Resurrection Express (35 page)

I know it’s not really her.

Dominatrix Barbie stares at me lustily, all done up in leather and lace and diamond studs. I wonder if the diamonds are real. It chills my blood a little.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “But you’re wrong.”

She pulls me close to her again. I don’t fight it. I feel the sweat on her face, salty like tears. I feel everything and nothing, all at once, deep inside me and coming loose. We stare at each other in the dark. We’re still wearing blue rubber gloves, the two of us. I almost laugh at that, it’s so goddamn absurd. We stay very close for a long time, standing here at the edge of everything. A million painted eyes stare back at us from the glass cases. We don’t say a word to each other. We communicate in soulspeak.

Or at least that’s what it seems like.

That’s what I tell myself.

But it’s not her.

It’s not her.

It’s not her.

It . . .

•  •  •

I
wake up in the middle of a dream.

I know it’s a dream because my father is here with us, and I am with Toni, and there are no questions about anything—everything is simple and beautiful and perfect. All the answers are easy. Nobody wants to kill us.

We’ve come home.

To the house of Jayne Jenison.

And I am clicking the keys on a computer console, speaking words that sound like numbers. And my father looks over my shoulder. And David Hartman looms over his shoulder. And the voice of the Sarge comes loud and clear:

It’s the face of God.

You ain’t got what it takes.

But I’ve come home. To Toni and my father and my family that never was. I click the keys. The numbers come at me. It’s a wall of rubber that bounces me back.

A wall of numbers that kills my father.

David’s voice now . . . so far away . . . fading . . .

This is where that nasty bitch lives, buddy-boy.

I struggle to stay here.

In this house.

The smell of roses pulls me away.

No . . . have to stay . . .

Have to . . .

•  •  •

T
he dull light hits hard as I peel my eyes open.

Morning now.

I can’t remember going to sleep. I was holding Toni in my arms, we were so close, and then I was dreaming. I feel it all dance in front of me in a cold shimmer. Am I dreaming now?

I hear the TV come on in the next room.

Franklin, scoping the news for some word.

I realize I’m lying next to the girl, and she’s already awake. We’re both still wearing our clothes. Maybe she never went to sleep. Guess that’s appropriate. We might be complete strangers.

My head still hurts.

Slashes of overcast morning gloom filter through the drawn curtains, capturing tiny swirls of dust. It’s like we’re hovering just outside our own light, in some lost place where only our shadows have substance. Hovering just outside the dream.

Just outside the house of Jenison.

What did it mean?

I sit up at the edge of the bed, looking out at all the dolls. Toni’s voice is somewhere, speaking to me now. So close to me, and a million miles away.

“You were talking in your sleep,” she says. “Something about a wall of numbers. You said Hartman’s name a few times. I wanted to wake you up.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was afraid to.”

Somehow, that needs no explanation. I rub my eyes, looking at the clock on the bedside table: 8
A.M.
Slept for three hours. I want to sleep for three years.

Gotta pull through this, somehow.

I hang my head and let loose a long breath. “Had a dream just now.”

“What about?”

“The bad guys were right at my shoulder, telling me things in plain English.”

“Do you remember what they were saying?”

“Just things I’ve already heard. Stuff about the face of God, and seeing Jayne Jenison’s house. I was looking at numbers.”

“Maybe the numbers mean something.”

You know where she lives and breathes, boy.

You saw it.

I see myself in the vault, sweating bullets. When the time locks were kicking my ass. That row of numbers I couldn’t ever figure out, always reorganizing and coming back in the original pattern. A ploy to fool hackers like me. Or maybe something else. Something put there by David Hartman. Because only a maniac like him would do that.

Don’t look.

The face of God.

Alex Bennett thought it was a decoy code and I didn’t believe her. Maybe we were both wrong. And I still have the numbers burned into my memory, the same way all numbers burn forever like snapshots, deep down, so I can leave them there and forget them.

Burned.

The same way God burns you when you dare to look in his face.

“Yes,” I say to her. “Hartman put the numbers there. It was his vault and he put the numbers behind all that security. I memorized them. I thought it was something it wasn’t. I thought it was the key to open the door.”

It was the mistake that got my father killed.

Hartman hid the damn thing in the deadly bear trap, where nobody could get at it—nobody but me.

The Sarge told me not to look.

They both knew it was the end of the world.

And I didn’t hear them.

•  •  •

F
ranklin sits glued to the big TV.

The local news channels are reporting the fire at Hartman’s compound, and there’s a continuing piece on CNN about the shootout in the lobby of the Sheraton. It spools all day long, but there’s no breaking information. They’re calling it TERROR IN THE HEART OF TEXAS, and there’s a lot of pundits and reporter-types arguing about the nature of the attack. That’s what they’re calling it now—an attack. Like what happened at Toy Jam in Austin. Some people are wondering if the two incidents are linked, but the official word is nil. Complete police blackout. There hasn’t even been a press conference yet. That probably means I was right about the security cameras—and Jenison’s people have to be combing the city for us right now. They’ll find us and kill us. They want what I have. And the cops want blood, too.

They’re not saying anything.

But someone has to pay.

Anyone.

We move in three hours.

But first . . .

•  •  •

T
he ghetto richies who live here invested a few grand in a nice civilian computer setup, with a printer and a scanner and everything. Cute. Getting past the Mickey Mouse security on the rig, I discover that they own a local business—a stationery shop in the River Oaks Shopping Center—and wifey has a side hobby selling those customized Barbies on eBay. The hottest one she had was a Britney Spears model, and the damn thing fetched near a thousand bucks from a collector who calls himself ILIKEDOLLSMAN666. This business really is creepy.

I hack the family e-mail account and find their travel plans, airline itinerary, the works. I even know the name of the ritzy kennel where they sent their dog to live for the next three weeks.
That takes me ten minutes. Should have taken three. It’s always a little harder with gloves on.

Then I get into my offsite location and dig up some zipped blackware I’ll need.

An hour later, I’m riding the datastreams.

A ghost among ghosts.

I run a scan of the girl’s hand through the Houston Metro police database and come up snake eyes. I’m even not thinking of her as Toni anymore. Starting to doubt everything now. Starting to feel the ground shift again. Hartman’s hackers are all long vanished from my chat rooms. Everyone’s staying real low. I’m on my own now, back in the city of the living dead. There’s no way out but the way down.

I hack into a Global Positioning Satellite owned by Google.

It’s real easy.

Then I feed it the numbers I memorized in the vault.

And that’s exactly what the numbers are.

GPS coordinates.

It’s a complicated road map and this rinky-dink consumer imaging software isn’t sophisticated enough to look very close, but I do get a fuzzy picture: sixty or seventy miles of desert in Wyoming. The girl leans over my shoulder and asks me what the hell it is. I tell her:

“It’s the house of Jenison. And we have the keys to it.”

16

00000-16

JUST ONE MORE THING

I
shouldn’t do this.

I have the discs and I know the general area where something big is located. It might not be Resurrection itself, but it’s all I need. I should run screaming from it, hide somewhere safe and wait for the sky to fall. I should use what I have to cut a deal with someone, anyone, for protection. But who do I go to? Who the hell do I trust? Can I even trust myself to see the truth—in anything? It all hovers in front of me. The plot wants to be figured out.

But there’s one more thing.

Toni.

I have to know for sure if I’m crazy. I have to know the truth about Resurrection Express. And only one man knows. Maybe.

I shouldn’t do this.

But I do it anyway.

•  •  •

I
route my voice through a cheesy Skype-friendly microphone I find in a drawer and feed it through a series of filtration programs, making an encrypted digital signal that dials the phone number Ellie Mayhem gave us last night in the bar. It’s 6
P.M
. sharp, just like she said.

A rough voice answers on the third ring, gravel cut with razor blades:

“Yeah?”

“Ellie Mayhem told me to give you a call.”

“Where is that bitch? Who you is?”

Who you is?

He’s a real mind, this guy.

A dangerous mind.

“I’m an old friend of Mollie Baker. And Ellie’s with me now. I think we should talk.”

The razor-blade voice goes silent for a long, long time before it speaks again.

•  •  •

W
e get to the club at eight fifteen and the sun is long gone.

Texas Hardbodies
says the lasso of neon revolving on the roof.

It’s one of those all-day-all-night joints that went way south from a strip club or a watering hole a while back—it’s a cheap mudslide instead, warped and tacky, full of beer signs and antlers on the walls, all traced in Tex-Mex bric-a-brac and dim Christmas-tree lights. The main room has six poles where the ladies let it all hang out. Most of them are teenagers with skinny legs and fake IDs. I try not to look. Three bars on three walls. Two pool tables. Plenty of private lap-dance booths, and some gated VIP escort rooms. A balcony full of rich depravos swarming like trolls in the dark, with the dull glimmer of lit cigarettes and fat cigars tracing their silhouettes. The gaudy thud-boom-twang of country trance music, which is the worst kind of noise in the world. Sounds like bowling balls pounding out a rhythm alongside a fiddle player having a seizure.

We’re early, me and Franklin and the girl.

The girl I thought was my wife.

We move through the room, towards the swinging doors at the rear that have a rolling set of police cherries on either side and
a sign across the top that reads
WELCOME TO THE PUSSY MACHINE
. There’s a booth near the doors, dug deep in a corner. In the booth sit three men. One of them is the man we came to meet.

I can tell it’s him just by the way he looks.

He looks just like his voice.

A big guy with extra-wide shoulders, black jacket over a leather vest, his chest naked. Something heavy in a holster, almost visible under his right arm. Bald head and bloodshot eyes, rough dark skin like bad road, split across the chin with a long scar. It looks like recent damage, maybe six months old. Hasn’t healed well because he keeps moving. Crazy guys like this have to keep moving or they drown—they’re like sharks.

His two homies sag next to him in windbreakers, checking us out as we come over to the table. He opens his mouth and those rusty razor blades spill out:

“You the man?”

“I guess that depends,” I tell him. “Are you Death Ray?”

“Only to motherfuckers who ain’t got no respect.”

I let the pounding backwoods techno-screech of the music take up the slack as I stare him down. I learned this in prison. With danger men, you don’t back down. They get the message loud and clear.

Sure enough, he nods.

“Okay, boy. You got my attention. We’re in a nice public place. Nobody’s gonna fuck with nobody.”

“You sure about that?”

“Who’s the Mount Everest motherfucker standin’ next to you?”

“He’s my doctor. Says I’ve got three weeks to live.”

“Nice hair, doc.” He does an evil thing with his face, and the scar almost winks at Franklin across his chin. Then he looks at the girl. “And what about this fine bitch here? You bring me a present or what?”

Ray’s scar winks at me again as he smiles.

Franklin nods to me.

Stands, with his hand under his jacket, inches from the gun in his waistband.

I sit across from the homies, and I notice one of them has silver-capped teeth—real silver, not a mouthpiece, like the rappers. That’s the flunky to Ray’s left. The one on the right is wearing sunglasses framed in Day-Glo yellow, like a reject from
I Love the ’80s.
They both look ridiculous sitting next to a danger man like Death Ray. Then again, maybe I’m just easily impressed by a voice on the phone.

“I’m nobody’s present,” the girl says, standing next to me.

Her voice comes during a lull in the music. The song has downshifted to something slow and dirty and R&B, the announcer crowing from his nest that someone named Lady Death is hitting the center stage.

“You my present if I fuckin’
say you is,
bitch!”

Ray stands up like a shot and pushes the table back when he says that. The two homies look like they’re going for pistols under their windbreakers.

“Be cool,” he tells them. Then
he looks right at me. “Where my fine-ass Ellie, motherfucker? Where she
at
?”