Sins of the Assassin

by Robert Ferrigno

  “Please, sir…you don’t have to show this to Gravenholtz,” said Tom. “That’s not Christian.”

  “Man wanted me to keep tabs on how you boys were doing,” said Rakkim. “Wouldn’t be Christian to keep the truth from him.”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” said Ferris.

  “One for all and all for one,” said Rakkim.

  “What’s that mean?” said Ferris.

  “Means we’re all responsible,” said Pruitt, working to hold himself steady. “One of us fucks up, we all fuck up.”

  Jeeter made it to his knees, wheezing, trying to breathe.

  Pruitt looked around, as though expecting to see other troops. “Sir, we…please tell Commander Gravenholtz that we never let down our guard before. Not once.”

  “Once is kind of enough, don’t you think?” said Rakkim.

  “This ain’t fair,” said Tom, small eyes blinking. “It’s ‘Tipton, do this, Tipton, do that, Tipton, you dumb fuck, wash out my socks,’” he said, voice cracking. “I do everything I’m told, and I still get tagged with guard duty five nights running, no relief. How am I supposed to stay awake? You tell me, how am I supposed to do that?”

  Rakkim wagged a finger at Jeeter. “You run a sloppy outfit, top dog. I surely would hate to be you when I make my report.”

  Tom tugged at his wispy goatee. “The women…those two women must have put something in our food…drugged us out.” He looked around for support. “Knockout drops or something.”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past those two bitches,” mumbled Ferris.

  Jeeter secured the strap of his overalls, looking hard at Rakkim. “I’m not worried. Gravenholtz knows me, knows I get the job done.”

  “Please, mister,” said Tom.

  “Too late, Tom,” said Rakkim. “Already sent it on. I put a three-hour transmission delay on it, give you boys a chance to head out for greener pastures.” He smiled at Tom. “Five straight nights of guard duty? You deserve a break. Besides, I hate thinking about what Gravenholtz will do to you if he finds you here. Gives me nightmares.”

  “Ain’t nobody leaving,” said Jeeter.

  Rakkim checked his watch. “It’s up to you.”

  “Jeeter, hey, man,” said Tom, “you can stay, but me…” He bent down, started shoving clothes into a backpack.

  “I said, stay put,” said Jeeter.

  “Like this guy said, Jeeter, one for all…one for all and we’re all fucked,” said Ferris. “I seen Gravenholtz crush a man’s skull for stepping on his foot. What do you think he’s going to do to us?”

  “He ain’t going to do nothing.” Jeeter glared at Rakkim with his one good eye. “This turd isn’t working for Gravenholtz. He probably don’t even know Gravenholtz. He’s running some game.”

  Rakkim looked at his watch. Shrugged.

  “What kind of a dumb game you think he’s running, Jeeter?” said Tom, the backpack overflowing. “He’s not asking nothing from us.”

  Pruitt watched Rakkim.

  Rakkim spread his arms wide. “It’s a free country. You want to stay here and find out who’s playing a game and who’s not, be my guest. Ta-ta.” He started toward the door.

  “Where you think you’re going?” Jeeter grinned. “By my count, there’s four of us and one of you.” He scooped a hammer off a workbench. “So you hand over that vid and maybe I won’t nail your pecker to the wall.” He looked around. “Ferris, get your fat ass in gear. Pruitt, Tipton…move it.”

  Ferris hesitated, walked slowly to a corner and picked up a crowbar.

  “Maybe…maybe we should talk about this first,” said Tom.

  “Tom’s got a point,” said Pruitt, still watching Rakkim. “This man here can count as well as you can. He sidles in here, takes our guns, wakes us up. He’s not armed…might as well be naked as a jaybird. He’s got to have something else going for him.”

  “Let’s talk,” said Tom.

  Jeeter hefted the hammer. “Soldier up, Tipton. Fucking Billy Goat Gruff, if you had been standing guard like you were supposed to, none of this would have happened.”

  “Now, boys, don’t argue over me,” said Rakkim. “The Good Book says blessed are the peacemakers.”

  Tom sighed, walked over, and pulled out a single-bladed ax from the stump used as a chopping block. He took a few practice swings, the ax swooshing the air. Dust motes danced in the morning light.

  Jeeter nodded at Tom. “That’s better. Now spread out.” He moved forward, tossing the hammer from one hand to the other, his eyes on Rakkim.

  Ferris sidled forward, awkward, gripping the crowbar.

  Tom closed in. Swung the ax high over his head, drove it down full force into Jeeter’s back. Slammed him into the ground.

  Rakkim was as surprised as Pruitt and Ferris. All four of them stood there, watching as Jeeter’s fingers clutched at the dirt floor of the barn, the ax still stuck in his back as he tore at the dirt like he was trying to hide in the earth. They stayed there watching until the fingers stopped.

  Tom spit on Jeeter. Looked over at Pruitt. “No matter what happened, he was going to blame me. You know he was, Pru.”

  “It’s true,” said Pruitt. “That’s just what he would have done.”

  Ferris dropped the crowbar. Stepped away from it.

  “I ain’t facing Gravenholtz…I ain’t doing that.” Tom shook his head. “I’ll head out to Florida first, see if Cuban pussy is as good as they say it is.”

  Rakkim rolled Jeeter onto his side. Patted him down until he found the phone, and then stood up. “You have about ten minutes until your eight o’clock check-in, Pruitt. Make the call and then you can all leave. That’ll give you some time before Gravenholtz gets the video. Enough time to put some distance between you.”

  Ferris and Tom were already packing up their gear, hurrying. It didn’t take them long.

  Pruitt walked over to Rakkim. “I’m not a deserter.”

  Rakkim nodded. “I can see that, but it’s not safe here anymore. You can stay, but I’m taking the women where Gravenholtz won’t find them.”

  “Does Leanne want to go?”

  “They know they can’t stay here.” Rakkim watched Ferris and the sentry trot out the back door. “She spoke well of you…if that matters.”

  “Yes, sir, it matters.” Pruitt looked toward the house. “I should have never joined up. I thought it would be different. The Colonel’s a good man…but he doesn’t know the things that go on. Gravenholtz…” He shook his head. “I didn’t sign up for—”

  “Make the call.” Rakkim handed him the phone.

  Pruitt ran a thumb across the keypad. “Right…yes.” He tapped in the access code: 7-8-3-6-0-9-5-3. Waited. A diode on the phone flashed. “It’s me. Yeah. Tell Gravenholtz everything’s fine.” He listened. “I’m stuck on the fucking bayou, that’s what’s wrong with my voice. Yeah. Talk to you tonight.” He closed the phone, handed it back to Rakkim.

  “Hurry up, Pru,” said Tom from the doorway. “Time to go.”

  Pruitt looked at Rakkim. “You don’t really know Gravenholtz, do you?”

  “No, but I can’t fucking wait to meet him.”

  Pruitt nodded. “Good.”

  “Pru!”

  Rakkim watched them run down the path to the main road before starting back to the farmhouse. He could hear Leo and Leanne chattering away as he approached, going back and forth like there was nobody else in the world. Inside he found Leo in a chair, a towel clipped around his neck while Leanne snipped away at his hair with a pair of scissors. The Ident collar lay on the table.

  Annabelle scooped scrambled eggs onto a platter.

  “What do you think?” Leanne said to Rakkim.

  The kid looked good.

  “He wouldn’t tell me who cut his hair last, but they sure didn’t know what they were doing.” Leanne cut a few more spots. Moistened her fingers in her mouth and slicked down a few errant hairs. “I’ll have to do a touch-up in a few weeks, but that’s the best I can do fo
r now.” She whisked off the towel. Her hand lingered on Leo’s neck.

  “We have to go,” said Rakkim. “All of us.”

  Annabelle glanced back toward the barn.

  “They’re already gone,” said Rakkim. “We’ll drive you and Leanne wherever you want. Someplace Gravenholtz won’t know about. Someplace safe.”

  “John expects us to be here,” said Annabelle.

  “I’ll tell him where you are,” said Rakkim. He saw her hesitate. “Annabelle, when Gravenholtz doesn’t get his eight p.m. check-in, he’s going to know something’s wrong. You can’t stay here.”

  “We’ll bring your father back safe,” Leo assured Leanne. “I promise.”

  Leanne looked him up and down, taking her time. “I believe you.”

  Leo swallowed, reached into his pocket, and set a tiny metallic object on the counter, another cannibalized creation from the toy tank he had taken apart at Mount Carmel. One of the soldiers from the toy tank hung from a paper-clip trapeze. As the sun hit the soldier’s helmet, he started doing lazy flips, then faster and faster.

  “We have a lot to do before we leave,” said Annabelle.

  “Don’t take any more than you can carry,” said Rakkim.

  Annabelle slammed a pan on the counter. “You think this is the first time I’ve had to leave my home in a hurry?”

  “No…I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” said Rakkim.

  “That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard you say all morning,” said Annabelle. “Now let’s all sit down for breakfast. With my good china and crystal and cloth napkins. We’re going to eat like civilized people. Then…then I’m going to make my bed and lock the door behind me.”

  Leanne carefully picked up the acrobatic soldier, who continued doing flips while decorative sparks flew from the base.

  “At the end of the routine he salutes,” said Leo. “I wanted him to be able to do a handstand too, but I ran out of parts.”

  Leanne chewed her lip. “Maybe I…maybe I could help you. I’m good with my hands.”

  Chapter 21

  “I wish we could have stayed longer,” said Leo.

  Rakkim kept driving. They had barely left Annabelle’s cousin’s house and Leo was already lovesick.

  “What would it have hurt to stay another night?” said Leo. “No telling what they might have told us about Gravenholtz.”

  “Yeah, you’re really interested in Gravenholtz,” said Rakkim. He had heard Leo creep down the hall from his room last night around midnight, heard him sneak back in around dawn. “Annabelle doesn’t know any more than she’s already told us. It’s time to get moving.”

  “Why do you always get to decide where we go and when we leave?”

  Rakkim didn’t bother answering.

  Annabelle had assured Rakkim that no one would think to come looking for her at her cousin’s house. Her daddy’s side of the family had cut off all contact after she married Moseby. Racial attitudes in the Belt had softened greatly since the war, but there were still folks who didn’t take to mixing things up. She hadn’t seen her cousin in a long time, but she and Mary Thurston had been close once. Almost like sisters. Her cousin had been startled to see Annabelle at her front door, but invited her in, then hugged her, the two of them crying like kids over a broken doll. Rakkim and Leo stood around, watching Mary Thurston cry some more over how beautiful Leanne was, and is this your son-in-law? Leo blushed so hard it looked like his cheeks were about to catch fire.

  “Mary Thurston said Leanne and I made a fine couple,” said Leo. “She does astrology, which is totally ridiculous, I know, but still, she said our signs were a good match.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Rakkim drove on through northern Arkansas, speeding along a fancy strip of eight-lane freeway. Good work too, some sort of computer-assisted roadbed the Japanese had put in to speed goods between their fertilizer-processing plants in Arkadelphia and Little Rock, a ninety-mile stretch that tapered off to the cracked and uneven blacktop that formed most of the roads in the Belt.

  “I love Leanne,” Leo said quietly. “I love her and she loves me.”

  “I’m touched. I’m moved. What, you’ve known her almost twenty-four hours.”

  “You think you’re the only one allowed to fall in love?”

  “Why don’t you make yourself useful? Check the phone for bugs and tracers.”

  “I already did.”

  “Check it again.”

  “I already did.” Leo turned around, looked behind them. Leanne was twenty miles away, but you would have thought she was right there, standing beside a white picket fence, waving a lace hanky. “There were two tracers, both of them now disabled.” He pulled out the phone, turned it on, and popped open the case.

  “I told you not to do that. You were supposed to disconnect the power source until we needed it.”

  “This is some very sweet tech,” said Leo, his tongue probing the corner of his mouth as he adjusted the innards of the phone with a piece of bent wire. “Oscillating frequency…at least fifty million possible permutations…but if you know what you’re doing—”

  “Leo.”

  A burst of static from the phone, then, “…never found a damned thing, but somebody must be certain. Logged in fifteen dumploads by noon.” A man’s voice, Tennessee cadence. Leo dragged the wire lightly across an etched circuit within the phone. More static. A different voice now: “…chicken for dinner again. Like to tear my guts out. Case you didn’t hear, Gravenholtz is on the warpath, so keep your head down.”

  Leo closed the phone case. Removed the battery.

  “They can’t hear us, can they?” said Rakkim. “When we’re monitoring their calls, they can’t hear us?”

  Leo snorted. “God, it must be weird to be so dumb.”

  A caravan of rusted National Guard trucks rolled slowly past, soldiers in the open bed hunkered down, eyeing them from under their helmets. The men looked sleepy and unshaven, their uniforms caked with mud, but their weapons were clean and well maintained.

  “I got a question,” said Leo, after the caravan passed. “Don’t laugh, though.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it.” Leo cleared his throat. “Leanne and I made love last night.”

  “No kidding?”

  Leo bobbed his head, eyes half closed. “Four times.

  “Last night…well, it was my first time,” he continued, “but it wasn’t the first time for Leanne.” He looked straight ahead through the windshield. “So…what I wanted to know is, how can you tell if it’s as good for the woman as it is for yourself?”

  “You mean…was she faking it?”

  “Not exactly. Just…was it incredibly beyond-belief astounding for her too, even though she had done it before?” Leo stared at him. “Don’t laugh, I’m serious.”

  “I’m not laughing.” He wasn’t. “Did Leanne seem like she was having a good time?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “So leave it alone. You don’t need any more proof than that.”

  A triple-rig Matsushita trailer truck loaded with tanks of fertilizer blew past them, had to be doing a hundred.

  “The first time…” Leo hesitated. “The first time we made love…it didn’t last very long.”

  “That’s pretty normal.”

  Leo shifted in his seat. “I went off as soon as I got inside her.”

  “First time…a woman’s a scary thing. Wonderful, but scary.”

  “You’re not scared anymore, though, right?”

  “Oh, I’m still scared a little bit.” Rakkim laughed. “That’s part of the wonderfulness.”

  An abandoned shopping center loomed off the side of the road, a gigantic Wal-Mart store with the windows broken, the roof caved in. There were ruined Wal-Marts all over the Belt, stripped of their goods, covered in graffiti.

  “Is there a secret trick?” said Leo. “So I don’t…so I don’t lose it so quick?”

  “You should ask your father. I’m not really
—”

  “My father’s not here and I couldn’t ask him anyway. You’re my friend, aren’t you?”

  Rakkim glanced over at him. Leo’s eyes were bugged out waiting for an answer. “Yeah, Leo, I’m your friend.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. Just…try to line up with the woman. Feel like you’re part of her. No, like you’re each part of something new…Or maybe just have fun and let things work themselves out. Come on, the fourth time had to take longer than the first.”

  “I was calculating the value of pi in my head. That’s how come I lasted longer.”

  “Pi? Like part of a circle or something?”

  “The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.”

  “So you were doing geometry while you were making love?”

  “I calculated pi to two hundred and fifty-eight decimal places, then I…then I lost my place. Hey! It’s not funny.”

  “I’m sorry.” Rakkim shook his head, trying not to laugh. “Really. It’s just…losing your place?”

  “Okay…I get it.”

  “Give yourself a break, Leo. Sex doesn’t have to be perfect. Sometimes it is funny.”

  “I want it to be perfect.”

  “Sorry, kid, welcome to the monkey house. Ain’t no perfect here.”

  They rode in silence for a few miles, going with the flow of traffic, a few car lengths behind a chromed-out blue sedan with a ONE NATION UNDER JESUS bumper sticker. The Jesus on the sticker carried an assault rifle.

  “Thanks…for before.” Leo raised his window up and down, up and down. “How long until we get to your friend’s farm?”

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll get there in time for dinner. You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted one of Florence Tigard’s buttermilk biscuits.”

  Leo pulled out the phone. Stared at it.

  “When things are over, we’ll bring Moseby back to join them,” said Rakkim. “Imagine the reception you’ll get from Leanne. You’ll be the guy who kept his promise.”

  “I wish I could talk to her, that’s all.” Leo slipped the phone back in his pocket. “I miss her. Is that dumb?”

  “No.”

  “You miss your wife too, sometimes. I can tell. You get quiet. Not your normal quiet, but more of a deeper thing where you hardly move but your eyes are happy. Like when we saw that couple holding hands at the little grocery store, the guy carrying the kid on his shoulders…you were thinking of Sarah, weren’t you?”