Weaponized (13 page)

Kyle drops like a stone, knees against his chest and announces his presence to the other swimmers with a lounge-clearing splash. German tourists scatter, scram to the shallow end; everyone screams.

Kyle stays under, producing bubbles, until he’s sure no one’s going to try to shoot at him from the balcony.

Fowler stares over the balcony, watches as the guy surfaces and makes a mad dash across the parking lot, upsetting a few topiary displays on the way.

Fowler couldn’t fire even if he wanted to. He’s too far away to get a clean shot, and the risk of collateral damage is too high.

Fowler steps back into the room, pissed off, shaking his head in disappointment.

Then, to top off Fowler’s personal farce, Monsieur Fresson—the bulb-headed hotel manager—arrives, takes one look at the blown-off door, curses in French, shakes his finger at Fowler, looks down, sees the body on the floor, passes out, and lands in a puddle of blood.

Fowler closes his eyes for a moment, really
understands
why the French don’t bother having an army anymore, and then holsters his gun.

He pulls out his cell phone, ignoring Fresson’s coma, and calls Rebecca. “What’s up?” she says. Fowler offers a guttural exhale she’s on intimate terms with. “Okay,” she says. “What do you need?”

“Get in touch with our Indonesian office. Tell them I need Lawrence Grant. He’s the best forensics guy in the Southeast. Try and keep the locals far away from here long as you can. I need some time with Larry before they come and contaminate the scene.”

“Can we do that? Not inform the locals?”

“I’m doing it.”

“What did you find there?”

“Something that needs Grant. And something not phone-friendly.” He pauses, considers pacing, then realizes he can’t avoid all the blood. “I need you here.”

Rebecca can barely contain her excitement. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Fowler says, already feeling guilty. “I really do.”

Purposely leaving out why he needs her:

To keep Fresson occupied while he and Grant get the place scrubbed down.

K
yle sits on a cement bench in the neon night waiting for Lara to emerge from inside a local market.

The severe heat, unleavened by the appearance of moon and stars, has partially dried his clothes soaked from the unexpected dive. He’s still breathless, and gradually coming to realize it’s going to be his permanent state until he finds Robinson. He’s going to have to learn to live with his heart hammering and the feel of a spear in his side.

Right now though, he needs to focus on slowing his brain down long enough so something coherent can burst through the neuronal bedlam.

He begins with a dialectic that’s served him well in the past. General Freudian castigation. He knows this situation is almost entirely his own fault, as much as he’d
love
to lay it all at Robinson’s feet. It all goes back to his own overwhelming need for safety, and his inability to move past seeking it in the sanctuary of someone older or braver.

First, it was his father who turned out to be a fraud, although the most loving fraud Kyle could have asked for. All fathers are mostly faking it, and at least Kyle’s dad got the
father
part right. He just happened to be on shakier terrain with the whole identity and truth thing.

Then it was Chandler who, in his modern-art mausoleum of an office, offered to become Kyle’s new father, who promised to make it all go away, to make Kyle his rich and spoiled little boy. Kyle would be relieved of the burden of self. He could code all day. It would only cost him his freedom.

Next, Robinson sprang onto the scene with promises of deliverance, promises Kyle could avoid further pain if he followed instructions, continued to embrace entropy, went back to sleep, and let the adults clean up his mess.

That’s how you end up like this,
Kyle thinks.
You keep waiting for someone to come along and save you, to absolve you of responsibility. You do that dance long enough, and the inevitable happens: You get older; you get desperate; you get less picky about your path to absolution; and someone like Robinson starts to look like divine grace instead of a dime-store Satan.

But this clarity, the result of a year of nothing but time to think, hasn’t gotten Kyle any closer to the root of his current problem.

He needs to find Robinson, needs to find out why he seems intent on destroying the meager remains of Kyle’s life.

And now his potential savior has come down to this:

Lara.

The one who jammed a gun against his forehead.

Yeah. Things have gotten to that point. And if Robinson was rough trade in a good suit, now Kyle’s got to work with the woman who already boasts a body count of three and could charitably be called a wild card.

So he’s got to double down on the killing machine, a woman who also happens to be—in one of those ironies peculiar to a God who also made asses the perfect height for kicking—the best kisser he’s ever encountered.

Lara emerges from the market and snaps her fingers to prompt Kyle. “I can’t believe you jumped in the fucking pool,” she says, shaking her head. “Get in the car, Jacques Cousteau.”

U
pon entering Robinson’s hotel room, Lawrence Grant, one of Fowler’s CIA brethren and a forensics specialist, utters:

“Fuck.”

Fowler’s watched Grant work before. He’s a guy so inured to carnage that his face remains a funereal tabula rasa even when confronted by the horror of a dead body left locked up in a hot room for so long that it exploded. To inspire Lawrence Grant to mumble “Fuck,” someone has to leave behind a hot fucking mess.

Grant is silent as he combs the scene for potentially usable evidence, then he turns to Fowler and says: “Should have told me to wear my boots.”

And he’s not kidding. Not all the blood and guts have finished drying, and Grant’s loafers are starting to look like part of the crime scene.

“I’m gonna check the closet,” Fowler says.

Grant doesn’t look back, continues to read the room, searching for the story. “Another one in the bathroom, right?”

“Yup,” Fowler says.

Grant kneels beside the first Chinese man, puts down a briefcase. “I’ll start with him.”

“You need me out of the room?”

“No.” Grant tosses Fowler a pack of surgical gloves. “Just don’t touch anything.”

“I know the drill.” Fowler’s walking toward the closet when Grant whistles and says, “Fowler. No smoking in here.”

Fowler’s about to respond when he looks back and sees Grant rooting around in what’s left of the man’s jaw, placing portions of broken bone and loose skin on the floor, while trying to extract part of a shell casing from what’s left of the cheek.

Fowler’s lunch rises to midchest and bubbles. He’s aware of the deep contradiction. He has no problem maiming people when they’re
alive,
but he hates to see bodies desecrated. It sickens him. For some unknown reason, he has far more respect and sensitivity for a body once it ceases to matter to its former occupant.

Fowler opens the door to the walk-in closet, puts a penlight between his teeth, and moves all the empty wire hangers to the end of the rail. He goes through the pockets of the clothing Robinson left behind, a pair of slacks, a purple-striped oxford shirt, a black blazer. They’re all empty, nothing but lint.

Fowler peers up and feels around the top shelf. Nothing. No luggage.

Next, he drops to the floor and runs the penlight beam along the carpet. He crawls the length of the closet, reaches the wall, and feels something digging into his knee. He turns around, backs into the corner, and examines the object.

It’s a poker chip. Bright red.

Fowler flips the chip and reads the number inscribed on the back. This chip is worth ten thousand American dollars. Not ten thousand riels. Ten grand is big money here. He holds it by the rim, brings it up to the penlight, trying to touch the surface gingerly to preserve any markings.

“I got something,” he says to Grant.

“Come out here and get a bag,” Grant yells back. “I’m busy.”

Fowler leaves the closet, sees Grant is now working on the victim’s back, and averts his eyes from the spinal spelunking.

“Bags are on the bed,” Grant says.

Fowler pulls one out of a plastic dispenser, drops the chip inside, and seals it. “How long until you need the bathroom?”

Grant’s cracking vertebrae in the victim’s spine so he can root around deeper for an errant slug. “You got time.” He’s visibly sweating from the effort of pushing and pulling the man’s body apart. “Can you turn up the air in here?” he says to Fowler while removing a serrated spreader and hacksaw from the briefcase, catching Fowler’s stunned reflection in the silver teeth.

Fowler adjusts the air, drops the temperature to sixty-five. He hears Grant crack the victim’s spine in several spots and doesn’t want to turn around.

Christ,
Fowler thinks,
the human body is a lot of effort. It takes a lot of sweat and tears to love it and an equal amount to destroy it.

Fowler hits the lights in the bathroom, steps inside.

He steps over the seepage from the body in the corner, does a quick search around the sink, then looks inside the medicine cabinet, where he finds nothing except an unopened box of pills for nausea.

Fowler rounds the space between the sink and toilet, stops, lifts the toilet lid, and sees vomit inside. “Larry,” Fowler yells, “I got some puke in here.”

“And?”

“Do you need that?”

“I’m set.”

Fowler flushes the vomit, then removes his shoes and steps inside the shower. He checks the walls for stray hairs, subtle prints, forgotten fluids. Doesn’t see anything. Then he notices the drain. A small pool of water has collected around the stopper. He kneels down, pops the plug off with a small penknife, sticks his gloved hand inside, and exhumes a clump of hair.

It’s long and wispy with split ends from too much blow-drying and the chemical treatment that turned it hot pink. Fowler holds it by its black roots and rises from the tub.

The hair still smells a little like avocado shampoo.

There was definitely a woman here with Robinson in the past few hours.

L
ara punches a code into the sunken keypad next to a drab gray door. A green access light pulses, and she walks inside.

The apartment’s never been lived in; all the furniture and appliances are wrapped in clear plastic. An indistinct but conspicuous chemical smell suffuses the air, but Lara puts an end to it by lighting a cigarette.

“Come in,” she says.

Kyle remains in the doorway, frozen. This is like entering Robinson’s hotel room all over again. He’s got the same eerie presentiment his life is about to change irrevocably and that somehow he unconsciously invited it to happen.

Kyle takes a few tentative steps inside.

“I said come in.”

Her face,
Kyle thinks.
Her body.
She’s a literal
lustmord
in casual clothes. She and Robinson belong together. They both harbor some personal power that can’t be articulated but could lure you willingly into just about
anything.
A power completely alien to Kyle, who’s used to a world of charts and boxes, facts and figures.

“Whose place is this?” Kyle asks.

“A friend.”

“That a good idea?”

“You got something better?”

“Isn’t it dangerous to go to a friend of yours right now? All things considered.”

“He’s a friend of
mine
. Not Robinson’s. He’s just a businessman.”

“That’s what Robinson told me
he
was. Seems like everyone’s a businessman these days.”

“This guy’s a salesman.”

“Another booming field.”

“I
fuck
him. Okay, I fuck him for old times’ sake. He doesn’t know Robinson. He doesn’t know what I do He’s the first person I met when I came to Europe. He thinks I study fashion. He brokers apartment complexes all over the Middle East and Southeast Asia.”

“Oh,” Kyle says with a hint of disapproval.

“Oh? The fuck is that?”

“I thought you and Robinson…”

“What?”

“Were a…thing.”

“You don’t know anything about me and Robinson.”

“I don’t know anything about you, period.”

No response.

Kyle looks around the apartment, trying to find some speck of human warmth. “Can I have a glass of water?”

“You want me to get it for you?”

“No. It’s just…this isn’t my place.”

“Not mine either,” she says. “Sink is over here.”

Kyle opens up several cabinets looking for glasses, but they’re all bare except for floral shelf paper. He turns on the tap, sticks his lips to the faucet, and drinks until his tongue doesn’t feel like it has a sock wrapped around it.

Lara leans against the counter, pitches the cigarette into the sink—where it dies with a soft sizzle—and folds her arms.

“At the hotel,” Kyle says, “you said you needed me to be Robinson.”

“There are people I need to talk to,” she says. “People I can’t talk to without Robinson. I don’t have him. But I have
you.
You can open a lot of doors for me.”

“I barely knew him.”

“How well does anyone know anyone?” She locks eyes with him. “You need to find Robinson to get yourself out of this. I need to find him too.”

“Look. There are other options. We have similar problems. I’m sure we can come up with something.”

She looks at him like he’s an insect she’s
allowing
to fly around the room. “You and I have very different problems. We just have the same solution.”

“You don’t think very much of me, do you?”

“Why should I?”

Kyle knocks his knuckle against his front teeth. “I don’t know.”

“Are you always so…direct with your questions?”

“No,” he says. “Seems like only around you or Robinson.” And it’s true. There’s something about the sphinxlike quality of these two that makes him want to confess his deepest sins.

“Well, if I may be as direct as you,” she says, “you’re not the only one who Robinson’s fucked over recently. And you’re going to help me undo that.”