Resurrection Express (33 page)

Jenison’s people could be watching this place. Coming here might have been a real bad idea. I decide that it’s almost certain they took out Mollie Baker after my dad talked to him. It fits the profile. No loose ends. Everybody pays.

But Ellie Mayhem, she’s a loose end, too. A loose end they don’t know about. They would have killed her if they had.

And Toni.

It has to be you, baby.

It just has to be.

But it might not be.

I want so badly for it to be.

But it might not be.

•  •  •

M
y voice is almost a whisper, but she hears it clear as a bell.

“What did Hartman mean? When he said you weren’t my wife?”

Her face flushes almost red with anger. “How can you ask me that now?
How dare you ask me that now?
”

“Calm down. It’s a simple question.”

“This is me, Elroy. This is
Toni
.”

“That wasn’t what I asked you. I asked you what Hartman
meant
when he said you weren’t my wife.”

“Hartman was completely crazy. He killed dozens of those girls. Took them in the room and killed them.”

The room.

Christ.

I don’t even want to know what that means.

And the worst part is . . . I suddenly have no idea if I’m right.

Have no idea if what she’s saying is true.

I am filled with her beauty and her scent, all those memories assigned to something that looks exactly like her. But those memories wore faceless masks before tonight. Did Hartman know? Did he know what it would take to push me into some sort of waking dream—a delusion powered by desperate need? My own insanity, used against me.

No, I won’t believe that. It’s impossible. Hartman couldn’t have been that smart.

And I know it’s you.

I know it.

“I heard all those other girls screaming,” she says. “I thought he was coming to take me in there so many times. I lost myself for days and weeks. They had me on a lot of dope, too. There’s so many details I can’t remember.”

“Funny . . . I’ve been having the same problem for the last three years.”

“I’m telling you,
it’s ME!
”

She makes a fist and slams the table, her words cutting across the room.

I sink back into my chair. “Don’t make a scene. Just calm down.”

Sure enough, Ellie Mayhem comes back over, empty soldiers balanced on her tray, giving me a look that comes from women who get slapped around and don’t like to see it happening to someone else. “Everything okay over here?”

“Yes,” Toni says, very calm, fixing me with a lethal glare. “I’m okay. Everything’s fine. Isn’t it?”

Ellie Mayhem gives her a suspicious twitch. “You
sure
about that, honey?”

I hold up a twenty-dollar bill. “She’s one hundred percent sure. Can we get some more shooters?”

She nods like she doesn’t believe me, like all men are scum. Snatches the bill and wanders off with one eye on us.

Damn.

•  •  •

I
ask Toni a few more questions she doesn’t have answers for. She says she doesn’t know the details about Hartman’s plans for me. She still has fire in her face, frustration and fear. She is so much like the real thing it breaks my heart.

But if there’s a chance she isn’t . . .

If I really am a crazy man, seduced by the promise . . .

That might at least mean that the
real Toni
is still out there.

Christ, what the hell am I saying?

You’re saying you just ain’t sure now, buddy.

You’re saying you believe me finally—that ain’t your goddamn wife.

Shut up, David. Just shut the hell up.

I look at Franklin. “Once I put a hundred large into your hands, you and me are square. But I’ll have a little left over. Just how dangerous
is
this scary Death Ray guy?”

“Depends on how you come at him. You’ll need backup.”

“That’s what I had in mind. Say, a five-K bonus?”

“Ten.”

“Done.”

“Always a pleasure doing business with you.” He lets out a tough sigh, then settles back in his seat, rubbing his chin. “I think I might know where to look. I’ll make a few calls.”

This could be suicide.

But I have to know for sure about Resurrection Express and I have to know about Toni. I have to know if I’m crazy or if she’s a liar.

And there’s a missing piece, still nagging in my skull somewhere.

Do I really know where Jayne Jenison lives?

Am I searching for a ghost?

For a strange moment I’m reminded of Jimmy Stewart in the movie
Vertigo
. About that kind of obsession. About wanting a woman back so goddamn bad, you
make it happen,
in spite of yourself, in spite of everything. And then it leaves you, because it can’t stay. Because it was artificial, something you created yourself. Even if she loved you all along.

Am I Jimmy Stewart?

Toni, is that really you, sitting right there?

Or is the lie true, this one time?

And the evil men who want to put us all out of business . . . what about them?

Resurrection Express
.

She doesn’t say anything. Her gears are working, too. All of this is triggering something. Memories. Traces. She keeps it to herself and I don’t press it.

Not yet.

•  •  •

W
e get up to leave and I tell them to hang by the back. I get Ellie Mayhem’s attention as I move casually toward the bathroom alcove. She follows me over with her tray empty in front of her. I slap a fifty on it. Bitch insurance.

“You never saw us,” I tell her, palming another two hundred in one fist, making sure she can see the crumpled green. “We understand each other?”

“Mollie’s dead,” she says, not chewing gum. She’s real serious now, almost whispering the words. I can see all sorts of cruelty etched on her face, up this close in the new dim spill of light from the bathroom corridor. There’s a couple of fresh scars running along the right side of her forehead, just covered by the bad makeup. Blood almost cracking through the base application.

“I know he’s dead,” I say. “You need to forget you ever saw us.
Understand?
”

She nods, grim. Like,
I can’t make any promises.
But she doesn’t say that out loud. What she says is this:

“I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“About what?”

“You’re looking for someone. He’s real bad. I want to hurt him.”

I look at the scars again, and I can see there are bruises on her face, too, hardly covered. The whole scenario comes real clear now:

She’s one of Kim’s whores. Whoever killed the Hammer slapped this little lady around and told her who the new boss was—left her alive because she was valuable merchandise. That means it wasn’t Jenison who did the deed. It was a contract hit. Someone street level, who plays by street rules.

“Death Ray,” she says. “I can give him to you.”

15

00000-15

DREAMS IN THE DOLLHOUSE

E
llie Mayhem gives us a number to call tomorrow. Six
P.M
. sharp. She says to drop Mollie’s name and tell Ray she’s working for me now. The guy’s real big on keeping what belongs to him, apparently. She won’t come in to work tomorrow because she’s hitting the road tonight—heading out to Dallas to stay with her mom. Says that Ray will freak out if he thinks one of his ladies has gone AWOL with another player.

It’ll totally get his attention, honey.

Just promise you’ll hurt him when I’m gone.

Hurt him bad.

She doesn’t say anything else and I don’t ask any more questions. I can tell she wasn’t with Kim when the shit went down, and she probably doesn’t even know if her boss is still alive—but she wants Ray’s head. I see it burning in her eyes and under her skin, even without the sting of her words. She is red with the lust. For payback.

It’s my one link back to Jenison.

Back to Resurrection Express.

I don’t ask any more questions.

It’s a hell of a thing when the planets line up like this, and you’re always really damn amused when it happens to you. But if it hadn’t been Miss Mayhem, it would have been Mollie, and if it hadn’t been Mollie . . . well, I would have worked something out.
Hartman had it right—I’ve always been real good at following the bread crumbs.

We leave the bar and go house hunting.

•  •  •

T
here’s a neat trick you can still pull these days, when you’re on the wrong side of a job gone bad. When motels are too hot and you need a place to hide—yesterday.

It was one of the last things Axl Gange taught me.

Always go in with confidence, but prepare yourself for the worst.

Part of preparing for the worst is the ace I’ve been holding in my shoe since we went into the vault: three tiny pieces of steel. The most important components of Remo’s manual lockpick set. Not enough to open a car with keyless entry and get away clean, but enough to jack something made in the nineties. And you can also usually find a mom-and-pop hardware store or a pawn shop in a neighborhood like this with ancient locks. That’s after you pick up your old-school ride to go cruising in, and there’s lots of those in the alley behind Blythe Spirits.

We’re on the road fast.

It’s a 1997 Acura with a huge dent in the passenger’s side.

Ten minutes later I’m inside E-Z PAWN, blowing through their cheap SERIO-SYSTEMS alarm system by entering a row of sixes into the keypad just inside the back entrance. The beeping in the room stops and the police have no idea there’s a thief in here. I wipe everything I don’t steal with a paper towel, just to be on the safe side.

I grab a duffel bag and stuff it with the tools I need.

Franklin and Toni wait outside with the motor running.

•  •  •

I
t’s almost four in the morning when we cross from the Montrose ghetto into the River Oaks area, where rich people live on
the border of everything scummy. That’s another weird thing about Houston: it’s a giant melting pot of degenerates and oil tycoons, and they all live across the street from each other. You have very interesting neighborhoods where falling-down crack houses face freshly built Victorian-reproduction town homes from less than twenty feet away. Some of those crack houses are ready to be torn down—just so much rotten wood hanging in a frame. The other places cost more than a high-end drug dealer makes in six months. We cruise a main drag just on the River Oaks border and find a street that hovers somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. We look for nice houses without any cars in the driveway—but not too nice. Toni spots a three-story colonial job with elegant French windows and a lawn that looks like it hasn’t been mowed in two weeks. The mailbox is stuffed, no newspapers on the front steps. People who don’t worry about money don’t read newspapers anymore. It’s all on the net these days. We pull into the open driveway. There’s no fence. A garage in back. Nobody’s home.

I get to the power box with my bag of tools and start working the leads and connections. No matter how far in the future we go with our handy-dandy technology, some things never change: you can scope a ghetto-rich family on vacation just by looking at the front lawn, and you can bet anything they haven’t spent too much money on a security profile. I cut the balls of the alarm system by rerouting the power to a grounded circuit, and then I reboot the breakers. The older the lock, the easier it is. You just need a screwdriver and a soldering iron.

We’re secure inside of fifteen minutes.

I break out gloves from the duffel bag—three sets of blue rubber dishwashing gloves that will keep our fingerprints off the grid when we leave this place and the owners discover they’ve been burglarized. Axl Gange was a really smart housekeeper.

The keys to the garage are in the kitchen. We get our new car hidden fast.

Inside the house, we’ve got high-speed Internet, flat-screen TV, hot showers, and even a wine cellar. Not much food in the kitchen, though. Some Popsicles and frozen meat. A few jars of condiments. Cheerios and shredded wheat. I have a feeling these people eat out a lot.

Twelve hours before we make the call.

I tell Franklin to watch the front door. He flips on the big TV and thumbs the remote to a news station. Nothing local at half past four in the morning. Not sure what he expected to find. I tell him to shut it off because the glow from the screen will seep through the drawn blinds. That could give us away while it’s still dark out, if one of the neighbors has insomnia. You take your chances on a block like this.

He nods and kills it.

“We should get some sleep,” Toni says. “We’re blown, all of us.”

“I’ll be okay,” Franklin says.

She sits down in the chair across from him. “What are our assets?”

I smile at her.

Always in charge.

Always my Toni.

Even if she isn’t.

•  •  •

O
ur assets:

Ruger Centerfire pistol, the gun Toni killed Hartman with.

The compact revolver and the dull gray Glock 30 Franklin took off the dead guy.

Not much, man.

The Ruger is a 40S, not an SR9, but they look almost exactly alike, with the same shiny silver slide and black plastic handle, no rounds in the clip. Twelve bullets in the Glock, three in the revolver, which looks like a Charter Arms Bulldog special, snubnosed
with rubber grips, a tiny little thing—the kind of close range weapon you walk up behind someone with. Gangbangers keep them in their cargo pants pockets.

We put our guns on the glass coffee table and I stare at them for a very long moment.

“Okay,” I finally say to him. “A baker’s dozen bullets to take down a really scary guy. You think you can handle it?”

“One bullet is all it takes,” he says.

“There’s a lot of heat out there,” Toni tells him, like he needs to be reminded. “The cops are going nuts right now. All the shooting that’s been going on.”