by Kim Oh
I just made it, with the blast from the truck’s air horn slamming through my head. And caught another break – zooming down the off-ramp at maximum speed, I hadn’t been able to see what was happening on the farther side of the surface street. But the arrow signal had come on for the traffic wanting to turn left onto the ramp heading up to the freeway. That resulted in there being no vehicles in the lane I shot into. I was able to lean the bike over before I hit the curb and ease on the brakes to avoid going down in a skid.
My pursuer wasn’t so lucky. There was no way his wide-stanced muscle car could make its way through the gap my skinny little Ninja had managed. If the gap had still existed – too bad for the Challenger guy, but the delivery van whose rear bumper I’d scraped by, so close I’d almost abraded my knee on its license plate, was brought to a screeching halt by its driver. The flash of my Ninja in his rearview mirror must have startled him into that automatic reaction. The eighteen-wheeler’s chrome radiator grille crumpled the van’s rear doors like tin foil.
All of which left a solid metal wall in front of the Challenger, as it followed me out of the freeway off-ramp. On the other side of the street, my view was blocked by the truck, but I could hear the shriek of car tires as its driver desperately cranked the steering wheel – uselessly, at that speed. From the sound of the impact, he must’ve been able to get the Challenger turned ninety degrees, so its passenger side hit the side of the truck, rather than going head on into it.
The noise of disintegrating glass and metal bounced off the underpass, close to where I’d brought the bike to a halt. I didn’t feel like sticking around to see what’d happened to the driver – or what kind of shape he was in now. Up above me, the freeway was bright and loud with the flashing lights and sirens of the police who’d already arrived on the scene – they’d be boiling down here onto the surface street before too long.
One of the backpack’s straps was still intact. I slung my delivery parcel over my shoulder, kicked the Ninja into gear, and shot through the underpass, heading for whatever might be on the other side.
SEVEN
“You’re bleeding.”
I’d heard that before. One of those fake paramedics, back on the freeway, had said it to get me to climb into the back of their equally fake van. Granted, I hadn’t been at the top of my game when that jerk sucked me in with that one – a bike crash will do that to you – but I was still kicking myself about it.
But these were different circumstances. I wasn’t at the side of the freeway, next to a steel guardrail, and with the traffic streaming by. My Ninja was parked in the narrow space between a cinder-block wall and a garbage dumpster that smelled of overripe garlic and tomato sauce. Plus, I could put my hand up to my face, take it away, and see the bright, wet red on my fingertips. So I knew this particular guy wasn’t lying to me, at least.
He sat on an overturned plastic beer crate, smoking a cigarette held between nicotine-yellowed knuckles. Skinny arms, blued with jailhouse tattoos, stuck out from his grease-stained T-shirt. Faded jeans and a pair of dilapidated work boots showed beneath the bottom edge of his kitchen apron as he leaned back against the wall.
“Yeah,” I said. “Not much I can do about it right now, is there?” I’d wiped my forearm across my brow, but that hadn’t done anything to slow the trickle I could feel coming down the corner of my jaw.
“Stay here.” He stood up and ground out the stub of his smoke beneath his boot sole. “I’ll be right back.”
I did what he said. Enough time had passed that the silvery lights were starting to come on at the top of the poles studded across the strip mall’s parking lot – I could see their cold glow past the roof of the chain restaurant I’d taken refuge behind. Inside, there probably were families working their way through the all-you-can-eat pasta bowls, or whatever suburban people ate after their kids’ softball games. Not really anything I’d know much about. Off in the distance, traffic faintly rumbled on the freeway, the mess I’d helped create finally having been cleaned up.
The kitchen guy came back out from the restaurant’s alley door, carrying in his hands a white metal box with a red cross on the lid. He came over to where I was perched sideways on the bike seat, and squatted on his worn-down boot heels in front of me.
“Lean forward –”
I did that, too. I was in this far already with some fellow I’d never met before, so why not? The hospital-like smell of the disinfectant flared my nostrils as he opened the brown bottle from the box he’d set down beside himself. He took a sterile cloth from its wrapping, tipped the bottle into it, then started dabbing away at my forehead. It stung bad enough to make me wince.
“Don’t be such a baby.” He squinted at his work. When the thin pad was soaked pink, he tossed it aside and got out another one. “If this is the kind of trouble you’re going to get into, ya gotta expect to get dinged up once in a while.”
“Believe me,” I said, “I’ve been dinged up before. And exactly what kind of trouble are you talking about?”
“Give me a break, sweetheart.” The rasp in his voice sounded as though he’d started smoking back in some hospital neonatal unit. He was a lot older than me, with that leathery look that comes with doing major jail time – could’ve been anywhere past forty, for all I could tell. “This kind of trouble.”
He reached his free hand forward and tapped at my jacket, just above my ribs. That’s where the .357 was tucked away. Where I’d figured nobody would know it was there. But this guy knew.
“Name’s Mason.” He’d finished with the disinfectant and now fished a big square adhesive bandage from the first aid kit.
“What Mason?” I hadn’t asked him, but had just gone quiet after he’d nailed me about the piece I was carrying. “Or is that your first name?”
“Just Mason.” He smoothed the unwrapped bandage into place, just above my left eyebrow, then let my hair fall back over it. Picking up the kit, he set it on his knees and started tucking its contents into place. “That’s all.”
I went silent, feeling an odd sense of ease from being around him. I figured that was probably because he reminded me of some people I used to know. People in the same line of work I was in. Maybe from not that long ago, but it seemed like a lifetime, almost – this kind of thing takes it out of you. When I’d started it, after I’d kinda lost my first mentor Cole – I could still see his body slumped in that hallway, with his eyes empty and the blood everywhere – I’d hooked up with some other professionals, doing some personal security work that had gotten seriously heavy. But that was what everything I’d learned from Cole had qualified me for. Of course, I’d had to prove it to those sonsabitches – working with a girl wasn’t anything that’d come naturally to them. But I’d finally managed to pull it off.
And then we’d all been friends. Or at least as much as people who made their living by killing people ever got cozy with each other. I missed those guys, Foley and Earl and Curt – Heinz I knew I’d never see again, since he’d wound up dead on that job we’d all been on.
This guy in the alley behind the crappy Italian restaurant? He’d obviously come out of the same world as those pals of mine. In the life, so to speak. The game. Except they’d done better at it, or had better luck, or things had just broken better for them. So they hadn’t done the same kind of time Mason had. Or even any – my pal Elton, who I actually did keep in touch with, had never gone into the joint. I was pretty sure he wasn’t lying to me about that. But that was the kind of smooth redneck operator Elton was.
So when this Mason fellow had come out of the back of the restaurant, lugging a garbage can full of microwaveable shrimp scampi bags that gone too old to heat up and serve to even the local Boy Scout troops, I’d figured I didn’t have anything to worry about. As soon as he’d tilted back the dumpster lid and let it fall behind with a thudding metal clank, he’d discovered me there. Hiding out, making myself scarce from any police who might’ve been looking for a motorcycle and rider who matched me and
the Ninja. Things had gotten so frantic up there on the freeway, especially when I’d been running down the malfunctioning drone before the guy with the souped-up Challenger had been able to grab the backpack from it, there was no telling what the witnesses in the cars and trucks might’ve said about me. Until I was sure the cops didn’t have a bulletin out for me, I was laying low.
Which was the logical reason for not doing anything that might make him rat me out. Yeah, as soon as this Mason spotted me, I could’ve pulled out the .357 from inside my jacket and silenced him for good. But as long as I had a gut feeling that he was what was known in the life as good people – the kind, that is, who wouldn’t say squat to the police – then why buy myself more trouble? Leaving corpses behind restaurant garbage dumpsters – that’s the sort of thing that can eventually catch up with you.
“Thanks.” I poked the bandage on my brow as I watched him snap shut the first aid kit. “You need to go back in?” I nodded toward the building’s back door.
“Nah.” Mason lit up another smoke. “They don’t care what kinda breaks I take. My parole officer set up this gig. Work release – they get me for free, basically. So what’ve they got to bitch about? Long as I’m checked back into the halfway house before midnight, I’m good.”
I didn’t ask him what he’d gotten sent up for. It didn’t matter.
Same as he didn’t ask me – at least, right off the bat – what kind of trouble I was in. Instead, he sat back down on the plastic beer crate, meditatively watching the clouds of tobacco smoke he exhaled.
Finally, he spoke up. “So –” He studied the glowing tip of the cigarette. “Now what’re you gonna do?”
“Head on out, I guess.” I shrugged. “I’ve got a delivery to drop off.” Picking up the backpack from the bike’s seat – I’d laid it on top of the other one, that had my own stuff packed in it – I held it up and gave it a little shake. “If I’m going to get paid.”
One of Mason’s eyebrows lifted as he gazed at the dangling backpack. “That’s not a lot you’re toting.” He easily could estimate the bag’s slight weight as it swung back and forth. “How much you getting for this job?”
I told him the details, of what I’d be getting paid upon delivery up in San Francisco.
“Hmm.” Another long drag, then slow exhale. “You know that’s kinda hinky, don’t you? Nobody pays like that, for just muling shit from one point to another. Not in eensy amounts like that. That’s the benefits of a market economy, sweetheart – there’s so much around nowadays, price for courier services has gone way down.” With his cigarette, he gestured toward the distant, unseen-but-heard freeway. “If you were running a double tractor-trailer, loaded to the top with pharmaceutical-grade blow, maybe you’d get paid half that amount. Maybe a quarter, even – I dunno. Been a while since I’ve done anything in the transport line.”
I stayed quiet while he was talking. Since it wasn’t anything I hadn’t already considered. I’d accepted the oddball nature of the job when I’d taken it, figuring the money made it worthwhile. Now I was having second thoughts about that.
“Something went wrong, huh?”
“Yeah –” I nodded. “You could say there’s been some, um, unexpected developments.”
“Well, at least it wasn’t the cops coming down on you.”
“How do you know that?” I set the backpack down on the bike seat again.
“Not how they work,” said Mason. “Cops make their moves on tip-offs. From somebody on the inside. Believe me, I’d know – not my last time, but a couple stretches before, that was how it came down. Never know who your friends really are, do ya?” He folded his skinny, tatted-up arms across his chest. “But if the cops’ve been clued in, they ain’t gonna wait ’til a shipment’s on the road. They come bustin’ in on ya soon as you’re loaded up. ’Cause that’s all the evidence they need, and they don’t have to chase after ya to get it. So – logically and all – if you got chased down, it wasn’t by cops.”
I could see how he’d figure that. Plus, it was obviously something he’d had more experience with than I had.
“So do you know who it was? Guy who was after you and the package, I mean.”
“Not some guy.” I shook my head. “Guys. More than one. And they weren’t working together.”
“Hmm.” Mason gave a judicious nod. “That complicates things. Doesn’t often happen that way. I’d have to know more, about the whole deal, if I was going to sort it out.”
So I told him. Not everything, but enough to get started.
“That’s it?” The one eyebrow crept up even higher. “You don’t even know what you’re carrying?”
I looked away from him and out across the sky, that was all night-dark now, the parking lot lights contrasting fiercely blue-white. Usually it happens when I’m by myself and looking out a window, but this time I was out in the open, with some beat-up ex-con type sitting on an empty beer crate beside me. Same feeling, though – that things weren’t quite real. The stars were just holes poked in black velvet, the traffic going by on the streets beyond the parking lot was just some audio file on endless repeat, and even the smell of the garbage in the dump came out of one of those little spritzer machines.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to at least make the stuff inside my head real, or real enough.
“Pretty much the case.” I opened my eyes and nodded. The stars looked like stars again, way out there in space. I hadn’t told Mason all the details about getting the assignment – all the stuff about the message from Morton, steering me to that ratty old office building in Los Angeles – because I figured that didn’t really matter. “For that kind of money, I didn’t need to know.”
“And the guys who came after you? Know anything about them?”
I gave Mason a rundown on what had happened on the freeway, with the Challenger and its crazy-ass driver and the fake paramedics.
“They used a drone?” Mason gave me an incredulous look. “That’s a military thing, right? Like a toy helicopter.”
“This one wasn’t a toy. If it hadn’t gotten dinged up, it would’ve gotten away – with the backpack, I mean.”
“Yeah, but the U.S. Army uses ’em, okay – over in Iraq and crap-holes like that. To shoot missiles at bad guys, blow ’em into little bits.”
“That’s a whole different thing,” I said. “Those are like planes. So yeah, this was more like a helicopter, I suppose, but with the rotors at the corners. And remote controlled, or at least when it started out.”
“Weird.” Mason nodded slowly as he went on smoking and thinking about all I’d told him. “And complicated. If people just wanted to get that bag off you, why not do it the easy way?”
“Which would be . . .”
“Simple.” His thin shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Pull up alongside on the freeway, roll down the window, stick a gun out, and blow ya away. Soon as your bike comes tumbling to a stop, just get out and pick the bag off your body.” He gave me an almost pitying look. “Like I said. Simple.”
He had a point there. And it was something that’d already passed through my mind. “You’re right . . .” My turn to give a slow nod. “If they just wanted to get it off me, why screw around like that?”
“Yeah . . . that was an awful lot of cutesy-pie stuff. These punks, whoever they were, went to an awful lot of trouble. And the gear they were using – a dummy paramedics van? Frickin’ drone? That kind of stuff’s not cheap. Okay, maybe not a million bucks, but hey – they had to have some kind of money behind ’em.”
“Okay . . .” The scrape under the square bandage stung as I furrowed my brow. “So not cops. And not professionals – I mean, not like this.” I patted the .357 inside my jacket. “But they were really set up . . .”
“And they were waiting for you.” Mason looked from the tip of his cigarette over to me. “They knew what they wanted. So you might not know what’s in that bag – but they do.”
Another slow and silent nod from me, as I thought a
ll this over.
“Thing is,” continued Mason, “how would these guys know that, if the person you got the job from is running a tight ship? Which, if he’s got the kind of bucks you said he’s got, he’d be way capable of doing. And if that’s the case . . .”
I filled in the blank. “It’s a setup. He set me up.”
Mason shrugged. “That’s one possibility.”
“Crap – that’s too weird.” I set my hands on the bike seat, on either side of myself, and leaned forward. “That’d mean Dalby gave me the job, then turned around and sicced these people on me – the guy with the Challenger and the phony paramedics – so they’d do their best to make sure I wouldn’t be able to pull the job off and make the delivery.” I shook my head. “That’s the kind of sick game I really hate.”
“Lotta people with money are nuts.” Mason tapped the side of his head. “Maybe the guy’s schizophrenic.”
