

by Stephen Romano

  Penelope Cranston makes some noise, and they are all hustled inside by the two plain-looking agents.

  • • •

  The man in the black truck sits on the side of the road, waiting for instructions. He has all the time he needs. He’s not a big guy, but a little guy gets the job done too.

  His big truck couldn’t possibly scream “I’m from Texas” any louder. It’s a double-wide Chevy Silverado with a custom chassis that’s been raised five feet to accommodate giant tractor-puller tires and a V-10 crate engine block. The whole thing is done in black with silver flake just under the finish, polished solid-steel trim running along every contour. A hood ornament made of chromed stainless aluminum, shaped like a cross of God. Nobody ever wants to steal that. But every head turns when this ride zooms out of the rearview mirror and into their blind spot. It’s the truck you get pissed off just thinking about. You could save a country with the liquid assets invested in this oil-burning, lane-gobbling, redneck monstrosity. You could house an entire third-world family in the flatbed. You could just kill the idiot who spent real money on a truck like this. You’re so busy thinking all that, in fact, that you never realize the guy driving is coming to kill you first.

  He chuckles to himself and changes the track on the stereo—old-school CD changer, not one of those damn MP-whatevers. Something tacky and eighties comes over the speakers. Something about the future being so bright I gotta wear shades.

  This man’s name is Reggie Cates.

  Remember that. It’s important for later.

  • • •

  The inside of the house looks just like what it is on the outside. No big surprise there, Mark thinks, but he wonders how secure the place is with just bars on the windows. The two men in black suits lead them through the front foyers and into a main corridor. Everything is hardwood floors and white walls with pine trim.

  One of the men—a pale, goofy shaghead wearing a sleeveless down vest that Mark thinks makes him look just like Marty McFly from Back to the Future—stops at a door and puts his hands on Jollie and Andy.

  “These two go here,” McFly says to Mark. “You’ll go upstairs with Miss Cranston. The Dictator is waiting for you in his office on the second floor.”

  He opens the door and motions for Jollie and Andy to be his guest. On the other side of the door, stairs lead down where it’s real dark. Jollie realizes it’s a basement.

  “It’s the most secure room in the house,” McFly says. “You’ll be perfectly safe, ma’am.”

  Andy follows McFly first, then Jollie.

  McFly hits the light switch just inside the stairway, which drops about fifteen feet into something that looks like a bedroom with a concrete floor. They follow McFly all way down the stairs and Jollie sits on the king-size bed, which is thick and has four silver posts. She bounces twice on the luxurious mattress, almost smiles.

  McFly walks back up the stairs when he sees her sit down. “I’ll be just outside the door. Try to get some sleep. You two look tired.”

  Jollie sees Mark look down at her once in the hall as the door closes.

  • • •

  The second man is in a red car. Checks his watch again—twenty minutes to showtime. He’s getting all kinds of crosstalk on the wire now, and it’s pretty standard stuff. He’s worked this gig a million times with a million pros. The boss man wants it handled with robot efficiency. Doesn’t want a repeat of what went down before. That means they have to have every angle figured, and a lot of manpower. It wasn’t even that hard, throwing it all together on such short notice. Always makes him smile when a plan comes together.

  Yeah, he still likes The A-Team. The old, good show, not the bad, shitty remake. They always remake everything, man.

  His car is red because his wife liked the color—not because he’s got a thing for flash, like those other kids do. Like Reggie Cates and his dumbass obsession with all things big and redneck. Like those kids who want it all and think they can get away with anything. Why be greedy when you can have your fair share and live like a king anyway? A nice house and some kids. A wife with big tits who likes The A-Team. You start making more than a hundred K a year and sleeping with too many strippers, and that’s when the IRS starts looking at you funny and your nice wife starts wondering where you’re spending your nights. Really, you’re just out on jobs. You’re out killing people in their sleep and marching on heavily guarded mansions. But the wife still wonders, and it’s still a pain in the ass. Because everyone else is out chasing pussy and being greedy.

  He’ll never understand it.

  His men report in one at a time. Real pros. Just one hothead in the bunch. Dumbass Reggie. But you take what you can get on short notice. He sends the squawk signal on the encrypted channel. His men squawk back. They’ve bled into the woods and fanned out hard, using the crosstalk on the wire to triangulate the positions of all ten agents on the perimeter. It’s gonna be easy.

  Our man’s name is Texarkana Smith.

  No, really—that’s his name.

  Just call him Tex. It’s important for later.

  • • •

  She is alone with Andy in the room. He moves toward her and they cuddle close. She feels like she’s cheating on Mark when she does this, and the feeling is disgusting. Because she shouldn’t feel that way. Mark is a liar and a murderer. He represents everything in the world she’s been fighting against.

  And she loves him.

  He said I could go right to the top with a machine gun. Right to the place where it gets really scary.

  Is that what I want?

  She takes the ring out and looks at it. Mark’s plastic promise-me ring. It’s been in her pocket this whole time. Is that an irony? She decides it isn’t.

  She puts it on the bed next to her and cuddles closer with Andy.

  • • •

  The third man slides silently through the woods.

  He is the darkest of them all. He has no life, no wife, no big truck, and he sure as fuck doesn’t watch The A-Team. He doesn’t even know what that is. He’s twenty-seven years old and he’s never kissed a woman. He’s cut from hard muscle and solid bone. He’s the closest thing to a reptile his boss has ever seen. He reinvents himself effortlessly. He follows orders to the letter and kills with an expert hand. He doesn’t believe in anything. He has no fear.

  His name is Xion Baxter.

  It’s pronounced Shawn—don’t ask him why because he doesn’t know. But remember the name.

  It’s important.

  8

  a tale of true love

  “This is bullshit.”

  The Dictator sits at his desk, his deep voice booming in the giant second-floor office. He’s starting to come around some. He’s just gone from You people are out of your minds and there’s no way I’m going along with this to, simply, This is bullshit.

  So Penelope figures they’re making progress.

  “Nothing is bullshit unless we decide it is,” she says. “We make the goddamn rules here. We can do whatever we want.”

  “Just like that, huh?” the Dictator says.

  He’s a middle-aged black man with broad shoulders and a big stomach—that guy you see running a high school or being mayor in a steel town like Baltimore or Pittsburgh. He has big bushy eyebrows and bright blue eyes. He puts dramatic accents on every third syllable and aims his finger at Penelope Cranston every now and then, underscoring a point. He’s really angry, of course, because what’s going on now is not the way it’s done. For the last ten minutes he’s been hammering that home, citing casebook law and letting them both know who the boss really is. He says he wants the operation back on track ASAFP. The Molly has to be delivered within twenty-four hours to our people, he says. And they want Mark to do it. Want him on that plane. Mark has already told him he won’t lift a finger until he has assurances that Jollie and Andy are
taken care of. The Dictator has already said he will take Jollie, but Andy is worthless to them.

  And that’s where they are right now.

  On the subject of Andrew Worthington Culpepper.

  • • •

  “It’s too risky,” the Dictator says, shooting his statement across the table like a laser beam. Mark thinks that makes him sound just like Ken Foree in The Devil’s Rejects, and he almost laughs because Ken played a pimp in that movie. Dictators are like pimps too, he thinks. You never know their names though.

  So Mark decides to call this guy Ken from now on.

  “I know the risk, but I’ll take full responsibility for it,” Penelope Cranston tells him. “I want the kid and I’ll do whatever it takes to get him.”

  “METRO is not a whorehouse, and I’m not a pimp.”

  Mark does a double take when Ken actually says that and then laughs out loud.

  Ken gives him a very ugly look. “Something’s funny, November Twelve?”

  Penelope gives Mark a very ugly look too. Like Thanks a lot, shithead.

  “No,” Mark says. “I was just thinking about something else.”

  “Would you like to share it?” Ken says.

  “You wouldn’t think it was funny.”

  “There’s nothing funny at all about our current situation, November Twelve. And if you want to keep your neck off the chopping block, I suggest less laughter and more listening. Do I make myself goddamn clear?”

  Mark nods. Then he says, slowly: “The lady wants what she wants. I suggest you hand Andy over or I’m not giving up the package. I want to know he’s safe with her. I want to know Jollie is safe with you. If I don’t know that—if you don’t give me your word as Dictator—this whole deal is off.”

  “I don’t make deals, November Twelve.” Ken pauses. “Normally.”

  “We can do a trial period with Culpepper,” Penelope suddenly says, sounding a little too desperate. “If it doesn’t work out, we can try something else. You can move us to a different state, where nobody knows who we are.”

  “That’s not just risky, it’s expensive. This ain’t The Dating Game either.” Ken’s expression softens a bit. He looks at Penelope. Smiles. “It must be very lonely for you out there, Maggie. We don’t want our operatives to be unhappy. That’s bad.”

  Mark smirks.

  Maggie. The lady’s name is really Maggie.

  (Where the hell did Penelope Cranston come from?)

  She’s not just a birthday, like me. Which means they got her much later in life, the way they’re getting Jollie now. So she has a real name and he’s calling her by that real name . . . which means they know each other. Which means they’ve known each other for years.

  Which is why this might just work, after all.

  “Lots of things are bad,” Maggie/Penelope says. “But we take the opportunities that come our way. You can call me a cougar or a cradle robber—I don’t give a shit. I want the kid, so you’ll give him to me and we’ll work it out somehow.”

  “Just like fucking that, huh?” Ken says.

  “Yeah, just like fuckin’ that. And you’ll find some reason to bend the rules, like you always do. Lie about the kid’s interview. Tell them he’s my new research assistant.”

  “I don’t know if it’s possible. It might just be easier to set him up somewhere else without you.”

  “Screw that. I saw him first. He’s mine, goddammit.”

  “Maggie . . . how long have you been in the field?”

  “Seventeen years.”

  “It must be very lonely.”

  Say it again, Ken, Mark thinks.

  • • •

  “I’ll tell you a little story, Maggie,” the Dictator says, folding his hands, settling back in his chair, winding up for the rest.

  Which goes like this:

  “I’m sixty-two years old, and I’ve been in METRO all my life. That means I was around when the company was first founded. Do you know what that means? That means I saw what the world was like before METRO and after METRO. I saw the face of a very uncertain future and I gave up my youth and my life to preserve it. That’s why we do what we do. That’s why we make the sacrifices we make. They tell us not to get personally involved. They say you should never grab prizes or make opportunities out of collateral damage. But there are exceptions to every rule. You make those exceptions because, after all, we’re not machines. We’re human beings. I learned that the hard and painful way when I was first doing field work. Those years were a nightmare. I was just a teenager. The seventies, man.

  “They had me running pickups and doing hits, just like the kid here. And one day my boss sat me down and told me that I was gonna have to go into a house full of children and terminate the parents while the children watched. You know, to send a clear message. That was back when the bosses were really bloodthirsty to make a point. They still are, you know . . . but then again, good business is where you find it, right?”

  Yeah, Mark thinks. Something like that. And you just quoted RoboCop.

  (The old, good one—not the bad, shitty remake.)

  “Anyway . . . so I had to do this really inhuman thing. Had to walk into someone’s living room and ruin their lives forever. And I really didn’t think I could do it, you know. It was just wrong. I told my boss I wanted to quit. He said I couldn’t. I told my boss I wanted to kill myself. He said I couldn’t do that either. So I went in there and I did it . . . and for a long time, I couldn’t get those kids out of my head. There were three of them and they were all girls. How do you like that, huh? Rosy little girls with goddamn pigtails, knee deep in the blood of their own parents. I killed their folks and left them crying. A nightmare, Maggie. Stuff you don’t ever wanna know about.”

  He stops for a moment. Releases a long, long breath.

  And the moral is . . .

  “So . . . it was about twenty years later and I was on my last hit before I whacked my way to Dictator, and they said I needed a partner, so I pulled up to an IHOP to meet my backup for the job. She’s sitting at a booth drinking coffee. A brand-new field operative. And guess what?”

  “It was one of the girls,” Mark says, seeing the scene clear as day. The face of your past, staring you right down over a cup of joe. With black eyes and red pigtails.

  “You got it, kiddo,” Dictator Ken says. “She was the old one in the bunch. I would’ve recognized that little lady anywhere, even all grown up like that. Turns out I was cleaning house back then. Rescuing abused youths and bringing them in to be operatives. I murdered her parents and walked away. Another team came in later and took her away to training. And this last job I was on now was her first job after that training. And she knew who I was too. Said she’d hacked the system and fixed it all so she could meet the man who killed her mother and father. But not so she could get some righteous revenge. So she could thank me.”

  He looks right at Maggie/Penelope and his look is almost horrifying.

  “See, her life before I came along had been nothing but a nightmare of abuse and denial. I was her rescuer. And all she ever wanted to do was thank me for it. And that’s just what she did. And I married that little lady not long after I made dictator. Married her in secret, married her right and legal. Even though you’re not supposed to do things like that in this company of ours. We both knew that the bosses would hate it if we hooked up—but we did it anyway because I was a lonely old man by then and she was an idealistic young lady. Love conquers all, right?”

  Maggie/Penelope smiles. “I never knew you were married. How did you work it?”

  “We didn’t work it. Not for long anyway. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. METRO does what they do for a reason. They set things up a certain way because when we think with our dicks and our hearts, we get sloppy. So me and my wife, we tried what we tried and it almost panned out. We almost lived h
appily ever after. But you don’t do that for long. And the bosses don’t ever like it when they catch you living happily ever after.”

  He leans back across the desk. His face becoming rock.

  “So they killed her, Maggie. They killed her while I watched. And you know what they said to me when it was all over? Do you wanna know what they looked me right in the eyes and said to me?”

  The Dictator opens his drawer, pulls out a silenced 9mm pistol—a Ruger SR9—and calmly aims it right at Maggie Ortega.

  “They said What the hell did you expect?”

  And he shoots Maggie right in her big dumb mouth.

  • • •

  Maggie’s weight pulls her to the floor and she clunks there hard, blood gushing from the hole in her face, the back of her head blown open like a Venus flytrap from the exiting hollow-point slug.

  Mark’s heart drops to the floor.

  He might have seen this coming—but the sudden reality of it slams into him like a train now. He watches the river flow out of Maggie/Penelope’s head, as Dictator Ken re-aims the pistol in his direction.

  Mark’s mind sputters in fits without a heavy dose.

  He needs the blow in his pocket.

  His eyes map the room and he gives himself away like an amateur.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Ken says. “I’ll blow out your heart before you get anywhere near me.”

  “Yeah. You could do that.”

  “I could paint the room with you, kid, and make up any story I liked.”

  “The operation would go to shit.”

  “So what? I could tell them you made your own move. It wouldn’t be the first time an operative like you got ambitious.”

  “You’re right about that too.”

  “I’m always right, kid. About everything.”

  “The op is scrubbed without the package—try telling that to the bosses who murdered your wife.”

  “There will be other operations, kid. I think I can make this stick. Here’s a scenario for you. See if it rings: I bring in a hotheaded, drug-addled deep op who’s blown his cover and he’s making demands. I try to reason with the poor dumb bastard, but he thinks he’s got me over a barrel. I use my own discretion and attempt to obtain the location of the package, using corporal field methods—but guess what? The hothead goes berserk. Kills Maggie and tries to kill me too. It all goes to shit and there’s no choice but to cap the kid and cut our losses. Sorry, guys, but our latest contestant is shit out of luck—be sure to see us next time on The Dating Game.”