Resurrection Express (21 page)

But she had me going after Cheyenne Mountain, man. This one’s got her finger on the triggers of much bigger guns. What the hell is she up to?

Who is she really working for?

I talk to my wireheads again. I have important questions, and now I’ve got cash to pay for the answers. The money brings them all running this time.

I get back in my secure chat room with six major players who know their way around government contracting and security. One of them is a guy who used to build guidance systems for nuclear warheads. Another guy had a hand in the 2000 presidential election. I tell them all what I’m looking for. I give them names. They name their prices. I say okay. It has to be cash, night deposits, but they know I’m good for it.

I ask about defense grids. I ask about rich people stockpiling women. I ask about every speck of dangerous military blackware created in the past several years, and the people who are running scared from it. I get names. Big names. Dictators. Guerrilla leaders. Feared terrorists with track records. Half these people are dead already, the other half vanished off the face of the earth.

I think about Jayne Jenison, and how easy it was for her to kill me on paper, just after Hartman took out Toy Jam.

Jesus tap-dancing Christ.

Is Jenison behind all this?

Did
she
kill all these people—and is it real or just on paper? Does she really have a daughter who was kidnapped? And what about Toni?

One of my hackers wants to see some of the code I decrypted.

I send him a sample.

He tells me he can’t fucking believe what I’m sitting on.

I tell him yeah, I know.

Two of the guys in the chat room bail—right after using a lot of colorful adjectives to explain that they never wanna hear from me again. The other four triple their fees. I say okay.

Now that we’ve separated the men from the boys.

•  •  •

B
ennett passes out on the hospital bed, zonked.

“She’s fixed up okay,” the doc says, mixing a drink from the bar, a dry martini. “But she still needs time. I can stay with her until she’s okay to move.”

“Is that gonna be extra? I want her taken care of, man.”

“The five grand covers everything. I’ll make sure she’s good.”

I press some more bills into his hand. “She wants to go to Florida. Can you find her a ride?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Can’t be an airplane. Has to be more off the grid.”

“I have a guy I can call.” He looks at the cash in his hand. “But it’ll take a little more than this probably.”

“How much?”

“Another grand should do it.”

I give him two. What the hell, right?

“Make sure she gets where she’s going. And don’t spend all the rest in one place.”

“Sure thing.”

He finishes stirring the drink and sips at it slowly.

•  •  •

F
or the next few minutes, the doc nurses his martini, smoking cigarette after cigarette, looking nervous as he flips through channels on the big-screen TV. He ignores the two homies, who throw down some poker in the dining room nook, doing a lot of cussing, playing for real money. Their guns are on the table. I peel an
eye at them, from my work at the rig. A couple of hard dudes, no doubt—maybe too hard.

I hope Bennett will be safe with them.

But I can’t . . . think about . . .

My eyes close by themselves and I slap myself.

Damn.

So tired.

Whatever the doc gave me, it doesn’t seem to be jump-starting my intellect that well. But it’s doing an odd rumble in my guts. Maybe it’ll at least help get that damn safe deposit key out. Not that I really need it, but would be a hell of a lot healthier if I didn’t have to bust the lock on a safe deposit box in front of God and all his security cameras.

No word back from anyone online. My guys are digging. Nothing on Gmail.

My eyes close again and I slap myself again.

I take the other two pills, chase them with warm sweet caffeine.

I switch off the console and fold it up in my pack, carry it with me into the main bedroom. Gotta do some thinking before I bolt out of here. Have to focus. My next move has to be a location near downtown, where I can get back on the Internet and find David Hartman. It hurts my brain to think about him, or any of my plots. I almost smell the roses, but I fight it off. I’m so goddamn tired. This bedroom has a marble walled shower recessed into a stylish annex all done up in marble and chrome that looks like something off the set of
Clash of the Titans
. The old, good one, I mean. My dad took me to see that when it came out in the early eighties. I was eight years old. All of this other business was ahead of me. All of this—my life, played in target-blips and info-bursts, just before I run again.

I splash my face in the sink. I sit down on the chromed toilet seat. My guts are rolling and rumbling. Nothing comes out. Dammit.

I pull up my pants and move over to the door of the bedroom and close it.

Unzip the long bag and pull out the shotgun—feel the weight, check the chamber, full load. These Mossbergs are monsters. I hold it in my hands for a few minutes, just standing there in the room, feeling anxious, feeling tired. Can’t lose it now. Have to think about a few things.

I sit in the center of the room cross-legged and watch the door, the shotgun across my knees. Only one way into this room. If anyone comes through, they get shredded.

I watch the door.

It doesn’t open.

I can hear my bodyguards arguing over cards in the next room. The TV tuned to
American Idol
. The doc sucking back martinis in there, earning his dirty money by hanging out with gangsters, or whatever the hell we are.

I breathe slowly, taking myself out of the room.

Trying to see the plot.

Their plot.

Jenison’s plot.

Were you ever really within my reach, Toni?

I still have to find you.

And to find you, I have to get Hartman.

And to get Hartman, I have to stay off Jenison’s radar.

I have what she wants. Hartman wants it, too. My friends in this town will be my enemies by morning. I have to deal with them all. Gonna be sticky. I start in just a moment. I’m in the future now, with Toni. She sees me and she smiles, though I can’t see her face. I realize I’m dreaming as she comes for me and her hands melt in the thick air, turning into long tentacles, with thorns that pierce my flesh, but in a gentle way, a way that hurts as it loves me, a way of love because it’s tough . . . because they’re
not tentacles at all . . .
they’re roses creeping on vines . . . slashing as they envelop me . . .

I’m dreaming and I have to wake up.

I hear the sounds of men arguing and the blare of a TV commercial about maxi pads, just on the other side of all this.

I have to wake up.

I smell the raw vegetation of the vines and the sweet smell of the roses as they invade my heart and my mind, filling me with wet dirt and sick perfume and the reverberating
boom-crack
of the magic bullet that took my one true love away from me.

Have to focus.

I hear something shatter, and there is a scream . . .

Have to . . .

•  •  •

M
y eyes open and I’m still sitting in the room. TV still blaring outside the door. The shotgun in my lap. My watch says it’s nearly one in the morning.

My body just gave up for four hours, shut down without a warning. That never happened to me before, not even in prison. I feel like someone just used my head for a toilet. What the hell did the doc give me?

I get up and wash my face in the sink. Look at myself in the mirror. I need a shave, need a shower. A new set of eyes. Mine have bags that go all the way around them. My head’s tingling—what’s left of the drugs that didn’t work.

I pick up the shotgun and go over to the door, open it carefully until I see movement in there. I go into the room, not aiming the gun at anything. The movement in the room was from the TV. A rerun of
Melrose Place
.

Then the smell hits me.

•  •  •

T
he doc got it the worst.

I only look as long as I have to.

The two homies are next to him on the couch, missing a lot of themselves. Most of it’s on the floor.

The smell. It’s so bad.

If there were any shots fired in this room, it wasn’t enough to bring anyone running, and this was mostly a hack-and-slash job. Real hands-on work. Knives, maybe power tools. God. It took a long time for these guys to die. There’s deep red all over the walls.

And . . .

Oh no.

Bennett.

•  •  •

H
er face is full of peaceful calm—she never saw it coming. Her throat cut while she slept. She lies on the floor, her long red hair floating in a sea of blood.

The briefcase I gave her is gone.

Goddamn.

Goddamn.

No.

Don’t think about her.

Survival, man.

Stay alive.

I check the shotgun in my hands and all the cartridges have been removed. Right from under my nose. While I was dead to the world and everyone else was dead, period. My twenty grand walking-around money is still taped to the inside of my right thigh, the same place it’s been since we pulled out of Jenison’s compound.

Were they were in too big a hurry to strip me down?

Whoever came in here cleaned house and emptied my gun, then left me right where they found me. There’s not even a drop of blood on my clothes. It all went down while I sawed logs in the
next room. They made sure I wouldn’t know a damn thing. What the hell is that?

Am I still dreaming?

The tingle does a spider dance all over me, jacked up by the sudden rush of knowing that it’s always darkest . . . right before you’re 100 percent screwed.

How long were they watching this place? Do they know about the car in the lot three blocks away?

I realize something else.

They took my rig, too.

Goddammit.

Why am I still alive?

This has to be a dream. I tingle all over. My right arm hurts. I look at it. There’s a bloody needle hole that wasn’t there before I hit the blackout, set inside a welling purple bruise, like a meteor crater in the flesh of a giant zombie.

Where they shot me full of something?

Why?

To keep me under while they cleaned house? Is that why I feel like so much hell right now?

I sway on my heels.

Tingle.

Shit . . .

I fall right on my ass, try to fight it while I’m on the floor and it sort of works. Look up at the computer in the corner. Look back at Bennett, her face frozen unknowingly in her endless sleep. Then my eyes fall on the TV screen . . .

There’s a cable box on a little glass shelf right under the flat-screen that says what today’s date is.

October 25.

Just now one in the morning.

Twenty-eight hours since I went to sleep.

10

00000-10

DEAD GAME

I
t all comes crashing at me like a revelation of God in a bucket of ice water.

They came in here
yesterday
.

In a blip that lasted just three seconds on my radar.

But it was really twenty-four hours and some change.

I crashed and burned . . .
and they just left me in that bedroom
. Which means I’m alive because Hartman wants it that way. It has to be Hartman who did this. He’s the only one crazy enough. Just like the store in Austin, killing all those people, making a riot happen. A monster in broad daylight. He sent a message again, and it’s simplicity itself: I’m goddamn dead already and I might as well cut my own throat.

I have to try something,
anything
.

I have to . . .

The cell in my pocket rings.

The smell of blood crawls up my nose, sharp and wet and stinging, like salt water dripping from a rusty razor. I never got used to that. I always avoided it.

But some things are inevitable.

•  •  •

“H
ello, Mister Coffin
.”

I expected to hear the voice of the man who destroyed my life.

It’s not David Hartman.

It’s her.

Jenison.

“
Did you sleep well, Mister Coffin
?”

Now that I hear the voice, I can smell her in this room.

She was here and she let me live.

“
Hello? Are you there, Mister Coffin?
”

“Yeah.”

“
I asked you a question. Did you sleep well?
”

“Okay, I guess. It’s the waking-up part that’s been hard. But you know that already.”

“
You did seem quite dead to the world last night.
”

“No pun intended?”

“
Obviously.
”

“What the hell do you people want?”

“
Why don’t we talk in person?
”

I hear the killer in her voice. That terrible need to be hands-on with her work.

I tell her I’ll meet her in the lobby.

And she says:

“
Excellent, Mister Coffin. The drinks are on me.
”

•  •  •

I
leave on the
ThunderCats
sweatshirt, throw on the threadbare corduroy jacket from Goodwill, the one from the long zip-up bag that had our guns in it. They took the guns, left the clothes. Left the bag of Fritos, too. Mighty white of them.

I get the Colt Python I stashed under the sink in the bathroom. They couldn’t have been in much of a hurry to get done with business. They had all the time in the world. That’s why the homies in here got it so bad. And yet they left me twenty grand and a loaded pistol. Maybe they just didn’t think about it. Had me cold, after all. Has to be a camera in here, keeping an eye on me.
That’s how she knew right when to call. How much else do they know? What kind of game is this?