I didn’t even bother with the knot on the ribbon. Leaned my head down, fumbled the key a moment until I felt it slide into the lock-
The door knob turned.
-and twisted and it gave way-
A BIG guy stepped inside.
It was off!
I snapped the padlock closed again and slipped the loop over my middle knuckle, so the lock was facing out. Improvised brass knuckles. Lunged and punched the BIG guy in the mouth with it. Teeth cracked, blood spurted, he fell backwards into the guy behind him, nearly knocked the gun out of his hand. Nearly.
I reached for the mike stand, lifted it, really felt the weight this time, tensed all over and …
Whap!
Swung the mike stand and crushed the hand in which he held the gun.
Bang!
The fucker had pulled the trigger. Barely missed me.
Then the gun was on the floor, skidding, spinning out of reach, a slow-motion metaphor of my life.
We both went for it. Scratching, kicking, gasping.
I got him in the soft parts with my stiletto heels. He groaned, grabbed my right arm, held it down, tried to climb over me to reach the piece.
Now the BIG guy had recovered enough to climb in, get the picture, and step across us to …
Fuck that. I had my fingers on the gun.
Fuckboy on top of me, smothering me, still going for it.
I wrapped my fingers around the grips.
Just as the BIG guy stepped on my fingers.
Tears shot to my eyes, blinding pain, hurt like a motherfucker, did it ever.
But I didn’t let go. Just wriggled my wrist and fired the thing.
Startled them both so bad, they flinched enough to give me leverage. I wrenched the gun from beneath his shoe, pointed it up at the BIG guy and fired again, then at the fuckboy on top of me, straight into his chest. Three times. He went deadweight and it knocked the wind out of me.
I looked up at the BIG guy, ready to fire again.
But there was no need. I’d finally caught my lucky break. Totally freehand, no aim, and yet the shot had ripped half his throat out. He was desperately trying to suppress the fountain of blood gushing all over the RV. He ended up sitting on the couch, still in his right mind. Turned to me. Wide-eyed.
He tried to speak. I swear he said, “Help me? Can you help me?” But it was all a gargle.
I didn’t say a word. Just watched him die.
Three dead. All at my hand.
I crawled from beneath the deadweight and caught my breath. I wasn’t some badass action hero. Far from it. But I was desperate, a caged animal in fear of its life, and they made one crucial mistake. They underestimated me. If they’d just gone straight for the kill, there was a good chance they’d all still be alive. Could have been me bleeding out in that torture porn cell.
I stayed on my hands and knees, eyes clenched shut, not wanting to be reminded of the death around me. I counted to one hundred, slowly. At least I tried to. I got to twenty-six before remembering that what I had done had most likely been streaming to the Fancy Rooms site. If my fear was more than stress-induced paranoia, it had all been recorded.
I looked up at the screen. Still blank. Maybe I’d just caught my second lucky break in under five minutes. Listen to me: lucky. Three dead bodies, me raped and beaten and as good as naked in a pool of blood, and I was considering myself … lucky. Fuck my life.
In spite of the scene, I started laughing. Some cosmic joke, right? I got upright — each motion an aching eternity, it seemed — and pointed at the camera. “What, can’t take a little death with your torture? Did it get too real for you?”
There was no indication that anyone was watching. No little red light. No squad cars screeching to a halt outside. No nothing.
I looked down at myself and nearly threw up with self-disgust. My bikini was covered in blood. A tense second later I relaxed in the knowledge that — third lucky break? — it was someone else’s blood.
Looked around.
Where was I? How much time did I have before the dead men’s back-up arrived?
I got rid of the heels, checked the boys’ shoes. One pair of Timberlands (the BIG guy), one pair of retro New Balance (Fuckboy). The NB’s were too small. Had to be the Timberlands, then. I pulled them off his sodden feet, my hands slick with his blood. Slipped them on without socks, felt the soles of my feet squish around, then laced them as tight as I could and tried a few steps like I was at a shoe store. Felt like I’d walked straight on to a Tarantino film set. Death — I’d certainly never expected to be responsible for someone else’s, but what was the real shocker was just how fucking surreal it can be.
I worked the other guy’s farm jacket off him, trying and failing to not touch his skin in the process. Cold already. Again my stomach convulsed. Had to think about something else. The jacket. Felt the fabric. Breathed deep. Slowed my heartbeat. Stood back up and tried on the jacket. Even with three still smoking bullet holes in the back, it was better than nothing.
But the pants … No. My knees threated to buckle just thinking of how I’d get them off one of the corpses, touch death in its naked indignity …
I’d just have to chance it.
I stepped outside. Found myself on the shoulder of the road. Where that might be, I had no idea. Straight highway as far as the eye could see in both directions. No house or business or farm in sight, just trees and asphalt. Time of day looked to be close to sundown. I had no idea how long we’d been driving, which direction we were going, except that I should probably assume we were driving away from wherever all this had started.
By that logic, I should go the opposite direction from the one the RV was pointing in.
Two problems with that:
First, I had to expect that others were on the way, and I’d be walking right into their arms. Raske’s operation, as we’d already seen, employed a lot of BIG guys, and as one of them had just reminded me, they hadn’t been instructed to bring me in alive.
Second, I wasn’t wearing any pants, and it was still cold enough this far north to give a person frostbite, especially at night.
(Oh, and I wasn’t too keen to meet anyone who’d actually stop to pick up a half-naked transwoman on the side of the road without knowing who she was or why she was dressed like an extra from The Walking Dead.)
Sure, I could’ve taken the van. Could have just hopped back in and driven away. But let’s say I’d stayed ahead of that the dead men’s relief crew for long enough to drive somewhere I felt safe. How would I have explained three dead people, all killed by me? Would the truth hold up?
I needed help. Badly. And the longer I stayed around this death-mobile, the less safe I was already feeling. Maybe I was traumatized, maybe I just wasn’t very good at making good decisions in bad situations, but whatever reason my sub-conscious had for making me run from the scene, run is what I did.
Straight for the cover of the trees. Feeling a little safer away from the open road, I started walking back through patches of snow, scratchy bare branches, fallen limbs, and the wind, sonofabitch, that fucking wind.
It wasn’t too long before I saw a sign telling me I was on U.S. Highway 2, which finally gave me a decent idea of where we’d been driving — northwest out of Duluth across the state. If we’d kept on track, we would’ve eventually hit Grand Rapids, then Bemidji, then, over the North Dakota state line, Grand Forks. In short, I was in the Great Northern Woods. The Great Northern Nowhere of tiny towns and land, lots of land, and starry skies …
I wondered how many other roaming freak shows Raske and Marquette had greenlighted in that RV. How much blood had been bled and shit had been shat? How many tears cried?
I shivered, only partially from the thought, as the wind felt like sandpaper on my exposed legs and face. I bundled my borrowed farm jacket tighter around my shivering shoulders. No sense of time. The dark had come and I could no longer see the RV when I looked behind me. No RV, no road, not even the sound of distan
t sirens in the frosty air, despite the best efforts of my paranoid sub-conscious, which kept trying to conjure them up with every pulsing of the blood vessels in my ears. But other than that, silence.
Where was I going? And what would I do when I got there?
Not that the answer really mattered. I just kept moving as far away as possible from all the people who wanted to hurt me. One slow step at a time. Survival instinct on autopilot.
But then, the road ahead curved. Looked as though there was a bright florescent glow around the bend. Headlights?
No, too bright.
The tress cleared for a lot, some old semi parts, a barely-there trailer, and a few older cars. Beyond that, a truck stop. An honest to god gas station with a café and separate pumps for eighteen-wheelers. A big sign on two white poles towered above, its benign heraldic message letting me know I’d made it to the “1 Stop”.
Seemed relatively new compared to the lots surrounding it — trailers, rusting junk, and an old concrete slab, proof that a smaller, shittier gas station had once ruled in its place. An omen? Was I, too, facing a brighter future? Manny Jahnke, the eternal optimist.
Next door, a sixties ranch home was probably inhabited by the same people who first lived there, because who the hell would buy a house thirty yards from an all-hours truck stop?
Talk about naïve optimism. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure about my future.
Anyway, time to refocus on the present. Put aside the trauma of my Reservoir Dogs moment in that RV and save my freezing ass.
Several big rigs at the pumps, a few more off to the edge of the lot, the drivers probably taking naps. Some wide loads — giant turbine blades. Then, a couple of cars at the regular pumps, several more pick-up trucks and SUVs pulled up to the café.
Yet despite all that custom, not a single payphone out front. Goddamn it.
If I went in, looking like this … take your pick: cops or ambulance.
Correction: Cops and ambulance.
Not to mention the possibility of getting my ass kicked by homophobic truckers.
So, there I stood, on the edge of the parking lot, hidden by trees, having to consider my own safety in a public place although my abused body showed everyone who cared to look that I was doing real bad and needed some help.
Maybe I was underestimating the folks inside.
Maybe.
But when was the last time I’d been right in my assessment of other people? Wasn’t that proven inability precisely why I was in this desperate situation?
Right, self-recrimination aside, I either had to risk waltzing into this place or do nothing, and doing nothing just got me colder, wetter, weaker, and more hopeless.
Last time I’d been in a situation like this — not dressed for the weather and, perhaps more importantly, having just ‘killed’ someone — two police officers had come to my aid. Maybe they would do so again. If only I could get in touch with Haupt and Engebretsen.
I took a deep breath. Stepped out of my cover and walked towards the 1 Stop.
3
Joel, too, stepped out of the woods, but his were in a neighborhood in Duluth. He checked his phone. Finally found some reception. He was definitely not going to make his ‘meeting’ with Tennyson, or whoever would’ve jumped him if he’d actually gone. All he was thinking about now was me, because without me, this whole thing was fucked. Chances were, it was fucked anyway, but hey, maybe that mystic bond between us wasn’t about our shared history of suffering after all. Maybe Joel, too, loath though he’d have been to admit it, was a romantic at heart, a diehard optimist, even in the face of all this abuse, violence, murder, deceit, and let’s be honest — the ever greater risk that he was gunning straight for a final betrayal.
Yet he kept going. Alone, out in the cold, since I was incommunicado when he needed me the most.
And to make matters worse, he was still using his very compromised phone. Not that there are degrees of compromised, but at least levels of awareness of the compromise. Joel was in caveman mode — tool good, use tool.
He called for a cab.
He had the cab take him to a rental car joint, and soon enough he was on his way back to the cities in a Nissan Juke.
What did he use for payment? His campaign credit card.
Two hours till home.
He called Robin, but couldn’t get more than monosyllables out of her. The woman was sick of the whole campaign. Sick of being left alone in the Cities. And for once, not even I could fault her.
He said he was sorry, but what was he supposed to do about it? Did she want him to quit?
Seven more minutes of passive-aggressive bullshit later, she asked, “Are you coming home now?”
“I’ve got stuff to do.”
“Of course you do.”
“But I do!”
Not telling her about the bodies in the van in the woods. Not telling her about me having gone missing. Not even telling her about the ride with his dad.
Why not?
Mainly because she hadn’t bothered to ask him how he was doing, how he felt, what he was thinking about. And because some of these things would even freak out a hobby ball-buster like Robin. Dead bodies in vans for example.
So, without a reason to fear for him, she just cut him off: “Right, right, bye now.”
Click.
Of course he was pissed. Of course he wanted to call her back. Of course he was feeling even more lost and desperate. Thankfully, he didn’t. Didn’t even text her where he was going.
Which meant the hackers wouldn’t know, either.
Was I still counting lucky breaks?
Fuck no.
But I was taking them wherever I could, and finally, so was Joel, that stubborn son of a bitch.
Where did that get him? The curb about a half-mile from my townhouse. Got out and walked the rest of the way.
Why my townhouse?
Well … if a clue was going to turn up anywhere, it would probably do so where I kept all my stuff.
Plus, he had a key for that place. He was one of the first people I’d given a spare one.
(Note to self: next time, give your trusty ex-Marine partner the keys to everything. You never can tell.)
He gave the building a wide berth, walked around the perimeter looking for signs of surveillance. Didn’t see any, but neither did he realize how much of it was digital, how many cameras were transmitting his image at that very moment.
He’d been blown. We’d all been blown. It was only a matter of time now.
Joel eased along, hands in the pocket of his jacket, Timberwolves cap pulled low on his brow, as he took the steps to my front door, slid the key in, twisted, and found that it was already open.
He didn’t waste a second. Pulled the gun, stepped inside quietly. The door squeak had to have given him away, but he kept on anyway. Into the semi-dark. The lights were off, but dim moonlight penetrated the large windows, giving the lavish furnishings silver halos.
He knew the layout. Listened hard. Thought he heard a noise from the bedroom. Maybe the door hadn’t given him away after all.
Joel also knew the floors, so he slipped out of his boots, quiet as the dead, and kept on down the hall, gun ready. Eerie sense of déjà vu. How many times had he pulled his gun these past several months?
He’d lost count.
More than in his days with the Marines, that was for sure.
Easy now.
Easy.
A quick peek into the computer room. Trashed, but the monitor still stood tall on the desk, its massive shadow dark on the glinting window behind it. The starry night lit the house enough to navigate, and for that he was momentarily thankful, but he wasn’t in the mood for all this daunting Gothic symbolism. Gave him the fucking creeps.
Suddenly, the sounds of shuffling, scuffling, slamming.
Joel flattened himself against the hallway wall, then stuck his head inside, cleared the left side of the room. The intruder was behind the door, off to the right.
Only one?
Joel didn’t get it. Why would the campaign send one person? Seemed like they could afford goons aplenty. Your tax dollars at work.
He swung into the room, gun out, shouted, “Don’t move!”
But the intruder, leaning into my closet, did move. Moved fast. Had his own pistol out, jumped into the closet, and yanked the door shut.
Not before Joel recognized him, though.
“Thorn? Is that you?” He kept his gun trained at the closet, as he went down on one knee.
Muted voice from inside: “Leave it alone, soldier. I don’t care what they told you. Leave it alone.”
“I know. I know what Marquette did, what he was up to. Tell me where Manny is.”
“I said, leave it alone.”
“Goddamn it, if I have to fucking shoot you down limb by limb, I will, but you’re going to tell me where Manny is!”
“I don’t know!”
“Tell me!” Joel squeezed off a round; aimed high intentionally to destroy the door above Thorn’s head. “What have you done to Manny?”
A new urgency in his voice: “Nothing, Joel, I swear. Nothing. How about we put our guns down and get shit straight?”
Joel didn’t waver. “Why are you here?”
“I need to talk to Manny. I don’t know where he is either.”
“Why do you need to talk to him?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because, just because. For fuck’s sake, Joel! Are you going to shoot me or not?”
Who could he trust? Thorn hated him, had Marquette’s complete trust, so, what the hell was going on?
Joel cleared his throat. “What do you want to do?”
Thorn’s hands slid from behind what was left of the door, the gun dangling from one finger. “Put down the guns, figure out what’s going on.”
“Fine. Put it down.”
Thorn eased the pistol to the ground and shoved it across the floor, far away from either man’s grasp.
Joel watched it spin and slide. His heart beat too hard, shook his vision with each thrum.
Castle Danger--The Mental States Page 20
