Internecine (23 page)

Testify, brother.

“Besides, I owe Mr. D. For, y’know, fuckin up the key thing. I’m sorry as hell, dude.”

I had just passed Go without two hundred bucks to un-flush my life, but, strangely, I wasn’t mad. I was
part
of something . . . whatever it was. Feeling uprooted and different felt good. I found it difficult to actually complain.

“Well, y’know . . .” I fizzled out.

“Yeah,” said Zetts. “We could all have ourselves a good cry, but what’s the point?”

“You’re a hell of a driver, DMZ.”

“Thanks, brah. It ain’t me so much as the chaser block in this sweet piece. Trigger can outrun any cop modification, even the hemis. Listen—kill that brewski and help me pull the skins on this thing.”

“You lost me again.”

Zetts disembarked the GTO and nibbled at the hood with a grimy fingernail. The paint, midnight blue, seemed to peel up in his hand like contact paper, revealing the car’s true, glossy crimson coat, beneath. “Skins,” he said. “Like on movie cars. Start stripping this shit and I’ll switch out the plates.”

Doping out the escape route (with a Plan B alternate path, I assumed), plus modifying his car’s identity, had all involved a lot of time, preparation, and thought. Thoroughness earmarked it as Dandine’s architecture. Rolling out of jail, the car had looked different to me, but the alteration had been elusive because it was so simple—color.

“Zetts, where the heck are we?” I said. “Is this some sort of safe house?”

I almost divined his answer, when I got out of the GTO and got a look at the expensive tools and equipment lining the rear wall of the dim garage.

“Naw,” he said. “I live here.”

So you stare at the blank blue square of the behemoth TV monitor in the “living room” (process of elimination has named it so). Zetts notes that he always leaves the TV on whether or not there is programming to be downloaded from his bootleg, black-box dish. He likes the warm electronic glow in the room, for company, he tells you.

You see crate furnishings and sprung secondhand chairs with visible afros of stuffing and patches of duct tape, and conclude Zetts spends most of his leisure time somewhere else, or in the garage. The sole decoration is an enormous poster—what used to be called a 24-sheet—for a 1950s movie called
Hot Rod Girl.
It covers one entire wall in the house, which is a small, totally anonymous two-bedroom cottage. No mail is received here.

Zetts shucks his T-shirt one-handed, shrugs at you, and says, “Pitted out.” You presume this means the secretions and sheer panic of your special, Speed Racer moment has transferred to Zetts’s garment. Kind
of like the method you always use, taking something that makes you feel emotionally rotten and transferring it to the nearest available candidate, so you can reassure yourself you’re a decent guy, all-around.

You did this to your ex-wife; made her the bad guy. You’ve done it to most of your girlfriends and will probably do it to Katy Burgess, if you live long enough. You compartmentalize excellently, and don’t allow any cross-pollution in the name of something so shabby as someone else’s feelings.

Thoughts of Katy Burgess, again. At the very least, Katy had gotten your message to Andrew Collier and thence to Dandine, all without the benefit of a secret decoder ring. Dammit, now you really want to see her. Not to use her, not to get anything out of her. To thank her. You allow yourself a brief side-story on what might have happened if it had been Katy, not you, who had found the locker key. Would she be sitting here right now instead of you? Would she have fared better, or worse? The reasons you think she may have done better, or at least more professionally, make you want to see her face even more.

If you live long enough.
Interesting concept. Rather, an old concept with new vitality. The old version helped you procrastinate on things that didn’t matter anyway. The new version counts the remaining hours of your life a minute at a time. Everything seems turned up, enriched, amplified. What food you’ve managed to grab tastes better, more essential, more satisfying. Your Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer roots are asserting themselves, emphasizing survival, if only for one more day. This attitude, you acknowledge, can help your career. If you live long enough to resume it.

Zetts is in his mid-thirties, at least, and he is still living like some college bum on the slum. He owns a couple of Melmac plates and cups, and a lot of empty beer cans, the latter almost classing as a collection. There are engine parts spread out on newspaper in various corners of the room, and they make the air redolent. There are no curtains and all the shades are pulled down—against burglars, Zetts says, as though it is the most natural response in the world. Why else?

Cool and dim, here in the cave.

You wonder when it happened to you—that moment when the exuberant dedication of your twenties suddenly caved in to the bitter disillusionment
of your thirties. And how come nothing comes after that? Just more bitterness, reinforced cynicism, the calcification of your personality into a slick know-it-all who attacks what he wants, pins it to the mat, nails it, and gets the job done. If someone asks if you are happy, in the conventional sense most of the walking dead understood the concept, you’d have to think about an honest answer . . . then say something else, something that sounds great, and changes the subject.

Truth was, the next stage in the program is total paranoia, nearly always. The gradual walling-up of self, until you are entombed in your own fear, like that guy in the Poe story, except without a bottle of decent wine.

If you are to get erased sometime in the next twenty-four, you can think of a couple of people who would say it was a “shame,” but nobody who might weep. Your parents, long split, have been taking the big dirt nap for nearly a decade now, re united in the oddest way. You have a half brother somewhere, to whom you have not spoken since Dad’s funeral. Hey, the phone works both ways, right? Not that anyone keeps the same number, anymore, for longer than a free subscription to a magazine nobody wants, anyway.

A couple hundred thousand people disappear off the face of the planet every year, so say the stats. Earth swallowed ’em. Aliens got ’em. Killed in some trackless jungle. Mugged and left for dead under some bridge and never identified. Changed their names, edited their pasts, shucked their baggage, and became new people . . . sort of the way you did, while in college.

Or they got assassinated, by contract. In America, if you know the right contacts, you can arrange to have nearly anyone murdered for a ridiculously low price. Efficiency (and avoiding felony time) costs more. Contractual clauses are infinitely malleable; loopholes are one of the things that help Kroeger Concepts chug so much steam. Nothing is ever ironclad, because there isn’t anything that cannot be renegotiated.

Contracts are one illusory way of trying to impose order on a chaotic world—the key word being “illusory.” Reality was fluid; as Burt Kroeger once told his staff, the only constant is change. If you rule straight black lines around your reality and get it into a nice, neat box, then you would break, not bend, when changes you could never foresee
swooped in to alter your map. And it didn’t take something catastrophic, like a terminal disease or an erupting volcano, to catalyze change.

Sometimes all it took was idle curiosity. Like picking up a locker key that’s not yours and wondering what might happen if . . .

Here you sit, criticizing your idea of Zetts, the man who just slung your ass from danger, and you really know nothing about the guy. Blond, blue-eyed, stoner, good wrench, good combat driver, who seems more wired into real-reality than you ever were.

You thought you knew everything, then Dandine came along and proved that practically everyone was in on the joke of the world, except you.

You are less worried about your situation, and more concerned with hunger, thirst, food, rest. Safety.

Maybe this is how you change, next.

“Yo,” said Zetts, ambling from his dark bedroom wearing a clean T-shirt, soft-old like a furry grocery bag, its silkscreened logo cracked and split with a hundred washings.
HOOKER HEADERS RULE.
“The man’s on the phone, for you.”

He handed me a cellphone. The display was a jumble of icon figures, not a number.

“Dandine?”

“Still kicking,” said Dandine’s voice from the other end. “Guess my first question, why don’t you?”

I had thought about this moment, and rehearsed an answer that seemed to lose structural integrity and fall to pieces as it tried to crawl out of my mouth. “You were hurt; I wanted to
do
something.”

“You mean like, put us in
more
danger?”

“You know what I mean.” I felt nervous and stupid. Futile.

“You mean you wanted to contribute—to bear some load for your situation, become more of an active player? Right? Connie, you’re an advertising man, not a black-bag dude. Although I appreciate the effort, you’ve really balled things up.”

I started to ask the obvious questions, then shut up before Dandine could tell me to.

“For starters, you skated out of the police station about five milliseconds before
NORCO
drew a bead on you. I didn’t think I’d get Zetts down there in time.”

“So, I’d still be in jail?”

“No. I would have had to risk the exposure to pull you out myself.”

“With your arm in a sling and your fake ID.”

“Imagine casualties,” Dandine said. “Then imagine you and me both winding up in a steel room somewhere. You know—a place we’re not allowed to send postcards from.”

“I had to do something!” I knew Dandine was trying to stoke me into barking, but I couldn’t help it. “I feel completely out of control! You were incapacitated! I had to
go
. . . get
out
. . . get
away.
Try to think—”

Slow hiss of air; Dandine sighing into the phone, or perhaps exhaling smoke from one of his five-per-day. “Yeah, well, you could have done worse, for a tyro. Tell me the part about Alica Brandenberg.”

“First-class monster hellbeast who is currently sleeping with
both
candidates for the California governorship. She knows about
NORCO
.”

“Hell,
NORCO
probably groomed her.”

“How’s your shoulder?”

“Hurts like a sonofabitch,” he said.

“How’s Collier?”

“Clear,” said Dandine. “Vaguely amused at the drama. I thanked him and relocated. You really owe that guy a huge favor, someday.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Didn’t want to attract any flies by staying put.”

I found I was pacing, tiger-walking the cage of Zetts’s living room, gradually and restlessly expanding my arc. Hyped-up, the way a politician must feel as district vote totals trickle in on election night.

“Why didn’t little Choral just turn you back over to Alicia Brandenberg’s bodyguards? She must’ve had four or five, dogging her.”

I tried to put events in order. “I guess that when she Maced me, the cops were right there on the street. Coincidence.”

“Never discount a random factor,” said Dandine. “It makes sense. If she lost face with her boss, and delivered you as leverage toward her job
and her trustworthiness,
NORCO
would have you by now. I wonder why she didn’t.”

“This is kind of hard to explain, but I think she wasn’t all that keen on working for Alicia Brandenberg.” From my own view, she had begun to see just how deep the sewage was, and had begun to rethink her goals about the time she had told her boss to get fucked. “Which gives her points as a human being.”

“Too bad she’ll never get a chance to enjoy her moral state of grace. She’s off the grid, Conrad. Disappeared. Watch the news and you’ll probably see her turn up dead, and if you’re very, very unlucky, you will be the fall guy. Prepare for that—murder suspect, dragnet, a crappy snapshot of you on TV. I know what I’m talking about. So don’t mourn her for kicking you in the balls and making you infamous.”

My voice dried up in my throat. He could have mentioned that up-front. He had not—proving who was still in charge. “How do you know?” I said, dreading the answer.

“Most obvious course of direct action,” he said. “You’re tailor-made to take the fall. If Choral knew about this little gubernatorial conspiracy, then she clearly knew too much, so purging her would be in the game plan already. That way, no severance, no unemployment. Economy counts. Not your fault—but you pick up the check, see?”

My vision started to swim and I felt like puking.

That meant that Alicia Brandenberg had been a total
NORCO
puppet, trained well enough to never reference her true puppeteers. They had  aimed her at both candidates, Jenks and Ripkin, like a deadly Tomahawk smart missile of sexuality with no fuse. When in doubt, cover both targets, accumulate intel, then choose who you can best advantage. Her machinations had been so complicated that she required a staff, hence Choral Anne Grimes. There was a distinct possibility that Alicia had been jockeying for position, ready to take over for either Ripkin or Jenks, whoever fell first. Alicia could seduce nearly anybody, and had even succeeded in making a confidant out of Choral Anne Grimes . . . until Choral Anne broke character and got uppity as a result of being threatened by guys with guns. Me and Dandine. There was a second distinct possibility that Alicia was grooming Choral Anne as her own manipulative replacement, once she moved more visibly into
the sphere of political double-dealing. God, it was an endless downward spiral, a rabbit hole filled with antipersonnel mines that never, ever got to the bottom.