Cookie Cutter Man (7 page)

*****

The next morning Echo rolled over in the bed, her groping
arm finding a cool emptiness in the sheets instead of the warm body she’d
expected, become accustomed to. She sat up and blinked several times to rid her
eyes of the sleep caught in them, listening to the apartment. Nothing.

“Daniel?” Echo got out of bed and pulled on his
much-too-big-for-her robe and walked out into the front room, thinking thoughts
of infidelity and desertion even though she knew he’d never cheat on her. There
was a note on top of the television.

Angel

Had to run some errands

be back

Love,

Daniel

He’d never once written her a note in the entire time they
had been together. She stopped and thought about it, and today was the only
morning she could remember not waking up next to him since they’d moved in with
each other three years ago. They had known each other less than a week at the
time.

Now he leaves a note?

A small pit knotted in her stomach and she saw herself slap
him across the face again and again. She sat on the couch, alone in the cold
silent misery of now, replaying the arguments of the last few days in her head,
every shouted word that had come out of her mouth. Echo saw herself pulling
away from him and scooting against the door of the car, taking his presence for
granted.

But what was she supposed to do?

She closed her eyes and remembered him lying in the pool of
blood the day he’d cut his head open. She’d been so afraid that she was going
to lose him.

Daniel was like a different person over the last week,
jumping at every shadow and looking over his shoulder at every turn, searching
for bugs and pulling guns on people ... what had
that
been about? She
hadn’t even given him a chance to explain.

Surely there was an explanation, right? Yeah, he’d done some
bad things but she knew Daniel,
knew
him better than anyone had his
entire life, and she knew how much heart he had. It was a good heart; a soft
one despite everything that had happened to him. Pulling a gun on some random
guy was not something Daniel would do.

Was it?

She thought of her talk with Dr. Stanzliek. Sometimes when
people get concussions they acted funny, he’d said. Different. Mood swings and
erratic behavior.

Maybe that hit on the head was worse than they thought.
Maybe it really shook something loose up there. She would talk to the doctor
tomorrow when Daniel went in to have a check-up. They were supposed to be
taking the stitches out in a week or so, but the doctor wanted to give him a
looking over to make sure he was healing properly and nothing was wrong. Like
this.

Something wrong like this.

Her inner cynic piped up with a different explanation but
she wouldn’t let herself hear the hypothesis. Nope. Not her Daniel. He just had
a worse concussion than they thought and after tomorrow everything would be
fine.

Echo wandered back into their room and sat on the bed with
her guitar. She had to push the sleeves of the bathrobe up to her elbows to
keep them off the strings, and she picked the song up mid-chorus to find her
voice:

“Distill the life that’s

Inside of me-eee

I sit and drink

Pennyroyal Teaaaa”

Echo started the song from the top, playing and singing in a
slightly lower key than she would at the bar ... part of it was just her voice
in the morning, part of it was just the song and why she sung it. All the while
she played she was wondering what that little boy or girl would be like now,
but no tears fell for that miscarried dream, for a 15-year-old girl had cried
them all out years before.

“Drink this,” he’d told her.

“What is it?” she’d asked, sitting down with the father of
the thing that was not quite a child growing in her stomach.

“Tea. I got it in Europe.”

She tried telling herself she hadn’t seen the label, that
she hadn’t known what would happen. She
had
to tell herself that just to
keep living in her own skin because at that time, no matter how much she wanted
to be a mother, she was even more afraid. It had been impractical of her to
want the baby of course; a girl not old enough to drive couldn’t —
shouldn’t
be responsible for a child. Not when she was still a child herself. But she
had
wanted the baby, wanted to raise it, to love it. If only that boy had been
Daniel … but all that had been years before they’d even met.

Echo strummed the final chords of her daily penance and
wondered if whatever god was out there would forgive her, deliver her and
Daniel into a future where the two of them might have a child of their own. She
wanted a future without drugs and guns and pools of blood, and every night and
day for the rest of her life she prayed for it.

*****

“Send me a car. I need to talk to Jared.” Daniel listened
long enough to hear the stuttering dial tone and know he’d been heard, and then
hung up the phone as quietly as he could. Echo moaned something through her
dreams. He wanted to wake her and kiss her goodbye, and it almost physically
pained him not to, but he wasn’t up for the questions that would follow. They
were just going through a bad patch. He grabbed his case out of the top of the
closet and wrote her a note.

Daniel put on his jacket and went outside to wait. 10
minutes later, Simon showed up in a small red Toyota pickup, looked like a ‘78
maybe; rear panel rusted out, Colorado plates. Daniel put his case on the seat
between them and closed the door.

“What’s up?” Simon asked, pulling back into traffic.

“Had something happen to me last night and I was hoping you
guys could maybe shed some light on it for me?” Daniel told Simon everything
that had happened.

“You pulled your piece on the guy?” Simon asked when Daniel
was done.

“Yeah, that’s not the part I’m having trouble with. It was
his eyes man, his fucking
eyes
.”

“You should have shot him,” Simon said. “Do you think you
could identify him?”

“I know I could.”

“Good. When we get back to the house we’ll sit you down and
go over our database. If you can spot him we can put out a search on the guy
and see if we can’t bring him in.”

“What for?” Daniel asked.

“Questioning,” was all Simon said, but the hard edge in his
voice made Daniel shudder.

After an hour in front of the computer, Daniel saw who he
was looking for and double-clicked the photo. The digital image enlarged to
fill the upper-left quadrant of the screen, and a bio filled the rest.

“Lawrence Wills,” Jared read off the screen. “Attended
Harvard Law for two years, dropped out and joined the disposable hero league.
Graduated the Marine Corps with honors in ‘85, bummed around in their Black Ops
for a few years and went to Kosovo on a mission marked level-three security.
There’s a hole in the intel here, but next time he surfaces is about two years
later, back in the U.S. and into the C.I,A. Had a brother that was a cop, but
he’s dead.”

“You sure this is the guy, D?” Simon asked.

“Definitely.”

“OK. Let’s see if we can’t get him in with a minimal amount
of bullshit, huh?” Jared said and turned to Ebin, one of the other agents. Ebin
had a scar shaped like someone’s kiss on the back of his hand.

“I’ll put the word out,” Ebin said.

“So what happens if I see him again?” Daniel asked.

“You gotta be careful,” Jared said. “This guy’s dangerous,
and whatever his story is, it was a secret until now. He’s exposed himself, and
he might come after you again.”

“What do I do?” Daniel already knew the answer.

“Kill him,” Jared said.

“It’s just that simple? Kill him?”

“There’s nothing simple about it,” Jared said. “And you’ll
never sleep the same again after you do it.”

Daniel looked into Jared’s cold eyes, and wondered how many
he’d sent to the other side.

Later that afternoon Daniel sat in the corner booth of a
small, rundown neighborhood bar, a dive if ever there was one. He had
frequented the bar since he was 19 and paid an old woman at the D.M.V. 50 bucks
to make him a little older. People didn’t go there to socialize or dance or
cruise for one-night stands. People went there to get away from those other
kinds of places. They went there to drink, to be alone, to get some peace and
quiet. The owner and bartender was an old junkyard dog of a man named Harry,
with a face that could’ve been drawn by Frank Miller. He kept the music and the
lights low and wasn’t much for conversation. As far as he was concerned, people
could drink quietly or get the hell out.

The door opened and Tommy shuffled in, his dirty gray
overcoat hanging on his ex-junky’s frame like the broken wings of a vampire
bat. He stopped at the bar and got a pint before joining Daniel in the corner.

“How are ya, Dan?”

“I’m OK.”

“Echo?”

“She’s good.”

“So I heard you been laying low, huh?”

“From who?”

“That dildo customer of yours, with the really bitchy girl
living with him.”

“Gene?”

“Yeah, Gene,” Tommy said, taking a sip of his beer.

“You don’t mind me sending him your way, do you?” Daniel
asked.

Tommy shook his head and smiled his cold smile. “Nope. He’s
a born sucker. I been charging him twice what he paid you.”

Daniel had to laugh a little at that. “Fuckin’ crook.”

“So what’s up?” Tommy asked. “You’re off the powder, you
give up your best customers, I don’t hear from you in a month? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Bullshit,” Tommy said. “I known you a long time, Dan, and
this is first time I ever saw you packing heat.”

“Heat? What are you talking about?”

“On your ankle. You don’t think I know a back-up piece when
I see one?”

He should have known better than to play dumb about guns
with Tommy. “Look, I just need a favor. If Echo asks, I was with you, OK?”

“When?”

“Whenever. Any time she asks you about, I was with you.”

Tommy leaned back in the booth and stared at Daniel long and
hard with his unsettling yellow eyes.

“Don’t look at me like that, Tom. I’m serious. You owe me
and you know it. That fucking guy that was looking for you? Didn’t I tell you
about that? Get you out of some shit?”

Tommy nodded, slowly, resigning himself.

“You didn’t tell me what you were into then, and I didn’t
ask, right?” Daniel said.

“Right, OK, fine. You were with me. You stepping out on her,
that it? Got somebody’s husband after you?”

“No, and fuck you very much for asking.”

“So why the gun?” Tommy asked. “Why the alibi?”

“I ...” Daniel looked down into the dark mysteries held
within his lager. 10 years he’d been friends with Tommy now, longer than
anybody. Daniel considered him to be the only real family he had, other than
Echo. He sure didn’t count his piece of shit father. Only Tommy and Echo, and
here he was lying to both of them, not playing it straight with either one when
he knew that was all they’d ever done with him. And bringing up old favors and
who owed who? That wasn’t like him at all. He didn’t look out for his friend so
he could rub the debt in his face; he helped him because he could, because
Tommy was the only friend he had.

“I ... I burned a couple people, and it’s catching up with
me,” Daniel said, hating himself a little more with each false word he spoke,
wondering if the peculiar x-ray vision Tom had for bullshit was cutting through
his story, short as it was. “I gotta see if I can make things right, you know?”

“Shit, is that all?” Tommy asked. “You need money or
something?”

Daniel shook his head. “No, just time is all. I need a
little time. So can you do this for me?”

“You sure this is all you need?”

“Positive.”

“OK,” Tommy said. “Consider it done.”

When Daniel finally returned home it was just getting dark.
He opened the front door and before he could even get all the way through it,
Echo was off the couch and coming toward him.

“Are you OK?”

“Hey,” Daniel said. “Sorry I’m late; I got a little hung
up.”

“Are you mad at me?” Echo asked, and this question surprised
him. He’d been expecting the third degree; anger instead of the worried look in
her eyes.

“Mad at you? No, angel. For what?”

“Last night. I—”

“No look, we need to talk about that.” Daniel led her to the
couch and they sat down. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, and that I scared you. I’m
sorry about all of it.”

“Who was that guy? Will you tell me?”

“I used to deal to him,” Daniel lied. “He’s part of the
reason I decided to quit the game. He couldn’t handle his shit, I guess, that
or he was on something I wasn’t selling to him. He went a little nuts,
following me around some, you know, always on me to hook him up.”

“So you were gonna shoot him?”

“No, I wasn’t gonna shoot him, I just wanted to scare him
off, or something. I don’t know. It was stupid. The gun wasn’t even loaded.”

“But you said—”

“I know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t want to admit it, but that
guy really scared the shit out of me, told me he was gonna start following you,
and that’s when I pulled the gun on him. I just couldn’t stand the idea of
anybody hurting you.”

“Oh, Daniel.” Echo sighed deeply, held his hand a little
tighter. “Well, I’m sorry I slapped you.”

“I know, and it’s not your fault. This was my bad. That’s
where I was today, actually, with Tommy. Sorting this out.”

“Tommy knows him?”

“Not really, I just wanted someone with me, you know, in
case the guy was pissed about the gun. But we talked to him, figured everything
out.”

“So it’s over then?”