Upgunned (15 page)

I hung
Targets #5
above the cast limestone mantel over the brick fireplace. I never liked gas fireplaces for the same reason I disliked outdoor gas grills—pointless and too phony. Plus a real fireplace was terrific for burning shredded documents. I toasted Ozzy's memory with some smoky single-malt and sat down in a fat chenille recliner to contemplate the artwork, and to determine how best to ruin what was left of Elias McCabe's smug little life.

*   *   *

Just because your team was expendable doesn't mean you had to enjoy the idea, because it means gratuitously confronting your own mortality. In all likelihood, Mal Boyd was stewing in similar juices right now, because he was too practical not to consider ending me.

I hated to lose Cognac. Seriously. She did what was required, never panicked, and stayed wired tight. Just look at how unhesitatingly she fucked a dead guy for me. No funny faces, no goofy protest; she jumped on and rode that pony, took her fee, and decamped. Plus she was a sexual adept, and those were getting harder to find in a world where the most sordid perversions have gone white-bread and mainstream. Past scat and torture and slavery for real—not the precious pretend slavery of safe words and mistresses by the hour—there weren't many extremes that could compare with the imminence of death.

So I made sure she had a top-rail, expensive dinner—a real date. We had fabulous sex. Then I killed her and dumped her body in the Lake Hollywood Reservoir. Most of it, anyway.

I halved her carotid artery with the Boker Magnum and she bled out in minutes without a sound. I was quick and merciful. She slid down into the still black water minus her teeth and fingertips.

I wrote it off as rehearsal for the Russian chick.

I added another charge to the tab that Elias McCabe was going to pay. I did his Eastern Bloc fellatrix out of momentum and sheer spite.

Nasjandra “Nasja” Tarasova was most likely Ukrainian since her given first name was anything but Russian. She was probably culled from some Lugansk cattle call because she was “linguistically capable,” a big plus in the world's second most popular sex destination after Thailand. Perhaps Clavius bought her at a bride auction. Apart from his sphere of influence, she was easy enough to vector upon because I had cloned the chip from Elias's cell phone. If you know how, anyone can do this in five seconds; I did it while Elias was shooting the commingling of the late Cognac with the late Dominic Sharps.

Nasja claimed to be married to Clavius—or maybe it was the other way around—but I could find no paper support for this. Out of his sphere she had a satellite time-share in Marina del Rey. The mail delivered there was all junk; apparently having the place was more important than using it. Tracking her own cell phone was kid stuff if you have the extra bucks and hours, and utilizing that as my own GPS told me she was headed there today. And not taking calls, it seemed.

I knocked, smiled, cut her main tubes and left her to slowly fill her clawfoot bathtub. She would read as an obvious suicide. She had ugly scars from multiple surgeries beneath her breasts, which I guessed were implant removal. Breast reduction is even uglier, especially when done by a hack, leaving a circle around the nipple, a vertical line, and fishhook curves that all resembled a cartoon anchor.

Her dreary ocean-view hole up was devoid of individuality to a degree I thought impossible. No snapshots, knickknacks, or personal gear more than six months old. All the clothing was new and from what I could see, yet unworn. Her shoe collection barely had scuffs on the soles. Once you subtracted the pictures (of her, every single one) the CPU data from her laptop hardly filled a thumb drive. Her nonpersonality had the telltales of someone on their way out. Clavius had finished with her, Elias was unenthusiastic, and she had a mirror cabinet full of prescription antidepression meds. Tailor-made. Nobody but nobody would check on this woman, here, until the smell hit.

I cut her with a straight razor I found still in its gift box (also in the medicine cabinet), and left the blade in her cooling hand. A tool is no better than the person wielding it, so I had to mess up the incisions to make them look tentative and unschooled, as though she had tried, hesitated, chickened out, tried again.

I was aware that I was saving the Kimber for my encounter with Elias. I had left him the cartridge; it was now a matter of form to finish up by gunfire. I should have just killed him straightaway with that bullet. But I had misjudged his diffidence. I should have gone with my gut feeling, and instead I gave him unearned slack because I actually liked his picture of the lady with her bits shot out.

Maybe I
was
losing my edge.

I showered and changed and dogged Elias's ass for most of the next day to scope his movements. He had some kind of business dinner that would hog-tie him for at least an hour, so that's when I went back to his loft.

Everything I saw there reminded me of my own failure. He was another guy who'd had it too soft for too long, and all he did was complain about it. It was time for Evil Me to let out the beast. I went utterly caveman on the whole place, working up a good clean aerobic sweat that would settle my pinging metabolism when the time came to show Elias how angry Mister Kimber could become.

After Elias, next stop was to find the blond chick, then maybe take out Clavius as well before confronting the more bitter problem of Blackhawk and Bulldog. Mal Boyd would only be impressed by a clean sweep, and perhaps some leniency would trickle down when he saw I would stop at nothing. No employee is so motivated as one who craves reinstatement.

And to be perfectly candid, the expungements performed thus far had my blood singing.

If the crimes were ever connected by the associations of the victims, media hysterics would think that a new serial killer was loose in the land. Yes, that was intentional.

But Mal had been right about another thing—my face was blown. There was the strong possibility of plastic surgery in my near future. I didn't feel like chilling out and opening a taco stand.

The break point is the moment where you are reminded that you and your team are completely expendable,
I had thought not so long ago. But it takes the biggest balls of all to confront that reality and enact it methodically. I killed Ozzy and Cognac first so that I would not hesitate or falter for all the rest. Mal Boyd would be frankly astonished and maybe even do a spit-take. He would recant his impugnation of my professional ability. It would be fun to watch him consume such a big roasted crow, vegetarian or not.

I could smell Elias's welling panic as he entered his formerly sacrosanct space to find it raped. The worst thing about home invasion is the idea that strangers have moved through your space without your permission, which is why, as with rape, the feeling is one of violation. I wanted him to tour the destruction of his own life, then die in the darkroom, his dingy womb, the place where he had tried to play superspy.

Which is where he found me, right on cue, on my third cigarette, because he had run late by my clock.

“It looks worse than it is.” I shrugged. “It only took about five minutes. Ten, tops.”

Elias was already trying to back away but the revolving airlock door to the darkroom did not permit that kind of retreat. I made sure he could see he had Mister Kimber's full attention in the lousy light.

Instantly, he tried to dissemble. To waffle. To yammer his way toward some lie that would disqualify him. So I put a slug in the wall next to his face and he folded up like a lawn chair. He was probably going to poop his pants again.

“Scared
now
?” I asked. His pre-death job was to listen, not talk.

Invigorating, it was, to slap his brain around with the complexities of setting up a job and pulling it off smoothly. Surely he could at least comprehend the idea of a job, a schedule, responsibilities.

“Wha-what d-d-do you want?” he stammered.

What I wanted was for him to stand up, face the hammer, and die like a man. Yeah—hold your breath.

“What I
want
is to put a bullet in your skull, set fire to this little workshop, and go have a nice steak.” And that indeed was my basic plan for the rest of the evening.

But my verbal thrashing made me feel better. It was emotional vomit and I needed to purge, so why not purge all over pussy boy? He wasn't going to stay alive long enough to fret his bruised feelings. So I spun him a recollection about the first time I ever killed a man for money. It felt good then, and it was going to feel even better now. Plus it drew him a picture that frightened him more—the remorseless taker of life, the stone-cold killer. His entire world was aloof and jaded, “mildly amused,” stylishly unimpressed. I needed to see him care about something enough to fear it.

The real question was why had he gone and fucked it all up? I had only borrowed him, and paid for the inconvenience. That was standard in America—cash absolves. I returned him to where I got him in more or less intact condition. There was absolutely no sane reason for him to try to fox me.

But now he was going into shock. Some beaten animals fight to get in that one last slash or bite, to take a piece of their tormentor into the next world. Others just lie there tharn, resigned to more pain. That was Elias now, glassy-eyed, breathing shallowly, unresponsive. He was not going to utter another syllable.

Which pissed me off even more, that he would not protest.

I was so close I didn't need a two-handed combat grip on the Kimber—handguns were never originally intended to be shot that way, but everybody picks up bad habits from the movies. I needed my free hand to shield my own face from backspatter because hollow points tend to be unsubtle. I took one step forward. He was going to die gibbering in a puddle of his own shame.

Something penetrated my right eye in the dark.

There was a brilliant white flash of impact lightning inside my head and I instinctively jerked backward to prevent the offending protrusion from sinking deeper into my soft tissue. I dropped the gun. My flailing arms swept the counters clear as I fell on my ass, immediately thinking—

—
You just put your eye out.

Panic did the rest.

I clutched my face and roared like a savage, more scared than hurt but the idea of what just happened nearly immobilized me with that fear, that pain. I had a lifelong terror of screwing up my eyes or hands. Now that terror flooded me, and made me a child again.

I could already feel some kind of wet dribble on my cheek.

I spread my wounded eye wide with my fingers, absurdly trying to
force
it to see. There's a blurry wash of vague color and knifing pain; when I looked at my fingers with my other eye—my
good
eye, I was already thinking—I saw dots of watery blood.

This was bad.

I couldn't wear a pirate patch or have a vacant hole in my face for the rest of my life.

I couldn't see Elias, couldn't find the gun, couldn't deal with the ominous lancets of pain in my head, and had to grope my way toward the door like a retard. My plug had been kicked out well and truly, surely as Achilles' own heel did him in.

I was thinking,
Ice pack wet cloths boiling water telephone. Kill him.

I got halfway to my feet and my viscera plunged as though I was going to puke. I fell into the inner curve of the darkroom door—I had to deduce this by touch alone—and started punching my way through the fiberboard. Every time I blinked it felt as though a cube of razor-edged glass was buried in my eye. Something was flopping around beneath the lid. Sliced nerves, ripped cornea, whatever; it blanched the shit out of me to even consider it.

And Elias had gotten away, or was getting away. I couldn't see so I didn't know.

It felt better to vent my panic in violence, so I kicked my way through the rest of the darkroom door. I could already tell by the room ambience that Elias had fled. I had to evacuate this area myself, posthaste. Get out while not being able to see; retrace my entry path while blind.

I pawed out my mobile, trying to think of who to call. Mal Boyd? Not a good choice. Friends? I didn't have any.

I knew some doctors, dentists, veterinarians and busted paramedics, though, and I fought to imagine what keyboard patterns their numbers might form. 1-2-3 was A through F. The right-hand side of the keypad was 3-6-9-#.

I couldn't let anyone find me. I had to get out and far away. I couldn't see a damned thing.

*   *   *

Crouching in a pool of water, I knew not where, shivering with the
potential
for the damage done, I tried to punch numeric sequences on my mobile and got them wrong because I was incapable of watching what I was doing. I had to be self-sufficient in this. Finally I reached a guy who could get a doctor, off the record, and that doctor got a specialist. Circumstances and security dictated that I wait more than an hour to be picked up, and it was very possibly the worst hour of my life.

*   *   *

The first doctor was named Albright. I had used him once for a gunshot wound. My last memory was that he looked like Falstaff, from Shakespeare. Round spectacles, neat gray beard. I couldn't confirm any of this. But his voice sounded the way I remembered. He acted as though he had been treating this exact injury all night and I was gushingly thankful for his businesslike efficiency; his patter was intended to impress and reassure, and that racked great points with me because he said things I wanted to hear—past the horror show in my head, that is.

“There's a triangular flap of your cornea sticking out,” he told me after droppering Alcaine into my eye to anesthetize it, then adding UV-sensitive fluid and locking my head into a metered steel gadget for a close-up inspection. All this was going to cost me a fortune, which is maybe why he was so avuncular.

The pain, the flinchy horror of my eyelid exacerbating the damage every time I blinked, magically evaporated for a few precious minutes. He tried packing my eye in antibiotic salve and taping a dressing over it. No go; the pressure was worse than the pain. He jabbed my arm with a tetanus shot and referred me immediately to an ophthalmologist whose office would not open for another eight hours. A third of a day ahead of me, during which I could barely see enough to stagger to the bathroom, gulp painkillers in an attempt to remain semicomatose, and try, try not to think, every second, about tearing, blinking, or being practically blind.