Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series)

by Craig McDonald

“Fuck this,” the returned Skull and Bones member dubbed “Temporary” says. He grouses on, “And drop the ‘Temporary’ nickname. You know I don’t go for this secret handshake and handles crap. Never have. And I really gotta get back to the Guard base.”

  The older voice again: “To hell with that. It’s only the Texas ‘Champagne Unit.’ You’ll leave when we’re ready for you to go, Temporary.”

  A snort. “‘Temporary.’ It’s ‘George.’ ‘George W.’ Short and simple, yeah?”

  “You mock and sully us,” the older man says. “For decades we’ve chased Villa’s skull, and this bastard, this boozing pulp magazine writer, took it from us when we almost had it in our grasp again. That Mexican barbarian invaded the United States and killed Americans. Now we avenge that.”

  “Christ’s sake,” this “George W.” says, “you avenge all that by putting some other poor bastard’s rotting skull in a glass case? How exactly does that work? Man. It makes no sense at all. It’s never made sense — not even taking Villa’s head. None of it makes a lick of sense.”

  The old man: “Granted, the Punitive Expedition failed in its central aims. We—”

  George W. cuts the old bastard off. “Whatever made any of ’em think sending Jack Pershing and all those soldiers south of the border would accomplish anything? Hell, it’s a crazy-ass notion — getting some wild hair and chasing a single man in another country’s desert. Especially a man whose countrymen are bent on protecting him. Hell’s belles, even the ones that hated Villa covered for him. The Mexicans, to a man, saw Pershing as an invader, not an avenger. The Pershing Expedition was a farce. Pure folly. It just genned-up anti-American sentiment in the Mexicans. President Wilson would have been ahead to pay some of Pancho’s cronies to take him out or turn him in. But to send Pershing and the Army in? Nuts, man. Just nuts. Like Teddy Roosevelt and that Berber chieftain — where was President Roosevelt’s good counsel that time out? Same thing with Wilson, sending Pershing into Mexico — wrong-headed and shortsighted. It was just vengeful.”

  “It matters to your grandfather,” the old man says. “Probably matters to your father, to ‘Poppy.’ And my God, I sincerely hope you don’t follow them into politics. Not with these naïve, simpleton notions of yours.”

  George says, “You’re one major-league asshole, you know that? It doesn’t matter to me — none of this dipshit mumbo-jumbo and secret crap does. It’s just damned nonsense and so much horseshit. My father has always seen the world in shades of gray and, you know, nuance is the father of hesitation. And, hell, you’re just a bunch of grave-robbers. You defiled a fellow American’s grave taking Lassiter’s head. So tell me, who’s the real evildoer?”

  Well hell: That strikes me as an entry line.

  I shoulder in, my Skull and Bone’s hostage thrust out front. Heads turn, wide-eyed to see a one-eyed invader in their granite and marble hidey-hole.

  “Just so you know, up front,” I say, “I’ve got a sawed-off shotgun at this man’s back. And I will use it.”

  This old man with a moustache, dressed as Don Quixote, is sitting there looking rusted and rickety. There’s another bastard perched there beside the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, dressed in a devil’s suit.

  Must be initiation night.

  The ersatz Quixote is so flummoxed he spits as he says, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Nobody,” I say. “Just some unwashed nobody with no college degree. But I’m here to pick up a friend. I want Hector Lassiter’s head, and muy pronto.”

  That declaration triggers more bluster from the Don.

  “George W.” shoots the old bastard a look of genuine contempt. George cocks his thumbs at me. “See, this is where this bullshit — this morbid plundering of graves and this vindictiveness — gets all you ghoulish old assholes. I should let him shoot all of you.”

  “Where’s my friend’s head?”

  George W. waves at a glass cabinet. Maybe five or six skulls and some assorted bones are displayed in there. I try not to look too hard; Hector was my friend — and not in the ground (or out) as long as Villa’s head had been when I made that skull’s accidental acquaintance. I toss a folded-up carpetbag to George W. and say, “Put it in there for me, would you, Ace?”

  George grimaces, but nods. He picks up a couple of folded, red-linen napkins — he’s not going to touch the head with his bare hands and who could blame him? He saunters over to the “trophy” cabinet.

  Sour-faced, he lowers a not-too-mummified-looking something into the bag and seals it up. I remember Hector long ago lobbing a severed head in a similar bag at a gun-pointing Texas Republican down El Paso way. So I caution George, “Hand it over to me, slowly and carefully.”

  He does. George smirks and winks. “You’ve got a pair on you, amigo.”

  “You know,” I say, smiling back, “I didn’t think it would be this easy.”

  George tugs on his ear lobe and bites his lip. Poor bastard’s eyebrows meet in the middle. He’s going to need to fix that if he really wants to go into politics. “It ain’t that easy, hombre,” he says. “This is the easy part. Getting out of here, that likely won’t be too tough, either. And you’ll have a few minutes’ head start. This joint is lousy with intelligence types — past, present and future. They distrust electronics because they all know what they can do with ’em on a surveillance front. So there are no phones here in The Tomb. You’ll have a head start — no pun intended — but out there ... well, they can bring a lot of heat to bear on you, amigo. I don’t envy you the pursuit. Pancho Villa at least had the advantage of the border and several days of running time.”

  Christ, my new friend George probably has a point. But I brass it out, backing out now, Hector’s head in a bag clutched in my left hand, the shotgun leveled in my right. “You said it yourself, George — one man lost on a continent ... it’s a fool’s mission to try and find him.”

  George nods and smiles sadly. “But that was a long time ago and in another country. You’re back east, amigo. Ain’t no frontiers left here in the land of the brave and the free.”

  Argue with that. I smile and say, “I hear you.” Then, “Thanks for the assist.”

  Don Quixote: “Temporary is right: We’ll crush you, little man.”

  The Devil: “You can run, but you can’t hide. If you run, you’ll only die tired. We’ll soon have your head in this cabinet. I promise you that.”

  The last voice I hear is George W.’s, urging me to change cars often. His last bit of advice: “Lose that eyepatch and fast, partner — damn few pirate look-alikes roaming the Yale campus.” It’s good, if obvious, counsel. I throw my Skull and Bone’s hostage to the floor and back out fast. Outside, I slam the door behind me. Checking to be certain nobody is following, I ditch my black coat and fedora in a trash bin.

  I stow Hector’s head on the floor behind the front passenger’s seat and toss my eyepatch out the window. I slap in the glass eye. For old time’s sake, I’ve brought along my old white vaquero’s hat — the one Hector took for me from a Texas Republican. It’s conspicuous as hell here in the East. But that’s the point: “Naked is the best disguise.” And a white cowboy hat is 180-degrees out of phase with a black slouch hat. So I put it on.

  George’s admonition about changing cars eats at me. I palm into the Greyhound lot and park there. I’ll let the fuckers chase cross-country buses assuming they ever identify my car. I snag a cab across town and then hoof it two blocks to a used car lot. About that time, I start to hear and see all the black helicopters. There are maybe a dozen of them, hovering ... searching.

  I wonder what they’ve been told to look for?

  Through the curtain of rain, the choppers all look big and black and unbeatable.

  Getting the sweats now, I pay cash up front. Twenty minutes later, I drive off in my new, used, midnight blue ’66 Impala with a red replacement hood. She’s got a lot under that mismatched hood ... a real power car.

  I fill up the tank and head southwest — highway
s all the way.

  Twenty-four hours of white-knuckle driving, sustaining myself with gas station coffee, BBF burgers and little pills they sell truckers.

  Twenty-five hours in — heart racing, sweating furiously, hands shaking — I start talking to Hector’s head.

  More troubling: Hector’s head starts talking back.

  Hec gives me some advice.

  Hector says, Call Alicia, now. Have her meet you somewhere. Tell her to make sure she’s not followed.

  I say, Why?

  Hector says, Because they are going to expect you to go to New Mexico to put me back together. They’ll watch my old place — Alicia’s new home.

  Goddamn, Hector’s so right. I slide off the interstate and drop some quarters. Her phone might be tapped, so I tell Alicia to get to another phone and call me back. She does. I instruct her to cross the border, follow the Rio Grande down to Matamoros. I’ll meet her there in a week.

  But damned if that wait by the phone for her to call me back doesn’t cost me, lets them get a bead on me, somehow — the fucking CIA spooks and their Yale cronies.

  Ten minutes down, thinking maybe I finally see some light at the end of this hellish tunnel that I’m locked into, it happens. A sniper on an overpass puts three bullets through my windshield. One goes through my hat, just missing my head. Another misses me, but flying windshield glass nicks my cheeks.

  The third bullet takes out my radio. No more country tunes to drive to.

  Those cocksuckers!

  Time for some new wheels.

  3

  It’s a zombie’s sprint.

  No safety.

  No hiding.

  No sleep.

  I’m reduced to running with the bag with Hector’s head, a trenchcoat to cover all my guns, a duffel bag filled with wadded up clothes, pills to keep me awake and a thermos filled with black coffee. My left kidney’s burning — probably first intimations that I’ve built for myself a hell of a set of kidney stones with all this undiluted high-octane java these past few days.

  I look like a hollow-eyed bum, unshaven, unshowered.

  All those cuts on my face courtesy of the exploding windshield don’t make me less conspicuous.

  I’m nearly always nauseous from lack of sleep. My junk food, caffeine and pep pill diet is playing hell with my diabetes; the insulin is hard-pressed to compensate.

  And some pachuco with a big old knife recently left a deep wound in my left arm. I’m watching it, afraid it’ll infect. Bandit bastard wasn’t good, but he made up for it with feral viciousness and a high-tolerance for pain. He must have been hired on the cheap when they somehow got another bead on me in Shreveport. They got their money’s worth, whatever they paid him: it took five slugs to his upper torso to take him down for keeps.

  It’s tantalizingly close now, but I figure the Texas border is too tough for me to cross at checkpoints without them picking me off.

  I’ve had an entire nation to hide in and they’ve nearly gotten me six times in three days. Now that they’ve located me in Shreveport, I double back a bit — head back east. Then I veer south.

  There’s a charter boat waiting for me in Morgan City, an old rumrunner with a thirty-footer. He’s agreed to take me across the Gulf, despite the fact we run the risk of running right into the eye of a tropical storm.

  But you know what? Money really does talk. And that’s a good thing — it can keep up my end of the conversation, ’cause I figure to spend the next few hours vomiting; I don’t do rough seas.

  Here’s my plan, such as it is:

  Hector and me’ll track toward the Rio Grande and the old rumrunner will drop me someplace along the Mexican coast.

  Then what’s left of Hector and me will make our way along the Rio Grande to find Alicia.

  Money isn’t the only thing talking.

  Hector’s head is going on, a mile a minute. He likes this plan. And he feels like writing. He starts dictating this tale to me he wants to call The Big Comb-Over.

  It’s a new crime novel — a harrowing collision of male-pattern baldness and tattooed treasure maps.

  * * *

  The boat is a rolling sanctuary. My skipper is a grizzled mad man — like the crazy captain who’d run you up the river to search for King Kong or to kill Kurtz.

  And what do you know? He’s a fellow cyclops — he’s got an eye missing on the same side. That shared loss seems to make us brothers in his eye(s?).

  Three hours in, he convinces me to go below — to wash up, rest, whatever I want. I take him up on his proposition.

  Below, I make the mistake of checking the mirror. Jesus God ... I look like a wild-eyed vagrant.

  I borrow the skipper’s razor and put in a fresh blade and shave for the first time in nearly a week.

  I slap on some “borrowed” Old Spice — I’m in deep clover now. I take a whore’s bath and wash my hair in the sink. I check my reflection again. Ain’t great, but at least I no longer look like Peachey Carnahan in those last few paragraphs of The Man Who Would Be King. But like poor Peachey, “I’ve urgent private affairs — in the south.” And just a little left of a friend.

  The knife wound in my arm is looking a little better now and that’s a relief. I fear the gangrene.

  I slick back my wet hair and change into some “fresh” clothes. I feel almost human. I gaze at the cot ... so inviting.

  But then the sea begins to pitch. Rain lashes the cabin’s portholes. The storm is on us. Can’t sleep through this — hell, I can’t cross the room. When the cabin goes nearly 65-degrees sideways, I start thinking Hector’s going to get a burial at sea — and I figure he won’t be going under alone.

  I curl up in the captain’s cot and try to close my eyes. But there is no sleeping through this storm. I see the carpetbag tumble across the floor. I untangle myself from the sheets and toss them carelessly over the pillows of the cot. I retrieve the bag with Hector’s head and duck under the steps leading to topside, figuring I’ll wedge the bag under the lowest runner to keep it in place. Then I see the feet descending.

  I don’t remember those pants.

  It’s supposed to be just me and the one-eyed skipper on the boat.

  So who is this skulking cocksucker?

  He’s wearing white slacks and matching white deck shoes with no socks, a cordovan belt and a pressed blue shirt with rolled up sleeves. He’s got a twenty-dollar haircut. Sucker looks like an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue version of a sailor.

  I smell Yale — maybe CIA.

  He crosses to the cot, closing in on that shadowy pile of pillows and sheets. He goes at the sheets with a big buck knife — a flurry of stabs and feints as he struggles to maintain his footing against the pitch of the ship. I cross behind him like some sleep-deprived drunk — trying to get to my overcoat and my guns. He senses movement, pivots on heel and raises his knife. The ship rolls again, in the opposite direction, and me and my would-be killer slam into the same bulkhead. I shake it off, rising. The impact did the other guy real harm: he’s standing there dumbfounded, staring at the knife that’s now buried hilt-deep in his own aorta. He drops to his knees, then falls forward, hands at his side ... no attempt to break his fall. A dead man’s fall. The knife’s point digs out a little deeper through his bloodied back.

  So I figure I’m gonna be made for this death — nobody’s gonna believe that this likely-to-be psychopath, this orders-exceeding frat boy, somehow butter-fingered himself to death.

  While the traitorous captain is busy keeping us afloat, I wrap the dead bastard up tight in the bedsheets and get him shouldered up into a fireman’s carry. It’s hard work with all that dead, loose-limbed weight ... with the shifting stairs and a rolling ocean underfoot. But I creep topside behind the captain who is intent and white-knuckled at the wheel. The captain’s not seeing and not hearing me.

  I pitch Mr. Yale overboard and creep back downstairs. I’m sweating like a pig. I wash up quickly again, change into yet another shirt — an unbloodied shirt �
� and take a couple shots of the captain’s bourbon.

  Then I grab my guns, grab Hector’s head and head back topside.

  My gun pressed tight to the back of the skipper’s head, I say, “I hope for your sake we’re still headed toward Mexico.”

  “Not much choice,” the one-eyed old man says sourly. “The storm is moving west to east. We’re nearly through it, I think. I’m sure as hell not about to go back in. I’ll make port in Mexico where I drop you, then head back when it clears.”

  Uh-huh.

  Jesus, I’m so tired. But I sweat out several hours there, my gun pressed to the back of the old bastard’s head. He accepted a hundred dollars to let them kill me. I was paying this cyclopean cocksucker five hundred to take me across.

  The math slays me.

  And that same math may yet slay him.

  Fifty yards offshore, I pistol whip the skipper behind his right ear.

  I’ve watched him work the controls for hours now, so I figure I can hit the shoreline just fine on my own.

  I line her up and set the controls to go in rather slow.

  Or so I think.

  I’m shooting for a semi-remote stretch of beach, about a half-mile south of some lights — some fishing village or vacation bungalows, maybe. I climb up on the prow, leaning into the offshore breeze. I have my bags full of guns, my insulin, and Hector in hand — ready to leap when the impact comes.

  That “impact” — that’s too gentle a word.

  It’s more like ramming a car into a wall at thirty or forty miles an hour ... while you’re standing on the hood.

  There’s something to be said for wet sand, and this is it — it’s too fucking hard.

  I struggle up, seeing lights and now nauseous as hell. I find my bags and start walking toward the real lights strung out along the shoreline.

  Then I trip over something, and I fall.

  I struggle back up and turn to see what took me down. It’s a body — the body of the one-eyed skipper. The luckless sucker shot right through the bridge’s window and way out in front of his own boat. He’s staring up at my with that one good eye.