The Blonde

by Duane Swierczynski

  “So where are you taking me?” she asked now.

  Wait.

  Chubby was on the move. Look at him adjusting his crotch. Getting ready for a little exercise. About freakin’ time, right? The sights followed him.

  “I was thinking ...”

  Steady now....

  Index finger on the trigger ...

  “... San Diego.”

  BLAM

  BLAM

  BLAM

  Acknowledgments

  The Blonde would not have been possible without Meredith, Parker, and Sarah. Nor without Allan “Sunshine” Guthrie, “Marquis” Marc Resnick, or David “Hale” Smith.

  The author would also like to thank Ray Banks, Lou Boxer (pharmaceuticals), Ken Bruen, Angela Cheng Caplan, Bill Crider, Aldo Calcagno (locations), Michael Connelly, Paul Curci, Carol Edwards, Father Luke Elijah, Loren Feldman, Nancy French, Greg Gillespie, McKenna Jordan, Jon, Ruth and Jen Jordan, Deen Kogan, Christin Kuretich (wardrobe), Terrill Lee Lankford (possum wrangling), Joe Lansdale, Laura Lippman, Emily MacEntee, Donna Moore, Kevin Burton Smith, Mark Stanton, Shauyi Tai, David Thompson, Dave White, the good people at St. Martin’s Minotaur, the City Paper, his friends and family, and fair-haired people everywhere.

  REDHEAD

  a novella by Duane Swierczynski

  You thought blondes had more fun?

  Wait until you meet the redhead.

  A Note to the Reader:

  This is a sequel to The Blonde, which you will find conveniently included in the front of this paperback. You should definitely read that first.

  If you purchased this book and thought you’d knock out the story in the back first, let me give it to you straight: Turn back now. Seriously. There’s a lot of weird stuff (The Mary Kates, CI-6, The Operator) you need to catch up on in the full-length novel before you tackle this one. And there’s even a spoiler in the first line.

  So turn back now. Thank you for your cooperation.

  (This story is for Terrill Lankford. He’ll know why.)

  —D.S.

  “That’s pretty deep for a redhead.”

  —U.S. MARSHAL MATT DILLON

  “I’m a pretty deep redhead.”

  —KITTY RUSSELL

  The word spread early—they had Kowalski in custody, and The Blonde was dead.

  Kowalski was flying in on an AH-64 Apache 2, due to arrive any moment.

  The Blonde’s headless body was currently under the knife at a small medical facility south of San Diego, not far from the border. The guys in the lab coats didn’t want to hang around Mexico any longer than they had to. Cartels, and all. Things were bad. Decapitations were the order of the day. They didn’t want to get caught up in that shit.

  Nobody was too worried about The Blonde anyway.

  They wanted Kowalski.

  He was the one with the intel.

  They prepared the secret prison facility like parents preparing the house for their five-year-old’s birthday party—the first with friends from preschool. The landing pad was hosed down as well as the interrogation room. One staffer was surprised to find some blood and bone fragments still congealed in one comer of the room. He could have sworn he’d cleaned this place out good a few days ago.

  Lights were checked, and in some cases, replaced. It was important to have the right amount of buzzing and flickering. Chairs were positioned just so. A new meat hook was hung suggestively from a metal eye towards the back of the room.

  The government has secret prisons all over the country, tucked away in little corners. This secret facility was halfway between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Neighbors—the closest ones living a mile away—thought it was a place where they pulped books. That was intended to explain the screaming. Machines are high-pitched and loud, they’d explain, if asked, which was never.

  The Apache landed at 4:46 a.m. Kowalski was rushed down the ramp, still in his street clothes, except for the hood. He’d been checked for weapons, of course. Outwardly, he was clean.

  They whipped off the hood to give him a hit of sunshine right before pushing his head down and running him through the musty steel hallway that led to the inner chambers of the facility.

  They walked him around a lot to confuse him.

  They stripped him naked, even removing the metal brace around his broken leg. They saved the vial of blood around his neck for last. It took them a while to realize what it was. Even better: it was early generation, from a month ago. Well worth studying.

  A guard reached out, enclosed the vial in his meaty paw, then snapped it off Kowalski’s neck.

  Now he needed them. Otherwise, he was fucked. If they wanted to kill him, all they would have to do is lock him in a room and wait ten seconds. Without anybody within a ten-foot radius of Kowalski, the nanites would travel to his brain and explode. There. Nothing easier.

  For now, though, two guards stayed with him. They could kill him later. They needed information.

  It was time for final security checks. They force-fed him something to make him vomit.

  He did.

  They repeated the process, and then checked his mouth and ass.

  They hosed him off, sat him in a metal chair.

  They’d opted not to put him on the hook. It was better to build up to something like that.

  “Hey,” Kowalski asked. “Is my brother-in-law around?” It was the first thing he’d said since being apprehended in Mexico.

  They said nothing.

  Others watched him wait, via fiber optic cameras.

  Kowalski waited.

  Sometime later the door opened. A guy Kowalski supposed was the interrogator stepped in. The guards stepped out.

  The interrogator didn’t look like much. But those were the guys you really had to worry about.

  He didn’t offer his name. He looked kind of bored.

  “To be honest,” the interrogator said, “I just want to get to the part where I hang you on the hook back there and start cutting away little pieces of you. Starting with your anal cavity.”

  “You guys are really fond of my ass.”

  “Shall we begin?”

  Kowalski said, “I’ll tell you everything.”

  “Crap,” the interrogator said.

  “And then,” Kowalski said, looking up at the ceiling, “all of you will die. One at a time.”

  The interrogator perked up. “Oh yeah?”

  “Every last one of you.”

  Huge smile from the interrogator. “Sure, sweet cheeks. Listen, let’s get the story going. I’ll call bullshit and then we’ll have some fun.”

  “I outthought you bastards every step of the way.” Kowalski stared at a corner of the ceiling.

  The people watching him were impressed. He seemed to know exactly where the cameras were hidden.

  “And yet,” the interrogator said, “you’re here.”

  He stood up and reached inside a pouch on his pants. He took out a small, thin blade with a black handle. It had a cardboard cover over the blade, which the interrogator removed. Apparently, it had been sanitized for Kowalski’s protection.

  “Here with me.” “We went to L.A. first,” Kowalski said.

  The interrogator sighed, then settled in to listen to the story.

  Let’s go to L.A.,” he told the blonde, whose real name was Vanessa. She’d come a long way in the past few weeks. She was napping less. Recovering most of her memory. Still, her mood remained the same: sad. Verging on black depression. Not surprising, considering that she’d almost died and, before that, spent a few weeks acting like a serial killer. Most people acting like that either ended up dead or in a padded room.

  “I thought you said San Diego,” she said. “Where I stashed the key.”

  “C’mon, L.A.’s fun. I’ll take you to Musso & Frank for a steak. Then we’ll drive down to San Diego.”

  “I don’t eat red meat.”

  They decided to go to L.A. anyway. Kowalski was just about finished with his Philadelphia business—th
ere wasn’t much left of the original crime family who’d butchered his fiancée, except for a couple of low-level numbers men who really weren’t worth the trouble. Already the Russians and the Poles were moving in to fill the void. They could have it, Kowalski thought. He could care less if he ever saw Philadelphia again. Maybe if terrorists nuked it he’d stop back, just to piss on the burning ashes.

  It was time to stop thinking local, and start thinking global.

  As in:

  Global Apocalypse.

  Vanessa told him as much as she could about Proximity. She relied on memory; the hardcore data was on a USB key in San Diego. But what she knew was frightening enough. Those little Mary Kate fuckers replicated like trailer trash: fast and furious and without much thought. And if The Operator—the dead headless bastard—was to be believed, the Mary Kates were currently busy inhabiting the bloodstreams of much of the population of North America. It had been a few months since their adventures in downtown Philadelphia. A lot of time for the Mary Kates to go forth and prosper.

  Meanwhile, Kowalski’s employers, CI-6, were slowly putting the pieces together, like a toddler with a plastic Tupperware shape toy. They weren’t entirely stupid. Just big and awkward, like any government agency.

  Kowalski didn’t think he had much free time left with Vanessa. They were going to come looking for them, hard. Maybe within the week. He could tell by the way he was treated when he called in to ask about new assignments. A new chill had set in. Something was going on.

  L.A. was the smartest move he could come up with.

  She went along with it.

  They rented a car and hit a mall in Neshaminy, a suburb just north of Philadelphia. They bought what they needed—small suitcases, clothes, some crime novels for Kowalski, some toiletries for Vanessa.

  Kowalski flicked the paper shopping bag with a finger. “What’s that?”

  “Me skin wasn’t meant for California sun,” Vanessa said. Her Irish accent was back in full bloom. She’d been faking deadpan Midwestern American during her trips from airport to airport across the country. No reason to now.

  “Your skin is just fine,” Kowalski said.

  Vanessa flicked the side of his plastic bag. “What’s that?”

  “I’m in a Ross Macdonald mood.”

  “Can’t get enough of the Oirish, can you.”

  It was meant to be funny. Neither of them laughed.

  They took the PA turnpike east, crossed over to the NJ turnpike, then flew out of Newark.

  Yeah, I know.” “You know what?” Kowalski asked.

  “I was there in Newark. I saw you. I was the guy who alerted the team in L.A.”

  “Bullshit.” Kowalski shifted in his seat. The metal seat was cold against his balls and ass. He knew why they’d stripped him naked. It makes you feel that much more vulnerable. Not Kowalski—he really didn’t give a shit. It was just uncomfortable, and that pissed him off.

  “No, seriously,” the interrogator said. “This probably isn’t professional of me, but I was there, three rows away. You were trying to read a paperback copy of The Way Some People Die, but you kept looking at your blonde friend. She looked distracted. Maybe even a little sad.”

  “Did she, now?”

  “Don’t take it hard. I’m good at what I do. As you’re about to learn.”

  “Well, your L.A. team sucked.”

  The interrogator smirked. “Yeah. They did suck, didn’t they?”

  Kowalski spotted them just a few yards out of the gate at LAX. He didn’t tell Vanessa, because he didn’t want to worry her. Not until it was necessary.

  As it turned out, it never was.

  Out of the rental place, Kowalski avoided the freeways and found La Cienega and rode it all the way up, right through the hoods. He lost them near Inglewood. Kowalski hoped they weren’t fresh CI-6 recruits. They were fond of plucking them right from colleges, filling their head with junk, patting their fannies, and nudging them out into the field. If they didn’t have a few ounces of street sense, they would be eaten alive. Not that this was Kowalski’s problem.

  “This is L.A.?” Vanessa asked. “Jaysus, it’s just another slum. With palm trees.”

  “They’re dying out, actually,” he said. “Some kind of fungal disease. Pretty soon it’ll be just slum.”

  “Maybe the Mary Kates got to them already.”

  Kowalski watched her as he drove. She touched the vial on her necklace. It matched his, which he also wore around his neck. Hers with his blood, his with hers. The vials kept them both alive.

  Forty minutes later they made it to the safe house.

  It was the sweetest safe house imaginable—a one-bedroom apartment up in the Hollywood Hills. The place belonged to a screenwriter friend of Kowalski’s, a guy he used to pal around with at places like Boardner’s during the early 1990s. For a few hardcore weeks there, Kowalski and his buddy had tried to kill as many brain cells and bang as many aspiring actresses as possible. Now Lee Michaels was up in Vancouver shooting his first big-budget movie—a radical update of a hyperviolent 1980s TV show called The Eviscerator. Kowalski kept in touch with Lee over the years, buying him a rib eye and a couple of lagers whenever he found himself in L.A. In exchange, that bought him access to Lee’s pad on occasion.

  Lee’s pad was completely unknown to CI-6.

  Lee’s pad was also famous.

  Or famous enough, if you liked Robert Altman’s version of The Long Goodbye. Lee’s pad was where Eliot Gould, playing Philip Marlowe, lived. Upstairs, they filmed parts of Kenneth Branagh’s Dead Again.

  Vanessa had never seen either film, so the fame was lost on her.

  So was the apartment.

  She didn’t even look out the window.

  Even Kowalski had to admit the view was pretty spectacular: rolling hills of green and brown dotted with model-sized multimillion-dollar homes. In the distance, you could watch the glimmering lights of downtown. If you had to be in L.A., this is where you wanted to be.

  Didn’t Vanessa even want to look?

  “I’m going to have a shower,” she said.

  Kowalski decided to have a beer.

  The shower was off the bedroom. As usual, Vanessa took a long time. Kowalski idly wondered what she did in there. But he had a pretty good idea. He was halfway through his third Sierra Nevada when she stepped into the kitchen, towel around her torso.

  “How about that wine?” she said, smiling as if she meant it. Kowalski looked at her bare legs, then the towel, then her body beneath the towel, then her face, then her hair.

  It was red.

  Jesus fuck, she had dyed it red.

  “What?” she asked, defensively. “I was tired of looking like me.”

  Katie had been a redhead.

  Katie was his dead pregnant fiancée, who was waiting to give birth sometime in the afterlife, whenever Kowalski could arrange to be there.

  “Huh,” he said, then took another slug of beer.

  And that’s when people started showing up to kill them.

  You have to admit, the second team was pretty good,”the interrogator said.

  “Yeah,” Kowalski said. “They were pretty good.”

  They were: Ms. Montgomery, a.k.a. “Ana Esthesia.”

  Mr. Brown, a.k.a. “The Surgeon.”

  Mrs. McCue, a.k.a. “Bonesaw.”

  Their skills complemented each other, which was part of the reason for their silly nicknames.

  But they were also a surgical strike team, specializing in accidental and bizarre sanctions. If you want someone to die and have nobody think twice about it, you call in these kinds of people.

  So, yeah. Surgical strike team, surgical nicknames. CI-6 had a fondness for the literal.

  Bonesaw dug her name. Then again, she was a pain freak.

  The Surgeon hardly ever spoke, so it was difficult to ascertain what he thought of his nickname, or if it even occurred to him that he should have an opinion. He did Sudoku. He answered most queries with “Yep.” />
  Ana Esthesia had a mental defect; she claimed to be able to rid herself of any kind of pain by inflicting the equal and opposite pain on others. Shoot her in the leg, and she’d immediately recover after shooting you in the leg. CI-6 experts could find no physiological basis for this claim; they thought she was nuts. She considered it a superpower. They tagged her “Ana Esthesia” as a joke. She called them names—asshat, fucktard—so she’d feel better. Sticks and stones, and all that.

  She went in first.

  There were only two ways into Lee Michaels’s apartment: up a caged elevator within a high tower that gave the complex its name, or up a winding set of concrete stairs. The elevator clacked and hummed so loudly it might as well have been an announcement: Hello there—coming up to kill you! So Ana opted for the concrete stairs.

  She jumped a white partition meant to give the apartment’s patio a little privacy. She crouched down then inched her away around to the glass-paneled door, which opened out.

  She didn’t carry weapons. She liked to use what she could find.

  She found something on the patio: a little metal table, with a glass ashtray and a couple of Corona Extra bottle caps littering the top.

  She cleared off the crap, hurled the table through the glass.

  She stepped in directly behind it.

  Kowalski was too distracted by Vanessa’s new hair color to fully comprehend why the glass patio door had suddenly exploded and a surly-looking teenager had come charging through it.

  The teenager pushed Vanessa to the floor. Vanessa’s towel unraveled. The sight distracted Kowalski for another fraction of a second. In the time they’d been living together, he’d never seen her naked before.

  The teenager charged and smashed her forehead into Kowalski’s. His eyes teared up, and he staggered back into the kitchen. It was difficult to keep his balance; his leg was still in a light brace. The Sierra Nevada slipped out of his hand, shattered on the floor.