Afterparty (11 page)

Maybe he could grab somebody off the street—an innocent, a little girl, perhaps—and torture her in front of the pastor? But that was crazy. Where was he going to find a little girl at this time of night? The black kid with the beard could have been leverage, but it was too late for that.

The Vincent said, “So what’s it going to be, Rudy?”

The man shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.” He sounded genuinely apologetic. “I made a vow.”

Even on the meds, with his empathy reduced to a trickle, the Vincent could detect the sincerity in the pastor’s voice. Rudy was determined to keep his promise.

The Vincent put a hand on the man’s neck. Three small dots surrounded the “13” tattoo, representing Prison, Hospital, and Cemetery, the gangster stations of the cross. “Just a first name,” he said. Asking, even though it was futile. “Or the initials.”

Rudy said, “It’s not too late. It’s never too late. God can forgive you. Even after you do what you’re about to do.”

The pastor stared at the floor. He was already gone, gone as that Afghan farmer.

“What are we going to do with you?” the Vincent asked.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ollie and I rode in the backseat, Bobby alone up front. During the ride to the strip mall she held my hand, running her thumb up and down my wrist. Her fingers were no longer trembling. She directed Bobby to drive around the back.

She pulled my face to hers and kissed me fiercely. “For luck.” She jumped out of the car and jogged up the steps beside the loading dock. She looked twice as big in the camo jacket.

I hopped out after her, then leaned back in to the passenger window. “Keep the car running,” I told Bobby. I’d always wanted to say that.

Ollie took something out of her jacket pocket and inserted it in the lock of one of the doors. I whispered, “How long will it take to—?”

She pushed the door open and stepped into the dark.

“Okay then,” I said.

Ollie turned on a thin flashlight. She played the light around the wall adjacent to the loading dock doors and finally settled on a small white box at eye level.
My
eye level, anyway—the box was positioned just over Ollie’s head. The lid hung loose. She reached up and popped it off.

“Huh,” she said.

“Problem?” I still had my hand on the door.

“The alarm’s already disabled.”

I closed the door. Ollie flipped a light switch. I winced against the light, turned to face the room—and my body jerked, then froze—the microseizure of the life-endangered mammal.

In the middle of the warehouse, a figure lay curled on the floor, his back to us. I flashed on the body of Francine, sprawled on the tile of the NAT bathroom, and knew this to be another corpse.

I stepped forward, and Ollie put a hand on my shoulder. “We have to get out,” she said. “Now.”

I ignored her and walked toward the body. He was naked, or nearly so. His hands were clasped behind him. His neck was straight, supported by something small, so that his head hovered over the floor. Blood had pooled beneath it, then spawned a rivulet that meandered a few feet to a drain.

I moved around his feet to see his face. It was the pastor. His eyes were open, his lips slightly parted. I crouched to see what he was resting on. I touched his shoulder, and he tipped onto his back.

A rounded wooden handle was buried in the side of his neck. The tattoo I’d seen yesterday was obscured by blood.

Ollie said, “Lyda…”

I was shaking, and couldn’t stop myself. Some neural pathways are so old, the grooves so deep, you’re forced to realize that you’re an animal first. Reason, choice, self-control? They all showed up late to the evolutionary party.

“The chemjet,” I said. “We need the chemjet.”

Ollie walked toward the bathroom and I rose to follow her. She pulled open the door. Immediately she put up a hand to have me stay back, but I stepped forward.

Luke, the skinny black kid who’d led us here a day ago, slumped on the toilet. I recognized him despite the plastic garbage bag cinched tight over his face like a superhero mask.

The chemjet was gone. The wire crates still sat on the floor of the shower stall, and a few remnant plastic tubes coiled around the drain, but the printer was gone, along with the boxes of c-packs.

“It’s got to be here!” I left the bathroom and slammed open the door to the office, but the printer wasn’t there either. I headed for the sanctuary. Ollie grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around. I was still shaking.

“It’s not here,” she said. “And we have to
go
.”

“Wait. Where are his clothes?”

“The naked guy’s?”

I found them in the warehouse: shoes, jeans, and T-shirt folded neatly and stacked on one of the wire shelves. I set aside the shirt and turned out the pants pockets, discovering keys, a smart pen, a wallet. I opened the wallet. Ollie watched me, confused. “What are you looking for?”

In the wallet was the usual: cash, credit cards, receipts. I handed her all the loose paper. “Check for rice paper,” I said. “Anything that looks like designer print.”

I marched back to the bathroom. I crouched beside Luke, trying not to look up at his face, and pushed a hand into his front pocket. It was empty. I reached across him to the other pocket. He gave off an earthy smell. How long had he been dead: an hour, a day?

There was nothing in the other pocket but some loose change. So, the back pockets, then. I took a breath, held it, then leaned hard into him, shifting him off one butt cheek. I worked a hand into his back pocket, and pulled out a square of stiff plastic like a miniature wallet.

I let go, and Luke slid off the toilet with a sickening thud.

I opened the plastic holder. Inside was a strip of paper with a single word printed on it. “Logos.”

Ollie appeared in the doorway. “Got it,” I said.

“Good,” Ollie said. “Let’s go.”

She pushed me to the back door, then said, “I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“A little cleanup.” She disappeared back into the building.

I stepped outside, and the back parking lot was empty. Where the hell was Bobby? I went down the steps, spun around stupidly. I put the mini-wallet into my pocket and reached for Fayza’s flip phone. I was about to dial when a pair of headlights turned the corner.

I backed up to the wall of the store. Bobby’s hybrid whined to a halt. “Where the fuck did you go?” I asked him.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! You guys were taking so long, then I saw a car and I thought it was the cops, so I—”

“Never mind.” I jumped in the back. “Shut off the lights.”

“What happened? Where’s Ollie? Where’s the printer?”

“Somebody got there first,” I said.

A minute passed, then two. Finally Ollie appeared. She shut the door behind her and climbed into the car. “Did you have to touch
everything
?” she said. But she was smiling.

“Drive,” I told Bobby.

*   *   *

“So what does it mean?” Bobby asked. “That word on the paper?”

We were the only three people in the harshly lit dining room of a twenty-four-hour Lebanese restaurant. Ollie sat on my side of the booth, her arm against mine, her hand on my knee. With her free hand she rummaged through a plate of falafel, three different dishes of fried vegetables, and a bowl of hummus. Driving the hospital food out of her system, she said. Bobby was deconstructing his baklava, eating it layer by layer like an archeologist. Me, I was just gripping a coffee, braced for the approach of sirens. I had no appetite. I kept picturing the awl in Pastor Rudy’s neck, the bag over Luke’s head …

“Lyda?” Bobby said. “What logos are they talking about?”

“Log-
ose
,” Ollie said. “It’s Greek.”

“Ding. Two points,” I said.

“For Gryffindor!” Bobby said.

“Gryffindor doesn’t play basketball,” Ollie said.

“The word means ‘word.’ ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God—’”

“And the word
was
God,” Ollie said. Her eyes narrowed. “So you
are
religious.”

“I was raised by a schizophrenic Southern Baptist,” I said. “But it didn’t affect me.”

“Obviously,” she said. She was grinning, almost giddy. Seeing the bodies hadn’t seemed to faze her. And now she was flirting with me, leaning into me like an Iowa cheerleader in the front seat of a Ford pickup. Jesus Christ, what had I started?

Bobby asked me, “So are you going to eat it?” Meaning the paper.

“No, of course not.” I
would
have torn off a piece and swallowed it, if I’d known which letter had been printed with the drug. Or it could be that the dosage was on every letter, or evenly distributed across the word. I couldn’t afford to damage my one sample with a taste test.

“I need access to a lab,” I said. “And one special machine.”

Ollie squeezed my arm. “Where do we steal it from?” She was wide awake and ready to knock over banks.

“I’m cutting you off,” I said. I pulled out the phone and slid out of the booth. “I’ll be right back.”

Ollie stopped me. “What is that?” Staring at the phone. I heated with embarrassment, which annoyed me, because I didn’t think I had anything to be embarrassed about.

“Fayza gave me a phone,” I said.

Bobby said, “So how come you’re always borrowing mine?”

“She did not give you a phone,” Ollie said. “She gave you a tracking device. Give me that.”

“You’re going to do something to it.”

“Yes I am. Give it.”

She snapped it in half, then pried off the back and tore out the electrical innards. She picked out the tiny battery and popped it free from the chip, then crushed the chip with the salt shaker.

“Yikes,” Bobby said.

Ollie said, “Didn’t you wonder why she gave it to you?”

“I thought so she would know the call came from me. Maybe she has a whitelist. Or special encryption…”

Ollie was shaking her head before I’d gotten halfway through the sentence. “From now on we use burners. No personal phones.”

Bobby made a move to leave. “Bathroom.”

“You too, kid,” I said.

“But my apps! I have videos!”

Ollie said, “Relax, you can get it all back from your backups.”

Bobby morosely took his pen from his pocket and slid it to her. She destroyed it as thoroughly as she had Fayza’s device, then withdrew a new pen from the breast pocket of her camo jacket. She played with it for half a minute, activating it, then handed it to me. “Never been used,” she said. “We’re getting some Wi-Fi here, so I set it to reroute through an anonymizer server, so receivers shouldn’t be able to pick up our location. Later I’ll set up a hopper network so we can use the cell phone towers.”

I didn’t understand half of what she was saying. What was a hopper network?

Ollie saw my look and said, “What? This is what you sprung me for, right? These are basic countermeasures.”

“I get all hot when you do spy talk,” I said.

“Oh jeez,” Bobby said. He went to the bathroom, sans pen.

Ollie stopped me before I walked off to make my call. “I know you’re upset,” she said.

“And you don’t seem to be at all.”

“I’ve seen bodies before.” She shrugged. “Also, I’m in a weird state, chemically. I’m not sure if I’m reacting appropriately. Like, I can’t stop thinking about this falafel—it’s fantastic.”

“Ha.”

She glanced up to make sure Bobby was out of earshot. “We need to figure out who killed them,” she said. “Was it the drug dealer?”

“Fayza has no reason to do anything with the pastor, not yet. I haven’t given her the results of the test.”

“But she thinks it’s the Little Sprout drug. So she kills them now, and if it turns out they weren’t using that particular drug, she still kills them—because they’re competing with her.”

“Ollie, come on, Fayza can’t be that—” I was about to say “paranoid.” But of course she could; she was a drug lord. Paranoia had to be one of the prerequisites for the job. “So this is what? Some low-level drug war?”

“Maybe not low-level,” Ollie said. “Your pastor was Mexican Mafia.”

“Wait, really?”

“He had the tattoos.”

“So he’s, what? Mexican cartel?”

“La eMe’s primarily a prison gang, but it became attached to the cartels.”

“I thought they all wiped each other out in the twenties.”

“The old gangs aren’t gone, just absorbed when the organizations from Ghana and Nigeria moved in.”

“I didn’t think he was faking the spirituality,” I said. The pastor had seemed so calm and centered. Or maybe he was a user as well as a dealer. So Fayza takes him out, and then—

“I just had a bad thought,” I said. “As soon as I give Fayza the results, she has no use for me.”

“True,” Ollie said.

“Jesus, you’re not supposed to just agree with me when I say shit like that! Say something encouraging.”

She thought for a moment. “You’re not a threat to her,” she said. “Not much of one. You’re not manufacturing, so you’re not a competitor. As a subject-matter expert, you could even be of critical use to her if she wants to manufacture the drug itself.”

“I’m not going to let her have the recipe,” I said. “That’s the whole point of this.
Nobody
gets to make NME One-Ten. Not Fayza, not Edo, not anybody.”

“Oh.” She put down her fork. “Then she’s going to try to kill you.”

“Damn it, Ollie.” I wasn’t mad at her, not really. I was pissed with myself for not taking the printer when I’d had a chance. I hadn’t even gotten a picture of it. Dr. G had recognized something about the engine, but then never got around to telling me what it was. And now she was no longer talking to me.

Bobby ambled toward us. He looked worried. “Are you guys fighting?” he said.

“Don’t worry, Mommy and Daddy still love you very much,” I said. “I need to make a call.”

I stepped outside the restaurant. The temperature had dropped to just above freezing, and the cold, wet air first jolted me, then immediately made me more tired than before. I was not used to being out this late while sober. The streets were mostly empty. No flashing lights in the distance, no sirens.