Internecine (6 page)

I tried to cross my legs in the narrow footwell. I worried my hands, having nothing to do with them, playing thumbeldy-peg, interlacing my fingers compulsively, broadcasting my nervousness.

“The hit-kit you intercepted was for me,” he said. “You opened it. They saw your face, not mine, and sent little Celeste to erase the op.”

“Just like that?” I said. “See a face, shoot a guy?”

“Exactly like that. Tainted ops are immediately expunged. Better to start over from
GO.
Understand?”

It was similar to the mercenary tactics commonly used in advertising, politics, and food processing: the slightest pollutant could queer the whole pitch. One botulin-infected can of tuna fish could deep-six your entire commercial line, leading to a costly recall and an even more costly promotional flourish to prove how socially responsible you are; how much you care for your customer. Better to just flush everything and resurrect under a new label. Consumers did not like being dismissed as collateral damage.

“I think I get it,” I said. “They have to act fast and decisively.”

“This is the twenty-first century—you can’t just hang up on a wrong number anymore and expect to skate.”

“Yeah, but wrong numbers don’t usually overreact and murder you.”

“These numbers do.”

“Then they need to work on their people skills,” I groused. “If a deal goes south in my business, everybody in the office knows who dropped the ball.”

The man who called himself Dandine winced . . . maybe at my use of two vile clichés in one sentence. “Doesn’t work that way,” he said. “Janitorial is immediately vetted to subcontractors.”

And I was immediately in danger of drowning in a whirl pool of argot. If I didn’t learn to speak this new language in a big hurry, I was going to flail-and-fail—a bit of in-speak I learned from Burt Kroeger. Better to let Mr. Dandine continue as interpreter.

This man rarely said anything he did not think over first.

“I assumed the case would have a tracking device on it, which is why we’re getting rid of it,” Dandine continued. “Sort of LoJack, with basically the same recovery window. That’s how your dream date found you. She came in like a pro but went out like a piker.”

“I don’t follow.”
(Always encourage clarification.)

“She came to you dolled up, with no weapons. Let your glands unlock the door for you. She probably could have eliminated you with her bare hands. You had the case, so she thought you were me. She’s never seen me, never seen you, so the fake ID didn’t matter. Am I going too fast for you?”

“I’m with you so far.”

“I mean, the car. Am I driving too fast? You seem touchy.”

My teeth were locked from grinding. “Well, excuse the piss out of me.”

He waved a hand. “Save it. You’re going to complain that you fell into a rabbit hole and you don’t know what the fuck is going on, that you’re an accessory to a murder and you’ve just been abducted, and you’re scared. I’ll give you the last one. But for the rest, you wouldn’t have seen that lady come apart if you had minded your own goddamn business. And you came with me of your own free will. So calm down. You want to stop for some herbal chai, or something?”

“No.” Now my bladder was about to explode, from all the seltzer.

“Okay, to continue. Our darling—what’d she say was her name?”

“Celeste.”

“Doesn’t matter; probably a pseudo. She got cocky and decided to terminate you with one of the guns from the hit-kit. But they were booby-trapped with firebacks.”

“You mean backfires?”

“No. Firebacks: burn charges designed to cripple and blind the shooter, not the shootee.”

“Intended to hurt . . . you?”

“Mm-hm. Except I would have stripped the rigs and checked them, and found out when I eyeballed the ammo. Hence, our Celeste was an amateur, probably a freelancer.”

“From someone named Varga. A subcontractor.”

“Glad to see you’re paying attention. Yep, I owe Mr. Varga a visit, and it might be ugly. But Celeste’s employers either didn’t know about the firebacks or neglected to tell her. Either way, that’s uglier. I’m beginning to think she was hired by Alicia Brandenberg, or possibly her creatures, to roadblock me. Which throws an uncomplimentary light on my contractors.”

There were too many balls to juggle. “The people who hired you to . . . er, kill Alicia Brandenberg?”

“Never use terms like that,” he said. “Too definitive. Could give people the wrong idea.”

“About what? Assassination by contract?”

“One of my friends used to call it ‘maximal demotion.’ It all means the same thing—to purge.”

It was no worse than advertising argot, I thought. Vague terms designed to cloak and mislead. Potent adjectives, wrongly directed. The art of saying one thing and meaning another. Politician speak.

“Are you some kind of black ops guy?” I said.

“You seem to be a fairly literate man, considering your profession,” Dandine said. “Right now you’re thinking of terrorism, counterassassination, military coups, dirty tricks, Watergate, spy-spy, murky secret organizations, that sort of thing, am I right?”

“Well . . .” I fumbled. “What would
you
think?”

“It’d only be funny if you were wrong,” he said. “You’re in the ballpark. So I’ll skip the smoke screen. You know why? Because it might be fun trying to explain it to you. There’s a reason subterraneans call people like you the walking dead. You live blissfully unaware lives in an overworld that pays taxes. Sometimes you are collateral damage, and that almost
never
matters, in the scheme of the real world. But we’ll save that for later.”

“Any special reason?”

We had sailed north from the freeway and were now in the center of Hollywood. Dandine wheeled the car into a parking slot at a 24-hour drugstore.

“Because, Conrad my lad, we have arrived.”

It was absurdly like a stilted, chaperoned date. I waited in the car while Dandine picked up decongestants from the drugstore. He said his allergies were bugging him. I correctly interpreted this as another test of my trustworthiness. As if I had anywhere to flee. As if I had more pressing business to conduct.

“If you do get out of the car,” he said, “do not, I repeat, do
not
phone anyone.
Anyone.
They had a pull sheet on everybody you know or work with, as soon as they had your face on camera. That’s important. I don’t care how remote you think they are, or how much they love you. No calls, no contact with anyone. Agreed?”

I shrugged helplessly and concentrated on not pissing my pants.

Pull sheet?
I confess I instantly wanted to know: (1) what was on
mine, (2) what was on everyone else’s, and (3) how I could access it. What Dandine did not know, and what I was thinking about now, was that there was literally nobody I cared to SOS or shoot an emergency holler toward. Not Burt Kroeger, my boss, therefore an assumed ally. Not my ex-wife. Certainly not Katy or any other lady friend. Not often do I admit to myself that the way I really work is by getting impatient once people have fulfilled the uses I require of them. A shrink would call it cold, emotionally isolationist.

But I couldn’t picture Dandine having Friday night two-for-one drinks with a gang of
his
“co-workers,” either. Maybe if I saw a gang of the type of pull sheets Dandine had referenced, I might know who to trust.

He returned and dumped a plastic bag in the seat. “Come on.” He lifted the Halliburton out of the rear.

“Where?”

He pointed next door, across a parking lot. “Bus station.”

“Why?”

He looked me up and down and cracked another of his almost-grins. “Because they have a men’s room there, Conrad.”

Checkmate,
I thought, feeling idiotic.

“You’re asking yourself,
why is this guy letting me roll with him,
am I right?” said Dandine. “I need to talk to you. About politics. I don’t keep up with elections and candidates; it means almost nothing to me. Here.”

He pressed some cash into my hand. “What’s this for?”

“Go buy a one-way bus ticket to Denver.”

“Am I riding the bus?”

“No.”

“Can I hit the restroom first?”

“Make it fast.” He was already scoping out the losers hanging around the vending machines, and the transients and bummers-of-change in the parking lot. He obviously knew what he was looking for.

“Go ahead,” he told me. “Meet me back here in five.”

I’d never spent time in jail, but the bathroom I located stank the way I always imagined a cell would. Urine, diseased shit, Lysol, ammonia, mildew, and more candidates for Dandine’s review, though these were drugged out or unconscious. The sink mirrors were those metallic
plates that are supposedly unbreakable. I saw sprawled feet in a locked coin stall, and heard snoring. There was water—well, moisture—all over the black-and-white tiled floor. Dried blood, or barbecue sauce, on one of the sinks.

God, I just said
I’ve never spent time in jail.
Just wait—that part gets better in a bit.

When I emerged, I queued up and bought a ticket. By then, Dandine had found what he was looking for—a man with that “help a homeless veteran” look. He was about fifty, sandy gray hair, with an occluded eye. Threadbare jeans, fatigue jacket, sneakers bound up with packing tape. He was holding the Halliburton.

Dandine was loitering near the storage lockers, leafing through a copy of
USA Today.
“Now,” he said, “Go give that man your ticket and we’re outta here.”

The man sized me up as I approached, maybe wondering if he should ask for a few loose bucks. But he took the ticket as though expecting it and muttered, “Semper Fi.”

Dandine had already walked out of the terminal. I had to hustle to catch up to him. “What the hell?” I said. “That guy won’t even get on the bus—he’ll try to trade the ticket back for cash.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Dandine. “He gets on or he doesn’t—doesn’t matter. He rides to Denver or finds a hidey-hole and tries to jimmy the case—doesn’t matter. I basted the locks so he’ll find it a mite difficult without tools.”

“ ‘Basted?’ ”

“Yeah, you know.” He showed me one of those blister-cards that pack four tiny tubes of Super Glue. One was missing. “These are great. Pop the cap, one shot, throw away.”

“Why?”

“He’s a random factor. Control freaks hate random factors. If anyone is following the case, he’ll toss ’em a few curves. Can you imagine how comic it would be if a black SUV pulled up and a bunch of secret agents jumped out, yelling
drop that case
?”

It was no longer our problem, but I did not feel
done
here, and Dandine smelled it.

“If you’re waiting for a shoot-out or an elaborate strategy to outfox
the people after the briefcase, forget it,” he said. “It rarely works that way in the real world.”

The man probably wasn’t even a bona fide soldier, ex-or not. Nobody was who they appeared to be. He’d stand up to the best interrogation because he really, truly didn’t know a damned thing. Buying the ticket was itself pretty smart. Pursuers, enemies, would waste more time trying to figure out why, connecting all the wrong dots.

Real operatives in real crises don’t stand around waiting for ordinary citizens to appreciate how cool they are.

“I trashed the guns, swept the phone—it’s bug-free—and kept the envelopes. No tracking shit on the paper. So the leash is slipped and now it’s your turn to make yourself useful.”

“I really don’t know any more about these political guys than—

“Yeah, yeah.” He seemed annoyed, aware of my obvious smoke screen. “Consider yourself my fucking captive if you want. You could have ended this evening strewn all over your living room. Or you could shut the hell up and let me ask my questions, and maybe you might learn something.”

I had to remind myself that this man was armed all the time.

His personality seemed to speed-shift again, so it was a surprise when he asked, “You hungry?”

He was batting my brain around like a paddleball. The bus station lockers brought memories that made my gut lunge. The tape on the Nam guy’s shoes reminded me of the duct tape with which Celeste had trapped me. The newspaper made me think of the big lie, the stage role we were both performing. Ordinary objects, unnerving new associations.

“Don’t glaze out on me, Conrad,” he said. “I need to ask you some questions about those politician buddies of yours, strictly for my own intel. If I’m going to quiz you, such good pals that we are, I should also offer you some disposable information in return that might make you see things differently. You know—value received. It’s an ad concept.”

The way I was looking around, any cop would ask to scrutinize my pupils.

“Conrad, look,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I am going to
use
you. Now, once again: Are you hungry?”