Black Rust (27 page)

Everything important to me was taken care of.  All I needed to do was leave.  I spun around in Workman’s chair, just for the hell of it, and to get a quick look down the long driveway.  It was still empty, but the sky behind was glowing orange and the clouds smeared across the horizon were turning red.

Had the whole day already passed?

I realized, circumstances and time had given me the opportunity for one more quick thing.

I spun again in Workman’s chair to face his desk.  I tore a piece of paper off a tablet, rifled through a few drawers to find a pen, and I started writing.

“What are you doing?” Lutz asked.

“Insurance,” I told him.

I slid the piece of paper across the desk to Sienna.  “Take it.”

She hesitated, glanced at Lutz, and then leaned forward to pick it up.  “What is it?”

“The combination to a safe in my house.”

“Why?” she asked.

Lutz opened his mouth to speak—in fact, got most of a syllable out—before I shushed him back to silence.  I’d come to a conclusion about what to do with him.  “You’re a liar without an ounce of loyalty to anyone or anything.”

Lutz shook his head but didn’t seem at all displeased.

“I’ve thought a lot about killing you this afternoon.  I don’t know what part you had in making this situation go to hell, but I’m sure it was significant.  Nevertheless, it’s your lucky day.”

“Yeah,” Lutz told me sarcastically.  “Sounds like it.” 

“Don’t screw me again,” I told him, looking into his eyes to let him know I was serious.

Lutz shook his head.  “I was—”

“I don’t want to hear your voice again unless I ask for an answer.”

Lutz slouched in his chair, unconcerned.

To Sienna, I said, “I’m a fugitive now.  I’ll have to cross the border, maybe go to one of the failed states where the law can’t reach me.  I’m not sure where, but I am certain going back to Houston will be a mistake.”

I pointed at the piece of paper in her hand.  “I would like to ask of you a service for which I’ll pay.”

“What’s that?” Sienna asked.

“There’s a safe in my house.  I need the money in that safe.”

Sienna looked at the computer.  She’d heard the deal I’d just made with Ricardo and Blix.

“In case they cheat me,” I told her.  “Lutz can take you to my house to get the money.  He’ll protect you in case any low-life Regulators are there waiting for me.  No harm will come to you.  I guarantee it with Lutz’s life.”  I turned to Lutz.  “Do you believe I can provide that guarantee?”

He nodded.  He knew about
Oxido Negro
.  He knew about
Oscuridad
, my nicknames from south of the border.  He knew what I could do to him.

Sienna took a moment to consider the situation as her eyes drifted down to look at her hands.  “How much money?”

“Enough to help you start a new life,” I told her.

“I don’t understand.”  She looked up at me.  “It’s your money.”

“The order of the day seems to be the three-way split,” I told her.  “One third for dipshit, here.  One third for you.  A third for me.  You hold onto mine, and I’ll contact you eventually and let you know what to do with it.” 

“And for that I get a third of your money?” she asked, shaking her head.  She didn’t believe.

“Right now the money is worthless to me,” I said.  “I’ll never be able to get it.  I’m paying you because I don’t want to have to go back to Houston.” 

I turned to glare at Lutz.  “If I don’t give him something, he won’t be able to keep himself from trying to steal some of yours or mine.  I’m cutting him in so you won’t get hurt and so I won’t have to kill him.  Besides, he needs money to get himself set up wherever he runs to after a warrant comes down for his arrest.  Are you still planning to tell the truth about what happened?”

Sienna was reluctant to answer.

“It’s okay,” I told her.  “It doesn’t matter, not to me.  I was doomed from the moment Workman called in the tip, I just didn’t know it until earlier this afternoon.  Lutz is slow.  He’ll figure that out, too.  It doesn’t matter what you tell the police when they ask.  Even if Lutz and I get off on killing all those d-gens, consequences will come for killing Workman and the others.  The police will investigate.  Some of the blame will land on Lutz even though he didn’t pull a trigger.  He’ll need to get out of town.”

“This needs to be done quickly, then?” she asked.

“As soon as you leave here,” I told her.  “Go straight to my place.”  I turned to Lutz.  “After that, you should leave town, immediately.  Take your cash and go.”  I figured I’d better dumb it down for him.  “Do you understand what’s going to happen?  Do you understand what I’m asking you to do?  Do you understand I’m buying you a chance at a new life in Canada?  Don’t go down to Mexico, okay?  You won’t last a month down there.”

Lutz nodded.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“I understand.”

“Thank you, Lutz.”  I turned back to Sienna.  “Thank you, too.”

I reached out a hand to Lutz.  “Give me that phone I bought for you.”  I gave Sienna the number from the phone.  “Any problems, call me.  You two should go.  Sienna, take your car.  Lutz, leave yours.  Don’t ever come back for it.”

He grimaced and said, “But it cost—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I told him.  “The only place that Mercedes will take you to is prison.  Besides, there’s enough money in your share from my safe to buy another wherever you’re going.  You’ll have plenty—” I stopped talking as a rumble grew suddenly out of nothingness, like an earthquake falling from the sky.

Shit!

I’d stayed too long.

Helicopters had come for me, and I had a lot of blood on my hands. 

Hate flamed in my eyes for Lutz because when I looked at him, I saw on his face that somehow, the helicopters were his doing. 

I did a quick guestimation.  With my military model hover bike’s speed, maneuverability, and range, I could get away.  I just needed to get to it.

I jumped to my feet, sending Workman’s chair bouncing off the glass wall behind me as I took up my pistols.

“Don’t.”  Lutz said it in a peculiar, satisfied way that caught my attention enough to spend a precious second of my escape window pausing to listen further.

“Four helicopters,” he spoke in a voice that wasn’t his.  It was confident.  The nasally quality was gone.  He didn’t sound like a dipshit.  “They’re all FBI.  One on each corner of the building.  At least two dozen shooters.  Former Special Ops, not like the yokels you killed today.  You won’t make it out alive.”

The scope of Lutz’s lies, the sudden change in his demeanor, the presence of the FBI, didn’t make sense to me, and I was usually one to put the pieces of a mystery together in a snap.

“Sit down,” Lutz told me.  “We need to talk.”

I didn’t sit.

“I’m FBI.”  He said it like I didn’t have two loaded pistols in my hands.

Snap!

All the pieces fell into place.  At least enough of them did.

Rotor wash was beating the enormous windows behind me.  Vibrations shook my feet through the floor.  Men were rappelling to the ground.  I was screwed.

Only one choice to make—die in a firefight, or hope I’d find a way to escape before Texas strapped me into an electric chair somewhere down the road.

Bad odds don’t bother me.  I can deal with those.  Zero odds, I hate. 

I hauled back, ready to pitch a pistol at Lutz’s face. 

Seeing my windup, he dodged to his right.

Guessing in which direction his reaction would take him, I threw the pistol where I figured my target would be.

The butt smashed his nose and blood splattered out.

“Damn!” Lutz shouted as my pistol clattered on the floor.  “The bet at the office was that you’d shoot me when it went down.  My money was on you being smart enough not to.”

“I still have one pistol,” I spat, “and the blood of a dozen on my hands.”  That last one wasn’t an exaggeration but an estimate.  “What difference does one more make?”

“If you believed that,” said Lutz, “I’d already be dead.  You haven’t killed me because you want me to tell you why I just admitted I was in the FBI despite the risk.  You want to know why I didn’t let you go outside to die.”

“I’ve been in worse situations.”  If there were indeed four helicopters—and it sounded like there could be—and they had just dropped former Special Ops shooters from the FBI outside the perimeter of the building, then my boast had probably been a lie.

Lutz smiled, his teeth red with blood from a smashed nose he seemed to have no regard for.  “Sit down.”

I didn’t.  I was angry.  “I’m thinking about shooting myself out of shame for getting duped for seven months by a dipshit-snitch bastard like you.”

“You got duped because I’m so goddamn good at what I do.”  Lutz didn’t sound like he was bragging, so much as reciting the score of a baseball game.  “I’m so good you can’t stop believing the lie I sold you even though I’m sitting right here telling you it was a lie, even though two dozen FBI shooters are outside, waiting for me to tell them to come or not.  I’ve got your life in my hands right now, not Lutz the dipshit Regulator you think you worked with, but Lutz the undercover FBI agent who’s a lot smarter than your arrogant dumb ass.”

“How will you do that?” I asked.  “Tell them to come or not.”

Lutz moved a hand to his shirt. 

I pointed my pistol at the mess of his nose, threatening him to be careful.  It was still a valid threat.  What difference would one more murder make?

“No danger.”  Slowly, he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a little mic taped to his chest and a dangling wire running down his belly.  “My boss is on the other end in one of the helicopters.”

I adjusted my aim at the microphone, which was conveniently placed over his heart. 

“Don’t,” said Lutz.

“Don’t?” I asked.

“I see the look in your eyes,” said Lutz.  “You’re planning.  You still think you have a hope to get out of this.  If the mic goes dead, they’ll come.  Why don’t you sit down?  We need to talk about a deal.”

I hate losing.  I hate it more than the idea of dying.  Backwards?  Maybe.  But losing is failure I have to live with, dying isn’t.

I sat down and laid my remaining pistol on the desk, trying to unravel the mistakes that had gotten me to where I was.  “What I don’t understand…” I shook my head as I thought about it.  “How long were you a Regulator in Houston hoping I’d show up?”

“You live in a self-centered little world, don’t you?” said Lutz.  “That’s probably why it was so easy to fool you.  You think you’re always right.  I only needed to fool you the first time.  Once you decided I was a dipshit, I could have worn my FBI badge on a chain around my neck, and you’d have never figured it out.”

“Try that on your next case,” I told him.  “I’m sure it’ll work out fine.”

Lutz looked over at Sienna.  “Why don’t you leave?  You don’t need to be here for this.”  Lutz glanced at me.  “She didn’t know anything.  She was just a bystander.”

Sienna got out of her chair.

“Raise your hands,” he said.  “Walk slow.  You don’t have anything to worry about.  You didn’t do anything wrong.” 

Sienna silently left Workman’s office.

“How’d you manage the hook up with me in Houston?” I asked.

“I was there working other cases,” said Lutz.  “I spotted you on that TV show, Bash.  A video drone picked up one of your kills.  I’m good with faces.  You looked familiar.  I ran you through our facial recognition software and voila, Christian Black.  My partner at the time had an accident—”

“I’ll bet.”

“—and I contacted you about the opening.”

“So this whole seven months, you’ve what, been waiting to catch me breaking the law in FBI jurisdiction so you could bust me?”

“No,” said Lutz.  “It was all about information, at first.  I was hoping you’d open up to your new dipshit buddy, maybe brag a little bit and tell him some things FBI Lutz could use against the cartels down in Mexico.  I’ll bet you’ve got a head full of nasty intel.  You were down there long enough to learn a lot.”

I shrugged.  No sense in revealing anything at this point.

“But we’re past that,” said Lutz. 

“Why?” I asked.

“We got tired of waiting.  We decided we wanted more.  Our requirements changed.  You weren’t forthcoming with any helpful nuggets.  Pick one.”

“So you set me up,” I guessed.  “You made all this happen.  This wasn’t a sequence of shitty coincidences.”  Then it hit me, the possibility I’d killed the wrong person.  “It wasn’t Workman who called in the tip.  It wasn’t Goose Ecken-fuckin-hausen.  It was you.”

“It wasn’t me.”  Lutz reached for the mic on his chest and yanked it off.  The wire came loose from whatever it was attached to.  He laid it on the desk.  “Just you and me now.”

“They won’t come in?” I asked.

“They know you’re being civil,” said Lutz.  “They’ll give us some room.”

“So it was you who called in the d-gen tip.  How?”

“It wasn’t me,” said Lutz, “but I did arrange it with a buddy.”

“So you set me up,” I accused.  “All the people I shot, they were your fault.”

“You shot ‘em,” said Lutz.  “Don’t pin it on me.  I just gave you the opportunity.”

“You egged me on.  You told me a hundred times to kill Sienna.  Why?”

“I needed you to be guilty of a capital crime, so I could get you to deal.”

“You’re a dirtier cop than you ever were a Regulator,” I told him.  “Is that how the FBI works?  Dirty agents breaking the law to do what?  Catch lawbreakers?”

“No,” said Lutz.  “The FBI isn’t dirty.  They’ve got their rules.  They play by them.  Me, not so much.”

“And they don’t care?”

“They turn a blind eye to results.”

“I’ll bet.”  I crossed my arms.  “Well, you got me.  I’ve committed at least a dozen capital crimes.”  I drilled Lutz with a hard look.  “But I killed the wrong people.”

“No you didn’t,” said Lutz, shaking his head.  “Workman was corrupt.  He was guilty of plenty.  And those trustees, you can bet they were all guilty of a lot more than they were in prison for.  No loss.  Not in my eyes.  Not in the FBI’s eyes, at least that’s true as long as you’re willing to deal.”

“Fine,” I told him.  “What’s the deal?”

“All this,” Lutz waved a hand at the helicopters.  “All those d-gens you killed.  Everybody you murdered today, it all goes away.  Hell, even that little cybercrime you just committed with Ricardo’s hacker bitch, that disappears, too.”

“And the price for all this exoneration?” I asked, flatly.

“Don’t say it like that,” said Lutz.  “This is what you’ve been working toward since last night.  This is fucking Christmas day for you.  You risked everything.  You paid big money.  You killed people so you could be an innocent man again, an upstanding citizen.  I’m making it happen.”

“What do you want?” It wasn’t a question I needed to ask.  Christian Black didn’t have anything that would interest the FBI except for one thing.

“The Camachos.”

There it was.

“If you wanted the Camachos dead,” I asked, “why not just hire me to kill them?  You apparently know who I was.  You apparently know what I did down in Mexico.”

“No,” said Lutz.  “We want you to lead us to them.  Nobody at the FBI would trust paying a thug like you.  We don’t buy contracts to have people killed.”

“You kill them yourselves,” I snapped.

“Don’t get self-righteous,” said Lutz.  “Don’t forget what your résumé looks like.”

I felt like I needed time to think about the deal on the table but I didn’t.  It was a one-option deal, take it or die.  Sure, I could sit behind Workman’s desk and fantasize about killing Lutz and shooting my way out, but that was just a delay.  My only way out was to take Lutz’s deal.

“This is your new start,” said Lutz, trying to convince me to say yes to what I was certain was a postponement of my death.  “This is the end of an episode in your shitty black life.  Take the deal.  Help us put two nasty psychopaths in a hole, and save some American lives.”

“Yes.”  I was seething over being conned by dipshit Lutz as I silently dredged my memory for clues about him from all those months that should have tipped me off about what and who he really was, but I was too angry for any to come to mind.  None that mattered, though.  I really had no choice.  “I’ll do it.”

Better to try tomorrow than die today.

The End