Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You sure you’re ready for this?”

  “As ready as I’m going to get.”

  A moment of silence, and then she grabbed him by the waist and tried to pull him back into the hole. At least that’s what it felt like she was doing. She grunted, switched grips, and grabbed his shoulder. Somehow, she braced herself against the opposite wall with her feet, and within a few seconds was hanging on with him.

  “A couple more seconds,” she said in his ear. “Just hang on.”

  He didn’t have enough air in his lungs to answer her.

  She jumped over, and ended up facing in, elbows on the edge. Then she pushed herself up and over.

  Something grabbed his shirt. Bernal yelped. The engine fell past and hit the bottom of the pit with a crash. His shirt ripped, but he stayed up.

  “Come on, man.” He grabbed her hand and she yanked him out.

  38

  That golf cart had ended up in the pit, but the rest were moving. Bernal could hear them in the darkness.

  “Have you seen Patricia?” Bernal said.

  “Is she here too?”

  “Yes. I hope I haven’t made things worse for her. . . .” He suspected that that was an understatement. He couldn’t even remember why he had done such an insanely dangerous thing. He’d made love to Ignacio’s woman.

  But he didn’t even try not to feel good about it.

  “God, I wish I had the charger.” Charis waved the herf gun. A red LED glowed on the handle. “One shot, and capacitors are out.”

  “Did Muriel have the charger?”

  “Sure. Big ass pile of batteries. I think she put them in a bag.”

  “A big flowered bag, like something an old lady would carry. I know where it is.”

  “Where?”

  “Ignacio’s trailer. I didn’t know what it was. Even though I tripped over the damn thing the night she died.” He remembered falling over it when he was chasing Muriel. She’d gotten it out for whatever confrontation she had planned with Hesketh, but had been forced to run when Ignacio showed up. She’d had to face Hesketh without the herf gun and had died.

  And Ignacio, with an eye for interesting gadgets, had taken it along when he left.

  Charis thought a moment. “It’s not worth going back for. We just have to dodge Ignacio—”

  The golf cart was so quiet that it was almost on them before they saw it. Charis, with nowhere else to go, dove forward and rolled across its top, to land heavily on the ground behind it.

  “Bernal!”

  “Whoa!” Bernal had jumped straight up and dangled from a bound batch of shock struts that was now tilting off its shelf. He let go and barely avoided getting creamed by it as it came down.

  “I don’t think we have a lot of choice,” he said.

  “Great,” Charis said. “Ignacio’s house it is.”

  _______

  The place was empty and silent. Neither Ignacio nor Patricia was in evidence. It was pretty much the way Bernal had left it.

  As he headed for the closet, the floor tilted. Was he dizzy, hit worse than he thought? No. The floor was actually tilting.

  Charis wrestled with the door, which had swung shut behind them. Outside, Bernal could hear a high whine, and suddenly, and much too late, put things together.

  By the time Charis got the door open, they dangled in the air, twenty or thirty feet up. The cables at the mobile home’s comers ran up to high-powered winches bolted into the racks. Together, they had just pulled the house up into the air.

  “Well, we’re good and stuck,” Charis said, disgusted with herself—and with him? “Where’s the charger?”

  Bernal jumped on the couch, hoping it wasn’t just a bag, something with a toothbrush and a change of underwear in it. There it was. He unsnapped the latches, and breathed a sigh of relief. Heavy batteries filled the interior. Everything in the modern world had become small and light, except the very heart of their power, which still had a Victorian mass.

  Charis reached past him and pulled a recharge cradle out of the bag.

  “Frickin’ thing has terrible human factors.” She pointed to where Muriel had taped a piece of paper in it with a picture of the umbrella herf and an emphatic arrow. “ Bitch to snap your herf in the wrong way and then have a homicidal robot charge down on you while you wave the useless piece of crap at it. I hired a couple of guys who got kicked out of MIT for a near-fatal prank to build it for me. Smart guys, but clueless. We had a fight over the invoice, but I eventually paid it and ended up with this stupid thing. It does work, if you handle it just right.”

  She looked up at the gas fireplace as she waited for the herf to charge. The long samurai sword, in a lacquer scabbard, hung on a rack above the marble mantel hauled in from some demolition. She stepped toward it as if wanting to grab it by its sharkskin hilt, but then paused and looked toward the kitchen.

  “This guy use cleavers, you notice?”

  “Yeah. Nice, carbon steel, and he takes good care of them. Well, he takes good care of everything.”

  “Like he wants to take care of us.”

  An engine roared in the yard outside. A bright light flared through the front windows.

  Charis ducked down, motioning Bernal to do the same. He dove behind a couch.

  The truck’s engine seemed to make the whole place shake.

  “Come the hell out of there!” an amplified voice bellowed.

  Charis listened carefully, as if to a secret message in the words, but did not respond.

  “The front door!” Ignacio yelled through a buzzy speaker, competing with the noise of his own engine. “Come to the front door, and let’s get this taken care of.”

  “We should—” Bernal stopped at a sharp hand gesture from Charis.

  “There’s an emergency rope ladder in there, near the front.” Now Ignacio sounded reasonable, as if realizing that threats weren’t going to get him what he wanted. “For when the motors screw up. I keep them up, but it happens. Just roll it out and come down. Just get the hell out of my yard, and we’re okay, huh?”

  Charis lay flat. For a moment, Bernal couldn’t figure out what she was doing. Then he saw her work her feet over to the coiled rope ladder that lay by the door. It was attached to the door’s sill by two bolts. She braced herself, then kicked the door open and kicked the ladder out after it.

  The gunshot wasn’t that loud, really. But the bullet tearing through the roof made the entire mobile home shake.

  “Damn it.” Charis scuttled back. “This tin is no protection at all.”

  It was as if Ignacio had overheard her and realized that there was no real need for luring anyone to the door. The lights moved until there was an upward glow all around the house, and now the rumbling engine was directly underneath. Shadows extended upward to the ceiling.

  The bullet tore through the floor a couple of feet from him. The entire structure vibrated.

  Bernal threw himself backward.

  “Don’t do that,” Charis said. “He can’t possibly know where you are. He can only shoot at random. Unless you make noise.”

  He realized she was right, so he didn’t answer her.

  From where he lay he could see that the herf LED was now a blinking yellow.

  Another bullet tore through, this one at the opposite end of the room.

  “There, see?” Charis said. “Once you get used to it, it’s not so bad.” She moved quickly around the mobile home, pulling open windows and screens. The cool night air blew in. “See if he’s made a hole big enough for us to stick that herf through. I’d rather try that than lean out of a window.”

  Bernal rolled over to where the first bullet had come through. He pulled the rug aside. He couldn’t judge caliber, but it seemed to have torn a fairly large hole. It glowed white from Ignacio’s truck-mounted lights. The LED was now a placid green. He tore the herf out of its cradle and pushed the business end against the bullet hole.

  It wasn’t big enough.
The end of the umbrella went in, but the rest of it, the necessary antenna, did not. Bernal pulled it back out. Was there anything around that would let him widen—

  He didn’t know whether Ignacio heard him moving around, saw the brief appearance of the umbrella, or just guessed that someone would decide that where the previous bullet went through would be the safest place.

  But the next shot went through a few inches away from where the first one had.

  It took Bernal a minute of severe shaking to even begin to move. Every muscle in his body seemed to move in a different rhythm.

  But this hole was bigger, maybe shot at a different angle. The umbrella slid right through.

  “This works!” he said.

  “You do the honors. It doesn’t really aim.”

  He clicked the latch, and it opened up. He pictured it, blossoming like an upside down black flower. He felt with his finger, found the trigger, and pressed it.

  Instant darkness and silence. The engine and the lights had died. He was grateful for the insane technological complexity of modern vehicles, with microprocessors regulating every part of their activities. An older vehicle, with nothing but sparks handed out to the cylinders by a physically rotating distributor, might have shrugged the herf off.

  He closed up the umbrella, pulled it back in. Ignacio’s footsteps crunched across the gravel. If Ignacio had thought about it before, he would have realized how much more ominous this was than the engine. Just the methodical step of a man in no hurry about killing.

  “Stand up,” Charis whispered. “Reduces your cross section. And be quiet.”

  Bernal rolled to his feet, making as little noise as possible. Then, in sudden inspiration, he crept over to the phone on the end table, picked it up, and dialed his own cell phone number.

  He heard a few bars of the theme from The Twilight Zone. Then he hung up.

  “Nice,” Charis whispered.

  Ignacio would have no way of knowing what Bernal’s phone sounded like. Bernal had done his best to make it seem like there was someone else in the yard. Someone who had not remembered to switch off his phone and had fumbled for it, desperately, and managed to switch it off after one ring. Someone else loose in the yard would be much more dangerous than two morons stuck thirty feet up in a sheet-metal trailer.

  Ignacio moved quietly across the gravel. Bernal could just see his shadowy shape against the paler ground. How long would it be before he realized that the phone had been one he’d already confiscated? Bernal had no idea where he had stashed the things.

  “There have to be motor controls in here somewhere,” Bernal whispered. “No way he was going to leave the override somewhere outside, where someone else had ultimate control.”

  “Good thinkin’, Lincoln,” Charis said. “But he must know it’s hard to find, Coded?”

  For a second, Bernal looked back at the phone. Could he activate things by dialing a certain number? Nice idea, but unlikely. But what else—?

  “Try the TV remote,” Charis said, as Bernal was already moving toward it.

  Charis went around the couch. As she passed the fireplace, she brushed against a coffee cup on the mantel. It fell to the floor and broke.

  The bullet that came through the wall was shatteringly loud. Pictures sprang off their hangers, and the entire marble mantel clanged. Charis fell forward.

  Threw herself forward. She had to have done that. There was no way Ignacio could have gotten the drop on her. It just didn’t make any sense. Not sure anymore whether standing up or lying down was better, Bernal compromised and scuttled over to her in a crouch.

  She had not thrown herself forward. She was unconscious, and there was blood in her thick hair. He couldn’t tell immediately how much.

  “Charis!” He’d always made fun of people in movies who yelled at unconscious people, but the knowledge that Ignacio could drop him just as easily was all that kept him from doing it. “Are you okay?”

  He felt at her head, half-anticipating that part of it would be blown off, and he would feel the shattered edges of her skull in his fingers.

  But it was all there, a solid sphere, and when he prodded one specific spot, she winced and moaned, though she did not regain consciousness. Incautious, now, of Ignacio and his weapon, Bernal ran to the kitchen and yanked a dish towel out of a neat stack of them next to the Garland stove.

  Out in the yard, an engine. Had Ignacio managed to restart his truck? No, too quiet. This was another golf cart.

  Ignacio fired once, then twice more in quick succession. But not up at the trailer. Bernal heard a ricochet, but the cart kept coming. It smashed into something. From the loud cascade that followed, it had clearly hit some rack of car parts. It backed up, turned, and tore down another aisle. Its sound disappeared, and there was nothing but silence.

  Bernal grabbed a glass and filled it with water. He ran back to Charis, put her head in his lap, moistened her lips, and put pressure on her wound. He looked around and saw that the samurai sword had been ripped off its lacquer display rack by Ignacio’s last shot. It looked like its hilt had struck her.

  Her eyes snapped open.

  “You got hit in the head. Not the bullet, something else. Do you want me to quiz you about commonly known facts?”

  “I’m not sure you and I know the same commonly known facts, Bernal.” Her voice was calm, even a bit sleepy.

  “I think something happened to Ignacio.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He helped her to her feet. She was coming back into focus.

  “Don’t go near the window,” she said.

  But he didn’t listen. He was so sure ... he peeked out of a corner and there, lying at the base of a parts rack, was a pair of feet.

  “I think it’s okay,” he said.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she moved to join him. “You may be right.”

  39

  The black shape of the mobile home floated above them, creaking slightly in a night breeze. The truck stood, door open, silent.

  Ignacio lay crumpled on the ground, just around a corner. His head was pulpy, the side of his chest was pushed in, and his arm had been forced out of its socket. Charis knelt and checked him over. “Yeah. Dead.” She glanced up at Bernal. “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t see—”

  “Best guess.”

  “A golf cart ran into that rack. Stuff fell off of it, hit him in the head.”

  They stood there, looking down at him. His gun lay on the concrete near his head. His dead face was smooth and inoffensive.

  “Who killed him?” Charis said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “No matter what he told you, it looks like it was him in charge of them the whole time. He screwed up, lost control of one, and got himself killed.”

  They both listened. The yard was silent. No cart moved. “It’s him,” Charis said. “The Bowler. The Easter Bunny. You saw the sword, the cleavers. I’ll bet any amount of money that when the lab guys get in here, they’ll get matches on vertebrae.”

  “If it was Ignacio, then there’s nothing to worry about,” Bernal said. “But if it wasn’t.. .”

  “Fair enough. You want to go out there and look for Hesketh?”

  “No. But if we don’t, it might be gone by the time anyone gets here.” Bernal looked over to the vehicle parking area. It looked like Patricia’s rig was gone. It had been there before. So she had gotten away. He felt a surge of overwhelming relief. Despite his insistence on finding Hesketh, he was almost convinced that Charis was right. Ignacio had been the killer.

  Still, he had to be sure. He checked Ignacio’s car, but all that was in there were two aromatic bags of takeout from a Brazilian churrascaría in town. They were still warm. Something about this false evidence of life struck Bernal. He leaned his head against the door.

  “Don’t lose it, Bernal.” Charis pulled him by the arm. “I need you functional. Let’s go.”

  _______
<
br />   The silence in the yard was now unbearable. Nothing moved, nothing was operational, and his own footsteps on the gravel were unpleasantly grinding, as if something was being damaged as he moved.

  The aisle he moved down narrowed and ended in a curtain made of dozens of dangling hoses from old gas pumps. As he pushed his way through the rotting rubber, the heavy nozzles clanked and bashed against his ankles. In a few minutes, the police would be here, and they would seal off the yard completely and go through it piece by piece. Not because they believed in the existence of Hesketh, but simply to make sure they had all the evidence needed to tie Ignacio Kuepner to the Bowler murders. He just had to make sure that Hesketh did not get away before then.

  Had Ignacio forced poor Patricia to make the call that brought Bernal here? Bernal didn’t think so. He had probably just given her the space to make it, knowing that she would after he beat her. Charis had told Bernal how psychopaths perceived normal, mentally flabby, purely contingent human beings. It would have been easy for Ignacio to exploit his and Patricia’s obvious and pathetic needs to get them to do exactly what he wanted them to.

  Beyond was a wide trench filled with what looked like waste oil. Grooved concrete sloped down to it. A rank of cars stood there, their headlights gazing mournfully into the greasy Lethe in the trench. Bernal recognized a Rambler with its Chrysler building-shaped taillights and an MG. Someone had been doing some kind of work here, because a red rolling tool case stood nearby, each of its drawers crowded with hand tools.

  He heard a thump. He looked around. Where had it ... ?

  It came again. This time he localized it: a rusty Impala. He walked slowly toward the car.

  Something shifted in the trunk.

  He remembered the Peugeot by the Black River. He remembered the car in which Aurora Lipsius had died. Ignacio was dead, but there was something here that was still alive.

  He felt in his pockets, but they hadn’t found where Ignacio had tossed their cell phones, and he was without a way to communicate with Charis. But if he left to find her, Hesketh, or whatever was in there, might find a way to escape and vanish. Or come after them.