by Bill Thesken
Another car explodes, and then another, and a fireball erupts out of the openings in the building. My exploding car is starting a chain reaction with all the other cars next to. Gas tanks are heating up and blowing up. People stop watching and start running for their lives away from the area. The fire department is going to be pretty busy tonight.
I walk quickly back the way I came, through the alley back to Market street. Someone rigged my car, it looked like C-4 explosives, and a basic trigger on the driver’s side handle. I’d heard about this kind of thing before, never actually seen it in action though. It’s the kind of extreme method the mob and the CIA used to eliminate people.
There’s no going forward for now, I have to figure this out. They rigged my car, they probably rigged my apartment, whoever they are, they’d probably blow me up when I opened the front door. There’s no reason to go anywhere near my apartment, it was my known place of residence. They’ll have surveillance on it and won’t pull them off until they have me back in custody. I need quick answers. There’s absolutely no reason to go forward until I gather some facts. I need to backtrack. But first I needed to consider my options. I could either disappear completely and go underground, I could go to the police, or I could go to the agency. If I disappeared they’d find me someday, they always do, and my dream of running my own security firm and having a happy life would be over, I’d be living under a rock for the rest of my life and wondering what happened. If I went to the police they’d put me in a cell where I’d be an easy target. If I went to the agency they’d put me to sleep again, maybe this time for good. But there was a fourth option, I could go underground and , but I was on my own.
I flagged a cab down. It was an old guy driving, chain smoker, thin and wrinkled. “Where to pal?” he asked me with a hoarse voice.
“St. Jude’s hospital.”
“Which one?”
I hadn’t thought of that. When I’d flown the coop I hadn’t looked at the street names, I was hiding under a gurney in an ambulance. But I remembered the direction we’d travelled. “Straight south, five miles.”
“Bell and Figueroa.”
“That’s the one.” I had no idea if that was in fact the one, but I’d know when I got there.
When we got to the cross street before the hospital I could tell it was the same St. Jude’s that I’d escaped from a couple of hours ago. There was the tower of rooms on the side and the parking lot and the ER building on the other end with ambulances parked in front ready to go.
“This is fine,” I told the cabbie and gave him a twenty for the fifteen dollar ride. Another big tip from the Eraser.
The area around the hospital was mostly homes and apartment buildings and I walked casually. Just another guy out for some exercise in the early evening. I passed by a car parked on the side and could see the clock lit up on the dashboard. Eight o’clock. They probably had a visiting time schedule at the hospital, and I imagined eight o’clock was right around that time. There was a bus stop on the corner across from St. Jude’s and I found a spot in the shadow of a tree and leaned against the trunk, blending into it.
They wouldn’t expect me to come back to the hospital. There’s no way they’d be prepared for it. I scanned the fifth floor windows, some lights were on, but they were all covered with drapes, no help there. People were coming and going through the front door, mostly leaving.
Visiting time was over.
I didn’t really have a plan, but I figured if I got back into the hospital I could search the fifth floor and maybe find something, anything. Maybe run into one of the agency guys, or that Asian doctor with the big fingers and pump him with sodium pentothal and get some answers out of him.
There’s a security guy at the front, a regular guy with a standard uniform, rent-a-cop badge, white shirt and black tie, milling around, talking into his phone.
I spotted some nurses leaving the side door of the building, bunched up together, saying their goodbyes as girls often do, hugging and laughing, and then heading in different directions in the parking lot. One of the nurses is my nurse. Amber. I can tell it’s her even from this distance the way she’s busting out in all the right places. She’s headed to a far corner of the parking lot, near my bus stop. I need to interview my first witness.
It’s a little too bright, too many lights in the parking lot but there’s no way around it, I‘m on a tight time schedule. I hustle across the street as a bus goes by, using it as a shield. The sidewalk borders the lot and her car is parked right up against a hedge. She sees me and smiles, just a big kid or a young hippy in a baseball cap and tie dye shirt, it’s funny how this type of shirt always triggers a mellow reaction in people. They think that because you’re wearing it you must be mellow or stoned to the eyeballs and harmless. And then she recognizes my face. “Oh!” Her cheeks turned red.
I showed her the gun and motioned for her to get in the car. “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want some answers.” I could see the security guy still talking on the phone, looking at his feet. Worthless piece of garbage. She got in the car and I squeezed in the seat behind her.
“Remember me?”
“Room five A.”
“That’s right, you have a good memory. It must be tough remembering everyone that comes in and out of that hospital.”
“You said you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“And I won’t. Just answer some questions simple as that. So you do recognize me.”
“I recognize your face, but as for the rest, you’re wearing clothes now, it’s hard to tell.”
“What?”
“I’m a nurse, it’s no big deal. It’s part of the job. It’s kind of like washing a car after a while. When they brought you in last night you were one big scrape from head to toe. I gave you a sponge bath and bandaged you up.”
Now my cheeks turned red. “When they brought me in?”
“Yeah, the guy’s in the suit and ties. They cleared out a whole floor for you, said it was a national emergency. They sure were angry when you walked out, especially the guy you put in your place with the broken needle. I think he’s got a grudge against you now.”
“So you really are a nurse?”
“I just got off an eighteen hour shift and I’m tired okay? My feet are tired, my brain is exhausted from all the action today and I just want to go to bed.”
She saw my eyebrows raise up in the rear view mirror and shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Now are you going to ask your questions or not?”
I was speechless for a moment, thinking.
“Look,” she said. “If the security guard doesn’t see me drive away soon, he’ll come to check on me. You better hurry up.” She started the car and put it in reverse. “I’ll give you a ride out of here okay? Just duck down on the seat till we get clear.”
I crouched down on the back seat and watched her as she drove, backing up and going forward, turning out of the lot into traffic. She kept her eyes forward, didn’t wave at anyone or make any gesture.
Maybe not making a gesture was in itself making a gesture. That was paranoid thinking and I re-routed my train of thought. I was feeling weak and tired. When it seemed that we were far enough away I sat back up. Just that little move made the blood leave my head and I got woozy and closed my eyes.
She was watching me in the rear view mirror.
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“I had an aspirin and a cup of coffee a couple of hours ago, why?”
“You need food.”
“I need answers.”
“First you need food. I’m a nurse, I know what you need, trust me. You’ll go into hypoglycemic shock without some fat, protein and carbohydrates soon.” She pulled into a fast food drive through and ordered two burgers and a soda. “Health food,” she said as she drove forward to the window.
I pulled out a twenty and handed it to her. “My treat.” Actually it was the Erasers treat but who was keeping track.
I wolfed down the burger
s and slurped the soda while she pulled back onto the highway, and I began to feel whole again. I hadn’t really noticed her car. It was a heap, clean but old.
“They don’t pay you very much as a nurse do they?”
“Are you kidding me? I get by, but that’s about it. That’s all I really need though, for now, to get by.”
“Isn’t there a Mr. nurse?”
“Used to be. He used to joke all the time that he was going to upgrade to a younger model, and then one day he did.”
“Can’t believe you’ll be single long.”
“How about a year?”
I whistled. “You must be joking.”
“I don’t joke, and I don’t lie. I hate liars, and I hate what happened back at the hospital. They were lying to you about being in a coma for a couple of days.”
“I know. I found out when I looked at today’s date on a newspaper.”
She eyed me in the rear view mirror. “You don’t look like a liar. You’re not are you?”
I took my time and shook my head. “Not if I can help it. There’s always those situations where lying might help someone avoid feeling stepped on, or hurt. I could have told you this is the nicest car I’ve ever been in, but I didn’t.”
“You didn’t say it’s the worst you’ve ever been in either.”
“Tell me about the hospital, how long have you worked there?”
“Three years.”
“Why’d they bring me there?”
“I don’t know. We got the call from the top. Clear a floor quick, it was pretty tough. And then you showed up.”
“Who brought me there?”
“The same guys who were there when you woke up, plus a few more that looked the same. Young, military looking, suits. Serious. You were unconscious, and pretty ragged. Like I said, we cleaned you up, they took some blood samples and x-rays, and we bandaged you up. Then we had a little meeting where they told us how to act. I was there when the doctor got the toxicology report. You were high on drugs.”
“I don’t take drugs. I don’t even drink.”
“That’s what I thought by looking at you. I see druggies at the hospital all the time. You didn’t fit the bill. Not willingly anyways.”
“Someone drugged me before they brought me there, I was riding a motorcycle, something hit me, I blacked out, I don’t remember what happened. What’d they use to bring me out of my fake coma?”
“Adrenaline. It counters the opiates.”
“What happened when I left the building?”
“They came and got me, questioned me.”
“The same guys who were in the hospital room?”
“A lot of different ones. But they all looked the same.” She looked at me in the mirror. “They yelled at me.”
“Yeah, well I owe you. My names Badger Thompson.”
She glanced again in the mirror. “You’re named after an animal?”
“I get that a lot. Sort of a family tradition.”
“Amber Clark.” She pulled into an apartment complex, and parked in a marked stall. She pulled her purse off the seat, opened it and handed him her wallet. “Check my ID.”
“That’s okay. I don’t need to…” I tried to push the wallet away but she was insistent.
“No, I want you to. Please.”
I unlatched it. There was cash, coins, credit cards, driver’s license, hospital ID. I flipped through them all. They all said Amber Clark. I was doing this for her sake. I’d already made up my mind about her. In my line of work you need to instinctively know when a person is telling the truth, and know it immediately. I could tell she was on the up and up when I came out of my coma. Even when she said the whole thing was a charade I knew she wasn’t a part of it, didn’t seem to like it. I carefully put everything back in place and handed her the wallet. I needed to move on.
“Alright, you check out. Thanks for the ride and the information.” I got out of the car and opened the door for her and turned to leave.
“Do you want to come up for a cup of coffee?”
I turned back slowly.
She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s easy to make.”
“I just held you up with a gun, gave you the third degree.”
“I’ve had worse done to me. Don’t forget, my husband left me for a younger woman. It doesn’t get much worse than that.”
“You haven’t been around.”
“Look, do you want the coffee or not?”
“Alright, one cup.” I was feeling groggy again. Maybe it was the head injury, or the lingering effects of the drugs they and whoever else had given me, or maybe it was just the greasy burger slowing me down, clogging up my arteries. A cup of coffee sounded like the ticket right about now. I had a lot of ground to cover before daylight.
I followed her up the stairs and into the little apartment. It was like her car, old but clean, a one bedroom one bath rental with Formica on the floor and counters.
“Nice place,” I lied.
She gave me a look that said, nice try. “Where’d you get that shirt?”
I looked down at the tie dye hippie shirt, the circle of colors radiating out from the center like an eyeball. There was a new color now, ketchup from the burger, and I wiped it with the back of my hand. “Whoops.”
She went over to a box by the door and rummaged through it and pulled out a black tee shirt and black sweater and threw them towards me.
“This color works better at night.”
“Your husbands’ old clothes?”
“Are you kidding me? They all went in the trash last year. These are just some of my Dad’s old clothes. He was about your size. I moved in here about a month ago and brought some old stuff with me, been meaning to take it to the second hand store.”
“I do a lot of my shopping there.”
She frowned. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said and motioned to the couch and turned on the kitchen light. “I’ll make that coffee.”
I sat down in the couch and nearly got swallowed by the cushions. It was soft as a fluffy cloud. I thought about changing out of the hippy shirt and into the black tee shirt and sweater but my chin kept hitting my chest, and my eyes felt heavy like they were weighed down with bags of sand, fought to keep them open…
4.
In the Penthouse at the apex of the tallest building in the state the butler pulled the drapes back and spread out before them as far as the eye could see, the lights of the city and the surrounding suburbia sparkled and twinkled, multifaceted, multicolored, as though they were sitting on top of a giant diamond cut from a black rough. The windows themselves were fifteen feet high, the outsides tinted green like money and there really wasn’t any need for drapes. They were mostly for show, like opening up the drapes that covered the screen in the old movie theatres. The butler tied them off with black ropes, then bowed to the man seated at the long desk.
Charles H. Washington II balanced a gold lighter on his thumb. His name was long and official and sounded like he was filthy rich, which he was, but his friends all called him C.W., or C-Dub for short which he liked since it sounded more like a rapper from the streets. A medium built man, dark and brooding forehead with deep set eyes, sharp chin and nose, receding hairline with a tinge of gray, not yet forty and yet aging like he was well into his sixties, his face at any rate was aging. The stress of running a growing empire cracking the area around his eyes.
His body though was lean and strong like a middleweight boxer in the middle of training, the veins and sinews in his forearms popping as he raised a big cigar to his lips, took one puff and exhaled a cloud while taking in the city skyline.
“They’re waiting sir,” said the butler. It was more of an announcement than a reminder, and the butler stood silent on the side.
“Good, they can wait.” And he smiled a crooked smile, his gold implants shining and took another puff on the cigar. It was the most expensive one you could buy, from a private garden in the countryside south of Havana. Yes, they can wait, h
e thought, like I waited all these years for just this moment in time, planning, scheming, killing even when needed…
Yes, everything was lining up nicely. The bid for the skyscraper was nearly complete, and a thousand luxury condos would soon be on the market, the residential development was moving forward, the golf course resort and casino were pumping cash, the record deals, the pro basketball team…
Now that would be the capper, forget about the money involved buying it and pumping into it like a car at a gas pump.
To be able to sit on the sidelines and have everyone look at him and say, “That’s the man” and be able to look right back at them in the eye and say “that’s right, I am THE man now.”
All these punk ass pro sports player wannabes looking for ‘street cred’ as they called it. He laughed at that. Hell, he wasn’t only a product of the streets, from the streets, toughened by the streets, whatever you wanted to call it, he was actually born on the street, his Momma rest her soul giving birth to him on the asphalt black top on a hot summer night in Chinatown while she waited for the pimp that was in charge of her to bring a hit of ice so she could keep working through the night. Bring her the hit of ice that would kill her and bring him into this cruel world. And when he was old enough to learn the truth and learn the ropes, he vowed never to be that helpless again. He was never going to be laid out on the asphalt again, never.
He started out with one small grimy little tattoo shop in the inner city, about as big as a closet, and built that into one of the biggest companies in the country.
With foresight and providence, a man can do a lot with the few years he has allocated to him in this world. He was proof positive. When he heard the kid rapping away at the little tattoo shop, and the kid told him he didn’t have a record contract, didn’t even know what that meant, it’s like a halo appeared over his head, like an angel sent to him from above delivering him from the pit, and the proceeds from the tattoo shop went into producing the first of many hit records, which only led to more opportunities. The night clubs, the record company, the real estate deals. Money was pouring in from all angles.
