Dead and Gone b-12 Page 8

  “How many were on the set?”

  “At least four, counting the kid. If he was a kid. I think he was. But it was dark, and I wasn’t that close.”

  “Just you. And four of them. And still you …?”

  “When the kid popped me, I took the rounds in the Kevlar … and whatever that stuff was that the Mole wove over it. I dropped. Pansy charged out of the car. She went for the kid. The guy behind me, the one picking up the money, he shot at her, but he missed. Pansy got the kid. Brought him down. Two others came out of their truck. My people opened up. The leader—the guy with the money in his hand—he told them to clear out. But to finish me first. That’s when I got … this,” I said, touching the right side of my face.

  “So they John Doe’ed you at the hospital?”

  “Yeah. Only this happened in Hunts Point, right? But I was transferred. When I came to, I was in Manhattan.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did your people drop any of them?”

  “Pansy got one,” I said, my voice strangling on pride and pain. “She got the kid. They … killed her. Right there. Right in front of me. They killed her and there was nothing I could …”

  My face was leaking. Just on the right side. I wiped it away with my palm, hard.

  “Another one of them got it, too. But they took their dead with them. And my people took Pansy. There’s nothing left there but blood in the ground.”

  “So you went back to … the person … to find out … what?”

  “A lot of stuff. But once I found out that the people whose kid was taken made it part of the deal that I be the transfer-man, all I wanted was how to find them.”

  “And he wouldn’t—?”

  “He killed my dog,” I cut her off. “He killed Pansy.”

  Wolfe took a sip of her coffee, her pale eyes steady on me. “People say things like that all the time. ‘If anyone ever hurt my dog, I’d kill them.’ But they don’t mean it. It’s just their way of saying how much they love their pet.”

  “Pansy wasn’t my—”

  “I know,” she said, gently. “But what do you have now?”

  “You mean, without that … person, right? Here’s what I have: The names and last known address of the people who hired him. And the knowledge that somebody wants me dead bad enough to pay a whole ton of money to get it done.”

  “You’re well away,” she said. “It’s been months. Whoever wanted you, they don’t know how to find you. If they could, they would have made their move already.”

  “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life as a target.”

  “What’s the difference, if you’re a target they can’t hit?”

  “Because there’s other things I’d rather be.”

  “For instance?”

  “At the other end of the sniper-scope,” I said.

  She looked into me. I wanted to reach across the table and just … touch her hand, maybe. But I froze. It was her call.

  “I need a few days,” she said. “And your passport.”

  I handed it over. Wolfe got up and walked away. Pepper flashed me her trademark grin, telling me to stay where I was. I could feel someone standing just behind me. I sipped my cold hot chocolate, alone.

  When I was a kid, I thought there was a way not to hurt. I wanted to be like Wesley. Ice. So cold inside that I wouldn’t feel a thing. Wesley was the only one I ever knew who actually got past it all. He had no hate in him. Nothing made him angry. All he wanted was to get paid.

  But he got tired. So tired that he checked out.

  Wesley taught me the difference between sad and depressed. People never get that one. I was born sad. I probably knew my mother didn’t want me even before she climbed out of that bed in the charity ward and strolled back to wherever I’d been spermdonored. I’m what happens when the trick tricks the hooker.

  My birth certificate may not have had a full name on it, but it did have a number—and I’ve had one or another of those ever since. I’ve been a file, a case, a subject, a foster kid, a mental case, a JD, a convict. None of the endless agencies ever knew me. They always got it wrong. But that didn’t matter to them—they always had my number.

  When you’re depressed, it all slips away. You stop caring, about anything. A depressed person, he can’t feel anything for anyone else. Empathy dies first.

  That’s the way they labeled Wesley. Killer sociopath. He wasn’t a man; he was a machine. You gave Wesley a name, you got a body. And Wesley got paid. A never-miss, platinum-proof perfect assassin. No friends, no family, no lover, no pets. No apartment, no house, no home.

  And what it finally came down to was … no reason to be here anymore.

  He went out with a bang. A big bang, taking a couple hundred along for the ride. Those kids at Columbine? They weren’t the first. Wesley was. He walked into an exclusive high school in the suburbs, carrying enough munitions to smoke every living human in the joint. And the truck he drove up in was full of some kind of poison gas, too. He went in there to die. And, like every other murder he planned, it worked.

  Crazy. Maybe that’s what you’d think. Depressed, suicidal. It wasn’t any of that. He was tired, that’s all.

  He left me something. A note. A suicide note, the way the cops saw it. For me, it was an escape hatch. In that note, Wesley took the weight for a lot of stuff I did. Signed it with his own fingerprint … the only part of him that the world ever recognized.

  If he’d been depressed, instead of just DNA-deep sad, he wouldn’t have looked out for me that one last time. We were brothers. Came up together.

  Wesley was ice, even then. I wanted to be just like him, once.

  It was Wesley himself who told me the truth. He had no fear in him. And it wasn’t worth it.

  So I knew. I wasn’t depressed; I was sad. I don’t know what other people who are sad do to fight back. I know some of what they do. Drugs, booze, sex—risks. I don’t know if it works for them, or for how long. But, for me, I could BASE-jump on cocaine and it wouldn’t change a fucking thing.

  The only thing I ever can do is let both the monsters in. Fear and Rage. One keeps me alive and the other makes people dead. If you took them from me, I’d just be sad. Nothing else. Empty and sad. That’s when the Zero calls. That’s when I want to go and be with Wesley.

  Maybe it would be like when we were kids. Leaning up against an alley wall, sharing a cigarette, eyes scanning, on full alert. Waiting.

  Depending on who showed, we’d run, fight, or rob them.

  But I don’t really believe that. I know where Wesley is. I know why they call it the Zero.

  But it pulls me, still.

  Max got back from Mama’s, came upstairs to my room, signed “telephone.” Then tapped his heart, pointed at me.

  I shrugged a “Huh?” back at him.

  He made the gesture for “Wolfe.”

  I called at eleven, like she’d left word to.

  “It’s me.”

  “Immigration has them still at that address.”

  “Illinois?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could it just be lag-time in getting the records updated?”

  “It could be,” Wolfe said softly, “if I were relying on their records.”

  I got the message. “Last contact?” I asked. “Almost a year ago. They made an application to sponsor a relative.”

  “I’m missing a piece. More than one.”

  “We’ve got someone out there.”

  “INS?”

  “Chicago PD.”

  “You said … Never mind. He’s with you? Or just someone who can be worked with?”

  “The former. And you and he have mutual interests, anyway.”

  “How could that be?”

  “He wants the missing kid,” Wolfe said.

  Even if the DEA wasn’t lurking around every big-city airport, fitting passengers into their lame “profiles,” everyone on my side of the line knows better than to buy a ticket wi
th cash. That one’s a guaranteed red flag. They want photo ID now, too, so slipping through the cracks isn’t as easy as it used to be.

  I didn’t know how far my new face would take me. Didn’t know if they had an alert out. My old mug shots wouldn’t match up. I knew they’d photographed me in the hospital more than once, but never without the bandages. Still, the two Bronx detectives had seen the new face enough times so a police sketch artist could probably get pretty close.

  It had been a long time. Happened in late August; now it was the tail end of January. Wolfe said there were no wants-and-warrants out on me. But that didn’t mean they weren’t looking—you don’t need a warrant to bring someone in for “questioning,” especially a two-time felony loser with no known address.

  I wasn’t worried that anyone loyal to Dmitri was looking. I didn’t think there was anyone loyal to Dmitri still alive. If they were, they were holed up somewhere, waiting for their chance to get out of town. Or for a clear shot at Anton.

  But whoever set the whole thing up, they were waiting. Or thought I was dead. And I had no way to tell which.

  I shook my head, as if the movement would clear my thoughts. There were too many possibilities. And not enough data. Maybe whoever set it up did think I was dead. The shooters would have reported that I’d been hit. And that they’d put a round into my skull to make sure. An unidentified guy found dead in the Hunts Point wasteland wouldn’t have been enough to make the papers.

  There would be a record, though. Homicides get investigated, even if not all equally. There’d be an attempt to identify any dead body. And if whoever tried to cap me knew anything about me, they’d know my prints would fall in five minutes.

  So they had a tight time-frame, a location, and plenty of resources. And with Dmitri getting blown away, more than enough to add it up. I had to play it like a hand of five-card stud, now down to the final bet. I couldn’t see their hole card, but there were enough other gamblers at the table so that I had a pretty good count of the deck. I was betting they knew they hadn’t finished the job.

  Wolfe had returned my passport. Some guy nobody recognized dropped it off at Mama’s. It was the same one I’d given her in the restaurant: the beautiful forgery she’d had made for me a while back. The new one had the same phony name. Only now the photo matched my new face.

  But that didn’t mean I should be quick to use it. No matter how big the organization that had tried to kill me was, they couldn’t have been watching all the ways out of town—especially this town—for the past few months. So they couldn’t trap me at the border. But they could follow my trail … if I was dumb enough to leave paper footprints.

  Clarence drove me to Philly. Only took a couple of hours, even with the sporadic snow. I shouldered my duffel bag and stepped into the terminal at Thirtieth and Market, where I grabbed an Amtrak for D.C. It was about ten minutes by cab from Union Station to the bus depot. I was on a Greyhound to Chicago by a little past midnight.

  We hit Pittsburgh by morning, changed buses in Cleveland, made a rest stop somewhere in Indiana, and rolled into Chicago around three-thirty in the afternoon. Going by bus, it takes quite a while. And you have to do without a lot of features the airlines provide. Like metal detectors.

  “You know this town?” The voice on the phone was cop-hard, but with an unmistakable Irish lilt.

  “Been here a few times is all.”

  “You’re not far from Wells Street. Just walk south—away from the lake—a couple of blocks. There’s a bookstore in the twelve-hundred block. Big one. Called Barbara’s. They’re used to all kinds of people in there. I’ll meet you outside at nine tonight. Just stand outside, to the left of the door as you come out. You smoke, right?”

  “No.”

  “Well, just carry a cigarette, then. Explains why you’re standing outside in this weather.”

  “Okay.”

  The bookstore was much bigger than a first glance would tell you. When I walked in, I saw a long narrow corridor with a counter to the right. But it spread out to my left, and just kept going. I wandered through the stacks, passing time until the meet. Walls of books. I thought about how much reading I’d done since … it happened. When I realized how close I’d come to losing my sight, I turned as indiscriminately greedy as a just-paroled prisoner in a whorehouse. I read everything I could get my hands on. Once I settled down, I kept up the reading but got more selective.

  The last few months had been a lot like being back Inside. Reading, lifting weights … getting ready. And most of the time spent scheming about what I was getting ready for.

  I spotted a new Joe Lansdale novel, one I hadn’t read. I almost grabbed it, but I checked myself in time. Maybe they wouldn’t remember every customer, but they were much more likely to remember someone who’d actually made a purchase. Independent bookstores aren’t like the chains. The people who work for the indies, most of them really love books. They’ll use any purchase to engage you in a conversation, find out what you like, try to hand-sell you something they like.

  My cheap plastic electronic watch said it was five minutes to the meet. I knew it kept better time than the Rolex I had stashed in my duffel. I stepped outside and stood with my back to the building, cupping my hands around the flame from the butane lighter as I got a cigarette going. As soon as I did that, a flashlight blinked on and off from inside a white Nissan sedan parked at the curb. The passenger window moved down in sync with my approach. I leaned in.

  “How’s Wolfe these days?” the driver said.

  I got in.

  “Clancy,” he said as he pulled away, holding out his right hand.

  Askew,” I told him, shaking his hand. “Wayne Askew.”

  “Wolfe’s?” he asked. Meaning: he knew my true name, and was the new ID one of Wolfe’s creations?

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded, satisfied. Wolfe’s papers were the best in the business. If I got popped in his jurisdiction, odds were I’d get past the screens—as long as they stopped short of printing me.

  The Nissan was overflowing. One cell phone was recharging from the cigarette-lighter outlet in the console, another sat on top of the dash, next to a small tape recorder, two pagers, and a notebook. There were a half-dozen pens clipped to the dash, and a sheaf of papers bulged from behind the sun visor. The windshield featured a series of hairline cracks. The ones in the dash were well past hairline, deep scars that showed the foam padding underneath. The back seat was covered with cartons, their tops cut off to make a filing system. Books were stacked haphazardly throughout the car, like pebbles from a carelessly tossed I Ching reading.

  “You got a place?” he asked.

  “No. I figured I’d wait until—”

  “Okay. Where’s your stuff stashed?”

  “Bus station. Twenty-four-hour locker.”

  He nodded, not saying anything, letting the fact that we were heading for the depot speak for itself. He stopped outside. I went in, opened the locker, grabbed my duffel. When I got outside, I saw his trunk was open. I tossed the bag inside and climbed back into the passenger seat.

  “You got a change of clothes with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean a change, not fresh clothes. If you want to work the area I think you do, you have to dress the part. Can you go upscale with what you’re carrying around?”

  “I can if I can get into a decent place for a few hours, take out the creases, clean up, and all; no problem.”

  “All right. What about cash?”

  “How much do you—?”

  I interrupted myself when I saw the look on his face. Mumbled, “Sorry.”

  “You think we’re all a pack of bribe-taking slobs?” he said, chuckling.

  “No,” I said truthfully. “A lot of cops aren’t slobs.”

  “Hah! All right, look, the thing about money is this: you’re going to need money if you want to poke around in the ritzy suburbs. That homeless-guy look you’re wearing, the only thing it’ll get you in the pl
aces you need to visit is rousted.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And you’ll need transport, too.”

  “I can pay whatever it costs. But I don’t want to book this ID if I don’t have to.”

  “I can get you a car. But not Hertz rates.”

  “I’m fine with that.”

  The hotel was right off the lake. We walked straight over to the elevators. The security man at the entrance to the elevator bank opened his mouth, then shut it without a sound when Clancy grabbed his eyes.

  The room was on the twenty-first floor, with a view of a driving range below.

  “It’s three hundred a night,” Clancy said. “That includes the room showing as vacant on the computer.”

  I handed him twelve C-notes, saying, “For the car, too,” as I did.

  “Be downstairs tomorrow morning,” he said. “Six a.m., okay?”

  “I’ll be there,” I told him.

  I unzipped the duffel, started laying out my stuff carefully.

  Especially that shark-gray alpaca suit Michelle had insisted I spend a fortune on.

  “This will never show a hint of a wrinkle, honey,” she’d said. “Just hang it in the bathroom and run the shower full-blast hot for an hour or so—it’ll be new every time you put it on.”

  Remembering her muttered threats about never allowing a wire coat-hanger to invade the sacred alpaca, I located a wooden one in the closet and got the steam working.

  Everything I had with me was new. Michelle had measured me herself, done all the shopping. That way, she got to do all the selecting.

  “You need a look, sweetheart,” she said, talking quick and nervous, the way she does when a topic upsets her. “With that face … until it heals, I mean—then you can have plastic surgery and it’ll all be … Anyway, in an Army jacket, you look like a serial killer. But in these clothes, baby, you’ll look exotic, I swear it.”