Total Immunity (24 page)

He decided not to listen to her anymore. Sometimes a man knows his course and can't be dissuaded from his mission. This was definitely one of those times.

He headed out of the main room, toward the darkened hallway where his trusty old ax lay in the closet behind brooms, mops, and pails.

It would be only a minute or so more, he thought, and he would show her not only his own brilliance, but also her true soul.

Things didn't get much deeper than that.

There it was! Jack had found the item he was looking for.

Fifty thousand dollars paid from Timothy Andreen to a man named Jesse Lopez.

Jesse Lopez, the mechanic at Star Motors in the Palm Desert. Fifty thousand dollars — and not for a car, either. Fifty thousand dollars for “Services Rendered.”

Jack took out his BlackBerry and within seconds had looked up Jesse Lopez's criminal records.

No surprise there. Lopez had done ten years for second- degree homicide in San Quentin.

Jesse Lopez, contract killer. Jesse Lopez, dope dealer. Jesse Lopez, master mechanic. The perfect guy to sever Zac Blakely's brakes?

Jack hit the print button on Andreen's printer, and waited. It was the first time he'd felt really good since Blakely and Hughes had died.

He finally had some hard evidence. What he had to do now was to get Timmy Andreen to roll over on his boss, whether it be Steinbach or Forrester.

And with this little receipt in hand, Jack didn't imagine it would be all that hard.

But he still didn't really know if Blakely and Hughes had been playing a double game. He ran through the accounts quickly and found something else. Something that made his heart sink.

A $100,000 payment to a corporation called Mason Security. Mason . . . as in Mason City, Iowa.

Zac Blakely's birthplace. He remembered it because Blakely had always talked about what a wonderful childhood he'd had out in the Midwest, how things were so idyllic there, how it wasn't anything like L.A., where all a man was judged by was how much money he had.

There it was, Jack thought.

Now it started to make sense.

Blakely had been forced into capturing Steinbach and probably was the reason he got out. But Steinbach didn't trust him anymore, so he had both him and Hughes removed.

He had pretended that he was mad at Jack for busting him, but that was just an excuse for his real motive. Hughes and Blakely knew too much and had to go.

Think of the order in which Steinbach had killed them. First Blakely, then Hughes . . . not first Jack, then Oscar. But if he had been killing them in the order in which he'd made the threat . . . well, that would have been a different story altogether. After all, it was Jack who'd betrayed him, not Blakely or Hughes. It was Jack and Oscar to whom he'd dealt his blood diamonds, and it was them that he'd threatened. So, logically, they should have died first.

But it was Blakely and Hughes who could really put the finger on him for good. In a situation like this, it was only a matter of time before someone found out that two Feds were bent, and they would, of course, roll over on Steinbach.

So Jesse Lopez would be the one to knock them off .

Hell, Jack thought, maybe he and Oscar weren't even on Steinbach's hit list. It all made sense . . . and yet, even now, as Jack printed out the crucial records, he felt he was still missing something.

For example, if this were really about the crooked payments to Blakely and Hughes, why would Steinbach threaten to kill them all? Why not just do it?

The answer might be bravado. Steinbach had plenty of that.

But drawing attention to himself, defying them to catch him

. . . was that the way he had operated in the past?

Not really. Jack thought of the elaborate security measures, the secret airstrips, the bodyguards, and the cleverness of the pool balls . . . All of that bespoke a smart, secretive criminal. Yes, he did have another side, a loud, playboy side that liked expensive wines, beautiful women, and fancy German cars, but Jack had never known him to be quite so verbal about his plans.

It was true that he was angry, especially at Jack, who had become something like a brother or a son to him, and that could have accounted for his threat, which is what Jack had thought at first.

But now that Jack knew for sure that Blakely and Hughes were crooked, the threat seemed somewhat out of character.

There was something wrong with the way he was looking at the case.

Was there some other reason Steinbach had threatened them all? And what was the connection with Witness Protection? How did Forrester figure into all this, or did he?

Christ, would he ever untangle it all?

But no matter. What he had to do now was grab the printed material and get the hell out of there. Then grab Jesse Lopez and see what he could tell them. With a murder rap pinned on him, Jack guessed he might get to a whole new level of the case.

As Jack waited for the first paper to slide toward his hands, Winkie was about to open the closet and grab his old guitar. He was struck by a musical dilemma. Should he play “White Line Fever” for Michelle, or some newer tune? It hardly mattered, he guessed. She probably wasn't a country fan in any case. So do the one he could deliver with the most feeling, the deepest soul. That was the point. He had to teach her how to reach down there and grab her own soul.

He was about to reach inside, past the cleaning fluids, when he heard an odd noise just behind him, across the hall, in Tim's office.

The sound of . . . of . . . the printer going off .

Winkie forgot all about his mission to get Michelle up to
American Idol
status.

He had an important mission to perform.

Someone was breaking into Mr. Tim's office, and it was up to him to stop them. Man, when he did that . . . He'd be back in Mr. Tim's good graces, for sure!

He held his .44 Magnum in his right hand, while he stuck his key into Mr. Tim's door with his left.

Then he turned and blasted through the door with all his weight.

Inside, a shaft of light from the hallway blinded Jack. He reached for his own gun, but never had a chance.

The gagging, cough-racked voice of Wink spoke volumes:

“Well, well, look who we have here! What are you up to,
Junior
?”

Junior? What the fuck was the great moron talking about?

Jack was about to come up with something clever, but he saw the barrel of the .44 in front of him, and Winkie's enraged, snarling face. Jack glanced at the window to his left. But there was no way.

When he looked back at Winkie, the giant was already on top of him. He smashed Jack hard in the forehead with his gun butt.

Jack fell quickly and heavily to the floor. The last thing he saw before he blacked out was a sneering porcine face, leering down at him with obvious glee.

31

WHEN HE AWOKE, Jack tasted sweet, hot blood — his own.

His arms were bound behind his back. There was a killer pain in his shoulders, and another one in his left temple.

He half-expected Winkie to be standing over him with a baseball bat, but instead there stood a very dapper-looking Tim Andreen, dressed in a sharp-looking silk suit and a black-and- white–patterned tie.

Jack was sitting in what seemed to be a cane chair with the back half busted out.

Where the hell was he? Certainly not at the Valentine Club anymore. The place had the look and worn smell of an old ranch somewhere in the Valley . . . the kind of place only known to the coyotes and wolves that howled outside at the besmogged stars.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the low light, he looked over at the cages just behind Andreen.

There was Winkie, leaning on one of them and smiling at him in an ugly way.

A tangle of snakes crawled up and down a piece of carved driftwood which sat in the middle of the cage.

There were pipes assembled from the cage walls, and a red- and-yellow snake crawled there and made a hissing noise which curdled Jack's soul. Jack recognized it at once. A coral snake, the most deadly in the United States.

How many snakes were in there?

It was hard to say. Ten. No, more. Fifteen, at least. More like twenty.

Jack looked up at Andreen, who had a wooden box in his own hands now.

“So, Bobby Hopps, it has come to this.” Timmy smiled and showed a little gum.

“I liked you, too. That's the pisser. I guess I really have to mend my ways. I have always gone by gut instinct. Felt I could tell what was essential to know about a man on the first meeting. And, of course, your introduction to me was so spectacular. I guess I just fell in love with you a little. I don't mean in any fag way, but you know, man to man. You are a charismatic type, Hopps, if indeed that is your name at all. You have the silent- but-deadly act down cold. But unfortunately for you, from now on it's not going to be deadly, but dead. But I can make your death tolerable — even, I might add, pleasant. Through the marvelous world of chemicals, I can send you on to the next, and we all hope, happier world, in a state of advanced ecstasy. Or we can make it more like Hellsville. Now, you may ask by what manner can you make it terrifying? Fire, lead, edged steel? But sir, I must say no to all of those. What I have in mind is much, much worse. Death by Ronnie and Jerry.”

He smiled and slid open the top of the wooden box.

Then he reached in and pulled out a reptile that for a second Jack couldn't name.

“This is Ronnie, a full-grown and very bad-tempered gila monster. Picked up off the Sonoran Desert sands. Ronnie is a fierce little biter, wouldn't you say so, Wink?”

Wink had stepped up and joined his boss now. A diamondback rattlesnake slithered over his forearm and wrapped its head around Winkie's massive bicep.

“That gila can tear through sheet metal, so think what it's going to do to you,
Junior.
Now, he's not very poisonous, as you may already know. But his bite is excruciating. And what we like to do is mix it up a little. We start you off with a little gila juice, and then we add this guy, Jerry-boy, the old diamondback rattler. Trust me, when them two poisons team up, things get pretty interesting,
Junior
!”

Tim waved the gila around slowly in front of Jack's face. It had two big walleyes and a forked, flickering tongue.

“Now maybe you want to tell me just what you were hunting for in my computer?”

“Playing video games,” Jack said. “I come from an impoverished family that only has television.”

“That's funny,” Tim said. “Listen, my friend. We have a piece of paper, which you printed out. Why you would want to see my payment to my Porsche dealer is beyond me. The man was getting me a sweet deal on a Carrera. Admittedly stolen, but I doubt you'd go to all this trouble to find a stolen car. So there must be something else. Of course we could findit if I called in the tech boys, but that might get a bit messy, because once they found it, they'd know, too, and I'd have to off them . . . so suppose you save me all that trouble and tell me what it is.”

He flicked his forefinger on the back of the gila's head, setting the animal into a mad hissing fit.

Then he set it down on Jack's right arm.

Ronnie opened his hideous jaws and slowly clamped them down on Jack's forearm. Jack felt his dry lizard tongue flicking over the skin and then a pain that was beyond endurance. He opened his mouth wide as the gates of hell and screamed.

“Ooooh, that must sting a little,” Andreen said. “Would you call it slashing pain or a deep solid one? I'm guessing slash.”

“Fuck you!” Jack said, gasping for breath.

“Tough nut, hey, Winkster?”

“We'll see just how tough
Junior
is,” Winky said.

The monster dug deeper into Jack's forearm, eating his way through Jack's skin. The sensation of being eaten alive was unpleasant in the extreme.

“Now maybe you want to tell me, and I can give you the proverbial hot shot. A nice mixture of heroin and cocaine, and I send you out with a Fourth of July rocket blast. This way you get all chawed up, and when they find you, your corpse will be embarrassed.”

“Fuck you, Timmy-boy,” Jack said.

“Okay, tough guy. Then it's time for Snakey.”

Without another word, Winkie applied the giant diamondback to Jack's left arm. The snake sank in with two-inch fangs, and Jack screamed again.

“Hey!” Tim smiled a little. “This could be one of those reality shows. A combination of a nature show with the greatest race. World's Greatest Predators, Reptile Division. Which one of these deadly reptiles can kill the asshole the quickest? In the end we'd have a showdown and see which one could kill the other. Of course, that's long after you're dead. By the way, Hopps, I have some antivenom right here, if you want to tell me the truth.”

Jack felt the venom shooting through his system, felt his stomach contracting violently, his head snapping back.

Above him, Winkie smiled and wondered if there was a song in this deal.

“Snakebit by Your Love. . . .”

Jack screamed and his head lashed backward.

“You sure are stubborn,” Tim said. “Maybe we're going to have to go for the coup de grâce. That would be your coral snake. Man, once we put that one in there, there's no antivenom in the world that's going to be strong enough to bring you around. No, Mr. Bobby Hopps will have hopped his last, and since we're going to bury you right out here in the godforsaken San Fernando Valley, none will ever know the pain you have suffered and died from. Now, that is sad . . .”

Jack screamed louder. And spat venomous froth in Winkie's face. Both men leaned back and Jack was able to rock the chair back a tad and violently thrust himself forward, knocking the rattler off at Mr. Tim's feet.

That made it Mr. Tim's turn to scream and fall backward.

He fell into Winkie, and both of them went tumbling down.

As they rose, the snake bit Tim's left thigh and he screamed and grabbed the writhing serpent, flinging it wildly toward Winkie, who fell against the cage, knocking open the half-latched door. As he fell, his head went into the cage and the dozens of snakes seemed to see this as their opportunity to stake their claim on their jailer. Three of them attacked his huge head as he screamed and flailed wildly.