The Devil’s Bed

by Krueger, William Kent

  • • •

  He woke again to the feel of hands and the sound of voices.

  “That’s right, Thorsen. Time to go night-night.”

  They lifted his legs and turned him so that he was sitting up, more or less. Bo saw a line of lights like a string of bright pearls against the black throat of the night and the rain.

  “Come on, buddy. Just a few steps and you’re there.”

  They helped him up. He stood unsteadily. He looked back. At first he saw a huge, gaping mouth. Then he understood that it was a car trunk. They’d lifted him out of a car trunk. That seemed odd. But they were helpful.

  “You can do it, Thorsen. That’s right. A step at a time.”

  Rain fell against his face, cooling and refreshing. The fresh air felt good after the stuffy car trunk. The air carried on it a familiar scent. The dank, muddy smell of the Mississippi River.

  “There we go.”

  They leaned him against a metal railing. Bo looked down. In the flash of lightning, he saw the river far below him, black and shiny for a moment, then lost in the dark again, and the rain.

  He knew where he was. His old stomping grounds. The High Bridge over the river. In the shadow of that bridge, he’d lived with his family of runaways in the old bus.

  “Damn it, Curtis, hold on to him.”

  “It’s the goddamn rain. He’s slippery as an eel.”

  Bo felt them grasp him low around his hips. He knew he was about to travel again on the black river he’d driven so often in his nightmares.

  But this was no nightmare.

  Bo gathered himself around that small, hard realization and acted without thinking. His body moved in the way he’d trained it for nearly two decades. He yanked his arm loose and delivered a hard kick to the knee joint of the man to his right, who went down howling. The other man Bo struck with a forearm blow to the middle of his face, and a fountain of blood squirted into the rain. Bo lurched away from the railing toward the car that sat idling on the bridge.

  “Christ, don’t shoot him,” one of the men hollered.

  Bo tumbled into the car parked at the curb, and he slumped over the wheel. As he jammed the stick into gear, the front door on the passenger’s side popped open. He hit the gas, and the car shot forward. Behind him, someone screamed a curse.

  Bo sped across the bridge into St. Paul. He was sleepy, barely able to keep his eyes open or his foot on the pedal. The car swerved across lanes. He mounted the bluff to Summit Avenue and headed west along the rain-swept street between rows of big, fine houses.

  Where? he tried to think.

  Not to Tangletown. They would look for him there.

  Then he thought of Diana Ishimaru. She lived on East River Road, less than a mile from Tangletown. All he had to do was stay awake for a few more minutes and he would be there.

  He drifted, heedless of stoplights. Dimly, he understood that it must be very late because there was almost no traffic. On East River Road, he tried to remember which house was hers. In the dark and the rain, it was hard to tell. He pulled to the side of the street, and the front right wheel jumped the curb. He jerked the door handle and tumbled out onto the pavement. He stumbled up the walk to the front door, leaned against the clean white wood, and pounded.

  The porch light came on. The locked clicked, the door opened, and Bo fell forward. A man caught him and stood him up.

  “Diana?” Bo said.

  “Ishimaru? Diana Ishimaru? She lives next door.” The man swung his hand in that direction. He wore a white robe and an angry look.

  Bo took a couple of steps back into the rain and almost toppled over.

  The man said, “Drunken asshole,” and slammed the door.

  Bo crossed the wide lawn, tramped through a flower bed, reached the porch of the next house, and hit his fist against the door.

  Diana Ishimaru answered immediately. Despite the hour and being dressed in a red chenille bathrobe, she looked wide awake.

  “Bo? Jesus, come in out of that rain.” She reached out and took his arm.

  Bo stumbled into the hallway. “Tried to kill me…” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Coffee,” he said. He leaned against the wall. He felt so tired.

  “Out of those clothes, first. You’re dripping all over my rug.”

  She led him to the bathroom. By the time she came back with dry clothes, he’d curled up on the tile floor and was drifting off.

  “Bo.” She shook him. “Here, let me help.”

  She worked him out of his shirt and then his pants. That left him in boxers. “I’ve done all the helping I’m going to. Get out of those wet Skivvies and into these things.” She dropped a set of gray sweats into his lap. “I’m going to make some coffee.”

  Slowly, Bo finished what Ishimaru had started. She knocked on the door, came in, helped him stand up, then walked him into her living room, where she settled him on the couch.

  “I’ll get the coffee and be right back.”

  Bo laid himself down. The couch cushions felt so good, so soft, so welcoming.

  Diana Ishimaru was an enigma in many ways. Although Bo knew where she lived, had driven past her house many times, he’d never been invited inside. So far as he knew, none of the agents in the field office had. In this way, and others, she’d kept her personal distance. As he took in the interior of her home, Bo was treated to a side of Ishimaru he’d never seen. A pair of gold-flaked screens decorated with cranes separated the living room and dining room. In the middle of the table near the front window sat a zen rock garden, six stones in raked white sand. On top of her bookcase were two clay pots containing tiny bonsai trees. On the wall behind the sofa hung a mirror in a blond wooden frame into which had been carved the delicate image of birds perched on branches. Bo was surprised by all this, for in her office, Ishimaru kept little evidence of her ancestry. He was just closing his eyes, ready to dream of the Orient, when Ishimaru shook him vigorously.

  “Wake up, Bo.”

  She pulled him upright and shoved the coffee cup into his hand. As he sipped, she drew an armchair near him and sat down.

  “All right, what’s going on?”

  In a stumbling patchwork of narrative, Bo told her everything. About the president’s request. About his own investigation into NOMan. About the men who’d drugged him and tried to throw him from the High Bridge. Although he got all the information out, he wasn’t certain how coherent it was. At the end, he felt better, but only a little less tired than before.

  Ishimaru looked thoughtful. “I haven’t been able to sleep, thinking about everything that’s going down now. I’ve had a bad feeling about a lot of this, but I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was that felt hinky.”

  “Sorry about blowing up this afternoon,” Bo said.

  “Forget it. We’ve got more important things to worry about.” Ishimaru stood up, stuffed her hands into the pockets of her robe, and began to pace. For a little while, she said nothing, then she looked at Bo, who was tilting to one side. “That coffee hasn’t done you much good. Go ahead and lie down. Get some sleep. You deserve it.”

  Bo followed her suggestion. “What about you?” he asked as he let his eyelids close.

  “I’ve got some heavy thinking to do. Considering the cloud you’re currently under, you’re not going to be viewed as the most reliable source. But rest, Bo. Let me worry about that now. You’ve done a good job.”

  Bo appreciated that. Coming from Ishimaru, it meant a lot. He finally gave himself over to the sleep that had been calling to him for what seemed like forever.

  In his sleep, he heard the sound of thunder, but it was a different kind of thunder. Fragile. More like the shattering of glass.

  He struggled to come up from his good, pleasant dreaming. As he opened his eyes, his head exploded. A stunning blow sent him right back into the dark from which he’d just climbed. Deep enough to dream again, this time a nightmare full of blood, but only for a moment before he tried once mor
e to pull himself back to consciousness. As he did so, his body was yanked upright.

  “Good,” he heard a voice that was all too familiar say. “Now put the Sig in his hand.”

  He felt the press of a gun butt against his right palm, and a hand molded his own hand around the grip. He felt the trigger slip under his index finger.

  “Where?” the voice asked. “I think between the eyes.”

  “No. Stick it in his mouth. An agent like him would eat the bullet.”

  Bo felt his hand rising under the power of another hand. An alien finger wormed its way into his mouth, prying his jaws apart. The finger tasted of leather.

  Bo bit down hard.

  “Jesus, God,” the voice screamed. “He tried to bite my finger off.”

  Bo dimly aimed the gun in the direction of the voice and he fired. The sound of confusion followed, the clatter of upended furniture.

  “Move, goddamn it,” someone shouted.

  Two figures, vague in Bo’s vision, merged with the dark near the back of the house. A door slammed shut. Everything fell quiet.

  Slowly, Bo stood, wavering in his stance, trying to pull his senses together. His head hurt and his eyes still felt heavy. He took a step forward, and he stumbled, but not from his own weakness. He looked back at what he’d tripped over. His heart nearly broke.

  Diana Ishimaru lay at his feet, her eyes half open. Had it not been for the small, bloody hole in her forehead, Bo might have thought she was simply staring at the ceiling. Although he knew it was useless, he reached out and felt at her neck for the pulse that was not there. From beneath her head, from the exit wound Bo knew would be large and ugly, blood leaked, spreading across her clean beige carpet, staining it steadily fiber by fiber.

  “No,” Bo cried. “God, no.”

  He stood up and gripped the gun tightly in his hand. He wanted to kill the men who’d done this. He wanted to blow their fucking hearts right out of their fucking chests.

  He stumbled toward the dark at the rear of the house where the men had fled. As his thinking cleared, he realized the uselessness of pursuing them. They were well gone by now. He looked back and saw that he’d tracked blood across the room. Her blood.

  He stared down at the gun in his hand. It was a Sig Sauer. He checked the registration number. His Sig. And he was pretty sure that the only prints on it were his as well.

  Slicing through the sound of the storm outside came the whine of a siren approaching. Someone had called the police.

  chapter

  thirty-nine

  Otter opened the side door of the church and stared as if Bo were an apparition straight from a nightmare.

  “Christ, Spider-Man, you look like shit. You’re soaked to the bone.”

  Bo stepped in out of the night and the rain. Barefoot and dripping wet, he stood before his friend.

  “What happened to your shoes?”

  “I was in a hurry.”

  Otter looked past him at the wet, empty street. “Where’s your car?”

  “I walked.”

  “From your place? Barefoot? In this rain?”

  “I need to sit down,” Bo said.

  Otter shut and locked the door. “Come on downstairs. We’ll get you into something dry.”

  It was a big, stone church, quiet and deserted at that hour. They walked past vacant pews dimly illuminated by a single light above the altar. Otter opened a door to a stairway and they descended to the basement. They crossed through a large gathering room with a kitchen off to one side, then they snaked down a couple of hallways, past the boiler room, and through an open door that let them into Otter’s quarters.

  The room, whitewashed cinder block, reminded Bo of a monk’s cell. A narrow bed, a table and two chairs, a chest of drawers straight from the Salvation Army, a small kitchen area with a compact refrigerator, a sink, and a short counter on which sat a microwave and an ancient-looking electric coffee percolator. Through a door at the other end, Bo spied a tiny shower stall and a toilet. Plants hung in every corner, Otter’s own touch that mitigated the austerity of the place. Despite what Bo knew must be a lack of direct sunlight, the plants seemed to be thriving.

  “Get out of those wet things,” Otter said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He left the room and Bo stripped off the sweats Ishimaru had given him. Otter came back in a few minutes with an armload of folded things that included pants, shirts, socks, tennis shoes, and even a clean pair of boxer shorts.

  “You prayed up a miracle?” Bo asked.

  “Donations. We’re collecting for a mission in Africa.” He took Bo’s wet clothes and hung them in the bathroom. “You look like you could use a cup of java.” Otter went to the cupboard above the sink and brought out a can of Folgers. He started coffee percolating.

  “The police will be looking for me,” Bo said.

  “You do something criminal, Spider-Man? Thought you’d outgrown that behavior.”

  Over his second cup of coffee that night and dressed in his second ensemble of borrowed clothing, Bo laid out for Otter what had happened.

  At the end, Otter shook his head. “And I thought I was the one who saw spooks everywhere.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, Otter. I can imagine what the police would say.”

  “You got to tell ’em, Spider-Man, no matter how crazy it sounds. You got to let somebody know.”

  “Nobody’s going to listen to me. I’d end up in a locked cell, and right now I don’t want to be anyplace NOMan could find me.”

  “What do you think they’re up to?”

  Despite the coffee, Bo wanted to lie down. He felt weary in every muscle, his feet were bruised, and he knew his thinking was fuzzy and desperate.

  “Otter, you mind if I sleep here for a while? Then I’ll figure things out.”

  Otter waved toward the only bed. “Mi casa is su casa.”

  “I owe you,” Bo said.

  “It never worked that way, and it never will. Sleep, Spider-Man. I’ll stand watch.”

  Bo laid himself out on the rumpled sheets of Otter’s bed and was asleep almost immediately.

  Bo came out of his dreaming as if he’d been yanked. He grabbed the hand that had been laid on his arm.

  “Take it easy, Spider-Man. It’s just me.”

  Bo stared into Otter’s face.

  “You were having a nightmare,” Otter said.

  Bo released his grip and relaxed back down onto the mattress.

  “You okay?” Otter asked.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost four.”

  “I didn’t sleep long.”

  “Four in the afternoon.”

  Bo realized that sunlight lit the opaque basement windows. Otter had put a fan on a chair, and it blew damp, basement-smelling air across the bed. The current also carried the aroma of coffee.

  Otter sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. He studied Bo for a minute, then he said, “They’re looking for you. It’s all over the news.”

  Bo sat up. “Have they been here?”

  “Relax. You’re safe.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “‘Famous Secret Service agent wanted for questioning in the shooting death of his boss.’ There are reports of a fight yesterday in your field office.”

  “Fight? I barely raised my voice.”

  “I’m just telling you what they’re saying on the news.”

  A knock at the door made them both fall silent. Otter motioned Bo toward the small bathroom. Bo slipped in and closed the door. He listened, but all he could hear was the low murmur of voices.

  Otter tapped at the bathroom door. “You can come out now, Spider-Man. The coast is clear.” When Bo stepped out, Otter said, “That was Sandie Herron from the church office. She asked me to help her with a computer problem.”

  “Do you know anything about computers?” Bo asked.

  “Not much.” Otter smiled shyly. “I think she likes me.”

  Bo came back with a grin of his
own. “Well, good for you, Otter. Sandie, huh? Nice name.”

  After Otter had gone, Bo put some toothpaste from the bathroom cabinet on his finger and did a quick rub of his teeth. He poured himself coffee from the electric percolator, opened one of the windows a crack, and peeked out at the sunlight. The wet smell of the earth near the window was the only evidence of the heavy rain the night before. He couldn’t see much. An old Victorian home across the empty parking lot. Patches of blue sky between big elms. Probably a lot like the small square of the world a prisoner would see from the window of his cell.

  Bo turned on Otter’s radio alarm clock and tuned in KSTP, a Twin Cities all-news station. He sipped his coffee and didn’t have to wait long before a report about Ishimaru came on. It didn’t sound good. Nor did it look good, him dropping off the face of the earth while he was being sought “for questioning.”

  He wondered if he should try to contact Lorna Channing. The slip of paper with her number on it was in the clothing he’d left at Ishimaru’s place. Any attempt to go through White House communications would end up with Secret Service involved. And maybe NOMan. As well informed as NOMan seemed to be, he couldn’t even be certain that using the code name Peter Parker would be safe.

  He had to think, to sort everything out.

  Someone had tried to kill him, probably because of his investigation into Robert Lee’s death. He was pretty sure that the someone was NOMan. But what was the broader picture? What specifically had Lee’s probing, and now Bo’s, threatened? Uncovering the connection between NOMan and Senator Dixon was too simple a reason in itself, and too simply explained if brought to light. There was something darker in the works, something that questions, any questions at this point, might jeopardize. But what was that something?

  In half an hour, Otter was back. He knocked and announced himself. When he came into the room, he said, “I’ve been thinking, Spider-Man. These NOMan people, they seem to know what you’re up to. That means that they probably know who you’ve talked to, right?” Otter poured himself some coffee. “I’m wondering about Tom Jorgenson. I mean, if he knows things and talked to you, wouldn’t they want to shut him up?” Otter sipped from his cup. “He’s got Secret Service and all, but they don’t know about NOMan.”