Going Shogun (17 page)

LX says he has no idea how they knew
about the plans, how they found him or why they’d be in his apartment.  They
tell him they’d been looking for him, and here’s where it gets even weirder. 
They say that he’s a chess piece.  A pawn in their game to eliminate the
underground competition.  That they’re not going to kill him as long as he
delivered a message.  Checkmate is The Minotaur, and that’s who they’re really
after.  All he has to do is leave a note that would lead us to the
maze-dweller.

The Minotaur mentioned they’d been
after him, but this is a ballsy move.  Although, I figure if you go untouched
for so long, when you’re so far out of reach from The Board and their myriad of
ways to track people down, you start thinking you’re above it all, and it
does
become a game.

LX keeps going.  “I made up that ‘Gods
is Grimy’ sentence because I figured it sounded like Forklift’s language, wrote
‘See The Minotaur’ like they said, and then added that whole thing about the
rabbit hole as a clue, hoping you’d know where to find me so I could warn you
if I got out of there alive.  Punched in a quick hotkey sequence to jazz the
monkey on a timed delay.  They read it and asked a couple of questions, but I
told them that it was gonzo-speak and you guys would know what to do and how to
find him.  They seemed satisfied.”

Forklift is quiet.  Taking it all
in.  Processing details.  I’m stunned, but he shows no reaction, no feeling, nothing. 
Emotionless.

I have to interrupt.  I can’t take
the curiosity.  “How in the hell did they know you were going to be working
with
us
?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

It’s impossible that anyone else
could’ve known.  Forklift, me, and LX.  That was it.  We were the only ones,
and I
know
I didn’t tell anybody.  Except for Bingo, but that was after
they’d already been there.  Could somebody have overheard us?  I don’t ever
remember talking about it in a place with extra ears nearby.  Forklift wouldn’t
have told anyone.  It doesn’t make any sense.

None of it.  None of it makes
any
sense.  I ask, “And they wanted
us
to find The Minotaur for
them
? 
The guys that managed to hack into a satellite and maintain a freeroam from The
Board couldn’t track down one guy, and we found him in an hour?”

Bingo interjects.  “They don’t know
the right people.  And you guys were the path of least resistance.  Mr.
Androgyny gets around, but he trades info like currency, and only shares it
when he thinks something is in it for him.  That’s why he told us where The
Minotaur lives.  You can tell he’s got eyes for Forklift, and I was certain he
was going to jump you right there on the dance floor at Elite.”

Forklift raises his eyebrows into
dual arches, but stays silent.  For the second time tonight, I instinctively
clench my butt cheeks together.  I relax and make a mental note to stay out of
Elite for a while.  If things like this keep up, I won’t have any place in the
city to go shogun on some cool waters.  Nevertheless, I’m sure we can check Mr.
Androgyny off the list as a snitch.  He wouldn’t have known about our plans in
any case.  If he were really trading information with Lewis & Clark, they
wouldn’t have needed us, or LX, to take their own terrible trip into Urine Town. 
They wouldn’t have been able to get into The Minotaur’s place like we did with
a freeroamed ID card, but nothing says they couldn’t have bought a couple of pipe
bombs off RollerNinja and tossed them in through a window.

Bingo says, “My theory is, they’d
probably spent so much energy trying to find The Minotaur, they figured it was
time to let somebody else do the work.  And if you guys were desperate enough
to do it, you’d lead them right to him.”

“I guess so.  How would they find
him through us though?  Some backdoor booby-traps?”

“Don’t look at me.  I’m only
hypothesizing.”

LX says, “Jesus, would you please
keep your voices down?  It would only take about three lines of code to trace a
new access point that they didn’t recognize.  If you’re going through with
this, be warned, those guys are better than you.”

“And The Minotaur?”

“Not necessarily.  If he’s working
on it now, he’ll spot it, but they would’ve expected that too, so there’s no
telling what kind of tripwires they have laid out or what he’ll be able to
avoid, supposing he’s good enough.”

We’ve gone beyond my ability to
understand the inner-workings, so I move on to new matters.  “What happened to
Shoobocks?”

“Who?”

“The damn dead guy on your floor.”

He shushes me again, then says,
“After they were satisfied with the message I left, Lewis or Clark, or Clark or
Lewis, one of them says, ‘You’ll keep quiet about this?’ and I’m all begging
and being a huge pansy and telling them I won’t say a word and he goes, ‘We
don’t believe you,’ and then he walks into the kitchen and comes back with a
knife and I’m about to shit myself because I think he’s going to stab
me
,
but he turns around and stabs the Shoe-whatever guy.  Quick as a freaking
ninja.  Stabs him and stabs him and stabs him and then when the poor bastard’s
down on the ground,
wham
, he slams the knife into the guy’s throat so
hard that I actually heard the blade hit the wood underneath. 

“I can’t get the image out of my
head.  I can’t get the sound of that...that
thunk
out of my mind.  I
just can’t.”  He’s whimpering, doesn’t know where to look, where to turn.  “And
then he goes, ‘Have fun in P-status, murderer,’ and that was it.  They walked
out.  I flipped because I knew they were trying to frame me, so I tried to wipe
down everything in the apartment in like two seconds, and climbed out the
window and down the fire escape.”

Right, the fire escape.

I say, “That’s how we got up to your
floor.  The fire escape.  I put my hand in some blood and wiped it on
Forklift’s leg.  I thought it maybe was yours, that you’d gotten stabbed and
were bleeding on the way down.”

He goes bug-eyed with fear and
forgets his own rule about keeping his voice quiet.  “It
was
mine!  I
left blood on the fire escape?  I thought I got it all.” 

“It was your blood?”

“Yes! I sliced my damn hand open on one
of the jacked-up rungs climbing down.  Blood was pouring out like they actually
had
stabbed me.  Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.  I left blood, I left
blood, I left blood.  I’ve gotta go back, I’ve gotta go back.  They’ll trace it
to me.  I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m so dead.”

Forklift graces us with his voice.  Out
of character, calmingly, he says, “Easy, easy, easy.  It’s raining.  Washed
away.  High Water Road got its name for a reason.  Your blood is gone, down the
drain, out into the water supply.  You’re cool.  Calm down.  For real, dude,
calm down.  Stop.  Stop crying.  The traces are washed away, and there’s no
proof that you did anything.  There’s a dead guy in your apartment, but
no
proof
that you did it.”

“There’s a dead guy
in my
apartment
, Forklift!”

“Relax.  Put your big boy panties
on.  Don’t go back there.  No reason to, plus, while we were at The Minotaur’s
place, we heard that the BAs were already deployed.  Lewis and Clark must’ve
called it in, anonymously, after you left.  You go back, the BAs might be
waiting on you.”

Forklift’s reassurances have had
zero effect, because LX only focuses on one thing out of the entire diatribe. 
He says, “Put my
big boy panties
on, beaver face?  Fuck off.  The BAs
aren’t coming after you for murder.”

LX rushes towards us, shoulders his
way through, knocking Forklift into the wall and barely moves me, but Bingo
flies back and luckily lands safely on the couch. 

He’s out the door, down the steps,
and gone.  Running out into the night, through the rain, off into his paranoid
oblivion.

Forklift pushes himself vertical,
straightens out his gi with a double-tug on both sides.  He says, “For real,
man, what’s with the ‘beaver face’ thing tonight?”

***

And now we know what happened.

Situations birth random thoughts and
we have no control over them.  Could be the smell of a woman’s perfume that brings
about snapshots of a day in the backyard, planting flowers with your mother. 
Could be the screech of a car’s tires that makes you think of a crash you saw on
the interstate one day.  Sights, sounds, smells, the senses trigger things. 

Moments manifest memories.

In my Common Clichés of Ethnic
History class, we covered examples and their definitive meanings on everything
from
Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds You
to
It’s Raining Cats and Dogs
,
which would be appropriate given the weather outside.  I even got an A+ on my
paper about
How History Affects Present Day Society in Regards to A Blast
from the Past
. 

As we stand there in Cat’s
townhouse, minus her, minus LX, one example that comes to mind is, when life hands
you lemons, you make lemonade.

We’ve been handed a lemon, and I
hate lemonade.

I have this sour, acidic taste in my
mouth like I’ve been sucking on one of those vile things like a lollipop.

I’m so fuzzy in the head from
information overload and freaked out by the fact that we’re outmatched, my only
recourse is to walk into the kitchen, sling open the refrigerator door, and
start chugging the first thing I can find to get the flavor of fear out of my
mouth.

It’s expired milk.

When the smell infiltrates my
nostrils and the chunks slither across my tongue and down my throat, I
instinctively gag, but keep going, trying to fill the hole that’s been gouged
into me.  I gag again, then twice more, before Forklift strides over and yanks
the jug from my hand. 

He shoves me.  Hard.  “Not you,
man.  Not you.  Lock up that C-status shit, you hear me?”

Bingo tells me to relax from the
living room.

I shove Forklift back and the milk
jug falls, vomiting its putrid contents all over the kitchen floor.  “How can
you be so calm about this?”  I shove him again with more force, up against the
refrigerator, hard enough to make it tip back, and I hear bottles rattle
inside.  I feel threatened.  Helpless.  There are people out there with more
information than me, leaving me out of control of my own situation, and it’s
petrifying.

He moves forward, I shove him back. 
He moves forward, I shove him back.  Bingo is shouting for me to stop, but I
don’t.  I shove him again.  And I don’t even know why I’m doing it.  I’ve been
too scared tonight, too wired up, to hold anything back anymore.  I’m jazzing
the monkey, freaking the jones on all the emotion that’s been curdling inside
me for the past few hours like the rotten milk that’s now gurgling in my gut.  Thrashing
the BA in
Diner
must have provided only a partial release, because I
shove Forklift over and over, and he takes it, and takes it, and takes it,
offering himself as a martyr to my release.  “Get it all out,” he says, and I push
him back one final time, breathless and filled with immediate shame for lashing
out at the guy that’s on
my
team.   

Because I don’t have any other
words, and don’t know how to convey the regret for what I’ve done, I simply say,
“I’m sorry.”

Now that I’m no longer the
assaulting assailant, the crazy cuckoo, Bingo cautiously approaches me, wraps
her arms around my middle, and gives me a much needed hug.

“We have to get out of here,” she
says into my chest, into my pounding heart.

“Sorry you had to see that.”  I apologize
to Forklift one more time and then ask, “What’s our next move?” 

I know what he’s going to say before
he even gets it out of his mouth.

In the common tongue of the rest of
us mortals, he assures me, “All is not lost,
mon frer
.  We can do this. 
Get you Ascending, take down Lewis and Clark at the same time.  They wanna play
chess, we can play chess.  Did I ever tell you I’m officially a master?  Got
the certificate to prove it.”

“No, you didn’t,” I say.  “One of
the many things you’ve left out lately.”

He ignores my questioning prompt,
slaps my butt like pro athletes used to do before The Board banned
inappropriate touching on national television.

“To preserve the innocence of
youthful minds,” they say.  Somehow it’s okay for those Board Agents on
White
Hearts
to make out like two pandas overdosing on Sex Booster Pro, but it’s
not okay for one man to congratulate another with a butt slap after a
spectacular end zone dash for a touchdown.

“You ready to go Fischer on some
Kasparov wannabes?  Tomorrow, we move Her Royal Highness into position.  Let’s
go get some dreamy dreams floating through the brainhouses.  You two could use
it.”

“
To sleep, perchance to dream
,”
I say.  “Right, Shakespeare?”

“Diggity bop.”  He launches an index
finger into the air and shouts, “To the Machine!” then does a high-kick,
jackbooted march toward the front of the house.

We step out onto the porch.  A
lighter rain is falling and as we let the squawking screen door slam shut
behind us, one thing stands out in my mind.