Resurrection Express (18 page)

Watches me click the numbers, sitting anxiously at the edge of the bed.

“I never saw anything like what you did back there,” she says sullenly. “The way you worked those protocols, I mean.”

“I still blew it.”

“Maybe that’s right. But I never would have gotten past those firewalls. It was really ahead of the curve. Never seen anything like it.”

“Neither had I. That scares the hell out of me.”

“Selling the getaway helicopter to a gangbanger was pretty original.”

“That wasn’t the smartest move I’ve ever made, either. It’ll be all over the street real soon, if it isn’t already. Hartman has his ear
to the ground, too. I’ll have to deal with him
and
our employers. But it won’t be your problem.”

“Oh really?”

“Really. You can go to Florida and live happily ever after. We’ll be getting a big payday for the machine.”

She smiles through her pain, sighing. “Pretty slick, Slick.”

I almost laugh, but don’t. It wasn’t really funny the first time.

“So,” she says, getting back to being serious. “You think you can figure out what’s on those discs?”

“I don’t have much time, but I can try.”

She looks off into space for a moment, then lowers her voice almost reverently. “I think I should apologize to you. I said a few things back there I shouldn’t have.”

“You said the truth. I should have listened to you in the vault.”

“Yeah. But still . . .”

“Still nothing. You were right and I was wrong.”

“I might have been right about the decoy numbers, but I never woulda figured out what the secondary pulse inside that lead pipe really was. That was a pretty fast move on your part.”

“If I had figured it sooner, my dad might still be alive.”

“I don’t think that’s true. You might be a scary guy, Elroy . . . but you’re still the best I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot.”

“You’re not so bad yourself. We were a pretty good team back there.”

“Damn right we were.”

I sigh, clicking the keys, seeing the numbers.

Feeling the logic.

“Computers and programs were invented by men, not gods,” I tell her. “That’s another thing Axl Gange said to me right off. You can solve any riddle invented by someone smarter than you. All you gotta do is go to zero. Start at the beginning. Just don’t mess with God.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

Go to zero.
I turn the words over in my mind. They were never truer than they are at this very goddamn moment.

Bennett hangs her head, and whispers. “I’m sorry about your father.”

“Please, I have to ask you: Don’t talk about him anymore. I can’t think about that right now. I have to do everything I can to block it out.”

The same way I did when Mom died. The shock first, then the pain and the mourning months later, years later. When it finally catches up to you.

The shock is my ally this time. A way to control the rage while my fingers move across the keys of my rig, searching for an answer. But right now, as my mind flashes over those last moments in the vault, it isn’t my father’s final words that haunt me—it’s the Sarge’s. He asked Bennett if she had what it took to look in the face of God. Told us all the seats on the express were taken. Said it was resurrection.

What the hell was that?
What did he mean?

It hits me hard, as I sit there in the half dark, surrounded by the secrets they had me steal. The answers are here, encoded on these drives.

•  •  •

B
ennett’s voice drifts over to me a few minutes later as I power up the machine. She’s scared and tired, wracked with dull pain. “They’re gonna find us, aren’t they?”

“Yes. Eventually. It’s bigger than what they were telling us. Much bigger. I’m getting that old sinking feeling.”

“And they’ll kill us when they find us.”

“Eventually.”

I feel her close to me in the half dark of the room. That sleek blur that was at my elbow during the job, her deep red hair and
the galaxy of freckles on her face and shoulders, made blacker by sweat and grime and blood, even after cleaning herself up. She’s trained in life-or-death survival tactics, and she’s even been in the soup, but not like this. Not fighting against enemies who are completely invisible.

“I ain’t gonna die like those others,” she says. “I won’t let that happen. I won’t let them torture me, either.”

“Good for you.”

“I saw a lotta that where I was, in the war. Men who were just like that asshole back there with the knife. All drunk on macho bullshit. It was hard being a woman in the middle of all that.”

“Is that why you got out?”

“Mostly. I didn’t wanna see people dying anymore. Kind of a joke, huh? I mean, here we are, right?”

“You did right by me in the vault. When the shooting started, I mean. You killed two men to save my life. I owe you.”

“You saved my life, too. You don’t owe me nothing.”

“Yes, I do.”

I stop clicking. I turn and face her.

I take a deep breath.

And.

“I was there when Axl Gange died. I watched it happen. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“You wanted me to tell you about it before.”

“Yes.”

“You’re his daughter, aren’t you?”

“Not exactly. I never knew my real parents.”

She lowers her head.

There’s a long, long silence before she speaks again.

“Axl raised me from the time I was two years old. His real kids were my brother and sisters.”

I think I knew it all along. That’s why she came down on my side back there—why she’s been on my side since before we even met. She came here because it was the only way to avenge her father.

Her father.

Goddamn.

“I left him when I was teenager,” she says slowly. “It was because he said he couldn’t teach us anything, Elroy. Said he wouldn’t show his children how to be like him. That it would lead to our deaths, and he couldn’t be responsible.”

“He was trying to protect you.”

“I didn’t wanna be protected. I wanted to be my father’s daughter.”

“I envy that. I really do.”

“What do you mean?”

“I never had a choice but to be my father’s son.”

And now he’s dead, too.

The silence settles again.

The terrible details of Bennett’s life shimmer like a vague mirage in front of me: scumbag parents, shot dead during a robbery or belly up in some back room with needles in their arms, Axl stepping up to claim her, because that’s what he did back then. Maybe her folks were friends of his, maybe they were just bad people he knew. I decide not to ask her.

Doesn’t matter anyway, I can practically see it all right here.

Frozen in the dark, silent spaces between us.

“I hated Axl for years,” she says. “I even changed my last name, it got so bad. Then he was gone and there wasn’t any way to make it right. I want to know how my father died, Elroy. Please tell me.”

“It’s hard, Bennett. Even harder than what we went through in the vault. Those were just guys with guns. David Hartman is a sick, sick man.”

“I don’t care. Tell me everything.”

“If it’s what you really want.”

Her face is like stone.

Her eyes unblinking.

“Yes. It’s what I really want.”

•  •  •

S
o I tell her. The words come easy. The pictures never fade.

Ever.

I tell her about coming back from Dallas, at the end of my apprenticeship, on the day my father got out of prison for the last time. That was after the army, after the dojo, the last six months with Axl and his team a grueling hell of final exams, all high-security gigs I walked through like a champ, with Jett Williams as my right hand. I walked straight from that last job to a meeting at Threadgill’s with my father. He said he was proud of me. Six years of busting my ass and my mind, all for this. So I could go free and become a slave again—but this time for a lot of money. My father said he owed me, the same way I just told Bennett I owed her, and I remember his face so clearly. As if this was the only way he could pay me back. By making me a criminal like him. I had no idea how bad things could really get. I hadn’t been to war, hadn’t been to prison. I hadn’t yet stared into the face of real evil.

That only happened when I met David Hartman for the first time.

You can’t really understand these things when you experience them. They stealth bomb your eyes and your ears and your soul, leaving hard scars you can’t feel right off. You have to look back before any of it means anything. At least that’s what it seems like now. All of it dirty, swimming in some terrible backwash, sour and wrong. And why the hell not? Someone else is always crazier than you anyway.

I tell Bennett about that next meeting—the one that happened three days later, after I spent the weekend with Toni. I hadn’t seen my wife in six months. She met me at the Driskill Hotel, downtown on Sixth Street. One of the oldest buildings in Austin, more
than a hundred years of elegance and history, retrofitted with chrome and steel, like a slice off some ancient future world from a galaxy far, far away. It was almost like our second honeymoon, our next pledge to one another, that we would always come back here, to this special place—not just the hotel, but the place in our hearts where nobody could touch us. I remember the moment when I first saw her again like an outsider, because the promise was broken of course.

You see, Bennett, that’s how it is.

These things never really last. Something always comes along and screws it up. And you have to stand away from those tarnished moments years later and figure out what any of it means. It might not even mean anything.

David Hartman met us in the restaurant of the Driskill on Monday.

Toni and I had spent our time together already, in one of the cheap rooms, not the special suite where we were married. That would have been bad luck. You don’t ever go home like that. Hartman had no idea about our history anyway. About why that hotel was important to us. Not that it wouldn’t have made him laugh out loud, but I never gave him the satisfaction. He just liked doing his dirty business there because it smelled clean. That’s what he told us—you gotta smell clean when you roll in the mud.

My father had arranged the meeting, while he was in prison. You go inside to be a higher class of criminal. That’s something a lot of people don’t understand. I’m not sure I understand it myself. Get busted doing a weed deal in a Denny’s parking lot, and they send you to graduate school, where you learn to sell smack in strip clubs and kill people. God bless America, you crummy bastards.

I sat across from Hartman in that dark restaurant, Toni next to me, the air between us filled with weird, drippy laughter, his eyes undressing us both. A lot of fat people have that sticky fleshwobble
in the way they speak, but David was worse than that. It was a deeper affliction, something tied right to his soul, swimming in slime. Scarier still, because I knew how powerful this man was, how much he had already taken, how many shooters he had on the street. I could tell he wasn’t exactly a smart man, but he had the showmanship that gets you through the door. Horse sense and spider sense. And he had enough to keep the door open, too. Because he was sharp enough to hire men like Axl.

He asked me politely if he could fuck my wife right there.

She politely said no thanks.

The reply I might have given him was drowned in more of that fleshy laughter. Sludge oozing in the spaces between us. A madman’s cancer.

He told us about the power and the glory, about how muscle rules the world. About how men like him pull the strings, and how those strings are connected to the fragile necks of every tough motherfucker inhabiting the world of organized wise guys and all those shady businessmen with soft hands who call themselves career criminals. He laughed at them all. His great flabby body shook and rolled and quaked beneath the skin of a five-thousand-dollar suit jacket. It was less like meeting a man of power and more like experiencing a wave of nausea. Not just because he was disgusting on the surface, but because I knew what he was capable of, even before I saw him do it. The lust for all those things that ordinary men turn away from, boiling in his laughter and burned on his face. He told me later that was what gave him his edge. Thinking outside the box, he called it.

He told me Axl Gange had been his boy for six years.

He said that Axl was an arrogant slob who never learned his place.

And that his final mistake was in training me.

Hartman said he liked my style, said he admired a man with a full skill set. He wanted to watch me hurt someone. Then he
laughed again, and the laugh was horrifying. The shrill sound of it, hitting my skin like creeping bugs. And then he stood up and told me to come with him. Said the lady should stay in the restaurant. This next part wasn’t for ladies.

I had no choice but to go with him. It’s one of those moments you look back on. And you have no idea whether or not you would do it differently.

It just is.

Toni ordered a drink and waited. Hartman hooted across the restaurant and said we’d only be an hour or so. He didn’t laugh so much in the elevator on the way up. The air closed in around me, thick with bad smells and the promise of terrible consequences, and I found myself asking him right out if I should be worried about anything. He said why the hell should I worry? I was Axl’s golden boy, after all. Hartman was impressed with me, of course.

The elevator opened on the top floor. The walk to the Renaissance Suite was the longest I’ve ever taken. He said this was the most expensive room in the place—even more pricey than the penthouses up top. It was the bridal suite, with high ceilings, a glassed-in bathroom finished with marble, and a view of the Sixth-Street party drag from the veranda balcony. All those bars and restaurants and pool houses down there like a string of glowing dream-scenes lashed across the heart of downtown, the shame of Oz—old honky-tonks like Casino El Camino, done up in ribbons of touristy sleaze, and dumps like Joe’s Generic, with the bar-code sign out in front of one room dripping with dirty blues and stale beer. All of it below us on the street, where all the action happens on a Saturday night for the young-and-beautiful college set and the old beer-gut burnouts of Austin, if you’re not rich like us. That’s what Hartman said to me. If you don’t know the secrets of being rich, if you don’t step up and take what’s rightfully yours—and if you don’t bloody well protect that right with every last ounce of scrappy shit-kicking fury you possess—then you’re
just down there in a no-name dive bar with all the rest. You don’t get what’s behind the fancy door. You burn out and fade away, and nobody knows you ever existed.