Metro (16 page)

That uninvited smell is here right now, just a few feet away from him.

She never says hi as she passes with her half-empty shopping cart. She never turns so he can get a very good look at her face. She is hidden and camouflaged by a long down coat, but the camouflage does not hide that perfume/pheromone four-alarm.

Jackie shadows her as she walks away.

He does it really smart, so she can't see him at all.

He realizes as he stays one step behind her that
she's not even aware he's there
—bumping into her like this was complete random chance. He wants to walk right up and ask her who she is.
Why did you break into my house? What is your name? Who the hell do you think you are, shopping fo
r breakfast cereal in the same store I do that in? And while you're at it, go fuck yourself.

But he plays it cool.

He stays right behind her, out into the parking lot.

He gets the license number off her car.

Runs it through a database and comes up with a name.

Penelope Cranston.

He finds out where Penelope Cranston lives and it's a shitty one-room house on the south side of town, right behind the Continental Club. It's so close to the Continental Club, in fact, that all she has to do to get her drink on is walk two blocks. Saves gas, and her car is shitty. Jackie comes to know all that stuff about Penelope Cranston because he gets
obsessed
with Penelope Cranston. He starts thinking she's an undercover cop of some kind. But she's such a lush—it doesn't make any sense. Why is her disguise so perfect, if it even
is
a disguise?

What in the fucking
fuck
, man?

He asks his father if he ever brought this woman back to the house and he says he's never seen her before. His father asks if they should be worried—if they should
do something
about Penelope Cranston. Finally, Jackie breaks down and breaks into her house one night while she's seeing Joanna Blythe. He does the job on stealth with some cat burglar buddies of his dad's and searches the place top to bottom, but they find nothing. One room full of empty booze bottles and Jenny Craig boxes. A bathroom full of loose hair and dried vomit stains. The whole thing is a wild goddamn goose chase, it seems . . . but Jackie has to be damn sure. So he does what any high-tech information junkie working for a major Austin drug dealer would do in that situation.

He hides a video camera the size of an M&M in her living room.

And stashes a GPS reader under the front seat of her car.

• • •

T
he last interview is over quickly.

Mark sits across from her one last time and she rubs her eyes, sighing.

“Okay, kid, I think we might be able to do business, after all. You were right about the girl. She's very good. And her network is solid. It might be enough to negotiate with.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Where did you find that bitch? I've never met a profiler who could plug in so fast to anything.”

“I think she's from outer space.”

“We might be able to do something with the emo slut too. He's a pretty one, isn't he?”

“The prettiest.”

“I must be out of my fuckin' mind, Mark Jones.”

“You want him, don't you?”

“This is business. The girl might be valuable enough to bring him along for the ride . . . but I'm telling you now that
none of this
will fly
without the package.”

“I know.”

“That's the only real reason I'm still here—the only reason this
might
work. You have to
swear to me
that you still have it, Mark.”

“I still have it.”

“You can't screw me on that. It's both our asses if you're full of shit.”

“I'm not full of shit.”

“I'm recording this conversation. You're on the
record
, Mark Jones. If these people think for one minute that you've lied to me, they're gonna chew us up and spit us out. They won't care at all about your smart little friend over there or the good-looking emo slut or any good deeds we've done for the company. They'll chop off your head and use what's left for fish bait. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“I don't suppose I can convince you to tell me where it is, huh? A little hint? Half now and half later maybe?”

“Not until Andy and Jollie are protected. I'll give your superiors the exact location of the package—but then and only then. That's for the record.”

“Mark . . . I'm
trusting
you.”

“And I'm trusting
you
.”

“I must be outta my fuckin' mind. Don't screw me on this. Whatever you're thinking about pulling,
don't screw me
.”

“That's Andy's job.”

“No more jokes. Tell me you understand. Say it.”

“I understand. I understand perfectly.”

“Okay, then. Let's go, Mark. We have to be quick about this.”

“Can I ask you one question before we go?”

“Shoot.”

“What's your name?”

“Not relevant, honey.”

“Then make up something, so at least I know what to call you on the phone.”

She sizes him up, as Jollie and Andy get up and start toward them.

She does a mental
fuck it
.

And says:

“Call me Penelope.”

• • •

J
ollie was right about almost everything.

Except one thing.

The most important thing.

Penelope Cranston—which is not the lady's real name, of course—has never actually had sex with anyone. She was trained to be a hopeless romantic by her mother, in the years before her mother was killed. She was nine years old when Mom and Dad died. More than enough time to be programmed just like a lady. She knows that there are some people in this world who will never love themselves, never see themselves as beautiful, never rise above society's straight line about what is pretty and what is not, about who you should screw and who you should run screaming from. These are smart people who've been lied to by their mothers. The lie is sincere. The lie is well meaning. It's like telling your kids about Santa Claus, and all the other fairy-tale crap that must be rethought and modified as the kids grow older and wiser. If you do your job right as a parent, the transition is hardly noticeable and there is no trauma. The lie mutates. The lie becomes a version of the truth. But that only happens later, when you are old enough to accept certain realities from a certain point of view, when you are no longer fooled by childish things and it doesn't matter anyway.

(Mark Jones would use the
Star Wars
analogy to explain it: All that elaborate double-talk George Lucas invented in
Return of the Jedi
to explain how Darth Vader could possibly really be Luke Skywalker's father—“Sorry, kid, everything I told you about the plot backstory in the first flick was something we changed later to sell movie tickets . . . but, umm, it was true
from a certain point of view
.”)

Penelope's mother died before she could tell her about the lie.

Died before she could tell her that you have to hold on to whatever you find in this world when you grow up, because the uglies like us don't have a chance.

(And Darth Vader was just an evil jerk all along.)

She's searched all her life for someone who would see her—really
see her
. Like her mother saw her. Something special.

If Jollie Meeker had been given a few more minutes to know Penelope Cranston, she would have figured all this out on her own.

Obviously.

• • •

D
arian Stanwell makes a few calls.

Jackie lies next to him, breathing easy, his mind swimming away in a haze. Within minutes, Darian is smiling too. In just over an hour, there will be more smiles.

But first . . . poor Jackie-Boy.

Darian sets aside his phone and hovers closer to the child, his fingers sliding along his chin, slick with blood, salty and red. Jackie almost can't tell what's been done to him. Almost can't see Darian's face in the haze.

Mostly, he sees Mark's face. And he
remembers
 . . .

“I want to kiss you, child. I want to kiss you good-bye.”

Is that Mark? Is he here, saying so long? The smell of strawberries and heated breath, smothering him now, turning into another memory, way down deep. Something very sweet. Something very warm.

Yes, it's Mark.

He's kissing Mark.

Like he always wanted to
.

And everything's cool, because he's back in the lap of family. Back to the halls of the Kingdom. Happy as the Fool in the House of JAM. And Jollie is kissing him, and so is Andy . . . and only this matters. Only the family he's been chasing after for years. His heart swells with it—swells so big, he thinks it might explode.

And then his heart really
does
explode.

As the knife hits him hard from just offscreen.

He doesn't see it, never feels it.

He dies from an overdose of love.

And Darian Stanwell drinks it deeply.

T
he sun burns weekly through the clouds like a bloody apple as Mark drives. Nine-thirty in the morning oozing above the horizon, the face of a hungover god, telling him tales. Jollie doesn't say a word to Mark during the trip, half-asleep. He looks through the morning sky, into the past. Twenty years' worth. He sees Jollie and Andy and everything that made him what he is at this very moment. He knows that his life is not a lie.

But he has to look at it from a certain point of view.

(Luke, I am your father—
really
, man.)

The weed they all smoked earlier at the safe house is fading in his system—just enough to keep him focused. He almost did some of the blow from the Black Box, but thought better of it for some reason. He's regretting that now, feeling weak in the new light of day.

So he doesn't notice that, five cars back, there is someone following them in a big black truck.

• • •

T
hree wise men talk to each other on wireless headsets.

One of them is bold, one of them is old, one of them is stone cold.

They talk to each other using elaborate code and squawk signals, and it's all business as usual. This is the seventh time in two months they have communicated to each other in this way. They do it very professionally. They are spiders weaving a web, one careful thread a time, and the web is unbreakable.

The boss talks to his three wise men and gives them the go-ahead.

Visual contact.

Solid global positioning from home base.

Lock and load.

• • •

P
enelope Cranston doesn't notice the black truck either, because her heart is fluttering like a little girl in love for the first time.

She shouldn't feel like this at all. She knows how stupid it is.

But she does.

“I was an only child,” Andy says. “So I guess I was a titty baby—a bit spoiled, you know? My mom and dad ran their own business. They bought and sold stuff on eBay and had a storefront for a while. Mom made miniature furniture for dollhouses and sculpted brass horses. Stuff like that.”

“Was your father an artist?”

“No, he was the business brain of the family. But neither of them ever really knew how to
love
, you know? I was always looking for something outside the house. It wasn't really bad, I guess. But it wasn't exactly good either.”

“Did they do well in business at least?”

“Oh yeah. People are always buying useless trinkets off the Internet. They wanted me to learn the biz, but I guess I couldn't get with it. I've never really known what I wanted to do. Even after living around Mark, I never really knew. Thought I might like to be a writer like him . . . but I guess that's all out the window now.”

“I read his book. The one that was published.
Countdown to Extinction
.”

“Crazy stuff, huh? He's a real nut. That's why Jollie loves him.”

“You have a problem with that, don't you?”

“Who wouldn't? He's this amazing artist and I've been jealous of that since I met him. I try to be a writer but I don't have any follow-through. I've tried a lot of things, I guess. Acting too. I was in a comedy troupe that did community theater for a while. That crashed and burned. Mostly I was just a waiter.”

“But the girls flock to you, don't they?”

“Yeah. All except Jollie.”

“That surprises me. I mean, don't you guys all live together?”

“Well, it's not like
that
. I mean, I've wanted to, but Jollie . . . well she's . . .”

“A bitch.”

“I was going to say she's very special, Penelope.”

“Yes, of course. I was just kidding.”

“Were you?”

“Yeah. There's not a lot of ladies around who can push my buttons like that, or think so well on their feet when their minds are blown the ways yours are. She's very eloquent and she has her shit together, more or less. I checked out her blogs and her websites. I can see how you might be in love with that.”

“I love everybody.”

“Me too?”

“Of course.”

“Andy . . . we're going to meet some very serious people. These are people who control other people. People who control
things
.”

“Mark told me about METRO.”

“He couldn't have made you understand completely. What's going on here is that Mark has inconvenienced these guys and deals have to be cut. He wants you to be protected, and there's only a few ways I can make that happen.”

“I'll do whatever you want me to do. If it saves Jollie's life, and Mark's too. They're my family and I don't want them to die or whatever.”

“You don't hate Mark for lying to you? The way your lady friend does?”

“I don't hate anybody. And Jollie doesn't hate Mark either. She's just going through a period of adjustment, like all of us.”

“You won't see her again probably.”

“I know that.”

“You're okay with not seeing her?”

“No. But what choice do any of us have?”

“What would you say to getting married, Andy?”

“Me and Jollie?”

“No. You and me.”

“For real?”

“For real. You become my husband and work for METRO. I'd look out for you. Everybody gets what they need.”

“And I never see Jollie or Mark again?”

“Sorry.”

Andy looks at her and smirks, seeing the smug desperation of her plan, smoldering just below the surface of an old lady who gave up years ago on anything like happiness.

And he says: “It might be fun.”

• • •

M
ark follows Penelope's car a few more miles down Highway 71, which slices like a main cable through the tiny town of Bastrop. The sun is all the way up now. Silly metaphors fail him. They are almost to Smithville when Penelope signals that they are about to exit.

The black truck isn't back there anymore.

Doesn't matter anyway—Mark never saw it.

There's a different car following them now, and he doesn't see that one either.

• • •

J
ollie finally stirs, and wakes up.

Dreams fade away to nothingness, and the bloody sunset almost blinds her.

“I think we're almost there,” Mark says, as they turn into a side road that weaves through wilderness. Everything is evergreen and cow fields in the spaces between Austin and Houston. Everything is hidden. You could hide anything here.

Anything at all.

Mark checks the rearview mirror as they move fast down the narrow one-lane road. Nothing behind them. No traffic.

Jollie never says a word to him.

• • •

A
dirt road suddenly becomes visible on the right when Penelope's car flashes its turn signal. The two cars crunch their tires through the deep woods. It's dark because it's still morning and the trees are thick. There's even a thin fog hanging just above the ground, so Mark has to turn on the lights. Eerie.

They drive on, for another ten minutes.

The smell of muddy water and frogs, all around them.

The dirt road intersects into another dirt road, then comes to an end. There's an open gate with one man guarding it. He's big and he's wearing a thick down jacket, his breath freezing in the fog. The big guy talks to the lady in the car in front of them, and the big guy waves them both through. As Mark clears the gate and passes the guard, he hears the squawking of a talk box on his waist and sees the nasty almost-hidden glimmer of weapons riding in shoulder holsters.

• • •

I
t's a big house by the lake. Your average middle-of-nowhere.

A big two-story job right at the edge of the water, with a pier reaching out about thirty feet and a small boathouse at the end of the pier. Very nice. The house itself is level with the wet earth that surrounds it. A lot of handcrafted country trim and lace, a huge front porch that stretches all the way around the bottom floor and connects with the pier in back—that part is brand-new looking, and there are iron bars on all the windows. A barn next to the house, very small, with a truck parked inside there. Two smaller cars in the yard. Thick evergreens all around the perimeter, blocking the rising sunlight. A bunch of oaks too, with their leaves scattered on the ground, spindly and skeletal, tangled among the Christmas trees. It's a giant clutch of deep-woods subterfuge.

Mark observes all this in sections, snapping mental pictures.

There are men all over the perimeter. He counts six at first glance, all in guard positions around trees—and then he sees more of them moving inside the house, just beyond the bars and the curtains. This is just a way station.

Jollie finally says something as Mark turns off the car, parked behind Penelope's Fiat, right in front of the house, just inches from the front porch.

“Tell me everything is going to be okay.”

He almost doesn't hear Jollie, he's so intent on mapping the lay of the land, on rehearsing what he has to say to the people inside that house—her voice comes as a shock, and it reaches him garbled.

“What?” he says. “What did you just say?”

“Tell me these people are going to help us, Mark. Tell me everything will be all right. I feel like the whole world is peeling away and there's something
else
under it.”

“There is.”

“Thanks. Just what I wanted to hear.”

He looks at her and sees that she's terrified.

“Everything
will
be okay, Jollie. I promise I won't let anything happen to you.”

“Mark . . . I need to say something.”

“Okay.”

“It's really serious stuff.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to know that I'll always love you. We'll always have the memory of our time together. And we'll always have our
moment
together. I gave away my womanhood to you and nothing will ever change that. That's a big deal.”

“I know. It was for me too.”

“The thing is I don't know if I can
forgive
you. This is all so weird and overwhelming.”

“I understand that. Maybe you can't forgive me. But maybe we can move forward somehow. Into a new life.”

“Could we really go to the top with a machine gun, you and I?”

“Maybe.”

“I don't just want to survive, Mark. I want to live. I want to fight. If I can't do those things, I'd rather be dead.”

“I swear to you, Jollie . . . I won't let you die.”

“Then help me fight.”

“Someday. But this morning we have to survive. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“I love you too, Jollie. I've never loved anything like I love you.”

She smiles at him and knows he is not lying.

This time.

• • •

T
wo of the men in the yard get instructions and start toward Mark's car—guys with their ears wired. They open the car doors on either side.

“Please come with us,” says the one on Jollie's side. His voice is high pitched like Kermit. She is reminded of John Denver again and how Mark made it rain in her car.

Penelope Cranston is already out of her Fiat, Andy right behind her, and she's jabbering at the agents about something. Mark isn't paying attention to anything she says, as they leave the car. He's still mapping the area. Pinning the exact locations of each agent by each tree. Then he catalogs his assets, one a time—everything he has in the trunk of his car, everything he has riding on his person. One of the good things about cargo shorts is that there are lots of goddamn pockets—and his are full.

A final check on inventory:

Car keys.

Two smartphones.

Three grand in cash and four loose diamonds.

A half ounce of the blow and some weed.

Vestika 9mm—he chose that one over the Korth .357 because it's invisible to metal detectors and you can fit it in snug in the small of your back with a full load.

Everything else is in the trunk.

Ready, just in case.

He moves over to Jollie and gives her one of the phones. That's just in case too. She smirks when he puts it in her hand, feeling a little absurd.

“Stay in touch,” he says to her.

“Going somewhere?” she says back to him.

“Who the hell knows?”

She slips the phone in her jeans pocket and kisses him. She's always loved kissing Mark because he's shorter than she is and he always stands on his toes to do it—thinks that's always been so adorable. And because she loves him. Even now.

Andy sees the kiss and smiles sadly.

Penelope Cranston makes some noise, and they are all hustled inside by the two plain-looking agents.

• • •

T
he man in the black truck sits on the side of the road, waiting for instructions. He has all the time he needs. He's not a big guy, but a little guy gets the job done too.

His big truck couldn't possibly scream “I'm from Texas” any louder. It's a double-wide Chevy Silverado with a custom chassis that's been raised five feet to accommodate giant tractor-puller tires and a V-10 crate engine block. The whole thing is done in black with silver flake just under the finish, polished solid-steel trim running along every contour. A hood ornament made of chromed stainless aluminum, shaped like a cross of God. Nobody ever wants to steal that. But every head turns when this ride zooms out of the rearview mirror and into their blind spot. It's the truck you get pissed off just thinking about. You could save a country with the liquid assets invested in this oil-burning, lane-gobbling, redneck monstrosity. You could house an entire third-world family in the flatbed. You could just kill the idiot who spent real money on a truck like this. You're so busy thinking all that, in fact, that you never realize the guy driving is coming to kill you first.