Point Of Impact (2001)

by Tom - Net Force 05 Clancy

  Michaels nodded. "Okay. So hypothetically speaking, maybe he lives within spitting distance of SoCal. Does that help us much?"

  "Narrows down the search. I can start checking chemical companies, drug supply houses, running lists of convicted dealers, like that. And maybe the cops will turn up something on the late Mr. Zeigler's travels."

  Michaels said, "Good a direction as any, I suppose."

  Jay took another long swallow of the club soda. "Anything new on the drug itself? How'd that cap assay out?"

  Michaels frowned. Crap! He'd tucked the thing into his pocket and forgotten about it. Those trousers were in a heap on the floor in his closet. He hoped Toni hadn't sent them to the laundry yet.

  He smiled at that thought. The only way Toni was going to do his laundry was if he specifically asked her to, and he hadn't done that. The pants would still be there when he got home. She hadn't signed on to be his maid, he'd found that out pretty quickly. Nor had he expected that.

  "Boss?"

  "Nothing. I mean, nothing on the capsule. I haven't had a chance to get by the lab yet."

  It was Jay's turn to shrug. "I got the DEA's breakdown of what ingredients they could find. I'll use those for a starting point. If the guy is smart, he'll buy his chem for cash, and far away from home, but you never know. Sometimes it's the little things that trip you up. Remember Morrison, the HAARP guy?"

  Michaels nodded. How could he forget that? "Yeah, I remember."

  "He had all the big stuff worked out but slipped up on something as simple as a night watchman. Him and the Watergate guys."

  "Well, do what you can do, Jay. Keep me in the loop."

  "Sure thing, boss."

  Michaels looked at his watch. Getting close to noon. Maybe he'd stroll on down to the gym and do a little workout. That way he could take a break when he got home without Toni making him practice his silat first. She'd work him harder than he'd work himself, but if he'd already done his djurus for the day, she'd let him slide.

  Newport Beach, California

  Drayne came away from the funeral experience pretty depressed.

  The church service had been fairly saccharine, like he'd expected. The old minister, if he remembered Creepy at all, couldn't speak in anything other than platitudes and generalities, and he put in a pitch to save souls while he did it. Neither Edwina nor Pat could bring themselves to get up and say anything, and Creepy's sisters and ex-wife managed some personal stuff that was touching and surprising. Drayne never knew that Creepy had a collection of Star Wars cards, nor that he coached a boy's soccer team in Utah.

  The procession to the graveyard and the internment service at the family plot was no more fun. While he was standing there, a sudden flash of deja vu hit Drayne. Another funeral he'd gone to when he'd been ten or eleven popped up in his mind, something he had completely forgotten about. A kid a year or so younger than Drayne who lived across the street and down a couple of houses, Rowland, his name was, had been killed in a gruesome freak accident. Rowlie's father had worked at a small private airport somewhere. Rowlie and his two brothers had gone with their father one Saturday to the airport. The boys had been playing chase in and around the hangars. Somehow, Rowlie had run in front of a small plane that was about to taxi out for takeoff. The plane's propeller had hit him. He'd been killed instantly. The coffin had been kept closed because he'd been almost decapitated and chopped up pretty good; at least that was what Drayne had heard.

  Jesus. He didn't need another reminder of death, not with Creepy just lowered into the ground.

  There wasn't an official wake, though family and friends were welcome to stop by Pat and Edwina's, so of course Drayne had to do that. What did you say at such times? People standing around, drinking coffee or tea, talking about the recently departed as if he'd gone on some kind of trip?

  Drayne got out of there as soon as he could. His old man was busy, taking charge, making sure everything was shipshape, and they didn't really have much to say to each other, Drayne and his old man. They never really had. The old man had never thought much of his only son, never seemed interested in what he did, always expected perfection. He brought home a report card with five As and a B, the old man didn't say, "Hey, good job! Congratulations!" No, he said, "Why the B? You need to apply yourself more."

  Once, when he was about twelve, he'd been visiting his grandma, out in the Valley. He found some old photo albums and started digging through them. In the back were a stack of his old man's report cards. The son of a bitch had made straight As through high school. Had been valedictorian of his class before he went off to college and law school, and eventually the FBI. Jesus. Drayne couldn't even bitch about the old bastard holding him to a higher standard than he'd achieved on his own.

  Oh, yeah, Drayne had been a whiz in chemistry. It had been his natural element. And he was smart enough to get good grades in his other subjects without having to crack a book most of the time. He just didn't see the point in working his butt off to learn stuff like "Tippicanoe and Tyler Too!" when it wouldn't ever be any part of his life. Who gave a rat's ass about gerunds and split infinitives, or ancient Greek history, or what the current names for countries in Africa were? Drayne was going to be a chemist, he was going to make his fortune playing with things he wanted to play with, and to hell with the rest of it.

  No, they had not gotten along for as long as he could remember, his old man and him. And yet he felt some kind of perverse need to demonstrate to his father that he was competent. Which was kind of hard to do when what you were most competent at was mixing and selling illegal drugs, and your old man was a pillar of law enforcement who put people like you away.

  The drive back to Malibu was bright and sunny. The fog had long since burned off, and traffic wasn't too bad. Neither the weather nor the lack of usual stop-and-go traffic lifted his mood.

  He hadn't seen Tad last night or this morning, and he suspected that was because Tad had taken another Hammer trip, even though Drayne had told him not to. The Hammer was Tad's reason to get up in the morning. Tad was a full-time doper, he could mix and match his chems to suit his needs better than anybody Drayne had ever known, and for him, Thor was the ultimate party friend, the guy Tad had been looking for all his life. And Thor would be the guy who'd kill him, too.

  Then again, in his own way, Tad was fairly reliable. If he had swallowed the cap and gone hyper, it had probably been after he had done the job Drayne had sent him to do. It was rare if Tad came home and hadn't done whatever Drayne had sent him to do, and even when that happened, it was due to something Tad couldn't control.

  He didn't really know why Tad was so important to him. They had run into each other doing biz, and something about the reedy guy in black had tickled Drayne. Nothing sexual, they were into women--though Tad preferred drugs to pussy, mostly--and not as if Tad were some kind of sparkling conversationalist or brilliant intellect. But he was loyal, and he did think Drayne was a genius. And he got the job done. If he wanted to go out in a blaze of Dionysian glory, that was his right. Tad was pretty much the only friend Drayne had. Making and dealing illegal chem didn't open you up to a whole lot of deep relationships with honest people. When Tad croaked, that was going to leave a big hole in the list of people Drayne could relax around.

  Of course, he had enough money now that if he invested it right, he could almost live off the interest. Another year or so of thousand-buck-a-hit sales, he'd be set. Then he could retire if he felt like it, maybe move into a better class of people, make some friends who started out thinking he was a dot.com millionaire, or had made a killing in the market or something, who'd take him at face value. Live his life out in the open, perfectly legal, no looking over his shoulder.

  That made him grin. Yeah, he could do that. Would he?

  Not an ice cube's chance in a supernova he would. Because it wasn't just the money, it was the game. The ability to do what he did, to do it better than anybody else, and to get away with it. Hell, if he wanted to, he could take h
is formulas to the legitimate drug companies, and they'd fall all over themselves to shovel money at him. A lot of what Drayne had discovered and created was what the pharmaceutical giants had been researching for years. Got a patient with muscle wasting who is bed-bound and on the way down? What would it be worth to him to enjoy some mobility in his final days? Got a guy who can't get it up, and Viagra doesn't work for him? How much would he spend to get an erection so hard it would hum in a breeze? You about to take the GRE to get into graduate school? What would adding fifteen points to your IQ for a couple hours be worth? Stuff Drayne worked with could do that and more.

  Drayne could have gone to work for those guys a long time ago. He could have brought just part of what he knew to the table, and they would have kissed his shoes and given him a blank check to get it. But there wasn't any challenge there, not to be straight.

  Not to be like his father.

  He sighed. He was smart enough to know he was a little fucked up when it came to such things. Had done some reading in psychology, knew all about Oedipus and shit like that. But he was what he was. However he had gotten there, it was his path, and he was going to walk it, and the devil take the reasons.

  Jesus, he was tight, wound up like a spring. Maybe he should stop at the gym on the way home, loosen up a little, take it out on the weights. He'd feel better if he did. A good, hard workout was the cure for a whole lot of things, tension, stress, it would mellow you out almost as much as champagne.

  Yeah. Maybe he'd do that. It would be relaxing.

  23

  Malibu, California

  Drayne couldn't remember the last time he had been so pissed off. He pounded the steering wheel of the Mercedes hard enough to crack it, and he wished it was fucking Tad's head!

  Jesus Christ!

  By the time he got home, however, he had calmed down somewhat. He was almost detached, almost fatalistic about it when he pulled into the garage and shut the engine off. He had always known this was a possibility, though he hadn't expected it would ever really happen. He was too smart to be caught by the plodders; he'd been giving them fucking clues and they couldn't do it. Only, Tad wasn't. And the boy had stepped in it good this time.

  Tad was out cold on the couch, and even the pitcher full of ice water hardly roused him. He mumbled something.

  Drayne started slapping his face. Eventually, his hand got sore and tired, but Tad came awake, sort of.

  "What?"

  "You idiot! You don't have any idea what you did, do you?"

  "What?"

  "The gym! You trashed the gym! I stopped by there to work out, and that was all anybody was talking about! Even if I hadn't sent you, I could recognize you from their descriptions! You moron!"

  Groggy, Tad sat up. He rubbed at his face. "I'm all wet," he said.

  "You got that right. Christ on a pogo stick, Tad!"

  "I don't understand, Bobby. I got the disk from the security drive, the job's done, we're free and clear, nobody has anything to link us to Zeigler. There's no proof of anything."

  "You really don't see it, do you?" Drayne sat heavily on the couch next to his partner. Of a moment, he felt sorry for Tad. He kept forgetting most people didn't have his horsepower when it came to cranking up the mental engines. "Obviously, the smart drugs hadn't kicked in when you decided to feel up Atlas's sister. Think about it."

  Tad shook his head, still not tracking.

  "Look, I know you're tired and stoned, and ordinarily I'd let you sleep it off, but time just got to be a problem. You made a mistake."

  "I don't see it. They don't know who I am. No way."

  "Okay. Let me explain it to you." He looked at Tad, who made death warmed over seem the picture of health, and realized he had to take it slow for him to keep up with it. He eased off his anger a little. "Let me tell you a story. Just sit back and listen carefully, okay?"

  Tad nodded.

  "When I was in middle school, they had us in an arts and crafts track. We got three months each of music, art, and speech in one bundle, and three months of drafting, shop, and home arts in another.

  "So the first day I show up in music class, and sweet little old Mrs. Greentree, had to be about a hundred and fifty or so, has us all sitting there, and she says, 'What is the universal language?' And of course, none of us have a clue. And she says, 'Music. Music is the universal language. The notes are the same in Germany as they are in France or America.'

  "Right, okay, so we got it. Music is the universal language.

  "So later that day, we get to to the first section of second bundle, which turns out to be drafting class. This is taught by Coach. Back then, every other male teacher in the school was Coach.

  "So we're sitting there, and Coach says, 'Okay, what is the universal language?'

  "So anyway, being as how I am newly educated and eager to impress, I shoot my hand up and Coach grins at me. 'Yeah?'

  'Music, Coach,' I say. 'Music is the universal language!'

  "Coach just about kills himself laughing. 'Music?! Haw! Music ain't the universal language, you dip, pictures are the universal language! You in China and you run into some Chinaman and you want to ask him where the toilet is, what are you gonna do, sing to him? "Oh, mister Chinaman, please tell me, where is the toilet, la la la...?"

  " 'Jesus, get your head out of your butt, son! You draw him a picture! Music! Haw!'

  "A couple years later, that same question came up in math class, and guess what? I kept my hand down and my mouth shut. Same thing happened when I got to basic computer class. Music, pictures, mathematics, binaries, they are all considered universal languages."

  Drayne shut up and looked at Tad, who shook his head.

  "Okay, so what's the point?"

  "Context is my point, Tad. Context." He spoke slowly, as if talking to a retarded child. "Not just what gets said or done, but where and when it happens is critically important."

  Tad frowned, and Drayne could see that he still didn't get it.

  "Let me tell you another story."

  "Jesus, Bobby, okay, I get it that you're pissed--"

  "Shut up, Tad. Once upon a time I knew a guy who was a bouncer at a titty bar. One night, he and some of his friends went to a heavy metal rock concert, you know the kind, head-bangers, primal rock, big crowds standing on the floor screaming to the music, half of them stoned or drunk. So in the middle of the concert, a girl who is sitting on her boyfriend's shoulders decides to pull off her top and flash the crowd, or the band, or whoever."

  "I've seen that a few times," Tad said, trying to follow him.

  "Right. So'd my bouncer friend, and no big deal. And normally, the way it works is, the girl waves her hooters around, then puts her top back on, a fine time is had by all, and that's that. But this time, while she was unbound and waving in the breeze, her boyfriend reaches up and grabs her breasts, starts rubbing them. Now, she doesn't slap his hands away, she laughs, and next thing you know, she's pulled off her steed and felt up by thirty or forty heavy metal fans. We're talking mob mentality here, and the atmosphere is ripe for trouble. My friend the bouncer is too jammed in to help, and the crowd is so thick that concert security can't get there, either. The girl vanishes.

  "Fortunately, aside from getting passed around and fondled against her will, it didn't go any further. They let her go, she gets her clothes back, her nipples are sore, end of event.

  "So, whose fault was it she got mauled, Tad?"

  "Hers. She should have kept her top on."

  "Yes. And people shouldn't get drunk or do drugs and go to rock concerts, and we should always look both ways before crossing the street. No, it's the boyfriend who set it off, and the girl, who could have stopped it, made it worse. See, soon as he laid a hand on her boob, she should have slapped the shit out of him. The implied message when somebody flashes in such a situation is 'Look, but don't touch.' When the boyfriend broke the implied rule, the others assumed that a girl who'd do that in public, who was willing to allow touch along with the
looking, well, she might be willing to let somebody else play, too, so they helped themselves."

  "Not right."

  "Nope, it wasn't. But given the circumstances, a bunch of stoned mouthbreathing head-bangers, you can understand how it might progress to that, or worse. There's the way things should be, and the way things are. You might not like it, but you ignore the way things are at your peril."

  "And you are saying that I fucked up even though I got rid of the evidence. That it is going to progress to something else?"

  "That is exactly what I am saying. See if you can stay with me here: The police and the feds will know you were on the Hammer, because nothing else can explain a burned-out matchstick like you kicking major steroid ass like you did. And the bust at Zeigler's was a major deal and on the minds of the cops. And if they dig just a little, they'll come up with the Zee-ster working out at Steve's, and zap! A light will flash over their heads and they'll think, 'Hmm. Big movie star shoots it out with the DEA, and they find this superguy drug in his house. Then, within a real short time, somebody trashes a gym where the big movie star works out, obviously on the same superguy drug. Say ... isn't that a funny coincidence?' And somebody ... somebody in the FBI or the local police . . . they are gonna ask themselves the big question: Why? Why'd the guy--that's you--why'd the guy come in and steal the security cam's recording device? Other than coming in to feel up Brunhilda and kicking the crap out of a few bodybuilders, that's all you did. And they are gonna come up with, 'Hey, maybe there is something on that disk the guy doesn't want us to see. What could it be?' And somebody is gonna take it one step further and make an assumption, since they know the Zee-ster worked out there, and that somebody is gonna say, 'mm. Maybe because the big movie star was there with somebody who really doesn't want to be seen?' "