Blood Double

by Neil Mcmahon

  He stepped through the wire fence along the road and stood unmoving for three or four minutes, tuning his eyes and ears to the night. Crickets chirped in steady rhythm. A tree frog sang its heart out, trying to win a ladylove. Farther away, an owl hooted. The smooth sinuous trunks of the madrones glistened with the damp and moved with the night breeze, seeming to twist like huge snakes.

  Monks began to walk, following a deer trail down to the creek that ran behind his place, then picking his way along its rocks. The creek was dry most of the year, but right now it was running swiftly from spring rains. In years past, he had spent many hours down here, sitting with a book while the kids played, until they were old enough to handle the dangers of fast water in floods and the occasional rattlesnake. Not much had changed.

  He found the path back up the bank that would take him onto his own property. When the woods began to thin, he moved one slow step at a time.

  Ahead through the foliage, he spotted a glimmer of light.

  Monks checked his location and placed the light carefully, grasping at the thought that he might be turned around and it was a neighbor’s. But it had to be from his own house.

  He was certain that he had not left any lights on.

  He stood motionless for a full minute, grappling with consequences. Smart money was to turn back.

  But this had gone past smart money. He took out the Beretta and walked on in careful silence. When he reached the edge of the woods, he saw a car parked in the drive, a newish, midsized sedan. He had never seen it before.

  What kind of assassin would advertise his presence?

  Monks listened hard through the surrounding woods, fearful now that the display was intended to lull him, that someone else was waiting hidden. The night creatures’ sounds continued, reassuring but no guarantee.

  Then a hard thunk and a blur of motion dropped him to a crouch, the pistol rising. Breath stopped, he waited.

  There was more movement: Someone on the deck was rising awkwardly from a chair, body pulling itself up with what sounded like labored cursing. A man stood and lumbered toward the kitchen, letting out a wedge of light as he opened the door. Something glimmered on the deck railing, and Monks realized that that was what had thunked:

  A beer bottle, set down hard.

  Monks heard the refrigerator open and close. The man reappeared in the house doorway. He was good-sized, well dressed but disheveled, and was holding a fresh bottle of Monks’s private stock of Moretti beer.

  Monks’s scalp bristled with mystical awe.

  It was Saint Lex himself, risen from the dead.

  15

  Monks said quietly, “Don’t panic.”

  Lex Rittenour, aka John Smith, wheeled at the sound of the voice. He moved his head back and forth, staring into the darkness with his nose raised, like a bear sniffing for food.

  “Are you alone?” Monks said.

  “Yeah.” Lex was wearing the kind of leather jacket that cost a great deal of money to look distressed. But otherwise, his clothes were the same ones he had had on in the ER, and his hair was greasy and matted. He looked like he had been living in the car.

  Monks stepped out of the shadows and edged forward, wary of other movement.

  “Hey, it’s you,” Lex said. His teeth showed in a ragged grin. “Where the hell have you been? I didn’t think you were ever going to show up.”

  “Where have I been? The whole world’s wondering where you are.”

  Lex raised a hand in deprecation. “Let them wonder.”

  Monks walked to the sedan and opened the passenger door. “Get in,” Monks said. “I’m taking you home.”

  “Fuck home. I could have gone home myself.” Lex raised the beer bottle and swilled, glaring.

  “You can’t just wander around loose,” Monks said.

  “Why not? Hey, calm down. I’ll get you a beer.”

  “A lot of people think you’re dead, is why not.”

  “They were almost right.”

  “Yeah, I was there, remember?” Monks said impatiently. “Come on, get in.”

  “I’m not going back. Somebody tried to kill me.”

  I don’t need your cooperation, Monks was starting to say, trying to visualize pulling a gun on a world-ranking celebrity. Then this new byte of information hit. He spent several seconds absorbing it. Off in the woods, the tree frog chirped hopefully.

  “Who did?” Monks said.

  “I don’t know. Whoever set up that overdose.”

  “Whoa, slow down. You think it was deliberate?”

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Lex said. “You’re the one who told me.”

  Monks tried to peer back through the maelstrom of the past twenty-four hours. “When did I do that?”

  “When I was leaving the emergency room. You said, ‘Be careful what you put in your arm, this happens because it’s purer than what you’re used to.’ “

  Monks vaguely recalled issuing the warning, but he had intended it for future, not past.

  “Tell me how it happened,” Monks said. “The overdose.”

  Lex shrugged, as if it should have been self-explanatory. “I came into SFO last night on one of the company jets. There was a limo waiting, with that driver and the girl, the ones that brought me to the hospital.”

  So much for the “taxi-driver-passing-by” story, Monks thought.

  “She had a vial of pharmaceutical Demerol, exactly the same I’d been using,” Lex said. “It was a welcome-home present—a blow job and a shot. Well, when she finished with the first, I thought, why wait for the second? So I went ahead and did up, there in the car. One milliliter, same as always.

  “But it was way too strong. I knew it the second it hit. She panicked and started screaming. Kicked me out of the car. That’s the last thing I remember until I opened my eyes and I was looking at you.”

  An overdose of street heroin could easily be accidental. But with pharmaceutical Demerol, that was highly unlikely.

  “You didn’t ask her who sent her?” Monks said.

  “I didn’t care who sent her. Pretty girl with a hot mouth and a bottle of high. I wanted them. Besides, she didn’t speak English.”

  So: Martine Rostanov was right. Somebody wanted to kill Lex.

  And Lex was not just avoiding the public eye; he was on the run.

  Too.

  “Why,” Monks said, “with all the places in the world to hide out, did you come here?”

  “I want to hire you.”

  Monks closed his eyes. He had been invalided out of Vietnam for malaria. The attacks had decreased in frequency over the years until he had almost forgotten about them. But once in a while, a situation would arise that was so surreal, he would fear that he was slipping into another feverish nightmare.

  He opened his eyes. Lex was still standing there on the deck.

  “Hire me for what?” Monks said.

  “To find out who gave me that dope, what do you think? You’re an investigator, right?”

  Monks was increasingly aware that minutes were passing, and that there might be men from Aesir coming this way. He tried to weigh it all, short-term risks and long-term consequences on the one hand—

  And payoff on the other. Having Saint Lex in the flesh opened up a whole new avenue of possibility.

  “We can talk,” Monks said. “Right now we’ve got to move.”

  “Name your price.”

  “My family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Monks climbed the stairs onto the deck and pulled open the kitchen door, turning in the light to display the crusted blood on his own face.

  “They tried to take me out too,” he said.

  “No kidding?” Lex’s expression changed to what Monks could only interpret as boyish wonder. “What did you do to piss them off?”

  “Made your acquaintance.”

  “Hey, that gives us a bond!”

  “Yell if you hear anybody coming,” Monks said, and stepped inside.

 
“You got a needle in there?” Lex called after him.

  “I’m not a pharmacy.”

  “Get off your fucking pulpit, will you? I’ve got my own stuff; just no spike.”

  Monks exhaled in contained anger.

  “Come on,” Lex said coaxingly. “I’ll quit, but now’s not the time.”

  Monks strode through the house, flanked by nervous cats darting around, and threw things into a duffel: several thousand dollars cash from the safe, a medical kit, his twelve-gauge shotgun. He added his address book and pulled the tape from his message machine, in case there was something traceable from Stephanie. He ripped open a twenty-pound sack of dry cat food and left it on the floor.

  “You guys are going to have to rough it for a while,” he said to the accusing stares. “Catch some critters.”

  Then he pulled open the refrigerator and palmed the tube of blood. The sense of unreality hit him again: These few milliliters of liquid had been all-important, worth risking his life for, and now their source was standing on the deck outside. Still, Larrabee was right: It remained the only hard evidence that that particular man had been in Mercy Hospital that particular night.

  But Monks admitted the deeper truth: He was operating on superstition, the sense that the Blood of Saint Lex had carried him this far.

  He wrapped it in a towel and stowed it carefully in his bag.

  Monks eased the sedan down his driveway without lights, and cut the engine to coast the last fifty yards. His head was out the window, listening. There were no sounds but the crunching of the tires on the gravel, the faint night wind, the distant murmur of the creek. He waited half a minute, tensed for the possibility of a shape or sound shattering the peaceful darkness.

  Then he realized that Lex, in the passenger seat, had rolled up his left sleeve and was wrapping his belt around his forearm.

  “Knock that off,” Monks said angrily.

  “It will only take a minute.”

  “First we get someplace I’m not going to get shot at again.”

  Lex watched him with a look Monks remembered from the ER: a bit wounded, a bit petulant, a bit arrogant—a look that was used to getting what it wanted. Monks was starting to grasp that this was a quality to Lex’s persona that lent it power, the ability to morph back and forth with lightning speed from haughty genius to sly charmer or vulnerable boy—all genuine.

  “We’ll be stopping in a few minutes,” Monks said. “You can do it then.”

  He started the engine and pulled out fast, still without headlights, accelerating westward into the coastal mountains. Anyone approaching his house would probably be coming from the other direction, behind them. Probably.

  “Where are we going?” Lex said.

  “To an old friend of mine. We need to gear up.”

  When Monks had first bought his place, there was not much occasion to get to know the scattered, reclusive neighbors. Then one spring, a series of torrential storms washed sections of Tocqueville Road down the mountainside. For two days, before county crews could make repairs, Monks’s house and a couple of dozen others were cut off from town. Soon after that, the power went out.

  It was not a serious crisis for his family—they had plenty of food and a wood stove—and even an adventure for the kids. Then, late the second evening, a gun-metal gray pickup truck that Monks had never seen before came rumbling up the drive. It looked like it had been welded together out of battleship plates.

  A powerfully built man, whom Monks had never seen either, got out. He walked to the house through the still-pounding rain, carrying a frightened, weeping little girl. Inside, he informed Monks that his name was Emil Zukich, he lived up the road, and he had heard there was a doctor living here. A fly had crawled into his granddaughter’s ear.

  By candlelight, with Monks’s own children watching breathlessly, and Emil glowering over his massive folded forearms, Monks soothed the girl and extracted the insect.

  Emil offered cash. Monks refused. A vodka was drunk and a few words of grim thanks muttered.

  Monks heard nothing more from Emil for the next months, but he heard a few things about him: that he was a good friend and a bad enemy, and a legendary mechanic who could bring machines to life and weld the crack of dawn.

  That next May, with the sun back and the road repaired, Emil pulled into the drive again one afternoon, this time in a rebuilt ‘74 Ford Bronco. He informed Monks that it was his for one hundred dollars, no more and no less. Monks agreed, more to humor the grizzled Hunkie than because he wanted it. But it did not take him long to realize what he had been given. Monks had owned other cars since then, but the Bronco was the one he kept.

  “What if this friend recognizes me?” Lex said suspiciously. “Decides to rat us off.”

  Monks almost smiled at the idea of Emil Zukich ratting someone off.

  “He’d wonder what I was doing hanging around with somebody like you,” Monks said. “But he’d be too polite to say so.”

  Lex reared back. “Fuck you.”

  “How’d you know I was an investigator? How’d you find my place?”

  Lex’s pique dissolved in a sort of cackling sound that might have been laughter.

  “Give me a little credit,” he said. “I design information systems.”

  Fog was creeping up the gullies, covering the road in patches. Monks decided to flip on the headlights.

  “Fill me in on how you got from the ER to here,” Monks said.

  “They took me to Ken Bouldin’s house and put me to bed,” Lex said. “Everybody was oh-so-concerned. But any one of them could have been the one who sent that dope. Maybe all of them. I kept my mouth shut and figured I’d get out of there as fast as I could.

  “Except Ron Tygard stayed outside my door. Supposedly in case I had trouble. But maybe he was going to come in and put a pillow over my face. I laid there like a little kid, terrified of a monster under the bed. I was still feeling like shit. But then—”

  Monks glanced over at the change in Lex’s voice.

  “Something came over me,” Lex said. “Are you into Zen?”

  Monks was unprepared for the direction this was taking. “I don’t know much about it.”

  “It was like this little flash of satori,” Lex said. “Like a samurai stepped inside my head. All of a sudden it was just there in me. I got a bottle of Perrier and wrapped it in a towel, and hid behind the door. I started moaning, like I was in pain. Tygard came walking in and I admit, I was so scared I almost pissed my pants.

  “But I did it. Boom across the back of the head, both hands, like Mark McGwire crushing one into deep center.”

  So that was what had caused the bruise on Ronald Tygard’s head: a bottle of deluxe sparkling water.

  “I snuck outside and found a car with keys in it, one of the help’s,” Lex said. “Hauled ass out of there.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the police?” Monks said.

  Lex snorted. “Companies like Aesir are the police. Except they operate all over the world, they don’t owe shit to anybody, and they don’t have to play by any rules. Governments kiss their ass. They dictate policy, not the other way around. They want me dead, and they’ll destroy evidence, suborn witnesses, spend millions on lawyers to dissect every molecule and stall every move. And gain plenty of time for another shot at me.”

  Ahead, Monks saw the water tank, made of a section of galvanized iron culvert, that marked Emil Zukich’s place.

  He slowed and swung the sedan in.

  Emil’s house, like Monks’s, was secluded, a good quarter mile up a steep and rutted dirt drive. The sedan bucked feebly up the climb, wheels spinning and the low chassis scraping.

  “Next time, steal a better car, will you?” Monks said, teeth chattering with the jolts.

  “Hey, I didn’t know we’d be running the Baja 500, okay?”

  Monks exhaled in relief as they topped the rise onto level ground.

  “How about that shot?” Lex said.

  They were still in
the woods. Monks cut the engine and lights, then broke out a plastic-wrapped syringe from his medical kit and handed it over. He had administered thousands of shots and taken his share, but never for pleasure.

  Lex wrapped the belt tight around his forearm, swelling the antecubital veins, and held up a clear glass vial of pharmaceutical Demerol: twenty milliliters at one hundred milligram strength. It was almost full—enough to last a moderate user a few days.

  “You’re sure this stuff’s okay?” Monks said.

  Lex nodded. “This is my own supply.” He drew clear liquid into the syringe, and stopped with a practiced touch at the 1 ml mark. Monks could just see a dark flower of blood appear in the syringe as Lex probed his flesh with the needle. Then it disappeared again as he eased the plunger down.

  He settled back in the seat with a soft exhalation, gaze going unfocused. Monks watched tensely for another minute, still fearing that Lex was wrong and this vial also might be tampered with. But Lex looked just fine.

  Monks drove the final fifty yards to the house, aware that by now Emil would be standing inside his door, watching. Monks left the headlights on and stepped into their beam.

  The front door opened and Emil Zukich came out. He was in his sixties, not tall and not fat. The word to describe him was thick, from his bristly gray hair down to his ankles.

  Monks spoke without any preliminary politeness. “I need a big favor, Emil. Rent that RV of yours a while.”

  Emil rubbed his ear pensively. “Can’t rent it. Borrow it, sure.”

  Monks followed him to the compound that was Emil’s real home—a salvaged World War II quonset hut filled with tools and equipment of every kind, and surrounded by what might have been the planet’s neatest junkyard. Car hulks and stacks of scrap metal were arranged with the precision of hors d’oeuvres on a French waiter’s tray. The RV, a midsized Pace Arrow, was kept in its own shed like a stallion in a stable.

  “Two gas tanks, switch on the dash,” Emil said, pointing. “Should be enough in there now to get you four, five hundred miles. There’s water and canned food. Need anything else? Guns?”