Internecine (29 page)

None of this dunning personal history was spelled out in exact language on paper. But if somebody had access to my hidden dossier, they might be able to draw conclusions about my character from it. Somebody like Dandine, for instance, might conclude that I would act a certain way when cornered, either personally or professionally.

Nobody had had enough downtime for that sort of pat solution to apply, though. It was tempting but highly unlikely.

The cork-popper was sticking out of the base of Marion’s neck, little fizzy red bubbles accreting around the penetration point. He was deader than God. Ditto his teammate, in the outside room. Dandine had put them down without a noise; the whole bellboy ruse was probably just window dressing. Or maybe he needed a way to carry the outfit up here for me, while keeping his gun hand free. My waistline battled the trousers that Dandine had just shucked. We now shared the suite with four dead bodies, one of which we would shortly be tossing out the window from above the twentieth floor.

“Move it, lardass,” Dandine said, after a thorough and professional once-over of the premises. “Jeezum-pete; I can’t leave you alone for a fucking
minute.
”

He ignored the corpses. I couldn’t
not
notice them. Sixty seconds ago, three of them had been breathing. He registered my expression, or perhaps, my hesitation.

“Don’t go all moral on me,” he warned.

I couldn’t help blurting it out: “Have you seen my file? The secret one? The one Zetts knows how to access?”

“Conrad, I haven’t had time for homework. Sure, I know about the system. If we’re alive half an hour from now, maybe you can walk me through the transgressions of your life, but
not now
.”

He withdrew the cork-popper from Marion’s spine. It made a little
fsssss
noise of retreat.

I got dressed in an ill-fitting hurry. Welcome to the service industry. Dandine peeled Marion, the neater of the two male kills. The clothes were twice his size but he somehow made the fit pass muster. Plenty of room to hide . . . guns and things. Like the weapon he’d used, an automatic with a lot of weight on the front end; boxy, vented and baffled. He broke it down and proceeded to stash parts in pockets.

I watched him snatch up Alicia’s pistol and check the magazine, then swap out the barrels. He had killed the bodyguards with the same make and caliber, only now it was Alicia’s gun that would tell the ballistic lie.

“Is Zetts okay?” I said.

“Later. Help me lift this sonovabitch.” Hoisting Marion’s clonelike partner, by the arms, to a standing position was obviously less easy than teaching a sofa to waltz. Together, we got him vertical—your standard crucifixion pose. He remained dead. Blood had trickled from both ears to ruin his shirt sufficiently against Dandine’s use. His eyes were open, sightless, their sclera crimsoned.

“Police are supposed to be coming,” I said, grunting. The dead guy tipped a gym scale at 300, easy, and most of it was above the waist at about 10 percent body fat.

“That’s not who we need to worry about.” Dandine bumped his chin against air, indicating we should haul our load toward the balcony—the one from which I thought I was going to swan-dive under duress, lifetimes earlier, this same day.

“They had me in another room . . .”

“I know. That made me almost too late.”

“We have to go back there.”

“For god’s sake, why? Haven’t you gone rogue enough? Making shit
up yourself and, uhh . . . !” He had to rehoist our silent partner. “. . .
floundering
around in the deep end of the pool, when you can’t fucking swim?”

I thought of all the movie trailers I’d ever seen:
He’s a cop on the edge who plays by his own rules. There’s just one problem . . .

Problem was, that guy wasn’t me. But some advertising dude had thought up all that hard sell, and it sure went down smooth as warm molasses. People never pay any real attention to that stuff, right?

“Because there’s a couple of cases up there. Next to the flat-screen TV. Those little file-boxes, on trolleys, with pull handles. Choral Anne described them to me. They’re full of Alicia’s blackmail tapes. We need that stuff.”

“More souvenirs?”

“She has a tape of me threatening her in the movie theatre. I’d say that’s important enough to go back for.”

Then I remembered I was helping Dandine drag a corpse toward an open balcony.

“Are you going to toss this guy out the window?” We were almost to the ledge. “You are
not
going to toss this guy out the window, right?”

“No.
We
are going to toss this guy out the window, et cetera. Unless you want to run around like a lunatic, setting fire to this entire floor as a diversion. If our adversaries were correct about the police, then those police should be looking for an inconvenient parking spot right about now. Our late friend here will delay them, cause a fair amount of disposable panic, and give us better odds on scooting out unnoticed. Here, pick up his feet.” He held back a beat. “Unless you can think of something better? In five seconds or less?”

We had the guy seesawed over the railing. Dandine held one leg; I held the other. We gave him to the air at the same time. Teamwork. I didn’t hear him hit (didn’t see it, either), but the bleats of distressed onlookers started to echo from below. Sure enough, the cops would find themselves swamped by the more immediate excitement. If we had been facing west instead of south, we would have noticed the beginning of a rather gorgeous sunset, courtesy of the distant rim of the ocean and the indigenous photochemical air. It was beginning to smell like rain once more.

I stuffed my jacket into a plastic trashcan liner, to carry it while I was dressed in the bellboy getup.

“Leave it,” said Dandine.

“Not with my wallet in it.” More importantly, and left unsaid, was
not with what’s left of my identity in it.

We still had to detour and grab Alicia’s tapes. I had no idea whether she had lied about recording me, too. It didn’t matter. It was enough that Dandine was willing to make the stop.

“Hurry up,” said Dandine. He handed me a can of oven cleaner, presumably smuggled in. Normal, commercial oven cleaner. My expression must have looked pretty dopey.

“Spray everything you touched,” he said. I noticed he was not wearing the latex gloves normal for his usual break-and-enter routine, which would have given him away to the bodyguards “And let’s make like a tree.”

Right at the door he held up the syringe so I could see it.

“Is this yours?”

The device
NORCO
had sneaked onto Zetts’s car was known in the trade as a “zombie.” It’s dead, then it comes to life again. More precisely, it functions on a preset time-delay so scans for active bugs will ignore it. Later, it winks on, and commences sending its signals, an hour, a day, a car chase later. That was what had doomed the Sisters, according to Dandine. The thing had not turned on until long after Zetts had activated his little bug-fryer.

When we exited the fire stairs I noticed Dandine holding his wounded arm stiffly, tolerating moderate pain. He indicated a beige Town Car in visitor parking, and we hit the trail again, with him at the wheel.

“Where’d you pick this up?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Not black?”

“I was in a hurry. Look.”

A pair of nondescript SUVs were nosing through the security gate at the far end of the lot, angling around the police cars. Their lack of detail virtually screamed
NORCO
. I had at least learned that much.

“Where’d you leave Zetts’s car?”

“Valet parking, Century Plaza Hotel, next door. Then I walked over.”

“Good man. Smart.” Dandine tried to maneuver his compromised arm around the shoulder strap, clearly miffed at being less than a hundred percent.

“Your arm bothering you?”

“Yes.” Tight, clipped, impatient. “Are you pissed off at me?”

He tried to get his cigarette case out while steering, and fumbled it onto the seat between us. I intercepted it, withdrew a smoke (there were three left), and lit it for him, taking a single puff that made me dizzy.

He took a long draw; I could see him trying to prioritize. Finally, he said, “Zetts is okay.”

“Should I send flowers?” I still felt awful about actually smacking him.

“I hate that,” said Dandine, turning east on Santa Monica Boulevard. The traffic in the gauntlet to Rodeo Drive, as usual, sucked. “The act of giving flowers—
here is a pretty thing
—has become totally disenfranchised from its roots.”

Was he making a pun?

“You’ve got a multimillion-dollar worldwide factory industry for perfect flowers,” he said. “Disconnected from the primal; reduced to a courting ritual. Someone with a handy reminder program tells their computer to phone a florist in commemoration of a calendar date everybody has forgotten. Flowers are dispatched in picture-perfect catalogue arrangements, like rubber doorstops from a mold. There—now, don’t you feel special? Multiply by everybody, and imagine all that rotting vegetable matter. They’re dying from the moment they’re plucked. A dozen little deaths, delivered to your door. A bouquet of twelve corpses, ebbing their last. They expire while you’re supposed to cheer up.”

“I always thought of it as a transfer of energy,” I said. “The flowers help heal you.”

He redirected his ire toward a pokey wandering over the lane stripe. “The pedal on the right makes the car
go,
you fucking knob! Look at
this idiot—blithering on his Bluetooth, going twenty miles an hour, telling some other idiot what street he’s almost at. Of
course
he’s got an American flag sticker; what a goddamned patriot.”

“You’re really pissed off, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m just dehydrated. Had to give myself a B-12 shot. I slugged down so much caffeine, it’s making me jittery. No food to soak it up. Got to find a market; get myself a PowerBar and some water. You hungry?”

“No, I ate at the hotel.” He
almost
snickered when I said that.

Then he told me the story about how he had instructed Zetts to “permit” me to escape, and I got angrier than I thought Dandine already was.

“When you hit him, he was faking it,” Dandine said.

“I
saw
him hit his head on the counter!”

“He wasn’t unconscious. He phoned me as soon as you left.”

I spluttered. “For fuck’s sake . . .
why?!
”

“We had to see what you’d do.”

My hands grasped air, fidgeting, trying to strangle some invisible man. When little bubbles crawl up the side of the pot, a hard boil is imminent.

“Connie, everybody in this scenario could be a ringer. The best ringers are seeming victims.”

“I’m not a fucking ringer; I don’t even know what the fuck is going on!” I didn’t have to yell but I yelled anyway.

“A ringer, in the parlance,” said Dandine, “would have alerted
NORCO
directly. Or broken cover to impart vital intel. You were let go on purpose to test this possibility, however remote. I’m sorry if you’re ruffled, but every contingency has to be checked out, and you already know why.”

“So you’re faking it, at Collier’s? Zetts is faking it? All to find out if
I’m
faking it? Jesus!”

“Calm down.”

“You fucking calm down! Does anything rattle you?
Anything?!
”

“Getting shot in the arm annoys me. For real. Now calm down or I’m going to have to slap you, like in the movies, where the guy who gets slapped goes,
thanks, I needed that
.”

“You said you didn’t go to the movies, goddammit!”

“You know what I mean, though, right? So take a deep breath or something, will you?”

I wanted a bump of cocaine or a stiff drink, the way flustered people always do in the movies.
Glug glug, ahh, that’s all better
.

“This was a
test?
The Sisters are dead!”

“See? You don’t know that for sure. You only know that because I told you. The dead come back to life all the time. More often than on TV shows. Ordinary people just never see what’s going on. Here we go.”

He pit-stopped at a 7-Eleven to stock up on carbs, and handed me one of those explosively named energy drinks—the kind to which you resort when Red Bull doesn’t cut it anymore. Remind me sometime to tell you the story of how Kroeger helped Red Bull destroy a competitor called Blue Thunder, with my help.

He downed a protein bar in two bites, swallowed painkillers at the same time, and washed it down with some fizzy green mega-jolt.

“What’s on those tapes?” he said. “The ones you thought were so important to stuff in your pockets at the hotel?”

“I told you.”

“No—you took microcassettes
and
a bunch of MiniDVs. So what’s on the video?”

“Alicia Brandenberg, naked,” I said. “So I’ve heard.”

We had been in and out in fewer than fifteen seconds, Dandine spraying oven cleaner everywhere, me grabbing double handfuls from plastic cases, cryptically labeled. Whatever I could fit in my pockets, since there had been no time to browse. The dictation recorder in her own handbag had been the obvious place to find my own audio.