No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) (36 page)

My anger didn’t fade; the bastards had tossed the place, and the contents of my suitcase lay scattered all over the floor.

I think they all lived through what I did to them.  No, not a Keatonic torture session, but I didn’t want any problems, and I wanted information, fast.  I made sure six of them were unconscious, not good for them at all, and those I stuffed into the closet, after I stripped them and wiped down the closet.  The one I didn’t stuff into the closet, the fifth detective I had taken down, I tied face-down on the stripped bed and questioned.

My gut said this one would be the easiest to make talk.  I didn’t have time, and used pain.  “Why did you come here?” I said, in my male voice.  Lucky for me, my suitcase contained only men’s clothing.  Nothing here screamed ‘Arm’.

“Gotta hot tip,” the detective said, after thirty seconds of excruciating nerve pokes removed his will to resist.  “Someone spotted one of our fugitives in this dive, a hitter named Mechlenberg, and his crew.  Only something’s not right.  You’re not Mechlenberg, are you?  The people who ran?  Who were they?”

This was what I wanted to hear – the detectives hadn’t corralled any of my crew.  I throttled the detective until he passed out, cleaned out the room – which took two trips – wiped the place down, cleaned out our other two rooms, and was gone before the detectives’ backups arrived.  I also slit the tires on their rides.  Petty, yes, but I was still Arm-angry over the violation of my lair.

I found a Gilgamesh metasense sign along the feeder road a half mile north – a north-pointing arrow and four cheery-metasensing dots.  He had found our missing people.  Whichever of my thugs spotted the local cops on the way, and got my people out, would get a reward.

I ditched the car, found another after I trashed the first, and drove off to Conroe.  I calmed down a little on my drive to the back-up meeting point, but only another Major Transform would have been able to tell the difference.  Thus the trashing of the first car, a wild and safe fury I let loose far from prying eyes, half anger management and half workout that left the vehicle in bent parts on a piney country road.  I torched the car when I finished, growling and swearing as it burned.

I had lost my Houston territory, at least for now.  Unless Keaton ordered me to find another one, my loss was only temporary.  Focus Peshnak was going to pay for this.  Hard.

---

I found my people in Conroe, right where I expected, eating an early breakfast at the local Denny’s.  I couldn’t reward my thugs – Hank had joined them on guard that night, fearing exactly what happened.  He knew Focuses far too well, and I realized I needed to sit him down and get him to tell me everything he knew about the various games Focuses played with cops and security.

“I’m going to question Captive,” I said to them.  We sat in the remotest corner and the waitress hadn’t yet summoned the nerve to come take my order.  “If you’re smart, you won’t bother me.”  I still wasn’t much into kindness or small talk.  Gilgamesh wouldn’t come close to me or my crew, and vanished once I found them.  He hadn’t revealed himself to Hank or the rest, just following my people after he had located them.  Hank and the boys had stolen a car, driven to Conroe, and ditched it when they got here.  The car theft had been Ricky’s work.  Ricky was tense and sweaty – using his initiative made him nervous.  I would make sure he knew I appreciated his work, later, after I calmed down.

Captive had survived all my abuse and turned out to know more than he realized.  The worst bit of intel I picked up was that when Rogue Focus took her extra male Transforms out of peri-withdrawal they became superbly motivated berserk fighting machines.  She had a small fearless army at her disposal.

The second worst was the fact she already had police in Houston and private detectives in neighboring cities out hunting for my home base before Gilgamesh and I stumbled into her juice patterns.

We were up against a smart, organized and powerful enemy.  Taking her out wouldn’t be trivial…and, one way or another, I was going to take her out.

Chapter 11

Male Monsters Molest Mission

The Community of Christ Evanston Mission reports that on the night of June 26, 1968, three Male Monsters ransacked their mission, kidnapped a Mission worker (name withheld pending notification of kin), and stole a large quantity of food and clothing.

“Hunter Activity Near Chicago and Media Responses”

Carol Hancock: July 1, 1968

I knocked at the door of Keaton’s old horse barn and tried to quell the churning in my stomach.  My anger at the loss of my territory had turned to resigned grief, a weakness I couldn’t afford to show in front of my boss.  She wanted to visit with me in private, never a good thing.  I had stashed my successes back at her main house: Gilgamesh, Zielinski and Captive.  I wondered what she had done with the baby Arm I gave her.  Or if the Arm remained alive.  I hadn’t seen her since the day I delivered her and I had no faith in Keaton at all.

I found out soon enough, as Amy Haggerty answered the barn door.  Still alive, at least, but only barely.  I almost didn’t recognize her when I spotted her.  She was a much different creature from the leggy beauty I had brought here.  This starved creature looked like she had recently crawled out of a grave and still belonged there.  Or in a third world refugee camp.

Then there were the injuries.  Haggerty wore a T-shirt and shorts, the same T-shirt and shorts I had worn myself on so many occasions, and both hung on her skeletal frame, her body covered with bruises and small burns.  Two of her fingernails were gone from her swollen and purple hands.  She had scars along her legs, the skin under her shirt showed lumpy and discolored, and she hobbled when she walked.

Such a pathetic, broken thing.  She cringed away from the door when she saw me as I came in.

“Where’s Keaton?”

“Follow me, ma’am,” she Crow whispered, flinching from the question.

“When was her last kill?” Keaton’s juice count was always a critical piece of information. Haggerty cringed again when I spoke.  Her cringe irritated me, but I found I no longer considered her the threat I had when I brought her here.  Nothing remained of the predator in this ruined wreck.  Keaton’s work.  Intentional work.  She wouldn’t tolerate a competitor either.

Haggerty sweated, terrified to have my attention on her.  “Ma’am, I, uh, uh…the day before yesterday.  I think.  I’m sorry, ma’am.  I lose track of the days sometimes.  I’m really sorry.”

I wondered if I had ever been such a pathetic creature as this, a disturbing thought.  I found her both revolting and irritating.

She did wear Keaton’s tag, though Keaton didn’t need a tag to keep this thing in line.  At least Keaton followed her own advice.

I put the baby Arm out of my mind.  Keaton would demand my full attention.

Keaton looked pensive, and her pensiveness didn’t vanish when I went down on my knees and reaffirmed I was hers.  She started by exercising both Haggerty and me.  I didn’t require supervision, knowing exactly what Keaton wanted.  Keaton was vicious with Haggerty.

We ate lunch up the hill in Keaton’s house of pain, a comfortable place if you ignored the basement.  The meal came from a refrigerator, clearly catering service food (cold roast chicken, cream cheese Jell-O salad, potato salad, and rice pudding for dessert).  I decided Haggerty couldn’t cook.  Keaton grilled me on everything I had done since my last visit, including my espionage mission.  I couldn’t pick up on why Keaton stayed so pensive, so I risked a leading comment.

“Haggerty seems to have learned a little respect since the last time I was here,” I said, nodding at the baby Arm, who was cleaning up after lunch.

“Damn, Hancock. You would not believe.”  Keaton leaned back in her chair and put her arm over her head.  I was astonished.  She didn’t seem to be damping her reactions at all.  She looked hassled.

My nerves sang with tension at the strange behavior, but I made a polite inquiring noise.  My boss clearly wanted to talk.

“You’ve never seen such a disaster in your life. The idiot has no sense whatsoever.  Besides that, she’s stubborn.  I knock her around some, try and teach her some respect, and she doesn’t get it.  Every time I try and teach her something, she has her own ideas of how things ought to work.  Every time I turn around, she wants to argue with me.”

Keaton brought her arm down and turned back to me.

“On top of that, she has moral issues.  She keeps wanting to be the good guy.  What’s more, she wants
me
to be a good guy!  I talk to her about hunting and she comes up with all these ideas about how to keep the body count down at only moderately increased personal risk.  I tell her I don’t care about the body count itself, just the risk factor, and she argues with me.  She argues with me!  So I beat the crap out of her and then she gets mad.  And snotty.  So I beat her up again and then she sulks.”

Some brand new Arm getting into a contest of wills with Keaton?  I remembered Mary Fouke and wondered if this one would do a better job at survival.

“Sometimes she’ll get stubborn during a robbery.  Or I’ll try and teach her something and she’ll criticize my teaching style.  She’s flat-out unbelievable.”

“I’m surprised she’s still alive,” I said.

“Hunting’s still good out here,” Keaton said, some form of complex falsehood I decided to ignore.  “I damned near killed her anyway.  I went after her a hell of a lot harder than I ever went after you.”

Keaton had said she would do so, if she got another baby Arm.  Looking at Haggerty, I believed it.

“What’s more,” Keaton said, “she’s worthless.  She can’t cook for shit. You should see some of the things she tries to feed me.  I don’t think this spoiled rotten baby-boomer hippie chick has ever held a broom or a scrub-brush in her life.  A more useless excuse for an Arm is hard to imagine.”

Not so long ago Keaton used that term on me.  An immense weight lifted from my shoulders…

Keaton shook her head.  “So, about two weeks ago, she decided she could make it on her own, and she decided to run away.  I knew immediately, of course.  I let her get as far as the bus station before I hauled her back.  Afterwards, I took her downstairs and took her apart for a couple of days.”

I always wondered what would have happened to me if I had tried to run.  I was glad I never did. Being ‘taken apart for a couple of days’ rattled my memories and chilled my blood.

“Anyway,” Keaton went on, “that broke her pretty good.  So, the next day, when I was out, she decided she still couldn’t take it anymore.  This time she tried to kill herself.  I came back and found her lying in the bathtub trying to cut her wrists with a kitchen knife.  Only her wrists kept healing up, so she was still alive by the time I got there.  God.  An Arm can kill herself by cutting her wrists in a bathtub, but only because she’ll eventually starve to death.”

I thought about Haggerty in a bathtub trying to kill herself and I started laughing.  I couldn’t help myself.  The image of her lying there trying to cut her wrists faster than they healed up was too ridiculous for anything else.  I laughed, laughed harder, and finally roared.  This was the funniest thing I had heard of in a long time.

Keaton watched me for a minute and then saw the humor in the situation.  She started laughing herself.  Long minutes passed before the laughter slowed and I could talk again.

“So what did you do, ma’am?” I said, still chortling.

“I brought her a better knife.  I told her that if she wanted to kill herself, she should do a better job of it.”

The thought made me laugh again.  Keaton didn’t laugh this time, and so I forced my own laughter to fade.

“After the tub episode, she broke completely,” Keaton said. “She quit fighting me and she’s been a hell of a lot easier to work with.  There’s not a lot there any more, though.”

Uh huh.  The Arm I met today wasn’t up to much of anything at all.

Keaton’s face changed back to being pensive.

“Come over to the couch.  I want to talk to you.”  I did so, pensive now myself.  I knew the routine: interrogation.  Examination of my deepest self.  I briefly wondered what I had done to deserve this, before I buried my traitorous thoughts deep.

“What’s your personal opinion of Focus Laswell?” she said.

“Top ten percent Focus,” I said.  “I’m not experienced enough to judge beyond a scale of one to ten.  Her household has minimal combat experience.”

“I’m not asking about her household, Hancock,” she said, grimacing.  Keaton stayed edgy.  “How do you feel about her personally?”

“Nothing like with Focus Rizzari.”

We went on from there into my feelings about Lori, why I chose Houston over Boston, and into my dreams (which remained non-informative).  She went into what little recruiting I had done, specifically, what criteria I used.

Keaton wasn’t sure about me and I knew why: while incarcerated I had invited the Madonna of Montreal into my dreams.  She wondered what the invitation had done to me, and where my loyalties lay when I didn’t sit next to her with my tag reaffirmed.  These questions worried me as much as they worried Keaton.

“After consummating your relationship with Gilgamesh, how did it change how you feel about him?” Keaton said.

“My desire to protect him increased,” I said.  I was on firmer ground here.  At least I thought I knew what was going on.  “My instincts want me to treat him as a helpless lover.  It’s worse when I’m out with him doing things; when I’m back home, alone, I realize this instinct will fade over time.”

“How much did your feelings for him influence your actions during the time he worked alone on his mission?”

“Early on?  A lot.  I grieved.  Got distracted.  Later?  My sorrow receded to being a dull ache,” I said.  Keaton sneered at me.  Dependence on others was a weakness.  “I hadn’t fully recovered, ma’am.  After Sky cleared the bad juice out of me the sorrow still remained, but the sorrow became no more than any other pain to me, something I could put aside to concentrate on other activities.”

Keaton spat air.  “In what, the ten minutes between when you got the crap ripped out of you and when you found Gilgamesh in your car?”

I rolled my eyes and made humbling submission gestures, in this case ending with my head bowed on her knee and her hand on my neck.  “It was a good ten minutes.”  Pause.  “Save for the juice hunger.”

Keaton laughed.

I raised my head.  “The bad juice made me lazy, ma’am.  Mostly psychologically, but Zielinski’s convinced me the bad juice caused physical changes in my brain.  Afterwards I became Arm-sharp again.  Thinking faster.  More in control of my own self.”

“Okay,” Keaton said.  Her eyes glazed in thought for a couple of minutes.  “You do feel easier to be around.  Before, you felt a little greasy.  Metaphorically.”  She licked her lips.  “Do you have any urge to tag Gilgamesh?”

“None at all,” I said.  She studied my reactions for twenty seconds before making a decision.

She reached into a pocket and brought out a folded piece of paper.  “Here’s the mailing address for the Madonna of Montreal.”  It read 358 Rue Lahaie, Pont-Viau, Quebec.  “Mail her.  May you have better luck than I did understanding what she sends back to you.”

Henry Zielinski: July 1, 1968 – July 2, 1968

“Hey, Doc,” Tina said as he walked up onto the front porch, and gave him a soft punch in the shoulder.  Zielinski wasn’t too surprised someone had invited the Focus to this meeting, but bodyguards from Charade, Flo’s household, gathered on the porch along with the Inferno bodyguards.  He warmly greeted all the ones he knew, and they introduced him to the other two.  They had all finished their advanced Transform training, which made him smile.  He left Frances and Fred with the bodyguards, as per Carol’s orders.  Tina opened the door for him and he entered Keaton’s house.

Once inside he took in the ambience of the elegant entryway.  A Japanese flower arrangement on a single marble table.  Keaton seemed to be doing a better job of maintaining her sanity; her home felt more pleasant than during his last visit.  He still marveled at Keaton’s choice of stark appointments.  Her techniques for compartmentalizing her life appeared to be working.

He followed the soft voices to the pale living room, where Sky entertained the two Focuses with what had to be a tall tale of a Chimera and an Arm playing ‘toss Sky over the tree’.  “They just wanted me to shut up,” Sky said.  He too had improved; his presence demanded attention and he spoke with firm authority.  “Back then shutting me up took work.”  Neither Keaton nor Carol was present.

“It’s always taken work,” Lori said.  “Hey there, Doc!”

Doc.  Well, this was different.  Lori appeared composed.  She didn’t get up and hug him like she normally did, though, just giving him a wave.  The tension he felt over the phone was still evident.

Flo did bounce up and give him a hug.  “Glad you made it, Henry.”  The perky Focus wasn’t composed.  She appeared horribly nervous.  “You’ve met Sky?”

“Yes.”

She looked around the room, concentrating, stopping in a corner.  “This is Gilgamesh,” she said.

Yes, there he was, standing in a corner.  He had been with them in the Houston fiasco, but never with them in person, apparently very Crow-like behavior.