Two in the Head

by Eric Beetner

  So we fell in love. And I had to make a change.

  But first, the ante.

  ANTE UP!

  To the best of my knowledge no one in the DEA ever got hurt as a result of my information. A few of the drug dealers and low level scum-bags had been shivved, shot, beaten, strangled and one met his end via a plastic dry cleaner bag over the head, but none of my guys ever got hurt.

  Until the night. I should have known in the game I was playing there is always a night like that.

  A sting buy was going to happen. It all came together quickly thanks to a new hot shot named Duane Something-Polish-no-one-can-spell, a hyperactive puppy who talked non-stop about transferring to D.C. from the second he set foot in our humble office.

  Anyway, he sets the buy so I have almost no time to let the boys know about it. I even thought I should let it go. I can’t be there 100% of the time. They really never even called on me much; one way I knew I wasn’t the only agent on the payroll. If it wasn’t me feeding them inside dope, it would be someone else.

  Truthfully, I called in details of the buy more for the payout than anything else. The fear of being Jimmied all over someone else’s jacket wasn’t really forefront on my mind anymore. We had a nice thing going, the twins and I. I hate to say it but those boys who should have been all Latino machismo and sexist to a new degree, were more respectful of me than most of my coworkers. And they paid better than the agency. Tax free.

  One younger guy who used to open doors and little else at Calder and Rizzo’s office once made a grab at my tits and the next time I came by he walked with a limp and sported a new gold tooth where a perfectly good one used to be. Coincidence? Maybe. Probably not.

  So Duane SomethingPolish and three other agents, me included, went to a warehouse space on the east side to make the buy. I hadn’t had time to talk to anyone directly so I left a message (something they frowned on because of the physical evidence it left) and talked to one low level dealer I knew to see if he could get word up the chain. If all went well they would know to stay away and we’d be spending an evening waiting for Godot.

  We’re all waiting there and I’m expecting an empty house, a cancelled performance. We’d wait, Duane would check his watch a thousand times, curse them out for giving him blue balls and we’d be on our way home before midnight. No one gets hurt.

  Then two of Calder and Rizzo’s guys walk in.

  I don’t know if they didn’t get my message, if they did and didn’t care or if they wanted to make some sort of statement this time. They crept in the back. For big guys they walked silently. Each held an assault rifle down around his waist. Each sported black coats over black jeans and kevlar vests like Mexican Columbine shooters at the wrong address.

  I saw them first since I hung at the back, or rather they saw me. I couldn’t tell you if I’d ever seen them before but they must have known who I am because they saw me, they looked me in the eye and walked past before they opened fire.

  Duane’s big Polish melon went first and damned if they didn’t light him up like a pumpkin on Halloween. His seeds and stringy bits went flying.

  The shooting was over in about ten seconds. Didn’t take any more time than that at the rate those guns fired. U.S. manufactured, 2nd amendment approved government agent killers. Well done, congress. Wish you were here to see your handiwork.

  Three agents cut down. And I mean cut down. Like a tree gets cut down by a rusty chainsaw. Hacked through the middle by a line of bullets, their insides churned to mulch.

  Adding insult to extremely severe injury they took the money meant for the fake drug buy and walked out. They never said a word to me. They knew they didn’t have to.

  That was the moment I realized I was in too deep. I’d rationalized it before then, telling myself I was nothing more than a speed bump on an already rocky road to justice for Calder and Rizzo. When the time came and they were behind bars, I’d no longer be beholden to them and I could work hard to make sure they went in and never got out. And now with Lucas I could give him enough information to send them to the electric chair on a rocket and keep my hands clean while I sold them out.

  It wouldn’t have been much of an answer for the old, “Where do you see your career in ten years?” but it was all I had at the time.

  After that there were other incidents. I’d crossed some sort of threshold with them, or maybe passed a test. The game got more violent, the consequences of each phone call and meeting became more threatening to my own brother and sister agents. I started thinking of how to pull out but each time I remembered that damn bolero jacket.

  Then came the deal three days ago.

  LET’S MAKE A DEAL

  Calder and Rizzo summoned me for a face to face. A rare occurrence. I went to their office, parked under the rickety looking carport, and went up to the tenth floor.

  Drinks were already iced and waiting on the glass table. Gin martini with a twist of lime for me. They knew somehow even though I never told them. It scared me.

  The meeting started all praise and thank you, thank you’s.

  “You’ve been our best insider,” Calder said. He was always the more talkative of the two. I liked the way his thick mustache bounced when he spoke. Rizzo tended to hide behind his long hair and I always felt like he harbored secret fantasies of ditching the narco life and joining a Rock En Español band.

  “I didn’t know,” I said, checking their belts for guns, their cuffs for bulges of snake-skinning knives. Everything seemed friendly. Know what though? Some of the friendliest guys I’ve ever met are car salesman. And whenever you talk to them you can let the smoke and mirrors blind you for a second but you always know it’s only a matter of time before the catch. There’s always a catch.

  “Samantha,” Calder started. “We want you to join us.”

  “Full time,” Rizzo said. They both smiled. Their light Mexican accents made everything sound happy and covered in guacamole. I had to fight to remember who they were. Killers. Drug dealers. Whenever I did think of those things I heard it all in Lucas’ voice. He had a bad habit of bringing work home with him, and since I’d been staying at his place most nights for the past month since our engagement I’d heard quite a lot about the case he built against Calder and Rizzo. A solid case too. Kept my lip zipped on that little tidbit.

  I’d kept any knowledge of my personal life way away from them. If they knew about my dating—and Christ—getting engaged to Lucas, I doubt that would go over too well.

  But, shit. I looked down at my martini and knew I’d been an idiot to think I could keep anything from them.

  “Your contacts can be valuable to us, but even more so when you don’t have to be afraid of getting caught.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” I asked.

  “You come work for us. Tell us what you know. All of it. Like a big bang, you give us everything. Make us smarter to deal with the forces trying to destroy us.”

  They meant Lucas. They meant my agency, my friends. They wanted me to burn it all down, make the case against them go away.

  “Ten million,” Calder said.

  “Up front,” Rizzo added.

  I hadn’t taken a sip of gin yet and my brain went fuzzy around the edges. Ten million dollars?

  Calder smiled. “You see the look on her face?”

  “She’s wondering…”

  “Where’s the catch?” They both laughed.

  I attempted a smile to keep up appearances, but I was shitting scared.

  “You will have a new life. A new start. Your old life will have to go away.” Calder leaned forward, his smile drooling off his face and his mustache suddenly looking less jaunty. “You understand, go away?”

  Not at first. Call me slow, but I wouldn’t have understood this deal any less if they gave it to me in Spanish. I provided them information, how much more did they want? I’d gone from simple interruptions in the DEA’s pursuit of them to causing multiple agent’s
deaths. And I did so without complaint, because to complain would be to ask, “Can you sever my head and throw it in a shallow ditch, please?”

  I really didn’t want to hear it but I made them spell it out for me.

  And they did.

  SPELLING BEE

  They were paying me ten million dollars to make the case against them vanish, and with it—Lucas.

  They knew all about us. I bet if I’d pushed it they could have showed me pictures and video. I was close enough to Lucas to eliminate him and everything he knew and, on my way out of town, destroy anything related to the case at the DEA office, including several of the task force team members dedicated to putting the brothers behind bars. All the while keeping their hands newborn clean.

  Ten million up front to trade my fiancé’s life. A reliable paycheck afterward for cleaning house on the agency and giving up any trade secrets I might know. It was some sort of bizarro-world witness protection program.

  And only if they kept their word and didn’t bind me, throw me in a trunk and ship me to Mexico to use as a piñata the second the deed was done.

  “We give you time to think about it,” Calder said.

  Time to say yes, he meant.

  I walked out of there a punch drunk zombie. I spent the night in my own apartment, calling Lucas and telling him I had a migraine. Pre-wedding jitters he called it even though we weren’t supposed to get married until next year. Now he wasn’t even supposed to be around next week.

  I thought about it between bouts of throwing up. The twins were good to me. I weighed the chances of them understanding if I declined their kind and generous offer. I came up with all the ways I could still work to derail the case without killing anyone, especially Lucas.

  I’d stay working for them, keep it status quo, and use my closeness with Lucas to let them know details of the case. I’d be condemning witnesses and informants to death but I wasn’t engaged to any of them.

  They had to understand. I think Rizzo even had a little crush on me. That would work to my advantage, right?

  WHICH BRINGS US TO TONIGHT

  I went there tonight to answer their proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse—by refusing the offer.

  I said no deal. I thanked them. Thanked them! Offered my services in all the ways I could detail. No matter what words I used it all came out like exactly what it was—a plea for my life.

  This time I gulped the entire martini with a twist in one go while I waited for them to say something back to me. If there had been a line of cocaine I’d have done that too, even though I’d never touched the stuff before. A morphine drip, two Tylenol—anything and everything to take away the pain in the interminable pause while they looked at each other and spoke in some sort of twin ESP or something.

  Calder ran a finger over his mustache. Rizzo brushed wisps of jet black hair from his eyes. Fuck it. Kill me now.

  But no, the blood might dirty up their hands.

  “We understand, Samantha. We are depressed, but we understand.”

  I spat out a laugh so unexpectedly, a tiny ball of spit flew from my lip and landed on Rizzo’s snake skin boot. He remained polite and pretended not to notice. Ever the gentleman.

  I thanked them again about a hundred times and got the hell out of there and back down to my car parked next to the brick wall.

  AND THAT BRINGS US BACK TO…

  … now the girl who looked like me walked back inside. I watched her go, all purpose-driven and catwalk stride, and I noticed my eyes were cloudy with tears that hadn’t fallen. My world blurred and became soft. I blinked and fat pools of water fell and cut streaks through the cement dust on my cheeks.

  After the way she killed the two grunts who obviously planted the bomb—a bomb which had been there the whole time I was inside declining the offer, by the way. Guess the twins already knew my answer.

  The smell of burning car and burning clothes was overtaken by the stench of burning skin as the impaled and shish-kebobbed man on the ground burned through his layer of clothes and the flames from the car-part skewer reached his flesh. I had to get away.

  I opened my eyes to slits and ran closer to the door, stopping on the end of the carport, the end without the collapsed roof, and took shelter against the brick wall, figuring its twin saved my life once already tonight.

  I needed to see Lucas. I needed his help, and just to hold him, have him tell me it was going to be all right. I wasn’t going to confess. I’d have to explain about the bomb and my car, but I couldn’t tell him the truth.

  And yet…

  Even as I made plans in my head about what to say, the words were turned around into the truth. Into a full confession. I’d think one thought and like two magnets repelling each other, the truth would flip my lie around.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew I still needed to see Lucas. Driving there was out seeing as my car was under a pile of bricks and fire. My first instinct was to show my DEA badge and commandeer a car from a citizen. But this wasn’t strictly in the line of duty and I had the same odd feeling. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. I couldn’t violate that rule.

  I did not like this feeling. I wanted my head cleared, this concussion or stroke or whatever brain bruise I was dealing with to heal over so I could think clearly and do what I could to solve this thing. Calder and Rizzo would know soon enough that I wasn’t dead yet and they’d work hard to make me so.

  Maybe that’s why the woman was going upstairs. But why hadn’t she just killed me herself when she had the chance? I started to doubt again if she was even real. Maybe the two men were killed in the explosion and I’d imagined the whole thing.

  Then something really weird happened. The harder I wondered about what went through her mind, I started to see…things. Flashes at first. Static. Broken images like old videotape or a half-remembered dream.

  I started to see things I thought she would be seeing, as if I were looking through her eyes, but in a weird overlay double-exposure sort of way. Instantly my head hurt. I closed my eyes and the double exposure went away. I could see her point of view as she pulled open the lobby door. The image cracked and warped, skittered and froze, then skipped forward. I concentrated harder on bringing the view into focus and my vision of her eyes came through a little clearer.

  She got on the elevator. What the hell was happening to me?

  I heard the sound of a bus. The number seven. I knew there was a stop for number seven only a block away from Lucas’ house. I’d cursed out that bus many a morning when I was running late for the office and it loitered on that corner loading on people too poor to afford a car.

  A short stab of pain spiked through my brain as I thought that cruel thought.

  No time to dwell on any of this weirdness now. I ran for the bus. Well, limped at a faster pace.

  Again, normally I would have flashed my badge and gotten a free ride, but instead my hand dipped into my pocket almost on its own and I dropped exact change into the slot.

  I must have looked a mess. Clothes askew, covered in dust, smoke from the fire staining my clothes. Anywhere else but a public bus at ten at night I would have stood out. As it was, barely anyone noticed me. I took my seat and felt a deep tired wash over me.

  In the back of the bus a man with a walker stood and began shuffling his way toward the side exit doors. This might take a while. I shut my eyes but when I did I had the visions again. The elevator. Buttons lighting up as it climbed. It was like I was there, or remembering I was there. Some sort of flash from earlier my brain was trying to point to.

  The sound I heard came through hollow, like a set of headphones a few feet away and maybe those headphones were at the bottom of a fish tank. I screamed at my brain to listen harder.

  It wasn’t a memory. Somehow I knew this was what she was seeing. The woman who saved my life and who had my face.

  She entered Calder and Rizzo’s office. A man I knew only as Gustavo stood, obviously sh
ocked to see her—me—stride right in with only a few scratches in the leather of her jacket. Gustavo is a big man who packs a big gun. I only wish I meant that as dirty as it sounds, but I mean a real gun with bullets. He reached behind his back for the gun. The other woman was ready.

  Without missing a stride she plucked a stapler off the desk (receptionist had gone home at a normal hour) and flipped it open like a switchblade, swiping it across his face and tagging his cheek with a tiny metal piercing. It was enough to throw him off balance and wonder what the hell happened. A few frames went missing in the live feed to my brain but I could tell she moved in on him and straddled over Gustavo, whacking three more staples quickly into his forehead.

  This was no memory of mine. It was like my wondering what was going on up in the offices conjured this elaborate fantasy inside my damaged brain.

  She put a hand on the arm pinned behind his back and wrenched the gun loose. So now she had a gun. I felt some phantom pressure in my hand, my years of experience holding a gun, I told myself. Power of suggestion with the vision I was seeing.

  Even from ten floors down outside I had a weird sensation that if it was my hand the gun rested in I wouldn’t be able to use it. I felt no desire to shoot, no knowledge of how to fire a weapon even though I had six sharpshooter citations at home to prove my expertise with a sidearm.

  “Stay,” she said in crackly antique radio quality. “Or everyone dies.”

  She immediately came off Gustavo and marched through the double doors into Calder and Rizzo’s office. The image remained frustratingly scattered. It went black and white a few times. Froze, the sound dropped out, the image bent until I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a face or a flower pot. I bent over in my seat and tried to block out all other stimulus from the world outside and listen and see what was happening ten stories up like my sister let me eavesdrop with a tin can and string.