Resurrection Express (8 page)

“Mister Coffin, I think we finally
do
understand each other. My name is Jayne Jenison. It’s good to make your acquaintance.”

I shake her hand.

Her flesh is cold, like the devil’s.

The killer inside her glows just beneath the surface.

•  •  •

T
hat night, I stash my getaway money under the bed in my room upstairs in the farmhouse. I don’t tell my father about it. I sit on the bed staring at the key to my safe deposit box. It might be useless now. I put it back in my pocket.

I
can’t sleep. Toni’s keeping me awake, as usual. She’s pissed off at me. She’s screaming that I’m her only hope, that she’s still alive, that I’ve messed everything up. That my plots have failed me, failed us. That I’m too smart for my own good. Too good at too many things. Tricking computers, stealing cars, breaking people’s legs with my bare hands, it all has a price, and I’ve been paying it for years . . . but now my smart self has painted me into a very dark corner. I want to cry. The tears almost come.

No.

Keep it under control, kid.

Keep your game face on.

Keep it under control . . .

My wife screams at me that I’m a diaper-wagging baby. The same cruel way she used to when my back was against the wall, when I had something to prove, those white-hot moments when I knew she was right and I was wrong and I was fighting just to hear the sound of my own arrogant pride.

But her voice is not
her
voice in my memory.

Not at all.

I know it’s her, I can
hear the words
 . . . but it sounds like someone else.

Something abstract.

Like in a dream I can’t bring back.

My head burns white-hot and ice-cold when I strain to hear her. I rub the plate under my thick hair and all the scar tissue. My whole skull itches. The smell of rose petals, canceling out the dampness of the room, overriding everything. Ammonia and a razor blade, the sharp smell of blood, somewhere way back among the important things that are washed out.

The doctors could never give me a straight answer on what it was, the way she was blocked from me, her face and her voice gone, but the memories still there, the details scrawled in abstract. Some kind of regression, self-punishment. A couple of guys told me it was a no-brainer. They actually said that to me. Someone shot you in the head, Mister Coffin. What’s the big mystery?

It never mattered to give my condition a name, but they threw around a lot of highbrow terms in the hospital. Cognitive dissonance. Prosopagnosia, face blindness. My favorite was
transregressional selective doorway amnesia
.

I don’t even think “transregressional” is a real word.

I started realizing they make this shit up as they go in some hospitals.

My wife would have laughed at those doctors.

I see my father telling me Toni’s no good, that I settled for something because I had nothing better, that she finally left me because she was a survivor, not because she was trying to save my life.

Love cannot stay, kid. She was just an illusion.

I know that can’t be true. I don’t want to believe that’s true.

But I see her in Hartman’s arms. The sweat dripping off his fat face, into her mouth, which is the mouth of a china doll—a smooth, blank face like porcelain, shattered into pieces. Not her at all. Her face shattered and lost to me forever. Until I can make forever go away. Until I can find her.

I get out of the bed and sit in the center of the floor.

Concentrate hard and take myself out.

Out of the room.

Yes . . .

I see the leads laid from end to end, but I don’t trust them now. My so-called plot got ten innocent people murdered by a psychopath who thinks he can play with everyone’s life and get away with it. And he’s right, isn’t he?

I don’t trust my own plans.

I have to trust these people.

Toni, I just might have killed you again.

Please forgive me.

Please be alive when I find you.

Please.

•  •  •

T
he next morning, we all meet again in the war room under the barn.

Jenison tells me I’m now officially dead.

She works fast.

There were two unidentified Caucasian males blown away in front of the toy store during the drive-by, probably homeless guys. One of them roughly fit my description. They pulled prints off the body and guess what. Matched with mine, spot on. Really tragic, a kid that young, out on good behavior, looking to make his life right again, cut down in a senseless random eruption of wholesale violence that’s still shocking the nation. My father will die soon, too, but not like this. They have to wait for another opportunity. Dad suggests at the table that he kill himself the next time an old man washes up somewhere in Texas with a shotgun in his mouth. Suicide makes sense. A lot of remorseful fathers do that after their kids check out.

They’ve decided on the Sarge’s acceleration plan. The run is in just three days. It’s an old-school sweep-and-clear, just like the kind me and Dad used to pull when we were the kings of the world. A seven-man team, led by him and the Sarge.

I was right about the quiet redhead—she turns out to be a hotshot air force computer specialist. She’ll be my right arm during the job.

Her name is Alex Bennett.

She’s an airman first class, just three years younger than me.

The flyboys press buttons, the marines blow shit up.

I only know all that because Jenison hands me a folder with some highlights from the lady’s service record in it. It’s an impressive résumé, but Bennett still never says a word to me. Now that I realize she’s so much older than I thought she was, I notice she’s a lot more beautiful. But the hard lines that encase her amber eyes tell tales of bad business, all confirmed by the papers in front of me: a fairly recent rotation in Baghdad, during the last years of the war, a couple of black ops before that, all classified. Her job was to deactivate bombs—the high-tech kind. Not pipe explosives rigged
to primitive detonators and car batteries in the street. No, we’re talking about major works of art, crafted by well-paid professionals. Labyrinthine deadfall canyons ruled by computers and time locks—the kind I bust in my sleep. She has twenty-seven commendations for shutting down that kind of death trap. She’s an expensive commodity on a job like this.

Her cold expression steels the air, as Jenison makes some pictures come up on the flat-screen. Photographs of young women.

“Elroy, how much do you know about the business of human trafficking in the United States?” She stops on a photo of the blonde I saw before with Toni. The blonde is standing in front of a church in a schoolgirl uniform, shot from a block away with a telescopic lens, digital camera, probably an XL Canon. Toni had one of those. She was in my dad’s face with it all the time, even though she never took pictures of any of us. It was an oddball family joke because they never got along.
Can I shoot you with my Canon, Dad?

“Not much,” I tell Jenison as she folds her hands, finding some Zen. “I know in some other countries child prostitution is legal.”

“It’s practically legal here, too,” the Sarge says. “You just ain’t allowed to advertise.”

Jenison lets out a grim breath. “What Sergeant Rainone means to say is that this sort of trafficking has reached epidemic proportions just below the radar in the past two decades. Texas has one of the worst concentrations, mostly because of the senators and high-ranking businessmen who grease the wheel. Not to mention well-placed criminal types who are in it up to their eyeballs. Most of these men have stock in major corporations and use their leverage in very bad ways.”

“You’re talking about David Hartman?”

“Of course I am.”

“So you figure your daughter was abducted into some kind of trafficking network for sick richies?”

“It’s a little more complicated . . . but, yes, that’s the essential truth.”

The Sarge chimes in again. “These photos were stolen by our man from a high-security database out of Houston. An encrypted series of sub-files hidden real well in the records of a corporate branch of Texas Data Concepts.”

Jenison goes into her briefcase and removes a cigarette from somewhere in there. She doesn’t light it. “The IRS was conducting an investigation of David Hartman’s assets about a year and a half ago, in collaboration with the FBI. What they came up with was an elaborate money-laundering scam that involved Hartman using his stock in Texas Data Concepts as leverage over some of the CEOs. That was what they
knew
 . . . but they could never prove it officially, because people started disappearing, along with certain documentation.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.”

“It shouldn’t. What should surprise you is that the FBI backed off and never came at Hartman or TDC ever again.”

“The Feds never do that,” says the Sarge. “They’re like fuckin’ bulldogs most of the time. They hold on to a dream or a nightmare.”

Jenison makes a disgusted noise. “Sad, isn’t it? A fat gangster waves his hand and it all goes away. The case was never even handed off to the Agency. They buried it. Meaning something very big was happening.”

“You’re saying to me that Texas Data Concepts has been fronting for a goddamn white slavery ring?”

“Not the company itself,” Jenison says. “Just some of the executives. We’re pretty sure Hartman’s still in bed with them. He’s been kidnapping people, sending them underground, probably selling them to the highest bidder. Mostly young women. Top-dollar merchandise, so to speak. My people got very close to him,
delivered some specific details about the operation. Our last solid connection was these photographs.”

“Who stole them for you?”

“The same man who photographed Hartman four months ago with your wife. He got in pretty deep. Undercover as an assassin for Hartman’s crew. But he was dangerous, unstable. Had a drug problem.”

“So your man leaked some tidbits and got himself killed.”

“For starters.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“After Hartman plugged the leak, they burned everything that could lead anyone back to their trafficking ring. We knew a lot by then. I was following up on the investigation privately. I had all the files from the FBI, but we never found anything new that gave locations where people were being held. We just found little crumbs. Photos mostly. Disgusting stuff. Most of it was pulled off private databases. Laptops and PCs owned by key executive officers of the company. You’d be amazed at how indiscreet some of those people were in their own offices.”

“No, actually, I wouldn’t.”

“My undercover man was good, in spite of his personal problems. He found files that had been deleted. Things we were able to reconstruct. There were a few e-mails that implicated Hartman directly. But it all dried up after my man went away. They locked everything up tight. That was four months ago.”

“So what we have here is a bunch of well-connected pervs with stashes of young female flesh all over the state—maybe even the country. You’ve lost the trail and they torched the leads. You need me to come back at them.”

“You’re still batting a thousand, Elroy.”

“What makes you think I can find something they missed?”

“That’s just it—they didn’t miss
anything
. My men have investigated Hartman with a microscope. He’s virtually sterilized
himself. There’s one database at a certain TDC facility we haven’t been able to crack. It’s on a private circuit, completely separated from the network inside the building. A vault. Protected by the most advanced multi-layered security profile any of my people have ever seen.”

“You think he’s keeping his women in there?”

“Your attempts at humor are wearing thin, Mister Coffin.”

“We know he’s keeping
something
in there,” the Sarge barks. “The objective of this operation is to get inside that vault and remove everything in it.”

I rub my chin. “That’s a long shot you’re talking about. Hartman was into all sorts of nasty business before I went in the can. I had his whole network circled. A lot of that was above-the-radar government contracting. Things like dirty bombs and smart missiles.”

“I know all about that,” Jenison says. “But missiles do not concern me.”

“Well, maybe they should.”

“That’s not what I’m focused on right now. We do know for
sure
that Hartman is using the Texas Data Concepts facility as his own private fortress. That’s how much leverage he has over these people. If he’s keeping something sensitive—
anything
sensitive—inside that vault, then we gain leverage over
him
and that puts me one step closer to getting my daughter back. If she’s gone underground with the others, we may be able to obtain her location from any encrypted data we recover. You’ll help us with that, also.”

“The photo you showed me back in the joint wasn’t taken that long ago,” I say. “Your girl could be in his bed right now.”

“And my grandma could be doing his dishes and your wife could be washing his car,” the Sarge hisses in my ear. “You startin’ to get the
picture,
boy?”

“Please calm down,” Jenison says softly. “Hartman hasn’t exactly been quiet about his own private harem. He supplies himself
and his friends with a revolving inventory of fresh stock. But Hartman mostly sticks to his own stomping grounds. Nightclubs he owns, things like that. He had a rash of bad publicity about a year ago over a Senate hearing he helped to buy, and that’s made him gun-shy of public places. The word was that Toni Coffin was looking out for my daughter, making sure she didn’t get hurt too badly. Hartman likes to hurt his women.”

“I know.”

“My daughter is very young, Mister Coffin. Just twelve this month.”

Jesus.

She looked twenty in the picture.

I level a serious gaze at Jenison. “Can I ask a favor?”

She scowls back, as if to say my favors are all used up. But then nods slightly, as if to say,
Within reason, kid
.