Another Life (20 page)

* * *

S
audi Arabia, that’s our bosom buddy. So was Iran, once, remember? The shot-callers here have their own magic label-maker: Pinochet was a realist, Castro’s a fascist, and Vietnam’s a good export market.
Letting Idi Amin run a country was like making Ted Bundy warden of a women’s prison. Idi Amin never sat in an electric chair, he sat on a throne. But once syphilis gets inside your brain, money can’t get it out. His last years were spent in a castle, not a prison cell. A castle in Saudi Arabia.
Our government counts Uganda as a major ally in what they call a “troubled area.” An area close to where Mobutu used to fill the same role.
I learned two things in my life. Everything’s connected. And you never want to
be
the connection. You know how therapists do that word-association thing? Some people, you say “connection,” first word that comes to their mind is “sever.”
I remember the Prof chuckling out loud at the whole idea of arming America’s friend-of-the-moment. “Fools think, just ’cause they can get a snake to dance, it won’t bite ’em the second it gets the chance.”
That’s all about international alliances, not families. Still, I had to reassure Max a dozen times that Mama would
never
find out who was with us the night we checked out the Sheikh’s fortress.

* * *

O
ur alliance with the third man on the roof started a few years ago, when I first came back home. We were almost down to our case money, so we started piling up cash any way we could.
Some people are fool enough to think that a shared profession makes them safe from their own kind, like the embezzler who blows his take on pump-and-dump penny stocks.
“A fool
is
money,” the Prof always said.
That first job we’d done together was trickier than it looked. Disabling that traveling circus of “bounty hunters” was easy enough, but we’d been paid to handle it ghost-style—absolutely no-trace guaranteed. The targets had to wake up
permanently
discouraged, but without a clue how it had happened.
Nobody was worried about them running to the cops—bounty hunters aren’t exactly an NYPD favorite.
Picking them out was embarrassingly easy. Four men, in two “unmarked” cars that were about as undercover as Britney Spears, never mind the stupid baseball caps the men wore, or the cage bars between the front and back seats.
It had taken us a couple of days to make sure they really
were
that lame, not just posing for some TV crew.
Once we locked on, Michelle slut-voiced an anonymous call to the bondsman. He’d figure it for the bail-jumper’s wife. Her divorce lawyers would have told her she’d only get to keep what the government didn’t take, and if her husband didn’t show up for trial…
The professional man-hunters pressed buttons at random until someone buzzed them into the building. They exchanged knowing looks—yeah, people who live in slums really
are
idiots.
If they hadn’t been such pitiful amateurs, they might have wondered why the lightbulbs were all burned out in the hallway where they positioned themselves on either side of the door, getting ready to kick it in.
I guess too much TV
can
rot your brain.
Being highly experienced in such matters, only three of them went to the bail-jumper’s door. The other one waited out back in case the bad guy tried the fire escape, a Desert Eagle dangling from his hand. Good choice; that piece is heavy enough to practice curls with, and it’s harder to conceal than a fluorescent brick. Naturally, the genius chose the all-chrome model—it picked up enough ambient light to sparkle in a coal bin.
That one was mine. Max and his friend took his partners.
Going in, we knew it was a three-man job, minimum. No matter how we disabled the bounty hunters, we’d need a driver to remove each of their cars, plus one more to follow them to the dump site and get us back to Manhattan.
The extra man Max brought in was a stranger to me. I didn’t know his name, never saw him before that night. He was an older guy—I wouldn’t even try to guess his age—wearing some kind of mottled-shadow bodysuit under a long, cowled coat, his hands hidden somewhere inside the sleeves. A night-merging hood covered his head. I deliberately didn’t make eye contact with him, but I already knew the one part Mama couldn’t
ever
know: he was Japanese.
And now the three of us were working together again. Standing on a rooftop on the East Side just before dawn, trying to see an answer.

* * *

T
he cowled man gestured to Max as if I wasn’t present. He spread his arms, upturned palms and a slight movement of his head indicating he had seen nothing that could keep him out of the building we had been scanning. He held up an admonishing finger, then mimed a man walking…walking slow. Shook his head.
Max tossed some invisible objects between his hands, like a juggler.
The black-cowled man placed his own hands together, made a pillow of them, canted his head. Then he shook himself like a man coming out of a daze.
Max bowed, his eyes never leaving those of the ninja, who returned the bow to precisely the same depth. Maybe Max saw him disappear; I know I didn’t.

* * *

T
he Prof’s hospital room was the perfect place for us all to meet. “We’ve got a guy who can get in from the top, work his way downstairs, and open the side door for us,” I laid it out. “But there’d be no way to cover up that the place had been visited. It’s just too big, with too much staff. There’d be bodies all over the place. If they got put to sleep, they’d wake up. And if they didn’t…”
“That ain’t the half,” the Prof said, almost condescendingly, taking the idea that a ninja might know more than he did about home invasion as a personal insult. “Even if Max’s boy got himself an invisibility spell, what if the phone rings while he’s doing the job? Or if they got something scheduled we don’t know about, like one of those ambassador meetings? Take nothing more than some FedEx driver ringing the bell to send it all straight to hell. Come on!”
“Pryce—”
“Pryce
might,
is all you can say, son. I taught you better than that; we don’t go till we
know.
Pryce flops, we
all
drop.”
“But it’s the only thing we’ve come up with,” I argued. “And even
that
window won’t stay open long.”
“It
is
logical,” the Mole threw in, looking up briefly from examining the prosthetic they were fitting the Prof for, already thinking of ways to make it work better.
Michelle exchanged a look with Clarence, silently agreeing that, for the Mole, those three words were a damn filibuster.
“She never leaves?” Gateman asked. If hospital security had a problem with a man rolling his wheelchair onto the elevator with a reworked 9mm Kahr nestled near his colostomy bag and a pit bull in his lap, they must have kept it to themselves.
“Could be that way, Gate,” I said. “She’s not some rich man’s playtoy; she’s property. She’s probably allowed out, but no way she’d ever be able to go alone.”
“There still has to be…”
“Went over the options, Prof. She can’t call a car service; they’d never let one past the gates. She can’t even go for a walk around the grounds without ‘protection.’ Even if she could sneak into that underground garage, so what? It’s against the law for women to drive where she comes from; she probably doesn’t even know how.”
“That’s a whole different set of—”
Whatever Michelle was going to say was chopped off by Taralyn’s brisk entrance. She stood by, hands on hips, eye-dueling the Prof until the old man pushed himself out of bed, gripped the walker, and propelled himself out the door.
Taralyn whirled, her eyes hitting Clarence like a two-ton electromagnet on a pile of iron shavings. “I should walk with my father,” he immediately said, and followed her down the corridor.
“I thought only a witch could cast a spell,” Gateman said, grinning.
“You need to get out more,” Michelle told him dryly.

* * *

“Y
ou want all this done because you’ve got an
idea
?”
“It’s not an idea, it’s a hypothesis,” I told Pryce, echoing the Mole. “So it has to be tested.”
“Has?”
“Or not,” I conceded. “But I’ve checked every place I knew about, and a lot more I
found
out about. Nothing. Not even a tremble on the Web-lines. So it’s either your scenario or it’s mine.”
I waited, but I could see he was waiting on me. So I said: “Now, yours, I admit, it could have happened that way. I can even see how it might make sense to some sicko; power
always
makes sense to them. Rats are supposed to desert a sinking ship, but some rats are smart enough to know it’s not the ship that’s going down…only the captain.
“Thing is, I could never test any of that, but I know
you
could. In fact, I know you did,” I gamble-guessed. “And if your theory had proven out, you wouldn’t have even shown up for this meet.”
Pryce steepled his fingers.
“What makes you think you could get her to—?”
“I didn’t say ‘think,’ I said ‘might.’ For all I know, she doesn’t even speak English.”
“Like a native.” Pryce was old-school all the way—even liked his razors double-edged. “I’ll have the rest for you in forty-eight.”

* * *

I
was on my way back home when my cell throbbed.
“What?” I answered.
“I fucked up, boss.” Gateman’s voice, street traffic in the background.
“I’m on my way.”

* * *

I
walked in the front door of the flophouse, hands empty. If something wrong was waiting inside, Gateman would have tipped me when he’d called—we all know how to do that, even if we’re talking with a gun at our heads.
He was behind the wooden plank, his semi-auto lying flat on the never-signed register book. Rosie ambled over to greet me. I saw she wasn’t chained. Expecting company, then.
We all went into the back. The interrogation-room mirror behind the “desk” let us keep watch. As an extra precaution, we kept the glass dulled, even though the winos who flopped upstairs never seemed to want to look at themselves.
“I just blew it, boss. Straight up.”
“Easy, Gate. Run it down.”
“It was only a couple of hours ago,” he said, glancing at the large-numeral atomic clock Terry had bought for him. Almost 3:00 a.m.
“I took Rosie for a walk,” he continued. “I figured, past midnight, even those dipshits who like to play urban pioneer would be indoors, I’d have the streets to myself. So I’m a few blocks over—you know, where they’re tearing down that old factory? All of a sudden, Rosie’s hair goes up on the back of her neck. I know something must be just around the corner, but I don’t get all hyped over it—any strong-arm guy working down here knows better than to fuck with me.
“Only it wasn’t a mugger; it was this bunch of kids. All wearing the same gear, so I figure them for some kind of club. That’s when I saw this huge pit one of them was holding. Heavy chain, spiked collar, you know the look—all that MTV crap.
“The kid’s dog growls, and Rosie just
goes
for him. Boss, I ain’t no weakling,” he said, holding up a thick forearm heavily corded with muscle. “And I had my chair
locked,
too. But Rosie, she was
still
moving on them, dragging me like she was in a tractor-pull.
“I tell the kids, ‘Get back!’ But the one holding the dog, he screams, ‘Get ’im, Tec!’ Their dog starts his bounce. Cocky, like it was gonna be an easy piece of work for him. I didn’t have no choice, boss; he was twice Rosie’s size. I pulled my steel, told the punk, he drops that chain, his dog’s a goner. Him fucking too.
“That stops ’em, but just for a second. One of them, he starts movie-talking. You know, ‘I can’t shoot
all
of them’ bullshit. So I plugged him.”
“Fuck.”
“I know,” he said, sorrowfully.
“Nobody went nine-one-one?”
“I didn’t total the punk,” Gateman said, sounding offended and defensive at the same time. “Just tore up his leg a little. They all took off then, dragging him behind. But how hard is it gonna be for them to find this place? All they gotta do is ask around about a man in a wheelchair….”
I nodded.
“And you know how gang kids always go for payback, boss. Gas-in-glass, that’ll be it.”
I nodded again. Gateman might be wrong about the Molotov—although I didn’t think he was—but it really didn’t matter.
Any
comeback they made wouldn’t be quiet. Win or lose, I was going to end up homeless.
“Wait here,” I told him.

* * *

“S
ure, I know who you talking about, bro. Call themselves Los Diablos,” Jester said, grinning as only a man who’d seen the real thing could. “They got a little clubhouse in the basement of that building that’s coming down, only a few blocks away. Didn’t know they had themselves a bulldog, though.”
“They called him ‘Tec.’ Probably short for ‘Tec-9.’ Either they weren’t carrying when Gateman threw down on them, or they didn’t have the stones to go for it.”
“
Pendejos
flash steel when
we
show, it’s
finito, ese.
”
“I wasn’t asking—”
“That’s
my
dog they got there,” Jester said.