Dead Man

by Joe Gores

  Knows better than to fuck with us.

  Of course he knew better, knew all about the buried codes that gave warnings when access was effected. But he didn’t care. Once he was inside, his obsession deepened. Sometimes, alone at night in his office, trying to find the man who had ordered his family murdered, he thought he might be cracking up. And still didn’t care. The search gave him focus, eased his nightmares.

  As for that access the wise guys thought impossible, at Cal-Tech he had learned all about the back doors always left in computer systems. Had designed viruses that would take security checks out and put them back when he was done. At Cal-Tech he had built his own computer, designed his own computer language, created his own software, broken into half the federal security mainframes in D.C. just for the hell of it.

  So latenights, weekends, overtime, his computer made love to the mob’s, stuck its tongue down their system’s throat, lapped up their data. The books behind the books, the offshore skim accounts, the secret sauna meetings to move millions… The feds would have killed to know what he knew, but he cared nothing about that. Let the feds make their own cases. All he sought was to name the nightmares that rode through his sleep.

  the door crashed back against the wall, two bulky men charged in with sawed-off shotguns in their hands, heavy boots on bare planks…

  Long after midnight, almost four years after it had happened, he found a name, buried deep in the belly of the beast, that meshed with all the givens of that June night.

  Mario Pucci. Los Angeles.

  Pucci’s specialty was bringing in drugs from Mexico on other people’s private powerboats. Like Ron Grimes’s. In fact, he and Ron Grimes had been yacht club cronies, had played poker together. What more natural, Grimes bringing in drugs for him? But maybe a scare from the Coast Guard had made him panic, want out… or maybe he’d gotten greedy…

  A phone call from Pucci, a specialist gets on a plane, Grimes’s yacht blows up with Grimes on it. Accident. End of story. But unknown to Pucci, a private eye named Eddie Dain had been hired by Grimes’s business partner fearful Grimes’s black money was coming from their company accounts. The private eye confirmed that it wasn’t—and then kept going on his own with his computer, like a kid with a new toy, thought it was all just a big fucking game, wouldn’t quit poking around…

  Dain saw himself reflected in the computer screen, panting, sweating as with fever. He’d read the joke in the P.I.’s report on Travis Holt, about him watching his reflection in the screen as he jerked off… Was that what he was doing here? Mentally masturbating into this goddamned machine?

  He sure wasn’t acting like a normal human.

  Goddammit, he wasn’t a normal human being. He was a man who had been blown to pieces and fit back together again like a jigsaw puzzle. A man whose wife and child had been blown to pieces with him, then burned up without the chance to be fitted back together. Anything he did was all right, was justified…

  He eagerly punched more keys. But when the machine spoke again the fire went out of his eyes, his jaw went slack, he sank back in his chair shrunken in size and density.

  Mario Pucci had died of a heart attack on top of his mistress in a fancy Beverly Hills hotel two years ago. Had left no records in anyone’s computer of who he might have called to swat that bothersome fly at Point Reyes.

  Dain settled slowly back in his chair. It was over. All finished. It all died with Pucci. He had nowhere else to look. Nothing else to do. No more reason to go on living. By habit, he backtracked out of the maze, reset the bypassed traps, logged out of the legitimate files, closed down his computer just as if he were coming back. But he knew he was all finished.

  Out in the desert the sun was just up. Empty, brilliant, still. Saguaro cacti, Joshua trees, rocks, sand. Cry of a distant hawk, dry moan of the wind. A good day to die. He left his car, ran at a steady pace out into the desert. He would run until he died, like the runner bringing news of the victory at Marathon. His was a defeat, but his death would be as good, as clean, in the desert. A Hemingway death: grace under pressure.

  Finally, miles from the road, where tumbled rocks rose to a ridge shaded by a big Joshua, he indeed fell. Collapsed facedown on the sand. A minute, ten, twenty. But he didn’t die, clean, in the desert. He didn’t die at all. He just felt hot, sticky, tired, irritable. He rolled onto his back. Lay there, arms wide, chest heaving, staring up into the clear blue sky. High above, wings motionless, dwarfed by distance, a turkey buzzard rode the thermals, binocular eyes seeking dead meat.

  What had he done? Trained too well? Forged a body and a will that knew no despair? But Mario Pucci, like the vulture’s meal, was dead meat. Along with Pucci, Dain’s planned revenge was also dead meat. Tears ran down the sides of his face to the sand at the thought of it.

  Finally he sat up, forgotten arms still outstretched. Scrambled to his feet. Began dancing to some silent inner music. Faster and faster, like someone stoned, twisting, rhythmic, sensual. Improvising, sweat flying.

  If he couldn’t run himself to death, he would dance himself to death.

  He whirled in a circle, fell, leaped up, face transfigured, carried outside himself. Any moment now he would fall down dead of heatstroke. He ran right up a nearly perpendicular rock face and did a perfect backflip, a graceful parabola to land backward in the sand and do a back roll to shoot straight up into the air like an arrow, come down crouched—and freeze.

  Dry deadly rattle. Lying on an exposed rock in the new sun, a massive rattler five feet long, red-brown with pale diamond markings. Still just slightly sluggish, but already drawing into its coiled striking position, tail vibrating visibly, vertical pupil slits in pale yellow lidless eyes almost closed against the direct sunlight. Red diamond rattler. Enough venom in its fangs, desert old-timers said, to fell a bull.

  He stared at it, motionless. Even better. Totally sure. Let the snake kill him.

  “All right, goddam you, do it!” he cried.

  The rattler hissed but was motionless.

  He began to move again, once more slowly, oh so slowly, slowly around the rattler, challenging it. Any moment now…

  The snake hissed and rattled warningly, but did not strike.

  Dain sprang in and out like a boxer dancing in and out to jab an opponent in the ring. That was it, a game. Once he had been a great, a tremendous games player. At chess. With his computer. With Marie’s and Albie’s lives. Now the game was to piss off the snake, so the game would have the ending he sought.

  Belatedly, the snake struck. But because the man was already moving away it missed, went out full length off the rock to thump down on the sand. Dain yelled again, eyes wild.

  “Yes! Yes! Goddam you, do it!”

  The snake, aroused, was striking repeatedly, as quickly as it could coil and release. But Dain was beyond rationality, into the game obsessively. Once the snake’s fangs struck the sole of his shoe as he whirled with one leg extended. He was shouting with… what? Madness, perhaps.

  He tried a pirouette, his foot slipped in the soft sand, he fell just as it struck again, fanging the air a foot above his descending head. It landed across him, he bucked and rolled, throwing off the bewildered rattler even as it tried to coil and strike again in midair.

  Venom was dripping off its fangs, its timing was gone. Its strikes were slower. It was running down like a cobra fighting a mongoose. Which is what the mongoose waits for.

  Here, now, this man was the mongoose, pure energy, the years of training in every discipline he could find coming together and paying off. He whirled about the rattler, reached in a lightning hand to give its smooth sleek hard body a tweak, leaping back and away in the same motion, too quick, the snake too exhausted, the inevitable coil and strike didn’t come within four inches of him, Dain was winning the game.

  The snake, overheated, finally lay stretched out on the hot sand. If it had been a pit bull it would have been lying on its belly and panting. The man stopped, hands on knees, head down, panting himse
lf in huge gulping breaths. He had won!

  Won? No! He had lost! He was supposed to die…

  Then he realized that his canteen full of water was on his belt. If he had really planned to die in the desert, why had he strapped on the canteen? He took it off his belt, opened it. Poured sweet cool water over the snake, then over his own head, down his throat. After long moments, the rattler slid away between a creosote bush and its sunning rock and was gone.

  Dain saluted it. He started walking back toward the distant car shimmering in the desert heat. Began to trot. To run. The dance with the snake had sweated out his madness. No longer Saul struck blind on the road to Damascus. The scales had fallen from his eyes and along with them, his blindness.

  Pucci was dead, but of course the two men he had hired wouldn’t be. And Pucci wouldn’t have dealt with them directly anyway, he would have used a go-between.

  Dain’s excitement was growing, but he had to face certain realities. He’d treated what was serious as a game. He’d been a computer nerd who’d wanted to be Sam Spade. Marie and Albie were dead because he’d been a fool. Accept it, go on from there.

  Accept also that, despite his new designer body, down deep he was still just Eddie Dain. With that shell of muscle and reflex around the old core, he’d thought he’d be the Terminator. But he was Eddie Dain, and Eddie Dain couldn’t do it.

  Unless he could make other people think he was as hard, as impervious as he looked. Then, perhaps…

  Making a game of life had gotten Marie and Albie killed, but how about making a game of death? He had been a private investigator of sorts when it had happened; now he had to make the mob think he was the greatest eye at finding people who had ever lived. He was smart and he was superb with the computer: he would learn how to find people nobody else could.

  For the mob. His months with organized crime had shown him they’d become company men like everyone else. Easy for him to create an aura, a mystique, make himself the man the mob came to when nobody else could find who they were looking for. He’d need a go-between of his own, heighten that air of mystery that would move him through the underbelly until, someday, somewhere, he would run into three special men.

  Would he know them if he did? Would they know him? He didn’t know, didn’t care; but he knew he wouldn’t find them here.

  So first he had to get away from Vegas clean.

  A week later, orders came for Travis Holt to report to the National Guard’s 72nd Military Police Company for two weeks’ “summer camp,” as the annual training is called. Holt dutifully took the order to his boss in casino bookkeeping; the 72nd had fought in the Gulf War, guarding Iraqi prisoners, so it was a popular outfit in Vegas. Permission was readily given for him to take his training without losing his accumulated vacation time.

  Ten days after training was done, while the casino thought Holt was on vacation, a hand-scrawled letter from his brother Jimmy in Vero Beach informed the casino that Travis Holt had been killed in a training accident during the 72nd’s summer desert exercises. Was any back pay due? Send it to his bereaved brother if there was.

  Holt fortunately had passed his ideas along to the bean-counters, so his death was no real hardship to the casino. A letter went to the asshole brother assuring him that no back pay was due, and the casino, shaking its collective head over slimeball relatives, closed the personnel file on Holt.

  Who worried about dead men?

  But even before he had died, Travis Holt had broken his tinted glasses, flushed his colored contacts, shampooed the dye out of his hair, shaved his mustache and goatee, and had left Vegas to become Dain. Yes, Dain.

  Because he had realized that the only three men alive who knew a contract had once gone out on Eddie Dain were the same three men he wanted to find. If they found him first, that was fine. Just so he had a chance to meet them—and had a chance to see if he could play the Terminator for real.

  6

  The game started, as the best games always do, with playacting. Dain wanted Doug Sherman to be his go-between, because Sherman loved gossip, loved intrigue, ached to be in the know, au courant. Loved playing a role himself, loved games, could be bitchy, was excited by power, by domination; being a go-between would push all his buttons at once.

  But Dain would have to con him into it, because he could never be told that Dain’s ultimate game was the killing game, not just getting back into the detective game. Dain had to make him want to be a go-between so he would never think to ask the questions Dain couldn’t answer.

  When Doug Sherman arrived to open the bookstore that June morning, a big quick stranger was waiting for him. Six-one, 210, 215, burned dark by desert suns, hands thick and knuckly from breaking boards. An Indian face, craggy and strong-boned.

  The stranger said, “Hello, Douglas,” in a voice Sherman almost knew. The voice was deeper than the remembered one, and there was no playfulness in it.

  Sherman, elegant as ever, was caught up short. He stared.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Dain,” the man said. Flat voice, flat eyes. Something dead in them, also something intensely alive.

  “Eddie Dain! My God, man…”

  Sherman tried to embrace him, but Dain stepped quickly back out of his arms, callused hand extended to shake instead. It was like grasping a rock.

  “It’s… good to see you…” said Sherman lamely.

  Dain nodded but didn’t respond. Sherman kept busy unlocking the door and deactivating the alarms while casting covert sidelong glances at Dain. Keeping up a running chatter to cover his embarrassment and his scrutiny.

  “Where have you been? After you checked out of Marin General I couldn’t find any trace…” The door was open. Dain walked through it ahead of him, a leather-bound book under one arm. Sherman caught himself stammering inanely, “I… I’m sorry, I… didn’t…” He went around behind his desk. “I’ll make coffee…”

  “Coffee would be fine.”

  Sherman busied himself with the Melitta, talking over his shoulder as he measured out fragrant ground beans into the paper cone, covertly watching Dain’s reflection off a glass-protected Greek icon of St. Nicholas above the table.

  “What’s the book?”

  “Ever the dealer,” that deeper voice rumbled. Dain almost smiled. Held it up to see. “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

  “The same one that I got you for Marie’s—”

  “The very same,” said Dain without apparent emotion. He lifted a shoulder. Muscles slid beneath his smooth hide like the muscles of a tiger. “Physical therapy. You carry a heavy book around all day, it strengthens your hands and forearms.” He chuckled. “So you’ll be ready.”

  Sherman had recovered. “Ready.” He nodded as if he understood what it meant, added, “Of course. Ah… and so, these past four years… where have you… ?”

  Dain put his leather-bound book down on the edge of the desk and sat down in the same chair he had habitually sat in four years earlier, but there was no unconscious lotus pose this time. He still looked flexible enough to do one, but now he was solid, hard. Prepared. Power seemed to come off him like heat.

  But he only said, conventionally, “Hospitals, mostly.”

  The water was heating. Sherman sat down behind the desk which had, as always, the inlaid chessboard with a classic problem laid out on it. For the first time, Sherman’s sad, beautiful eyes studied Dain quite openly.

  “And?”

  “And nothing.” Dain almost shrugged. His smile was very slightly lopsided from the tiny white plastic surgery scars on one side of his face. “Lots of operations, lots of pain, lots of physical therapy. All of which cost a great deal of money.”

  Money. Familiar ground here. Doug Sherman knew all about using money to control situations. And he wanted to control this one. This Edgar Dain made him feel defensive, uneasy, perhaps a little frightened. Talking to him was like stroking a tiger.

  “I can imagine. If there’s anything I can…”

  “The
re is.”

  A statement so bald startled the aesthete in Sherman. He felt almost embarrassed for Dain; such a blatant pitch for charity diminished the man’s power. The kettle started to sing. He poured boiling water to the top of the paper cone.

  “Listen, Dain, I don’t have a great deal put by, but…”

  “Not money.” Dain stood up, started to pace. It was the impatient padding of a tiger about its cell. “Business.”

  Intriguing. “I’m in the book business.” He suddenly thought he knew where this was going. Needed money, too proud to ask. He gestured toward the book. “That would be worth a good deal of money… and it must be painful psychologically to…”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  Sherman sighed, nonplussed. “A pity. But then, what…?”

  “I’m going back into private investigations.” Dain paused, staring at a new painting in one of the alcoves. A Magritte original, he was sure. He shivered slightly, picked up his thread again. “For… unconventional clients. I know of no other way to make the kind of money I need relatively quickly.” He looked over at Sherman. “I need a front man. A go-between.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “Sure you do. I want heavy-money clients on the shady side who will pay a lot to find someone they need found without questions asked. I don’t want anyone else as clients. So I need a cutout, a go-between to screen out the unwanted.”

  “But how can you… I mean, four years ago you were…”

  “Naive? Inexperienced?”

  “Bluntly… yes.” He poured coffee into two exquisite Meissen china cups, set out cream and sugar in solid silver bowls. “Why would anyone in that… underbelly sector of the… um, American experience, say, want to hire you?”