“What’s wrong, kiddo?” he asks, then, “Wait. Is this a secure line?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s my personal phone. I locked it down myself.”
I may suck at talking in code, but I can encrypt and secure a line like it’s no one’s business, so I don’t have to speak in metaphor. Or maybe it’s because I can secure a phone line that I never really learned. Eh. Chicken and egg.
“Good,” he says. “So, tell me what’s wrong?”
“There’s this job,” I say. For a moment, I struggle how to get the embarrassing details out.
“Took on more than you could handle, eh? We’ve all done it.”
“Sort of,” I say, and before I know it, I’ve spilled everything.
“Oh, sweetheart, that’s tough.” He is silent for a few seconds. “Look, I know growing up, you always said you wanted to kill the bad people, and that’s sweet. You’re like one of those kids who goes to law school thinking every client they get will be innocent. But sometimes in this business, the good guys or sometimes the just okay guys go down. It’s the nature of the beast.”
“But…”
“Listen,” he says sternly. I suppose by calling him dad, I’ve invited this sort of fatherly tone. “You did good on that Thompson job last year. Was it sloppy work getting all those other people killed? Yes, absolutely no question. Did Bill Thompson deserve to die? Maybe, maybe not. It’s not my place to care. But professionally, it put you into a place where you can be choosey. You don’t have to take contracts on the good guys. I’m happy for you. That’s the dream. You turned down the job. Good for you. But you can’t go getting in someone else’s way just because you don’t like the contract. It doesn’t work that way.”
“But it’s Dan Germany! You grew up watching this guy. I grew up watching you watch this guy!”
“I get it. It sucks,” he says. “Nobody wants to kill their heroes. For you to jump in and try to stop it, that’s unprofessional.”
“But-”
“End of discussion, young lady,” he says. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get a head count for the Fourth, and I expect you to do your best to knock out that foreign leader business early and make it to the barbecue. Lullaby Jones is going to be there, and you know how sad he gets when he misses seeing you.”
Ugh. Lullaby. Of course he’ll be there. He was big in the nineties but hasn’t done a job of note in years. What else does he have to do? He was supposed to be an opera singer when he was younger, but as he has told me the story so many times, fate’s a funny thing, and now I’m expected to spend a whole night with him belting arias at me? Now I’ll definitely make sure I’m busy.
“See you, Houston.” I say.
“See you too,” he says. “At the party.”
I slump in the driver’s seat and roll my eyes. I’ll be stuck listening to Lullaby all night telling me how great he is, and to make matters worse, Houston is right. Professionally, it would be bad for me to stop the hit on Dan Germany. What would I do? Kill the guys they send after him? Steal their guns? I have to work with these people. I’ll never get a gig again if people knew I did that.
“If people knew,” I said to myself, proverbial light bulb flashing on over my head. “But who says they have to know?”
I couldn’t warn him, obviously. If I tell the old man someone’s out to kill him, it might spook him, cause him to shake up his routine, and that might tip off my colleagues that someone’s feeding the target privileged information. For obvious reasons, I can’t get directly, visibly involved. Accidents happen, and accidents are my wheelhouse, bad luck is my specialty, even if I am known for that one sniper shot. After all, the official report on the Bill Thompson accident was a blown tire. Car tires blow out all the time. People get sick. Car keys are lost. Surely someone of my ability could keep Dan Germany alive without anyone the wiser.
I just needed to find him. And figure out who was coming for him. And when. And how. And where.
Bodyguarding is hard, I now realize. Killing a man is easy. You watch the guy. You spot his patterns, his vulnerabilities. You pick the time, the place, the means, all of which can play to your strengths. Defending a guy? You have to watch all places at all times for all threats. Thinking about it, I don’t know how anyone in good conscience could charge money for bodyguard services. It’s such a racket. Unless someone with no training comes at you at close range in some painfully obvious way, bodyguards don’t stand a chance. Hell, Kennedy had a whole branch of government to keep him safe, and how did that turn out? Even the Pope, who has God watching his back, drives around in bulletproof glass.
What have I signed myself up for?
Chapter 5
JAIME
GROWING OLD BUT NOT TO DIE
“Pick your new you,” I said, and a large book of photographs fell on the coffee table in front of Danger Man with a booming thud. He jumped a little, which worried me. I’m supposed to attempt the most hare-brained stunt I’d ever heard of, and he jumped at a little noise. I was going to have to work with that fight-or-flight instinct. The Marquis had left already, as he usually did once we’d given the client the convincer and settled the specifics of the job. Maybe that was why Dan was so jumpy. He was just afraid to be alone with me. The dead woman. The freak.
“What do you mean?” he asked as he slowly pawed through page after page of pictures and brief medical histories.
“Part of this deal we have going is you become someone else, right? After you die, you have to be someone else. Who would you like to be?”
He looked stunned, confused. I guess this part of the transaction never got fully explained to him.
“Let’s start over,” I said. “What did you think was going to happen to you after we faked your death?”
“I don’t know,” he said, scratching awkwardly at his neck, his chin. His fidgets were driving me crazy. I was not looking forward to having those fidgets. “You guys would give me a new driver’s license, new birth certificate. Maybe some plastic surgery. It’d be like witness protection or something only permanent.”
“Oh sweetie,” I said and patted his hand. “We can do so much better than that.”
“How?” he asked.
“The same way I come back from the dead.” I paused and let the realization build on his face. “Magic.”
“You mean…,” he stammered. “I could be young again?”
“If you want,” I said. “It’s your money. Or Ambrose’s. Either way, not my concern which face you pick.”
Danger Man mouthed an inaudible cry of astonishment, then turned back to the first page of my face book and read more carefully. Several minutes in, he disappeared into the bathroom for what sounded like an extended vomiting session, no doubt from the shock of everything that had happened and the weight of the decision before him. After a few minutes of silence, he returned, much calmer than I’d seen him all day, and he resumed the search for his new identity. Two bowls of cereal and three episodes of Highlander later and he had settled on a guy in his mid-twenties, good shape, strong jaw, athletic, and no medical history worth noting. I texted the sample number 3581694-4A to a blood donation center I’d made arrangements with, and within the hour, an anonymous cooler arrived on my door step containing a pint of AB+ and a note saying the supporting identity and all related documents would be ready within two days. I didn’t know how the Marquis coordinated all of this, but I was beyond grateful that he did.
“How does this work?” Dan asked. “I mean, what’s the blood for?”
“The blood is for you,” I said, “but first, I’ll need a sample of your own.”
“What for?”
“Like I said. Magic.”
I took him into the bathroom and pulled out my supplies, an IV needle, a pint bag, and the usual assortment of tubes and sterilizing agents. He watched intently as I took a pint of my own blood and stored it in a micro-fridge.
“Your turn,” I said.
He shuffled uncomfortably for a moment.
/> “What’s the matter?” I asked. “You afraid of needles or something?”
“Needles give me problems,” he said and avoided looking my way.
“Unbelievable. You can jump off a building, but you can’t handle a little needle.”
“Can you take it from my leg at least? The veins in my arms aren’t so good.”
Fair. In my phlebotomist days, rolling veins drove me crazy. If sticking him elsewhere would simplify my life, so be it.
Lowering his trousers, he turned his leg, directing me to a spot on his upper thigh that had taken a needle recently, and offered, “Blood tests. Fact of life at my age.”
I shrugged and collected his sample then had him pull his pants back up. No sense prolonging either of our embarrassment, me hanging out that close to his pendulous scrotum.
“Before I do this, do you have any medical conditions I need to know about? Heart problems or digestive problems? Are you currently taking any medications?”
He said no, but I felt sure he was hiding something. Hopefully just something embarrassing like erectile dysfunction or herpes, but if worse came to worst, if it was something more serious, it wasn’t like I would have to live with it for long. I shrugged it off and readied the spell.
“Do you want to go first or shall I?” I asked.
“Umm, I’ll go first, I guess,” he said, and I obliged by drawing a circle on the floor with sample 3581694-4A’s blood. Dan squirmed uncomfortably as I wrote the arcane symbols with my sticky red fingers.
“Are you a religious man?” I asked.
“No, why? Are you going to conjure up the devil or something?”
“No,” I said, “but there’s something about bloody magic circles on the floor to make people nervous, and while you don’t have to sit perfectly still, it’s no bueno to go flailing any part of your body outside the circle while the spell’s going on, and it’s definitely a bad idea to make a run for it once the magic kicks in. I just need to know you’re not going to freak out on me.”
“I’ll be cool. Don’t worry about me,” he said.
I shrugged. “Very well. Take off your clothes and step inside the circle.”
He gave me a look, and it was all I could take not to chuckle. It doesn’t matter who you are or what the circumstances. If you ask a guy to get naked in front of you, somewhere in his head, he’s weighing the possibility that you will try to have sex with him. Pulling off his shoes and socks, awkward at first then confident, he continued undressing. Shirt, trousers, tighty whities, until standing before me was a raisin of a man, arms folded across his chest, brandishing what he had as proud as a peacock.
“You wish,” I said.
“Oh, you say that now,” he said with a sly grin. “According to you, I’ll be a fit young fella in a few minutes, and then won’t you wish you hadn’t said that.”
“A few minutes after that,” I replied, “and I’ll be a shriveled old man, and won’t you feel awkward if we did.”
He laughed, genuine and deep, and all the folds and wrinkles of his skin shook. “Yeah, but what a story!”
I almost liked this guy. Without wasting another moment, I started chanting. The circle at his feet began to glow and I saw the first changes taking hold. His skin tightened, his hair, where he had it, gained color and pulled back into his scalp, and where he had lost it, it crept out, stretching from his crown for the first time in years. His muscles toned up. Then came the painful part. He cringed as the bones stretched and compacted, resizing his body to fit the new frame. To Danger Man’s credit, he did not scream as I had seen others do. Perhaps it was the hundreds of broken bones he’d sustained over his professional career. Either way, I was impressed by his mettle, and soon the transformation was complete without the need to shout over him.
The man who was Dan Germany stood in front of me, naked and beaming. Not proud like he was earlier. No, I knew what he was going through, the transition from old man to young buck. So many aches and pains you learned to live with so long ago, all suddenly gone. He tensed and released his arms, flexed his fingers and toes, then giggled like a small child telling his first joke. He was a new man, and he knew it. He leapt, whooped, and quite suddenly grabbed me and kissed me, not in a sexual way, but as an expression of pure, unadulterated gratitude.
Then he pulled away, and the sexual way set in. “Are you sure we can’t…?”
I would have been lying if I had said I wasn’t tempted. He was handsome, for sure. Chiseled features both in face and physique. Gorgeous blue eyes, and a nice, thick head of straw blond hair I could really tangle my fingers in. Under normal circumstances, I would give it a whirl. But these were not normal circumstances, and we had work to do.
“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I said as I set about bandaging his arm where the sample was drawn.
He looked down, disappointed, and then noticing his new body’s dimensions, the disappointment grew. “Can you do anything about… my uh…”
“You chose it. You live with it. With any luck, you’re a grower, not a show-er. Now shoo,” I said. “I’ve got my own transformation to make and I don’t want your young, uncontrolled libido watching.”
I chased him from the room, scrubbed the old circle off the floor, stripped down, and braced myself. Becoming young was easy. All the little pains went away. But becoming old, all those aches hitting at once instead of gradually over decades. It was like getting a hangover and then going fifteen rounds against Joe Frazier.
And then, quite unexpectedly, it subsided, slowly at first, and then suddenly I was awash in a warm euphoria, wrapped in a blanket of perfection I never wanted to crawl out of. I couldn’t think, but a realization dawned on me. The euphoria. His jittering and scratching and vomiting. It didn’t come to me on an intellectual level; my mind was far too soft for complex thought. No, I understood because I recognized it, because I had spent years fighting that battle. Dan Germany was a heroin addict. Which meant for the time being, I was a heroin addict. I was either going to have to pull off this stunt high as a kite or wracked with withdrawal.
Damn.
Chapter 6
OLIVIA
GODS AREN’T WHAT THEY USED TO BE
It’s a difficult task, protecting someone whose whereabouts I don’t know from enemies I can’t pick out of a lineup, who will strike in ways I can’t imagine. I decide the first step is confirming the number our Mister Smith used can actually be traced back to Mister Smith himself. Lucky for me, it can, which in turn gives me a real name, Raymond Malone, a home address I don’t need, and a cellphone number. Pay dirt. If I can get on his phone soon enough, I can find out what hound he’s setting on Danger Man’s trail.
I’m not much of a code monkey, but the Internet is full of people who are. After a few short minutes chasing leads from Google to Stack Overflow to GitHub, I have a virus for his iPhone that will send me his GPS coordinates and allow me to access his microphone remotely. I would worry about how to plant the virus, but as easy as it was to get his information, I figure he’ll probably fall for the old “Your system is not secure. Click here for blah blah blah.” I log in to one of my anonymous, official sounding e-mail addresses and shoot off a carefully crafted message laced with paranoid ideas. Someone may be listening. Data might not be secure. The sorts of things that keep a mobster up at night. Nothing else to do on that front but sit back, wait, and hope he clicks the link to my hosted virus.
Finding Danger Man will be more difficult. All my research says he’s essentially been a flat broke drifter for the past decade, living mostly on cash and popping up in hotels all across the country, only rarely stopping by his squalid one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia, usually just long enough to catch up on his back rent. No credit card or phone number to put up an alert for, which is just as well. I don’t have the skill set to track those, and though I have a number of people who owe me favors for pro-bono services rendered, I don’t want to call them in, not this early in my career. All the coolest people who de
al in favors horde them, and if I’m going to play their game, I should be smart like them and not use them until I have to.
I set a Google alert to tell me if any articles are published online about Danger Man. If I’m lucky, it will let me know the next time he pops up in some small town to do an appearance. A little more reactive than I’d like, considering if I don’t move quickly he’ll probably be gone by the time I arrive. Still, a semi-fresh trail is definitely better than no trail. Again, if I’m lucky. Hopefully, he does something before someone does something to him, or else all my alert will tell me is that Dan Germany was found dead in his hotel room and he will be missed. Not ideal.
And then I sit. And wait. And clean my weapons, working my way from smallest to largest. Queen “Bloody” Mary I, my Colt .38 Detective Special snub nose pistol, on the left to Bonnie Prince Charlie, my sniper rifle, on the right. Eat some Ramen. Play some FreeCell. Watch a Highlander marathon on TV, which reminds me to try calling that immortal guy again, but unsurprisingly, he doesn’t answer. Bastard.
I’m so bored, I almost don’t hear my phone go ping, dismissing it instead as one more invitation from Houston to play stupid Facebook games that I will resist for months, break down and accept, then dive into obsessively until I get mad and uninstall it. But it’s no Houston on a
I practically fall out of my chair racing to my computer, synching my monitoring app there to record anything that passes across his line. The rest of the day is spent feverishly comparing his transmissions with Google research. It seems our man has found someone else to take care of his tree problem. Someone I’ve never heard of. Someone who didn’t balk at the price. Good. An amateur. I also discover why they want Danger Man dead. Gambling problems chasing down a drug debt, compounded by a failure to settle things with the mob because he was too high to carry out the errand they sent him on. He was a god to me when I was a kid, and now this? My heart breaks a little, and a part of me dies. Oh, Danger Man, how the mighty have fallen.
The Daredevil Corpse (The Departed Book 2) Page 3
