Internecine (41 page)

“Which means Burt has got to repurpose three warm bodies from the hottie pool to cover Maggie,” I said. Maggie was Burt’s executive assistant. The hottie pool was a rotating corral of incompetents Kroeger kept hiring with something like endless optimism, giving them about a
month each to burn out. Maggie was also Burt’s hit woman; if you were getting married and Burt didn’t show for the wedding, you’d get a voicemail from Maggie explaining why and tendering all regrets.

“Okay,” I said, “I meant talk about
your
work.” I was trying to pick up from where we left off . . . before.

“Boring. I’ve been doing vendors and designers ever since we had our not-quite-a-date. Know how much G. Johnson Jenks has in his campaign fund? Over five mil, nonapplicable to the matching fund. That means
major
—”

“Katy!” I almost jumped too fast. Bad idea, to jolt things loose, inside and out. “Sorry, but . . . when was the last time you saw Jenks?”

“Day before yesterday. He’s out in the world somewhere, pressing the flesh and minting the cash.”

No, he’s supine on a slab in the morgue that might otherwise be needed by a real, dead human being,
I thought,
if
NORCO
hadn’t taken his body and simply mulched it into cat snacks.
I didn’t want to ponder what had become of Dandine. Nor did I want to bring up to Katy the way that sonofabitch Jenks had talked about her . . . but I chose the lesser of two rotten options.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “Please. I don’t mean this to sound like it does. But did you have anything going on with Jenks, I mean, besides the business relationship?”

She arched one contrail eyebrow. “Connie, I do believe you’re blushing.” She put her fist on her knee, her elbow on her fist, her other fist on her chin. She appeared to be puzzling out an intricate math problem. “You mean, like a
relationship?
”

“I apologize. It’s stupid. I don’t have any right to—”

“Shut up. You’ve already stepped in it, and it ain’t apple pie. All you have to do is
look
at the guy. He’s half a century older than me. He wears a for-god-sake toupee. How much class do you think I
don’t
have?”

“You’re right, I—”

“Shut up,” she said. “I’m talking. Now, I think the only reason an otherwise sane man might ask an obnoxious,
insulting,
prying question such as that, is if said man perhaps felt threatened, in some way.”

Threatened, by Jenks. Oh Katy,
I thought,
you have no friggin’ idea.

“No, more like unbalanced by an overdose of unreality,” I said. I tried to find ways to encapsulate the past few days for Katy’s benefit and could conjure no explanation that would not sound completely insane. Not only was I stuck with my story; I was stuck with it
alone.

Gesturing was tough, so I had to push out words: “Katy, when this madness is done, I promise I’ll regale you with a tale such as you’ve never heard. You alone. I owe you at least that much, and I guarantee you will not get the minimum consideration. You took a chance on me. You went to bat for me. Nobody else did. And that gets you in deeper than most of the walking dead out there. But not until it’s over, and I promise, also, that I’m not just trying to be mysterious.”

“You forgot rule number one.” She smiled. “Never try to hustle a hustler . . . and you’re laying it on with a trowel.”

“Blame the meds.” I felt myself sinking into the adjustable mattress. Tar, trying to engulf me. “Okay. Very shortly now, you’re going to find out that G. Johnson Jenks is out of the running, permanently.” At this point I would have raised my hand for dramatic emphasis, to cut short her protest. I had to give it to her no-frills, sans semaphore. “Don’t ask. That’s the ‘later’ part. Yes, it is for your own safety. I’m serious. Here’s what you can do: Find Ripkin, if you can. The Beverly Hills cops have got him squirreled away somewhere because Jenks tried to have him killed. I found out, and that’s why I’m here, convalescing.”

To her credit, she did not immediately call for the psycho-ward orderlies. But her aura of tolerant humor had dissipated. “You’re saying that you’re not finished, yet, with whatever it is?”

I nodded, practically immobilized, strapped into a bed, full up with thoughts of continuing a battle against phantoms, even after I had been so definitively benched. I could return to my apartment, now; show up for work after a brief sick leave, and it would all be as Dandine had told me—my life, spackled over, refinished and painted, leaving no evidence whatsoever of mishap. And right now, I hated that inevitability. I was furious for my glimpse behind reality and angered that I was now supposed to ignore what was real.

Then, after that first day back at work, once I’d gotten up to speed on my job and my obligations, I was supposed to have cocktails, recreations, and dalliances, and return home to my security building, lock
my door, put down my briefcase . . . and then what? Look at myself in the mirror and confirm the truth:
You are one of the walking dead.

And then, one day down the line, I quite incidentally get clicked off like a switch and nobody notices.

I couldn’t do that, and I think Katy
saw
that I couldn’t do that, which said a lot for her as an ally. I did not have to ask her, what would
you
do?

(Perhaps you are shaking your head at this point, and thinking,
What the fuck is wrong with this guy?
Give it up, for christ’s sake, before they pummel you into mud. Haven’t you learned anything? You don’t stick your dick where it isn’t wanted. You indulged your wild, fancy abandon and look where it landed you; and it could have been lots worse. Cut your losses, fool. Play the game the way you’re supposed to. You got a get-out-of-jail-free card and you’re just squandering it. Keep your high-paying sinecure, your toys and fancy ladies, and stop messing about with the system. You’re eating, and millions aren’t. God, you’ve got it made, and you’re bitching about how it’s not enough because the “truth” is wobbly. Who cares?

(Or perhaps you can understand why the same simple list of items kept reverberating inside my head: [1] It’s not enough. [2] It’s not finished, and [3] I hate being forced, to do anything. Period.)

“Therefore,” she continued, “what you are
really
saying is that I shouldn’t ask, and you can’t tell. But you will.”

“I promise.”

“You’d better, if you know what’s good for you.”

I had no idea what was good for me, other than staying alive.

Katy was standing at the closet where my street clothes were stashed. My shirt was bloodstained. She held up the shoulder holster as though she’d discovered a strap-on dildo amongst my stuff. “Is this part of what you’re
not
telling me?”

“Call it a bad idea.”

“That’s a good nonanswer. You packing, now? A taste of urban paranoia?”

“It belongs to a guy nobody will admit exists.”

“Your imaginary friend?”

“Katy,” I said, trying to act more like an invalid. “Not right now, okay?”

“Then what do you want me to do?” she said. Her tone was clipped; all flirtation was cancelled, and she resented being left out. I wanted to tell her, but I did not want to watch the resultant vacuum suck her into a black hole.

“Find Ripkin if you can,” I said. “Play everything normal. It won’t be long, now. Bring back some folding cash, if you can. And above all—assume you’re being watched. Don’t act paranoid or alter your routine. Just . . .
know.
Okay?”

“I’d better get a hell of a dinner for this. Two dinners, at least. It’ll take you that long to make up a good story . . . so I can pick it apart.”

“Thank Burt for the flowers; I know how gay he thinks that is.”

“You have another admirer, too,” she said, examining the cards on the bouquets. “DMZ? Lady friend?”

Funny, Nurse Vanessa had said almost the same thing, but I could not gauge how long ago.

“Not nearly,” I said. “And far from competition with you.” I was aware that while I was enjoying Katy’s company and the sound of her voice, I was trying to repel her, to get her out of my range in case something drastic was scheduled to happen inside the hospital. At least I’d gotten her to stand, as a prelude to exit. But she kissed me on the cheek before she departed and it caused my heart to ice up with sorrow.
Rotten timing,
I thought.
Rotten all around.
All my fault.

My mind had become a sieve. I reviewed benchmarks and came up lame. My memory could not approximate a likely location for Rook’s eyrie, west of Laurel Canyon. The Sisters no longer existed. Varga’s crew would have run to Earth and erased their tracks. My pal Andrew Collier would wink at me . . . and deny everything to anyone else. The too-tempting First Interstate address given for
NORCO
had been a blind, according to Dandine. Everyone else who might help me or clear away clouds was dead or under deep cover. I couldn’t guess at where Zetts’s house had been, and even if I could, it might not be there
now.

My memory was behaving almost as though I had been given a drug to obliterate precise types of recall.

And while I was at it, what about Dandine? What solid proof did I possess that he wasn’t, in all boring predictability, my own version of Mr. Hyde? Was there some impartial third party I could use to verify his existence? People I loved? People I trusted? None, none, and none.

Dandine was the sort of creature who ceased to exist between missions. But that did not mean he stopped existing altogether. You had to know how to tune your perceptions, to tilt your vision so you could perceive him there in the background, blending unobtrusively, where he’d been all along. Kind of like those moments where you enter a room and immediately forget what you were looking for; that doesn’t mean you weren’t in the room in the first place. Or those times when you have to concentrate
away
from something, in order to call up some vagrant, lost fact.

Ripkin,
I thought, again. Supposedly the police still have him. That was not for me, but something on which I could reasonably sic Katy.

“One last thing, Katy, and this is important: Do you know about, or have you ever heard of, an outfit called
NORCO
?”

She thought about it. “Other than a drug company, I don’t think so. You know—pharmaceuticals.”

“Also known as the North American Consultancy?”

“No.”

And then, out of the ether, out of pure nothingness, I came up with someone else to ask, someone who had nothing to do with Dandine. My own resource. Mine.

Life is a bottle of wine. If you don’t sip with deliberation, you slurp blindly. Connoisseur versus addict. Or, like me, you try to float above it all because you want to put up a good front, without actually knowing or caring about chapter and verse on vintages and “nose.” I even faked Dandine out. I even impressed the Sisters, right before they died. That’s me, a dusty, respectable-looking bottle of
Faux de Merde.
Sip with me, and try to ignore the earthy afterbite of the
merde.
Everything in life boils down to this sort of blind corner-turning—your pivotal event is not intrinsically momentous or earth-shattering; most often it simply
happens
and you feel no tingle, no vibration indicating the world is about to change. Consider, then, how rare and special it is when you are fully
aware of an apocalyptic course-change in your life
in the moment,
as it befalls you. (Consider, also, how many people you know only perceive the best days of their lives in retrospect, with the insulation of time. Some sainted wiseass said that once.)

I was fully aware I was planning to sashay back into the world of the walking dead, oblivious to sniperscopes, and utterly without resources of any kind. Dandine had been a crutch, an expert to whom it was too easy to defer. Now I was making a conscious choice to exacerbate a situation that a hundred other people would have the common sense to leave alone. I think the part that bothered me the most was “common.” Few of those imaginary hundred people would wish to be dismissed as common. But then, what was the difference between them and me?

Katy duly delivered some rolling cash, fresh clothing, and a private cellphone number I promised not to utilize. She even kissed me on the cheek again, asked not to know what was going on until it was over, and left. Her special scent—spicy, not floral—lingered in the hospital room after her. I thought,
my God, if she’s for real, I am a dead man, in a good way.
And if she had never heard of Norco, and not been poisoned by their tendrils, I had to accept her as genuine.

(Unless, of course, she was smoothly lying for some future advantage, which is, I’m sure, the first thing you thought of, too. Nurse Strock? They could easily have cast her because she would remind me of my ex-wife. Katy? A familiar face to buffer the lies; a friendly. My medication? Mixed to order, to drop my guard and increase my fear. It would have been child’s play to infect me with a low-grade flu that would keep me a-dangle on the edge of hallucination. There were probably homing devices in the cast on my wrist. Where do you stop, once you start dropping impediments in your own way?)

Everything else, I did on my own. Have you ever pulled an IV tap out of the back of your hand, and discovered how much it bleeds?
Not
recommended. I’ll bet you’ve never de-catheterized yourself, either, but I’ll spare you that joy.