Nature of the Game (53 page)

“You smoke too much,” said Jud.

“What the hell else do I got to do?” she intoned flatly.

“You got a problem?” he snapped.

She laughed.

“You think that's funny? You got more than you ever wanted. There's a million women who'd trade places with you!”

“You been taking names?”

“I don't have to take names, they're given to me.”

“Oh, right, I forgot who you were.”

“You never knew who I was.”

“Really?” she said. “Who else has heard you cry?”

“I guess that was my mistake.”

“So that's what it was.” She sniffed, scraped the last of the coke off the saucer with a playing card, hit both nostrils.

“You're a fucking junkie,” said Jud.

“We don't fuck anymore,” she said, staring at him flatly. She watched him watch her lick her numb lips.

“At least I don't,” he said.

“You going to tell that to the bitch you got stashed at the beach? I'm not complaining. She saves me the trouble.”

The plastic channel wand cracked in his grip. If she heard it, she was past caring.

“Your men are too afraid to fuck me,” she said. “They might shoot me, but they won't fuck me.”

She stood, stared out the window. The sky bled.

“Why do we live like this?” she said.

“Would you rather go back to Nebraska? You want to go back to making hair appointments and two-dollar tips?”

“Rather?” She shook her head. “I can still
rather?
”

He heard her crying, but all he could think about was when would she stop.

“I'd rather …,” she began—then she lost the thought, her mind slipped gears. Wistfully, she said, “I'd rather we'd had the baby. You said it wasn't the right time, it wasn't safe. You said I hadn't been clean enough long enough, the baby would be … You said you were worried.”

And he couldn't stop, “I was worried whose kid it was.”

Awareness
slammed back into her face, her features hardened as she turned toward him. Her cheeks were wet, but the razor was back in her voice.

“You've got your secrets,” she said. “I've got mine.”

“I did all this for us!” he yelled. “And for things you can't understand! Don't know about!”

“Honey, that's a sad lie,” she said. She swirled around as she had in the picture Nick had taken of her. This time, her smile was empty. “Congratulations. You're brilliant. You won.”

“What do you want?”

“Me?” She looked around the empty mansion. “I want to be gone.” She laughed. “I want some more coke.”

She smiled slow and sweet, leaned toward him, her thick hair cascading, her body still young and lush, said:

“I'll pour you a drink.”

Jud threw her the keys to his office where the drugs were. He heard her climbing the stairs as he walked out.

The Porsche took him across town. He stopped twice for a drink. The post office he used gave its boxholders twenty-four-hour access. There was a letter in his box.

He knew something was wrong the moment he opened it. The envelope contained two sheets of paper, one small folded square, one carbon-copy sheet of a typed, encoded message.

A carbon copy
. There should never have been any copies of anything; that he'd been sent a carbon was a message in itself:
the team had lost autonomy
. Jud stood at the postal table in the deserted government building, decoded the message:

Sanction withdrawn effective 12/20/81 …

A month. They were giving him a month. They claimed.

Exit clean. Prepare full final report. Identify Assets, Targets, Personnel. Turn over material, operational funds. Debriefing to be scheduled. Inform fully.

Something's happened
, thought Jud. He unfolded the second piece of paper. That message was hand printed in plainspeak, a private communication:

REMEMBER MONTERASTELLI

Blown
, thought Jud, then he corrected himself:
Discarded
.

He'd become a liability—the general's or the general's general. The rules had changed. Carbon copies: suddenly they wanted a record to cover their asses.
Identify Assets, Targets, Personnel
. Finger your people. They'd roll up Wendell, Marie, others. Put the screws to them. The big boys would have another line entered in their file folders—the big boys had lawyers and connections and could keep the cops away no matter what a roll up of Jud's network yielded.
Turn over …
everything. Be Joe Shit The Ragpicker. And just to be sure, we'll polygraph you and dope you and microscope you until you are.

Sanction withdrawn
. If he ignored them, every cop who'd been warned away and every tax man who'd been told to mind his own business would be loosed on Jud. His picture would join the mug shots on the wall of this post office.

And if the law didn't get him …
Remember Monterastelli
.

Don't talk. Don't piss us off. Or you'll die.

Something more
, he realized. He looked at the two messages. Sending Jud a carbon, sending him the personal note, the general had to realize Jud would figure out …

That was it: the general and the team didn't want Jud to come in any more than he did. But somewhere someone had gotten scared or changed his mind, and as long as Jud existed, the renegade dope spy, he had to be pulled back into line.

As long as he existed, they'd have to try.

Joe Shit The Ragpicker.

For nothing
, he thought.
I did it all again for nothing
.

What he kept would be the measure of their revenge.

The scream roared out of him, echoed off the empty post office's green walls and brass boxes.

Two hours and five drinks later, he was back at the mansion. The bodyguard was awake. He was a Korean with dubious papers. The Doberman liked him. Jud ordered him to pack.

Lorri was passed out across their king-size bed, a bottle of Valium by her side. She used them to bring her down so she could sleep enough to get high again. While she lay there, Jud packed two suitcases with her less flashy clothes. He packed two bags for himself, went into his study hung with the fourteenth-century Japanese-samurai woodblock-print collection he loved.

His green beret, a 9mm Smith, and $50,000 in cash went into his briefcase. His practiced eye told him there was about $70,000 left in the safe. He put $10,000 in one envelope, the rest in a shaving kit. The safe held about a kilo of cocaine. He put two cupfuls in a plastic bag, dropped it in the shaving kit.

It took him an hour to make the rest of his preparations.

“Come on,” he said then, shaking Lorri into a semiconscious stupor. She was sluggish, but he got her downstairs, into the garage, into her black Mercedes. The Korean loaded her bags in that car, loaded Jud's in the Porsche along with a case of Scotch, drove it up the block, and walked back.

“Take this,” Jud said, handing him the envelope with $10,000. “Go to your cousin's in San Francisco, use what you need. If I haven't contacted you in two months, it's all yours.”

Jud tossed him the key to the second Mercedes.

“Take the dog.”

A slow bow, and the Korean obeyed.

“Never liked that dog,” said Jud as the Korean drove away.

Lorri was in a stupor. Jud drove the black Mercedes down the hill three blocks to the parked Porsche; later he'd ditch it for the low-key Dodge he'd kept stored at a safe house. They could see the glowing mansion. Neighbors they didn't know slept in palaces around them on this pinnacle of American success.

“Wake up!” he said. He used his knife to give her two hits of coke from the shaving kit. She snorted them automatically.

Blinked, shook her head; looked around and saw her bags, the shaving kit with money and drugs he'd left on the floor, the keys in her Mercedes.

“Wha … What th'hell …” Her eyes widened.

A black box sat on the car seat between them. Jud pointed back to the mansion with all their expensive frivolities and fineries. He turned a dial on the box, flipped a switch.

Radio bombs exploded in his office; in the kitchen; in the basement; in the living room where the giant-screen TV still played. Each bomb was taped to a full can of gas. Fireballs novaed through the oak-paneled mansion: drapes, electronic spy gear, paintings, computers, guns, ammunition, clothes, drugs, piles of cash abandoned in kitchen drawers—all fed the inferno.

The peacocks in the street panicked; stupidly ran toward the exploding house as lights came on all over the hill.

“You want to be gone,” Jud hissed to Lorri, “
go!
Go now, go fast, and go hard. Don't look back. This is all gone. It never was. There's nothing here for you. Not in this town. Not in this life. Forget my name and don't ever forget not to fuck up!”

The burning mansion was reflected in the black dimes of her eyes. He saw she'd been waiting for this, expecting this.

From farther down the hill came the sound of fire engines. House doors slammed nearby.

Jud got out of the car. Lorri hesitated, then slid behind the wheel of the Mercedes and drove away.

She didn't look back; Jud watched.

Nine years later, he was driving a stolen car west on the interstate highway crossing Iowa. Headed to Nebraska.

He knew where she was—a cousin of hers still thought Jud could send him money so he still sucked up. Jud even called her trailer once, heard her say “Hello.” Heard her hang up.

The stolen car turned south, crossed the Missouri River. The afternoon light made shadow patterns in the trees along the road. Jud hadn't expected Nebraska to have so many trees.

Not that he was going to stay. Not that he had any expectations, any idea of where he was going next. He knew she'd have
not much
to say and cared not for words he didn't have anyway. But he had to see her, just one more time. Just to say one thing.

A flash of white, walking in the trees; it was Nora.

When Jud cut south on the state road outside Lincoln, the VC whose throat he'd cut was standing by the curb, crusty black pajamas, empty eyes. Jud half expected him to stick out his thumb: hitchhiker. Jud roared on by.

Can you apologize to all your victims?
Jud wondered.

Maybe Lorri would say,
Where you been? Where'd you go?

Low
, he'd tell her. Maybe she'd laugh.

Maybe he'd tell her everything. Maybe he could and maybe now she could understand, maybe they finally knew the right language. Maybe she'd be proud of him:

They activated me one more time after our fire
, he'd tell her.
Horoscope horrors. They didn't know how low I'd fallen. Autumn, 1984, and I got them to brief me through the mail and I told them no
.

So?
she'd say.

But maybe she'd say,
What the hell
. And smile.

And then maybe she'd let him go.

Conrad, Nebraska, is a dirty little town. Couple hundred houses, half of Main Street boarded up, grain elevators by rusted railroad tracks where trains don't stop anymore. More gravel than pavement in the streets. Satellite dishes to bring real life into drab living rooms. Pickup trucks parked outside the two bars that Jud forced himself to drive past. The blue airline bag by his side still had thirty-two dollars in it, plenty enough for a bottle or maybe two. But he could wait. He could make himself wait.

The trailer was east of town, a quarter mile from any other houses. A row of trees cut it off from prying eyes. A mile on the other side of the trailer were the sewer lagoons. They only smelled on really hot days, and by the time Jud got there, the sun was setting. It was spring, anyway.

Two mongrel dogs circling the trailer loped off when Jud drove up. He didn't like their look. He grabbed the blue airline bag. Got out of the car, road stiff, nothing else to do but walk up to that closed metal door.

Knock.

THE YELLOW DOG

W
es found the trailer outside Conrad, Nebraska, before noon the next day. The sun was warm, the sky blue. He parked his rental car a hundred meters up the empty road from the trailer, used binoculars to scan the curtained windows, the splotchy pastel paint on the metal walls. A rusted pickup with Nebraska plates slumped beside that now-immobile home.

Three mongrel dogs paced the dirt yard, sniffing, trotting around the aluminum box. The yellow dog scratched at the trailer door. No one let him in.

Wes ran his hand over his unshaven stubble. He wore a black windbreaker, shirt, black jeans, sneakerlike black shoes.

Not an official image
, he thought.

The Sig rode on his right hip. Chambered. Ready. During his Nashville layover, his sleep had been deep and dreamless.

Nothing moved at the trailer. Except the dogs.

Twelve o'clock
, said his watch.
Straight up
.