Toe Tag.
Shit.
Goddamned Boo Radley with a chloroform rag and a bone saw.
The knob moves again, the faintest tick like a spider trapped inside the tumbler. The rabid lab weasel locked in my chest fights with the coked-up monkey, both tearing at my insides and shrieking in my ears.
The television will go through the door if I have a running start. Those three or four or five steps might give me away, but Toe Tag won’t expect me to get the drop on him. All I need is an unconscious Toe Tag on the hallway floor, lock pick in one hand and piano wire in the other, to clear things with Anslinger.
I sprint, screaming Fuck you, Boo Radley, and the airborne television’s cord catches my wrist, nearly ripping my arm from the socket. I’m waving through the splintered hole in my door, my hand turning purple from the power cord cinched around the wrist but the hallway is empty. Goddamn, he’s fast.
seventeen
I’m having a tough time explaining this to Anslinger. As well as being on the Warden’s shit list, I’m in deep with the Firebird residents. A crashing door sounds like the apocalypse to them, and a visit from the law suspends all activity, the buying, selling, shooting and bartering. The Firebird’s lifeblood freezes for a window as crippling as it is brief.
“I do a birth record search on ‘Toe Tag,’ what am I going to find?”
Anslinger wears black today. The kerchief tucked into his front pocket shifts between blue and green when he moves beneath the light. He scans my brain tissue while a pair of plainclothes cops wearing rubber gloves toss my room. They pile their plunder atop my mattress—my clothes, bug spray, yellow marking paint, boric acid, steel wool. They tag my notebook, drop it into a property envelope. A uniform takes notes while we speak. Another snaps pictures of my dissections and diagrams. They’re new to the force, straight from the assembly line. Their fresh static burns my nose and makes my eyes water but my hands are cuffed.
“I’m sure it’s a nickname,” I say. “That name can’t be real.”
“You’ve got great instincts, my man. This retarded savant killer couldn’t possibly have a name like that.”
“I’ve seen him.”
“You mean you think you remember meeting him.”
“No, I’ve seen him,” I insist. “Some details are crystal clear. Others are sketchy. Things are coming to me but it’s hard. Does this make me cooperative or not?”
“If I come to you, that makes you uncooperative, but my disposition can change depending on what I learn from you. I’m in a good mood today,” he says, “so I’ll cut you some slack in this particular instance. Tell me more. Who looks after this short bus assassin?”
Toe Tag works the muscle for the chain with his stun gun, syringes, plastic bags, draining shunts, bolt cutters and bone saws. He answers to his father, Manhattan White, a ranking executive in the chain that funded the lab. White runs things according to Hoyle’s instructions, who controls the chain and its assets. I started out experimenting and they pulled me in. The money was good and it was supposed to be short-term.
Anslinger leans against the wall, wetting the filter of a fresh cigarette between his lips, James Dean cool. His lighter chimes like a round snapping into a chamber. His tape recorder stares at me with its glowing red eye, a lump of primitive mechanics and magnetic tape. He must think I’m insane to fall for such a cheap decoy.
A field medic examines my bandages, runs a gloved fingertip over the bites on my arms, then swabs one in the crook of my elbow with alcohol.
“Are they infected? Maybe I’m having an allergic reaction.”
“These aren’t insect bites.” He addresses Anslinger instead of me.
The uniform reads my statement, unable to keep a straight face. A bug clamps onto my arm, I think, but it’s medic shooting something into my vein.
“Easy,” he says.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Thank you, doctor,” says Anslinger, but the man’s not a doctor and Anslinger isn’t paying idle courtesy. He’s sending a high-frequency signal that everyone catches at once, everyone but the rookies. The rubber glove cops drop everything and exit without a word. The field medic slaps his kit shut and leaves without bandaging my leaking injection point. The rookies stand bewildered, not tuned to Anslinger’s wavelength of command. In two swipes, Anslinger rips the notebook and camera from their hands, like pulling the cloth from beneath a banquet setting. He dismisses them both.
The room is empty but for Anslinger and me. The warden’s handyman removed the television and the remains of my door. I hear murmuring from the hallway.
Anslinger crouches to my level. He locks his brown eyes onto mine and stares through to the inside of my head. Blood moves to my brain, fueling my thoughts. Anslinger can read the heat patterns with those eyes. He needs neither a tape recorder nor some rookie’s notes or pictures. Here comes his Big Speech, I think, but he smiles, stands and leaves.
Something bites my chest. I hunch my shoulders to scrape it with my chin but it’s too low. It severs its tracking chip head into my bloodstream then crawls deaf, blind and leaking around my belly, down my back and drops out my shirttail. It sounds like a bottle cap hitting the floor.
My notebook slaps the desk, freed from its brown envelope and one-way ticket to the evidence locker.
“If it were up to me, I’d beat your ass into the dirt,” the uniform says. The name below his badge reads “Officer Lloyd Delgado.” The note taker.
It’s not up to you, I think, though I have the sense not to say it out loud.
“It’s your lucky day.” He hisses into my ear with a voice like a blown speaker. “He must really like you.” As he unlocks my cuffs, he torques my wrist until pain shoots up my arm.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know when he doesn’t.”
I massage the feeling back into my arm. Officer Delgado, Anslinger and everyone else are gone, as though they silently faded into nothing.
The warden steps into my doorway, his jaw set. If he doesn’t kick me out, it means Anslinger had a talk with him.
“You need anything?” he asks.
“A door.”
“I know you need a door.” He looks to his left and right, then speaks in a low voice. “You bring that kind of heat here again, they’ll be carrying you out.” He leaves.
The warden’s handyman, wearing work gloves and a canvas tool belt, props a door in the hallway outside, a spare that’s been collecting dust and mildew in the basement.
“I hear you’ve got a bug problem,” he says.
eighteen
ONE OF WHITE’S STUTTERING LAB GEEKS GAVE WORD THAT A COYOTE BY THE handle of High Tail had gone supernova between drops, scorching his ghost onto a patch of Route 127 like a Nagasaki flash shadow. I was carrying four pounds of lysergic acid amides in my trunk when I stopped to check my messages from a gas station pay phone. Otto was wiping dragonfly guts from my windshield when I heard the black magic word assigned to the signal man working Gotham.
“Hindenburg.” Dial tone.
A Wicker Man could be contained. A Hindenburg meant an accident en route, so the highway patrol knew about it first. My Gotham man had been on point, ears glued to the scanner, but he’d been taking payment in product to stay awake. His panic was contagious.
The signal man picked up on the first ring.
“Go,” he said. Emergency phone protocol. Say nothing explicit and keep it short.
“Yes or no,” I said. “Nothing else. Is Angela there?”
“Yes.”
If a tapeworm in the phone picked up the name, it wouldn’t matter. Angela was code—wipe everything down.
“Cargo.”
“I didn’t—”
“Cargo.”
“No.”
They should have packed while waiting for me to phone. The drill called for the crew to load their belongings—nobody brought more than a single bag—wipe everything down, salvage the product, abandon the glass
and cut our losses.
“Then everyone pack up and walk,” I said. “And I mean walk. Do you understand?”
“There’s—”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Product?”
“No.”
“You know where to whisper?”
“Tell me,” he said.
“I’ll tell you when you get there.”
“In thirty.”
“Twenty.” I hung up.
Once the authorities ID’d our dead man, they’d run his arrest sheet, bank and credit card action, phone records and every pay phone within a mile of his residence, and repeat the same for his known associates and lean on every one of them with both barrels. Delinquent parking fines, outstanding warrants, parole violations, child protective services, property search and seizure, rat jackets.
Somebody always talks. Always. The cops dangle immunity deals and cash payouts from seized trafficking assets. Nobody gets cuffed and stuffed solo, and every one of them knows someone else, their best friend, wife or children, who will break in exchange for the free ticket out and a marked bankroll. They had to be faster than the next guy, so our crews had to be faster than the DMV and dental records.
We were en route from Texas. I’d grown a culture of claviceps fungus at Gotham, then moved it via coyote to a location code-named Sleepy Hollow, where the crew used it to infect a rye crop. Otto and I arrived just after their midnight harvest. I worked with them until sunrise pulverizing the seeds and showing them how to leech out the fats with toluene. The resulting black mash was sensitive to light, air and temperature change, so I triple sealed it on dry ice before I hit the road. On certain runs, I prefer my own wheels. I didn’t want one of White’s idiots veering into a reservoir or river. The call from Gotham confirmed my caution.
One cook was legend. His blotter sheets were ready for infusion when he did a face-plant in his own lab. A puddle, a stray cord or a six pack, no one will ever know. He splashed a quart of pure, liquid LSD all over himself as his head hit the concrete. He went black for a week. To this day, he swears he reinvented acid, but his girlfriend’s dog was a spy for the government who stole the recipe and engineered his accident.
I left the crew their cash and instructions to dismantle the lab and abandon Sleepy Hollow. I’d been driving ever since. We had to store the ice chest at Gotham until runners arrived with the other materials. I was anxious to get home, Otto was anxious to hit the Vegas tables for an afternoon.
Otto reached into the car and flashed the headlights. I waved him off. He resumed cleaning the windows. Wasps, crickets, moths, locusts and horseflies grew bigger the deeper into Texas we drove. Where men are men and so are the insects, he’d said. They hit my windshield at 70 mph like small rocks, held on long enough to crack out the whiplash then flew away. Others exploded on impact, their guts blotting out an entire headlight.
After eighteen minutes, I dialed the second pay phone. The signal man answered, sucking wind.
“Go.”
“Your turn,” I said. I needed details.
“Who is this?”
“You said, ‘Hindenburg,’ that’s who. Tell me everything is sprayed and the glass broken.”
“It’s done. But they wanna get paid and they’re scared. And pissed.”
“If you shut down and dispersed according to procedure, you having nothing to worry about. Everyone will get paid, but they’ll have to wait.”
“I heard about the last one.”
“You heard what?”
“Pinstripe.”
“Shut up.” I listened to the wire hum. Tapeworms don’t click, like the old days. They’re quieter. Alias or not, he said Pinstripe’s name. His crew wasn’t connected with Pinstripe’s crew. The coyotes didn’t know each other or the cargo they carried.
“The guy,” the signal man was stuttering, “he was getting help and nobody’s seen him.”
“Who told you that?”
“I heard.”
From a rogue link in the chain.
“Listen, he screwed up,” I said. “He didn’t follow instructions and had to get help. He’s fine, but he’s out of the crew. That’s why nobody’s heard from him.”
I’d forgotten about Pinstripe as soon as I passed him off to White.
“Now, pull it together and tell me what happened.”
The coyote was carrying phosphorus. Someone overpacked. Someone left impurities in the product. The agitation on the drive created a spark. The CHP found the smoking husk of the VW, the paint blistered from the heat, in the middle of the road, overturned from the driver’s attempt to regain control after the spontaneous combustion of the cargo. He drove the flaming ball for a quarter mile of absolute panic before rolling it, setting off the gas tank and the rest of the cargo.
God, how I missed you then.
A week ago, you blocked my way into your front door after I’d just returned from another road trip.
“Tell me you missed me,” you said.
“I missed you.”
Maybe I didn’t look you in the eye long enough. Maybe my tone was off, ever so slightly.
“Try again,” you said. “And mean it.”
“I missed you,” I said again. “I came straight here. I haven’t been home because I wanted to see you first.”
You smiled, weighing my sincerity against its expression. You stepped aside to let me through. I dropped my bag and pulled you to me, burying my face in your flaming hair.
“I did miss you, Firefly.”
“Don’t call me that.” You took my wrist and pulled me inside.
“I could do this forever,” I said. You squeezed me, lightly. “Just lie here beside you. Watch the sun go down.”
“How can the sun go down forever?” Your voice sleepy.
“Sorry?”
“You said you could do this forever.” You rested your chin on me. Your eyes were brighter.
“And then you said you could watch the sun go down. How can you do both?”
“I try to be romantic and you mince words.”
“Giving you a hard time,” you said, then kissed my chest.
“Maybe the sun could set really slowly. I mean really take its time.”
“Sshhhh.”
Darkness settled. Your curtains open, no moon in the sky. We’d kicked the covers away in the heat, and I wanted to look at you.
“Where are you going?” you asked.
“Bathroom. I’ll light a candle when I get back.”
“Hurry back. No candles,” you said into your pillow.
I thought you were joking until I struck a match.
“Eric, I’m serious. Don’t.”
“Once again, I’m the romantic one.”
You said nothing, your face away from me.
“Hey. Your house burn down or something?” Your room grew darker in the silence. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You didn’t know. It’s just my stupid hang-up.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“It’s stupid. I’m paranoid, and that’s stupid.”
“You’re paranoid about fire in general or just candles? Is that how your house burned down?”
“No, that’s the stupid part. It was a fire in our kitchen when I was four years old. My mom was cooking. But I’ve been really sketchy about some things ever since. I hate gas stoves. Candles didn’t always bother me, really, until an old roommate of mine started a fire in our apartment. She was stoned.”
“You’ve had two homes burn down.”
“No, the second time wasn’t serious. She lost a bunch of her stuff to smoke and water damage. But when I was little, our family lost everything. Nobody got hurt, but everything was gone.”
“Where were you?”
“I was watching the parade.”
“What parade?”
“We lived near a middle school and their marching band would practice around o
ur neighborhood. I used to run outside because I thought it was a parade. My own parade, every day.”
“You were saved by a marching band.”
“After my roommate started the fire in our apartment, I think I freaked. I don’t remember, but I definitely overreacted. Then she told them about me, so this asshole fireman thought he could get into my pants. He got our number and kept asking me out. I said no for three weeks before he gave up. Guys were always saying they had gone through the training or were thinking about becoming firemen. Like I was some damsel in distress who’s going to get wet over firemen.”
“When it’s really marching bands that get you hot.”
“Go home.” You hit me with a pillow.
“I’m going to learn the trombone.”
“You’re a jerk.”
“And wear one of those shiny hats.”
“They’re called shakos.”
“Busted.”
You hit me again.
“Forget it,” I said. “I’m going whole hog and learning the tuba.”
“Good. The standup lessons aren’t paying off.” You left for the bathroom. I loved watching you in the dark.
Your body jigsaw wedged against mine when I woke, your face against my neck and our ankles interlocked, the morning glow of your room turning into the garish sunlight I’d be driving through, to Texas and back. You were asleep, but still clung fast when I tried to get out of bed. The hot shower pounded me awake and I ran through my departure checklist. I gave myself five days for the round trip.
I leaned over to kiss you before I left, and you pulled away.
“Do you have to leave again?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you wait for a day?”
“No. Please, let’s not get into that.”
“One day.”
“Please,” I said. “It’s my turn to be serious. Please don’t harass me about work. I’ll call you, every day. At least once, I promise.”
“Promise me.”
“I just did.”
“Say it again.”