Mickey stopped across the street from the park. His stomach fluttered, as it had when the boy from 3G had first told him Jason was looking for him. He wiped cold sweat from around his eyes. The vision of at least thirty figures standing, sitting or lying on the ground in and around Dead Man’s Park did not fade.
A shelter bus might have dumped its contents at the park entrance, Mickey reasoned. Or an abandoned building in the area had burned down, spilling its inhabitants on to the street. Mickey shook his head back and forth. He had never seen so many homeless people gathered in one spot. It was almost as if someone had promised them that free food or safe shelter would be distributed sometime during the night from the park.
He crossed the street, then eased himself among the figures. He chose a bench at the far end of the park, where there were no lamps to attract the eye and he could observe anyone coming in through the entrance, and slowly walked to his chosen haven. He was relieved to see a small hole in the fence near the bench, through which he might flee if Jason came to look for him. He sat between a single figure hunched over, head between its knees, and a pair of shapes he identified as parent and child by their relative size, though he could not determine their sex in the darkness.
Mickey closed his eyes and tried to imagine what was happening in his old building. He wondered what the owner would think, when he found out that Mickey had run out on the job. He thought of the elderly men and women, shut into their tiny rent controlled apartments, venturing out only occasionally, and in broad daylight, for the meager groceries that would sustain them for the week. He thought of the boy from 3G, and wondered whether or not he would outlive Mickey.
The stench from his neighbors forced him out of his reverie. He looked to his left and right, but could not tell from which end the smells of rotten produce, spoiled meat and dead rat were coming from. The several cars turned into the street. Their headlights, set to high beam, panned across the park. Mickey almost jumped when the lights caught him for a moment. The cars passed slowly, silently by the park. He could feel hidden eyes on him, on the coat Jason had seen him in, his face open to the world.
When the cars had moved on down the street, Mickey slid down the bench towards the single figure still doubled over with apparent weariness or sickness. The smell of decay thickened until it seemed like a fog, almost visible, and Mickey fought against the nausea stirring in the pit of his stomach. He raised a hand, hesitated, reluctant to touch the figure for fear of contracting its filth as much as from the shame he felt in the plan he had quickly concocted to extend his life. But the jacket had a hood, and would change his look. Finally, he pulled his hand back and whispered to the figure.
“Excuse me, mister,” he said, getting as close as he could, “but could you do me favor? I’d like to change out of this coat. Wondering if you’d give me your jacket? My stuff is good, see?” he said, holding out an arm and tugging at his sleeve. “It’s just a thing I got, I can’t spend the night in my stuff. Please, could you do me that favor?” The figure did not move.
Mickey coughed, glanced back at the street, then studied the figure. He could not detect the regular rise and fall of the shoulders that would indicate breathing, much less any sign that his embarrassing plea had been heard. Mickey forced himself to touch the figure’s shoulder.
Nothing happened. Mickey pushed the shoulder, and still the figure refused to stir. Thinking he had found a junkie, Mickey grabbed a hold of the shoulder and pushed the figure back, hoping to make the clothing switch before Jason came.
The figure’s head lolled as Mickey pushed the figure into a straight-back sitting position, then suddenly snapped up and turned towards him. Mickey drew back, surprised by the figure’s size and sudden wakefulness. Then lights flooded the park. Mickey looked towards the street. Three cars had rolled down the street with their engines off and turned in towards the park entrance. Three pairs of high beams cut Dead Man’s Park into pie slices of darkness.
A voice boomed out from behind the glare of the lights. “Yo, you mothers, what are you doing here? Get the hell out of this park. Do you know where you people are? What the hell you think you’re doing?”
Mickey sat back, slid his hat off, and tried to melt into the shadows. Jason stepped out in front of the lights. A group of six men followed. They entered the park. Mickey glanced at figure beside him. Cold seized his heart. A whisper that was more than a breeze murmured incessantly in his ears.
The man called Max X on the street, a low-level dealer who had worked for Mama Aponte until two months ago, when Jason had killed him by the sliding pond in a turf fight, was staring at Mickey with black holes for eyes. His black, desiccated flesh clung to the foundation of bone that was his skull. His lips were thin, drawn back into a permanent leer.
Gunfire crackled, and muzzle flashes sparkled from several weapons held high up in the air by Jason’s followers.
“You hear me, you homeless assholes? I want you out of this park. Now. This be a business place. You can’t stay here. Get up and move.”
One of the men behind Jason kicked a sitting figure propped up against the fence pole at the entrance. The figure started to keel over, then snapped erect. The gunman kicked again, this time landing a blow to the head.
The figure’s head went flying into the air. It cut across a light beam, spinning slowly, then bounced twice and rolled to a stop by the glass-littered sand pit.
Then the headless body jerked, its limbs flailed out, and it scrambled to its feet.
The gunman shrieked and fired a full clip into the headless figure, which fell back, its entire body shaking spasmodically from the impacts of the bullets. When the clip was exhausted, the headless body continued to stagger towards the gunman.
Mickey stood, glancing from Max X to Jason to the headless body closing with the gunman. Max X stood and, almost reluctantly, looked away from Mickey, to Jason. He staggered off toward the assassin.
The park teemed with movement. The figures Mickey had dismissed as homeless men, women and children were now rising out of their shadow cocoons and approaching Jason. A knot of the figures closed off the park entrance. Three of Jason’s followers tried to break through, first firing their weapons point blank into the wall of flesh, then, when the figures refused to fall, wading into the mass with open switchblades. They fell quickly. Their screams ended abruptly.
Two other gunmen abandoned their weapons and charged a section of the fence. They climbed up and over the wire mesh and started running towards the cars. The headlights flickered, as vague shapes moved across the beams. Mickey heard curses, saw shadowy movement behind the bright lights. The cars never moved. The cursing stopped.
Jason was left with his last follower. Mickey sidled over to the hole in the fence. The tall and short figures he had shared the bench with passed him. He recognized the child as a girl slain in the park one year ago when she’d been caught in the crossfire between Horse’s and Mama Aponte’s gangs. Her mother, walking beside her, had been killed six months later when word of her cooperation with police detectives on the case had reached the street. Wisps of hair and shreds of tattered, leathery flesh still clung to their skulls. Their funeral finery was ragged and discolored.
Mickey had no doubt as to whose bullets had killed them both.
Jason and the gunman fired their weapons in all directions. Mickey had to fall and lay flat on the ground as bullets flew by and bit into the bench on which he’d been sitting.
“Who’s out there?” he shouted. “Who’s doing this? That not you, is it, Mama Aponte?”
Jason threw his gun at the nearest corpse.
Mickey got up on his knees. All he could think of was Tee, her voice small and distant on the phone, talking about the Way. He started to laugh.
“That you, Mickey?” Jason cried out. “I recognize that horse’s laugh, man. You did this? You don’t got that kind of power.”
The last gunman squealed as the corpses grabbed him and forced him down.
�
�I didn’t do it,” Mickey said, gasping between bursts of laughter. “I got nothing to do with it.” He started for the hole in the fence on his hands and knees. Relief mixed with panic. The Way was being used, magic was strong in the air. But he could still be caught up in its storm.
“What you say?” Jason shouted. “I got something for you, man. Still got something for you.” He thrust his arm up in a gesture of defiance. His hand held a long knife that glinted in the light of the headlamps.
Then the wall of bodies closed completely around him. The knife hand flashed down. It never came up again.
Mickey crawled through the hole, scampered along a gully, finally got to his feet when he hit cement, and started running.
He burst into his apartment, found nothing changed. No final assassin waiting for him to escape Jason’s judgment. He went up to the third floor, knocked on the door to 3G. No one answered, but the old, nosey woman in the apartment across the way saw him through the peephole and opened the door a crack. After telling him about her broken radiator valves and leaky faucet, she told him the ambulance had finally come for the boy. Mickey thanked her, promised to return in the morning, and went back to his apartment.
He showered, cleaned and covered minor cuts, then settled into bed and closed his eyes. He framed the request he wanted to make of the building owner in a way he felt certain could not refused. It was important for him to go back south for a visit, to see Tee once more, to smell the old farm smells of trees and horses and manure, to feel the hot, clean southern sun on his back. And it was important that Tee find him someone who knew the Way, so he would be prepared when Mama Aponte made a second call on him.
And if Jason ever returned to make his promise good.
THE SOFT PACKAGE
Everything had gone to hell. And neither Max nor the Beast were to blame. Heart racing, ears ringing, gasping for breath like prey batted yet spared by its hunter, Max lay stunned but scrambling for cover in the dust.
He found shelter in the shade of a vehicle, hot and smoking, twisted metal sticking out through the front grill. A jeep.
He’d been driving that jeep a moment ago.
Everything between then and now came to him in a compacted wreck of memories wrapped in darkness, too dense to sort. But he was alive.
He took a quick inventory. No blood. No broken bones. Glock in holster. Clips in BDU pockets.
Everything else was a dream of Hell.
Sun low, bright, a burning eye condemning all.
Through the ringing in his ears, the razor-edged whine of bullets delivering judgment.
Gasoline, cordite, burning rubber, and flesh in a bouquet of judgment passed.
The Beast, a lump in his heart, an impenetrable black cloud in his mind, a broken-off spear head in his gut, dazed and silenced within him.
Max vomited breakfast, tea and couscous leaving burning tracks through his chest. When he was done, the world fell back into focus.
The Beast roused itself, smelling blood. But slowly, still searching for footing in Max’s shaken flesh, his scrambled mind.
His partner, a Mossad operative, was crawling to the western side of the street where there were no shooters hiding in the shadows and breaks along the continuous remains of a stone wall. Raised on his elbows, keffiyeh tightly wrapped around his skull in Palestinian fashion, though his boots were IDF issue, he kept his head low and never looked back. It was a long way to any kind of cover. Even further to the rendezvous point where they’d been scheduled to deliver the soft package.
Max’s hand reached for his holster, pulled the Glock 17, fresh at his personal request from the first Austrian production run, checked again for the two extra clips in his BDU pockets. His hands were shaking. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been caught off guard or the Beast stunned into momentary submission.
A quick scan of the jeep revealed it wasn’t ever going to run again. The hood was gone, the engine’s charred remains smoking. A few fragments of the agent’s Uzi and his own AK-47 lay scattered in the seat wreckage.
Memories surfaced from the compressed past in slices, like a CAT scan of disaster. They were lucky to have survived the RPG hit. The Mossad man had been riding in the back, with the soft package camouflaged in an open ammunition bag slung across his chest, and jumped without warning Max when he’d seen the rocket fired.
It was the Beast that had noticed what was happening. It didn’t understand machines or rockets, but it knew betrayal and threat. Max had thrown himself out an instant later, and the blast had carried him another ten feet. It wasn’t the first time the thing he carried, the sum of appetites and death that was the Beast, had saved his life. He was sure it wouldn’t be the last.
The soft package.
The agent was up on his elbows because he had the soft package clutched against his chest.
The infant was the mission priority for the agent. He didn’t care if Max survived. Max had done his job and killed the parents. He was expendable.
Sporadic fire was coming from the eastern side of the road, but nothing directed close to them. Not yet. Max wasn’t inclined to waste rounds providing the agent with covering fire, or killing him for his betrayal. The Beast, however, would demand vengeance once it was fully recovered.
Screams and thick smoke rolled in on Max’s position from fifty yards back up the road, where a white Mercedes was burning and still drawing most of the attention. Two men in jeans, T-shirts and vests were exchanging fire with shooters in houses on the east side of the street.
The intended target, Max thought. The jeep had been mistaken for an escort vehicle.
Of course. A white Mercedes and a U.S. military surplus vehicle equaled government official. In reality, someone with enemies really had been on the move, just like Max and his partner, early in the morning. Their being lumped together had been an unlucky coincidence.
All the players were running out of town at the same time. Rush hour in the casbah, or something like that, ran the lyrics to the song on the radio he’d heard when he’d taken the taxi to the airport for the flight to this assignment. Next time, he’d avoid cab drivers in tattered leather jackets.
And jobs involving babies.
If possible. Mr. Jung had been insistent. He thought he’d earned a measure of respect for the way he’d handled his last few assignments, completing them discretely without causing collateral damage, keeping the fulfillment of his appetites separate from work. But when he’d pointed out he didn’t like partners, except for Lee, and never worked with children, he’d only been reminded again of the life he’d lead without the sanction of powerful men who hired people like Mr. Jung to have the likes of him perform the necessary work of power.
The ambush was another reminder of the realities of his existence.
He’d done his job. His part of the operation was over. He was the one positioned to become collateral damage. Wouldn’t Mr. Jung be amused.
If it had been Lee out there, he might have tried to help. They worked well together. It would have been a waste of a convenient asset. But Lee wouldn’t have made himself a target in his desperation to complete a mission he didn’t understand.
Kill the mother and father. Take the child. Return with the baby alive.
Max hadn’t fought with Mr. Jung hard enough to recall Lee from his Argentinean operation—he regretted that now. Lee would have warned him about the rocket, might even have anticipated the ambush. He wouldn’t have risked their lives to please their masters.
But Max knew it would have been hard for a deep black op involving murder and child kidnapping to compete seriously for resources needed for a small-scale war. He could almost hear Mr. Jung’s reasoning still rationalizing the decision: the times demanded that experienced assets be dispersed as widely as possible. And there would have been an implication that pairing Max with a familiar partner might tempt him to revert to his old ways. Even Max couldn’t argue against the temptation of war zone chaos. Mr. Jung would have claimed he was
only trying to protect Max.
They could have sent him to the Falkland Islands, and Lee to the Middle East. At least the baby problem would have been resolved. But apparently it hadn’t been that kind of war.
Instead, bad timing ruined the operation. It wasn’t the Beast’s fault. Or Max’s.
Surfacing like a leviathan trapped too long in darkened depths, gasping for the breath of its life, the Beast fed on the fuel for its rage: the whine of bullets, the dust, the heat rising with the sun, the sting of smoke burning Max’s eyes and throat, the smell of spilled fuel and burning flesh. It didn’t care about blame or fault. It remembered its hunger for prey and wanted to tear Mr. Jung apart and eat his heart and guts and liver. It wanted to leap through shadowed doors and windows from which soft, glistening eyes had watched its passing, gleaming with terror, during the past twenty-four hours of the mission cycle as they’d made their way to the town where the targets lived. It had moodily heeded Max’s call for restraint with the locals and the Mossad agent. But now it wanted the vulnerable flesh of those who feared it. Because the demon had waited long enough.
It wanted the Mossad agent. With the Beast feeding him its rage, so did Max.
Max appreciated his demon’s vigor. Decisions of life and death came easier when riding the Beast.
A fierce exchange erupted around the mosque on the next street. RPG blasts punctuated the exchanges. The roar of a combat jet providing cover shook the dry, dusty earth. Another operation, entirely. It seemed time to call for prayers, but no one was getting on the mosque’s minaret loudspeaker.
A detonating bomb sent tremors through the earth. A plume of smoke and wreckage billowed into the air, eclipsing the early morning sun.
Other fights flared like dim embers fed by fresh winds of hate. Now was the time to run. Max leaned into the Beast’s rage, directing the demon’s chaotic flow of raw emotion against the men in the town who’d ambushed them. Survival meant using the Beast’s strength in a battle with his present enemies, not in avenging the last moment’s betrayal.
A Blood of Killers Page 18
