I was supposed to be doing something, but I couldn’t remember what. Just ahead and to the left, I saw flaming rings and I remembered that I was supposed to go through them for some reason that must have made sense at the time. But I did it. It felt right. It felt natural, floating through the canyon toward the flames, drifting through the rings, each narrower than the one before. In the middle of the last one, a burning streak pointed downward, a rope on fire, and beneath it a glint of golden light caught my eye. Something hung there, and reflexively, I swooped to grab it. It cut my hand as I flew past, but my grip held strong and I found myself in possession of something jagged and metallic.
Ahead of me, I saw a platform. I knew I was supposed to go there but I was coming in too fast. Instinctively, I arced up, trying to catch a little more wind, hoping to slow, but it wasn’t enough. I pawed at the suit looking for something I knew should be there someplace, some cord or something. There was a thing strapped to my chest, but it wasn’t that. Too many wires. That was a bad thing, some hazy recollection told me. That was a thing I wanted gone. Hanging on my shoulder, I found a cord, which I yanked hard, jolting me backward.
A parachute. Of course.
I drifted down toward the platform, spotting an envelope resting in the center. I needed that envelope, I remembered. That envelope got rid of the thing on my chest. The bomb on my chest. The bomb. Shit.
I maneuvered as best I could but came up short, the parachute having slowed me too much too soon. I hit the ground in a roll and detached the chute straps as quickly as I could. The metal thing in my hand broke loose and clattered across the ground. It was a small brass key. The countdown on my chest said I didn’t have much time. It was still a little fuzzy what I was doing here. I just knew I wanted to live. Death by explosion made for a slow recovery. That was a long wait in blistering flame I would have liked to avoid if I could. I dove for the key, scooping it up in my bleeding hand, then raced for the platform and scrambled up the scaffolding. All the while, the timer on my chest counted down. Beep. Beep. Beep.
I had sixteen seconds by the time I cleared the top.
By fifteen, I’d rolled completely onto the platform.
I clambered to my feet by fourteen seconds.
Fumbled with the lock. Thirteen.
Twelve.
Eleven.
Ten.
Click. A cover popped off, and I saw a keypad inside. Nine
Sprinting for dear life. Eight
Seven.
Grabbing the envelope and tearing it open in one motion. Six.
I read the number printed there. 4981. Five.
I punched it in frantically, fat-fingering the combination. Four.
I tried again carefully.
Three.
Two.
Silence.
The timer froze on one, and I realized I hadn’t taken a breath in a long time. The air was as sweet as ever I had known.
Overhead, crowds cheered. Did Heaven itself celebrate my escape from Hell’s fiery clutches? I took a bow.
No, I remembered as the adrenaline subsides. No. I was supposed to die here. I forgot to die. I was being paid to-
I heard a click and the timer beeped. Sabotage!
Zero.
The world came to a standstill in this millionth of a second, the same sort of “oh shit” time freeze you got right as you realized your keys were still in the car, but it was too late to stop the door from locking behind you. In this moment, there were distant staring faces, a cool breeze on my left side and a blazing flash of light and pressure rising up from my chest.
Then I was torn to pieces in an instant, and the fires took me.
Chapter 26
OLIVIA
FIND A FRIEND TO CALL YOUR OWN
“Don’t get me wrong, Olivia,” Houston tells me, shoveling the four-hundred-calories-per-serving potato salad down his throat. “This is good, but it’s store bought. Your recipe is better.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s just I’ve been busy lately and the fridge hasn’t been working so I couldn’t chill a home-made batch properly.”
It’s not exactly true. I have been busy, but my fridge is working fine. It’s just full. After the explosion, the stunt coordinator guy and I ditched our assistant uniforms and ran down to the bottom of the canyon to the landing pad to scavenge for pieces of the exploded Dan Germany. According to the coordinator guy who calls himself Ambrose, the immortal being posing as Dan Germany regenerates from the largest remaining piece. Usually, it’s the whole body that regrows a hand or something, if that. Not this time. We search for forever, doing the best we can to find the biggest piece before the medics show up to help.
We develop a pretty good system, he and I. We stash the biggest part we find and “assemble” the rest as best we can, keeping track of how much more of the body we need to locate before we can confidently declare to have the regenesis piece. When we find pieces smaller than the hidden body part, we add it to the reassembly. When something bigger comes along, say a calf after we found a hand, we swap it out with the previous reigning champ piece and put the old one on the pile. That’s how I ended up with a thirty-pound chunk of old man thigh in my fridge, which over the past couple weeks has turned into a complete leg, the lower part of an abdomen, and the upper portion of the other leg, the floppy jibbly bits between the legs now fully intact.
He doesn’t want to hear that I have a corpse regrowing in my fridge or that consequently all of my meals for the past while have been fast food, which includes virtually no vegetables. I figure it’s safer to tell him the fridge is out.
“I can take a look at it if you need,” he says. “I wasn’t always a contract killer, you know.”
“Yes, you were,” I say. Fathers are static creatures, always exactly as you remember them even when they aren’t, and always were as they are now. “You know nothing about fridge repair.”
“Okay, you’re right,” he says. “I was just going to buy you a new one and make you think I fixed it. But I did have a life before killing people.”
“I didn’t,” I say, taking a hotdog from the grill and slathering it with obscene amounts of mustard. They never give me enough at Hot Dog Heaven.
“You did,” he says and drapes an arm over my shoulder. “It was just very short.”
He’s right. I did. Eight years with two miserable excuses for humanity. I chose to go with Houston. I asked to learn what he knew. I wanted this life, and if I had to do it all over, I would make the same choices. Mostly. “It is lonely though, this line of work,” I say.
“What are you talking about? Look at all these interesting people! There’s Fishback Dominick, married with three kids. Mbodji the Shadow has a fantasy football league. The Rose has two thousand followers on her knitting blog. She’s a guest of honor at knitting conventions when she’s not working. Did you know they have knitting conventions?”
“No,” I say.
“Neither did I until I got to know her,” he says. “Put down that hotdog and get out there. Talk to people. Make friends. Do you even have any friends?”
“Of course I do,” I lied. I talk to people on Internet forums, but that’s not the same thing. I wanted to go to high school, hang out with kids my own age. Houston said it would be too risky. All those hormones flowing through my teenage head, making me fly off the handle for no good reason other than angsty teenage angst. Give those hormones to someone who knows fifty-two ways to murder anyone and has the crime scene sanitizing skills to possibly get away with it? Disaster. I’d be the Mary I of prom queens. I’d make Carrie look like amateur hour. Sure, I swore if he’d just trust me, I wouldn’t kill anyone at school, cross-my-heart honest, but he didn’t buy it and in hindsight, neither do I. I’m probably the only person I know who watched The Breakfast Club and thought, “Here’s how I’d take out assistant principal Vernon.”
“Your computer friends don’t count,” he says. “For all you know, you could be talking with dogs who learned how to ty
pe. Now socialize.”
I groan, shove the rest of the hotdog in my mouth, and set out to mingle. In all honesty, though it pains me to admit it, they aren’t as bad as I remember, these middle-aged killers. It’s the first sign that your youth is fleeting when you find you can tolerate the company of people twice your age. Do they talk about the old days after a few beers? Yes. Do they go on about how easy I have it now and how hard they had it? Yes. But it’s good history, it’s good perspective. It’s good to know my roots and to remember the importance of good fundamentals. Maybe I hated these barbeques growing up because I was a teenager and hated all things adult. They aren’t so bad, these people, and they aren’t nearly as old as I remember them being. Even Lullaby is fine to be around. He’s a much better singer than I ever gave him credit for. I definitely believe he could have gone pro in the opera world. His “Ave Maria” gave me chills.
There are some cool people here, I admit. You get twenty of the world’s best killers together, give them free food and a keg of beer, and you’ll hear some cool stories. Stories about barging in to shoot a guy only to find him engaged in a sex act so bizarre you are forced to apologize and actually utter the words, “I’ll swing by to kill you later.” Stories about spending weeks plotting how to make a target’s death look like a suicide by hanging only to find as you enter the room that the target has just hung herself. Stories about random seagulls taking a bullet for an ambassador, about the guy covered in maple syrup who tried to escape by riding off on a moose, about the head of the crime syndicate who, upon drinking her poisoned milkshake, cocked her head to the side and said, “Does this taste like arsenic to you?” before falling over dead. These stories and so many more keep me in stitches for hours, and I agree to hang out with some of these people in the future, to share drinks or catch a movie or talk about everything Pulp Fiction got wrong about being a hired killer.
I’m looking forward to these hangouts, but these are still work friends. Yes, I can be open and honest with them about what I do, no secrets, but I crave normal friendships. I want to laugh about something other than amusing ways people did or did not die, which these barbeques always devolve into. I want to keep grounded, keep in touch with the real world where what I do isn’t okay. I am fine with the fact that I kill people for a living. I’m comfortable with it, and I’m good at it. But I never want to be cavalier about it, never want to be nonchalant. I never want taking another human life to feel normal.
There’s a web comic I used to read called Toothpaste for Dinner by Drew Fairweather, and in one comic, they had a little kid saying something like “I want to be a cat when I grow up,” and it has two arrows, one with Internet and one without. Without, the kid grows up normal. With, the kid is wearing ears and claws and a tail and saying “meow” all the time. It’s why conspiracy theorists and flat earthers have become so plentiful. It’s why we have tiny hate groups killing in the name of the people thinking the masses support their cause. There are a billion people on the Internet. Any idea, no matter how crazy, can find support out there. You can believe the sky is made of grape jelly and if you look hard enough, you will find someone who agrees with you, and you congregate and you build a safe space where ideas can be discussed without judgement. Usually it just results in harmless things like online communities filled with Space 1999 enthusiasts convinced it’s the best show ever or it creates subcultures like furries and Bronies, and that’s cool. But as those like minds congregate, they find it harder and harder to accept that their ideas are maybe a little crazy. They cling to every little scrap of madness more and more closely until it becomes as unshakeable as a religious belief, and then you have Q-Anon and people shooting up pizza shops. I need friends who don’t kill people for a living so I don’t become convinced that poisoning a dude is a perfectly reasonable solution to most problems. The Internet is a great place to discover new ideas, but it’s even easier to get caught in an echo chamber.
I need a friend I can trust, a person who will keep me from losing touch with my humanity but someone I can still tell my secrets to without fear of judgement. I need to keep around someone who helps instead of harms, who will help me believe in second chances and that some people don’t deserve to die just because they’ve had a few problems.
I know just the person, and what’s more, he’s already staying at my place. He just doesn’t know it yet.
“Hey Houston,” I say, shoving another hotdog into my mouth, “I’m about to head out. I have stuff to do around the apartment.”
“Did you make any friends at least?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I think I did.”
Chapter 27
JAIME
I DARE YOU TO TRY THE UNKNOWN
When the bleariness of the heroin faded, I was more than a little surprised to find myself lying on a decent couch in a fairly geeky living room. I noticed Star Wars posters on the wall, shelves of comic books and DVDs, a few computers and video game consoles. Even the clothes I wore, which I suspected were bought new for my resurrection, were pretty nerdy. Comic book characters adorned my pajama pants, and I didn’t recognize the two people on my shirt, but they are wearing suits and holding weapons so it was probably a video game or movie reference.
“Where am I?” I asked, hoping there was someone around to answer. “Marquis, I know this isn’t your place. Is this Dan’s? Please don’t tell me this is how you spent your big payout.”
Part of me wanted to grab the Batman phone and call the Marquis right then, beg him to come and get me out of here, but then I would have been back where I had been for the past hundred years and more, under his thumb. I needed to learn to rely on myself more. I needed to break this centuries-old habit of believing I needed his help to do anything.
“Dan?” said a familiar female voice. “Oh, right, yeah. Danger Man. No, this is not what he’s spending his money on.”
“I know you,” I said, trying to put the face with the voice. “You’re Olive, right?”
“Olivia,” she said. “We met last year. I paid for that phone you never check.”
“Right,” I said. “Thanks for helping out on that Dan Germany gig. How did it go?”
“Surprisingly well,” she said. “No one expected you to pull it off. There was a trainwreck vibe the whole time. We all knew you were gonna die, but we couldn’t take our eyes off. But then… It was… amazing. It’s cheesy, but your speech nailed it. I really felt like anything was possible after seeing you take that bow. Everyone bought the explosion as an accident, called it a terrible tragedy. There were very touching tributes on all the news channels.”
I nodded. The assassin from the Bill Thompson job stood over me, holding some steaming cup of something or other. It was the first time I had seen her as herself in full daylight, no disguises, no acts. Maybe it was just the old man in me, but I thought she was adorably human for a professional killer. Genuine. Happy. Not at all dark and broody. She wouldn’t get cast as a romantic lead in any Hollywood movies any time soon, but then again, who would? She had an earthy, chipper sort of realness to her that was refreshing after years of associating almost exclusively with the Marquis and his friends. At a glance, I would never in a million years have suspected she had shoved me down the stairs, pulled the plug on my life support, or blown out my tire while I was doing seventy-five on an overpass, leading to a pileup that killed seven people. Then again, that’s part of what made her so successful.
“What’s this?” I asked, cautiously taking the cup from her. “Are you trying to poison me?”
“No,” she said. “It’s just hot chocolate, extra marshmallows. We both know poison won’t do anything to you.”
“Not long term anyway,” I said, and took a sip. Surprisingly good. Rich. Creamy. Everything I could have asked for. “What am I doing here? Also, where is here?”
“Oh,” she said, “you wouldn’t know. You’ve been dead. After you exploded, your friend Ambrose and I gathered up your bits and pieces. I ended up keeping your rege
nesis piece while you regrew the rest of your body.”
“My regenesis piece?”
“Yeah,” she said, taking a sip from her own mug. “The big bit that you grow back from.”
“Hmmm, I never really had a name for that part of me, but I like it. Regenesis piece. Nice.”
I took another drink from my chocolate. “This is really good,” I told her.
“Thanks.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” Olivia said, “once you knew you had that heroin habit and you knew that killers were after you, why didn’t you just turn into someone else, and then turn back into Dan Germany right before the stunt? You know, so you’re not walking around looking like someone twenty people want dead?”
Good damn, that was an excellent question. Why didn’t I? It would have saved me so much trouble. “I don’t know,” I said. “It didn’t occur to me. Drugs, I guess.”
I shook my head in embarrassment.
“So, not to change the subject,” I said, “but would you happen to know whether or not my paycheck has gone through? Doubtful I know since I just came back, so the final tally isn’t in, but it’s worth a shot.”
“About that,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me. “Your friend Ambrose and I were talking about your rates and I figured you wouldn’t mind just calling it an even hundred thousand, given the circumstances.”
“The circumstances?”
“Well, your total came to a hundred seventeen thousand, but what with Dan Germany or Calvin Watkins’s legal troubles I figured you would be fine giving a discount, and he could use the money.”
“Legal troubles? What sort of legal troubles? The Marquis said everything was covered from a legal standpoint.”
Crap. Didn’t mean to name the Marquis. It was one thing if she knew my secret, but another if she knew his. Then again, screw him.
The Daredevil Corpse (The Departed Book 2) Page 18
