37.
It was a little after four in the morning, inside that momentary pause of breath where the city almost slept. I walked alone down a desolate street, one block from Fremont and a stone’s throw from Container Park, where my long-distance death match with Elmer Donaghy had begun.
A short hiss of static burst from the walkie-talkie in my hand, followed by Caitlin’s voice. “I still think this plan is too dangerous.”
I squeezed the call button. “It’s the best way to find Grimes. We know he’s going to be looking for me, and we know he’s got a means of tracking me across the city. Best thing I can do is give him a nice, juicy target away from any collateral damage.”
“And thank you for that,” he said, rounding the corner in front of me.
I came to a dead stop. We squared off, ten feet apart.
“I’ll call you back,” I said to Caitlin and hooked the walkie-talkie onto my belt.
Harry didn’t look any worse for wear after our fight in the apartment. He spread his legs in a gunslinger’s stance.
“Nice shooting back there,” he said. “You almost parted my hair.”
“In my defense, I couldn’t see what I was shooting at. I’ll do better this time.”
“Let’s make a bet.”
“That I’m faster on the draw than you are?” I asked.
“Too easy. How about I close the distance between us and take that little gun away from you before you even get a shot off?”
I had to steel myself for what was coming next. We had a plan. It was a good plan.
It was an okay plan.
Most of all, it was a plan that required me to be exactly one-hundred-percent right. If I’d misjudged Harry’s motives, or my hunch about his secret employer turned out to be wrong, well…my backup wouldn’t get here before I was reduced to red paste on the sidewalk.
“Let’s do this,” I told him.
I threw back my jacket. He charged, coming at me head-on, a high-speed juggernaut of muscle and bone. I had just cleared my holster when he plowed into me, tackling me to the sidewalk. We rolled end over end in a clinch and his fist cracked across my chin hard enough to leave me seeing double. Then he ripped the pistol from my grip, raised it high, and smashed the butt across my forehead. Blood spattered his face and ran down my scalp, a hot, salty river on my cheeks.
He tossed my gun aside, grabbed my shoulders, and wrestled me onto my hands and knees. I had crimson in my eyes and a branding-iron burn across my hairline, drowning out anything but animal panic. I think I flailed at him. He caught my wrist and wrenched it behind my back. My cheek smacked the concrete.
“C’mon, pretty boy,” he snarled. “Bite the curb. Let’s give you a brand-new face.”
If I was right, Harry wouldn’t kill me. That left everything else, up to and including disfigurement, on the table. It was now or never.
My walkie-talkie squawked. “Dan, it’s Jen. You there?”
Harry grabbed it off my belt, leering at the plastic shell as he raised it to his mouth. Probably thinking of something badass and witty to say to her before he pulverized me.
“Did you lead him away?” Jen’s voice crackled. Harry blinked at it, slow realization dawning.
“Jen,” I croaked, straining one hand up like I was reaching for heaven. “Help.”
“Just stay ahead of Grimes, keep him distracted and chasing you so he can’t get in our way,” Jen said. “We’ve got Elmer Donaghy and the second Network safe house surrounded. The strike team is in place and we’re rolling in five minutes. Soon as we snatch Elmer and we’ve got the place on lock, we’ll come and pick you up.”
Harry’s beefy hand curled around the walkie-talkie as his face went red. “The fuck? You…you tricked me!”
I managed to flop onto my back. Somehow, I even managed to smile.
The walkie-talkie shattered on the pavement and spilled its electronic guts. He turned and ran, bolting up the alley, heading back the way he came. I tugged my phone from my hip pocket.
“He bought it,” I breathed.
“We got eyes on him, kiddo,” Corman said. “He’s running eastbound, hell-bent for leather. Looks like he’s headed for his van. You in one piece over there?”
I sat up, groaning, and stripped off my jacket. I pressed the rumpled fabric to the split in my forehead. One hell of an expensive bandage.
“Just don’t lose him. Stay tight, swap pursuit cars every few blocks, and I’ll be right behind you.”
I hung up. Then I reached over and scooped my pistol off the sidewalk. The safety was still on. It didn’t even have a magazine loaded, not that he noticed.
“Putz,” I muttered.
Harry Grimes thought you had to be a tough guy to win a fight. He wasn’t wrong, but you had to be even tougher to get in a fight and lose on purpose.
* * *
Convinced he was racing to Elmer’s rescue, Harry led us on a chase across town. Well, not far across. His final destination was a foreclosed storefront in East Vegas, a hop, skip, and a punch away from where he’d jumped me. My crew kept on him, running an alternating pursuit and putting plenty of slack in his leash.
“Left side of the street,” Corman said over the conference line. “He’s pulling up…looks like a deli. Shut down, though, old newspaper taped over all the windows. Two floors of apartments above it. I’m driving past so he doesn’t make us.”
“I’m on it,” Jennifer shot back. “Coming up the alley opposite. Yep, he’s unlocking the front door.”
We couldn’t track down Elmer Donaghy on our own, but Harry knew exactly where to find him. And he’d just led us straight to his hiding place.
“He left the front door wide open,” Jen said. “Man’s definitely in a panic. Can’t see too much unless I get closer, but it looks stripped to the bone inside.”
I wiped some crusted blood from my left eyelid. It clung to my hand like flakes of rust. The place was just up ahead; a long, low storefront with paper-shrouded windows, Marino’s in faded gold leaf over the open front door. Hard light spilled from the open doorway and etched a razor-sharp angle on the sidewalk.
“He’s coming out alone,” Jennifer said. “Looks like he’s leaving, and he is pissed.”
Elmer wasn’t here. And now Harry knew he’d been tricked, twice. His stolen van was curbside, up ahead near the deli’s doorway. I stood in an alcove to the left of the door and pressed my back to the wall. The cut on my forehead still hadn’t clotted over all the way. It oozed down in a slow, warm trickle, tickling the side of my nose and pooling on my upper lip. I tasted copper on my tongue and waited.
Harry boiled out of the deli, slammed the door shut behind him, and headed for the van. I pushed away from the wall and prowled in his wake. My footsteps matched his beat for beat, my stride longer, closing the gap between us.
Then I lunged in, clamped one hand over his mouth, and punched him with the ice pick in my other fist. Five quick jabs, tearing into his kidneys, his lungs, turning his back into a mangled slab of raw meat.
Harry Grimes collapsed to the sidewalk, glassy-eyed, dead. He never knew what hit him. Just like I promised. He’d figure it out when he woke up in hell.
My crew swarmed in, guardian angels with lockpicks and guns. Bentley went to work on the deli’s front door and Jennifer popped the side of the panel van. We grabbed Harry’s corpse under each arm and hauled him along the sidewalk, leaving a slug smear of scarlet behind.
“How much of that blood is yours?” she asked, nodding at my face.
“All of it. Why? Bad?”
We heaved, once, and tossed the body into the van. The door rattled shut. He’d keep for a couple of days, until somebody noticed the smell and called it in.
“Nothing’s that bad if you’re still breathin’. All the same, oughta get some stitches on that cut.”
“If we have time,” I said. “If Elmer’s not here, there’s a good chance Harry got a warning out to him. I want this whole operation mopped up tonight.”
Tonight was turning into today, with the glow of dawn on the horizon. Bentley got the door open—faster than my best time, the man still had a magic touch—and we got off the street. The deli was stripped bare, just a long counter, a dusty glass case, and stark light from a couple of humming fluorescent tubes over our heads.
On the far side of the abandoned shop, a backroom door hung open with a keypad lock set into the wall beside it. Harry was in too much of a hurry to close up properly. Either that, or Elmer was just beyond the doorway, waiting for us.
“Jen, Cait, you’re with me. Bentley, Corman, and Pix, hold until we give the all-clear.”
I slid a fresh magazine into my gun. No more play-acting tonight.
We crossed the threshold in single file, Jennifer and Caitlin splitting left and right, all eyes hunting for danger. What we found was half private apartment, half mini laboratory, where a wall-mounted cot and a chemical toilet shared space with computer tables and racks of analytic equipment. My gaze drifted to a rounded platform of metal with a drain in the floor, ringed in Plexiglas. I thought it was Elmer’s shower, until I saw the dangling, open manacles.
“The hell were you doing in here?” I muttered to the empty room. Hand-written notes lay scattered across a folding table, with incomprehensible graphs etched onto green-lined graph paper. A camcorder stood on a tripod, pointed toward the empty plastic-walled cell, and a scattering of cassettes joined the clutter beside it. Each tape was marked with symbols, not words or numbers, spiky, boxy glyphs that spoke to some kind of common hierarchy.
Language, I realized, as I saw more of the symbols adorning his charts and notes. Elmer Donaghy was an alien, not from outer space, but a parallel Earth. He’d learned to speak English at some point, but he naturally kept his personal records in his native tongue.
“Clear over here,” Jennifer called out.
“We’re clear,” Caitlin said. She waved the others inside.
Pixie made a beeline for Elmer’s personal computer. She ducked under the desk, yanking cables, tugging his boxy tower out onto the floor and going after the back-panel screws with a multi-tool.
“Touch nothing electronic,” she said. “Leave it for me. If it’s anything like the gear at the waste plant, it’s all booby-trapped ten different ways.”
I pointed to the tripod. “How about the camcorder? This thing looks vintage.”
“Huh?” She glanced over, uncertain for a second, then nodded. “Sure, knock yourself out.”
I picked up a random tape from the pile, fed it into the bulky camcorder’s slot, and leaned into the eyepiece. I rewound and set it for playback. I wanted to see what Elmer had been up to while we were chasing our tails all over the city.
I saw it, all right.
“You sick bastard,” I breathed.