Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) (18 page)

“I'll take a couple of AK's, too, and all the ammo you can give me.”  Russwin said to Ace, then looked at me. “You want anything for your friend?”

Do you want weapons?

time and space and the spaces between.

“Uh, you got any knives?” I asked Ace.

“Oh, yeah,” Ace said expansively, “knives, swords, axes, chainsaws—you should see some of the shit they take off guys in county lockup.”

“Let's see,” Russwin suggested.

Ace locked up the first shipping container and opened another one. “AK's over there, knives over here.”

Take what you want, I told Catskinner.

Unlike the neat lockers and sealed envelopes on CSI, the things that Ace had in the shipping container were just stuffed in bins in no order that I could see. A few of them had tags with faded numbers scribbled on them.

I didn't really expect Catskinner to do anything. He'd never expressed much interest in physical objects, and he'd certainly never expressed any interest in personal possessions. In fact, he always seemed to view my desire to own things and take them with me when we were on the move as a liability. He used objects, if they happened to be close at hand, but he'd never shown me any indication that he ever understood the concept of ownership.

I felt him reach to take control and I eased back, taking a moment to urge him to be very careful. I felt him acknowledge that, and when he spoke he was slow and deliberate.

“
i may have these?
”

If Ace noticed the change she didn't react. “Sure, if anybody was going to come looking for that crap they would have done it long before now.”

Catskinner reached my hands into the tub full of knives and I winced inside, but he was moving gently and deliberately. My fingertips stroked the steel and I felt Catskinner's attention and also his intensity. Almost passion, except that passion in human beings is such a physical thing, heart rate, temperature, breathing, all the body's ways of showing emotion. Catskinner's intensity had no physical component. He wasn't “feeling” anything. Instead, his focus narrowed, his awareness contracting upon the box of blades. It was like watching a slow zoom in a movie or the adjustment of a microscope.

“these are intentional things.”

My hands stirred the metal objects, sorting through them quickly but almost silently, and came up with four: a bayonet, a small cleaver, a short, homemade looking blade that seemed to have been made by sharpening a screwdriver on a grinder, and survival knife with a serrated edge. He turned to Ace with the four of them balanced on his open hands.

“
i may have these?
” he repeated.

She had taken several steps back and looked uncomfortable. “Sure,” she said slowly.

Russwin was glaring at me. Catskinner sank back out of my body.

say thank you to her.

Thank you? Catskinner?

“Uh, thanks,” I said, holding the knives awkwardly. I started looking for ways to put them in my pockets.

“James,” Russwin said, emphasizing my name, as if to make sure it was really me he was talking to, “why don't you take the van outside. The gate will open when you get to it. I'll be along in a few minutes.”

I nodded, still trying to put the blades away, and headed for the van.

What the hell was that all about?

Silence. Catskinner was a bottomless void in my head, a hole in the fabric of the world, cold, dark, silent, and endlessly empty. In short, he was back to his usual self. I did my best to stash the blades he'd selected in my clothes, the survival knife and the screwdriver in my back pocket, the bayonet in my front pocket. The cleaver was a problem. I stuck it on the dashboard. Catskinner still didn't react.

I had left the van running—the ignition was workable, but awkward. I turned on the radio. It was set to classic rock, I left it there, playing softly. Sitting in the van listening to the radio made me think of Godiva. I told myself that Morgan wouldn't hurt her. He wanted me and would use her to get to me. He couldn't do that if he killed her.

After a while I almost believed it.

Russwin's “few minutes” was closer to twenty, but he did come back to the van, coming out a personnel gate I hadn't noticed.

He swung up into the passenger seat, and I looked over at him. “Well?”

“I guess we find a place to coop for a while. You got cash?”

I nodded. “A couple hundred on me.”  I thought about it. “More at my motel.”

“We just need enough for a room.” He thought it over. “Maybe across the river.”

I pull the van around and headed in what I thought was the right direction. Something occurred to me. “Shit. I had a bunch stashed in my van, too. Can you check for stolen vehicles or something?”

He shrugged. “I can get it on the hot list.” He pulled out his phone. “What's the plate number?”

Uh. I frowned. “I think I've got it at the motel, in the stuff I took from the shop.”

“You don't know your plate number.” Flat, disgusted. He put his phone away. “No point in calling it in—there's a million white cargo vans on the road.”

Well, hell, I never claimed to be secret agent material. I headed for the highway and got caught in a massive traffic mess. There was something big going on downtown—a ball game maybe. I sat and watched the taillights ahead of me and wondered if James Bond had days like this. Of course, his cars had rocket launchers to get rid of the guy ahead of him who was trying to make a left hand turn against the light from the right lane.

Speaking of which.

“So . . . why do we need anti-tank weapons?”

Russwin grinned. “For a frontal attack on the Good Earth.”

I stared back. “We're going to attack the Good Earth?”

“Hell, no. That'd be suicide.”

“But—you just said.”

He nodded. “Look, Ace is a great kid, but she gets lonely and she gets bored. I mean, she's stuck in that damned shack all night. So she talks to people. She talks to people a lot, about a lot of things.”

I was starting “So you think she's going to talk about you and me and the . . . stuff.”

“I know she will. Before morning she'll tell somebody. The story's just too good not to share—particularly the way your little friend went ga-ga over the knives. She'll tell somebody, and when she does, Morgan will be listening.”

“So you wouldn't really use that stuff.”

“Hell, yeah, I would,” Russwin said emphatically. “I just hope I don't have to. Morgan's got the next move, I'm just making sure he knows I'm prepared to raise. In this game we can't afford to bluff. Turn right here.”

I turned and headed away from downtown, down a side street.

“The highway's a mess—we'll just head south on the surface streets. We can find Motel 6 or something down this way.”

“Sure.”

We drove for a while without talking. The news came on the radio and Russwin turned it up, but there wasn't anything for us. He turned it back down when the DJ returned.

“We've got to do something,” I said at last.

“What?” he asked.

“I don't know. Something.”  I felt so helpless. It wasn't a feeling I liked.

“Look, Tom White was my partner for six years. We've been through shit together that most people can't even imagine. Right now he's out there somewhere with the side of his head smashed in. Believe me, if there was anything I could do, I'd be doing it.”

Russwin stared out the window for a moment. “I've thought about shaking down Morgan's contacts, but he's just got too damned many of them. We could spend all night chasing our tails and ending up with nothing. Like I say, he's got the next move. We needed to resupply, we did that. Now we need to rest up so that when he makes his move we're ready for it.”

I nodded. I couldn't fault his logic, I just didn't like it.

“I've got Tom, Alice, and Godiva in the system as persons of interest. If they show up on the radar, I'll get a call. Other than that, if there's anything you can think of, I'm all ears. Has your friend got any ideas?”

Do you? I asked in my head.

he is right. rest, prepare, be ready.

“No,” I admitted.

“See?”  There was a convenience store coming up on the right. “Pull in here, let's stock up on food.”

I pulled in.

“Say,” Russwin asked, “Does your friend sleep?”

“I don't think so.”

“But you need to, right? I mean, if he tries to keep you going without sleep, it'll mess you up. Like the food thing?”

I saw what he was getting at. “Yeah, he can keep my body awake, it's rough on me.”

He nodded and looked momentarily sympathetic. “Yeah. I can imagine.”

I opened my door. “You coming in?”

“No, I'll stay with the van. I want to make a couple of calls.”

I got some plastic wrapped sandwiches and beef jerky, and a handful of candy bars. Russwin drank soda, so I got him a twelve pack. I thought cops were supposed to be coffee drinkers.

At the register I thought about the food I'd bought for the little suite up by the airport. Godiva's new clothes were there, too. I wished that I was there, with her, watching TV and making popcorn in the cheap white plastic microwave. Even more, I wished I could have invited her to my little apartment above Victor's shop. I'd probably never see that place again. I wondered if I'd ever see Godiva again, if, somehow, we could spend time together, lazy afternoons and quiet evenings, in a place where nobody was looking for us.

Goddamn it, I was tired of running.
 

Chapter Seventeen

“all of the world is either red or black.”

Russwin was on the phone, listening and grunting, when I got back to the van. I broke open the twelve pack and handed him a can, he smiled his thanks and went back to frowning at the phone.

“Nothing,” he said to me when he hung up.

I nodded and put the van in gear. “Where to?”

He pointed vaguely south. “There's a Holiday Inn Express a couple miles down.”

“I guess where I'm staying isn't safe?”

“Too easy to find.”

“But don't we want Morgan to find us?”

“We want him to contact us, not kick in the door shooting.”

I guess that made sense.

Russwin went in to talk to the clerk when we got a room and I stayed in the van, very aware of the rocket launchers and machine guns in the back—not to mention four mismatched knives.

Odd. I still didn't understand why Catskinner wanted those particular blades. He had seemed almost . . . emotional about them.

Russwin came back and directed me down the row to our unit. I backed into the space without him having to tell me. That much I knew.

The room was a box with two beds, a TV, and a bathroom. I'd spent way too much of my life in rooms like this. Russwin frowned at the beds.

“You got a preference?”

I shrugged and sat on the one by the window. He slipped off his shoes, put his wallet, his gun, and his phone on the bed table next to the other, and flopped down. He stared up at the ceiling.

I kicked off my shoes, started to stretch out, and then I found Catskinner's knives. I pulled them out of my pockets and put on the bed table. Odd, the cleaver was there, too. I didn't recall picking it up.

“So . . . how did you get messed up in all this . . . stuff?” I asked.

He sighed. “It was one of those inter-agency clusterfucks. A cult compound down in Mississippi. Middle of the swamp—miles from anywhere. DEA was coordinating it, which should have been my first clue the op was doomed from the start.”

“So you weren't DEA?”

“Me? Hell, no. Postal inspector. I was supposed to be in a nice safe dry sorting facility, kicking back parcels for insufficient postage. But part of the report alleged these guys were sending controlled substances through U.S. mail, and I had field experience. Ten years in the Corps. MP.”

A bitter chuckle. “That's why I wanted to work for the Post Office, you know? I figured I paid my dues and they owed me a nice cushy Fed job.

“Anyway, like I say, it was a mess from the get-go. DEA was in the driver's seat, but there was me from Postal, a couple of grunts from the Bureau, some Customs guys, Mississippi state police, some chick from Border Patrol who looked like she just figured out she was on the wrong bus, and the local sheriff who kept wanting to call a press conference. It was about three in the morning, and I'd been on three planes coming in from DC—this place was nowhere. They flew us in on a couple of Coast Guard choppers. The plan was, we show up in the middle of the night, wave some guns and badges around, and then sit around and process prisoners.

“As soon as we touched down the whole thing went to hell. I don't know what kind of recon DEA thought they had done, but nobody was home in bed. The whole compound was up and having some kind of festival. We could see the light from the bonfires and hear the drumming half a mile away. The smart thing to do at that point would have been to bug out and come back later, but that was out of the question, too much manpower and too many egos involved. So we slogged on through the mud to join the party.”

He fell silent then, and I didn't push him. I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the rest of the story. I had a feeling it didn't end with “they all lived happily ever after.”

After a minute or two, “There was maybe a hundred of them, about twenty of us. The head nark in charge comes marching out into the clearing with his bullhorn and starts barking orders and the whole place goes stark raving mad. They were naked, most of them, covered with mud and sweat and blood and God knows what else, and they all just rush us with whatever they've got. Some of them had rocks or sticks, but mostly it was teeth and fingernails. I'd never seen anything like it, and I'd spent years in combat zones.

“Our people were freaking out, shooting up the place—that asshole sheriff had a tactical shotgun and just sprayed the thing like a fire hose. Me, I fell back tried not to use my weapon—these were unarmed civilians, no matter what they were acting like, and I could see prison time looming in my future.

“Then I saw the pillars. A dozen of them, maybe, big stones set in a circle like a poor man's Stonehenge. There were people tied to the pillars. What was left of people, anyway. I remember seeing one guy who missing both his legs, just hanging there by his arms, and he was still... moving. Twitching, kind of. There was a girl—a teenager—her legs weren't touching the ground, but her guts were.