The Echelon Vendetta (8 page)

Extending his arm, he watched the red lines spreading, a delicate tracery of spreading poison. His fingertips had already gone numb but the pain that had been crawling up his arm eased. Panic began to recede and his heart stopped trying to hammer a hole in his sternum. He picked up the scissors and ran the blades under steaming hot water for a full minute. Then he sprayed the length of his fore-

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arm with the cologne, braced his left hand on the edge of the sink, pulled the tip of the belt tight with his teeth, and began to slice into the skin of his forearm, cutting a series of diagonal wounds across the thin red traceries, concentrating on nothing but the shining steel tip of the scissors as they carved a bright bloody path through his flesh. He flexed his fingers and cut too deep. A sudden leaping gout of red blood from a large vein sprayed itself across the sink and the bathroom mirror, a spouting burst that he could feel in his upper arm. He let the tip of the belt drop from his teeth, easing the tourniquet. Blood ran down his forearm in a widening river that glistened in the light like red satin.

He rested his forehead against the mirror and watched the blood swirling and roiling down the drain. Steam from the hot running water rose up and floated around him, reeking of copper and limes. A sudden cold sweat broke out across his cheeks, his neck, his back and shoulders. A vein in his neck started to pound slowly. A white light filled the bathroom and a great calm rose up from his chest and spread itself out across his upper body, rising like a flood into his mind. He felt his fear leaving him, replaced by a kind of blissful acceptance, a lack of caring.

His forehead began to slip down the mirror, leaving a streak of bright red as it moved through the blood spray on the glass. The sink below him looked like a pool filled with white light. It had a bright red center that looked like a setting sun. Comforting warmth and the scent of fresh limes rose up from it and he began to let himself fall gently downward.

“Christ, Micah! What the
hell
have you done to your arm?”

The voice was behind him, strong, deep, familiar. He jerked his head up, reeling as he did so, and saw Porter Naumann’s reflection in the mirror, standing behind him. Naumann’s mottled skin was pale blue. He was dressed, absurdly, in a pair of what looked to be emerald-green silk pajamas. His facial wounds had been sewn back

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together, badly, by someone with neither skill nor art, but it was still the old Naumann visage, piratical and wild.

His pajama top was open and Dalton could see that a vivid yellow-lipped scar ran down his naked body from the point of his chin to his flat belly, sewn shut with thick black thread. Dalton turned around and stared at Naumann, who grinned, showing bloodstained teeth in pale-gray gums.

“Why the
hell
were you hacking away at your arm like that?”

Dalton looked down at the slashes and cuts on his forearm.

“A spider . . . it bit me. Now the poison is spreading up—”

“And so you’re hacking your arm to ribbons? Where’d you get that notion? ‘Hints from Heloise’? Put some pressure on that.”

Dalton looked down at his arm. Blood was running off it and spattering onto the floor. The belt slipped off his arm and fell onto the tiles at their feet.

“Use the Kleenex,” said Naumann.

Dalton picked up a box of tissues from the toilet top, ripped off a wad of them, and pressed them into the wound. Naumann bent down, picked up Dalton’s leather belt, and handed it to him.

“Use this to tie it off.”

Dalton took the belt. He noticed that Naumann’s fingers had been swabbed clean. His strong hands looked as they had looked when he was alive, but of course the color was wrong. His feet were naked, the toes splayed and purple-looking. Naumann, for his part, gave Dalton a worried appraisal in return.

“Don’t you pass out on me, kid. Cinch up good and tight with that belt there, or you’ll pass out.”

Dalton tied off the tissue pack, twisted the belt tip in under the band, and jerked it in tight. Naumann shook his head.

“Not that tight. You’ll kill tissue. Back it off a bit.”

Dalton loosened the belt a notch. Underneath the wad of Kleenex the blood was welling up, but more slowly, seeping into the

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compress. Dalton swayed as he looked down at it, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Naumann was gone.

He sat down heavily on the toilet, shaking violently. At his feet the bathroom floor was covered in blood, smeared rectangles of bloody red tile. His suit pants were dappled with it and his shoes were stained almost black. The bathroom mirror looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. He leaned against the tank and let his head roll backward. The soft white light came back again, growing brighter, and his blood began to sing in his ears. His lids grew heavy again and he let them slowly close.

A brassy bellow from the other room snapped him upright, Naumann’s baritone vibrato, full of striding jovial life:

“Micah! Wake up. Where the hell’s your booze?”

He got to his feet, swayed, steadied himself on the tank, stepped around the blood pooling in squares across the tiled floor, and went back into the main room. Naumann was standing in front of the dresser. He had the top drawer pulled open and was riffling through Dalton’s shirts. He looked up when Dalton came into the room.

“The minibar’s empty, you drunken sot. You always have something in reserve.”

“I think I finished it all.”

Naumann waved that off with a sideways flick of his hand.

“Not you. How much have you had today, by the way?”

Dalton tried to give the question some thought while Naumann watched him. Was he really going to have a chat with this hallucination? Dalton decided that in reality he was passed out on the bathroom floor right now and that this was all a dream, the kind of out-of-body experience he had always heard about but never actually believed in.

What the hell.

When in Wonderland, talk to the Cheshire Cat.

“I started this morning. I believe I never stopped.”

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Naumann leaned an elbow against the top of the dresser and shook his head slowly at Dalton. “Man, I have to tell you, Micah. You look like death.”

“I look like death?
I
look like death?”

Dalton sat heavily down on the bed, cradling his bloody left arm, and watched in a detached but vaguely appreciative way as Naumann went through the rest of the dresser drawers, rapidly and efficiently, as if he were tossing a crib for an entry unit.

Finding nothing, Naumann turned and pointed down to a place beside Dalton’s feet.

“How about your briefcase?”

Dalton reached under the bed and pulled out a travel-worn leather case with solid gold fittings. He threw it on the bed beside him. Naumann came over to the bed. He ran his hands over the top and then down the sides, stopping at the left-hand hinge plate. Sitting this close to him, Dalton caught an autopsy-room smell of disinfectant and dried blood coming off Naumann.

He managed to give every appearance of not being sickened by this. Naumann was an old friend and, although dead, deserved some consideration for what he had just been through.

Naumann found the release and pressed it and the case popped open. He stood up and shook his head slowly. “Same trigger you’ve always had. You should change it.”

“I’m on it. If I live through the night, I’ll make it a priority.”

“You think you’re dying?”

Dalton let out a slightly self-pitying sigh. “I think so. I think I’ve passed out from loss of blood.”

“What about the spider bite?”

“Or that, yeah—from the spider bite.”

“And now you’re ...where? Lying on the bathroom floor having an out-of-body experience? Don’t go into the light, Carol Ann?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

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“Melodrama. Your generation drives me nuts.”

Cursing softly to himself, Naumann leaned down and fumbled around in the papers, picked up Dalton’s Agency-issue Beretta, thumbed the magazine release, letting the magazine plop onto the bedspread. Then he racked the slide once, deftly caught the flying brass round as it popped out of the ejection port, and tossed the unloaded Beretta onto the bed beside it. He handed the round to Dalton, patting his cheek with a raspy palm as he did so.

“Don’t take it personal. I don’t trust you around loaded guns when you’re all maudlin and pitiful.”

He gave Dalton a fatherly smile and fished a silver flask full of Napoleon brandy out of Dalton’s case, unscrewed the top, and took two long gulping swallows. Dalton thought about going back into the washroom to see if his dying body was still spread-eagled out on the floor in there, and decided against it. If he was really having an out-of-body experience, one of the advantages of it was that his left arm wasn’t hurting like hell right now.

Naumann pulled the flask away from his lips, exhaled noisily, and handed the flask to Dalton with a satisfied smile. The light from the street glimmered on his teeth and put a sickly wet sheen along his right cheek. It reminded Dalton of Milan and Gavro, Gavro’s mean leer in the moonlight, Milan about to get himself kicked to death.

“Go on,” said Naumann. “I left some for you.”

Dalton put the flask up to his lips and then hesitated, displaying a reluctance that made Naumann laugh, in itself an unsettling sound.

“You’re talking to a dead man while dying from a spider’s bite, but sharing a flask of cognac is where Micah Dalton draws the line?”

Naumann had a point, even if he was dead. Dalton put his head back and let the cognac sear its way down his throat. He screwed the top back on while Naumann pulled a chair over and sat down by the bed. Naumann leaned forward and took the flask from Dalton, un

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screwed the cap again with a wry look, put it to his lips, and gulped a mouthful down with obvious enjoyment.

The light from the street flared around Naumann’s silhouette, giving him a pale aura in the darkened room. The cold blue glow from the open bathroom door lay in a luminous wedge across Naumann’s feet and ankles. Naumann wiggled his toes in the shaft of light, stretched out his legs, and leaned back into the chair with the silver flask cradled in his hands. Dalton leaned forward and plucked it back, giving Naumann a significant look. Bogarting a flask of Napoleon, Dalton recalled, was a typical Naumann trait. Naumann shrugged, smiled, and spoke out of the dark.

“I suppose you’re wondering why I called this meeting?”

“Not really. You’re a hallucination, that’s all. A figment.”

The room seemed to ripple and the aura around Naumann brightened. Dalton’s vision was suddenly flooded with white light. He blinked several times and shook his head hard, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opened his eyes the room was back to normal, but Naumann was still there.

“You are, however, a damn persistent figment,” he said, with some resentment. He needed to either wake up or finish dying. Naumann watched him drinking from the flask with amusement, took the flask back and had another sip, set it down. Dalton woozily considered another drink and realized how little he needed more of
anything
alcoholic right now.

Naumann seemed to be of much the same mind.

“Man, we need to ease up on this stuff before we’re
both
tanked. I never knew you could still get drunk after you’re dead.”

“So you actually
know
you’re dead?”

Naumann gave him a look. “It’s kinda hard to overlook being dead, Micah. It’s the sort of thing that jumps out at you whenever you look in a mirror.”

“Do you know anything about how you died?”

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Naumann shook his head. “No idea. All a blur. Maybe there are rules about this sort of thing. Maybe I’ve got amnesia.”

“You can’t have amnesia when you’re dead.”

“I’m the only dead guy in this room. So far. I’ve even been autopsied. I’m certifiably and reliably dead. I think that gives me a measure of credibility.”

“Stallworth thinks you committed suicide. So do the cops.”

“Suicide? Not my style. I had too much to live for.”

“Stallworth didn’t think so.”

Naumann cocked his head to the side.

“Yeah? Why not?”

“He said you had a prostate operation. Lost your will to live.”

Naumann snorted. “He knew that, huh? That surgeon of mine couldn’t keep a secret if it was hammered up his colon and sutured shut. Sure I had a prostate operation. And it screwed up my courting tackle. So what? I could still play the trumpet, enjoy a scotch. Life was sweet. Come to think of it, I wish I’d paid more attention to being alive when I was still alive.”

“This is a real Hallmark moment for me, I’m sure. I’m touched beyond words.
La douceur de la vie
and all that. But I have to figure out what happened to you.”

“Look, kid, I haven’t got much time—” Naumann made a move as if to check his wristwatch, realized he didn’t have one anymore, and sighed heavily, his mood darkening.

“Damn. That was a Chopard. I wonder who got it.”

“It’ll be in your effects, Porter. I’ll get them tomorrow.”

“Make sure you do. It was an anniversary gift from Joanne. However, back to my point, as much as I’ve enjoyed seeing you one more time, and I admit that I have thoroughly loved freaking the living Jesus out of you, I’m actually here to give you some advice.”

Dalton emitted a pained groan and put his head in his hands. “Please. Not Marley’s ghost.”

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“What? You don’t think you need some advice?” “Not from a ghost.” “Ghost? I thought I was just a figment? How about we ask Milan