Splicer (A Thriller)

by Theo Cage

  "Where?" she asked. She gasped it out, barely under control. But it was still some kind of control. She said it loudly in his ear, the warmth of it surprisingly erotic. He turned to her in the dark. The car swerved, throwing them against each other.

  "Grieves' father. Owns a cabin by the lake. Red Lake. Near some place called Alders Bluff. He calls it Ragnarock." He felt he had to explain more but was afraid that Grieves would hear their voices, would somehow discern their feelings. Of hopelessness. Rusty wasn't going to allow that. Grieves would enjoy it too much. The car bounced and the jack bit into his back and a pulse of anger slammed into his head with such force he felt like screaming.

  "Shit! He talked about this. About taking Ludd out there and forcing him into the trunk and just driving off the dock." He remembered the conversation. It's a deep lake said Grieves. Hundreds of feet deep. Real cold. They'd never find it.

  She grabbed his shoulders to steady them. "He talked about murdering Ludd?"

  "One of his crazier fantasies," answered Rusty. "I never took it seriously" He tried to move his leg, which was cramping. Jump off a three-story building then fold yourself into a car trunk. Drive for three hours at high speed. A great recipe for life in a wheelchair. If I was going to have a life at all. He grunted and swore again. His head and his back hurt like hell. The music was pounding a painful tattoo into his brain. He couldn't think. This must be Grieves' idea of some kind of inventive psychological torture.

  :

  When Jayne and he had finally picked themselves up off the pavement next to the Sports Complex, Grieves had hustled them along to Rusty's car at gunpoint. He told them they needed to get away before the police arrived. They were both tired of guns and people telling them where to go but he looked crazy enough to use it. And his logic sounded vaguely convincing although Rusty was starting to look at a prison cell as a pretty attractive alternative to being chased all over the countryside by trained assassins. When they arrived at his Cutlass and Grieves ordered them to crawl into the trunk, Jayne's face couldn't hide her surprise. They were still not safe. Grieves blamed them for his cover being blown. And he knew that Rusty had a copy of the Splicer subroutines. Was he crazy enough to believe that they actually worked? They climbed in reluctantly, the last vestiges of their dignity finally stripped away.

  Rusty rolled painfully with the sway of the old car, finally convinced that it needed new shocks. "I've got an idea," Jayne said loudly against his cheek. He could smell her perfume mixed with the rubber and the soggy carpeting. She turned but he could barely make out her eyes in the dark. She whispered into his ear again. Her plan sounded absurd - but it was a plan.

  "And where did you learn how to do that? Law School?" he asked.

  She reached out in the dark and steadied herself against the frame. "My brothers. They're car freaks. I spent a lot of time around 327 Chevys and small block Fords."

  He reached around in the dark, felt her leg, then touched her side. She didn't pull away. He felt beyond her, up by the spare, in a depression in the metal pan of the trunk. There was a pile of miscellaneous tools. He pushed through the contents as quietly as he could. She heard a soft click and then blinked from the light. He had a flashlight in his hands, its thin yellow beam shining into her face. Then he turned it away from both of them to the back wall of the rear seat. She pointed with a broken fingernail at a number of rusty bolts. They were going to attempt to remove the back seat. She had done this once before as a teenager, fixing up an old Malibu that belonged to one of her brothers. Because of her size she was the only one who could crawl into the trunk to loosen the bolts holding the back seat in place. She took the flashlight and shone the beam along the punched steel frame and springs. "We're going to loosen six bolts," which she pointed to. "Then you're going to crawl through and brain that bastard."

  "With what?" he asked, shrugging, realizing it was a useless gesture in the dark. He reached behind her again and she heard metal striking metal. The music continued to pound. He turned with a ratchet and a socket in his hand and smiled with a mixture of bravado and relief. She felt like weeping but instead she took his arm and turned him sideways, pulling him towards her. He turned his head to hear her, to place his ear near her mouth. He waited but he heard nothing so he turned slightly. Her mouth met his shakily. She clung to him, kissing him. He could hardly breathe, her face pressed against his nose. She was cool and wet, her breath hot. He felt a tear on his face where she had pressed against him. Then she slowly released him. "Break a leg,” she said.

  "It's already broken," was all he could think of to say.

  :

  The bolts were badly oxidized and they gave themselves up reluctantly. Jayne and Rusty worked slowly, afraid to let the ratchet click, removing the socket carefully on each turn. As he worked, he caught himself imagining the cold lake water rushing in on them. We have time he thought. We have time. She passed the bolts to Rusty who tucked them away under the tattered matting. Then the music stopped. They both froze. He's listening. Rusty's forehead was soaked with sweat - he could smell their fear now, a stronger odor than the mold and wet dust. The music came back up. He felt the car pick up speed, the feel of the road change beneath them. The highway. Jayne removed the next bolt with even more care. Then she turned to the last one and twisted it carefully. Nothing. It was frozen in place with age and oxidation. She picked herself up on one arm and tried again then fell back. She turned to Rusty. "You're turn."

  "Sure. It's always the last one." He reached up carefully, grasped the ratchet and turned it. It refused to move. His arm shook with effort, and then suddenly it gave way with a high-pitched groan. Rusty swore under his breath. He looked at Jayne who held the flashlight. With her eyes wide, the pupils dilated, she looked like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming train.

  CHAPTER 77

  Jayne McEwan brushed up against the concept of death and violence every day of her career. It had become an unsettling sub-text to her life as a single female criminal lawyer living in a large, urban beehive. The dizzying speed and violence of their confrontation with Grieves though - at ninety miles per hour on a deserted logging road - caused her to involuntarily pull her knees up to her chest and her hands to the side of her head. For the first time in her adult life she prayed.

  The rear bench seat of the Cutlass, though unbolted, had not been moved since an assembly line worker in 1999 had ratcheted it into place. It groaned when it finally gave up its hold on the back deck frame and slid up several feet where it bumped up against the back of the drivers seat. The space that Rusty had planned to scramble through looked a lot smaller than he had imagined but he had no choice.

  Grieves, his eyes on the dark gravel ahead, heard the metallic cry from behind and then felt the sudden pressure against the back of his seat. He reached across the bench seat for the gun but was surprised when a body tumbled forward into the passenger compartment.

  Rusty had kicked with both feet as hard as he could and pulled himself over the tilting back of the wobbly rear seat. His momentum carried him up over the front backrest where he saw light for the first time in over an hour - their headlights on a dark landscape of a narrow road cut through dense conifer forest - and the green glow of the dash lights on Grieves' anxious face. He rolled into the front passenger seat headfirst, anticipating the shock of a gunshot wound, hoping it would be to his leg or arm. But Grieves hadn't fully reached the gun yet. It sat half-hidden; pressed into the fold where the seat bottom met the seat back on the passenger side. The car had already begun to move into the on-coming lane and the inertia of the vehicle's slight change in direction had pushed Rusty up against the passenger door.

  Rusty reached down for the butt of the gun in mid-flight but his head met the lower part of the dash and he was momentarily stunned. He crashed down onto the dirty carpet, face pressed into the stones and gravel, his back against the dash, his arms tangled uselessly underneath him. He knew that within seconds Grieves would have the gun and there was no
reason why he wouldn't put several bullets into him in short order. While he struggled to regain his balance, Jayne was pinned by the force of the car swerving into the soft shoulder of the road.

  Grieves braked hard and the big car nose-dived, sending his attacker into the dash with surprising speed. At the same time, the worn tires of the Cutlass broke traction on the oily gravel, sending the car into a counter-clockwise spin at just under seventy miles per hour. Grieves released his hold on the wheel, he believed, just long enough to reach over and retrieve his weapon. His fingers closed on the handle but the cars momentum had pushed him across the seat towards the passenger side. Rusty, in desperation, had kicked out in the driver’s direction and connected a glancing blow against Grieves' jaw. The surprise of the pain to his face and the unexpected pull of inertia carried Grieves over the gun and now out of reach of the steering wheel. With the machine-gun roar of gravel striking the lower part of the vehicle and Grieves' garbled roar of pain, they all felt the car cant slightly and then rise up and roll in mid-air.

  The forward inertia of the Cutlass, as it turned on the loose rock bed of the road, caused it to spin fully once. Then, as it struck the softer mud of the shoulder, it flipped quickly in the air. If it had been moving any slower, the car would have crashed down on its roof or side, but its velocity caused the vehicle to do a violent full rotation and then land hard on its worn tires and leaky shocks. It settled awkwardly, like a tired animal, in the tall grass at the side of the road amidst a cloud of gravel dust.

  Jayne experienced Rusty's dash for the gun and the subsequent rolling of the car in the dark hard space of the trunk as if through a semi-conscious stupor. There was madness everywhere. Everything became a deadly flying obstacle - she was struck on the hip by a tool box, gravel, stones, the errata of ten years of storage in the cars huge trunk released itself at her. She rolled, her world tossed into a blank weightlessness. Then there was the awful shock of the landing.

  CHAPTER 78

  To Rusty's surprise, his fear of death by the entry of a bullet into his brain was replaced by an equal concern for ending his days crushed under the weight of a car he still owed 500 dollars on. The spin was mind-numbingly quick. He was pressed harshly into the dash and passenger door with Grieves' weight upon him as well, aware of the irony of possibly saving Grieves' life by providing him with a human cushion for the crash. He tried to relax, remembering a story once told to him by his father about a man who had survived a numbing car wreck only because he was too drunk to tense up.

  The blow of the landing threw them viciously against the floor. Grieves on top of Rusty, crashed even harder into the floorboards. Jayne was tossed against the spare tire, bruising her ribs and whipping her head back against the sheet metal. Grieves was instantly alive and moving, but Rusty had his arm around his neck. He tasted blood in the back of his throat when he saw Jayne's head slowly appear above the front seat, her eyes glassy and remote. Rusty squeezed harder and Grieves stopped struggling.

  "Jayne?" he tried his voice, surprised it still worked. He became aware then that he had bit deeply into his own tongue. "Jayne?" he tried again. The radio still blared. "Can you turn off that damned ..."

  She reached over, one sleeve of her coat torn, and turned off the ignition. For a few seconds they listened in silence to the engine giving off heat to the night air, waiting for the hiss of flames.

  "The gun ... it was on the seat."

  "I've got it," she said.

  "You hear that, Grieves? She's got the gun. I'm going to let you go. And when I do, get the hell off of me!" He pushed Grieves back with an angry shove and slid out of the passenger door, which was sprung open on its hinges.

  They stood in the wet grass at the side of the road in the moonlight. Grieves appeared unhurt and it occurred to Rusty that he might have just unwittingly saved his ex-partners life. Grieves had the car keys in his hand. He had obviously scooped them up before crawling out. Jayne, her arm shaking, held the gun on Grieves, who stood calmly, rubbing his right arm.

  "Now what?" asked Jayne, to no one in particular.

  Rusty turned to Grieves. His ears were buzzing and he felt light-headed. He had difficulty standing straight. Any minute, shock could overtake his body and kill him as quickly as a bullet. "Why, Grieves?"

  Grieves pushed his hair back out of his eyes and smiled. "Redfield! You're an idiot. You're always asking why? As if it really mattered. Why? Why? Why? Go fuck yourself, that's why."

  Rusty stared, then took the gun from Jayne and brought it up higher, his arm trembling slightly. "Why did you kill her?"

  Grieves stole a glance at Jayne who answered for him.

  "He claims it was that team of hired goons back at campus." She grimaced with the memory and rubbed her neck. "And he might have a point."

  "You're saying it wasn't him?" said Redfield.

  "Those three that were after us looked a lot more capable than ... than him!"

  Rusty shook his head. "No way! I've had enough of this bullshit. This is your last chance, Grieves. I figure you had every intention of killing us - still do - and what have I got to lose if I gun you down in the middle of nowhere. They want me for Ludd, for Shay, for that hired assassin I landed on - what's another body?"

  "Rusty, let's think about this ..." asked Jayne.

  "I'm through thinking. Every time I stop to think some mercenary like Kozak comes after me like a blood-starved vampire bat. Grieves, tell me the truth about what's going on here or so help me I'll shoot you in the stomach and leave you in the woods for the wolves to finish off."

  Grieves looked over at Jayne who nodded, then glared back at Redfield. "Why did I think I'd get any sympathy from a lawyer?" he asked.

  Jayne spoke up. "The wolves and I, we're like that." She crossed her index and middle finger. "Professional courtesy." Rusty took two steps towards Grieves, whose eyes grew fiercer. Fear seemed to instantly turn to anger in Grieves. Primitive but effective Rusty thought, deciding not to get any closer. He had no intention of using the gun but appreciated the weapons power to pry answers out of people.

  "Speak now or forever hold your peace," prompted Rusty. "You don't have much time. The last thing I do before I pass out is put you out of your misery."

  Grieves looked at the gun, at the lawyer, his hands in the pockets of his baggy brown cotton pants.

  "The long or the short version?" he asked. Rusty waved him on. "Ladies and gentlemen, let me draw your attention to three dark strangers. Three mysterious men without identification. Three men who the police are puzzling over at this very moment. Three hired killers. But who hired them? And who was their target?"

  "Go ahead," said Jayne.

  Grieves smiled. "You don't scare me, you two. I've been scared by the best."

  Rusty fired the shot as close as he dared to Grieves' feet. His lack of experience with guns caused the bullet to actually graze the toe of Grieves' left shoe and raise a cloud of limestone dust. Grieves startled but said nothing. There was a shimmering look of madness in his eyes.

  "You two are pathetic. I didn't kill Shay, so your anger is misdirected and stupid." He spit out the word stupid as if it was a black fly that had wandered into his open mouth.

  "What about Ludd?" asked Jayne.

  "I would have loved to have snuffed out that jerk. Here was a man who would have flushed civilization down the toilet for the thrill of discovery."

  "You sent an email to Ludd that morning didn't you?" said Jayne, her arms crossed, nursing a cut above her right eye with her sleeve. "Under Rusty's name?"

  "You found it?"

  She waited for Rusty to reply, then offered "Ludd encoded it and saved it in his word processor, right?"

  Grieves shook his head. "I was hoping the police would have found it. It would have enhanced the frame-up."

  "Then you met Ludd that night?"

  "You've heard of mail tampering, McEwan? Well, the message that Ludd received wasn't exactly the one I sent. I asked Ludd to meet 'Rusty' for dinn
er at the President’s Club, but he was supposed to pick him/me up at Finnegan's Bar in the parking lot. I waited there but the asshole never showed up."

  Jayne looked puzzled.

  "Rosenblatt intercepted the message that morning before Ludd got in and changed it. He took the part about Finnegan's out. Then he went with Ludd to the President’s Club and they waited in Ludd's car for Rusty. Rosenblatt acted uncharacteristically spontaneous that day. Asshole stole my idea."

  "Your idea?"

  "Ludd would never meet with Rusty, or me for that matter. He hated us. In fact I like to think maybe he even feared me. But the reference to Kim Soo was the clincher. The bastard had a cheap thrill in Vegas and was dense enough to tell us about it."

  Rusty spit, his mouth full of road dust. "You talked to this Kim Soo?" he asked. It was getting harder by the minute to hold the gun up and steady.

  "Why would I do that? I just used her name to scare him. That and the subroutine nonsense got his undivided attention. Rosenblatt's mealy little brain locked onto that email that morning and he cooked up his own little plan. You don't get it yet?" Grieves shook his head and continued. "Rosenblatt tells Ludd he should go along with him to meet Rusty. They're waiting in his car. Rosenblatt says I see him coming, I 'll get in the back. Ludd doesn't see anyone but by then it's too late. He's got a wire around his neck."

  "You didn't kill Ludd?" puzzled Jayne, "but you seem to know a lot about the murder scene."

  "I was there, lady. I took a cab to the President’s Club figuring Ludd screwed up my message. I got there just in time to watch Rosenblatt kill Ludd. I would have applauded but that might have distracted the proceedings."

  "You watched!" she exploded.

  "In glowing bloody Technicolor. What Rosenblatt did was motivated purely by greed, he wanted Ludd dead so bad he could taste it. He offered me a million to do it. But in the end, what he did himself was good for mankind. If you can't figure out why ... well maybe there's something in the water in this country that suppresses intelligence."