I owe . . . I owe . . .
Can I bend my elbow? I concentrate solely on my right arm as I will it to flex. It responds, only a millimeter of movement, probably invisible to anyone but me. But it was there; I felt it. Ping.
A woman enters and breathes onions into my face while she checks my pulse, my blood pressure. I crack my eyes just enough to see that her face matches her breath.
“Back to the land of the living.”
I try to respond to that unimaginative opening but my throat feels like it is filled with sand.
She holds a cup of water to my lips and I start to gag, but when she withdraws the cup I manage to croak out “more.”
She returns the water and it goes down better this time, like a sudden squall washing the dust from a dry creek bed.
“Your vitals are all solidly in the green,” she says. “You look rough but you’re gonna live for a bit.”
I cast my eyes about the room. We’re alone but there are a couple of cameras affixed to the ceiling. The dark men may not be here, but they’re watching.
I have to watch too. Wait and watch for a mistake.
I owe. I owe
. . . Ping.
It happens a week later. I can’t be precisely sure of how much time passed, but it feels like a week. Nurse Onions has been in and out at regular intervals, what I’m guessing are eight-hour shifts, replaced by Orderly Tough Guy and Nurse Eyebrows. I did my best to extract some personal information out of each, but Onions is the only one who strung more than two words together. I haven’t asked about Risina. I won’t. If they already know I care for her, then I’ll make them question how much. If they don’t know, I’ll make them think she was only my pawn.
My strength returns, slowly. I’ve been flexing my legs under the sheets and my arms, I’ve been swinging in small concentric circles just above the mattress. I hope it’s unnoticeable to the cameras as I lie in the dark. I make barely enough movement to toggle a few pixels on their monitors or maybe they’ve figured out what I’m doing. A man named Mr. Cox used to lock me inside a house all day when I was a kid. While he was gone, I’d work on my strength until I was ready to confront him. I don’t have the time or the freedom to do pushups, chin-ups, sit-ups like I did then. I’m just going to have to make a move with the strength I built from those little circles and flexes. They made a mistake not handcuffing me to the bedrail.
Onions enters carrying a steel tray of food. Some kind of protein shake, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bowl of fruit. They haven’t given me a single utensil, and that pen-light hasn’t made another appearance, but sometimes larger objects can do the trick. Ping. They should have brought everything in on a paper plate. Ping.
As she moves to set the tray in my lap, I spring up with more agility then they’ve seen out of me since they dragged me here. I grab the tray with both hands and as Onions leans in to restrain me, I slam the flat steel into her face with everything I have. She spills backward but doesn’t drop as a metallic clang reverberates around the warehouse. Her nose is broken, and her hands go there instinctively, as I spin the tray around like I’m twirling a football and smack her with the flat end a second time, this time to the back of the head. She topples forward on to the bed now, a moan rising up like a foghorn from somewhere deep inside her.
I hear footsteps rushing in my direction from the darkness and I’m going to have to move quickly now. I charge the footsteps and just as Orderly Tough Guy steps into the light I hit him with the edge of the tray into the white of his throat and he falls to his knees, his strength sapped as he gasps for air. Twirling the tray again, I set my feet like a baseball batter and swing for the fences, the flat of the tray catching him in the temple. He capsizes the rest of the way to the floor and I’m into the darkness, looking for an exit.
I find an open doorway in the corner and enter a narrow corridor only lit by emergency lights. I move quickly now, the tray curled up in my arm. A man in a suit swings out from a doorway fifteen feet away, a gun in his hand, and this might’ve been the end of my escape, but as he pulls the trigger, I realize he’s firing a stun-gun, one of those devices that shoots out an electrode along a connecting wire. This ignorant bastard thinks we’re playing a game of capture or be captured instead of life and death. The electrode flies forward and I swat it away with the tray like I’m backhanding a tennis ball, and then I fling the tray at his head. It frisbees through the air, making the sound of a ringing bell as it slices into his forehead and nearly rips his scalp off. He drops instantaneously, as though his bones and muscles turned to jelly after the flying tomahawk nearly decapitated him. I scoop up the tray on the way through the door from which he just emerged.
The room is something akin to a break room, complete with a couple of vending machines, a long table lined with folding chairs, and a microwave. I flip through drawers along a row of cabinets, nothing, nothing, nothing and then jackpot: metal silverware. I take a handful of knives, start to leave my tray behind, then think better of it and retrieve it before heading through another door.
A new hallway, this one with a sign above a door at the end of it that reads “exit,” but might as well say “freedom.” I’m tired, sore, a little dizzy if I took the time to admit it, but all of that is just vague wisps at the back of my brain as I glide through the corridor and hit the door in full stride.
It slams open and slaps the outside wall with a bang and I’m surprised to find it overcast outside, like the beginning of a summer storm. It might be dawn, it might be dusk, impossible to tell.
Two cars are parked in an otherwise empty lot, a pair of foreign sedans and it won’t take me long to jump one, get the hell out of here, and figure out where the fuck I am before I make my next move.
Just as I approach the driver’s door of the black one, a familiar voice shouts from the doorway, jolting me as abruptly as if that guard’s stun-gun had sent a thousand volts into my body.
“Columbus! Wait!”
I can’t believe the voice I hear. I don’t even have to turn around to know who it is. I start to shake my head, my hand poised inches from the sedan’s door handle.
“Hold up just a second, now,” he calls out.
I turn, an about-face, and a wave of nausea suddenly springs up and threatens to cloud my vision. The first drops of rain prick my head, cold.
“Archie?”
It comes out more of a question than a statement, like he might disappear, a mirage.
“First thing I gotta say before you hit me with that silver tray, Columbus. I wasn’t part of this. Not directly.”
He doesn’t disappear. The rain starts to fall harder but he’s really there, wet but not washing away.
“What the hell’s going on, Archie?” In my mind I say this calmly, but I can hear it come out with a sharp edge.
“Well, I can answer that. I will, too. But what say you come back inside and we talk about it out of this mess.”
“What’d they do to you, Archie?”
“Come inside, Columbus.”
“If you think I’m walking back inside that warehouse, you’ve forgotten everything you know about me.”
He nods at that as the rain accumulates in his close-cropped afro. “You gonna make me talk about this in the rain, aint’cha? Goddam.”
He steps away from the warehouse door and approaches as cautiously as a bird looking for breadcrumbs under an occupied park bench.
“Second thing I gotta say is I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“Can we at least sit in that car to do this?”
“Only if we drive it away from here.”
“Sold.”
I ready my elbow to smash in the sedan’s window. “Wait!”
He holds up a set of keys. “That’s my rental.”
“Then you drive.”
“As long as you don’t kill me before I tell you what for.”
“Depends on what your answers are, Archie.” I slide into the passenger seat and wait for the car to come to life. The rain patters the windshield like gunfire.
A back booth at Dunkin Donuts admits us a place to talk and eat, two of Archie’s favorite pastimes.
“It all played out how you know it. Some men put hands on me in the middle of the night. I put up a fight and they cracked me till I was flat. I didn’t know it was Spilatro or the Agency or none of that. No one told me this was coming. You gotta believe that. I meant what I said when I said I’d help you stay gone.”
Archie doesn’t smile as much as he used to. That was his trademark, flashing his teeth, making you feel comfortable, even when you thought maybe he was trying to pull one over on you. Maybe after his sister died, he couldn’t bring himself to put on that show anymore. Or maybe this business with the government shook him up.
“How long have you been working for Uncle Sam?”
“Not working for. Working
with
. There’s a continent of difference between those two prepositions.”
He bites into a cinnamon twist, but doesn’t look down, his eyes stoic.
“Any fence worth a whit does some Agency shit time to time. They outsource the domestic bloodshed. It’s their culture. They use their talent on foreign soil, but back home? They contract out the wetwork, same as everyone. You’ve done a job or two for them over the years, guaranteed.”
“I don’t care.”
He holds up his palms defensively, like he wants me to let him finish. He hasn’t dropped his hands below the table since we arrived.
“I know you don’t, Columbus. You a Silver Bear and you don’t look to know who hired you. A kill’s a kill and it’s all about the hunt. I get that. I’m just trying to put some background on this thing we’re in.”
He coughs into his fist, like he’s still sorting out his thoughts. “Some people in the government found out you was the one what killed that senator . . .”
“Congressman.”
“Politician. Presidential candidate. Abe Mann. Whatever. We on the same page.”
“How’d they know it was me?”
“They got a name and that’s all they got. Contractor named Columbus did it. There are only a few like you in the whole damn world, so the field was narrow. Who knows how the whisper became a fact, but they knew, and when they found out it was you, they found out about me.”
The cinnamon twist is gone and after he licks the sugar crystals off his fingers, he’s on to an old-fashioned.
“They knew you’d given up the game, and they hired Spilatro to bring you back. He’s the cat who came up with the kidnap plan, the ransom note, the bread crumb trail that would bring you out of hiding.”
“So these men could have revenge on me for killing their candidate, their puppet.”
Archie sets down his donut. “Not exactly.”
I wait for more.
“They want you to work for them.”
I shake my head, my mouth twisted in a frown. “Do I look like I have a bump on my head, Archie? Why would I buy that?”
“Because it’s the truth. They saw the job you pulled in Los Angeles and wanted to know the man who could execute like that and walk away clean. They got beat by you, and dark men like them do one of two things when they get beat. They either fix the problem by plugging it up, or they recruit the son-of-a-bitch over to their side. Except with you, they figured best to do both.”
I don’t think my head has stopped shaking.
Archie continues, undaunted, “They went to their best hitter inside the company and said, ‘here’s your assignment. You find this Columbus and you kill him.’ But what they were really saying was ‘let the best man win.’”
“A test?”
“Something like that.
Competition’s
a better word. They want to run a stable with the best horses. And you just proved again you’re the best in the game.”
“And you played along?”
“After the beatdown they put on me, they drove me to what they call a ‘secure location.’ Then the real players showed up and told me the what-all. They kept me fed, let me watch TV, but they made it clear they wasn’t fucking around. Wanted to keep me alive and kicking so I could broker a deal if you bested Spilatro. And so here we are.”
“And Smoke is dead.”
His eyes cloud over. “Yeah. It’s a fuckin’ shame Spilatro did him like that. Smoke was good people.”
I sit back and fold my arms. “Call ’em over here.”
Archie gets that look on his face I’ve seen before, the one that says he forgot who he was dealing with. He wipes his fingers carefully with a napkin, then leans back and lets loose a long sigh. Finally, he cranes his neck and nods at the corner booth.
Two men wearing charcoal suits rise from the booth as they try unsuccessfully to keep their faces blank.
Archie slides around next to me, and they sit opposite.
“And the third. Call him over.”
The shorter of the two men—the one with bushy, black eyebrows that seem too large for his face—calls out to a third suited man perched at the counter. “Grayson, you’re made.”
A man at the counter slumps his shoulders, turns around, and pulls over a chair to the end of the table. The three men look approximately the same age—late forties—and all have hard eyes that indicate they’ve seen a lot of shit most people reserve for nightmares.
“You’re the dark men, huh?”
Bushy Eyebrows speaks up. “I’m Mitchells. This is Vancill. And Grayson’s at the end there.”
“You ordered all this?”
Mitchells shrugs. “I ordered your elimination. You cost us a great deal of time, effort and expense when you put our candidate in a bodybag.”
“He set it up.”
“But you killed him.”
“And now you want me to work for you?”
He smiles. “We happen to have an opening.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Mitchells sniffs the air like he just caught a whiff of something unpleasant.
“That’s warranted, so I’ll let it slide. But you’re a very smart man, Columbus, so I won’t let it slide twice. There are advantages to working for us that I know will be attractive to you. Namely, you’ll get to keep doing what you love doing the most.”
“I was out.”
“Were you?” He says this without a smile. “I’m trained to read people the way my colleagues are trained to crack code. I’ve watched your progress on this mission and before it . . . all over Europe for the preceding three years. Prague, Belgium, Spain, Paris. You’re a killer, you’re good at killing, and I’ll be damned if you don’t enjoy it. I don’t know any plainer way to say it.”