Revolution No. 9 (5 page)

“You're a fucking grunt. You don't touch the brides. Maybe you'll make
maquis
someday, and maybe you won't.”

Then Taxman said, “You seem to be developing a little attitude problem, HH. Guess we'll have to work on that.”

Under the hard stares of both men, Hammerhead deflated into fidgeting. Captain America watched, with the air of a seasoned gunfighter irritated by an upstart punk.

“Marguerite needs to help out here another couple of minutes,” Freeboot told him. “She'll be ready after that.”

Captain America sauntered to the table and twisted the top off a bottle of Red Hook ale.

Monks glimpsed his fingertips. They were thick with callus, like Freeboot's.

Monks scanned the other men's hands covertly. They were the same.

That could not be accidental.

The fingerprints had been deliberately obliterated, by burning, cutting, or chemicals.

The blanket in the bedroom doorway shifted aside and Marguerite came out, holding a chipped white enamel mug. The room became still again as she carried it to Monks. He took it from her and knelt beside a lantern so that he could get a good look. The urine was pale yellow and had the same unpleasant fruity smell as the child's breath.

But with no technological means to measure the blood sugar, there was only one way, the way the old-timers had done it. He dipped his index finger into the cup, then put the finger in his mouth. He waited until the taste was gone, then did it a second time.

There was no doubt. Along with the sour taste of the urine itself, there was a cloying sweetness. It was saturated with sugar.

Monks got to his feet. All attention was focused on him.

“Diabetes mellitus,” Monks said. “Judging from the other symptoms, it's very advanced. If it's not treated, it will kill him. Soon.”

Freeboot erupted from his tense, staring pose in a convulsive jerk, his hands rising from his sides as if he was ready to fight.

“How the fuck can you tell that?” His voice shook with rage that seemed far out of proportion.

“It's sweet,” Monks said. “His blood sugar's out of control. Go ahead, taste it. Then taste your own. You'll tell the difference.” He offered Freeboot the cup.

Freeboot strode to him and yanked it away, hoisting it to his mouth as if he was going to down the urine in a single
gulp. But the cup hovered at his lips, untasted, for several seconds.

Then Freeboot spun away and slung it into the fireplace. The cup clanged against the stones, the urine spraying into the flames.

“There is
nothing
.
Wrong
. With
my son
!” he roared.

His back remained turned to the room, and Monks had the queasy sense of having offended a primitive, egomaniacal tribal ruler, who next would whirl back and order the death of the messenger bearing bad news.

But when Freeboot turned around again, his face had become an almost mimelike mask of calmness.

“Diabetes,” he said. “There's a medicine for that, right?”

“Insulin.”

“All right, we'll get some, and you give it to him.”

“Whoa, wait,” Monks said. “First off, it's a very complicated procedure. You need a precise way to determine dosages and measure blood sugar. Second, a few shots of insulin are not going to make that kid well. He needs major treatment on several levels, and follow-up treatment for the rest of his life.”

“I'm talking about right now. We get him feeling better, who knows? That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.”

Monks's outrage leaped again at the thought that a life-threatening illness might make a four-year-old child stronger.

“It
is
going to kill him!” he finally exploded. “What the hell's the matter with you?” He stepped closer to Freeboot, holding his gaze, trying to make contact with the father who had to be in there somewhere.

Freeboot seemed unperturbed. “Let me think it over.”

“There's nothing to think over,” Monks said. “He needs to get to a hospital, now.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“What would I have to gain by lying?”

“Maybe you're trying to fuck with our heads.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake.” Monks turned away in disgust.

“So, we'll just try some of that insulin for a few days,” Freeboot said. “If it helps, maybe I'll start listening to you.”

He turned his gaze on the others, imperious now, and spoke with the clipped efficiency of having made a decision.

“Taxman, Shrinkwrap, we've got to talk. You”—he pointed at Captain America—“take your bride. Hammerhead, you stay here.”

Marguerite flashed a bruised glance at Freeboot, then stepped out into the night. Captain America followed, closing the door behind them.

Hammerhead watched them with flat, unblinking eyes.

Freeboot swung to face Monks. “You go on back with Mandrake.”

There was no point in arguing further. Monks did as he was told.

When he stepped into the bedroom, Motherlode was sitting on the edge of Mandrake's bed, petting him and whispering to him—finally acting like a mother, if a stoned and disheveled one. She was wearing a rumpled flannel nightgown, her breasts loose and sagging beneath it.

“Is he going to get better?” she asked Monks.

“If we get him proper treatment, he will,” Monks said, making another bid for an ally.

“That's why I wanted a doctor.”

That's not enough
, Monks was about to say, but it was another pointless argument. Whether Freeboot had ground her down to this state or she had found her own way to it, there was no help here. On the one hand, it was hard to feel sympathy for a mother who could fall into a self-induced stupor beside her sick child. On the other, Monks pitied anyone that desperate. She seemed bewildered, more than anything—incapable of dealing with this crisis.

She stood up, opened a dresser drawer, and took out a bottle of Percocets.

“Will you take care of him now?” she asked.

Monks looked at the fearful, uncomprehending little boy, in the hands of his addict mother and berserk father.

“I'll do what I can,” he said.

She murmured thanks, and with a suddenly furtive air—clutching the pills, avoiding Monks's gaze, and not looking back at Mandrake—she edged out of the room.

A moment later, the blanket in the doorway shifted aside, and Hammerhead came in. He dropped something on the floor that clanked when it hit.

Monks realized, with numb amazement, that it was a pair of handcuffs.

“Put them on,” Hammerhead said.

“You can't be serious.”

“You seem to have a little attitude problem. We're going to have to work on that.”

Monks stared at him, looking for some sign of sarcasm—the recognition that he was parroting Taxman's words about himself, from just a few minutes earlier. But his face showed nothing except barely controlled anger. It hit Monks that this was really about Marguerite, whom he clearly was sweet on, walking off with the handsome Captain America. He was shifting the blame, projecting his rage onto a safe target. It was akin to Glenn's claim that Monks had this coming because he “owes me bigtime,” and Freeboot's blaming Monks for his own maltreatment, because he couldn't be trusted.

This was a trait that Monks associated with children and with psychopaths, and a memory flashed through his mind of a court defense that he had once heard from a bank robber who had gunned down a young female teller: her death was her own fault, because she had pressed the alarm button.

“Do you have any idea of the consequences of kidnaping
me?” Monks said. “In the eyes of the real world? You're looking at prison.”

Hammerhead raised his shotgun a few inches and pressed the muzzle against Monks's knee.

“There's no need for that,” Monks said. “I know I'm outgunned.”

“Coil says you got a reputation for causing trouble. Don't try it with me.”

“Okay,” Monks said. “I won't try it with you.”

F
reeboot ran like a wildman, pounding barefoot over the camp's familiar paths, then out into the forest and onto the deer trails that he knew just as well. He was hot with rage.

Monks had made a fool of him. He had
lost
it, in front of everyone.

He just couldn't get past the fear that drinking that piss would infect him with the weakness it carried.

After half a mile the trail took a sudden rise up a steep rocky crag. Freeboot drove himself to the top, leaping from foothold to foothold like a mountain goat, his hard, horny feet gripping the rocks surely and silently. Finally he slowed to a walk, circling the crag's summit with hands on hips. He was breathing hard, but not winded. His legs ached with the strain, but he was ready for more.

He took the Copenhagen can from his shirt pocket and dipped his knifepoint into the powdered crank. He blasted three sharp hits into each nostril, a dose that would have left
a normal man crawling around on the ground, screaming. As the drug filled him, he stood and opened his arms wide to the night sky, feeling like he could leap up into it and fly to the fucking moon. Most nights, he spent several hours out here in the woods, prowling his turf. In clear weather he could see almost to the Pacific, across the swaying treetops of the redwood forest that rose and fell down the mountain slopes like the waves of a deep green sea. The nearest paved road was fifteen miles away, the first tiny town was three miles farther, and tonight, even the few dim lights of the camp were lost in the blanketing mist.

Everything that he was going to do—that only he
could
do—was lying there at his feet, waiting.

All right. He was feeling better now. Monks had won that round. You had to respect the motherfucker.

But it was just starting.

Freeboot shook an unfiltered Camel cigarette from a pack and lit it. An occasional smoke would not hurt a man if he flushed his lungs rigorously with clean air every day.

He took a different path back down the crag and toward camp, moving with a stride that was almost a lope, but stealthy enough not to alarm the herd of deer that bedded down nearby.

He paused at one of the hidden seismic geophones that were buried around the camp's perimeter. His favorite night game was to trip a sensor to alert a sentry, lure him into a snare, then disarm him and leave him tied to a tree for the others to find. The way he was feeling tonight, he would have hung the man upside down and thrashed him with a fir branch.

But there was business to take care of. Freeboot loped on to the bunker, a shaft cut into the rocky earth by coolie labor back in gold-rush days when this place had been a mining camp. The entrance was hidden by a shed with a false floor.
He bolted shut the shed door from the inside, yanked up the wooden hatch, and dropped down the ladder into the hollowed-out antechamber. The bunker was secure and soundproof, outfitted for comfort, with chairs, cots, and a propane heater that vented through a hidden flue. There were battery-operated electric lights and laptop computers, with a gas-powered generator to recharge them. The catacombs of mining tunnels that branched out held stocks of food and water, along with weapons and other covert equipment.

Bunker-wise, Hitler had nothing on Freeboot.

Taxman and Shrinkwrap were already inside, waiting. Freeboot walked directly to an IBM ThinkPad and slotted in a CD that had been delivered earlier that evening. The screen changed as the CD's contents came up.

“We've got some issues here, Freeboot,” Shrinkwrap said. She was trying to sound cool, but her mouth trembled a little. He could read her emotions as clearly as he could hear the forest creatures moving through the night. She was angry, she was afraid, and, like always, she was edgy because she knew that only he possessed the
power
.

But he needed her, so he spoke lightly.

“Had to happen, Shrink,” he said. “Motherlode was freaking about the kid. I could feel her getting ready to do something stupid. This will calm her down.”

“You should take him someplace, man. Like I said.”

That had been Shrinkwrap's idea when Mandrake started acting weird—to take him several hundred miles away to another state, and abandon him in front of a hospital. He was too young for anyone to identify, and he'd be taken care of.

“You still could,” she said. “This is no place for a kid.” She wasn't bad-looking, although thin as a bird, and she looked more feminine now, with a little pleading in her eyes.

Her anger was easy to deal with. This softness was not.

“Mandrake's got to get his shit together,” Freeboot said uneasily. “Let it go, okay?” He pulled a bottle of the Monte Alban mescal from a shelf and drank from it, still watching the computer screen.

It was showing a news clipping from that day's
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
—a small item, the kind they stuck down at the bottom of a back page because it wasn't really news anymore.

CALAMITY JANE MURDERS STILL A MYSTERY

“No, it's not okay,” Shrinkwrap said hotly. “There's a million fucking doctors out there. Why'd you have to pick Coil's dad?”

“Because Coil's dad won't take a chance on sending his kid to prison.”

“When's he going to get that chance? Don't tell me you're going to let him
go
.”

“I want him to
think
I will. And you never know, he might come in handy down the line.”

“What the fuck are you saying—‘down the line'?”

“Some of the shit Coil's told me, Monks has got a crazy streak,” Freeboot said, with a mocking edge. “Maybe he'll come around.”

She stood up from her chair and stabbed toward his chest with a shaking finger.

“Quit fucking around, man. A dumbass trick like this could bring us down,” she said.

Freeboot gave her a heavy-lidded, measuring look. Shrinkwrap was a psychologist and very smart, but her buttons were easy to push.

“Where's Coil?” he said.

“In our cabin,” she said warily. She knew the gaze she was seeing.

“What's he doing?”

“Getting high, probably.”

“I need him to find me some insulin.”

“Hey, lighten up. He just got back from a mission.”

“I'm trying to make him feel more like a
maquis
, Shrink. Let's face it, he's a mama's boy.”

She flinched. She was more than fifteen years older than Glenn Monks—the latest in a long series of the bad boys she craved.

“What are you going to do, B&E a drugstore?” she said sullenly. “There's no place within a hundred miles of here open this time of night.”

“Don't you think maybe I know that?” Freeboot swigged from the mescal bottle again, still watching her.

She lowered her gaze, defeated.

“Have him hack the local pharmacy records and find somebody around here who buys that stuff,” Freeboot told her. “Old people, or a woman living alone. Then call down to Base and tell Callus to go get it. Mask and gun, scare the
shit out of them. Take everything they got, needles, the works. Give them a couple hundred bucks and tell them if they keep quiet, he won't be back. They call the sheriffs, he will. And I want everybody moving with the fucking speed of light, starting
now
.”

Freeboot watched her thin blue-jeaned ass hurry up the ladder. He drank again from the bottle, a long burning pull, then leaned over the computer's keyboard and brought up a master file.

“Where you think Hammerhead's at?” he asked Taxman. Hammerhead wasn't hell for brains, but he was fierce and loyal.

“He did okay tonight,” Taxman said.

“I've been working him up, about Marguerite and Captain America.”

“He's right on the edge, for sure.”

“You want him in on this next one?”

“Let's have a scalp hunt tomorrow night, give him a chance to get savage,” Taxman said. “If he makes it, I'll take him along.”

He spoke with his usual quiet drawl. Somebody who didn't know better might mistake it for timidness. Taxman was ex–Special Forces, who'd left the army in disgust after the Gulf War because there wasn't enough close-range killing. Now he got his fill of it, leading the almost thirty
maquis
that he had trained so far. The most experienced ones were out there in the world, unknown to anyone but each other—drifting, quietly stirring up anger in homeless camps and ghettos, and waiting to be summoned for their next mission.

Freeboot turned back to the computer screen and scrolled. A collage of newspaper headlines appeared, dated several weeks apart over the past months.

SEDONIA STUNNED BY KILLINGS

GROSSE POINTE POLICE TIGHTLIPPED

DOUBLE MURDER IN DARIEN

There were eleven sub-files from the past two years, made up of clippings about the killing of rich citizens in different parts of the country. The outrage tended to start as long front-page reports, only to shrink and disappear as police admitted their frustration.

The “Calamity Jane” file was the latest one. Freeboot transferred the clipping from the disc to the master folder. He had an online search done daily for news about any of the murders, and he read it all carefully. It was important to stay on top of developments.

“I think it's time for us to let The Man know what he's dealing with,” Freeboot said. There hadn't been any reason for police to link the killings yet, at least officially. The
maquis
had played it safe at first, choosing low-security targets while they perfected their operations.

Taxman nodded. “Let's jack it up a notch.” He knew a lot of ways to get under people's skins. Dumping the golf clubs at the homeless camp had been his idea.

“What you got in mind?”

“Pull up Emlinger on the screen.”

Freeboot scrolled farther down the master file, to an alphabetical list of names. There were several hundred of them, mostly men but a few women. Each name was followed by a short description.

He paused at an entry that began:

Atherton was a several-hour drive south of here. The FBI knew that serial killers tended to start close to home, then branch out geographically. Freeboot had been careful to do it the other way around.

He double-clicked on Emlinger's name, bringing up a longer file. It included photographs of Emlinger and his family; a plan of their spacious house and grounds, including the security system; city and area maps; and a detailed analysis of their personal habits and daily routines. Emlinger looked like a generic corporate executive, with gold-rimmed glasses and perfect teeth, brimming with confidence in his own net worth. Mrs. Emlinger was a Stepford-type trophy wife, almost twenty years younger than her husband, and very good-looking.

“She's got a thing about jade jewelry, antique Chinese stuff,” Taxman said, tapping her photo with his finger. “He bought her a collection of it for a wedding present—used to belong to the Princess of Monaco, or some such shit. If
that
ends up in a Dumpster, they're gonna read the mail.”

He stepped to a dinner plate where several lines of white powdered meth were laid out. The tiny crystals glittered like broken glass.

Freeboot took a closer look at the computer photo of Mrs. Emlinger. She was a green-eyed blonde. No doubt jade looked good on her.

“I like the way you think, young man,” Freeboot said. “You got a future with this company.”

 

“I'm going to name you Circe, baby,” Freeboot told the girl who had been in the sauna with him earlier. They were
naked, lying face to face, in the afterglow of energetic sex. “You know who she was?”

She shook her head shyly. Her eyes were big liquid pools of adoration, pupils dilated from the finger hash that came from picking sinsemilla buds.

“A witch. She turned dudes into animals. And you turn me into a wild beast. A
swine
.”

He lunged face first into her breasts, growling and nuzzling her with his bristly beard. She squirmed, cooing with delight like a child.

They were in the structure that Freeboot had named the Garden. From the outside, it was a log building, like all the others here—a crude bathhouse, with a big stone basin for the hot springs that flowed from the ground at a perfect 112 degrees. But inside, he had transformed it, stocking it with things that he hadn't even known existed until he was able to buy them. Then he learned about them fast.

The rough log walls were hung with old tapestries from Europe. Thick Persian rugs carpeted the plank floor. A two-thousand-year-old Greek statuette sat on top of a Chippendale console. The central piece was the Louis XV king-sized bed that Freeboot and Circe were lying on. Part of a wall had to be chainsawed out to get that in. The moisture and warmth from the hot springs maintained a jungle of exotic potted plants. There was every kind of liquor and every kind of dope. Freeboot wanted the feeling in here to be overpowering—
lush
. But above all, the Garden was for sex. The brides were a reward for the
maquis
who performed their missions well, and a tormenting lure to recruits.