Bad Radio (21 page)

“They were going to kill you and Leon both. I avoided any killing until they forced me into it. I wasn’t even going to kill the guy that stabbed me. Speaking of, are there any bandages or anything in here? You know, for where I got stabbed trying to save everyone’s lives?”

Anne rummaged through the drawers in the room and found a plastic tray wrapped in plastic full of supplies. Among the other items inside the package were a box of Steri-Strips used to close wounds and some antiseptic swab sticks. She brought them over to me and said, “Take off your shirt.” When she spoke to me, she avoided looking me in the eyes.

My hand was stuck to my stomach and shirt by congealing blood, but I managed to pull it away without too much pain. Peeling the shirt off was much worse, as the fabric wanted to tug at the wound as it came free of my skin.

The top of my pants were soaked with fresh blood by the time we got my shirt off. She took the gruesome article of clothing without reaction, wadded it up, and dropped it in the red bin in the corner of the room marked “Biohazard.”

“You’re a mess. Hold still and put two fingers over the puncture.” Setting the medical supplies on the bed, she pulled out a fistful of paper towels from the dispenser and wet them, squeezing out the extra water until they were just damp. Then she carefully cleaned the blood off of my stomach, working around my fingers. Then she knelt down in front of me.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m unbuckling your pants so that I can get the blood off of your waist. The wound is right over your belt, and I need it to be clean for several inches all around so that the Steri-Strips have a clean area to stick to. These pants are going to have come off.”

I grinned down at her. “I should get stabbed more often.”

“Just stop it. You just killed two people, not to mention seriously injuring a third, and you’re making jokes. It’s not funny, it’s creepy.”

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to control it. This isn’t how I normally am.”

“I know.”

She finished cleaning around the wound and had me take my fingers off of it. The edges were pretty clean and the whole thing was only about an inch and a half wide. It was barely seeping blood at this point. I wondered how deep the blade had gotten.

I didn’t know if I could survive having my guts punctured. Sepsis from a gut wound was far more likely to kill you than the bullet itself, back in the war. I was in a hospital, but seeking treatment would mean sticking around for the cops, as well as losing time. I decided to trust in my altered physiology.

Anne swabbed the area, leaving yellow-orange smears on and around the wound, and then taped it shut with the Steri-Strips.

“Not bad. Ever work as a nurse?”

She shook her head. “No, just one more thing Patrick forced me to learn instead of going out on dates or seeing my friends.”

There was nothing to say to that, so I grabbed my bag and went into the bathroom to change clothes. I came out in time for Leon’s nurse to chide all of us for hanging around in his room and disturbing him.

We made polite small talk for a few minutes until she left, and then I dropped the three wallets and two cell phones that I had claimed on the edge of the bed.

“I know you don’t approve of what I’ve done, but that doesn’t change the fact that the altar pieces are still on their way to Piotr. The guy in the stairwell said that Dominic does business out of a phony real estate office in Boulder called Coyote Realty.” I pulled out all of the ID cards and fanned them out next to the wallets.

Henry and Anne crowded around to look. “They’re obviously fake, but you’ll notice that they’re all Colorado licenses. My guess is that Dominic and his crew really do run out of Boulder.”

Henry picked up a cell phone and flipped through it. Then he went to the phone next to Leon’s bed and dialed 411.

“Yes, can you tell me if Boulder Colorado is in the 303 area code? Thank you, and could you give me the address of Coyote Realty in Boulder? Thanks, again.” He hung up. “Almost every number in this phone is a 303 exchange, so I’d say that you were right.” He scribbled an address down on a pad next to the phone and handed it to me. “Better get out of here before the police find your victim in the stairwell and the dead guys in the parking lot.”

“Yeah. You have Anne’s cell number, keep in touch.” I shook his hand and he looked at me very seriously. Anne stood up and walked to the door.

“Abe. One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Think hard about what you’re doing.” His eyes flicked to Anne and back to me. “Be careful that you don’t become more of a danger to her than the man you’re hunting.”

22

W
e spent another restless night in sterile airports and uncomfortable airplane seats as we raced across the country on my dwindling funds, landing hungry and exhausted. I entered the men’s restroom shortly after landing and checked my wound. It was still tender, but the skin at least had healed over. I threw the bandages away in the trashcan.

We rented the cheapest car they had, a tiny blue econobox, and minutes later were headed out into the pre-dawn gloom towards Boulder.

Anne slept in the passenger seat for the entire hour-long drive, not even waking when I stopped for coffee and a map. She looked lovely and peaceful and heartbreakingly vulnerable. I thought a long time about what Henry had said.

The horizon was just beginning to lighten when I finally located the right office park.

The entrance to Coyote Realty was an unremarkable door in a willfully bland stone cube, surrounded by carefully tended generic landscaping. The parking lot was deserted, so I pulled around back to avoid being seen from the road. Perfect silence descended when I turned off the car.

I shook Anne gently on the shoulder. “Hey, wake up.”

“Mmf. Sleeping. You go in, I’ll wait here.”

“I need you to come with me.”

She peeled her eyes open and glared balefully at me. “Why? It’s completely deserted. Just go in and snoop around, you don’t need me for that.”

“Well, what if the drop-off location is on a computer?”

“So?”

“So I don’t know jack about computers. I’ve been living on a farm with one TV and a rotary dial phone for the last twenty years.”

“What, not even one of those senior citizen classes on e-mail?”

“Being sleepy isn’t making you any funnier.”

“Fine.” She groaned and got out of the car, looking like she felt my age. I tried not to notice the way her clothes slid and stretched across her body as she yawned and reached for the sky.

I turned away and grabbed my combat baton from the trunk and then trotted over to the building. I would have liked to have armed Anne as well, but unfortunately all these trips on airplanes was making it difficult to keep both guns and ammo available on short notice.

Coyote Realty’s rear entrance was easy to find, as each of the gray-painted steel doors behind the building was stenciled with the appropriate suite number. As I expected, it was locked.

Anne thumped a fist against the door. “Steel doors. Now what?”

I rapped the door a few times with my knuckles. “Luckily for us, steel doors aren’t solid steel. They’re actually two steel sheets separated by a few ribs, or even a foam core.”

“Yeah, that’s really lucky. I was just thinking, if only this giant steel door was only a couple of sheets thick.”

“There’s still some coffee in the car, if it’ll make you less cranky.” She made an unladylike gesture. “I said lucky because, if it were solid steel, I couldn’t do this.”

I leveled my baton and aimed it at the door, about a foot to the left of the deadbolt. Then I drew it back, sucked in a big breath, and slammed it forward with enough force to flip over a pickup truck.

The end of the baton went through the door like tissue paper. The impact sounded like somebody hitting a dumpster with a sledgehammer, but that didn’t bother me. In the middle of a commercial district at dawn, there probably weren’t many folks around to hear it.

Gripping the baton with both hands, I began to work it back and forth, and then when I had a little room, I started rowing it in a circular motion until I had a hole big enough to stick my arm through. Which I did. I then unlocked the deadbolt from the inside. I opened the door and stepped in, flipping the light switch on as I did so.

We were standing in a small break room. The floor was cheap linoleum, the single table was topped with plastic, and the place smelled like stale coffee. There was a refrigerator in one corner next to a chipped counter with a tiny stainless steel sink in it.

I looked into a couple of cabinets, finding only stained coffee cups and plastic cutlery. “I guess crime doesn’t pay as well as the movies would have you believe.”

“Or we just broke into an actual office.”

“No, this is the right place.”

“Because criminals don’t lie when you’re about to throw them off of a building?”

I fought down a surge of irritation. “I said I was sorry.”

“No, you said that it was necessary. You never once said you regretted murdering two people. I saw the mess outside when we left the hospital. I suppose I should be grateful that I didn’t look into the stairwell.”

I peered down the dim hallway outside the break room. It was an empty stretch of thin gray carpet lined with doors on each side. “Fine. Now I’m saying I’m sorry.”

I stepped out into the hallway and slowly opened the door to my right. The office was tiny, filled nearly wall to wall with a cheap desk and one two-drawer metal filing cabinet. A square beige monitor sat on the corner of the desk with a grimy keyboard the same color in front of it.

A picture in a plastic frame sat alone on the stark white walls, an eagle snatching a fish out of a stream. All the colors were oversaturated and there was some motivational text about teamwork underneath. I’m guessing the fish wasn’t a valued member of Team Eagle.

Anne glanced inside past my shoulder, then turned to face me. “Henry was right, you know.”

“About?”

“Yesterday at the hospital. You were high from the fight, like you were about to burst out laughing at any second. There was blood running out of your stomach and two people were dead, and you were cracking jokes like it was a party.”

“Christ, how many times do you want me to apologize for that?” She narrowed her eyes at my tone and crossed her arms.

I lowered my voice and tried to regain my composure. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to defend it, but at least let me try to explain it.” It took me a few moments to find the words. Talking about this with someone else made me feel vulnerable, but I realized that it was important to me for her to understand.

“People think that they make decisions with some kind of mental arithmetic, where they weigh their options and make the right choice, but they don’t. Most of the time, people decide with their gut. They only use their brains to justify what their gut has already decided.

“You want a particular car, so you start talking about how it’ll save you money on gas if it gets good mileage, or you talk about needing the space if it doesn’t. You like a politician, so you downplay his ugly side and focus on the good stuff, or how bad the other guy is. Most people don’t even realize that they’re doing it.

“Whatever happened to me is at the gut level. I don’t control that, and it makes it hard to tell if I’ve actually decided to do something, or if I’m just justifying it afterwards. I believe that killing those men at the hospital was necessary to save Henry’s and Leon’s lives. I’m just not sure if I became certain after I did it, or if there had been another way that I never looked for.”

Anne pushed her hair back from her face and sighed, obviously frustrated. “It’s not so much the killing. I understand that. For what it’s worth, if I had been armed and any of those men had come into the hospital room, I’d have dropped them right there in the doorway. That’s not the part that has everyone worried.”

And there it was. “I know. You’re worried that I’m looking for chances to kill people that will seem justified after the fact, so that nobody knows I’m doing it on purpose. For all you know, those guys had surrendered, or were bluffing about killing everyone. You don’t even know if they were really armed.”