She smiled ambivalently, still not willing to drop her guard. He gestured to the waiter, showing five fingers, then pointed to the walls. Seconds later, five waiters stood lining the room, all with their eyes on her. “There, feel safer now?” he said.
She smiled despite herself.
“Don’t make me walk to your table. You’re the one in the slit dress. Seems ridiculous to wear such a thing and not show off your legs.”
She smiled. “You’ve got me there.” She walked over to his table and took a seat opposite him.
“I hope you don’t mind. I took the liberty of ordering everything on the menu. Seemed the least I could do for taking up this much space. I figured we’d take a bite, no more, from each plate, and move on.”
“Sounds delightful,” she said.
“So tell me about yourself.”
“I was in a lecture hall today, and, besides the speaker, was the only one to make it out alive.”
His eyes left the wine bottle he was pouring into her glass. One of the waiters had to rush to the table to save him from spilling the wine. “Thanks,” he said to the waiter, who returned to his statuesque pose against the wall.
“You’re either one very lucky girl, or you have yourself a champion.”
“A champion?”
“Hard to beat odds like that without one.”
“I was thinking a psychopath with a fixation on me. I suppose it’s possible he fancies he’s saving me from…”
“…from what?”
“God only knows. Boring lectures?”
“Either he is a loon, or he’s really your champion. If you have any instincts at all, deep down you know. So which is it?”
“Can we change the subject?”
“Of course. Talk of stalkers or serial killers, as the case may be, always goes better with desert, in any case.”
She smiled at his weak humor. “And what’s your story?”
“Not much to tell really, which is a sufficiently mortifying acknowledgement for someone my age.”
“I don’t know. Odds are you’re my champion, or the psycho. Either way, I’d say you’re one hell of an interesting man.”
“You flatter me. I’d happily admit to either if I thought I could hold your attention a moment longer.”
She lowered her eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “I really wasn’t hitting on you. Just, well, it’s nice to pretend I’m still in the race. It’s far more terrible to admit I just don’t have those urges anymore. Makes me feel that much less connected to life.”
“I can appreciate that,” she said, lifting her eyes.
“You can?”
“I’m part scientist, part romantic, part adventure seeker. Only the scientist tends to hog center stage for herself, making me feel out of sorts, and well, disconnected, like you say. Today, in fact, ironically, was the first time I felt such an adrenaline rush in a long time.”
“When was the last time?”
She lowered her eyes again. “You mind if we change the subject?”
“No, of course not. Excuse me,” he said.
“For what?”
Mike took the gun out of his shoulder holster and silenced the waiter with the silencer on his gun as the waiter flung a knife at Jane and missed, the bullet reaching the waiter first. Afterwards, Mike took the knife out of the table where it had wedged itself. “I guess at these five star restaurants, it’s not just the extra forks you have to keep track of.”
She gulped as she met his eyes. The irises… good thing he was wearing colored contacts, gray ones this time. The eyes might well have shown his hand despite all the latex about the face. She swallowed hard again as she realized all the waiters had fled the room and she was alone with him.
Jane pressed the cloth napkin to her lip, keeping her eyes on him the entire time. She stood up abruptly and fast-walked away from the table.
“For such a rational woman, Jane, I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not the smartest move. Who else can protect you?”
She just walked faster to get away from him until she was out of earshot and out of sight. “I suppose logic doesn’t always take on the first try, probably not even for Plato.” He stood up, gun still in hand, and fast-walked after her. At the rate at which her adversaries were coming after her, he couldn’t afford for there to be any gaps in his surveillance if he expected to keep her alive. “Maybe she thinks it’s all part of some elaborate dinner theater. After all, if I could buy out the restaurant for the night, I could pay an actor to throw a knife. Maybe she is being super-sensible as opposed to irrational. What do you think, Frank?” he said to the maître d’.
“I think next time I’ll tell you to keep your money.”
“Probably not a bad idea.” Mike sped into the street after her.
When he climbed into the beamer, he engaged the dashboard TV screen, brought up a picture of her in her car, looking a bit frazzled. He switched to a city-cam image showing her running a red light next as he set his own car in gear after her. “Easy, Jane. Don’t let all my good work go to waste.”
He picked up the pace when he saw another car following her. Mercifully she chose to stop at the next light. Her stalker did the same, pulling up beside her. Mike pulled up beside him, slipped the power window down, and fired a silencer-muzzled shot at him. When the light turned to green, only Jane and Mike’s car made it through the light. She hadn’t noticed his latest handiwork on her behalf. The fact that he wasn’t a hundred percent certain the man he’d just killed was one of her many stalkers sent shivers up his spine. The longer this shadowing of her went on, the more he was turning into that psycho she was afraid of; the less able he was to tell the truth from fiction himself.
She was pulling up to her two-story duplex. “Easy, Jane. Give me a chance to check things out first.” He pressed the buttons below the TV display on the dash, brought up various camera angle views of her apartment. Then he breezed through some camera angles on the stairwells leading up the side of the building, of the roof, and the grounds, shifting at the last minute to infra-red to peer into the shadows.
There was definitely someone lurking in one of the shadows. Besides the identity-masking trench coat and hat, there was the not-so-intent-concealing gun, with a silencer attached. “Careful, Jane, if no one brings out the best in me quite like you do, could just end up falling in love with you.”
He parked the car, hopped out, and tried to close the gap between Jane and her latest assailant without giving away his presence.
Mike ducked out of sight as she looked back before shoving the key into the lock on the entryway door to her building.
Shadow Guy was making his move, so he had no choice but to make his, though his position was awful. He fired three times before he hit his mark well enough to drop the guy. The silencer on his weapon continued to cloak his presence, and the guy falling on the grass dead didn’t make much of a sound either. The wind helped with the sound masking. As did the fact that she was already inside the house when he dropped the assailant.
She was already heading upstairs to her floor.
He went back to his car, got her on his dashboard TV as she was locking the door behind her to her flat. She triple bolted the door, then went to the windows, checked the streets and pulled the blinds.
Then she started pacing.
***
Think, Jane, think! Two attempts on your life that you know of, and some guy who wants to keep your head from ending up on a plate with way more to his story than he’s letting on. What you need is someone to bounce ideas off of. Anyone. You don’t want to be alone inside your head right now.
She padded to the phone and started dialing. When the first number didn’t go through, she dialed again, and again, until she got the call to connect.
“Hi, you don’t know me,” she said. “I’m just a random caller who a bunch of people are trying to kill, and I could really use someone to talk to right now.”
“Go on. You have a sexy voice.” She pulled
the phone away from her head and shook her head.
“You mind if I ramble in your ear,” she said, bringing the phone back to her ear. “I’m afraid I’m not being entirely coherent right now, so rambling is about all I’m good for.”
“Ramble away, lady. I like psychos and wrong numbers. Ever since I retired there hasn’t been much else to keep me going.”
“Look, don’t mean to intrude on your grief, okay, but I really just need room in my head to think. Can’t deal with your emotional baggage right now.”
“No problem. Now that I’m getting the hang of this, I’ll make sure to pay it forward.”
“Can’t call the police. Then I’d have to tell them why they’re chasing me.”
“Why are they chasing you? Not that I need a sensible plot to this story. Married for thirty years. Trust me, there was no sensible plot to that story either.”
“I can’t tell you. It’s a sure thing this line is bugged.”
“A paranoid psycho. My favorite. I hate being the only one seeing pink elephants in the room. Sorry, I guess I should mention I drink. I need some way to fill the time between psycho callers.”
“I could go on the lam. Yeah, like they left you any choice, Jane.” She continued pacing and running her hand through her hair, as if getting it off her eyes would help her think better.
“The psycho told me her name. I guess you have to kill me now. I think it only fair to tell you I have caller-ID. I’m six states away. By the time you get here, I’ll be dead from natural causes most likely. If not, I assure you I was past caring five years ago, when the wife died. No one to torture me anymore with senseless tirades. Well, no one until you, that is.”
“Do you mind?”
“Sorry. I’ve nothing more to say anyway. That’s my whole life story right there. Not much of an imagination either. Sorry I didn’t think of the whole psycho angle earlier. Could have saved myself a lot of empty years.”
She ignored him.
***
Mike, monitoring both sides of the conversation between Jane and the old man on the bugged line, was cracking up in the car. “If you could come up with one liners like this guy, maybe you could actually win her over.”
Jane collapsed on the edge of the bed and sobbed into the phone. “Uh-oh. This is getting deep,” the old man said. After some more sobbing, he cut in with: “You’re crazy. What do you have to be sad about? If I could check out from reality like that I’d be happy as a lark.”
More sobbing. Jane didn’t appear to be hearing him. Finally, she wiped her eyes and made an effort to pull herself together. “I think I might have a protector.”
“And me thinking I had to be the only one in your life.”
“Only…”
After some dead air, the old man said, “Only what? Get your genres, straight, lady. This is a thriller, not a suspense.”
“Only, there’s something off about him. He’s as scary as the people chasing me.”
“Scary is preferable to creepy,” Mike said, running his hand over Jane’s image on the miniature TV screen. “Let me in, Jane, before this gets any creepier.”
He saw the preternatural calm come over her. Her breathing became normal; her eyes dried up; she no longer needed to pace to take the edge off. She’d maneuvered herself away from the fast moving edges of the tornado of anxiety to the eye of the storm, courtesy of all her yammering. Her eyes were lit, not with fire, but with realization.
“I think I’m going to hang up now,” Jane said. “I got what I needed.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The last thing anyone suspects, even me.” She hung up. “Thanks,” she said, a bit too late. “I’ll destroy the formula. Then there’ll be nothing to kill me over, no reason to kidnap me, either. Couldn’t repeat that happy accident if I tried.”
“Oh, boy,” Mike mumbled.
She ran out the front door of the building, only to see Dead Guy. She checked out the gun in his hands, noticed it contained real bullets. Then she checked his ID. She found some other killing devices on his person. The whole time she might have been thinking, If this was an elaborate ruse concocted by a psycho, as opposed to real people out to kill her, it was a damn good one.
Mike waited for her to cart her trembling body to her four door sedan, get in the car, fire up her engine, and drive off, before he brought his vehicle to life, and drove off after her. “Takes at least two to play Truth or Dare,” he said.
SEVEN
“Mind rubbing some of that lotion on me?”
Jane smiled at the handsome man staring up at her from the poolside foldout chair. About the only part of him that was covered was his left arm. He was quite the Greek God. Meaning she shouldn’t have given him a second look. Instead, she stopped before his bronzed magnificence, bowed and paid her respects to the latest false god in her life, against everything her Catholic upbringing had taught her.
She’d come here to get away from her troubles for a while, and to ponder her rash decision to destroy her formula before it was too late to undo what she’d done. If she really wanted to clear her head, she needed an escape from herself, and if this guy was offering one…
“You have great arms,” he said.
“Thanks, so do you.” She pulled back the towel on the other arm to see it was missing from the elbow down. “Walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
“You sure did.”
“Let me guess, if I recoil in horror, that just makes me a complete heel. If I don’t, well, it’s probably because you figure my imagination will keep filling in the rest for me as it has been doing all along.”
He just smiled wickedly at her. “Incidentally, how long you been playing this game?” she said.
“All week. Hasn’t failed to get me laid yet.”
She smiled at him, threw the towel back over the arm. “You can’t grow another arm, but, with time, who knows? You might grow into a real human being.” She turned her back on him and walked off.
The next thing she knew he was flying off the chair and chasing after her. She should have guessed his ego had taken greater hits than anything she could throw at him. “Wait a minute!” he said.
“What are you doing following me?”
“I always follow women who make me beg.”
She smiled despite herself. “Your charm isn’t going to work this time.” She walked off on him for a second time in as many minutes.
“What if I said you could grow me another arm?”
She turned briskly on him. “What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
She stomped up to him and poked him in his well sculpted chest, trying to think of not doing him the entire time, and fighting desperately to stay focused on the point that mattered. “Who are you?”
“I’m someone just desperate enough to get over himself to do his homework. You grow me another arm and I swear I’ll be your love slave for life. You can mold me into anything you like, including something more human, if that’s what you fancy.”
“Tempting, but no. There are far more deserving people. More deserving of another arm and of another chance at humanity.”
“How do you know?” he said. “I lost this arm in service to my country.”
“Oh yeah? How many people did you kill for it? Totally innocent people who were about as clueless about all the fighting going on as you were about your reason for being there.”
He hesitated, then as she was starting to walk off again, said, “A few hundred, give or take.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Hey, you’re the one who wants me to be more human. Figured it couldn’t hurt to start with some honesty.”
She continued putting some distance on them. Though she had noted how heavy-hearted he sounded with the admission about taking innocent lives. Still, could just be good acting. And even if it weren’t, he deserved some penance for the soul; the missing arm could only help keep him focused on doing it.
; “They sent me to kill you,” he said. She stopped dead in her tracks. “If you didn’t cooperate. Actually, even if you did, I was supposed to steal the formula and kill you anyway.”
“I liked you better when you couldn’t tell the truth to save your life.”
“Continue to help me fall in love with you, Jane. It’s your best chance really. To play me better than I can play you.”
“Somehow I doubt I’d last five minutes with you.”
“You’ve gone six so far,” he said, checking his watch. She’d lied earlier; he wasn’t entirely naked; there was the watch and the speedo. “Come on, Jane. I tracked you halfway around the world without you knowing. Been on your tail for months now waiting for you to slip up. So I became infatuated somewhere along the line. Can you blame me? But they’re itching for a progress report, Jane. Either we give them one, fake it somehow, or give them just enough of a taste of the real thing, or I send you back in a body bag.”
“I thought you said you were infatuated with me.”
He shrugged. “I’m not a teen. I’ll get over it.”
She turned her back on him yet again, this time, perhaps less sensibly.
“I’m a soldier, Jane. I’m trained to do what I’m told. You haven’t yet humanized me, remember? For what it matters, I imagine killing you will go a long way to humanizing me, as I doubt I’ll ever recover and ever let myself off the hook. Facing painful dilemmas, and making the tough choices, even when it goes against every instinct for survival, isn’t that what humanizes us all?”
On her tail for months? It was only then that she realized the men who’d been stepping up to her of late, though different, had a penchant for approaching to the left of her, to show her their right side, and to make it easier to conceal their left sides from her. Had it been the same man all along? A master of disguises? The man with the gloved hand at the blue collar bar, taking over for her at the video game! The one at the ritzy joint the night after, taking the stool beside her! The man seated to her left in the lecture hall where all those people had been killed! Even her “dinner date” kept his left hand in his pocket, while using his right hand to dispatch the waiter! In truth, the left arms of what she’d taken to be several different people had all behaved in a wooden fashion; it was just the smoke and mirrors distractions that kept her from making the connections—until now.
Nano Man Page 5
