Skinner

by Huston, Charlie

  Smith stops grinding his thumb into his flesh and looks at her.

  “And man, I knew, I knew right that fucking second. He did it. He killed those people. And he killed them because they were planning to take his asset and he found out about it. He killed them, tortured two of them, because they were planning to come after me. Jae. So. And, but, knowing it, that wasn’t good enough for me, because I specialize in knowing. I needed to really know. So back home I hacked some shit. And I found out that yeah, that was a Hann-Aoki asset acquisition team. Yeah, I was the asset they wanted. And then I looked at the pictures of what he did to them.”

  He puts an index finger at each temple.

  “So thanks for this. Bringing him here, asking for the details. ’Cause now I have that shit back up on the main screen again. Shit!”

  Jae looks at the floor, she’s thinking about Route Irish, the Kestrel contractor’s hand dropping onto the blacktop.

  “Sorry. He’s what Terrence sent me. I didn’t know it would be a problem.”

  Smith takes his fingers from his head.

  “He asked if I’d seen Terrence lately. I told him a few days ago. That’s all we talked about.”

  Jae is still looking at the floor, nodding. She stops nodding. Looks at Smith.

  “Terrence is dead.”

  Smith opens his mouth, grabs a fistful of beard, gives it a tug, and looks at the door.

  “Does he know?”

  Jae shrugs.

  “I don’t know. Why I wanted to talk in here.”

  Smith is still looking at the door.

  “Because you don’t want him to know?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Because he may have done it.”

  Smith looks at her.

  She shrugs again.

  “Or that’s what Cross said.”

  Smith grabs some hairs at the corner of his mouth, starts to chew the ends.

  “Jae. You know. They tried to kill him. Back in the day. This is like, lore, yeah. Around the time you were in Iraq, before you dropped out of the game. Terrence was getting forced out of Kestrel. Cross’s coup, that whole deal. Business boomed post–nine-eleven, and Cross convinced Terrence to take on investor cash so they could grow faster. The board was stacked with his people. Part of the final push, cleaning house. Cut loose my contract. Bunch of other guys like me. But Skinner. No one, no one who’s ever done an asset contract with Kestrel that involved Skinner wants him going freelance. Private intelligence was getting too big, so much money. So legit. Cross did some mumbo-jumbo is the lore. Made it look like Skinner was ready to go over some line or other. Slapped an asset designation on him. And handed Terrence the paper on the gig. Said, You created him, Dr. Frankenstein, now you burn him. Words to that effect. I imagine.”

  He’s staring at the locked door, chewing hair.

  Jae moves from her corner for the first time since entering the SCIF.

  “And?”

  Smith looks at her.

  “And unless that’s a ghost out there, they fucked it up, didn’t they?”

  He stops chewing his beard, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “I mean, the word, scuttlebutt, was the whole deal was blown. Someone with an interest in knowing things might have hacked around a little and found out that they sent a third-stringer named Lentz to do the dirty and he scored a fail. But that couldn’t be because everyone knows the Skinner Maxim means that anyone involved with what they like to call the Montmartre Incident has to die horribly, but they haven’t. Just Lentz. And Skinner was gone. Until now. When he’s come back, and is working for the people who tried to kill him.”

  He wipes sweat from his brow.

  “I am scaring myself shitless here.”

  Jae knuckles her chin, rubbing hard.

  “Yeah. Me too. But. If Terrence sent the third-stringer, Lentz, to get Skinner off the hook.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Then why kill Terrence now?”

  Smith steps close to her, needless whisper in the box of secrets.

  “Jae. His methodology is to scare people into leaving his assets alone. And he hasn’t worked in years. His reputation has faded.”

  “I get it.”

  “People may not be afraid of him anymore. And they won’t be until he does something to remind them how scary he is.”

  She shakes her head.

  “I’m his asset. He won’t kill me.”

  Smith nods.

  “But he might use you to get close to the people he wants to kill. Cross. The Kestrel board. Whoever else. Terrence. Reestablish his rep and be on top of the food chain again.”

  She looks at the door.

  “He doesn’t think like that.”

  Smith blinks slowly.

  “The sudden expert.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s what Terrence sent. And I have to go.”

  She pushes the lever, feels the lock release, the door swings open, drawing smoke into the SCIF as they register the darkness in the unoccupied condo, a muted crackle, a dancing yellow and orange glow visible in the hallway beyond the unit’s open front door. The SCIF door jams half open and they look down at the corpse that has stopped it, the X-Acto blade from Smith’s workstation stuck in one end of a long straight gash running across its throat.

  Something moves in the hall, a shadow on the wall, long, shortening, collapsing into a man, sprinting into the frame of the doorway, two streaks of red light hit him in the upper back, and, with the sound of an immense balloon being popped, he’s shoved face first into the floor.

  Another shadow appears, shortening in the firelight, moving slowly. He steps into the doorway, absurd big gun in his hand, and looks into the condo at Jae and Smith frozen at the entrance of the soundproof box. He looks down at the man on the floor, raises the white plastic gun, and shoots him in the back of the head.

  He looks at them, raises the pistol slightly.

  “It works.”

  He squats and sets his gun on the floor and starts to touch the dead man.

  “They didn’t bring firearms.”

  He stands.

  “That was shortsighted.”

  Fire sprinklers pop on and an alarm begins to sound.

  Skinner raises his face, the water rinsing a spatter of blood from his cheek, then looks back at them, walks into the condo, stops just outside the SCIF door.

  “We better go now.”

  And he offers his hand, something they can hold for balance, as they step over the dead man at their feet.

  tide of a beating heart

  SKINNER ENTERED THE SCIF condo just behind Jae and Maker Smith, watched the armored door swing shut and latch, and felt something like what Alice might have experienced, he thought, as she stepped through the looking glass. Outside a box, this one opaque, neither observer nor observed.

  There was an experiment, in the midst of the single long experiment that was childhood, in which his parents left him alone. Forty-eight hours, unobserved. He was ten. An alien living under the eternal light of two suns, one or both always in the sky, finding itself plunged into darkness for the first time, would not have been so dismayed. He froze. As day turned to night, he began to believe that he was being watched, that something in the darkness beyond the Plexiglas, as inert as himself, was gazing into him. Watched by something unknown, he retreated to the furthest point he could find, deep within himself. For two days he stood in one spot, awake, aware, restraining all urges to urinate or defecate, willing his body to remain whole. When his parents slipped back into the basement, thinking to find him asleep, he screamed, as loud and violent a noise as he had made since infancy, drawing their attention as primally as he knew how, their gazes cementing him in the world. The following days were not without difficulty.

  A potent memory; when he discovers it he has a tendency to fix in place, as if it sends an old signal through his muscles, bidding them to be still again, hold fast. Engaged in stillness, he is slow to recognize the
voice from the hall that announces an arrival on the eleventh floor and encourages one to have a pleasant day.

  Elevator voice, says something far inside his stillness.

  People, suggests some other part of himself.

  He moves.

  The man who enters the condo does not have a gun in his hand, he does not wear body armor, there is no translucent earphone trailing its cable into the collar of his shirt. He’s wearing white cross trainers, jeans, a royal blue t-shirt branded with the logo of the apparel company that made it, a navy blue windbreaker, and a sweat-stained Grapefruit League Yankees cap. He raps his knuckles against the frame of the open door.

  “Anyone home?”

  He might be lost. Repairman. Prospective tenant. One of Smith’s clients.

  He looks at the SCIF in the middle of the room, raises his eyebrows.

  “Dude.”

  He has a phone in his hand, brings it to his mouth in the manner of a walkie-talkie. It chirps loudly and he speaks into it.

  “Want to see something cool?”

  His phone chirps again, talks back to the man.

  “I don’t know, do I?”

  The man takes a few steps toward the SCIF, looks at something on the door, smiles.

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “How cool?”

  He walks to one corner of the SCIF and takes a look around it.

  “There’s a SCIF.”

  “Yeah, well, that was in the brief, dildo. Is there a cool part?”

  The man walks back to the door, points at it, as if the man on the other end of the conversation can see the gesture.

  “Cool part is the little red LED all lit up next to the lock. Says, under the LED, it says occupied.”

  There’s another chirp, a pause, chirp.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty cool. On my way. And call Doonan.”

  Chirp.

  The man looks at the phone in his hand.

  “Call Doonan. Fucking prick. Died and made you fucking king?”

  Hitting a speed-dial code, pressing the phone to his ear this time.

  “Doon. Fuckpants wants you. Yeah. In a box. A SCIF. It was in the brief, dildo. Middle of a condo. No shit. Come up. Because we don’t need a lookout if they’re in the fucking SCIF, we need bodies to handle them when they come out. Hurry your ass.”

  He ends the call, turns away from the door of the SCIF, begins to take a step, and, reaching down from where he has slipped himself into the cramped space between the roof of the SCIF and the ceiling of the condo, Skinner shoves several fingers into the man’s mouth, hooking them into his upper palate and pulling. His other hand is already at the left side of the man’s neck, shoving the curved #28 blade of the X-Acto into his jugular and raking it across his throat, a moment in which the man is double-hinged, neck and mouth both wide open, and then Skinner lets him drop to the floor. Blood pumps out, the mouth opens and closes, air whistles from the wound, he slaps the forming puddle of his own blood, splashing.

  A slight squirt of blood has dappled Skinner’s cheek. He leaves it to dry. Worming from the top of the SCIF, legs swinging down, he lands well clear of the blood puddle. He took off his jacket before concealing himself, rolled his shirt cuffs to his elbows, slipped off his shoes. His pants and shirtfront are covered in dust; a film of it clings to one side of Maker Smith’s plastic gun where he set it on the roof of the SCIF. He rubs it on the dust-free back of his thigh. The man has stopped moving, the puddle is spreading, but slowly, seeping, no longer swelling on the tide of a beating heart. Skinner skirts it in his stocking feet, walking toward the door, silence without effort.

  The man in the hallway is dressed much like his dead co-worker. Different brand of t-shirt, blue running shoes, yellow Nike swoosh on his green cap. Emerging from the door of Smith’s apartment, the man is surprised to see Skinner. He stops, half out of the door, angles his head as if to see behind Skinner, looking for something.

  “Where’s Norton?”

  Trusting in Smith’s craftsmanship, Skinner shoots him twice in the chest, the second shot fired before he can register the streak of bright red light that traces the path of the first bullet, a similar tail following its partner. Smith, for reasons Skinner cannot begin to fathom, has loaded the gun with tracer rounds.

  The man falls, and a fire starts on his chest, the phosphorus in the base of the bullets igniting his t-shirt. He arches his back, one arm lifts, tries to swat at the quickly spreading flames, but something has gone wrong in the nerve trunk in his shoulder, the arm won’t go where he wants it to and he slaps his stomach instead of his chest. Skinner is there now. The man turns his head to the side, as if offering his ear so that he might better hear a whispered remark. The third bullet goes in his temple, and the fire consuming his torso is no longer a matter for concern, nor the sudden smell of burning hair and melting carpet fibers.

  Eleventh floor. Have a pleasant day.

  Skinner turns toward the sound of the elevator’s voice, sparing a moment to look at the gun as he does so. There are scorch marks at the mouth of the barrel and around the edges of the ejection port but no external signs of melting. Really, it’s a remarkable piece of work. A man he takes to be Doonan steps out of the elevator. Cowboy boots, slacks, and windbreaker, all black, and a white cap emblazoned with the blue star of the Dallas Cowboys. He sees Skinner, the burning corpse.

  Ding.

  The sound of the elevator door closing twists his head around. He tries to shove his hand inside, stop the doors, but is too late, so he turns and runs up the hall toward the red Exit sign. Skinner steps to the middle of the hallway, excellent sight line, fires twice. The man drops next to the open door of the SCIF room. No fire this time. Skinner walks to him, stops to look inside the room, and sees Jae and Maker Smith, both frozen. Their gazes upon him, he is certain that he exists, and he shoots Doonan in the back of the head.

  A moment later, when Jae takes his hand as he helps her to step over the blood of the first man he’s killed in over seven years, Skinner feels an urge to scream, to release what has been bottled inside for so long, and let the world know that he is here.

  PART THREE

  hammer

  RAJ HAS SEEN dead bodies before. Several. But this is the first one he’s seen with a bullet hole in its cheek. Looking at the corpse, he becomes aware that he is poking the tip of his tongue into his own cheek, just where the bullet entered the dead man’s face. He stops, clenches his teeth, trapping his tongue behind them so that it will stop probing the inside of his mouth, inviting trouble.

  “Do you know him?”

  Raj puts a hand on top of his head, presses down, nods.

  Sudhir waits.

  Raj takes his hand from his head.

  “Policeman.”

  “Thug.”

  Sudhir turns his attention from Raj to his mother, Taji in the crook of her left elbow, as she uses her right hand to flip the dirty oilcloth back over the dead policeman’s face.

  “Gangster.”

  She wipes her hand on her thigh, smearing a tiny spot of mud and blood onto her pink-and-orange-patterned sari.

  “Gah.”

  She rushes to the sink, a plastic five-liter cooler strapped to the wall over a basin, and runs water over her hand, then blots the new stain.

  “Filthy in death as he was in life.”

  Sudhir takes up the cords that had bound the oilcloth shroud before he tugged them loose to show the body to them.

  “So little compassion for the dead.”

  Raj’s mother waves a hand.

  “Devils had that one from his cradle.”

  Sudhir measures the ends of the cord, pulling until they are even, and then begins an elaborate string of knots.

  “Devils come only when they are called, and babies don’t know that they exist.”

  She makes a noise through her nose, expressing neither agreement nor disagreement but, rather, a deep dissatisfaction with the entire notion of philosophy.

  Sudhir shak
es his head, as if to politely disagree with a point she has made.

  “Evil is not brought to us on a platter, we discover it, early, yes, but not in the cradle. And then…”

  He yanks hard on the ends of the cord, drawing the string of knots tight, securing the cocoon of oilcloth around the dead man inside. No caterpillar, he will not rise a butterfly.

  “Then, we either walk away from the evil we have discovered or we pick it up.”

  Raj’s mother plucks a bit of her sari between thumb and forefinger, shakes it back and forth, airing the wet patch where she blotted away the stain of blood.

  “When he found evil he didn’t pick it up, he rolled about in it; pig in a wallow.”

  Sudhir tucks the ends of the cord inside one of the snug loops wrapping the body.

  “Still. It is terrible to die.”

  She raises her hand, flaps the air.

  “Then you should not have shot him.”

  Sudhir rises.

  “He was asking about the night of the rain. And then we found him poking around the Number One Shed.”

  He lifts his shoulders, drops them.

  “It is a terrible thing to die, but I would rather it be him than thousands. Millions.”

  He looks at Raj.

  “What is larger than millions, Raj?”

  Raj doesn’t have to think.

  “Billions. Trillions. Many things are larger. There is a number, a googol. That is where the company took their name. Ten duotrigintillion. Ten to the hundredth power. Much bigger than a million. Many things are bigger than a million.”