Another Life (2 page)

* * *

I
t took them only a couple of minutes to get out of the building, but it took us the rest of the afternoon to move the table and chairs down to the basement, scour the apartment, and give the whole area a final visual sweep.
If anyone ever came back there, the only difference between it and the other warehoused units would be that the one we’d used would be CSI-clean.

* * *

N
ot all the scripts were for major productions.
One group was very interested in a plot where the bad guys get a service tech to swap out the hard drive in one of those gigantic pay-to-use photocopy machines you can find in any of those joints that offer copying, fax, printing, and anything else a hustler with a cell phone needs to set up his “office.”
In my revised screenplay, the new hard drive looks exactly like the one that came with the machine, but this one has a little USB port—just plug in a programmed memory stick and wait for it to fill up. Most of what you siphon out is useless, but it’s like panning for gold—all you need is one big nugget, and they have search programs for that.
Always amazes me how people think they’re being “anonymous” by using a public library or an Internet café. Keep clearing that cache, suckers;
that’ll
fucking do it. Clowns who sign up for some free service that “anonymizes” their e-mails never stop to think that while they’re flaming each other in newsgroups, somebody else is collecting all their
actual
addresses…IPs and all.
You can usually turn stupidity into money, but any good 419 man knows it takes more than stupidity alone to sell the heavier schemes. That recipe always needs at least a pinch of greed to make it palatable enough to swallow.
Nigeria originated this con: “419” is a section of their criminal code, so they get scam-trademark status, like “Ponzi scheme.” The mark gets an overseas e-mail from someone who has managed to “divert” a certain sum of money—twenty million or so—by depositing it in a Swiss bank. But this person has a problem, which is why he’s contacting you. A source, who cannot be named, has vouched for you as a person of discretion, honesty, and intelligence.
The current fave is Nepal. Now the source can vouch for your deep concern for human rights, too.
Of course, this person can’t transfer that kind of money to
his
bank account; that’s where you come in. All you have to do is open a Swiss account of your own—detailed instructions included. Soon as you do that, the money he “diverted” gets transferred to you. After a suitable waiting period, you send it back to the thief. Of course, there would be a commission involved for your trouble—say, 10 percent? All you have to do is open that account, wait a little bit…and
presto!
you’re a couple of million to the good.
That’s where your honesty comes in. Your new pal is counting on you to come through, do the right thing, take care of him. After all, you’ve been vouched for, so he knows you won’t just keep the whole twenty mil for yourself, the way some crooks would.
Costs nine grand to open your own Swiss account. Should be more, of course, but everyone knows you’ve got to stay under ten on wire transfers, and the last thing anyone wants is the government—any government—poking its nose into
this
one, right, pal? What could be simpler?
You
couldn’t be, sucker. Open that Swiss account, send the password, and your nine grand is vacuumed out in seconds. The stupider—or greedier—you are, the longer it takes you to wake up and smell the scam.
Ah, it’s not that bad. You get to go on TV and tell the world how you were “victimized.” And how you’re just telling your story because you want to protect others who might fall into the same insidious trap.
Uh-huh.
The Internet didn’t create kiddie porn, but it sure made selling it easier. Spam-and-scam artists don’t even have to spend money on postage or faxes anymore. But they still need a database to work from.
So help yourself to another “free” e-mail address. Post your contact information on your “personal” Web site. Add your kid’s photo to your blog. Then call me a cold-hearted bastard when I don’t give a damn about you being “cyber-stalked.”

* * *

“M
y father is one of Jah’s Men,” Clarence said. “Jah’s protection is on him, always.”
Michelle shot him a look. She held it only a nanosecond before shifting it to me, but she was way too slow—Clarence could beat a scorpion to the draw.
“No, no, little sister,” he told her, not offended. “You think I mean those boys who wear their dreads and beads, smoke the ganja, listen to reggae? No. I am not speaking of some club you can join, like being a Rasta-man. Jah’s Men are
chosen.
”
“The Prof always said he had the call—”
“You see, then?”
“You can be called
home,
too, son,” I said, not pulling the punch.
“He is not going,” the young man said, his voice so heavy with his own helplessness that the words fell of their own weight.
Max held his hands apart. Glanced from one to the other. Bowed slightly.
“If he goes, it would be his choice,” I translated.
“My father would never surrender.”
“Couldn’t spell the word,” I agreed. “But I want to ask you a question, Clarence. And I want you to
listen,
okay?”
He nodded, brotherhood overpowering resentment.
“If you had the choice of living so that you had no control over what you do, a brain inside a body, but no power over that body, would you choose that life? Would you want someone to feed you, change your diaper—?”
“I would never allow—”
“I know you’d do it for him, Clarence. He knows, too. You think he wants to put you in that position? You want that to be his last thought? The last thing he sees? You want to take that from him? This is your
father
! Show some respect.”
The young man broke, sobs razoring his heart. Michelle moved close to him, just barely touching physically, but still holding him.
“John Henry never dies on his knees,” I reminded my little brother.”
Silence dropped like a shroud, transporting us all back to how the Prof had ended up caught between worlds.

* * *

Clarence blasted the Roadrunner down the narrow corridor like he was running for pinks. I spotted a black blotch against the wall just ahead, screamed: “Stop!”
The four-piston calipers locked like a heavy anchor in hot tar. I was out the door while it was still skidding, hit the ground rolling.
“Prof!” I screamed. The little man was lying with his back to
the wall. I couldn’t see anything but blood where his right thigh should have been.
I knelt next to him as Clarence charged toward us, holding his pistol like a voodoo fetish against the descending panic.
“Get that ride outta here, quick!” the Prof gasped. “Too big a target.”
“Prof—”
“I was inside, ’cross the way,” the little man wheezed out. He twisted his head toward a closed-down factory building. “I was on full ghost, but the motherfuckers peeped me anyway—must have had an electronic eye somewhere. I thought I’d got away clean, but they got a rifleman on the top floor. Left corner window.”
Pain flashed across his face. “Ten, twelve more of them up there with him, too. Full gear. Probably be coming down this way any second.” A warrior’s grin drove the pain from his eyes. “That is, if they got the balls—I fed ’em some lead before I fled. Now go!”
“We will not—”
“You hush, boy!” the Prof snapped at Clarence. “I’m all done, son. But I can buy you enough time to get gone.”
“Father…”
The Prof’s eyelids fluttered. My turn: “Get the car around that corner, where that sniper can’t see it,” I ordered Clarence. “Pop the trunk. I’ve got something in there for him.”
The Prof’s eyes snapped back into life. A bubble of blood was in his mouth from where he’d bitten into his lip to revive himself. “Do like you told, boy!” he barked, his hard voice too full of love to be disobeyed.
A piece of the wall flew off just above us. I hadn’t heard the shot—the shooter must be using a suppressor.
“Cocksucker ain’t hardly no Wesley,” the little man sneered. “I been laying here like a paper target, and he already missed me twice.”
I leaned close, needing to catch every word, but desperate to get to my car.
“Honor thy father,” he whispered. “Call my name, son. My true name. Call it! Call it
loud,
so those whores know who’s gonna be barring the door.”
“John Henry!” I screamed with everything I had in me.
The war cry pulled the Prof back from the brink. I could see a golden blaze flare in his all-seeing brown eyes.
“Fetch me my hammer, son!” the little man commanded. “Time to drive some steel for real.”
I was frozen—trapped between the two most compelling forces of my life.
“Get gone, Schoolboy,” he assured me. “I’ll be waiting when you show up. Me and that hound of yours.”
I kissed him. Another shot splattered concrete dust over us both. I pulled a fistful of double-zero shells from the Prof’s side pocket, lined them up on his right side. Found his sawed-off 12-gauge a few feet away, placed it reverently in his right hand. Then I ran for the corner.
The Roadrunner’s trunk was open, but Clarence wasn’t in the car. He was down on one knee, pistol out, a rabid wolf on a gossamer leash.
I grabbed the RPG out of the trunk, shouldered it, shouted, “Get behind the fucking wheel!”…and ran back the way I’d come.
The Prof was still down, but his sawed-off was up and ready for business. The concrete around his leg was a spreading red stain.
He never saw me as I dropped to one knee, sighted, and let loose at the sniper’s roost, screaming,
“Die!”
inside my heart, like I’d been doing since I was a kid. I could actually feel my hate raging inside that whistling warhead, deadlier than the shaped charge it carried.

* * *

I
n some professions, plastic surgery is a business expense. I remember a woman whose husband’s cash had greased the skids for her political career. She finally overdosed on her own press releases and decided her act could play even better in a bigger room. Desperate to stay telegenic, she’d had so many facelifts that her eyes became the side-glancing goggles of natural-born prey.
The only difference between her and the “dancers” who buy spine-herniating implants is the price they pay to stay on the stage.
On my side of the law, you don’t use plastic surgery to steal; you use it so you can
keep
stealing.
So when I didn’t recognize the face of the slender, colorless man who showed up for the script consult, I didn’t have an anxiety attack.
The guy who had called to hire my services was an established pro, but violence wasn’t in his repertoire. I’d never known his name, and a new face might have been a smart investment, considering he was a specialized-target art thief who never varied his MO.
He put in years of research on Nazi-looted canvases. Not the ones in museums or sitting in Swiss bank vaults; the ones kept, very discreetly, in trophy rooms.
The paintings aren’t the trophies; the power to acquire them is. And such power must be displayed.
This guy had everything he needed to get himself invited to some of those displays: that unbeatable combo of contacts, connections, and cash.
He wasn’t one of those hit-or-miss thieves who have their bondsman’s name memorized. No, this guy was so slick you’d have a better chance of picking up a drop of mercury with a pair of Teflon toothpicks. Plenty of high-skill operators could brag they’d never been arrested; this guy had never been
suspected.
He could only make a move every few years, and his expenses were high, but he never let ego interfere with his pursuit of perfection. For him, paying for a script consultation was nothing more than checking the “extra insurance” box on a rental car.
But as soon as the man sitting across from me put his hands on the table, I knew he wasn’t the art thief. It was the webbed fingers that tipped me. And I knew the tip was deliberate.
After the first time we’d met, a few lifetimes ago, I’d done some research. “Simple syndactyly” is what doctors call his condition. “Simple” means only the flesh is joined, not the bone; the attachment only goes as far as the first set of knuckles.
The condition is congenital—you’re born with it—and easily correctable. Best if the surgery is performed during infancy or as soon as possible afterwards, but it can be done at any age, and it’s about as low on the risk scale as any flesh-cutting could be.
No question that the man across from me—Pryce was the name I knew him by—could afford the best. But he liked his little jokes. I figure that’s where he picked his name from, too.
Why he changed his face so many times but always left his physical ID in place was something it might take an army of therapists to unravel.
I smiled to myself at the thought: the only way Pryce would ever go near a mind-man would be to hire him to probe into someone else. A surgeon’s scalpel can only open your flesh, not your secrets.
I didn’t know what Pryce wanted, but having the art-thief specialist make the call was his way of telling me he knew what I was doing for a living these days. Getting a man to make a phone call isn’t hard if you can get him killed just by making one yourself. Pryce was a certified no-limit man. Everyone in my world knew the only thing he
wouldn’t
do was bluff.
The first time we’d met, he told me he’d planted an informant inside one of those “leaderless cells” that were all the rage in the White Night underground after Oklahoma City. The “agent” he was running had an infant son, but his wife had fled with the baby. She was somewhere inside a safe house, one run by a network Pryce had never penetrated.
I’d known about Pryce for a long time before that meeting.
Of
him, anyway. He was some kind of psycho-patriot, a man who drew his own maps. But he was a purist in his own way: whatever he worked for wasn’t people, it was some…concept in his deranged mind. Administrations changed; Pryce didn’t.
The cell where his informant was planted was planning some major act of terrorism, details not yet known. One problem: the informant was demanding possession of his son as payment for staying on the job.
I had a problem, too, but picking a winner wouldn’t fix it. I needed to hit the exacta: a walk-away for my brother Hercules, who’d finally managed to bulldoze his fool self into an escape-proof box,
and
a disappearance for the same baby Pryce wanted to hand over to his informant.
We made a trade.
That was then. Now he was sitting across from me again. Just a couple of old buddies, playing five-card stud. The minute he let me recognize him, we were down to his last draw, but that didn’t matter—it was his hole card I had to pay to see. So I kept playing…playing like he was there for the “script consult” the art thief had called about.
“The way to make this work is change the house to a custom-built one,” I said, tapping my pad.
“What good does that—?”
“The guy you’re looking for would be a subcontractor. The electrician, specifically. Anything he installs, he knows how to make it malfunction. Just a little twist on the standard route. The pro burglar looks for the guy who reads the gas meter, the maid, anyone who has regular inside access. What he ends up with is the whole schematic: floor plans, security systems, like that.
“That’s fine for cash or jewels, but not for what your script calls for. No maid ever gets near your target’s trophy room; the meter reader probably doesn’t even know it exists. The architect would know there’s space there, but not what it’s used for. When it comes to lighting, air quality, temperature, stuff like that, the electrician’s the one you want.”
“But wouldn’t the cops immediately suspect him?” Pryce said, still playing the role.
“If anyone reported the theft, they might.”
He nodded.
“Okay,” I went on. “So the way the script starts, the star’s just a regular B and E man. Top-quality, but no specialist. One night, he gets inside a house. The camera shows him looking around for the goods. Then he stumbles across the trophy room.
“Soon as he sees it, he knows there’s
something
special kept in there. All this money spent just to build a setup like that, whatever’s inside has to be worth serious bucks.
“Immediately, he knows he’s out of his league. So he slips out without taking anything. Then he starts poking around—you can have him doing it on the Net; there’s Web sites that list the stuff, with images and everything. Makes a nice visual, too.
That’s
when your guy has this…what did you call it again?”
“Epiphany,” the man across from me repeated.
“Right. So he finds that electrician. Pays him a fat wad of cash to
cause
the system to malfunction—that can be done over the line, no need to go anywhere near the house. Naturally, the trophy-collector calls the same guy who installed the system to come in and fix it. And while this electrician’s doing that, earning triple-time plus a bonus, he plants a locator.”
“A what?”
“You can program a device no bigger than this,” I said, holding up a nickel-sized disk—same circumference, but much thinner—“so that it alerts at the presence of…hell, anything.” This was like showing a surgeon what a scalpel looks like, but Pryce went along with the gag.
“Like canvas,” he said, as if he’d just caught wise.
“Exactly. It’s a transmitter. You download all the info, check off the
known
missing works, and one of them will match.”
“That’s brilliant,” he said. “You should have been a screenwriter.”
“And you should have just called.”
Pryce shook his head. He opened his palm, the webbed fingers on snare-drummer’s wrists underscoring that he hadn’t tried to trick me. “I don’t like phones. Besides, it’s been a long time.”
“Not long enough.”
“Just in time, actually,” he said, turning over his hole card: “A private hospital. Top of the line. Best doctors on the planet. And you can visit. All of you. In the state he’s in, he hears your voices, it could make a difference.
All
the difference.”
I didn’t pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I sat back as if I was stunned, using the time to think of a way to get him to up the payoff. Because with what he was offering, he had to want something way off the charts in return.
“Herk and Vyra are doing fine,” Pryce said, lighting a clove cigarette as he stepped inside my thoughts.
I made a “So what?” gesture with my shoulders. Vyra had been a lot of different things before she met Hercules, including a rich man’s wife. When Herk disappeared, so had she.
“They wanted to get married,” Pryce said, the expression on his face just short of rolling his eyes at the strangeness of some people. “New York has archaic laws for contested divorces. Adultery counts, and so does abandonment, but that’s what
she
did, not him. The husband didn’t want to let her go. Not even when she offered to sign away everything, including the joint account and the house.”
I shrugged.
“We could erase Hercules—right back to the cradle. But Vyra had no record to clean, and a name change would make any marriage to Herk void
ab initio.
That means—”
“That you speak Latin, or hang around too many lawyers.”
“You want to know what happened or not?”
“I don’t even know who you’re babbling about,” I said. Pryce’s native tongue was Oblique, so maybe he was reminding me of the deal that put Herk inside the same cell where Pryce was running an informant…and the insurance policy I’d added. Not double indemnity, double-barreled. The policy turned Pryce’s new man into his
only
man…and showed him who he’d really signed up with at the same time.
I played the old tape in my mind, knowing Pryce was doing the same.