Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  He wrestled with it. “Yes.”

  Char and Clavius had also gone to New York. Okay.

  “When?”

  “I dunno. Soon. Like, right away.”

  “What did he do with the gun? The Kimber? Is it still here?”

  “I dunno. He wanted me to take it; I couldn’t.”

  My eye throbbed. Now I was going to have to risk more exposure and search this dump again.

  * * *

  Maybe I was hallucinating, but I could have sworn I saw Elias at the airport, Delta terminal. Just a sidelong glimpse, but I pursued the vision and saw nothing. My handicapped eye was generating wish-fulfillments. I was more concerned that it might pressurize and explode when I hit 30,000 feet. I was wired and tired.

  Elias had fled to New York. Where Char had gone. With Clavius, who was easy to find.

  That was all I had really needed out of Joey, although in the end he volunteered a great deal of useless peripheral intel—his backhanded “permission” to use the loft in Elias’s absence, for instance, or that Mummy Girl’s name was Gwynne. I covered his desperate eyes with my hand before I shot him, collected my brass, and dug out the slugs, including the one that had terminated Varla, which was stuck in the wallboard not far from where Targets #5 had once hung. I stripped all the ID I could find from Joey and Varla. Two fresh Does on a previous crime scene would make law enforcement very interested in speaking to Elias, who would become a person of interest. That might drive him further under … or cause him to bolt into the open where I could scoop him.

  Back in Thai Town—less than a mile from the Equitable Building—I broke down Bulldog’s P250, plus adequate ammo, into an aluminum kit I had devised specifically for travel, a showy road case for a set of pricey paintball guns. I swapped trivia with one of the baggage rats about leakproof valves, custom volumizers, in-line regulators, and best of all, “reballing.” A high-end paintball gun cost more than some actual firearms, capping in the $1,500 range. All so dimwits could pretend to kill each other. The checked-bag examiner snapped my case shut and wished me a safe trip. You don’t hire geniuses for twelve bucks an hour.

  Similarly, I had a laptop carry-on modified to conceal my bank.

  I scarfed some airport pizza. I had always thought the concept of “terminal food” to be amusing.

  My wonky eye did not burst, although I kind of hoped it might, since the in-flight movie was a crapfest called My Best Senior Prom, about two rival cliques of airheads who become serial prommers. It was a prom-rom-com, espousing the idea that life is all downhill from high school. Even with no headphones, it was excruciating, constantly veering into my peripheral sight even if I tried to ignore it, and I could not utilize one of those little sleep masks since its pressure exacerbated my left eye. If you ever need a justification for going on a killing spree, watch this film or one of its many clones, which always feature a scene where some ingénue sings along to a pop hit while nursing a glass of white wine in her underwear, and always ends with these mouth-breathers getting married or reproducing. This was a dastardly life template that provided impossible aspirational ideals to people who had no lives to begin with. It predefined happiness for people who needed to be told they were supposed to be happy. It was like seeing a documentary about life on another planet. I wondered what aliens might make of the film as anthropology. Like that classic story about how the only evidence left of life on a long-burned-out Earth is a Donald Duck cartoon.

  It was charming. It was delightful. It was worse than drinking barium. As I slouched in my miniature seat I felt the glassy gazes and toothpaste smiles of the other passengers crowd in on me. When had airlines downsized the seating to fit the average petite Japanese? I did not belong here, among these benighted idiots. Ignorance really was bliss, it seemed from their vacant expressions and vapid laughter.

  I was happier than civilians could ever fantasize. Because I had a talent, something I was good at. Few were better. I needed to prove that to Mal Boyd and all the phantoms who stood behind him, judging me. I wanted to stay in my world, off the grid, not transition to this shallow pastel purgatory, which was the one-and-only life goal for many of our fellow pedestrians.

  But then, I’ve always thought Thanksgiving could be improved by initiating a lottery system whereby a family can elect one member to kill. Carve the bird, add fresh whipped real cream to that pumpkin pie, and stone Uncle Carl to death because he’s a fucking pedophile.

  I wondered if Elias had smuggled my Kimber along on his trip. If he was working a movie gig he had probably zipped east in a private jet, a thousand feet higher and a hundred miles faster than my lumbering commercial heavy. No such thing as baggage checks on those sporty Hawker 800s and Gulfstreams. You could toss a bag of M-16s and plastique into the cargo bay and nobody would blink.

  Also riding clandestine class with me, disguised in a diabetic kit, were several ampoules of tripaxidine B, the instantaneously acting knockdown I had used on Dominic Sharps. Did you know that airlines permit a diabetic to board with unlimited syringes? Too late, I thought of jamming myself into unconsciousness to avoid the damned movie.

  Airport security was a fool’s illusion, administered by amateurs. If I had to remove my shoes for a walk-through scan, I wanted to wear six-day-old socks. I had a phony passport and ID, a custom gun, plenty of ammo, two completely nonlegal knives and a complement of deadly drugs … but no gelignite up my ass or beauty products, so I was permitted. I recalled the story Cognac had once told me about being detained for her nipple rings—that must have been festive.

  Poor Cognac; I did regret killing her a little bit.

  Five years ago, before Cognac, I had become enamored of a woman provisionally named Dawn Marie Sonderhoff, an independent contractor, same as me. She was technically married to some beard in Las Vegas and her cover job was as a substitute teacher in some elementary school. I never saw the school or the husband, but I saw quite a lot of Dawn Marie on weekends when we could both work it out (via another poetry ladder of coded phone contacts). We had a lot of sex in the best hotel suites subterranean cash could buy, after a lot of big-ticket meals in the restaurants most avoided by frugal tourists. She pulled me into her with an almost feral hunger and you could sense these interludes were a lifeline for her. Any and all stress generated by her double life, her white picket fence, and her elective assassination jobs got sweated out when we joined up. She was a true sensualist and we were both grown-up and smart enough not to complicate what we had, inside our safe little bubble, by splicing on the shackles of a relationship. We had what we had inside a safe zone where the rubrics of the dull, conventional world outside did not apply. It was comforting enough that we achieved a fundamental connection that could never be disrupted by time or the background players in our separate lives.

  One single time, I went to Dawn Marie’s home at her invitation. Her happy lumpen hubby was state-hopping or business-conferencing, or as she put it, “off screwing Asian hookers because he’s adding stomach and losing hair.” Her house turned out to be a characterless McMansion in some development, with all the right cars in the garage, a rarely used yet overremodeled dream kitchen, and a depressing abundance of beige. It was the sort of norm paradise I would have pegged as a halfhearted cover house. No dust would ever accumulate here, nor history.

  Exactly three family photos were strategically positioned in the cubbyholes of the living room’s prefab entertainment center—one stilted, ultra-stiff wedding pose that did not bespeak any sort of fulfillment, and one shot each of the branch tribes. Hubby’s crew was a sprawl of relatives whose generational pride resided in their breeding capacity. Dawn Marie’s similar gang shot said two things: Dawn Marie’s family did not get together very often, and Dawn Marie had gotten the best of their gene mix. Her two sisters looked like horsy failed experimental iterations of her. It had taken Mom and Dad three tries to get it right.

  Hubby, of course, had invested considerable effort in impregnating Dawn Marie without knowing it
was foregone. Without offspring or teacup humans to impress his tribe, he had been written off as a failed branch of the tree and left to channel his frustrations into work, long hours away from home, and Asian call girls. Problem aborted.

  By moonlight we swam naked in her pool and made love in her Jacuzzi. It was very important to her that I occupy—for one single night—the bed she shared with hubby (she took his side; I took hers), a bed that appeared brand-new and utterly unused. She wanted to remember me in that bed, even though after I had gone she would restore it to its usual undespoiled state.

  That’s when it struck me: Dawn Marie was completely comfortable within this asphyxiating suburban death trap, because it compensated for the other half of her life as a contract operative. It was her safe house, her fallback, which was why it had never developed as a home in any meaningful way.

  Then—also one single time—I saw her work. I watched from a distance. It was another of those drug-monkey sausage parties. She did not trust her hand-to-hand skills and stuck to gun work, triple taps to three targets in a couple of seconds, chest-chest-head. She was using a Kimber then; that’s where I got the inspiration.

  That was when I saw the true light: she needed both lives, the frantically covert and the dunningly dull. They were her balance; her yin and yang. My own “normal” existence was spent waiting for the next job. I had nothing like what she had already found.

  Dawn Marie was the only person who ever called me on my birthday. Granted, I never told anyone else the date, and granted, she used secure phones and never identified herself, but I knew it was always her, just checking in.

  Elias’s girlfriend Char reminded me a bit of Dawn Marie—same body language, same flashing eyes, hints of a similar attitude.

  I never found out what happened to Dawn Marie other than she got killed in a complex operation involving Mafia goons, but in the private rooms of my mind I always maintained the fantasy that her death was a firework, a showy display to mask an identity switch, just like mine. In my version of the story, Dawn Marie was still out there, and one day she would make contact again.

  If she was really, truly dead—dead-dead—then there was always the chance we’d be reunited in some warrior’s Valhalla when I finally bit the big one.

  I snapped awake uncomfortably to the stench of burning in-flight coffee, thinking (just for a nanosecond) that I was on approach to Vegas instead of New York. My eye was gelid with gut-wrenching lumpiness.

  Air travel had lost so much of its getaway allure.

  * * *

  Clavius owned an entire floor of a building up in the Seventies, West Side, and was simple to stake out from the Lucerne Hotel on West Seventy-ninth, dead center between the river and Central Park. Using the next card from my deck of IDs I got the highest room I could, but it was still a radical up-angle view from my roost to that of Clavius. I could sneak onto the rooftop for a more level vantage, but it would still depress a sniper. Looking down, though, I had excellent coverage on street level.

  Each of my identity packets had an ID for differing states of origin, a passport for same, and four credit cards with astronomical limits for which I would never see a single invoice. The bottommost identity was nearly two years old and I was leery of testing it to see if it still played. What I really needed was a refresher session with my prince of documentation in L.A., a grizzled cowboy named Rook. But a stop at Rook’s would be on Mal Boyd’s checklist, so I spared him and rolled with what I had already.

  Today I was George Walker Boult, an insurance claims field adjuster from Chicago, fresh from a one-year around-the-world cruise that explained his lack of recent air travel.

  It didn’t take long for George to fix a 20 on Elias’s runaway ladyfriend, Charlene Glades. She strolled out of Clavius’s high-rise looking like about a quarter-million bucks on the hoof, a walking Elle cover in soft brown leather and cashmere. Over-the-knee boots with dangerous heels whose lift brought me another sharp memory jolt of Dawn Marie, my lost Vegas compatriot.

  I cornered Char in the elevator at some garment factory in the mid-Thirties between Seventh and Eighth. The district was a sad shadow of its former fashion glory, and had been ever since the Gambino trucking slap-down forced out most of the designer crème in the early 1990s, leaving millineries and cutting shops to be redeveloped into retail space and condos. New York, of course, wanted to reverse the en masse flight, but zoning and sky-high rents hobbled the rebirth, which was still dodgy and under radar.

  Char immediately recalled me as “Mister Kimber,” and that just made me madder. She smiled hesitantly. I smiled back with grinding teeth and set the lift for the top floor. She bridled, so I stuck a gun in her face and changed her expression superfast.

  “There is no Mister Kimber,” I said, close enough to breathe on her. “I’m Mister Boult. You can call me George.”

  The eighth floor was stuffy and abandoned, still waiting in dusty silence for its face-lift. I sat Char’s ass down inside a room full of dismembered mannequins, ancient wire-frame body forms, and decommissioned office equipment; empty desks with drawers rusted shut, broken chairs exuding the smell of rat piss from chewed and sprung stuffing, several stacked tons of obsolete paperwork, and the moldy blanket miasma of water damage.

  “Where’s Elias?” I said.

  In any sequestration scenario valuable time was always wasted by the subject, who felt the outraged need to establish her own bona fides. Yes, I was that man from the night in the loft. Yes, that was a real gun. Yes, I knew what I thought I was doing. It was so ingrained it had become a bore years ago. I needed to see a bright, wet spark of fear in Char’s almond-shaped eyes, since she was practically begging to be roughed up. Yes, I had killed—

  “What the fuck do you mean, Elias said I killed people?!” I almost shouted. I could see flecks of my own saliva in the dust-moted air between us. “When did you hear this from Elias?”

  “Today!” she shouted back at me, higher volume. “About an hour ago!”

  I got sick of bulldogging her back into a busted chair every time her body tried to lunge for escape. The chair was minus a wheel and listed to port. “You keep this shit up, I’ll tie you to the chair and roll your ass right out the window,” I said. “Where?”

  “Right here in the city!” she said. She was only just getting the idea that her life might depend on whether I believed her. “Like an hour ago!”

  Holy shit with a capital shit.

  I had tailed her for longer than that. She had moved in and out of five or six public places, the longest layover being at a pub on Amsterdam with a terminally bad view through the front windows. I guessed lunch and kept my distance. I had guessed wrong.

  Then I remembered. Dude in a baseball cap and sunglasses who came out of a coffeehouse right after Char had grabbed her first cab. His collar had been up and his face, mostly obscured. No goatee. Just another cabber in a city of taxis. He had to tail her that way. Me, I had already taken Char’s cab number and hacked into Yellow’s GPS destination base, so I didn’t haul ass out the door on the mark, which is what I should have done.

  “He didn’t say where he was; I only saw him for about five minutes and he was acting totally insane; he said you killed Nasja and now Joey’s dead and and and—”

  In fact, she was starting to babble the way Joey had. Backhand slap, left, right, snapped her trap in midrant. The floating dust was already harassing my weak eye.

  If I went ballistic on her, the way I had on Elias that first night to subdue his protest, Char would just dish that anger back in equal measure. Yelling would not work with this woman. I kept my voice low and steady. It creeped some people out, that flatness.

  “Listen to me, Char: none of that matters. It’s a long story you don’t have time for. Concentrate. Simple answers to simple questions. Yes or no would be splendid.”

  She wasn’t crying, not yet. She’d fight the impulse to run off at the eyes because Mr. Boult was manhandling her.

  “You saw Eli
as at that pub?”

  “Y-Yes.”

  “He came all the way to New York to tell you I killed somebody?”

  “He said you were framing him! Yes!” Her pupils were down to pencil points, I realized. I was getting an erection.

  “Why, Char,” I said, keeping my tone avuncular. “What are you on, sweetie?”

  She shot me the “fuck you” look. Whatever Elias had told her back at the pub had stirred her up enough to grab for the blow stash.

  “Where is Elias now?”

  “I have no idea!”

  “Does Clavius know?”

  “No, no, no!” She shook her head like a child with increasing velocity. “Clavius doesn’t even know I saw him. Clavius got a call from the police about Nasja. Then about some Internet thing. Then about Joey, because of the loft. Clavius says somebody is trying to frame him. That’s all he told me. Really. I swear to—”

  I overrode her silly and futile desire to convince me I could trust her. Just a tap, for emphasis. Really, why do people swear so vehemently when they’re lying their asses off, seeking to deceive and dissemble?

  Dawn Marie had been all about the bottom line. Char had reminded me of Dawn Marie from first glimpse. Staring at Char now, it was easier than ever for my damaged eye to make the substitution. Close up I could see her boots were Hussein Chalayans, with straps. Expensive.

  Her voice clicked dryly. “What-what are you-you going to—?”

  I sighed. What did it matter, what I was going to do? Jeezo-pete.

  “What is the name of the man Elias knows in the movie business?” I said.

  This seemed to take her completely by surprise, which meant her previous speech was most likely true. I saw the squirrel running rampant in her brain stop and focus for a moment.

  “What … do you mean Tripp?” she said as though I had just asked for a cupcake recipe.

  “Not a trip. A person.”

  “No, no, Tripp is a person, I mean, his name is Tripp. Bergman. Bergen. Something like that.”

  I suddenly felt sorry for anybody stuck with the name Tripp. But Char thought she had lucked onto an escape hatch with flashing lights. EXIT HERE. Then she had another brilliant idea.