The Detachment (38 page)

“You want me to change the location?”

“No, I don’t want to say anything about where we’re meeting on an open line. Urth is fine. We paid up for the room?”

“We’re paid up.”

“What’s Dox driving?”

“The Honda I boosted.”

“Then the truck’s still here?”

Treven nodded his head toward the bed stand. “Keys are right there.”

“All right. There’s a payphone on the northwest corner of Lincoln and Pico. Call Dox, tell him we’ll meet him as planned as soon as we can.”

“Where’s my gun?” Larison said.

“Top dresser drawer,” Treven said. “Yours and his.” He waited a moment, but Larison didn’t move for the dresser. That was good. If he had, Treven was going to shoot him right then and there. He wondered if Larison understood that.

“We’ll pull the truck around in about fifteen minutes,” Rain said. He seemed to know exactly what was going on, and Treven wondered what he had planned. Talk to Larison? Kill him? He couldn’t read Rain much better than he could read Larison.

Whichever it was, he hoped Rain knew what he was doing. He nodded and went out.

L
arison wanted to go to the dresser and get the Glock. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to do with it, but he felt so outplayed and so boxed in that he just needed to be holding a weapon. It was like this sometimes when he woke from one of the dreams, arms shaking and heart hammering and torso slicked with sweat, and the only thing that could bring him down was the feel of a weapon in one hand and solid objects, totems of the waking world, under the other. But Rain was standing between him and the dresser, and he didn’t know what Rain would do if he made a move. Would Rain try to stop him? Larison had sixty pounds on the man, maybe more, but he’d watched Rain take out those contractors in Tokyo and they were even bigger than Larison. Anyway, even if he could beat Rain hand-to-hand, there wouldn’t be much value to reaching the gun if he got to it with a broken arm, or worse. He decided the safer course was to stand down, for now.

Rain was watching him, and Larison had the sense the man knew exactly what he was thinking.

“Well?” Rain said. “What are we going to do?”

“What do you mean?” he said, telling himself he was playing for time.

“What would you say if I told you about a four-man team, three of whom independently came to the same conclusion about the fourth member?”

Larison didn’t answer.

“In case I’m not being clear,” Rain went on, “the conclusion I’m referring to is that you were going to come back here and punch that girl’s ticket.”

“So what?”

“Were we right?”

“What difference does it make?”

“In a way, none. Because when you have three people out of four thinking the worst of you, there’s a problem even if the three people are mistaken. And that problem is you.”

Larison didn’t answer. Christ, if he only had that gun. Just the feel of it in his hand. To hold all this shit at bay.

Rain watched him. “You want to know what Treven didn’t say?”

Again, Larison didn’t answer. The dresser was eight feet away. Could Rain really stop him?

“He didn’t say the other thing we were all thinking. Which is that you weren’t just going to punch Kei’s ticket. You were going to try to punch everyone’s.”

Larison gritted his teeth. He’d never felt so exposed. They knew too much about him. They’d seen through him. Somehow he’d faltered. It was all out in the open now. All of it.

“Were we wrong?” Rain asked.

Larison looked at him. “Stop fucking around. You want to finish this, let’s finish it.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do?”

“You’re trying to fuck with my head, and I don’t like it.”

Rain walked over to the dresser.

Larison, distracted by his own inner turmoil, was slow to react. He said, “Don’t!” But in the time it took him to get the word out, Rain had already opened the drawer. Rain glanced back at him, then reached in and came out with the Glock.

Larison watched, fascinated. A weird placidity settled over him. He tried to think of something to say. Nothing came out. There was a moment of weakness in his knees, but he thought that was relief more than fear. Yes, relief.

Rain checked the load in the Glock. He held the gun and looked at Larison. His expression was grimly purposeful.

Larison smiled. It seemed important to let Rain know he wasn’t afraid. That, on some level, he was even complicit.

Rain tossed him the gun. Larison was so astonished he almost couldn’t react. At the last instant, he got his hands up and caught it. He stood staring at it for a moment in shock.

“What a waste,” Rain said. “Overall, we’ve been a pretty solid detachment. We’ve survived two ambushes and a hunt by the national security state; we’ve scored a hundred million dollars; our biggest enemy just neutered himself, as you put it…and we’re going to cash all that in because we just can’t help killing each other. Does that make sense to you?”

Larison blinked. Was Rain fucking with him? He could tell by the Glock’s weight the magazine was full. Still, he racked the slide to be sure. A bullet ejected. Larison caught it in the air and looked at it. Standard nine-millimeter round. The gun was loaded.

“What are you doing?” Larison said. He was holding the gun, but he felt suddenly terrified.

“I’m doing for you what Dox once did for me. The thing I told you about in Vienna—Kwai Chung.”

“You told me he saved your life.”

“That was the obvious part. He also proved to me I could trust somebody. Of the two, I think the second had the more lasting effect.”

Larison tried to think of something to say and couldn’t access the words.

“How do you think Horton wants it?” Rain said. “You think he wants you killing everyone who might know your secrets? Or trusting people to watch your back?”

Larison looked at him. He wanted to ask what Rain meant by “secrets.” But to ask would be to reveal. And besides, he could sense, on some deep, unexplainable level, that Rain…already knew. The same way he could sense that he also didn’t care.

“What about the others?” he heard himself say. Christ, it sounded so weak. So pleading.

“Dox expects people to act honorably,” Rain said. “If you let him down in that regard, he also believes the honorable thing is to track you down and shoot you. But he does like to give people the benefit of the doubt.”

“I can’t figure him out.”

“He grows on you. Anyway, you think Dox or Treven cares about you as anything other than a friend or a foe? Each of us just pocketed more money than we can ever spend. The trick now is to live to enjoy it. And we have a better chance of doing that watching each other’s backs than we do trying to preemptively kill each other. Isn’t that what you told me in Vienna you wished you had? Someone who really had your back? Well, how are you going to get that if you reflexively kill people because you’re terrified of trusting them?”

Larison blew out a long breath. Then another. He felt like he was going to jump out of his skin and told himself to Calm. The Fuck. Down.

Rain looked at him. “You mind if I take my gun out of the dresser?”

Larison shook his head. A minute ago, he would have killed Rain to stop him. Now…it didn’t matter.

Rain took out the Wilson Combat, checked the load, and eased it into his waistband.

“What’s the plan?” Larison said, unable to let go of his own gun, though he had no intention of using it.

“Well, it might be selfish,” Rain said, “but I’m pretty sure the three of us are going to Nebraska to try to stop a massacre.”

“Why is that selfish?”

“Because you could argue we’re not doing it to save the lives of others. You could argue we’re doing it so we can live with ourselves.”

Larison didn’t answer. He knew Rain was deliberately echoing what Larison had told him in Vienna, about the nightmares. It had been weak of him to tell Rain that, and he wasn’t sure why he had. But…the idea that there was something he could do, that there was a way to beat back those awful dreams…he wanted to believe it.

“I didn’t know it when I agreed to this op,” Rain said. “At least, I didn’t know it consciously. But I need to take all the shit I’ve done and the horror I’ve inflicted and do something good with it. And yes, Horton used that notion to manipulate me, and even though it turns out I was wrong about what the op was really about, it also turns out that maybe I’m going to get my chance anyway. And I don’t want to blow it.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because if we make the wrong choice here, I don’t think there’s a way back. I’ve come close before, very close, right up to the edge of the abyss. I don’t want to fall into it. And right now, I’m teetering.”

Larison swallowed. He thought he’d never been so confused. Or so suddenly exhausted.

“I need…a little time,” he said.

Rain nodded sympathetically. “Yeah, I remember the shock of trusting someone. It fucked me up, too. You get used to it, after a while.”

Larison shoved the Glock in his waistband. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “What the hell did you just talk me into?”

“I didn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. You were just trying not to hear it.”

Rain held out his hand. After a moment, warily, Larison shook it.

D
ox drove the Honda Treven had stolen east, toward Union Station. From there, Kei could catch a Red Line train and be home in no time.

He’d hated having to zip her back into the cargo bag to get her to the car, but Treven was right, no sense taking chances about her figuring out where they’d held her. The truth was, he was less worried about her being able to run to the police than he was that she’d feel bad if she didn’t. Better to just deny her the ability, and therefore save her the guilt.

The worst part of it was how willingly she’d let him do it. He’d taken the headphones off her and said, “Darlin’, I’m not comfortable waiting around for the bogeyman to get back here. He’s just too unpredictable for my tastes. So, with your permission, I’d like to take you home now.”

She’d looked into his eyes, smart enough to search for a lie, trusting enough to want to believe none was there, insightful enough to see that none was. Then she’d nodded and said, “Okay.” And that was that. He carried her out in the bag, unzipped it inside the trunk, closed her inside, and drove off, taking care to use an indirect route with plenty of bridges and underground parking garages along the way.

He’d been driving for nearly an hour when his mobile phone rang. He picked up. “Yeah.”

Treven’s voice: “All right, they’re back. The stones are real.”

“Well, that’s good news. What’s going on with our friend?”

“I don’t know. Your friend is alone with him right now. Trying to talk him down, I think.”

Dox didn’t like the sound of that. “Talk him down?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. He asked me to step out and call you from a payphone. And to tell you we’d meet as planned as soon as the three of us can get there.”

Dox hoped there would be three left. If whatever talk Rain was trying didn’t work out, there would likely be only two. Or one.

“All right, thanks for letting me know. I’ll see you in a little while.”

He clicked off and finished the route on Ducommun Street, an empty cul-de-sac a few blocks from Union Station, where he parked in front of the busted chain-link fence in front of an abandoned warehouse. He got out with Kei’s mailbag and looked around, squinting against the sun and the heat. Someone had spray-painted
No Parking, Tow-Away
in now-faded red on the boarded-up doors of the building, but amid the weeds growing through the cracks in the pavement and the garbage collecting at the bottom of the teetering loading dock, he didn’t think he was likely to encounter any objections.

He walked around to the trunk and opened it. Kei shut her eyes and lifted a hand to shield her sweaty face from the sudden invasion of light.

She squinted up at him fearfully. “You’re really going to let me go?”

He wondered if he could feel more low. He was never doing something like this again, no matter what the stakes. Never.

He held out his hand. “I promise you, I am. And I’m sorry, that was a long drive. I can see where you might have started to doubt me. Plus, it must have been god-awful hot in there.”