The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  “Such as?”

  “Musical chairs.”

  “What?”

  “Musical chairs—my theory about marriage. Want to hear it?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Okay. People get married at a certain age because they think the music’s about to stop and they don’t want to be left without a chair to sit on, so they marry the nearest person before the switch is flicked.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Think about it.”

  “What’s to think about? No one’s that cynical.”

  “I didn’t want to be left standing. Brenda was nice, the sex was great, and I didn’t think I was going to find any better. I don’t think Brenda’s motivations were too much loftier or deeper than my own. Like I said, people get to a certain age, and that’s the age when they think they should be hitched. Maybe that’s why there are so many divorces. The music stops, you get hitched, and then one day you realize the people who didn’t find a chair were the real winners after all.”

  “You’re damaged goods, aren’t you?”

  “Why do you think people get married?”

  “Because they meet someone they love and they decide they can’t go on without them.”

  “Quaint.”

  “Maybe I haven’t been kicked in the guts enough.”

  “Yet.”

  “So what happened? You haven’t told me anything.”

  I sighed, the resigned sigh of someone who knows he can’t escape. “Brenda and I were having problems. She’d decided that she needed to find herself. Before I knew it, I was drinking green slime for breakfast and eating roots for dinner. I needed to grow a second stomach to digest it all. She stopped shaving her legs, took up yoga, and spent the household budget on kinesiology seminars and bulk purchases of aromatherapy oils.”

  “What were you doing all that time?”

  “The usual. Jumping out of planes, killing people who disagreed with Uncle Sam.”

  “You grew apart.”

  “No. We didn’t grow apart. We just stopped liking each other. Nevertheless, we followed advice and went to a counselor to find out why. After a while, I refused to go, when I felt the advice from the counselor was maybe a little one-sided in my wife’s favor. I was told these feelings were just a manifestation of my resentment toward her spiritual growth. And I was even starting to believe it until I came home early one day and found her on her knees in the shower, blowing him.”

  “The marriage counselor? Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. Actually I think they were precisely the words he used when my wife stopped trying to suck his tonsils out through his cock and he opened his eyes and saw me standing in the doorway.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I dragged him naked onto the lawn. Then I bitch-slapped him in front of the neighbors until he begged me to stop.”

  “And did you?”

  “Stop? No. I got blindsided by the MPs. My wife called them. Maybe it was just as well. I don’t think I’d have been able to stop.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was that moment when I ceased to believe in the dream. You know, the one you have when you’re growing up and you imagine what you’re going to be and do, and how you’re going to be different. That was the moment I realized I wasn’t any different from anyone else. I was just an ordinary, everyday fuckup. I beat the colonel up for it.”

  “Jesus! The shrink was a colonel?”

  “Right. Didn’t I mention that?”

  Masters half laughed, half snorted.

  We walked in silence. Part of me hoped Brenda was happy now that the divorce was through and we really were going our separate ways, free to pursue the life we each wanted. The other part of me hoped she’d choke on the colonel’s genitalia.

  “My turn to ask a question.”

  Masters replied, “Depends what it is.”

  “When you were parked outside the pensione the other night, were you about to pay me a visit? Or did you have my apartment under surveillance? And if you were watching me, why?”

  Masters didn’t answer immediately. Then she said, “If I was staking out your apartment, do you think I’d do it in a mandrill’s butt, as you call it, and park it right across the road from you?”

  “No.”

  Silence.

  “Well…?” I prodded.

  “If you must know, I had a bottle of wine and a couple of packets of peanuts with me. I remembered you had a toothache and decided the nuts were a bad idea, so I went home.”

  “Come on, you can do better than that.”

  Masters considered the challenge. “Okay, the truth? The case was closed. You were going back to the States. I felt bad about the way we’d started off. I decided that was mostly my fault. So I bought some wine. I figured we could just talk about the case and perhaps part on better terms. Also, I didn’t buy the suicide thing, and I wanted to see how you felt about it. But then I had second thoughts about coming up. I thought maybe you’d misunderstand my intentions—it was nighttime, the wine, your hotel room, you know…I was wrestling with this when a cab pulled up and Ms. Viagra stepped out ready to party, and hustled into your building. I decided three would be a crowd.”

  “I would have.”

  “Would have what?”

  “Misread your intentions.”

  We arrived at the Al-Rasheed. It had been a hell of a day at the office. I felt like I’d been awake for a week straight. I wanted to spend some time thinking through the case but my brain was wandering around the place like a drunk in the dark. Several servicemen and-women were sitting out front in the cool dark night air having cigarettes, the tips glowing and illuminating their faces momentarily. Here and there, faces appeared in the blackness and then vanished. The effect was eerie.

  Being so near the perimeter and well within range of RPGs and sniper fire, the hotel was blacked out. We dragged our carcasses up the short flight of stairs outlined in low-light red and made it to the reception area. The same sergeant was still on duty, and still watching television. Masters gave the room number, obtained the key, and we shuffled toward the elevator.

  “The first day’s always the worst,” the sergeant offered behind us.

  “What’s day two like?” I asked.

  “Fucking awful, I’m afraid. Oh, and you’ll have to take the stairs. The elevator’s out.” She added a shrug by way of apology. It was only two flights to the first floor, but I felt every step.

  The night was getting cooler by the minute. With the sun gone, the heat leached rapidly from the dry desert air. Masters opened the door to our room. A night-light was on, throwing a thin yellow veil across the shadows. The windows were blacked out by heavy plastic taped to the frames. “You know what would really improve this place?” said Masters.

  “A truck bomb?” I suggested.

  “No, lava lamps.”

  I grunted and collapsed on the double bed, which instantly took on the shape of a hammock. It’s beds like this that keep chiropractors in Porsches. But I was way past caring.

  There was a thunderous pounding on the door. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. I thought maybe it was mortar fire coming in real close, or maybe an RPG round or two had decided to join us. How long had I been asleep? Where was my M9? I hate being awakened.

  “Can’t you answer the door, Cooper?” said Masters as she stormed out of the bathroom, toweling her wet hair, dressed in light blue men’s pajamas. She went to the holster lying on the night table, extracted her weapon, pulled back the slider, and thumbed off the safety.

  I glanced at my watch and realized I’d been asleep all of twelve minutes. I felt like I’d been arc-welded to the bed.

  “Who is it?” Masters demanded.

  The door was thick and I couldn’t hear the reply, but Masters seemed satisfied. She opened it. General Harold Lee Edwards’s adjutant strode in. I managed to peel myself off the bed and give him the courtesy of standing up. The man looked like he’d swa
llowed something that didn’t agree with him; either that or his sphincter had been sewn closed and his personality had gone septic. He was the type that collected clipboards.

  “Can we help you, sir?” said Masters, replacing her weapon in its holster.

  “Get your bags packed. There’s been a change of schedule. Your plane leaves in…” he checked his wrist, “…fifty-two minutes. I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay with us and that you tell the folks back home only good things. Transport downstairs will take you to the marshaling area. Your names are already on the BIAP manifest.”

  His eyes shifted behind his dirty glasses from Masters to me and then back. I knew just what was going on in his mind. I half expected him to lick his lips, and I thought of a lizard digesting a fly. I decided not to disappoint him. I took a step toward Masters and put my arm across her shoulders. To tell the truth, I think I was just looking for an excuse. The perfume from her freshly washed hair filled the air around her. Her skin felt soft and smooth and clean and warm beneath the cool cotton fabric.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I stretched the sleep out of my body when I stepped off the back of the C-130’s ramp and onto the Ramstein tarmac, careful not to rip the sutures out of my arm, and then shambled toward the building indicated by the loadmaster. Winter wasn’t retreating from Germany without a fight. A cold, hard rain was slanting in, driven by a blustering wind that also picked up the water pooled on the ground and blew it forward in sheets. After the heat of Baghdad, the cold was a shock. It went straight to my tooth, which, despite the bullet wound, reigned supreme in the land of pain and discomfort that my body had become. Masters and I were both drenched by the time we made it to shelter.

  I’d only a vague recollection of the last five hours. I’d snoozed in the Humvee to BIAP, dozed while waiting for the Black Hawk to Balard, and sat frozen with terror as we jinked and swooped through the full range of the aircraft’s performance envelope in the sightless void of a moonless night over the desert, with only the fluid sloshing around in my inner ears for reference. Sleep hit with the force of a left hook as the C-130 taxied to the Balard threshold markers. And, mercifully, that’s all I remembered till we bounced down the runway at Ramstein.

  Beneath the nerve-jangling effect of an ambient temperature just a handful of degrees above freezing, I was still bone tired, and so was Masters. The local time was 2345 hours, and I had a date with my mattress back at the Pensione Freedom. We hitched a ride with one of the flight crew to the parking lot at the main gatehouse. Masters and I both looked at her Mercedes and came to the same conclusion without speaking a word.

  “Cab it?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  We’d both caught a little paranoia from Ambrose. I wasn’t keen on getting in her car until it had been checked over. We could have done that ourselves, but the thought of doing it in the rain didn’t appeal. A couple of taxis were leaving the base, having dropped off fares. We shared one back to K-town. The cab smelled of garlic sweated out of the driver’s pores.

  Masters said, “You’ve got a dentist appointment first thing in the morning, remember? I arranged that on your first day here.”

  “You do care,” I replied.

  Masters closed her eyes. We sat in silence for the remainder of the journey.

  “Pick you up at oh-eight-hundred,” she said as the cab pulled in front of my pensione.

  “Okay.” I opened the door and the wind nearly ripped it out of my hand. I noticed that the weather had swept the normally busy street clear of foot traffic. I stood on the sidewalk and motioned for her to wind down the window. “You did good over there,” I said.

  She smiled and replied, “Thanks. You were average.”

  The cab drove off before I could snap out a reply. Yeah, Masters was learning all right. I watched the taxi’s taillights disappear and felt the rain hammer into me. It was freezing but it felt good on my skin, which was still impregnated with the dust and the heat and the death of Iraq. I picked up my bag and turned toward the pensione. A man walking the other way bumped into me. I was about to apologize because maybe the collision was my fault, but then I realized it wasn’t.

  Perhaps it was the ski mask he was wearing, or the way he swung the length of pipe in his hand—like a baseball bat. He was athletically built, lean but muscled, and under six feet. The pit bull type. The rain and the darkness made it impossible to see his face. The ski mask didn’t help, either. I thought I was about to get mugged, but the way he moved—carefully, keeping his balance with his center of gravity low and at a point between his feet, aware of each step—told me the pipe was a disguise. He was no street thug. Two other men, also wearing masks, detached themselves from the shadows and cut me off from the Pensione Freedom. They spread out, moving to encircle me. The rain came down harder and the pellets pounding onto the road made a roaring sound. A veil of shattered water and mist swirled above the ground. Waterfalls ran off my nose and chin. I rubbed my hand over my face to clear my eyes. The movement made me remember the bullet wound in the back of my arm.

  There was nowhere to go but backward. Three against one. Not good odds. One of the men produced a knife with a long thin black blade—a dagger, a thrusting knife rather than a slasher, the sort Special Forces use for quick, silent killing, pushing the point up into the base of the skull from under the chin or at the back of the head where the brain stem meets the spinal cord, or sliding it between the fourth and fifth ribs into the heart muscle. I’d used one myself a couple of times. You had to know what you were doing to use it well. The dagger was intended for extremely close-quarter use, like when you were sneaking up behind an adversary who was thinking about Ms. July in the magazine tucked under his cot.

  Number three had no weapon, which meant either he was confident without one or he’d dashed out of the house and forgotten that his knuckle-dusters were in his other pants.

  My mind raced through the options, assessing the situation. I knew, for instance, that there would be some indecision between the assailants about who would strike first. Basically, they risked getting in each other’s way. They were maneuvering me back into the darkness of the alley. I turned slowly, keeping myself in the middle of the circle, waiting for the first strike.

  The muscles of the guy with the pipe twitched. He was reacting to something behind me. My feet moved before I thought about it. I stepped to the side, split the angle. The knife jerked past the space occupied by my head an instant earlier. Light caught the length of the pipe as it swung through the air. I ducked and heard it bat a path through the rain, a low thrumming sound. They were feeling me out.

  The plumber got cocky. He stepped forward, pipe raised high to bring down on my skull—a kendo strike. I went forward, down on one knee, prepared to wear the blow, raising the bag I was carrying above my head. The pipe whacked into the soft, rain-drenched leather, and hit Peyton’s Kevlar helmet inside. I struck back, burying my fist deep into his testicles, slamming them into the corner pockets. He collapsed as I rolled to the left and came up beside him, facing his two buddies.

  The guy armed only with his fists came next. Suddenly the heel of his boot swung through the air. It thudded into my bandaged arm and it fucking hurt. I dropped the bag, which instantly disappeared in the rain bouncing off the pavement. He drove a punch into my extremely tender sternum. Fortunately, I caught the edge of the blow on an elbow, deflecting it slightly. My stomach muscles weren’t quite what they used to be and the wind was driven out of me. I staggered backward and tripped over my bag. I rolled over several times on the pavement, half gasping, half drowning. I came up on a knee, still sucking in air. The two remaining assailants were looking around like I’d just vanished, Merlin the Magician–style. The darkness and the mist rising from the asphalt had hidden my withdrawal. I was congratulating myself on this when a man materialized out of the water in front of me. The guy with the pipe. I dove at him and knocked him into the pavement. Something cracked beneath my shoulder—a bone. It wasn’t one of min
e, which was all that mattered. I scuttled away as the other two raced across toward their fallen pal. A vehicle turned into the narrow road five hundred feet away, its headlights illuminating all three of us. The man with the dagger lunged forward. I reacted, catching his wrist, deflecting the thrust. The speed of the move must have caught him unaware, because it unbalanced him. I helped him along by twisting his arm the wrong way, threatening to break it off at the shoulder ball joint. The headlights bounced nearer. For some reason, I looked at the man’s wrist. Was it possible? I hesitated. Bad mistake. From the edge of my peripheral vision I saw the pipe swinging toward me. I tried to bury my head in my shoulder. Too little too late. The pipe smashed into the side of my—

  “Vin…Vin…”

  It was Masters’s voice, gentle, soothing. I wasn’t ready to open my eyes. Her sympathetic tone told me that I was probably in a hospital. The hospital smell confirmed it, as did sheets with so much starch that they felt like photocopy paper against my skin. I remembered the fight. I remembered getting hit, and I remembered something else. I kept my eyes closed for another handful of seconds, just to see whether this kindly tone in Masters’s voice would condense into—if there really was a God—mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  “Could you call my pager when he wakes?” said Masters to some unidentified other person in the room.

  “Sure,” a male voice said with an accent I couldn’t recognize.

  “My number’s on the card.”

  I received no kiss. My commitment to atheism would have to continue. I opened my eyes.

  The white ceiling was framed by a stainless-steel curtain railing. Yep, no doubt about it, I was in a hospital.

  “Special Agent? The patient is awake,” said the stranger’s voice. This time I pegged the accent as Italian. A young man appeared in front of my face, a stethoscope around his neck. Am I imagining it or are doctors getting younger? This guy had a bad case of acne and his nose was red and shiny. His hair was black, oily, and unwashed. He looked like he should still be in school, or maybe in a grunge rock band.