Goodman flinched in pain and sank to his knees. He rubbed his forehead and steadied himself by leaning on his club.
“You son of a bitch,” he said, standing. The ball left a red welt the size of a quarter.
I stepped toward him. “I’m just getting started. The next thing I’m going to do is shove that club up your ass.”
“Not so fast, you freakish fuck.”
“You and your mouth need some manners.” I got closer.
He held his hand up and dug into his pocket. He tossed something at me.
A cell phone. I caught it. The phone had a leopard skin cover, like Carmen’s.
My ears and fingertips tingled in alarm.
I opened the phone and recognized the photo on the screen—Carmen blowing herself a kiss.
It was Carmen’s phone. How did Goodman get it? The tingling turned into an electric shock.
“The last message in her voice mail was from you, Felix.” Goodman rubbed the knot on his forehead and winced. His frown changed into a smile. “Behave yourself, and you might see her again.”
Chapter
39
Carmen captured?
My mouth went dry. My fingers started to tremble and I forced them to keep still. “This is a trick.”
A dozen men in black uniforms appeared from behind the trees and bushes. They pointed submachine guns and assault rifles. My fingers trembled again. I’d come here thinking I was the tough guy and instead I stumbled into their trap.
My thoughts careened into one another.
Everything in this case had been about the darkest of conspiracies and the confluence of cold-blooded human cunning and alien murder. What was the Araneum warning? That I not allow one of us vampires to get compromised.
But I had. Worse, it was a good friend, someone who had saved me.
The trail leading here began with the death of one alien, so were other aliens involved in her capture? I didn’t know, but how else could Goodman have managed to snag Carmen?
Another golf cart rounded the corner past a stand of live oaks and palms. The cart drew closer and I saw Krandall driving, Peltier by his side. Both wore matching dark uniforms and equipment harnesses. At the party, these two looked like pampered yuppies; now they had the menacing presence of wolverines. An HK submachine gun with a silencer rested on Peltier’s lap. Make that armed wolverines.
Carmen had gone to see them for a session of casual sex. So these two had set her up. How? They and Goodman had to know more about us than I could imagine. What device—alien or otherwise—had they used to capture her? Carmen? Mice subduing a tiger made more sense. My kundalini noir tightened in confusion.
Goodman would tell me. Quick as a thunderbolt, I seized him by the neck. I whirled him around to use as a shield. If the guards opened fire, Goodman would be the first to die. Movement rippled through the security detail as they steadied their weapons to shoot.
Goodman waved his arms. He coughed twice and pulled at my fingers. “I’m okay.”
Peltier and Krandall cupped their earpieces and shouted into the microphones clipped to their harnesses. “Check fire. Check fire.”
My talons pressed into his throat. “Where is Carmen?”
Goodman squirmed from the pain. He turned to look at me. The arrogant smile of his was long gone, replaced by a grim, hateful stare. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
“One of them, who?”
“The alien Gilbert Odin.”
Goodman knew about aliens and had me mistaken for one of them. A little bit of good news.
Unfortunately, I was surrounded by bad news. If the guards opened fire, I would kill Goodman first and then leap at Krandall and Peltier and slash their throats. After that?
“Easy now,” Goodman said. “Don’t forget about your friend.”
He didn’t need to repeat the threat. What were my options? Only one.
“I’m not leaving without Carmen.”
More armed men crept out from the surrounding trees and brush.
“I knew you’d say that.” Goodman couldn’t keep from gloating.
I gave him a fresh taste of my talons. “If you think you’ll survive this, think again. I’m going to tear that smile off your face before this is over.”
Goodman’s face turned red from the pain. He gasped, “You want Carmen? Then let up and you’ll find out what I want from you.”
What could he possibly want? I relaxed my hold.
Goodman’s color faded and he stumbled and coughed. He turned his attention toward Krandall and Peltier. “Tell everyone to stay cool. We’re going inside. Pass the word.”
“Inside where?” I poked my talons into Goodman’s neck.
He winced and grabbed my wrist. The guards steadied their aim.
“Somebody wants to talk to you.”
“Who?” My kundalini noir coiled in alarm.
“Mr. Big.”
“You’ve lost me.” I gave Goodman’s neck another squeeze.
He choked and clutched at my fingers. “You want to talk to the one in charge, let’s go.”
My kundalini noir coiled tighter.
That arrogant glint hovered in Goodman’s eyes. “You don’t have a choice. Carmen, remember?”
I thought I had come here to bully Goodman. Instead I was the one with my back against the wall.
Goodman clasped my hand. “Mr. Big wants to talk. He’s got questions about you and your friend.”
“Who is this Mr. Big?”
“Does it matter? You don’t think you can handle him? I thought you wanted your friend back. No? Then stay out here and pick your nose.” He gestured toward the guards. “They need something to do.”
I had Goodman by the neck but he had me by the balls. I let go. “What kind of questions?”
“That’s between you and him.”
I looked back at Krandall and Peltier. She was touching her earpiece.
I warned them: “There isn’t a bullet fast enough to kill me before I can rip the heart out of your boss. Either one of you want to bet that I couldn’t kill you now?”
I expected Peltier to flinch in horror. Instead she put a hand on her submachine gun and flicked the safety to the fire position.
I pushed Goodman into his golf cart. “You drive. Don’t want to keep your Mr. Big waiting.”
He got behind the wheel and I sat next to him. I rested my hand on his shoulder. “Goodman, if I detect anything suspicious…”
Goodman massaged the red marks I’d left on his neck. “You mean more suspicious than being escorted by a platoon of armed guards through a golf course?”
Good point. “Despite what you think,” I replied, “the odds aren’t in your favor.”
“Don’t get too cocky, my weird friend.” Goodman’s demeanor frosted. “I’ve made a career of beating the odds.”
“So have I.”
Goodman pursed his lips in contempt before giving a rude smile. He pressed the accelerator pedal and the cart rolled forward. He drove on the asphalt cart path toward the hotel. I counted more than thirty guards along the way. Hotel guests gathered a safe distance from the display of firepower and gawked at the spectacle.
My sixth sense buzzed constantly, from what, specifically, I couldn’t tell. Despite the fact that he was but one short second from decapitation, Goodman seemed at ease; then again, he was a professional assassin. A squad of snipers could be aiming for my head, or the cushion under me could be hiding a Claymore mine.
I thought about what got me started on this case. “You murdered Odin, didn’t you?”
Goodman sneered. “You can only murder humans.”
“What about Marissa? She was human.”
“I had to.”
“Why?”
Goodman kept quiet.
I poked a talon against his ribs. “You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to live, either.”
Goodman said, “Sure you want to do that? It would make your job harder.”
“Why woul
d you care? You’ll be dead.”
Goodman must have thought about that, because he offered, “The nosy bitch knew too much.”
“About whom?” I asked. “Naomi Peyton?”
The color receded from Goodman’s ruddy cheeks. “You know too much.”
“Not enough. What about Vanessa Tico and Janice Wyndersook? Where are they? Or did you kill them too?”
“They’re still alive.”
Where? Why? Are they with Carmen? “Why are you telling me this?”
“To make you aware of the stakes involved. You make a wrong move and it’ll be more than your friend Carmen who gets popped for good.”
I snatched Goodman by the throat. He grunted like he was passing a stone. “Don’t put their murders on my head.” Droplets of my spit sprayed into his face.
The cart shuffled to a halt. I wanted to squeeze his neck until his eyeballs popped out.
“You caused their commuter plane to crash, didn’t you? And murdered seventeen more innocent people.”
“It’s called collateral damage.”
Collateral damage? “What about Karen Beck? More collateral damage?”
Luminous red spots the size of peas floated on my arms. A couple of the dots hovered on my nose and dazzled my eyes. The guards were painting me with the laser pointers on their rifles.
Goodman’s eyes traced the laser dots dancing on my face. “Go ahead and play the angry macho man. See where that gets you.”
It would finish me off and Carmen would remain a prisoner. I let go. The laser dots disappeared.
Goodman took a deep breath. “I did what I had to do.”
“What you’ve done is mass murder,” I said. “And you’re admitting it?”
“What are you going to do about it? Tell the world? You’re a fucking alien.”
Alien? By using the word, Goodman admitted he knew about the extraterrestrials. I wanted to shout my questions at him, then pick him up by the ankles to shake the answers loose. But if I asked him, then I’d be giving away what I knew or didn’t know. Let him think I was an alien.
“What do you care?” he said.
I grabbed his collar. “I care about Carmen. Why did you do it? Why did you murder all those people? To cover up the kidnapping of Tico and Wyndersook? To kidnap Carmen?”
Goodman tensed his arms as he put a death grip on the steering wheel. His knuckles turned white. “Ever try making people disappear? Pretty soon the numbers add up and the goddamn noise about what happened to all these broads can get fucking deafening.”
“You like being a murderer on the government’s payroll?”
Goodman stared, and his expression grew ever more hateful. “Do me a goddamn favor, Felix. Don’t patronize me. I know I’m a henchman for this kleptocracy we call a democratic republic. I’ve always been a soldier. I still am. They give me my orders and I say, yes sir, three bags full.”
“Only following orders? You sound like a Nazi.”
Goodman stepped on the accelerator. The cart lurched forward. “Read your history books.” Goodman added a dismissive look. “We didn’t beat the Nazis by being pussies.”
“These are innocent women, not Nazis.”
“Orders are orders.”
“If you ever met Mother Teresa,” I said, “I’m sure she’d shoot you.”
“Not if I shot her first.”
“What happened to the blaster you used on Marissa and Odin?”
“I gave it back to Mr. Big.”
Was Mr. Big an alien? Why had he ordered the hit on Gilbert Odin? What did Mr. Big have to do with the disappearance of the women? Was this the threat the Araneum wanted me to investigate? Every question was like a box with another question inside.
We passed through a cordon of guards. Goodman nodded at them and they nodded back.
“Think you’ve seen everything?”
“Why do you ask?” I replied.
“Because if you think you’ve seen everything, guess again, wise guy.” Goodman smirked. “Compared to what’s coming up, you haven’t seen shit.”
Chapter
40
Goodman took a left and followed the fence around the service area. We rolled behind the maintenance shed and the Dumpsters and continued past the parking garage.
I’d come here to rescue Carmen and instead I was letting my enemies take me deeper into their lair. The guilt of failing to protect her weighed on me. My hidden ace was that Goodman assumed I was an alien and had no idea that I was a vampire. When the time came, I hoped my supernatural powers were enough to help me find and free Carmen and for both of us to escape.
Krandall and Peltier trailed behind us with three more carts and a Gator after them. Each of those carts carried three armed guards, the Gator four. To complete our little circus parade all we needed was a brass band and a bear riding a tricycle.
Our convoy went beyond the back of the hotel and halted at the gate in the chain-link fence around the enclosure of the annex building.
Two guards wearing sunglasses and cradling submachine guns waited for us. An electric motor retracted the gate.
Goodman drove the cart over the threshold and into the grassy enclosure the size of a baseball infield. A concrete pad with a yellow H occupied the middle of the enclosure. This was where I’d seen the military helicopter land before.
The annex, a featureless three-story box with the antenna farm on the roof, stood to our right.
The gate closed behind us. The guards and the other carts remained outside the enclosure. As far as I could tell, Goodman and I were alone, though I was sure we were being watched.
I didn’t notice an entrance into the annex until Goodman headed toward a concrete driveway that inclined into the ground under the wall. We proceeded down the incline. A metal door scrolled open and we entered an underground corridor.
My kundalini noir tightened with apprehension. I put my hand on Goodman’s leg above the knee and pressed my talons into his thigh. If this was an ambush, I’d pull him apart like a wishbone.
Goodman didn’t slow the golf cart as we drove onto the linoleum floor and under the fluorescent lights. The whine of the cart’s motor echoed in the hall. The corridor continued straight down a long tunnel that must connect the annex to the main hotel building. A second hallway opened to our right. Placards on the doors of wall compartments indicated access to power and water conduits. We made a right turn at this second hall and stopped at a set of elevator doors. They pinged open and waited for us. We were being watched, for sure.
Goodman halted in front of the doors. I locked my fingers around his arm. We got out of the cart and walked into the elevator. I turned Goodman toward the video camera in the upper left corner. I grasped his chin and lifted his face to the camera. I scratched his neck with a talon to make him wince. “There’s more of that, if your friends are not careful.”
The doors closed and the elevator rose. I got ready for anything and held Goodman by the back of his collar. If the floor dropped, I’d leap through the ceiling. If a flamethrower sprayed fire, I’d use Goodman for cover.
The elevator stopped on the second floor. In the moment before the door opened, I listened carefully. I detected no rustle of clothing, no muffled click of a weapon’s safety moved into the firing position, nothing that threatened me.
When the door opened, I pushed Goodman in front of me into a deserted foyer. A simple steel door stood across from us. A red light glowed above the access lever. The light went off and a green one lit up.
Goodman grasped the lever. He paused and glanced over his shoulder at me. Did his look telegraph a warning?
“Think twice before you try to surprise me, Goodman,” I warned.
“You’re going to be surprised all right, hero boy.”
The door swung open. We entered a large sitting room decorated with high-end wood furnishings. Pistachio-green floor mats, table linen, and tapestries accented the room. Fresh flowers—red alpinias and camellias, purple and white pansies, an
d yellow trumpet flowers—stood in crystal vases on a console table and a credenza. Despite the blossoms, the room smelled like a humidor.
A fabric screen of shiny green material partitioned the floor. Past the left side of the screen I could see the door of what looked like a freight elevator. What did that transport?
In front of the screen sat an emerald-green velvet love seat and a leather cigar chair. This place was right off the cover of Better Homes and Gardens.
Something stirred behind the partition. Mr. Big? My sixth sense tingled.
Chapter
41
“Colonel Goodman, you are dismissed.” The voice was high-pitched yet sounded male, like a teenage boy breathing helium.
Goodman tugged against my grip.
I held firm. “You and I are in this for the duration.”
“We have your friend,” the voice behind the screen reminded.
Goodman gave a dirty grin, like he’d wiped a booger on my sleeve and there was nothing I could do about it.
I let go. Goodman straightened his rumpled collar. He backed out the door and it snapped closed. A light beside the door lock went from green to red.
Who lurked behind the screen? I knew it wasn’t the Wizard of Oz. I was sure it was an alien and hoped it didn’t come out with Carmen’s head in one hand and a blaster in the other. My kundalini noir knotted into a tight ball, like a fist ready to strike.
I removed my sunglasses and surveyed the room again, looking for any obvious threat. I could trust nothing and expected the worst.
“Have a seat, please,” the voice said from behind the screen.
I walked to the love seat and cigar chair. Both pieces of furniture looked normal enough. A step of polished heavy wood had been pushed against the front of the chair. Why the step? Was Mr. Big a midget?
An end table, in a finish matching the step, separated the chair and love seat. On the table sat a heavy crystal ashtray and a shallow glass bowl with a red cactus blossom floating in water.
The step indicated that the chair was reserved, so I stood beside the love seat and waited. I remained very still, to let my sixth sense absorb every nuance. My muscles remained primed to react to anything.
The Undead Kama Sutra Page 19
