by L T Vargus
Spinks let out a long exhale. Almost a sigh. Loshak usually had a pretty good gut about these things, but maybe the pharmacist angle was a bust. They could try again, expand their search to doctors and lawyers. Now that they had a log of all the plates around the parking garage the shooter had dumped his car in, they had a lot to work with. One way or another, those would turn up something, wouldn’t they?
Spinks stared down a vacant street, snow blowing down in it in a way that reminded him of the desolate tundra at the opening of The Empire Strikes Back instead of the third-largest city in America. It howled a little now and then, quiet and a little mournful, just to heighten the lonely effect, Spinks thought.
Crazy how fast the blizzard had emptied the streets. Nobody was out anymore. He’d only seen one car go by since he came out to make the call, and that had been inching along like it was scared to death. He could empathize.
In the absence of traffic, the city had gotten quiet. No sirens or horns honking or constant whir of wheels on asphalt. With the white drifting up everywhere and hanging like a curtain in the air, it was beautiful. Almost like the snow was absorbing all sound.
Looking at it, a little flash of memory came back to him. Being a kid and finding out that kids in northern states didn’t have school on the days it snowed too much. He couldn’t believe it. The only time they’d gotten out of school for weather in Florida had been when they were worried a hurricane was going to make landfall. Even then, he was never able to enjoy it because everybody was so scared it was going to slaughter them all, smash the building where he and his mom lived to soggy bits. Of course, then there were the assholes out looting. There was always looting when there were hurricanes, and that brought its own set of terrors as order broke down around everyone.
To stay home from school because of something as beautiful and harmless as a little snow had sounded like magic to him. Why didn’t you guys have school today? Oh, because God dropped a big fuzzy white blanket everywhere.
Spinks grinned out at the storm, hoping kids across Chicago were getting a snow day tomorrow. He figured it a very strong possibility, at the least.
After one more long look up and down the snowy street, he turned and headed back into the building to let the detectives know he hadn’t reached Loshak. Hopefully, his partner was being careful on the roads.
Chapter 60
The Camry’s tires crunched through the snow. Loshak could feel them slide every now and then, unable to get traction. The drugs amplified the feeling, made it feel like he was shooting out over the drop on a roller coaster and finding no more track. Weightless. Falling. To steady himself, he grabbed the seatbelt buckle sticking up out of the backseat and held on for dear life, fully expecting to hear the crunch of metal as Walsh plowed into something.
That calm voice spoke up in Loshak’s head again. If you go along peacefully, you die. So find an opening and make your move. Now or never.
Walsh’s voice broke up his internal monologue.
“People call cities the concrete jungle, but the jungle isn’t the place itself. It’s bigger than that,” Walsh said from the front seat. “But I’m sure you know that. You study human psychology, right? You’re a profiler. So you know that it’s a jungle everywhere, inside and outside every one of us, and only the strong ever really live. The powerful. We take what we want, we thrive because we make ourselves thrive, because we will it, while the weak cower. They just roll over and take it, you know? Whatever the world wants to do to them. The neutered ones. Impotent. Domesticated animals.”
He shook his head, breathing heavily through his nostrils. Then he went on.
“But you? You’ve seen both sides of the glass. Way I figure it, a guy like you, you’d know the difference when you see it. Ain’t that right?”
Loshak eyed the pulsing mane of darkness hanging around Walsh’s head. It was coming from the drugs, he knew that, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was seeing something real. Something beyond regular perception. Maybe a manifestation of Walsh’s psyche. Warped perceptions. A kind of manic furor. They made the air around his head darkle. Ebon tendrils writhing there.
Loshak swallowed around the dust bunny lodged in his throat and tried to focus on what Walsh was saying.
“You—” He coughed, then tried again. “You see the rage as the marker for what’s real. You can’t see it in anyone else, so they’re not real. Impotent, like you said.”
“Because they are,” Walsh said. “They handed their sacks over when they signed up to be a part of this society, and they never once think about taking them back and being whole again. Never think about standing up for themselves, expressing their true selves. Better to have good manners, they think. Better to roll over and shake and beg for the dog bone. Fuck that.”
Light glinted off the rearview mirror, and Loshak realized these were the first headlights he’d seen on the road since they got in the car. Walsh turned, the wheels sliding a little.
A second later the headlights were back.
Were they being followed?
Loshak swallowed again. The likelihood was too small. But even if they weren’t purposely tailing Walsh, the guy was driving too wildly on the snow and was probably high on a lot of the same stuff Loshak was. If he could get Walsh more worked up, get the pharmacist to do something stupid, maybe they would crash into some parked cars or a building. Maybe Walsh would be incapacitated and Loshak could get out. Flag down the tail car and get them to call 911.
If he was going that route, though, he needed up off the floor. He didn’t want to be crushed when they wrecked. He needed to be ready to rip the door open and run.
“But you creep around your real life,” he said, grunting a little as he pulled himself up onto the seat, “hiding the rage behind a façade of normalcy—”
“I don’t fucking creep anywhere,” Walsh snarled, the dark mane swelling with fury, the edges reaching out like black flames licking at the air. “I hunt. I’m like a wolf, hiding in plain sight. The sheep can’t see me because they’re blind. Dim. Starting to forget that people like me — predators like me — still exist.”
“And you never wonder if they’re fooling you, too?” Loshak asked. “Hiding their own well of rage and anger, ready to pounce on you.”
Walsh shook his head, hard.
“No fucking way. I would know. Smell it. Feel it. Breathe it. Instincts. The cattle give weakness off like pheromones. They’re begging for violence to be enacted upon them. Bleating for the axe.”
“And the only time you can give it to them is when you’re hiding behind a ski mask.”
Walsh made a hissing, spitting sound like an angry cat. He slammed both hands on the wheel. Then he twisted around in his seat, eyes bulging.
“Bullshit! You’re full of fucking—”
Loshak raised his voice to yell over the man-beast’s yowling. “You’re not brave, you’re hidden, you coward.”
“I’ll fucking—” Walsh glanced back at the street, then slammed on the brakes. The light had turned red.
Loshak cringed, feeling the car fishtail, seeing the street drop out from beneath them on either side like sinkholes opening and nothing but darkness waiting below to swallow them up.
But Walsh got it under control, letting off the breaks and easing to a stop with the front half of the Camry hanging over the yawning abyss. Loshak’s heart thundered in his head. He stared up at the set of glowing red eyes dripping from the traffic lights overhead.
“You piece of shit,” Walsh muttered. He slammed his palm on the steering wheel. “You’re trying to get inside my head. To fuck with me. You think I’m stupid? You’re worse than a sheep, Agent Fuckhead. You can see both sides of the glass, but you chose the wrong side. You chose to hand over your balls with a shiny red Christmas bow on them. So, here’s what we’re going to do. If I hear another word from you, I’m going to blow your fucking teeth out of the back of your head.”
Square yellow headlights drifted to a slow sto
p in the rearview mirror. Loshak quickly shifted his focus back to Walsh’s pulsing darkness, but the pharmacist didn’t seem to notice the other car.
“That’s what I thought,” Walsh growled, obviously taking Loshak’s silence for submission.
The lights changed, casting everything in sickly green. Walsh drove through the intersection.
Loshak didn’t look up again, but he could tell by the intensity of the headlights that the other car was right behind them.
Chapter 61
Frank grimaced as the little sedan fishtailed to a stop halfway into the red-lit intersection.
“Fucking mother Mary!” Vince grabbed the dash. “Don’t hit him, Frank!”
“I’m not gonna hit him, you mook.” Frank took his infinitesimal pressure off the gas and let the Buick roll to a crunching stop with plenty of space to spare. “What do you think this is, my first day driving?”
Vince relaxed back in his seat, heaving out a long sigh. His shoulders dropped like a cartoon character. Then he twisted the lid of his Pepto and drank deeply.
“God, Frankie, I thought we were gonna plow him down.”
“Now you’re scared of a fender bender?”
“No! I just… want to make sure nothing happens to our FBI guy the boss doesn’t tell us to make happen.”
Frank shook his head. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say whatever’s going on here won’t be beneficial to our guy’s health. You don’t tie up somebody and wave a gun in their face if you’re trying to pat them on the back and be friendly.”
Frank dug out a cigarette and lit it while Vince processed that.
“Unless that’s what he’s into,” Vince said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“There’s a lot of sick fucks in this world, Frankie. Like those pedos from Kansas City. This Fed might be into being kidnapped and, I don’t know, fucked up or something.”
Frank squinted at Vince through the smoke.
“What?” Vince asked, his tone playing innocent.
“Sometimes I worry about you.”
“I was making a guess! Speculating as to his motives. You wouldn’t believe what some of these freaks get up to. I read an article about this guy a while back. Some British spy or something like that. Guy had like a luggage fetish.”
Frank sighed. Closed his eyes. When he spoke he pointed two fingers and a cigarette at the younger man.
“You know why I’m not going to ask you what a luggage fetish is, Vince? Because I don’t care to know what a luggage fetish is. I’ve lived 51 years just fine without that information, and I think I just want to ride the rest of this life out not knowing, thank you very much.”
“The guy liked to be locked inside in a suitcase.”
Frankie didn’t say anything. Vince went on.
“Like for sexual pleasure, I mean. He liked to be locked inside suitcases for sexual, uh, gratification or whatever. Naked. Anyway, they found him dead like that.”
“Inside of a Samsonite?”
“Yeah, pretty much. He was inside of a big duffel bag or something. Sitting on a coffee table in a hotel room locked and chained from the inside. It’s all a big mystery. They’re not sure if it was, like, a perv session gone wrong or if he was killed. Murdered, you know. Intentionally.”
Both men fell quiet after that.
The light changed and the Camry pulled through the intersection. Frank crept out after it, leaving a decent space between them just in case.
“Well, I don’t know what kind of ghoulish shit you read for fun, but you ask me, it takes a sick mind to make a leap like that about our agent here,” he said, shaking his head.
“People like all sorts of different stuff is all I’m saying,” Vince insisted. “I was just guessing based on what we seen!”
Frank bit back a laugh at Vince’s embarrassed tone.
“Well, unless they’re as sick as you, that’s not what’s going on here.”
Another light turned red. The Camry handled this one a little more gracefully, coming to rest at the edge of the crosswalk. Frank drifted to a stop behind it.
“I’m gonna find out what it is,” Vince said.
Frank rolled his eyes. “Oh yeah? How you gonna do that, genius?”
The door handle clunked, and icy wind gusted into the Buick.
“I’m gonna ask ’em,” Vince said, climbing out of the car.
“Hey, what?” Frank leaned over, snatching at Vince’s arm, but his fingers came up empty. “Get back in here!”
With a flapping hand gesture, Vince slammed the door.
“Dumb shit,” Frank muttered, sitting back up in his seat.
But as the big ape walked around the front of the Buick to the sedan’s driver’s side, he craned his neck to see what would happen.
Chapter 62
“Hey, I thought I told you to stay put in the floorboard,” Walsh said, finally realizing that Loshak was sitting in the seat. He pointed with the gun. The motion was awkward because of how much he had to twist around to get the muzzle facing the floor in the back. “Get your ass back down there before I cut your car ride short real fast.”
A dark figure passed Loshak’s window. The head was above the roof, so Loshak couldn’t determine age or race, but with the way Walsh was turned around, there was no way the shooter had seen the man.
“Alright,” Loshak said, holding up his zip-tied hands in defeat. “I’m going.”
Before he moved, though, the dark figure rapped on the driver’s side window. Not the three-note rap Loshak associated with law enforcement, but almost a drumming. A constant stream of knocking.
The sound made Walsh flinch. His shoulders jerked into a hunch. Then he whipped around, holding the gun down alongside his leg.
If the person on the other side of the glass read anything suspicious in Walsh’s twitchy body language, however, they showed no signs of it. The guy just waited by the door while Walsh rolled down the window.
A pudgy face smiled in the opening. The guy was huge. A Mack truck of muscle and tanned skin and white, white teeth. When he spoke, something rang artificial in his tone.
“Hey, we’re a little lost.”
It was an attempt to sound disarming, Loshak thought. Trying to sound like a tourist or something. The agent blinked and sat back a little, startled.
Something… Something was happening here, and he had no idea what.
The big guy hooked a thumb at the car that had been following them.
“I’m sorry. I should explain. We ain’t from around here,” he said, smiling and friendly. “Need to find Michigan Avenue, but we can’t read a single damn street sign. All this snow. We’re pretty turned around. You know which way we need to go here or what?”
Walsh cleared his throat. “Michigan?”
“Yeah. Is it really far? Feels like we’ve been circling this stinkhole for hours, pardon my language.”
Walsh stammered a little.
“Michigan Ave. Yeah. Uh… It’s not far.”
That was when Loshak realized it had happened. Was happening. Right now. This. The moment he’d been waiting for. He didn’t need Walsh to wreck. This — the huge man asking for directions — was the distraction.
Loshak took a breath. His eyes fastened to that little curve of chrome set in a little cut out in the door, and he licked his lips.
This was it. All in one motion.
He grabbed the door handle and yanked. Squeezing his shoulders in and head down instinctively, he shoved the hunk of metal open and scrambled out into the snow. Stumbling. Moving.
His feet skidded out from under him. Dropped him flat. He flopped down onto his face and chest.
The cold fluff enveloped him like a fresh white blanket, and he was surrounded by the quiet of the snow. It was strangely peaceful.
But he didn’t have time for this. Couldn’t afford to lay about. Not now.
He shoved himself back up, elbows then knees, scrabbled to his feet. Running.
Somewhere behind him, he heard Walsh yelp, “What the fuck?” But he didn’t slow down.
Chapter 63
Ben watched in the rearview mirror, stunned, as the agent bailed out the back door. He flashed across the other car’s headlights, a silhouette of a human. Snow and slush kicked up as he ran, like some slow-motion documentary shot of a wildebeest charging through a river.
The air froze in Ben’s lungs. All he could do was stare. Blink. Mouth agape.
He was getting away.
Without really thinking about it, Ben raised the gun he’d been holding down in the passenger seat. Could he make the shot from here? With the Uzi, maybe he could slam out enough bullets to take the guy down, but not with a pistol, and not twisted around like this. He’d have to get out of the car and go after the dipshit.
The dumbfuck tourist hanging in the window next to him said, “Hey, uh, where’s your buddy going?”
Ben turned back around and shot the guy in his big teeth.
Chapter 64
Frank heard the pop, saw the muzzle flash light up the interior of the sedan, watched Vince flop face down in the snow, a thin line of blood spurting from what looked like his mouth.
He knew what had happened, but he didn’t get it, couldn’t process it. Not right away.
The sedan took off, wheeling to the right. The front end dragged the back end around after it, leaving crazy marks in the snow, as it tried to chase after the Fed fleeing on foot.
“Fucker shot him,” Frank croaked. The words came up like a bubble bursting in his larynx, making involuntary sounds.
Then he was moving, drawing his gun and firing out the passenger window — Vince’s window — at the sedan.
