Children of Paranoia (24 page)

Right before he closed the door behind him, I finally mustered up the courage to speak. “He wanted to die, Dan,” I said. “He was waiting for me.” Dan looked at me and nodded to let me know that he understood. Then he closed the door. I'm glad that I said something. I wish it had been enough.

I sat at the counter for another twenty minutes or so before I decided to go to sleep myself. I don't remember what I thought about for those twenty minutes. Before walking back to my bedroom, I turned off all the lights. The darkness felt good. When I got to the bed, I stripped down to my boxers and climbed in. I usually showered after a job, but I didn't need to this time. I just lay in the darkness and closed my eyes.

I awoke to the sound of a bang. A loud, horrible bang. I remember shooting up in bed, sitting up straight, my heart racing, short of breath, before I could even remember what it was that had startled me. Then I remembered. The bang. I jumped out of bed and ran over to the dresser. I pulled open the top drawer and peered inside. My gun, it was still there. I pulled it out of the drawer and carried it with me as I moved through the house. The bang. Had they found out? Had they come back for vengeance already? I moved through the house without turning the lights on. If there was anyone in there, I'd get the jump on them. I moved quickly, holding the gun up near my head so that I could aim and fire it quickly if I needed to. The gun was starting to feel dangerously comfortable in my hands. The living room was empty, as was the kitchen. I noticed a light coming from Dan's room. I moved more slowly and quietly as I approached. I turned the doorknob to his bedroom and swung open the door. His bedroom was empty, his bed unmade. There were six or seven empty beer bottles sitting on top of his nightstand. The light was coming from the crack below the door that led to his bathroom. “Dan?” I shouted. There was no response, no movement whatsoever. I held the gun out in front of me and pushed open the bathroom door.

The white linoleum was covered in blood. It was splattered all over the tiles on the wall. It had already begun to drip toward the floor, creating long red stripes against the white wall. Dan's body was slumped against the wall, his head slacked and his jaw hanging open. The back of his head was missing. In his hand was an old revolver. I looked down at the gun. There were still five bullets left. The only one that was missing was the one that had traveled through Dan's mouth, out the back of his head, and into the wall.

I had no time for sympathy or anger or whatever other emotion I was supposed to have at that moment, looking down on Dan's wasted body. I had to get out of there. I had to move fast. Anyone could have heard that gunshot and called the police. The police could already be on their way. Dan's suicide would be easy enough to cover, but they'd eventually find Jim's body too. I had to leave, and I had to cover my tracks. I ran back into my bedroom and grabbed my backpack and my duffel bag. I'd be leaving on foot, so I would have liked to carry as little as possible. I took the gloves back out of the backpack and slipped them back onto my hands. I pulled the rope that I had used to strangle Jim out of the backpack as well. Then I dropped the backpack and the duffel bag near the back door and went back into the bathroom where Dan's body was lying. I knelt down beside his body, careful not to step in any of the blood that had seeped down to the floor. I didn't want to leave any suspicious shoe prints. I took the gun out of Dan's hand. I took both his hands in mine and began to wring them around the rope that I had used to kill his best friend. I rubbed until there was visible rope burn on his hands. “Sorry to tarnish your good name, Dan, but you didn't exactly leave me with much choice,” I said to what was left of Dan's head. Some of the fiber from the rope and possibly even some of Jim's blood should have gotten on Dan's hands to match the rope burn. When I was done with that, I put the gun back in Dan's hand. I took the rope and placed it on Dan's night-stand, near the incriminating, empty bottles of beer. Then I grabbed my things and ran out the back door.

Crystal Ponds didn't afford much cover. The palm trees and low bushes wouldn't have worked in a ten-year-old's game of hide-and-seek. They surely didn't provide cover for a full grown man. Instead, I slipped from house to house, hiding along the unlit outside walls of homes, trying not to walk past any windows. Eventually, I got out of the neighborhood and onto the highway. Next to the highway there was a long stretch of barren woodland. It would provide me with enough cover to get away from Crystal Ponds.

I was just hoping to make it downtown before it started to get light out. There I could find some shelter in the crowds. Maybe I could even find a place to stay and rest for a couple of hours. A couple of hours, then I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. On my way downtown, I passed a brand new condo development. There were only a couple of finished units, but one of them had a sign out front labeling it an open house. I decided to see if there was any truth in advertising and was lucky enough to find that the sliding glass door in the back had been left unlocked. I slipped inside, thinking that I could lay low in there for a few hours while the heat died down. I'd attract a lot less attention walking around with my duffel bag in the daytime than I would at four in the morning.

The little model home was fully furnished. There were even some cookies and bottled water in the refrigerator. I drank two bottles and tossed the empties in the garbage under the sink. I didn't turn on any lights or any of the appliances, but I did set the alarm clock in the bedroom for six-thirty. It was three o'clock in the morning when I climbed into the bed. Three hours of sleep would have done me well. Unfortunately, when I lay down, it was like uncorking a bottle. All the emotion that I had suppressed upon seeing Dan's body slumped on the floor slowly came to me. I ached, but I don't know if I was feeling anger or grief. I wanted to be mad at Dan, mad that he couldn't have waited one more day and let me leave with a clear conscience. But what I felt was grief, grief for this poor old bastard who'd had every last thing in his life taken away from him. What had I done? First I had almost killed a civilian in Montreal and now this. I tried thinking of you, to see if it could clear my head, but the image of Dan's body slumped on the floor, streams of his own blood trickling down the wall around him, kept returning. I thought about the pictures on Dan's bookshelf, souvenirs of a life gone horribly wrong.

“I'm sorry, Dan,” I whispered into the darkness. I hoped somehow that he could hear me. I closed my eyes but didn't sleep. I just lay there for three hours, wishing time away. I thought about Dan's first toast, when he took me out drinking, “To breaking the bastards' backs before they break ours.” I guess the order didn't really matter, did it, Dan? A broken back is still a broken back.

I got out of bed at six, a half hour before the alarm was set to go off. There was simply no sense in my lying in bed anymore. I searched the house for a phone. They had one phone set up, hanging on the wall near the kitchen. I picked it up and got a dial tone. I dialed the number for Intel. Jimmy Lane, Sharon Bench, Clifford Locklear. I was patched through to Allen.

“Don't say anything to me unless the job is done,” Allen said as soon as he picked up the phone. So much for hellos.

“The job's done, but there were complications,” I replied.

“You're the fucking king of complications.” Allen was on a roll. “Is he dead?”

“My target?” I asked

“Yes,” Allen replied.

“Yeah, he's dead.”

“Well, then, that doesn't sound that complicated. That actually sounds pretty simple.” God, I hated him.

“He's not the only person who's dead. My host is dead too. He shot himself in the head.”

“Well, it serves your host right for fraternizing with the enemy.” Allen knew. The bastard knew. People knowing more than me was quickly becoming an unpleasant trend. “So how did you handle it?” Allen asked. It was a test.

“I planted the evidence of the murder on my host. I tried to make it look like a murder-suicide.” That's what the papers would say, and the police, “murder-suicide.” In the end they'd be right; they'd just have the labels backward.

“Good work, kid. Very clever. Maybe I'll make something of you yet.”

“Anyway, I need to get out of town. I did your job. I'm ready to go back to Montreal.”

“I'll send you back to Montreal, kid, but it's going to take some time. Rent a car. Start heading north. I have a few jobs that I want you to do along the way.” I wanted to argue, but I remembered how far that had gotten me last time. Allen gave me the next code: “Mary Joyce. Kevin Fitzgibbon. Richard Klinker.” Then he hung up.

Allen's few jobs took me the better part of three weeks and totaled four more bodies. After only two of the killings, I was begging off the job. I told him that I couldn't do it anymore. I asked him if I could teach a class instead, that I was willing to work doing other things. He told me that I wouldn't be teaching any classes anytime soon, that I had get my head back on straight before they'd let me influence the next generation again. “We need men teaching tomorrow's men,” I believe he told me. “Right now, you're not man enough for that job.” So he kept me killing instead. I was man enough for that.

First there was a thirty-five-year-old man in Georgia. He was a recently retired assassin for their side. He had just settled down with his new wife and was ready to start a family. His new wife wasn't born into the War. She married into it. Allen gave me the “option” of taking her out as well. I declined.

The second killing was a woman in Tennessee. She was just a dispatcher. I asked Allen why we were bothering killing dispatchers. He told me only that this was war and that she worked for the other side and that we wanted everyone who worked for the other side to tremble in fear at the thought of us. “Until they are defeated, every last one of them is a target. They kill ours and we have to strike back.” I assume this meant that one of our dispatchers, one of the joyfulsounding women who shuttled me from place to place when I was calling Intelligence, had been murdered. It seemed a horrible waste to me, on our side and theirs.

The third was a twenty-one-year-old black kid in Washington, D.C. He was poor. He lived in a tenement house in Southeast D.C. with his entire family. He put up a hell of a fight. It took me two days in a hotel room to recover. I had a small knife wound as well as scratches and bruises all over my body. He'd begun killing for them when he was eighteen and had already amassed a portfolio of murders. He was vicious. Once he knew he wasn't going to survive, he did his best to take me out with him. Before he died, I asked him why he did it. Why he fought for people who clearly hadn't given him anything. His response was “They give me hope.” Those were his last words.

 

 

On my second day recovering in the hotel, while still trying to clean my wounds and recuperate, I got a phone call. When the phone in my hotel room rang, I wasn't sure I should answer it. I didn't get phone calls. No one was supposed to know where I was. Allen knew but there was no way he was going to break protocol like that. But it kept ringing. A wrong number would have hung up. On the seventh or eighth ring, I picked up the phone.

“Joe,” an old familiar voice echoed out of the receiver, “for a second there I didn't think you were going to answer.”

“Jared,” I replied, “you have no idea how good it is to hear from you. How did you find me?”

“Forget that,” Jared answered. “Look, I'm in D.C. Do you have any plans tonight?” Plans? What sort of plans would I have?

“Well, I was going to order room service and maybe watch a movie on pay-per-view,” I said.

Jared laughed. “Any way you can cancel those plans and meet me for a drink?” Nothing could have stopped me. I was at one of the lowest points I'd ever been. It was like somehow Jared knew that. It was like he knew just when to reach out to me. Jared suggested that we meet at some old bar in Georgetown. The place was a little out of the way, he said, but that was the draw. It would be quiet. We could talk.

Jared was already sitting in a booth in the back corner of the bar when I walked into the place. It was dark inside. The floor, the bar, and the booths were all made from an old, dark wood. Frank Sinatra was playing on the jukebox. I didn't need Jared to wave me over to him. I saw him right away. I knew which booth he'd be in, the one farthest away from all the bar's other patrons. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the place and they were all sitting at the bar watching a basketball game. I walked past them toward Jared's booth. When he saw me approaching, he got up and gave me a hug. I still wasn't walking right from my last job. It would take some time for the bruises to heal. “You all right?” Jared asked me as we sat down.