Mad Dogs (28 page)

Zane said: “Something special.”

Cari concentrated on chewing rice so words didn't fall out of her mouth.

Russell smiled at her: “So, turns out you do think about stuff like that.”

“Why wouldn't I?” said Cari. “I'm normal.”

The five of us tightened.

Russell leaned over the table towards Cari, ignored my glare to back off, to let her be, to let us eat at least one dinner in peace.

“So,” he told our witness, “since you're
normal
and an expert on what's going on in other people's houses… What goes on in the houses of people like us? People who aren't so young and aren't so old.”

Cari's emerald gaze hit everybody: “People like us don't get to live in houses.”

Metal forks and real knives clinked on our dinner plates.

Leftover chicken thighs smelled cold.

Later, the midnight hour when Hailey said: “All I need to be is lucky.”

All six of us, dressed for the road, stood staring at the phone on the rolltop desk.

“Worked before,” said Eric.

“But now Kyle Russo's had five days to clean up,” I said. “Cover up.”

Russell said: “Maybe he's figured that any move equals added exposure, that the safer risk is to let things ride, let nature take its course and let Blondie here and her bands of gunners do his work for him. After all, we're still just a bunch of maniacs.”

“Mad dogs,” corrected Eric.

“Yeah,” said Russell. “We kinda helped him out with that one.”

Hailey picked up the phone. Dialed a number gleaned from the brown matrice cards for Nurse Death as Russell ran to stand sentry at the dark living room's window.

Her call connected. She listened to the computer voice pronounce her options. Hailey pushed one button. Listened to another list. Pushed another button. Listened.

Zane whispered: “I hate having to wait while a machine tells me what I can do.”

Hailey pushed another button—or rather, a button required her to push it.

“Call trace or caller I.D. won't have kicked in yet,” said Eric.

Cari watched us.

Hailey punched in the ten digit number of Nurse Death's cell phone.

Eric said: “Now we're hot. If we're hot.”

The room heard me say: “I've never felt cool.”

Hailey said: “Push ZERO to speak to a human being. How appropriate.”

Our hearts beat out time we dared not waste.

“Yes, hi, I'm calling from my father's house out of town,” said Hailey, knowing that her “in town” was not Bombay or Belfast or wherever this American cell phone company had out-sourced its Accounts Processing factory. “I need to give you his address so you can send a duplicate bill here and I can pay on time.”

Hailey read off our dead man's address that would confirm the factory's caller I.D. “So that's two bills to send. Let's double check both addresses.”

Zane steadied a yellow pad for her to write while she held the phone.

“OK,” said Hailey, “like they say in the army—
tanks
.”

She hung up, told us: “The way she laughed, she's either a great actress or she doesn't know about any trace/trap.”

“We're still gone,” I said. “Machines are in charge, not her. They could have reported this location 70 seconds ago.”

“Or not,” said Hailey, as we hurried to the garage. “But just like I got trained, Nurse Death or
whoever
bought her mission cell phone in a company name to protect her identity—and now we've got that address.”

“Berlow Services, Inc.,” said Zane. “In Wheaton, Maryland.”

“Suburb of Washington,” I said as we left the study. “Near the Beltway.”

Russell ran from the front windows to join us. He snapped off lights as he came.

Cari argued: “So the nurse who you—the nurse you say killed the doctor, so what if she's got a cell phone registered to a company? Could be a dozen reasons.”

“Only one that counts,” I said, opening the door from the house to the garage. “And it says we've been going the right way.”

Zane said: “Now we'll know when we get there.”

“Lucky you,” said Russell, nudging Cari into the garage: “You're on our bus.”

All the lights glowed in that cavern. We closed the door to the house behind us. Stared at the dead man slumped over the oil case.

“I forgot his name,” said Hailey.

“I don't want to know his name,” said Russell.

“No,” said Zane. “We need to remember.”

“Harry Martin,” I said. “His name was Harry Martin.”

“
Tanks
,” Eric told the body.

Cari said: “He's starting to smell.”

Our stolen BMW sat jacked onto racks five feet above the cement floor. Its hood gaped open, its wheels were stacked in the corner, and its two front doors—with absent windows—leaned on the BMW's removed front seat. Stolen license plates from that stolen car were nailed on the wall amidst other crucified metal tags.

“Leave blanks for the cops to fill in,” I said. “But show them the easiest answer.”

Nowhere in the house would cops find ownership papers to the BMW awaiting its repairs. Nor would they find Harry Martin's driver's license, which nestled in Zane's wallet. That driver's license photo resembled Zane only because its image showed a man with white hair: looking old can be a sufficiently confirmed identity. Zane wore the same windbreaker as the old man in the driver's license photo. That jacket hid a full shoulder holster once held by the now-stored weapons' vest. And finally, Harry Martin's house held no papers proving he'd ever owned a 1959 Cadillac.

The Caddy glistened in the garage lights. Long and white. Shiny and bright. Swooping fins with red taillights. Four perfect black tires and a full gas tank. Our GODS and booty from the road filled the trunk.

Three people filled the back seat built for four: Zane sat beside the driver's side rear door, then next to him came witness Cari, feet still tethered, hands belted and cuffed in her lap. He told her:
“I'll be the one to get you.”
She probably knew that he was messing with her mind, forcing her to fight concentrating on him in order to be aware of danger from all of us
if
. She said nothing. Eric rode by the curbside rear door.

We didn't need to vote: I drove. Hailey sat beside me with Harry Martin's maps on her lap. On the roof above the windshield and the rear view mirror, she taped the white matrice card black lettered: KYLE RUSSO.

“In case we start to ramble,” she said.

Oh-oh
, I thought: Are you starting to lose it, too?

At the wall by the dead man, Russell flipped switches to kill the overhead lights, leaving only the Caddy's dome light to glow in the darkness. Russell climbed in the front seat and slammed the door shut with a clunk that dropped us and the white beast into total blackness.

Where we sat for one long, deep breath.

Russell said: “Put on your sunglasses.”

Cari's voice came from the backseat. “It's pitch dark in here, night out there!”

“So?” said Russell. “This time, we're going to start out cool.”

We heard Eric obey, clip onto his regular glasses the pair of sunglasses we'd picked for him from the shoebox.

Cari inhaled to protest Zane groping to fit her with eye-doctor oversized glasses, but she re-thought that and heeded the four magic words.

Hailey shifted beside me and didn't need to say she was ready.

“We're cool,” said Zane from the back seat.

Cyber-wraparounds slid over my eyes.

The key turned my fingers. The Caddy rumbled to life.

And I said: “Hit it.”

Russell thumbed the remote garage door opener at the windshield.

Clanking and groaning, a plane of blackness rose from in front of our growling Caddy's silver grill. Cold suburban night flowed into the garage with shimmers of streetlights and rainbow ghosts of neighbors' TVs and twinkling stars.

Russell said: “Now this is a road trip.”

41

Cari escaped in the morning mist of Day Six.

We took off our sunglasses after blasting out of the garage, followed the dead man's maps, found a state road with no roadblocks of state trooper cruisers and
steel boyz
in civilian coats they never zipped. We stayed off the Interstate with its traffic control eyes. Gassed up at a Mom & Pop store too deep into yesterday to have surveillance cameras. Followed the road into a wilderness called the Pine Barrens.

Night fog swirled in our headlights. The highway ran straight as a bullet. We saw no other cars. Nobody said much. Nobody dozed in the great white beast.

The
out there
we raced through faded from black to gray. Fog floated amidst scruffy pine and oak and black cherry trees crowding the highway. As we drove in that time zone between night and day, Zane said: “I need to… stop.”

“Again?” said Russell.

“Too much coffee.” Zane sighed. Confessed: “Too many miles.”

“That's OK,” said Hailey. “I've got to, too.”

The white Caddy muscled off the highway, onto a bumpy side road. Gravel crunched under our tires. We stopped. Dust settled outside our windows.

My shoulders burned, my spine felt compressed, my right foot ached. I groaned as I stepped from the car. The others climbed out to stretch. Zane helped cuffed & tethered Cari slide from the back seat, put her dead man's white sneakers on the gravel road.

Quiet covered everything like the pale fog hiding the treetops. Cool air felt good to inhale. Smelled of pine and wet bark.

“Can't see more than thirty, forty feet off into the woods,” said Russell.

“Don't worry,” said Zane. “Out here, we're alone.”

He told me: “I'll be right back.”

“I'm going with you,” said Hailey.

Cari said: “As long as she's going… I have to go, too. My guess is, this is the last best place you guys will let me do it.”

“I'll come,” I said.

Zane's poker face didn't change as he watched me shrug.

“Russell,” I said, “key's in the ignition.”

“Eric and I are cool,” said Russell. “But get it done and let's get out of here.”

We faced a forest jumbled on scrubby marshland.

Hailey said: “Which way?”

“Doesn't matter,” I said. “It's all trees until you hit a road.”

We left the gravel for packed wet earth, cushions of dead brown leaves and jarring rocks. Every footfall freed odors of mud and snapped branches. Tendrils of white mist snaked around our ankles. We could barely see through the bars of trees and floating gray walls you couldn't touch. The fog thickened as it rose from damp earth until the tops of 20-foot green pine or winter-naked trees disappeared in currents of pale. Somewhere above that sea of clouds had to be the sky and a rising sun.

Invisible fluttering wings rushed overhead.

I led the others on what looked like an easy path—with her feet tethered, Cari had a difficult journey over rough ground or through trees. We'd zig-zagged sixty steps beyond our last sight of the white Caddy when urgency tightened Zane's voice:

“Any time now.”

“Have to find the perfect—
there!
”

The forest widened to a glen the size of a tennis court. Lightning had split an oak so it lay like a propped Y. Each fork of the Y-ed tree made a ledge on which to sit.

“That's ours,” said Hailey.

Zane fidgeted as he and I watched her lead the tethered woman to the Y-ed tree.

Cari inched around to the far side of the split tree's furthest fork. Haley stood behind her and to her right in the gap of the ‘Y'. Their backs were to us.

Both women glared at us over their shoulders.

“Look away! Do your own thing!” ordered Hailey.

Zane and I turned to face a forest of quiet trees and drifting fog. I heard his zipper descend as—
why not
—I lowered mine. We heard the sound of Hailey and Cari dropping their slacks, sitting on the tree forks.

Liquid trickled onto the forest floor.

“
Ahh
,” sighed Zane. I joined him as he said: “When you got to, you got to.”

Behind us, Hailey knew that Cari'd finished that business quickly, was taking her time standing up from bent-over-sitting-on-the-tree-branch as Hailey herself filled the morning with a long stream of sound. Finally finished, Hailey bent down like Cari had to—obviously—pull up her clothing, stood and fastened her—
whirling blur!

Cari—
Hands free! Feet free!
—right palm on the tree as she vaulted over it with a 180° turn that spun her to face Hailey. Cari used the torque of her vault to pivot on her left foot, spin another circle that closed the gap between her and the astonished Black woman, a spin that whipped Cari's right leg through a high crescent kick and slammed her oversized dead man's sneaker smack into Hailey's face.

The kick snapped Hailey around in her own half circle, would have dropped her even if she hadn't stumbled over the tree limb.

Something deep in Hailey refused to just
fall
. Call it guts. Call it street smarts. Call it the caliber of her soul. As she crashed towards the brutal earth, Hailey ripped the pistol from her waistband, tossed it towards us as she screamed.

Zane and I jerked around fumbling our hands to fix ourselves and fill them with something more functional than what we held in that
scream moment
.

Saw Cari crouched in the Y of the downed tree. Saw
free hands
. Saw her glare at Hailey who'd denied her a gun. Saw Cari whirl and charge away
feet free
into the trees.

Go!
Don't shoot her can't shoot her
run!

I knocked saplings out of my way. Leapt over logs. Slipped on a boulder—didn't stop as I charged through the forest, heard Zane racing behind me to my right, caught glimpses of Cari's blue shirt dodging through the trees and currents of fog, heard her pant and snap branches and crack through brush.

Leaves slapped my eyes. Thorns slashed my forehead. I bounced off a tree. Ran. My stomach heaved gasps of
wet forest
into my burning lungs.
Cari… in great shape!
Don't think. Don't stop.
Run
. Get her. Got to
get her
.

Hunters and prey raced through trees and fog. Our vision bounced, saw her searching for a glimmer of
go that way
amidst the fogged forest world rushing at her; saw us chasing her, glimpsing her, sometimes seeing her completely.

The dead man let us catch her.

She leapt over a dry stream bed but Harry Martin's too-big shoes made her misjudge her landing. A stone caught the floppy toe of her sneaker, sprawled her into a pile of deadfall, and when she shoved herself up, scrambled for footing in the wet muck, a shoe went one way, her left ankle the other. Cari cried out as we burst through trees thirty feet behind her. She ran through a stand of poplars.

We saw her limp as she fought her way through another hundred feet of clinging trees on that sprained ankle. Burst out of brush and staggered onto a graveled road. Fell onto its rocks and dirt. Pushed herself up. Stumbled limping steps following the graveled road toward where it disappeared in the mist. Didn't quit. Wouldn't quit.

Until I snapped her image into my pistol sights, yelled: “Done!”

She heard my feet crunch gravel behind her. Dragged to a stop.

“Don't fucking make me shoot!” I yelled.

Brush crashed behind me.

My buddy Zane burst onto the road. Whipped the pistol from his shoulder holster, yelled: “Don't do it!”

Cari spread her gravel-scraped hands out from her waist. She'd left the handcuffs and rope belt back at the pissing tree where she'd picked those locks with the paperclip she stole off the dead man's desk and hid behind her upper lip through whatever she said or ate. Bent over to pull up her pants, she'd untied the tether between her ankles. Now she held nothing, wanted us to know that before she risked turning around to face us.

She saw me standing in the middle of the gravel road, two-handed combat grip on the pistol staring straight at her with its black bore.

She saw Zane, who'd worked his way across the road and up the barrow pit so he stood ten feet ahead of me and off to my heart side, pointing his pistol.

We made a triangle on a graveled road in the forest of a misty morning.

Suddenly, an epiphany seized me.

“Don't you do it!” yelled Zane.

He means Cari
, I thought; yelled: “Cari! You're done running! This is over!”

“Nobody do nothing!” yelled Zane.

“Now is not the day to die!” I said. “Now is when to be a spy!”

Cari said: “What?”

Zane said: “What?”

Don't let your gun shake like that!
I wanted to yell as his aim wandered. He had to be as tired as I was, throat dry, chest heaving, heart slamming his ribs. Us catching our breath had to be easy compared to Cari with her scraped hands, twisted ankle and wild eyes facing two pistols hungry to blow her lead kisses.

Cari watched me combat-shuffle towards her, my pistol zeroed on her heart.

“Who are you?” I yelled to her. “What do you do?”

Zane's gun wavered between Cari and me: “Victor! You're here. It's now. Don't zone out, man! And stop, stop there, you have to stop!”

I stood 15 feet from Cari in the middle of the gravel road. Zane stood by the trees, gun floating like the mist surrounding us. Again I yelled to her: “Who are you?”

Cari glared at me: “What are you talking about? You know who I am.”

“'Xactly!”

“Forget all those lies!” I yelled. “Forget your cover and your other cover, your mission and your real mission, whether you were launched to catch us or kill us. Forget
national security
and
need to know
and
don't get caught
and
don't get the bosses blamed
and
failing the fullness of your career
, forget all that and look at this new light!”

“Vic,” said Zane, his gun more ambivalent: “Easy…”

“You know who you are?” I said to Cari, softly so ears hiding in the fog couldn't hear.

She blinked; shrugged.

That meant that even if she was humoring Mister Got A Gun, we had a chance.

“You're a spy,” I told her. “And that means you're our salvation.”

“What?”
said Cari and Zane, together.

“A spy has to find out what's real.”

She shook her head. “But you can't know whether or not I'm one of your hypothetical renegades!”

“I'll take that chance,” I said. “This is getting too heavy.”

Lowered my gun.

Zane's pistol pointed towards heaven.

“You're a spy,” I told Cari. “And you're out here in the fog. With us. And yeah, you got sent here to do us—whatever, however, I fucking don't care. Doesn't matter now. Not for this moment of clarity. And yeah, we're crazy, you're not, so what.

“Out here with us is
why
plus enough
what
s to add up to
why not
. Why are we all here? Why did Dr. F die? If we killed him, what about Nurse Death? If we didn't get the gun that shot her
from her
, where did it come from? If she had it, why?
Rectal exams?
I don't think so, she was working a temporary mental hospital gig. Why is her cell phone set up as a classic Op cover job? And who is Kyle Russo?”

“He's a name written on an index card taped above the windshield of the white car you stole from a dead man.”

“Exactly,” I said for Zane's benefit, hoping he was getting it, too. “But why?”

“Because you can. Sometimes that's the whole reason for doing what you do.”

“You are so cool!”
I whispered.

Cari blushed. Her eyes finally let go of the gun in my hand. “What are you talking about?”

“The heart of your Op, of any spy Op, is knowing. Merely catching or killing us leaves you as ignorant as before. Here, now, you've got a chance to be who you are and do what you're supposed to do.”

“What?”

“Be a spy. With us. On us.”

“You… you're offering me a chance to join your pack of mad dogs?”

“You don't qualify. You're not crazy. But you're already our witness. Fold that into being more than dragged along until whatever's going on is over.”