“Yes, I suppose.”
Cliff squeezed Piper’s shoulder. “My turn. Let’s show you how to handle yourself in a room with me, so you’re not taking my head off in an effort to get to him.”
“What about that booby-trapped obstacle course outside?”
“All good things to those who wait. Besides, don’t want to take away the fun of running the course.”
Piper’s eyes went wide. Then he smirked. “Let’s do this.”
***
Tired of seeing him struggle with breaking down the gun, Cliff grabbed his hands and walked Piper through the steps hand-over-hand. The charge between them, the instant their skin touched, was undeniable.
Later, Cliff said, “Good,” as he watched Piper piece the weapon back together on his own.
Cliff broke the pistol down and stuck the pieces in a darkroom bag photographers use for loading film, and said, “Now do it blind.”
Sweat prickled on Piper’s skin as he endeavored to perform the exercise. Cliff laughed, took his thumb and wiped the sweat off Piper’s brow with it, then licked his fingers. “Your salt balance is good. No need to worry about dehydration causing you to lose your bearings just yet.”
***
That evening, Cliff and Piper played Wild West games in Mr. Brimley’s hallway, quick-drawing on each other. Cliff kept winning, of course, but this wasn’t about him; his mind was totally focused on his student. “Faster,” Cliff said. Draw. Reload holster. “Faster.” Draw. Reload holster. “You want to do it until the gun feels like an extension of your own body. I want you to live with the pistol from now on. Never out of arm’s reach. Put it on before you put your clothes on. Get so you feel naked without it.”
Piper laughed. “Sounds surprisingly reasonable.” Draw. Holster.
“The next time you draw, you better be prepared to die, mister,” Cliff said playfully, enjoying being in character. His voice was desert-winds dusty.
“You talk tough for a guy whose hand shakes.”
“Just over-excitement at the thought of killing you. Don’t worry, I can shake pretty badly at this distance and still put one between your eyes.” Cliff’s tone was steely, convincingly callous.
Piper thought about his earlier prophetic remarks. Depending on how far they made it on their learning curve, if they got past Orchid Man, and the Eternal—who was the most impossible to kill of all—they may well have no choice but to turn on one another. By then, there would be no one better, and no way to test their mettle save on one another. But Cliff was right, that day was a long ways away, and the path was everything. So why not enjoy it?
Piper said, “You aren’t afraid of this guy walking in on us?”
Cliff holstered his gun. “You’re the profiler. What do you think?”
Piper thought a moment and said, “Nah. Takes a lot to build up that charge again before he can release it. He’ll be out collecting agonizing experiences like a dipole collecting up static electricity. Home doesn’t provide enough of a spark, anymore.” Draw. Holster. “That reminds me. We have to time this right. Make sure that charge is pretty built up before we gang up on him. We’ll want to keep him under surveillance. That’s not going to be easy, with him being a SEALs guy.”
“Tell me about it,” Cliff said.
***
Cliff and Piper, hovering at different stations in the liquor store, watched the Barroom Butcher collect his candy and soda. He was munching the chocolate bar before he was even at the counter.
When he continued walking past the counter without paying, the clerk shouted, “Hey, you gonna pay for that?” But Mr. Brimley kept walking. The clerk reached for the shot gun, pumped it, pointed it at him.
Mr. Brimley turned toward the counter.
The clerk saw the pistol against Brimley’s shoulder, tucked under his opened jacket. And he saw Mr. Brimley’s eyes.
And the strangest thing happened.
He lowered the shot gun.
Even with the drop on him, he wasn’t messing with this guy. Cliff and Piper smiled in tandem, lowered their eyes from the security mirrors through which they’d indirectly observed the drama.
Mr. Brimley exited the store.
Cliff and Piper found one another in the central aisle of the liquor mart. “What do you think?” Cliff said. “Is that a go?”
Piper laughed. “I’d say so.”
***
Cliff admired the view to the backyard. “God, this is a beautiful house. How come we didn’t notice this before?”
“We were focused on catching a psycho killer.” Piper heard the doorknob turning on the front door. “Speaking of.”
Piper stuffed the clip into his Beretta.
“The Beretta 92FS.” To Piper’s surprise, Cliff had recognized the distinctive sound of the magazine’s movement into the stem of Piper’s pistol. “That’s a sexy gun, isn’t it?” Cliff said.
“Where’d he go? And how come the last sound I heard was of the doorknob turning?”
“I told you he was good. I’m guessing we’re about to find out just how good.”
Piper ducked the shrapnel from the exploding tchotchke, coming unglued under the pressure of Brimley’s pistol discharge. “Fuck! What was that?”
“.357 magnum,” Cliff said. “It’s famous for its stopping power.”
“No shit,” Piper exclaimed, then composed himself. “I got enough silver fragments in my face to qualify as a punk rocker.” He was glad Cliff had thought to equip both their pistols with silencers, for the sake of the repartee. It helped him keep his nerves in check.
“I’m thinking this guy isn’t much on banter.” Cliff stifled a scream as Brimley’s .357 sent enough splinters from the leg of the couch into his own leg for a game of pick-up sticks to help divine his future. As he pulled the slivers out and let them fall to the floor, judging from their splay, Piper thought, his future wasn’t looking particularly good.
Cliff shouted, “Hey, pal. Switch to a lower caliber, will you? Out of respect for the furniture, if nothing else. You don’t see us disrespecting the eye candy.” No response from Brimley. “I’m beginning to think this guy is just plain humorless.”
Piper picked up what was left of the silver bauble that had redefined its nature in the presence of the .357 magnum bullet. “Where did you get this gewgaw, you don’t mind me asking?” Piper threw his voice to Brimley, the way he and Cliff had been throwing their voice to one another for his benefit. “You’d think it’d have more sentimental value.”
“The model rocket?” Brimley asked, his voice leaden.
“Yeah.” Piper shoved the pieces back together in his hand to make a rocket.
“My daughter wanted to be an astronaut,” Brimley said, his voice watery, as if he was drowning in a pool of welling emotions.
“I don’t think it’s too late to put this thing back together,” Piper said empathetically. Cliff threw him a “What the fuck?” gesture. “Sorry,” he whispered for Cliff’s benefit. “He’s getting to me with the daughter.”
“We’re supposed to be getting to him,” Cliff said, lobbing the soft-spoken words at Piper’s ears.
Piper regrouped, strategized his next play. He aimed at the Remington “Mountain Man” bronze, fired a couple of shots to knock out the legs of the horse on the descending slope, watched it and the rider slide off the steep grade. “So tell me about the Remington,” Piper said. Cliff nodded approvingly. Piper whispered, “Was that for the fine shooting, or the fiendishly clever turn in strategy?”
“I’ll let you decide,” Cliff said softly.
In a reflective surface, Piper caught sight of Brimley crouched behind cover, wiping the tears from his eyes. He had probably calculated the reflections would be better for stalking his prey should anyone enter the house, not figuring the ruse might be turned around on him. Any more shiny surfaces and the house interiors would suffice as a carnival mirror maze.
Brimley said, “My wife loved horses and the Wild West. We spent the summers on
ranches from Colorado to Montana.” While Piper was still reeling from the psychological pain he’d caused this man, Brimley dove so he was belly down on the hardwood floor. He rolled. When he had the angle he wanted, he fired at where he calculated Cliff would be off of the reflections.
He missed.
“Yeah, the convex and concave surfaces distort the hell out of perspective,” Cliff said. “Makes distant things seem close, and close things seem far away. How are you at angles and perspectives, Brimley? Myself, I’m not half bad. I was going to teach math once, decided I wasn’t quite good enough. You’re coming up against a frustrated mathematician with something to prove, Brimley. Isn’t that a bitch?”
Cliff calculated the angles off the reflections, and took his shot. He and Piper both saw Brimley wipe his cheek from the track left there by the bullet. Cliff said, “I told you I had something to prove.”
“Stop making him mad in the middle of my efforts to melt him down emotionally,” Piper whispered for Cliff’s benefit. “Makes it too easy to block his emotions.”
Cliff replied, “I’m thinking it’s just one more way to throw him off balance. We have to vary our game. Sort of like tennis.”
Piper shook his head, then hit his head against the wall. “So, where did you come by the moolah for the house, Brimley, you don’t mind me asking?”
“My wife’s money,” Brimley said, reloading.
“God, I love the sound of that.” Piper sighed, and relaxed just at the thought of being rich. “Personally I would have no trouble settling into the house husband arrangement. Maybe if you could have given yourself over to the idea, you’d have had more time with both the wife and the daughter, huh?” Several bullets came his way, like a flock of birds all turning into the wind at the same time. “Thanks for the feedback, Brimley. Hate to think I wasn’t hitting a nerve.”
Piper fired at the next décoratif, a swank, sensuously curved abstract piece of wood, as much to vent his frustration at Cliff for cramping his style as to get at Brimley. “Tell me more about that one, Brimley. I love hearing about your life.”
“Bastard!” Brimley shouted. His voice echoed, came at Piper from three directions at once, each one closer than the one before, as if Brimley was making a mad dash for him. Piper flailed with the gun, chasing the voice with the business end of the barrel.
Piper said, “Yeah, Brimley, better come out and shoot me dead before I get to work over your décor any more. The price of prolonging this just keeps going up and up.”
He heard Brimley sob. “Pull yourself together, Brimley. You know better than to go to pieces under pressure. What happened to all that professional training?” Cliff threw him another “Are you kidding me?” gesture.
“What, you want one of those Tyson fights that’s over in the first round?” Piper whispered defensively. “That’s no fun. Gotta think of the audience.”
It was Cliff’s turn to groan.
Brimley switched to rubber bullets and shot at no less than six of Piper’s reflections, probably hoping the rebounding pellets would catch the real Piper at least one of those six times, and decommission him long enough for Brimley to get over there and finish the job.
Piper winced three times as the rubber bullets caught him in the arm, the leg, and his oblique abdominal muscles. “Sonofabitch. That was pretty damn clever of him. Why didn’t you think of that?” Piper whispered.
“Stop it,” Cliff said. “I can’t stand to have you think less of me.”
“Then you better take your game up a level.” Piper groaned. “You should let me wound you, Brimley,” Piper said. “The physical pain is easier to deal with, trust me.” He fired another shot, ending the chip powering the slide show in the animated picture frame. “Wow, there goes a whole slew of memories all at once. Got a wholesale discount on that one.”
From numerous angles across the reflective surfaces of the house’s interiors, Piper saw Brimley’s head hang low. He glanced away to shove another clip in his gun and, when he looked up again, Brimley was gone—as were all his reflections. “Shit, this can’t be good.”
They heard footsteps downstairs.
Cliff slid across the hardwood floor to one of the big windows to see if Brimley was fleeing outside. He was. “He’s headed into the forest.”
“I haven’t even seen the living room yet! And there’s the whole downstairs. That’s damn rude of him not to give us a complete tour of the house.”
“You talk like we haven’t been here before.”
“But my whole perspective has changed!”
“I suppose there’s a lesson in that.”
Piper glanced at Cliff, who was setting the timer on shaped wads of plastic explosives. “You sure about this?”
“What do you think, profiler?”
Piper thought about it. “I don’t know. Could go either way. Might just snap him out of his self-pity. He could clamp down emotionally better than a Maine clam. Or he could explode just as violently, do stupid things that work in our favor.”
“Looks like I’m not the only one who has to take his game up a level.”
“You still going on about that?” Piper said. “Christ, so sensitive.”
Cliff glanced at the yard. Piper arrived by his side to share in the view as Brimley disappeared into the forest. “That definitely shifts things in his favor,” Cliff said.
“How so?” Piper asked.
“I didn’t exactly give you much of a tutorial on jungle warfare.”
“You handle it then, if I’m going to be such dead weight,” Piper said.
“Now who’s Mr. Sensitive?” Cliff’s expression grew pensive. “Nah. We’re going to need a wild card. Mr. Brimley and I are a little too evenly matched.”
“Let’s get this done then.”
“Not so quickly,” Cliff said. “We’re not going out there half-cocked. I have an idea.”
Cliff hit up Brimley’s gun collection before going any further, found combat earplugs for himself and Piper. He inserted them for Piper, to make sure they were situated correctly. Piper once again felt the bolt of lightning strike him at Cliff’s touch, quivered at the casual intimacy.
Then Cliff pulled Piper’s gun and his, switched them out for Colt M1911 .45 caliber pistols. “For jungle warfare, we need a little more stopping power to put down someone charging at us full on and up close, rage or no rage,” he explained.
Piper nodded.
They changed into Brimley’s camo fatigues, which were hanging in the closet. He was a close enough fit, even if he was a good six inches shorter than both of them.
***
When Piper and Cliff settled into the woods, they sported Brimley’s choice of combat earplugs, so when the house blew, they wouldn’t be left without hearing. Good thing, Piper thought; they were going to need all their senses to stay one step ahead of Brimley.
The house went up better than Fourth of July fireworks.
“Let’s hope Brimley didn’t get far enough away from the house to keep his hearing,” Cliff said.
“What, and remove any chances I have of softening him up further with my latest taunts? I should hope not.”
“Now that we’re on the run, I’d save your breath,” Cliff advised.
He darted off, picked up on Brimley’s trail as he went along.
“Jungle warfare, huh?” Piper mumbled to himself. “Let’s hope that doesn’t include crotch rot.”
He loped after Cliff, realizing it wouldn’t take much to lose him in this backyard “oasis,” which Piper figured Brimley had built as a Plan B, in case the house mirror-maze failed to slow down his attackers. Say one thing about the guy, he was smart, and thorough, and he had Cliff off-balance, which spoke volumes. Cliff’s abbreviated manner the instant they headed into the forest said it all; he needed his entire mind focused on taking Brimley down; no more fun and games.
When they paused to catch their breath, Piper said, “Hey, at least he’s sticking to the wider trails, right? Less chance of
catching lime ticks. They’re deadlier than bullets.”
“Less chance of marking the trail unwittingly with a broken branch or a footprint out here. He’s just covering his tracks.”
“I still appreciate the gesture, I don’t care what you say,” Piper said. Cliff eased off with the annoyed looks, probably realizing Piper was fighting to hide his sense of panic. Understanding he was just trying to calm himself further, Piper said, “At least we’re wearing camo gear. That should shift things in our favor.”
“He’d have stripped down to his pants by now, greased up if he thought to take camo paint with him, or tagged himself with mud, tree branches, whatever, to blend. You can concoct a lot of that stuff on the fly.”
“Maybe now’s a good time to start lying to put me at ease,” Piper said, still panting. “I think our relationship has progressed far enough.”
Cliff ignored him and plunged headlong into the heart of darkness. Piper only absently noted the increasing shade formed by the overhead branches starting to grow into one another.
Despite fighting to keep up, Piper lost sight of Cliff along a sinuous trail. “Great!” he mumbled.
Piper used his camouflage to good effect; trotted from tree to tree, then froze. Throwing his voice in a shout-whisper, like a ventriloquist, he concealed his location further with sound-dislocation. “Cliff!” Dart. Freeze. “Cliff!” Dart. Freeze.
Finally, on the third try, Cliff responded in kind. “Over here!”
Piper ran unthinkingly to where he heard the sound and straight into Brimley’s line of fire. The barrel of the gun pointed at him. “You mimicked his voice?”
“Don’t sound so betrayed,” Brimley said. “Next time you two entitled shits want to play hero, try paintball.”
Piper drew on him. Brimley shot the gun out of his hand and out of reach, Piper realized, as he calculated the distance from him, and his ability to survive a dive in its direction.
“Now what?” Piper asked.
“Now, we go fishing.” Brimley shot him in the leg and disappeared back into the trees.
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 157
