The Program (50 page)

Randall entered, crossed his arms, and laughed darkly. "That wall's a foot thick and reinforced with steel. Keep scraping."

Tim felt Randall's hands close around his ankles. He was dragged away from the wall, laid out for Henderson, who watched from behind round spectacles, rubbing his soft hands.

When Chad pushed in through the door, Stanley John's hysteria rose to crescendo. He was pleading to be taken to an emergency room.

Exasperation showed in Randall's scowl. "Can't you get him to shut up?"

"He's in a lot of pain," Chad said.

Winona ruffled Tim's hair, her long nails scratching scalp. "Our boy Tommy here's in a lot of pain, you don't hear him impersonating a howler monkey."

Randall wrapped a rag around his bruised knuckles and stepped forward. "Give it time."

As Henderson calmly worked Tim's vital points, Randall interspersed questions with the pain.

"You came for Shanna, didn't you? You knew each other before? Is Leah involved with you? You were looking for financial records?"

When Tim emerged from the unlit tunnel of his thoughts, his eyes found Randall's, and he slurred through a swollen lip, "I'm going to kill you."

Something in Tim's voice made Randall blanch. He wiped the sweat from his forehead -- it hadn't been there a moment ago -- and continued.

At first Tim's captors had snickered and joked, but as the hours passed, they grew exhausted. The break times between sessions grew longer, leaving Tim more time to work at the wall with the ground-down watch lug, wincing through the sporadic blasts of noise.

Randall returned and appraised Tim's meager headway, amused. "How's the progress?"

When Tim didn't respond, he bound Tim's ankles and propped him in a chair. Chad bent back Tim's arms, pressing his wrists together so Winona could straddle his lap as she worked. She spent some time on his face, a stone-heavy costume ring augmenting her punches. Her eyes gleamed; her red mouth glittered. She was enjoying herself.

Randall began a soft repetition of the same questions. "Who are you?" His teeth clicked as they waited through the silence. "LAPD? FBI? What were you after?" A flash of anger stiffened his body, and he shouldered Winona aside, wanting at Tim -- "Open your fucking hole and speak."

Tim barely had time to dip his head so Randall's fist would connect with his hard crown. Randall stormed out, Chad and Henderson trailing, Winona wearing a healthy flush and panting from the exertion. As he shoved out through the door, Randall grimaced at Stanley John's shrieking. Tim saw him reach for the .44 on the table. The door swung shut, and a crack echoed off the concrete walls, cutting short Stanley John's last whimper.

Some raised voices -- Randall and Henderson having it out.

Tim strained, making out little more than mumbles.

Randall's voice briefly rose into audibility. "...getting out of hand. I say we cut our losses. You two get the body in the van..."

Tim tilted forward, falling from the chair. He pressed his ear to the floor. Henderson's and Winona's voices faded into the distance. A few seconds later, Tim thought he sensed the rumble of the van's engine turning over. He fought the rope from around his ankles, dragged himself to the wall, and continued his tedious etching with the watch lug, freeing a scattering of dust and a few thumbnail-size chips.

Finally he rested, the floor a slab of ice beneath his cheek. He worked off his shoe, rolled off his sock. He prepared, and he waited. When the speaker screeched again, Tim yanked the wire from the back panel, cutting the sound short.

A few seconds later, Randall's enormous frame blotted out the rectangular throw of light from the doorway.

The door creaked shut. Randall took a few steps and squatted, spinning the frayed end of the stereo wire between a blunt finger and thumb. His eyes shifted to Tim. He rose.

Tim shrank from his advance. As Randall drew near, a slash of a grin bulging his underbite, Tim sprang up, grip tightening around the end of his blood-soaked sock, the fist of powdered concrete pulling hard and dense in the toe. He twisted hard like a fastballer, pain screaming through his hips, his torso, his arm, aiming for the fragile part of the skull at the temple. Randall jerked a half step back, a surge of fright seizing his features like a hiccup.

The makeshift sap missed Randall's blind-flailing arm and struck the side of his head with a dull pop, caving it in.

Randall's bowels released with a gurgle. His knees gave, and he toppled over, the sock wedged inside the neat oval of missing skull.

Tim frisked him but found no weapon. He staggered to the door and peered through the tiny square of glass at the top. His face a fishy gray, Chad mopped Stanley John's juices around on the slick floor, making little headway.

Tim gently tried the knob. Locked.

To buy some time, he let out a few groans, as if he were still being tortured.

A scouring of Randall's pockets turned up a driver's license. Light-headed, Tim made his way back to the door and started working the lock, but the license was too wide for Tim to get a good angle.

Chad looked up and let out a garbled cry.

Tim began bending Randall's license back and forth lengthwise. "Let me out."

Chad was quivering. "Where's Randall?"

His tongue felt like an anvil. "Turn on the light and see."

Resting the heel of his hand on his pistol, Chad inched forward. His fingers found the switch and flicked it on. Tim stepped aside to provide a good view, and Chad let out a gasp.

His voice rose to a desperate whine. "You're gonna be in deep shit when Dr. Henderson gets back."

Tim managed to rip the license in half along the seam. "I won't lay a finger on you. I'll just walk out of here. You can say it was Randall's fault. That he came in and left the door unlocked. He certainly won't mind."

"You're out of your mind. Like I'd let you out now."

"If I stay here, you'll regret it."

"Yeah, right. Sure." Chad's chest shook with a few sobs that he hid under a nervous stutter of a laugh. "What are you gonna do?"

Tim turned his head slowly, eyebrows raised, indicating Randall's body.

Chad's face convulsed as if he'd bitten into something sour.

Tim slid the halved license beneath the latch bolt and shoved the door open.

Chad yelped and drew back against the wall, the Sig pointing at Tim's head though Tim was a good ten feet away and could barely stay on his feet.

No exterior doors in view. The only window had been blacked out.

Tim heard Winona's voice before he saw her. "Chad, Dr. Henderson says if there's gonna be two bodies, we should prepare them inside before --"

She rounded the corner, nearly colliding with Tim. Her eyes barely had time to flutter wide with alarm when Tim struck her above the ear with the side of his closed fist.

She glided weightlessly a few feet before collapsing to the floor.

Tim faced Chad across her body. The gun shook in Chad's hand.

Winona stirred and coughed up a mouthful of vomit on Chad's shoes. Broken blood vessels squirmed through her right cheek like crimson maggots.

"If you call out," Tim said, "I'll come back and kill you."

He left Chad frozen and hobbled down the hall, his bare foot slapping linoleum. A window looked out on Randall's van, still parked tight to the building beside a sporty Lexus -- Tim's ears had betrayed him. Displeased and slightly panicked, Henderson was aborting Plan A, tugging Stanley John's stiff body back out of the van. It landed on the asphalt with a thump.

Searching for an exit, Tim slid past the window and banged through two swinging doors, leaving bloody handprints on the metal plates. The sound boomed back from the distant reaches of a massive warehouse.

He wiped the run of blood from his eyes and halted, shocked. Rising vertiginously from a bedrock of pallets were colossal pillars of videotapes, DVDs, and CD-ROMs, all sporting TD's close-up and a jagged advertisement bubble proclaiming, Your Free Program Software!

A virtual army of tape sessions awaiting deployment.

Tim took a few shaky steps into the product labyrinth, disoriented by the surrounding sameness. He registered a flutter of footsteps at the doors, then a shout. More voices answered; all three were on the prowl now.

Tim dashed between two forklifts and down a lane of DVDs, trying to source the voices. He followed a forced turn and came up against a wall of videotapes, TD's portrait leering at him in mosaic from beneath endless cellophane wrappers.

An engine revved sharply, then tires chirped against concrete. Truck forks punched through the rise of VHS cassettes, bringing them raining down on Tim.

He was buried instantly.

Chapter
forty-six

At 7:12 P.M. Dray snatched the phone off the hook the instant it chirped, knocking over an untouched glass of vodka she'd poured and sat staring at since Bear phoned an hour ago to let her know the print from the car key was a seven-point match.

Bear said, "We didn't find him --"

Her breath pushed through her teeth like steam.

"-- but Metro Division just got a hit on Leah's car."

"I could give a shit about Leah's car right now."

"They pulled a guy over off Florence downtown, pretty far afield from the ranch. Denley and Palton took over custody, picked him up from Parker Center. We've got him upstairs. Name of Leo Henderson." Bear cleared his throat, then cleared it again. "The thing is..."

"Yeah?"

"The thing is, we found some supplies in the trunk."

"Like what? Bear? Like what?"

"Heavy-duty garbage bags. Bleach. Lye. And a hatchet."

Dray let out a noise she didn't recognize.

"Thomas and Freed are working him."

She snapped into focus. "On what? They'd better not be mentioning Tom Altman or if Tim is still --"

"They're just questioning him on the car and the supplies. But he's not putting out. He sits there wearing this complacent smile. He's got the thousand-yard stare and everything. And his knuckles are bruised."

"He was coming from Tim." She drew a deep breath. "Or going back to him."

"Maybe he hasn't done it yet."

"I can't hear 'maybe' right now, Bear."

They both let the silence draw out and out until Dray almost forgot they were on the phone. Finally Bear grumbled under his breath, a litany of seething fricatives.

"Say I tell Thomas and Freed to take a coffee break. Say I go in there and me and him work some shit out."

Dray pressed a hand to the bridge of her nose. "No, no violence like that. The rules apply when it's our family on the line, too. If they don't, the rules don't mean shit. And we don't mean shit." She realized she was standing, and she eased herself down into a chair. A stampede of anxiety overtook her; she waited for the dust to settle. She couldn't survive another funeral. She couldn't endure identifying Tim's body, seeing the cold face beneath the Tom Altman-dyed hair and fake goatee. An idea sailed through her grief, setting her back in the chair.

"Bear?" Her voice was shaky, excited. "Bear, where's Leah's car?"

"Police impound lot. They towed it to the one on Aliso off Alameda. Why?"

"We gotta make a phone call."

Wearing dark slacks, twice-cuffed shirtsleeves, four-inch lifts, and a contentious scowl, Pete Krindon approached the heavyset city worker at the impound lot. The guy manned a station resembling a Hertz rental booth near the front gate. Behind the high-rising fences capped with barbed wire, Ferraris and Pintos commingled, an egalitarian paradise for the appropriated.

The worker tugged at his jowls and suspiciously regarded the biohazard-orange zippered bag swinging at Pete's side.

Pete's hand moved to his hip; a badge glinted, then disappeared. "Derek Cliffstone, Department of Homeland Security. I'm looking for a stolen Lexus IS 300, license plate four-xray-union-Paul-zero-two-two, impounded this A.M. from a Middle Eastern male, alias Leo Henderson."

"Leo Henderson?"

"Persian. They make 'em light-skinned, too, there, chief." Pete leaned forward in his oxblood loafers, the heel of his hand resting on his holstered Glock. He ran his tongue along the inside of his lower lip and spit on the curb. "Sometime today might be nice."

Pete set the orange bag on the counter as the worker drummed reluctantly on a computer keyboard.

"You want a look, you're gonna have to produce a warrant -- wait, wait, wait!" The guy scrambled back off his seat. "The fuck is that?"

Pete finished tightening the rubber strap on his gas mask. He dug through a selection of filters, mumbling under his breath, "Anthrax, smallpox, sarin nerve gas -- a ha, VX." He screwed the filter into place beneath the nose cup. "Sir, we have reason to believe the trunk of that vehicle might contain some hazardous material." His voice sounded metallic and alien. "Parking-space number, please."

Ashen, the guy stared at him.

"Parking-space number, please."

His hands sprang forward onto the keyboard, knocking over a cup of coffee. "Three eighty-five. In the northeast corner."