by James Grady
“Could’ve gotten me a mocha.” The rich coffee aroma made him sniff.
“Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve,” I said and walked towards the stairs’ curtain.
He said nothing until I got there, then rasped: “Tell me about it.”
Instead, I climbed the stairs to Hailey and Eric.
“Thanks,” said Hailey. She nodded towards the window. “It’s a slow Sunday morning. The Black manager showed up at 6. Trish stumbled in at 9:22, and that looked late. Nobody’s touched the tube.”
Eric sat holding his cup of coffee. Watching us.
“It’s OK, man,” I told him. “Drink it as you want.”
He nodded. Twitched a smile. Sipped the hot steamed milk and coffee.
“How’d you sleep?” I asked. “I know you went to Hailey and Cari’s room. Zane probably appreciated a room to himself, especially with his nightmares.”
Eric’s face twisted in thought. He opened his mouth to speak.
Hailey cut him off: “Eric, get the donuts off the desk, see if Vic wants one.”
Eric walked the five steps away to obey.
As Hailey told me: “The chain donut shop on the corner was the only thing open when Russell drove us here. Thanks for finding better coffee. Where are the others?”
Eric handed me a sack of donuts. I took a chocolate one. “We cleared out of the room so the maids would think we were at the family reunion. Our crew is at a Laundromat. They can do some wash, hang out in plain sight and be practically invisible.”
“Hey, Eric,” said Hailey. “Why don’t you go use the bathroom. Wash up.”
Without a word, he left us for the small closet near the rear stairs.
She’d moved him out of earshot, so I said: “How’s he doing?”
“Holding on—barely. All the noise out here in the world is tearing him apart. Too many orders, too many options, too many voices besides ours and his own heart. Holding on to who he is keeps getting harder for him.”
“He’s never going to be free,” I said. “You know that.”
Hailey dropped her eyes. “I hoped that out here, before I died, maybe I could have helped him get stronger so that someday…”
“These are his best somedays. With you.”
Hailey’s eyes misted. “All of you know he’s brilliant, but that’s just what he can do. Who he is comes from his heart. From his essential nature. Our essential nature gets us every time. And his is about love. Pure love. Self-sacrificing, unflinching love.”
“So he served his country as a spy.”
“Yeah. And his essential nature led him to his perfect torturer and perfect private Hell. So much for self-awareness. So much for cosmic justice.”
“How are you doing?” I said, pretending my coffee cup was shaking because I liked to see the tan liquid swirl.
“I’m dying faster every day. I’d hoped that I’d be with you this whole run. That at least I could see it through. But since we don’t seem to be getting anywhere—”
“Hey!” I insisted. “We’re here. We made it this far.”
She showed me the lying smile a mother gives a child to soften the inevitable. “I’m shaky, but I’ll hold on.”
I glanced across the street. The tube sat where it was.
When I looked away from the window, Hailey’s eyes were on me.
“How are you?” she asked.
“We’re doing OK,” I said. “And with Cari—”
“Forget about her.” Hailey shook her head. “She’s not for you.”
Heartfelt shock colored my tone. “What are you talking about?”
Hailey shook a smile onto her face.
“Life sure dropped on your sorry ass,” she said. “Plopped a dead man on the floor of your safe house. Put a hurt on your crazy. Not fair. Not right. Again. You knew the murder score totaled bad for us innocents. Letting that happen is like making it happen. So you squeezed the trigger for all this.
“You know why you grabbed Cari? Because she’s you. Cool, tough, ruthless, a Hotshot. She walked into your life crackling with fire. She was the you that got lost in Malaysia. The killer-edge you. The secret needs-somebody-to-love you. All rolled into one more-than-a-woman—and the hurtin’ from losing Derya meant you poured even more power into Cari.
“In one Stone Pony heartbeat, you bullshitted yourself that she was walking cosmic justice. Your redemption babe. Either she’d whack you into dead, or she’d pull us off the bull’s eye—plus love you. Either way, you figured hooking up with her would take you off the hook.”
“But guess what, killer: she ain’t that angel. For you, she’s just a gun with no bullets and blonde hair.”
A toilet flushed in the bathroom.
What I wanted to say was how she was wrong.
What came out of my mouth was: “You know what happened to our last shrink.”
“I’m already on the cemetery train.”
Water turned off in the bathroom sink.
“You can come out now, Eric,” called Hailey.
She protected him from having to say much of anything until Russell walked in, sent them both out to be picked up by Zane and Cari in the Cadillac.
“We’ll pull a double shift,” Russell told me. “Every time we cruise that white beast, we draw eyes.”
“What are the others going to do all day?”
“Don’t ask me.” Russell stared out the window. “Surveillance sucks.”
Lunch. Cheeseburgers and greasy fries from a fast food pit stop two blocks away. The cadaver clerk gnawed a pepperoni and fresh tomatoes pizza. Long day’s sunlight. Bloody sunset. Rush hour. A city bus belched black exhaust. Ginger pork skewers on flat white noodles. Two dozen door buzzes for men who hid their faces. A hundred scans of the Black manager working. A thousand views of Trish, like, jabbering in her cell phone. Twenty-seven customers in Mail 4 U!, Thirteen of them using mail boxes. No one touched the white tape-wrapped cardboard tube behind the counter.
“Surveillance sucks,” said Russell as my trembling watch ticked the palindrome of 10:01 and windows showed us another night of novels for the old man across the road.
“Spying is about seeing.”
“Spying is about believing that there’s something to see. You still got the faith?”
“The mail tube’s still there.”
“What if nobody comes to pick it up? What if we’re looking at a dead drop used only by a dead woman? What if nobody but us cares about that tube?”
“What do you think I’ve been wracking my brains about all day long when I wasn’t dealing with you pacing or bitching or the bad food or the stinking toilet or—”
“Don’t get all good soldier on me! Do go all tradecraft Op realities and—”
Man’s voice yelling through the floor: “Yo! Upstairs guys! I’m coming.”
Russell looked at me: “Do you think he wants to volunteer?”
“I think he needs to use the bathroom. Again.”
But Russell drifted to the opposite wall. I positioned myself to watch the stairs or outside the window with a flick of my eyes. My leather jacket draped over the desk chair and my gun rode holstered on my belt for the world to see.
The clerk joined us. Pale, still with a three-day blackish stubble on his cheeks and skull. Bloodshot eyes. His sweatshirt fronted a French drawing of Le Fantastic Four, his jeans came from a dumpster. He wore red chuck sneakers and a scowl.
“So where is it?” he said.
“Where’s what?” said Russell.
“I’m not talking to you, Mister Bang Bang. What about it, Coffee Man? A deal’s a deal. Where is it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, looked across the street, saw no one but the old man in Mail 4 U! “You haven’t been busted.”
“But I been broken. You see
n it. You heard it. And promises was made, but nobody’s delivered, so I come to get the form.”
“What form?”
“The reimbursement form. This is America. This is a legitimate business. You break it, you buy it. You broke it. Mister Bang Bang there swore I’d get me a reimbursement form, but he ain’t delivered on the deal, so I’m here to collect.”
“Pay back?” My rage pulled Russell off the wall. “You want pay back? You think you’re owed? That your government… For a fucking TV!”
“With remote control,” he said.
“Remote? Like in remote possibilities—that what you mean? And you want a form. To compensate you for your loss due to national security necessities, gee, that’ll solve everything. Well, let’s see if I’ve got the form for compensation and redemption.”
He crossed his toothpick arms. “That’s all I’m talking about.”
I slapped my pants pockets: “Nothing there!”
I thrust my hand into one of my leather jacket’s chest pockets. “Nothing there!”
My hand dove into the second chest pocket, closed on a folded piece of paper.
“Wait a minute!” I pulled the folded piece of paper out to the light of this filthy room above a thousand faked film fantasies. “What do we got here?”
With great flourish, I unfolded the paper, saw a logo stamped across its top:
Mail 4 U!—Box Rental Application
My leer swept up to the clerk: “Looks like a standardized form!”
With a grand gesture I held up the form. “But damn!”
And I met the clerk’s scowl with chagrinned worry. “It looks like I might have grabbed the wrong form from the office.”
I knew he watched me shoot my gaze back to that printed sheet of paper with its instructive lines, unfilled out blanks, and unchecked boxes. “Yup, that’s what…”
Then I saw what was right in front of my eyes.
Whispering from my mouth came: “My mistake.”
Russell said: “What? Vi—Buddy, you OK?”
My eyes lifted off the form to find the clerk: “Thank you.”
“Huh?” said the clerk.
Russell stared at me like I was crazy.
“We’ll get the form to you in the mail.”
“Why don’t you bring it?” he said. “The mail ain’t what it used to be.”
“Because we won’t be here tomorrow. Our day off.”
“Day off? Figures. Government guys.”
“That’s us.” I nodded to Russell. “My partner will take you downstairs. Get the address where you want the form sent. Give you an advance to carry you home tonight.”
“Cash?” The clerk flicked his gaze from me to Russell and back. “Will, ah, will that advance show up in any of the paperwork that, you know…”
“We’ll cover it in our personal expense reports,” I assured him.
“Well OK then. I hear you.” The clerk turned and went down the stairs.
Russell acted like I’d taken leave of my senses, but followed him.
As I punched a programmed number into my cell phone.
Five rings—what’s taking so—Zane, breathless, answered: “Yeah!”
“What are you doing? Never mind,” I told him. “Gear up. We’re hot.”
50
Midnight. Our seventh straight up tick since we charged into the real world. Zane and I lay pressed flat commando style on the slope up to a parking lot from the drainage ditch bordering the elevated Metro track. We huddled in the shadows between watch light poles on the train bed behind us. A bare bulb glowed on the back of a brick building. That light faded before it reached the weeds along the ditch. Through the gaps in the row of buildings came the glow of Georgia Avenue.
Back when we started, Zane had figured that without our meds, we’d crash and burn after seven days. Even with the grace our bootleg drugs had bought us, the way I was shaking told me he wasn’t far from right.
Ride it out, I told myself as I lay there in the cold night. We can ride it out, ride through it. Or Hell, manage it. Make being crazy work for us.
“Thirty-two minutes between subway trains,” Zane told me. “We got 21 minutes before a train clatters past and somebody looking out the window might see us.”
Zane wore a black stocking cap over his white hair, a purchase made at the same 24-hour supermarket that had provided our unfortunate selection of gloves.
White cloth gardening gloves. Big, thick fingered, floppy even on Zane’s hand that he wiggled in front of my eyes. “These make me look like Mickey Mouse.”
“He’s a tricky rodent,” I whispered.
“Trick me.”
“Hailey said they were all the store had. In this real world, you get what you get.”
“If I have to get to my gun and get off a shot, we got trouble.”
Two dark figures raced along the edge of the building towards us.
Russell and Eric dove into the ditch.
“OK,” whispered Russell. “No alarm circuit box we could see. And like you said, no cameras. They could have an infra-red light beam system or motion sensor, but that would mean skipping over the obvious for the elaborate.”
“Who’d do that?” muttered Zane.
“This’ll work!” I told him.
“Think Watergate,” I told everybody. “Those burglars, when they hit the office of the psychiatrist to smear that dissident, they made it look like a routine break-in robbery.”
“What happened to those guys again?” said Zane.
“They got movie deals,” I said.
“They weren’t breaking into an all glass, lit up office on one of the busiest streets in a city that’s always working.”
“So we got more drama,” I said. “We’re better pros.”
We carried triple-strength 30 gallon black plastic trash bags.
“Eric, after we walk around front, Russell will give you the signal and you’ll pick the locks.” Even with the amateur tools he’d fashioned, we knew Eric would succeed: an order was an order was inevitable. We worried about the time he’d need, the exposure that gave us, but every Op has its risks. “When we get inside, I know which file cabinet to check. Russell, you trash and grab whatever, pull open the desk drawers, turn over—”
“Rock ’n’ roll, I know how to trash a place.”
“Zane, you’re lookout. Claim the curb like you’re waiting for a ride.”
Our two cell phones were conferenced into Hailey’s as she sat behind the steering wheel of the white Caddy idling in the parking lot of the supermarket eight blocks down Georgia Avenue. Cari rode shotgun. If we got caught, if we went down, at least our witness might be free to scream our story.
Three white gloved thumbs stuck straight up.
And I said: “Go!”
White gloved rats scurried along the brick wall of the building. I peered around the edge of its brick wall. Saw no one walking along Georgia Avenue’s wall of malls that even during the day saw few pedestrians. No stream of cars passing by on either side of the avenue’s median. No lights of occupation in the strip mall across the road, negligible neon glowing from Viet Mine’s sign. COYOTES’ blue glow was turned off.
We whirled around the corner, Zane peeling off to claim the curb, Eric and I side by side as we scanned the glass wall front of Mail 4 U! and Russell…
Russell jogged away from us like he was following Zane.
“What the hell are you—”
Before I could finish my hissed question, Russell whirled to face us—and the store. He wore his black leather trenchcoat. His white gloved hands turned its collar up. Eric quivered beside me, waiting for Russell’s signal to start picking the door lock.
A deep breath moved Russell. I heard him mutter: “Watergaters got no balls.”
Woosh! Russell charged s
traight towards the store’s glass front, his arms pumping, his long coat flapping around his pounding legs… closer… closer…
Russell launched himself into the air, spinning as he flew so his back rushed towards glass pane. His white gloved hands flew up to cover his eyes-closed face.
PWSHEE! Russell exploded backwards through the glass wall. Crashed flat on his back in front of the business counter as unexploded chunks of the window tumbled to the hard tile, shattered and covered him with a shroud of diamond beads.
“Holy fuck!” yelled Zane from the curb.
Running, glass crackling under my feet, looking down—
Russell, black shoes, black jeans, black leather trenchcoat buttoned up to his neck, his white gloved hands splayed out at his sides in a judo breakfall.
“Russell! Russell, can you—”
“Oh man,” he moaned, slowly moving his limbs, his torso, opening his eyes. “It’s a lot easier in the movies.”
“Real life hurts. Are you functional?”
“About like always.”
I helped him to his feet.
“In in a heartbeat,” he said. “Less exposure time. ’Sides, cops wouldn’t buy that real burglars know how to pick locks. That’s Hollywood.”
“Just trash the place!”
“Oh. OK.”
As I vaulted the business counter, my gaze swept back towards the crater exploded to the night in the glass wall beside the door—
Where Eric was obediently picking the lock.
“Eric! Forget that order! We’re already in! Help Russell.”
The green file cabinet. The manager had either made Trish replace the file or finally done it himself. I stuck what I wanted in my trash bag and threw other files into the air with a celestial gesture: Let there be a blizzard of paper. Russell crammed a portable TV from Trish’s desk into his trash bag, tossed in her stuffed cloth fantasy figures that in a previous decade had been bartered like ingots of gold by millions of sane Americans. I rummaged through the manager’s desk, laid his family pictures down so their glassed frames “amazingly” wouldn’t break. Tossed random junk out of the middle drawer of his desk, put a penny face up in the drawer, and deeper in its recesses, left five folded $20 bills. The amazing karmic luck he’d tumble to after the inconvenience of this crime was, obviously, that burglars missed personal money he’d forgotten he had.
