Upgunned (16 page)

Oh, and I couldn't lie down. I had to sit upright in a chair with my head between two pieces of duct-taped foam, and “try not to look at anything,” and avoid blinking if I could, and seek counsel in my own thoughts for the next eight hours. Rising to recharge the curative gunk in my eye (from two bottles and one tube) proved a bit more difficult than Dr. Falstaff's prestidigitation; he just shot it in there and it somehow stayed. When I tried to do it, my eye teared instantly and flooded out all the medication. I finally smeared lines of ointment on my lower lid and dragged my upper lid over it to transport the salve onto the surface of my eye. I could see in the mirror that the sclera was totally crimson. The goo had the fringe benefit of cementing my eye shut, a microscopic blessing for which I was nonetheless thankful.

Falstaff planted me in his living room until the drop-off time. By now, if Elias had called the cavalry, policemen were checking the hospitals. I could not even tell you what Falstaff was wearing, or what his living room looked like.

I was extremely grateful to Dr. Falstaff, miracle worker, until the Alcaine wore off.

I was very tired—exhausted—but knew I'd never capture anything like sleep.

“The good news,” as I was told by an impeccably manicured and groomed Dr. Frankenfelder in a significantly more upscale medical environment, “is that corneal tissue repairs comparatively rapidly.”

The subdued light in his examination bay was much easier on my headache—my imagined pain, so I hear, from the trauma, because like the organic brain itself, the eyes possess no nerves to transmit pain signals. The “optic nerve” is a signal carrier akin to coaxial cable, uninterested in broadcasts not having to do with visual information. Hence soldiers on the battlefield could reinsert their own eyeballs, popped out under combat duress, feeling (one presumes) only such “imaginary” pain. My imagination had gotten pretty explicit, though.

I went ahead and asked for the bad news, since Dr. Frankenfelder was still waiting for his cue.

“The bad news is that until then, it's going to hurt like hell. I can bump up your scrip for painkillers, but it is vitally important that you do very little over the next couple of days. Apply the meds religiously. Be back in here day after tomorrow unless there's an emergency; you've got the number for that.”

I just couldn't
see
it very well was all.

I blinked.
Flip-flop
. The protruding, pie-wedge shape of gouged cornea opened and closed its yawning mouth, feeling like a cockleburr trapped under my madly flapping eyelid. This boded to be a whole amusement park full ‘o fun. Perhaps the pasty consistency of the antibiotic would help glue down this ocular hangnail?

Good news is always bad news for somebody else, and vice versa.

There was really nothing I could do apart from waiting for it to get better. Memory of the real world, prior to the accident, seemed a week or more distant, but it had only been a few agonizingly protracted hours.

Nervously, I asked if I'll have to wear glasses from now on.

“Maybe. We'll just have to wait and see.”

Glasses. Goggles. A helmet with a visor. Anything, so long as it got better. From this point until the end of my life, I would be jumpier about objects near my head. Treasure your eyes, and for fuck's sake, take care of them. For this first time ever, there was a
difference
between my two eyes. Smoke, cold, allergies, pollution have all assumed an amplified status of threat. Just what I needed—a reason for being
more
paranoid.

The first day of sitting in my modified chair, like Frankenstein's monster waiting for a jump-start, completely sprung my back and neck. Add an orthopedist and masseuses to the menu. Poor old monster; nobody ever got his name right; he was hounded and abused; he wanted a girlfriend and
that
didn't work out; then he educated himself and kicked the ass of his own highborn “creator” … which is more than humankind has managed to date, as a species. The Frankenstein monster should be on our currency as an example to emulate.

He didn't
ask
to be here.

I stupidly attempted to go online and within seconds tears were coursing down my face (rinsing out the medication) and I won a very unimaginary migraine. I ate tasteless food and eliminated it. I became one of those stock-schlock brains in an aquarium, the kind in black-and-white movies that bitch about having nothing to do but
think
.

I had never felt so thoroughly neutralized, and would have willingly taken several bullets to avoid all this.

I requested and got enough powerful meds to keep me asleep through most of the waiting. There was literally nothing else I could do, except perhaps listen to music, or maybe books on audio. And wait. Wait for an entire week to pass as my laggard cornea tried to heal itself.

Frustrating, it was. I ate essentially nothing but soup and lost five pounds.

The sole advantage was that nobody knew I was in Hidden Hills, especially not Mal Boyd. Any attempt to track my cellular movement was doomed to be shunted into tail-chasing frustration, which is why you always sweep for bugs, especially after job meets.

If I contacted Mal Boyd now, he would merely advise that I keep as far from him as possible. If Mal Boyd held back and played it smart, he would begin to perceive my architectural pattern: Ozzy Oslimov overdosed, Cognac simply vanished (as hookers often do), and Nasja Tarasova had been a clear suicide. There were no connection among them, and the window for theorizing such links was shrinking.

Similarly, if Elias McCabe stuck to a fable about interlopers and murder, he would be nakedly available. If he ran, he would graduate to being a Person of Interest in Dominic Sharps's disappearance. It was very possible this here photographer fellow had just snapped and trashed his own place, say, prior to becoming a fugitive.

I wondered if Elias would wise up and cut his cellular leash as I reviewed the data from his phone chip—or tried to. My left eye kept hanging up like a shopping cart with a bumpy wheel. The only position that felt neutral came from rolling it upward all the way. Every movement of my good eye brought a parallel movement of its injured twin, and another stab of pain and phantom light, just as the doctors promised. If I tried to ignore this very real handicap I was adding wear and tear that would delay healing. Try it sometime: try looking at something with one eye while prohibiting the other from following. It cannot be done unless you were Marty Feldman, Kevin Pollak, or a chameleon.

Elias's top five contacts included the blond lady, C
HAR
, who had seen me, J
OEY
, his gofer, N
ASJA
, who didn't matter anymore, somebody named B
RADY
, and at the top of the list, C
LAVIUS
.

Char and Clavius had left for New York, which did not put them high on the list of informants. Mal Boyd wanted a total slate wipe—his usual response to compromise, a downside I had never presented to him before—which meant Char had to be checked off, definitely, and Clavius, maybe.

Then there came Blackhawk and Bulldog, both utility subcontractees. Three options there. Mal Boyd would have them killed independently. He would wait for me to kill them as part of our new deal. Or, most practically, he would aim us at one another, send them to kill me, and deal separately with the last man standing.

This disaster was still containable. I hoped Mal Boyd could see that. I hoped I would not have to take Blackhawk and Bulldog out, because they were essentially blameless.

I was functionally blind, but at least I was not hospitalized, IVed, and sedated. That's sitting duckery.

It was crazy-making. I could do nothing except watch time elapse, and I had people to kill.

Blackhawk and Bulldog showed up to kill me on the third day.

*   *   *

A word on the topic of security: Never assume you're safe.

I watched my exterior perimeter system go passive on the little readout screen as somebody de-lased it outside. Okay: my uninvited visitors were aware of the system and outfoxed it without a noise. They couldn't lick the motion sensors, though, and came in hot, front and rear, simultaneously.

How they found me … well, I just assumed they would.

I had to keep wiping tears away from my left eye. It was devilish, constantly baiting me. It acted completely normal one second, then went “chunky” the next—that's the only way I could describe it. It was hypersensitive to cold, allergens, air, every goddamned thing, responding like a jumpy point man sending his fear back to infect an entire patrol. I could not depend on my vision for split-second options. My answer was stealth and overkill.

Blackhawk worked frontally—of course—and Bulldog handled the rear. They each had a backup man with them, and I marveled at Mal Boyd's cold-bloodedness. My own guys had come to wax my sad crippled ass … and then get killed by their own backup. I wondered why Blackhawk and Bulldog had not seen this. Then again, I had no idea of what they had been told. A survivor might be informative if I could make the idea of a double cross clear. That would be sweet if I could manage the more urgent task, which was keeping my head on my own body.

God, they were good to watch. Both teams came in high-low with maximum coverage of unknown space, and they were immediately aware of the trespass sensors, which one man would fog on a clear signal from the other. Light by telltale light, I watched my sensor grid go to sleep.

Good thing I wasn't in the house. Not technically. I wasn't in any part of the house they could see.

The false wall built by my late Afghani contractors? It was right behind my gun safe, and it would stop a speeding car, so I could not be shot through it. The only vulnerable spot was a horizontal firing port, built so as to be invisible until actual gunfire had to commence as a last resort.

Which was pertinent since the backups both had shotguns—cut-down Benelli SuperNova smooth-bore shorties, from the ugly profile they presented. With no stocks, sights, lasers, or any real way to aim, they were abbreviated weapons strictly for close-quarter carnage, and I knew on discharge they'd kick like a kangaroo with a shock stick up its ass. Probably loaded with fletchettes encased in sabot rounds to spear right through body armor, which all of us were wearing.

I had a fish-eyed view of them via pinhole camera as they rallied in the living room near the fireplace after checking and clearing all suspect space. They seemed a bit befuddled, almost disappointed.

“Nice place,” said Blackhawk, taking in the framed print of
Targets #5
above the fireplace. He gestured idly with the gun in his hand, which looked something like an old Beretta M951R because of the wooden front grip and extended mag. Another close-quarter lead-sprayer.

Bulldog had his trusty
SIG
. In concert with the shotgunners, they were going for a rapier-and-mace combo assault. “Gun safe,” he said, pointing down the hall toward me, or rather, the room I was hiding behind.

“Booby-trapped, I bet,” said Blackhawk.

“So?” said Bulldog, wiping his face. The first jittery flush brought on by their armed breach was past already. “Aren't you curious?”

“You open it, then.”

In fact, there were stacks of cash in there. To attract the greedy eye long enough for a directional mine to detonate.

“Where's our boy?” said one of the shotgunners.

Blackhawk shrugged and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maybe he went out for a burger. Maybe he's banging that high-priced whore, whats-her-name, Saki, Chardonnay…”

“Cognac,” said Bulldog.

“Yeah, whatever. Well, we fucked up the security system already so it would be stupid to just leave for nothing. There any brew in the fridge?”

“I'm not going to open it. You can.”

“Dog, it's a
fridge.
Jesus fucking christ.”

Not bad—I should have thought of putting a mine in the fridge.

Together they drifted toward the kitchen. Blackhawk selected a bottle of Amber Bock and decapped it with his gun.

“Maybe this is sign,” said Bulldog. “Nobody home.”

“Ain't no sign,” said Blackhawk after a long pull. “Maybe he's just flown. I would.”

“It's not right, amigo.”

“I hate it too, but it's him or us. Pick one now if you're not decided. This is a real nice kitchen, ain't it?”

“You thinking panic room?”

“Yup.” Blackhawk finished the beer. “Gun safe.”

Before, they had merely cracked the door for a sneak-and-peek. This time they came into the gun safe room ultra-hot. One of the shotgunners kicked the door full open for a clean field of fire.

That was my cue.

Sometimes the simplest mantraps were the best. One of my favorites was a plain double-aught buck round lodged against a cement nail as a trigger. The shells were cut-downs, inside the door. The nails were in a parallel vertical row under thin spackle inside the wall. I had removed the doorstop so the door would impact the wall, and when it did, the array went off all at the same time. The topmost two shells caught the first shotgunner right in the head, splashing Blackhawk with brains and teeth. The disintegrating door provided extra shrapnel.

There's only one way to outdraw three expert men with automatic handguns and shotguns, and that is with a bigger shotgun.

My AA12—Atchisson Assault Shotgun—is a drum-fed nightmare that can spit five rounds per second on full auto, and my loads were Frag-12s, high-explosive antipersonnel armor-piercers with a burst radius of nine feet. Some maniac in Britain had modified a standard three-inch twelve-gauge shell to deploy tiny rocket fins for stabilization, arm three meters from the muzzle, and detonate on impact. The drum holds twenty of these bad boys, which should inspire your awe. Great if you have to pulp a roomful of terrorists through a window from a hundred yards away; not so great for close quarters, where there was a danger of eating your own frags … unless you have a specialist mess with the fusing and were prepared to deal with the consequences. My rounds came from the same fellow who custom-loaded the cartridges for my long-lost new Kimber. The AA12 has such a controlled kick that you can fire it one-handed, Arnie-style.