Internecine (5 page)

“She’s dead now,” he said. “For sure.” He moved closer, gun in hand, hands on knees, leaning down to inspect me. “She hit you in the head?”

I nodded. “Why?”

“Because your forehead is the color of a pluot.”

“A what?”

“Pluot. You know—plum and apricot, a hybrid. Fruit. Look it up.”

No, I didn’t know that.

“You got anything to drink around here? I’m as dry as sand. Sure you do.” He rummaged around inside my refrigerator (a KitchenAid double-wide in stainless steel that cost over four thousand bucks, new, and was mostly for show) until he found a bottle of sparkling apple juice. “You?”

“No, I’m good,” I said, as though deferring another drink at a cocktail reception. Glib. Terrific. I needed to purchase a spare hour somewhere just to wrap my brain around the concept of this ninja-looking sonofabitch now standing in my very own living room, and until I found my voice I was going to sound like a complete tool.

He leaned against the counter. “Suppose I cut you loose? You going to cause any trouble, you think?”

He was making it my responsibility, and the implied threat was already lying dead on the floor. Smart.

“I really have to go to the bathroom.”

“Don’t want to leak all over on your Danish cowhide? The reason I ask is because I have to decide what to do with you, and we have to reach an accord rather quickly, and—what’s your name?”

“Conrad.”

“And, Conrad, time is of the essence, and I need you to promise me that you don’t have a hogleg hidden in the bathroom, or something equally laughable. I’ll know if you lie, and I’m faster than you, and a better shot, too.” A lockback knife appeared in his grasp as magically as the gun had. He snicked it open by thumb, without looking. It was narrow and mean, probably of German manufacture, with a clip-point blade.

“Try not to cut the chair.” My follicles, from the back of my head to the cleft of my ass, were standing sharply to attention. Cold, sickly sweat had popped from my pores. I couldn’t play cool, even faking it. My whole body would betray me, and I knew this man would see it, smell it, just
know
.

“Don’t worry about the chair.”

I saw him use a fingertip as a depth guide and he slit the tape around my wrists, again without really looking. I peeled loose and he handed me the knife.

“Well, go ahead, Conrad.”

He had given me the knife and I clumsily freed my neck, then legs. It was a test, to establish fake trust. Dammit, that was one of
my
tricks.

“Does this have something to do with Ripkin? With Jenks? With the election?” I’m afraid I babbled.

“Don’t know any of them,” my intruder replied.

I closed the blade and handed the knife back to him, leery, as though feeding a treat to a surly alligator.

“Go. You’ve got two minutes.”

I always try to default to levity. “Sure, I can have a nervous breakdown in two minutes.”

“I mean it. Hurry.” He was really loving that apple juice.

I walked like a zombie to the bathroom on numb, unresponsive legs. Closed the door. Didn’t lock it. Made the mistake of staring at myself in the mirror. A huge crimson-violet cloudbank of bruise joined
my eyebrows and the moisture on my upper lip was not perspiration, but thin drops of blood. My lying bladder mustered a dribble that would barely top off a shot glass. I flushed anyway. Rinsed my face. It hurt to touch my head. I leaned on the counter and tried to remember how to breathe. Hurry.

When I came out, the intruder was still in the same spot.

“Good,” he said. “Now, Conrad, listen carefully because I don’t have the time to explain things in detail or repeat myself. If you came out of that bathroom with anything in your pants besides your dick, tell me now.”

“I’m not armed,” I said. He patted me down regardless.

“Okay. Do you have any guns in the house I should know about?”

“Just what’s in that thing.” I indicated the Halliburton. “Can I please get some water?”

I saw his eyes and mouth compose a frown, through the holes in his mask. “Fuck, Conrad, it’s
your
house; you don’t have to ask. I thought you said you didn’t need a beverage. And don’t play that phony courtesy shit just because I have a gun. That gets on my nerves.”

I poured and drained a crystal tumbler of seltzer, imagining I could feel his gaze boring into my shoulder blades, or maybe the horripilation of a gunsight, trained there. But when I turned around, he wasn’t even facing me.

“Conrad,”
he said peevishly. “You’re not my fucking
hostage,
okay? I ran a fast meditation unit while you were in the can and I’ve decided I can’t neutralize you the way I did the kindergartener over there. You have inadvertently stuck your weenie into a fan, but you may also have saved my life tonight. For that, I have to break tradition and discuss a couple of things with you. Hot button items. Like these fellows Jenks and Ripkin—who they might be, I mean beneath and behind all the schmooze and persona, and how that involves you, because according to the crap in the briefcase you’re part of their mix, in some mysterious switchback way. But in order to explore this like civilized human beings, we have to leave, like, five minutes ago. Unless you want to wait around for Celeste’s pals, who will probably be storming your lobby by the time the news comes on.”

It was three minutes till 11
P.M.

“You can stay here and try your luck with the, ahem, authorities, if you want. But I guarantee you won’t see any real police for days, during which time you’ll be detained by grim people who aren’t very giving. Like her.”

“She gave me a hell of a headache,” I said.

He snorted. “Hmm. I guess she did. So let’s you and me make like a tree and get the flock outta here. We have to dispose of
that.
”

He meant the briefcase, not the corpse.

And he had not mentioned Alica Brandenberg at all, not once.

“Expect not to come back here for a while. Take some aspirin and we go.”

I gulped some leftover Vicodin and killed another whole glass of bubble water. So much for my Katy fantasy. A brief vision of her, at home and safely asleep (alone, I hoped), made my sinuses throb. When I looked back, the gun was gone, the knife was gone, and my living visitor was holding the Halliburton.

“Shall we? After you.”

He had also removed his stocking mask. It was the guy whose photo was laminated onto the FBI card.

There was a helicopter idly buzzing the building when we exited through the stairwell fire doors. It made me feel like a fugitive, already. My keeper pointed at a Pontiac Sebring parked in the visitor lot and keyed the doors open with a fob remote.

I could run away, sure, but the point of that would be . . . what? I’d spend the rest of my life (however short) wondering what the bejeezus had just happened to me. I mean, what would
you
do?

“What do I call you?” I said.

“You can call me Dandine,” he said, as though he’d thought the name up on the fly.

“Well, Mr. Dandine—please tell me what the hell is going on?”

“In a minute.” He shrugged into a black jacket and fired up the car, identical to my airport rental, except this one was not a convertible but a black sedan, with a sunroof. “First, we get clear of the hot zone. Second, we lose that fucking case.”

That seemed wrong to me. The mystery, the questions, were all tied
up in the briefcase. To get rid of it seemed somehow counterproductive.

Dandine sensed this, apparently. “Here’s what you failed to know about that case. The center button, the one above the handle? It’s a microcamera about the size of a penny, with a 54-millimeter lens and a DC power supply that activates when you open the lid. The second you opened that thing, they had your face. How long after that did your killer girlfriend show up?”

“About an hour?” I wasn’t sure. “She said her name was Celeste.”

“Whatever.” He tooled us onto the eastbound 10 freeway. “Looks like one of Varga’s freelancers, which might explain a lot.”

That didn’t track for me, but I behaved as expected. Waited for more.

“Interesting thing about that model,” he said, meaning the briefcase. “The inside is a polymer sleeve designed to present a bogus profile to X-ray. Instead of guns and ammo, the scope sees a digitized representation of papers and folders as the contents of the case. That’s handy until some nosy baggage rat opens the case, but sometimes, it’s handy enough to get you to the next step.”

“Does it blow up, too?” The damned thing was sitting on the seat right behind us.

“Nah. Don’t see those much, anymore. Drug runners still use ’em.”

“Are you a real FBI agent?”

He smiled. “No. But that ID is the tits, ain’t it?”

Dandine looked vaguely European to me, maybe it was his hairline, or chin, or nose, or something. He had green eyes but wore contact lenses that might have been tinted. Later, I saw him use eyedrops. Clean shaven, maybe eighteen hours from the razor. Conventionally handsome, yet almost nondescript. That’s hard to get across, that sense that he could make you remember him, or make you forget him; always by his choice. It was mostly in the eyes. Even now I can’t summon a clear mental picture of him, or tell you which movie actor he most looked like.

“I’ve got an idea, Conrad, “ he said. He was using that negotiator’s tactic of constantly repeating my name for emphasis. “You tell me what you think is going on, and I’ll butt in as needed. That’ll be more
fun than us playing the license plate game while we’re on the road, yeah?”

Around us, the fast-motion traffic of the 10-East zoomed. We passed some of them; some of them passed us; everybody changed lanes at high speed with impunity. Normal people on normal missions. Night shifters, speeding toward clandestine hotel affairs, or a late beer and indifferent sex at home. People on first dates. People on last dates, in separate cars. Road diggers headed to and from hole-patching work. Stoned kids in muscle cars. Rice rockets that were all bass hip-hop and no horse power. Mexicans in pickup trucks that looked like they had driven through Armageddon en route to some leaf-blowing or janitorial gig. Tharn soccer moms up too late, driving too slow in SUVs too large, wandering lane-to-lane and pissing off everyone as they tried to manipulate mobile devices, texting, Tweeting, eyes on screens instead of traffic. Limos and taxis from the airport, inbound. We were inarguably the weirdest story on the road that night, I believe.

“All right,” I said. “I got off my plane and found the key in my rental. I sat on it for a couple of days. What can I say? My curiosity got the best of me.”

“Possibly fucked up the remainder of your life,” Dandine said, not taking his gaze from the road . . . but also reminding me of my probationary status.

“I didn’t open it until I was at home. It looked to me like . . . well, you know, an assassin’s toolbox. With the lady in the envelope as a target.”

Dandine chewed the inside of his cheek and nodded. Then irritation creased his face. “Fucking Zetts,” he said.

He caught me looking.

“Oh, nothing. Just that some guy I trust, who possibly got bought out from under me, but more likely, fucked up a simple drop. Apparently he can’t perceive the difference between a blue convertible and a black car with a sunroof.” He thought about it for two seconds more. “Nah. He wasn’t in on it.” He glanced to meet me eye to eye. “You ever use marijuana in a recreational capacity, Conrad?”

I shook my head no.

“Don’t start,” he said.

I began to form a fuzzy picture of Zetts. “So this guy, Zetts, put the key in the car?” I asked.

“Yeah. Not time to kill the messenger, at least not yet. Knowing Zetts, I’d bet that he’s not what you and I would call a ‘complicitor.’ Still, it was sloppy. Might have been more fun if you’d just turned the key in at lost and found, but then your life would still be full of badges right now, and that’s no place anyone wants to be. If you’d’ve played it safe and tossed the key, you would be at home, asleep in your secure building under your nice Milford comforter, or maybe making some fashion model or wannabe actress swallow your DNA. Am I boring you, Conrad?”

“No way.” I felt fatigued, but wide awake.

“What do you do?” he said. “This being Hollywood and all, I guess I should ask what you
really
do. You look like a studio executive to me. A Suit.”

“I work for an ad agency.”

“That’s kind of like working in the movies, now isn’t it? Your own company? If not, I’ll bet you’re pretty far up the ladder. Benefits, per diem for travel, perks, deductions, all that?”

“I’m a vice president.”

That seemed to disappoint him, as though it made me predictable. I hate people who judge by first impressions. Who judge
me,
before I get a chance to charm them.

“A lot of cross-country jumping? Shit, man, you could be a courier and not even know it.”

“No. I pack my own bags, like they say at the airport.”

“Squeaky-straight, am I right? You ever cheat on your taxes, Conrad? You know—amp up those business dinners, run double receipts, pad the expense account? You ever lie to a woman to get her heels-up in the sack? Ever take stuff without paying for it? Oh, wait—guess we’ve answered that one, already.”