Time Bomb (52 page)

Crisp’s purse slid off her shoulder and thumped on the landing.

I bent, picked it up, and gave it to her. Up close she smelled of cinnamon gum, had gravelly skin under pancake makeup.

“Thanks,” she said. Finally a smile from those disapproving lips.

She used one hand to take the purse, drew back the other and touched her forehead, fixing hair that didn’t need fixing. Then she lowered it and lunged forward suddenly. Hitting me very hard in the solar plexus, using a stiff-fingered karate punch that turned her hand into a dagger.

Electric pain. I lost breath, sucked air, clutched at my belly, and doubled over.

Before I could straighten, someone behind me—it had to be the smiling Blanchard—shoved a hand in the small of my back, rattling my kidneys, and slung an arm around my neck.

A blur of gray sleeve. Gray noose. Under the fabric, hard muscle pressing against my carotid.

My mind knew the right moves—heel on instep, elbows back—but my oxygen-starved body wouldn’t obey. All I could do was flail and gasp.

The gray arm pushed upward, keeping the pressure on and rolling against my neck as if it were dough. Forcing its way under my chin, shoving my head back so hard it whiplashed. Clamping harder against the carotid, relentless.

Consciousness faded. I saw Crisp, watching. Amused.

Blanchard kept squeezing. I wanted to tell him what I thought of him—how unfair he’d been, pretending to be the good cop. . . .

My legs gave out. A heavy, oily blackness oozed up all around me . . . total eclipse of . . .

I came to in the back seat of a car—lying across it, my wrists bound behind me. I wiggled my finger, felt something hard—warm, not metal. Not handcuffs. I touched it again. Some kind of plastic tie. The kind the police use for quick trussing.

The kind that had always reminded me of garbage-bag fasteners.

I managed to sit up. My head felt as if it had been squeezed for juice. My throat was raw as tartare. An inside-of-the-seashell noise roared in my head and my eyes were out of focus. I blinked several times to clear them . . . to catch a view of passing terrain . . . establish bearings.

Blanchard was driving, Crisp up front, next to him. The car made a quick turn. I rolled, twisted my body, fighting to stay upright, and lost. I hit my head against the door panel. Sharp sting, then nausea ate its way into my gut—a reprise of the sucker punch.

My eyes slammed shut and I gave an involuntary groan.

“It awakens,” said Crisp.

Blanchard laughed.

Crisp laughed back. No internecine conflict now. Two bad cops.

It felt as if we were moving very fast, but that could have been my head spinning. I fought down the queasiness, managed to pull myself up again.

I mouthed words, produced sound: “Wha . . . who . . .” My tonsils ached.

“It
talks,”
said Crisp.

“If it knows what’s best for it, it will shut the fuck up,” said Blanchard.

I pressed my face against the window glass. Cold and soothing. Outside, more greasy black.

Endless black.

Blind-from-birth black.

I felt a stab of vertigo, had to concentrate on not rolling back down, clawed at the seat with my bound hands and felt a fingernail rip.

I looked out the window again, barely able to keep my eyes open. My pupils felt as if they’d been dipped in glue and breaded with grit.

I closed them. The same flat black . . .

Ladies and gentlemen
,
tonight the part of Hell will be played by Absolute Darkness.

I bit my lip with frustration, flopped like a beached seal, rubbed my face against the door panel, happy to be chafed. Metal nubs where the handles should have been.

Low conversation from the front. More laughter.

I blinked some more. Opened my eyes and waited for them to accommodate to the darkness. Finally. But everything was still blurred. It hurt to focus.

I looked anyway. Searched for context.

Black turned to gray. Grays. Lots of them. Contours, shading, perspective . . . Amazing how many grays there were when you just took the time to look . . .

Dead streets.

“It observes,” said Crisp. She turned and looked down at me. Her monkey face reminded me of a Stephen King book cover. “Want to know where we are, cutie?” she said. “The Valley. Feel like being a Valley Boy tonight?”

Bound but no blindfold.

They didn’t care what I saw.

Garbage didn’t fight back.

I shoved that out of consciousness, worked at staying lucid. Ignoring weak bowels, hammering heart, the drainpipe noise in my head.

Blanchard fed the car more gas and it surged forward. My eyes finally cleared. A darkened shopping center. A lazy streetlight casting a urine-colored glow over boarded-up businesses, cracked and missing signs, texture-coat walls sprayed with gang wisdom. An empty parking lot shot through with weeds.

Bad part of the Valley.

Blanchard made another series of quick turns that my eyes couldn’t make out.

A sprinkling of signs.

cuidado con el perro. bonded premises . . . element depository . . . keep out, that means you!

Then a reflective orange diamond, gem-bright: pavement ends.

Blanchard kept going, onto a dirt strip that rocked the car, traveled for another few minutes before making a short stop at a padlocked sheet-metal gate.

Crisp got out, letting in more gas stink. I heard fiddling, rattling, rasp, and creak. She got back in and said, “Okay.” The petrol smell lingered, as if it had saturated her clothing.

Blanchard drove through the gate. Crisp got out again, locked it, and returned. The car moved forward, across empty space, past several vehicles parked diagonally. VW bugs. I thought of Charlie Manson’s apocalyptic dream: Veedubs converted to armored dune buggies—heavy artillery for the race war Helter Skelter was going to foment.

Blanchard slowed and pulled up in front of a bank of concrete. I made out metal-railed stairs, a platform. A loading dock. Behind it the outlines of a blocky, flat-faced structure—fifty feet of bulk unrelieved by architectural detail.

Light from the left—a low-wattage bulb surface-scratching the darkness like crayon relief. Dribbling illumination down on the top half of a grated door. To the right, a bigger door, triple-garage width, corrugated steel.

The smaller door opened. Three figures came out. Shadow people.

Blanchard turned off the engine. Crisp bounced out like a kid going to a birthday party.

The scuff of footsteps. The right rear car door opened. Before I could see their faces, my ankles were gripped and I was pulled down, slid out of the car. As I emerged, hands took hold of my body at the belt, under my armpits. Fingers digging in.

Grunts of effort.

I went limp. Make the bastards work.

As they carried me away, I caught a glimpse of the car. Tan, I thought. But I couldn’t be sure in the darkness.

I was swung up and forward, sagging, butt scraping the ground.

Carried with all the care of a sack of spoiled meat.

Time to take out the garbage.

33

It took a while for them to get the small door open. I heard tumblers and clicks and machine whirrs—some kind of electronically driven combination lock. No one spoke. I was held fast by the limbs, trunk dangling, joints aching. Staring at trouser legs and shoes . . . Click.

Inside. Floor level. Cement floor. Cold, conditioned air—or maybe I was shivering for another reason.

I was carried by silent pallbearers through an aisle sided with high tan walls. Cardboard tan. Partitions. Plywood doors. A warehouse. Sectioned into cubbies. Unevenly lit. Patches of illuminated cement flooring followed by intervals of darkness that made me feel as if I’d disappeared.

Now into a larger area. My captors’ footsteps echoing. Other footsteps now, softer. Distant. I had a sense of vast open space. Cold space.

Hell was a warehouse. . . .

Was this how lab animals felt, readied for air-freight?

Then other sounds: typewriter pecks. Computer bleeps. Scraping soles.

More cardboard. Boxes, stacks of them. I made out lettering. Black-stenciled. printed material. special rate. Lots of those. Then a few that said machinery. fragile.

A flash of yellow. I twisted to see what it was. A forklift. And another. Several smaller vehicles that looked like sit-down lawn mowers. But no gas stink here. Just the yeasty, respectable fragrance of fresh paper.

Lots of huffing and puffing from my bearers. My eyes raced past trouser legs. A few pairs of stockinged female calves. I began counting feet. Two, four, six, eight, ten . . . I craned upward, hurting my spine, wasn’t able to make out faces.

The aisle angled to the left. My journey as hunting trophy continued for another twenty paces before coming to a sudden stop. Heavy breathing, locker-room sweat. The hands holding me lifted and twisted. All at once I was upright, arms still fastened behind me.

Coming face to face with Them.

Blanchard. Trying to smile while huffing.

Others. Ten of them. Younger. Clean-cut.

I knew them without knowing them. Had seen them at a school. Attending a shooting. Enjoying a concert.

Bright-eyed, then. Dead-eyed tonight. Faces set in the mire of obedience. As if the internal light in each of them had been switched off. Conservation of personality.

The other times, they’d dressed for success. They were dressed for something else tonight: black turtlenecks over black jeans and sneakers. The proper attire for an all-night wait in a storage shed. Or a backyard killing.

I said, “Hello, boys and girls. Take me to your leader.”

It shook a couple of them out of their zombie reverie. They held on to me but retracted their heads, as if I’d just given off a bad smell.

It talks.

Blanchard stepped forward and backhanded me hard across the face. My head twanged from the blow. I focused away from the pain—from the fear. Looked past all of them. Narrow passageway created by ten-foot-high stacks of printed material cartons. Directly in front of me was a black wooden door. Something painted on it. A red circle containing a spearhead.

Someone stepped out from behind one of the cartons. Someone wiggle-walked toward me.

Beth Bramble in a long-sleeved black dress. Her hair was drawn back tight. Chromium thunderbolt earrings dangled from her earlobes.

I struggled to clear my throat and said, “Mourning period over for the beloved leader?” It hurt to talk.

Blanchard hit me again. Bramble said, “Aw,” the laughter back in her voice.

She came closer, making kissy-poo movements with her lips. She’d eaten something with a lot of garlic in it. It folded into her perfume—floral pizza.

She chucked me under the chin. Pinched me by the cheek Blanchard had slapped. Pinched it again, harder, twisted, and smiled.

Through the agony I said, “Secret agent time, Beth? Nothing like getting an inside track on the opposition.”

She smiled, said, “Fuck you, darling,” pinched me again, let her fingers drop down my shirtfront, then my fly. She lingered there, gave me a playful honk. Someone snickered. Bramble winked at the young ones, turned, and disappeared behind the cartons.

Blanchard knocked on the black door.

A muffled reply came from the other side.

Blanchard opened it, put his head in, and said, “He’s here, D.F. Everything smooth as silk.”

Another muffled answer.

I was shoved in, and the door slammed behind me.

The room wasn’t much, maybe fifteen feet square, poorly lit. Maroon linoleum floor worn through to the concrete slab in several spots, block walls painted institutional white, warped acoustical ceiling browned by moisture, sheet-metal ceiling vent that dumped out stale, frigid air.

In the center was a seven-foot olive-drab desk that had to be army surplus. Two green metal chairs sat in front of it. Extra chairs stood folded in one corner. On top of the desk was a black multiline phone and a short stack of papers weighted down by a tarnished artillery shell. Running against the left wall was a brown couch that looked thirdhand.

Bunker-nouveau? All that field-command drabness provided a nice sense of contrast with what covered the wall behind the desk. A flag big enough for City Hall. Black muslin bordered in red satin. In the center a red spear-in-a-circle motif.

Gordon Latch sat on the couch, wearing double-pleated ankle-pegged black slacks with narrow cuffs, black snakeskin boots with riding heels, and an oversized black silk shirt buttoned at the collar in the pseudo-nerd style favored by actors and dope dealers. The shirt had twin breast pockets with flaps, pearl buttons, and ostentatious epaulets. Chrome spears glistened from the lapel tips. His legs were crossed, his posture relaxed—the casual but calculated slump of an old favorite guest on a late-night talk show.

He tossed me a victory smile. The smile flickered. His triumph marred by something . . .

I looked over at the green desk and understood.

Behind it sat Darryl “Bud” Ahlward in a high-backed green leather swivel chair. His uniform was identical to Latch’s but for rainbow splashes of battle ribbons over each breast pocket and a black leather shoulder holster from which a black gun butt protruded.

Gold
spears on his lapels. Despite the generous tailoring of the shirt, his shoulders stretched the arm seams.

He sat very straight and very still, eyes static and changeless.

I turned back to Latch and said, “Nifty little role reversal. Still second cadre, huh, Gordon?”

Latch sat up straighter and started to speak. Ahlward shoved the words back down his throat with a quick look. Latch turned away from both of us, recrossing his legs and making a show of boredom.

I said, “So this is what the well-dressed storm trooper’s wearing this season. What’s the official greeting?
Sieg
Heil Ciao
?”

Ahlward reached across his chest and took the gun out of his holster—a big black affair with a long barrel and a high-tech profile. He caressed it, then pointed it at me.

“Sit down.”