* * *
Trooper Wayne Dupar of the Indiana State Police lit up his rack as he pulled in behind the late model Taurus with three occupants, male it appeared from his vantage, following the vehicle as it glided to a stop on the shoulder of the interstate.
He gave his position to his dispatch center, knowing that if another unit was in the area they would have it do a roll-by as a matter of practice, and left his cruiser to approach the car from the driver’s side, hand on the top of his pistol.
“Gentlemen.” Dupar said. “Good evening.”
Georgie already had the window down, and his wallet out. “Officer. Was I speeding?” Just give me the ticket. Fast.
Dupar leaned low and looked across the front seat. Ralph looked back at him, smiling casually. In the back seat a stern man sat on the far right, a bag on the seat next to him. Dupar recognized it as a pilot’s bag. So, planning on doing some flying, are we—
“No, sir, you weren’t speeding, but we had a report of a vehicle matching this one driving recklessly about fifteen miles back that way on the interstate.”
“Reckless?” Georgie repeated with a sprinkling of shock. “I promise you, officer, that wasn’t me.”
“Well,” Dupar drawled, “I’m going to have to satisfy myself about that. I’m going to have to ask you some questions and give you a field sobriety test.” He looked to the other two men. “I’m going to have to give you field sobriety test also, gentlemen.”
“What?” Ralph protested, leaning toward the window.
“It happens that sometimes a passenger was driving, then someone switches off,” Dupar explained in a painfully slow, meticulous cadence. “Like I said, I’m going to have to satisfy myself that you all are all right to be operating a motor vehicle.”
Son of a bitch. Ralph looked at his watch. Twenty minutes. They had to be at the airfield in twenty minutes. “Officer, can we hurry this up, maybe? We’ve got someplace to be.”
Dupar scratched his square chin, once, twice, three times. “Sir, hurrying causes accidents. I’d hate to see you all hurt in an accident. I’d hate to see that.” Not… “I want you to drive away from here alive and in good shape tonight. All right.”
Fine. Fucking fine. Just do it. Do it. Ralph nodded and sat back in his seat.
Officer Dupar showed rows of bone-white teeth to the driver and asked, pronouncing every syllable as if talking to a foreigner, “Okay, sir. How about we get you done first?”
* * *
“What do you think?” the supervising FBI agent asked, showing the hours-old photo to two of his subordinates on the hastily arranged operation. “I think it looks like him.”
The other agents looked to the photo of the man driving the black Dodge pickup, then to an older mug shot of a man named Kirby Gant, a.k.a. Mr. Tag.
“If it ain’t him,” one of the agents commented, “it’s a twin.”
The supervising agent tapped the photos together on the edge of the fold-down desk in the back of the surveillance van and picked up the phone, dialing the number he’d been give.
“Yes?” a voice answered after just one ring.
“Mr. Breem…”
* * *
The lobby elevators were good enough for Keiko when she arrived a few minutes after eight, darkness having settled upon the city, and a quietness to the massive building that she found exciting. There was nothing like the shrill edge of a scream ripping an unsuspecting silence to shreds.
She imagined a cry resonating from Jefferson as the elevator began to move. Closed her eyes and made it real in her head.
Her stomach pressing low from the upward rise, the sound playing as if real, she felt a warmth trickle up her thighs and plant itself between her legs. Alone in the elevator, she pressed them together, surprised that thoughts of one so old could excite her.
Maybe pain was pain, and pleasure just pleasure, regardless of age. She would soon know. If so, it would mean a far broader horizon.
Chapter Twenty Four
Dead No More
There was nothing to which Art could compare this sight. Nothing. As he and Simon walked past sawhorses and the idle tools of carpenters’ labors, and approached the east side windows of the Skydeck Observatory, all the world below seemed to be a sea of undulating white mist that rolled inward from Lake Michigan, lit with a radiance borne of a thousand man-made lights below. And from this sea the Sears Tower rose, a rectangular island of black against a star flecked indigo sky, the moon barely a scythe above.
Simon released his grip on Art’s hand and pressed himself right up to the glass wall, his breaths laying steamy ovals on the surface. His head came up, eyes also, the jitter somehow steadied, and he looked out upon the world high above the world below.
“This is up…” he said, and moved along the floor to ceiling window, hands walking along the glass like a mime searching for an exit from the transparent box that imprisons him. “Up…”
“We’re way up,” Art said in agreement, losing himself in the moment, in Simon’s discovery of another place, maybe another universe altogether as he saw it. However he saw it.
Simon’s head twisted as though he were pressing an ear to the glass, eyes to the ceiling, trying to get the best view possible. “We’re in the sky.”
Art followed along as Simon neared the corner of the stripped room. “What do you see?”
“Simon sees up.”
And what did that mean? Art wondered. Did Simon even know? In the end, did it matter?
“Up,” Simon said once again.
Art put a hand on his back and tipped his wrist to check the time. It was almost nine.
* * *
This was the night it would end, and Rothchild was gone. Kudrow had made the trip from the Chocolate Box to Rothchild’s office to monitor developments. But the man who did not exist had gone home for the day, treating it as any other. That might have been appropriate in most cases, but not this one. He should have realized that, Kudrow thought. Damn right he should have.
So back to the Chocolate Box Kudrow went, through checkpoints he had just come in the opposite direction, back to his office and to a small phone book he kept in the safe with the master cipher books for KIWI. In the back of that phone book, on a page with more scribbles than readable text, Kudrow ran his finger to the third phone number from the bottom. It had a line through it like most of the others.
He dialed it standing behind his desk.
“Hello?”
An unseen hand might have reached out and lifted Kudrow’s chin, but it was his own reaction to the strange male voice at the other end of the line.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
Kudrow’s throat constricted involuntarily, lest an errant demand be loosed on the person who had answered Rothchild’s phone.
No one answered Rothchild’s phone but Rothchild. That was the agreement. That was the rule.
“Who the hell is there?”
His breathing might have traveled over the line, and Kudrow thought maybe the thump of his heart as it slammed against the inside of his chest at a pace he could not remember, even during the most grueling treadmill tests he’d been subjected to.
This was a muscle out of control, fed by adrenalin and whatever other chemicals his brain was telling the glands to let loose into his system. This was panic.
“Is anybody there?”
Kudrow laid the phone back into its cradle, keeping his hand on it as if to hold it in place, standing as still as he could, feeling the bethump bethump bethump bethump in his chest go on until he thought it might let loose, like an engine that had thrown a rod, ripping a hole right there and letting the blood spurt out against his blazing white shirt.
He wondered if he was having a heart attack, and then he wondered if he should be wishing that it were so.
* * *
The supervising FBI agent spun a chair around and sat facing Kirby Gant in his kitchen.
“Can I have something to drink,” Rothchild asked
almost meekly, as he remembered doing long ago.
“You got anything?” the agent asked.
“Fruit punch, in the fridge,” Rothchild said, and one of the dozen FBI types in his apartment poured him a glass. He sipped from it, draining half, then set it on the kitchen table. “Thanks.”
The supervising agent nodded. “Now, how is this going to go? Easy or hard?”
Rothchild had already been read his rights. He knew that he could have an attorney present during questioning. And he further knew that no attorney in the land could do for him what he could do for himself.
“Your name is Kirby Gant,” the supervising agent said when no reply came to his question. “Correct?”
Oh, old Kirby. Kirby was dead. Kirby could do Rothchild no good at all. Zero.
“You don’t want to talk to Kirby,” he told the agent. “You want Rothchild.”
Because Rothchild was the one with value, and Rothchild understood the game. Kirby had showed him how to play.
“Rothchild has much more interesting things he can tell you.”
* * *
Art looked at his watch again. Nine o’clock sharp. And as if on cue, emerging from the sea of mist as a dragonfly might broach murky water, a helicopter appeared and gained altitude as it neared the Tower.
They’re here, Art thought, his hand sliding from Simon’s shoulder to his back, where it rubbed soft circles.
Simon caught sight of the helicopter also, and tried to point at it but stubbed his finger into the glass. “It’s coming up.”
“It’s coming,” Art said, knowing what he had to say next. “Those are friends, Simon.”
Friends? How could that be friends? Friends were not that. That was Up. Friends were like Art and Doctor Anne and Doctor Chazzz.
“Come on,” Art said, turning Simon from the window and guiding him back toward the exit from the Skydeck.
The thrump-thrump-thrump of the helicopter penetrated the windows as it passed and circled to the north, turning to head back for a landing on the roof. It was a sound that fascinated Simon, requiring Art to keep a firm hand on his back as they weaved between the stacks of construction materials nearer the room’s center.
Another sound drew Art’s attention, though: the soft squeak of a door opening and sliding back on its hinges. He slowed as they neared the turn around the elevator core, which had let them out directly into the Skydeck. He slowed and kept one hand on Simon’s back but let his other lift the side of his sweater, and he could feel the cool grip of his Smith & Wesson on his palm as Keiko Kimura came around the corner with a gun in each hand.
Chapter Twenty Five
One on One on One
Art did two things at once, three if it mattered that he was cursing at the top of his lungs. He gathered Simon’s sweatshirt in his fist and heaved him to the floor several feet away behind a pallet of dwarf I beams, and with his other hand he drew his weapon.
He might have fired if Kimura hadn’t had the same idea, and as the first muzzle flash spurted from her weapons, he dropped to the floor and rolled toward Simon.
Bullets were not her concern. She had plenty, and therefore Keiko had set both compact submachine guns on full automatic. As she squeezed the triggers, she swung one left and the other right, driving sixty rounds into tools, and materials, and fixtures, and the ceiling, and the bare floor. But the greatest result of her wild firing came when stray bullets, of which almost half of them were, peppered the large window panels on the east side of the Skydeck. At fourteen hundred plus feet in the air, with the tail of a Canadian low driving fog in from Lake Michigan, the wind load on the exterior of the tower was enormous. And on the window panels in particular. They were designed to accept the load, but not when being punctured by dozens of hollow point rounds that sent spiderweb cracks in all directions from each point of impact. They were strong, but not that strong.
The winds, gusting upward of fifty miles an hour, slammed into the suddenly pulverized panels, which exploded inward, showering the unfinished room with hundreds of thousands of tiny, crystalline blocks. Keiko Kimura fell back as the shower swept over her. Art, in covering Simon, felt the sting of hundreds of the tiny particles pecking at his skin.
And then there was the wind.
Art got to his knees and was almost pushed over by the gusts now invading the east side of the 103rd floor. The howl caught his sweater and lifted it over his head, and he was forced to pull it off entirely and discard it. He grabbed Simon and pulled him along the floor by his sweatshirt, toward the elevator core, keeping behind pallets until he reached a spot of open floor where it seemed a million tiny sparklers danced on the floor in the little light there was.
The elevators were across the open space. The elevators were a way out. Kimura had come in the door.
The elevators it would have to be.
Keiko, huddled behind a stack of boxes containing heavy ceramic tiles, reloaded her weapons, and shook as much of the glass as she could from her hair.
She peered over the boxes and went to her stomach, covering the major part of the room from just south of the door. She could hear nothing but the cry of the wind and the crackle of glass still being torn from the window frames.
This was not a good position, Keiko knew. The stacks and pallets of construction materials ran north to south in rows, cutting the room off every ten feet or so. She needed a field of fire down the rows. Down each if she could clear them. One at a time. Make her targets’ safe zone smaller and smaller.
With a plan, now, she came to a crouch and duck-walked south, toward the beginning of the rows.
Art helped Simon to his knees, and tried to tell him something, but the noise was just too intense. Simon’s hands were pressed to his ears, his eyes flitting open only sporadically. He would have to lead him to the elevators. No, carry him. Or at least drag.
Son of a bitch! Where did she come from?! Art allowed himself that brief venting, then took Simon’s shirt in hand once again, and, keeping his weapon in the direction he had last seen Kimura, made a low dash for the T shaped elevator core.
He moved as fast as possible, his eyes moving, looking up the rows between the pallets, and then taking a quick check of the space between the two elevators, the doors of which opened into the vertical base of the T. Beyond the elevators, two small alcoves that would soon be walled in formed the cross of the T, and looking back to the room from just outside the elevators, Art could see nothing but debris being swirled in mini cyclones.
He could not see Kimura, and considered that a possible break in his luck, until he pressed the elevator button and saw that there was no light behind it. Nor above in the readout of its location.
The elevators were not working.
“Shit!” he said aloud, losing the word to the wind.
The only choice now was the door to the hallway, and then to the stairs. Art pulled Simon up again and eased back toward the spot where the T let into the room, his weapon sweeping the path ahead, his eyes moving, moving, looking for anything that migh—
BRRRRRR-RRRRRRR-RRRRRR-RRRRR.
The bursts of fire caught Art completely by surprise, coming up the row that looked directly down the base of the T, driving hot spikes into his arms, and sending him backpedaling, still holding Simon’s shirt through pain that seemed to course through him from fingers to shoulders on both sides, and sending him into one of the alcoves at the top of the T, where he collapsed against a pile of cardboard refuse, Simon at his side.
Keiko came up to a half crouch and set one of the Mini-Uzis on a stack of boxes. She’d emptied it, saving the other, and now wanted to have a hand free. She moved down the row and, even in the low light, could see the spray of red on the floor and the bare gypsum wallboards.
She had made contact. Removing the straight razor from her pocket with her free hand, opening it with a snap of the wrist, she hoped, actually prayed, that she hadn’t killed him. Not yet.
Art looked down at his arms and saw immediately
two neat punctures in the skin over each bicep. His weapon was still in his hand, loosely, and when he tried to squeezed his fingers around the grip the reply was a buzz of hot sparkles that dazzled his senses and forced a scream from his lungs.
Unfortunately, in the windbreak of the alcove he could hear himself perfectly.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Now what? Now fucking what? Art would have liked to wait for an answer to present itself, but he knew there wasn’t time. Either Kimura would make her way to him, or he’d bleed to death. He had to do something, something to save Simon. But what? He was alone and wounded.
Frankie Aguirre and Art Jefferson - 03 - Simple Simon Page 22
