“How are you not dead?” he says.
“Because I’m not. Head through there,” she says, pointing to a door on the other side of the courtyard. “You’ll pass through another hall and then into the outer peristyle.”
“I have no idea what a peristyle is.”
Her face goes blank for a second. “A columned porch or open colonnade in a building surrounding a court, which may contain an internal garden,” she says and blinks, confusion flickering across her face for a moment before she shakes her head and her face clears.
“Oookay,” Fitz says.
“Look. Doesn’t matter. Just go that way. Keep going. You’re gonna hit a bunch of columns on a ledge, on the other side of the fountain. Stay to the right. Don’t stop. Jump when you hit it.”
“Jump?”
“I have a truck down there. I’ll be right behind you.”
First a grenade and now a drop off a sheer ledge? “I don’t like this plan,” he says, coughing more smoke out of his lungs. “It sounds unpleasant.”
“Then you probably shouldn’t have gotten yourself Tased by a bunch of crazy yoga moms, huh? Soaking wet after being gassed with a grenade is unpleasant; this is easy. Now go. I’ll be right behind you.” She shoves him toward the far side of the courtyard and Fitz starts running.
He gets through the museum and into the peristyle, which is exactly how Amanda described it. It’s long, like a football field with covered walkways along the edges, and the garden and pool-like fountain stretching the length of it open to the air. Behind him Fitz hears a metallic pinging as Amanda pops a couple grenades and tosses them into the room they’ve just left.
Not waiting to hear what happens next, Fitz bolts for the entrance. He doesn’t get more than ten steps through the garden when he sees three helicopters come over the far end of the garden from the coast.
Black, unmarked, with bright blue-white spotlights spearing through the darkness. Fitz cuts under the covered walkway, but a light catches him and tracks him like a hound. He freezes.
“Keep going,” Amanda yells. She runs through the museum’s doors as her grenades go off, a string of anticlimactic pop-pop-pop noises, followed by far more impressive sounds of shattering glass, cracking concrete.
She runs past him, firing the Remington into the air at the tracking helicopter and screaming, her face twisted up into a Marine drill instructor’s wet-dream war face. The shotgun is too far away to do any serious damage, but the pilot veers off anyway and Fitz is plunged into darkness, his vision shimmering with halos from the light.
“Don’t just fucking stand there,” she screams at him. “Fucking move.”
Fitz bolts after her, cutting in close. The other two helicopters swoop in behind them and ropes unravel from the open doors. Black-suited men in mirrored aviator sunglasses, their faces all blandly generic, rappel single-handedly down the ropes, submachine guns appearing in their hands as if by magic.
They start firing before they even hit the ground, bullets smacking into columns, fountains, shrubs. Everything but Fitz. A round wings Amanda in one arm and she staggers but recovers quickly, barely missing a step.
“You’re hit,” Fitz yells.
“You must be the smart one in your family!” she yells back. “I’m gonna be a hell of a lot worse if we don’t get the fuck outta here.”
As they get closer to the far end of the garden, Fitz can see where it ends in a railing over a sheer drop.
“I can’t do this,” Fitz says.
“Suit yourself,” Amanda says. “But I’m leaving. You don’t and you get to deal with those guys. I don’t think they’re very nice.” She hits the railing at a dead run and vaults over it, disappearing from sight.
“Fuck,” Fitz yells, closing his eyes and leaping. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” A second later he hits a relatively soft pile of empty cardboard boxes, crashing through them as they break his fall. He hits the bed of the pickup truck they’re piled in with a bone-jarring thud.
He’s bruised, coughing, soaking wet, but he’s not dead and that’s got to count for something.
“Hang onto something back there,” Amanda yells from the pickup’s cab.
“Like what?” he yells, but his voice is drowned out as she guns the engine. The driveway down to Pacific Coast Highway is a meandering cobblestoned path, and as far as Fitz can tell she hits every bump and divot as she tears down the road. Fitz bounces around the back of the truck, desperately trying to hang onto the lip of the bed as cardboard boxes knock against him on their way out of the truck.
He finally gets a grip on the cab, holding tight to the little sliding rear window as they near the bottom gate to PCH. He knocks a box out of the way so he can get a better view of what’s going on and wishes he hadn’t.
Blocking their path is a limousine. Slick and black like the helicopters, a lone figure standing in front of it.
“Blake?” Fitz says.
“You know that guy?”
“Yeah,” Fitz says. “That’s my boss.” At least, he thinks it is. It looks like him, but there’s seriously something off about him. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, maybe it’s the way he’s standing there in a three-piece suit and sucking on a cigar with a shit-eating grin on his face, but even from this distance he looks younger somehow, leaner.
But even with all that, Fitz is sure that it’s Blake.
“Your boss has a bunch of black helicopters and guys with guns?”
“No. He’s got one girl who can handle herself in a fight and maybe a dozen assholes who run drugs for him.”
“Hope you’re not too attached to him,” she says. “’Cause he’s in our way.”
Fitz isn’t. If he’s here, then he must know about the money. But even if he knows about the money, how did he know where Fitz was? And how the fuck did he get the helicopters and the goons from Central Casting?
And where’s Sam?
“Hey,” he says. “Look out for a—”
The truck skids sideways as a Buick barrels into it from a small side road, knocking Fitz clear of the truck and into an ivy-covered hillside. He hits hard, but the ivy cushions the impact enough that he doesn’t black out. Every part of his body is screaming in agony, but he doesn’t think he’s broken anything.
His vision swims in and out of focus and his thoughts dance around his brain like water on a hot skillet. He’s not sure where he is, or what’s going on, but he’s pretty sure it’s bad. He tries to stand, but his legs aren’t working. Or maybe it’s his brain that isn’t working. Hard to tell when everything’s spinning. Probably has concussion. Great. Traumatic brain injury, on top of everything else.
“Shit!” Sam says, running from the wrecked Buick and up the ivy. “Fitz! Fuck. Fitz, are you all right?”
“The fuck, man?” Fitz says. “Why’d you run me over?” Then he remembers that if Sam’s here, she’s trying to kill him, and he scrambles away on all fours as best he can.
The bear of a woman grabs him around the waist and hoists him back. “Jesus, man, stop fuckin’ squirming.”
“You’re gonna kill me. Blake wants me dead and you’re going to fucking kill me.”
“Goddammit, will you quit it? Something’s wrong with him. I am not going to kill you.” She pulls Fitz to his feet and hangs onto him by the shirt collar, shaking him like a ragdoll.
“No shit, something’s wrong with him,” Fitz says, batting at Sam’s hands, but he can’t make her let go. “You fuckers want to kill me.” The reason why slips in and out of his memory from the beating his head’s just taken, and when the thought finally clicks in place and stops jumping around, he remembers everything, and realizes what Sam has just said.
“Wait. You’re not here to kill me?”
“No,” Sam says. “That’s the weird thing. He doesn’t want you dead. He did. Wanted to skin you like a fuckin’ banana. And then all of a sudden he calls it off and then he makes some phone calls and bam, we’re down here with a bunch of weird-ass G-Men like we
’re assaulting a goddamn castle.”
This is not good. Fitz would like to chalk it all up to crazy coincidence, but with the helicopters, the agents and the gods, he can’t believe that what’s going on with Blake has nothing to do with it.
“Louie, my boy!” Blake waves from where he’s standing at the limousine down near the gate. “So good to see you! How are you feeling?”
“Blake doesn’t talk like that.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Sam says quietly. “He doesn’t know FBI agents with helicopters, either. Or, hell, maybe they were CIA. I can’t tell.”
Wait a minute. It hadn’t clicked before, but now it does. Were all those guys up top the Agent? When he got a read off him in the hospital he got the feeling there was only one of him. Can he be more than one? It makes a sick sort of sense. The Agent is everywhere, the Agent is legion. He’s the empty face of a soulless bureaucracy, a machine designed to grind people down.
Of course he isn’t just an individual agent. He’s all of them.
How the hell did Blake get tangled up with that thing? Fuck. Is he a god, too, and Fitz never knew? Have the last twenty years of his life all been a long conspiracy to fuck with him? He racks his brain, trying to remember if he ever felt that weird humming background vibe he got off Zaphiel, or ever had an episode where he had a flash of something other like with Medeina or Bacchus, but he can’t think of anything like that.
“I don’t know what the hell to do,” Sam says. “No offense, man, but I’d feel better if all I was supposed to do was kill you.”
“Yeah, I kind of feel the same way.”
“I’m really sorry about this,” Sam says. “But I need to give you to him. I’m kind of worried what he’s going to do with you.”
“You and me both.” How is he going to get out of this? Bacchus was scary, but something tells him going with Blake is going to be worse in ways he can’t even imagine. He puts his hand into his jacket pocket, his fingers wrapping around the ketamine syringe. It might not work on the Maenads, but it’ll sure as fuck work on Sam. But if he tries to stab her with it, Sam will just make him eat it. He needs a distraction.
And then Amanda gives him one.
She kicks the door of the truck open and staggers out, a cut on her forehead pouring blood into her left eye. She wipes it away with the back of her hand, drags the Remington out of the truck and starts down toward Blake.
Sam’s good at her job, and first and foremost her job is to make sure nobody punches holes in her boss. So it’s no surprise when she drops Fitz and turns to run down the hill to help.
Fitz pulls the syringe from his pocket, popping the cap off with his thumb, jams the needle into Sam’s neck and shoves the plunger all the way down. She yowls in pain, scrabbles at the syringe with her massive hands, but her shoulders and biceps are so thick she can’t reach it. All that muscle just gets in the way, and she can’t close her arms far enough to get to it.
Sam dances around, trying to get the syringe out and howling like a monkey. Which is totally the wrong thing to do. The jumping and the hopping? That’s just getting her heart to beat faster, the blood pumping more, the drug up into her brain a lot sooner.
Instead of minutes, it hits her in seconds, and pretty soon she’s not jumping and hopping so much as staggering and limping. She falls to her knees and slides down the hill through the ivy, her face a mask of betrayal.
“Oh, fuck you,” Fitz says. “The best you could say is you were sorry you weren’t supposed to kill me.”
With Sam staring limp-eyed into nothing, Fitz turns his attention back to Amanda. She’s ducking behind a dumpster on the side of the road and trading shots with Blake, who’s pulled out some giant Magnum monstrosity Fitz has never seen before.
Up the hill, Fitz can hear the sound of the Agents coming for them. They don’t have a lot of time. They need to get past Blake and out of there. But the truck is trashed. They’ll need a car.
A limo would work.
Fitz decides that whatever is down there taking potshots at Amanda, it isn’t Blake. And even though it looks like him and he feels a twinge of guilt for doing this, he’s not going to let himself fall into that thing’s hands.
He checks Sam and pulls two guns, one from her shoulder holster, the other in a belly band, checks that they’ve each got a round in the pipe and thumbs the hammers back.
If Blake wants to take him alive, he’s going to make it really goddamn difficult for him.
He bolts down the cobblestone road past Amanda, who shouts at him to get the fuck out of the way, but he doesn’t listen to her. Blake, that weird feral smile plastered onto his face, opens his arms to receive him. It’s almost a Kodak moment. The much younger Fitz running into Blake’s arms like a dad on Father’s Day.
And when he gets close enough, Fitz raises the guns in his hands and empties both clips into Blake’s fat head.
CHAPTER NINE
BLAKE’S SKULL EXPLODES like a melon on Gallagher. Pulped brain and bone spray across the side of the limousine in a bloody mess. Blake’s body stands for a second, as if not quite sure where it put its head—it could swear it was right here just a second ago—and then falls forward onto the cobblestones with a wet thud.
Fitz stares at the corpse, horrified. What the hell has he done? He’s known Blake for decades. He didn’t want things to go this way. Even when he stole all that money from him, he didn’t expect things would end with him dead. But then he didn’t expect a lot of things.
He closes his eyes. He knows he needs to run, knows he needs to get out of here before the Agents show up. Or Bacchus. Or Medeina. Or, fuck, whatever other psycho religious nightmare is after him.
But he needs time to collect himself, to say goodbye. A second or two to mourn. Just a moment.
“Holy shit,” Amanda says, running up behind him and reloading the Remington. “Did you ever do a number on that guy’s head. You ever drive a limo?”
And moment over.
“No,” he says. “You?”
“Nope. But I learn fast. Get in.”
Fitz slides into the passenger seat as Amanda gets behind the wheel. Behind them, he can see the Agents rappelling down the side of the ledge and the helicopters heading their way.
Amanda throws the car in reverse, crushing the bumper on a metal traffic column and putting the limo into a three-point turn that would normally take five or six if she cared about the car. By the time she gets it turned the right way, she’s torn both bumpers off and ripped the right front molding until it’s hanging over the wheel. The Agents are maybe a dozen feet away, firing madly at the car.
Whatever Blake had become back there, seems he was still just as paranoid as he’d always been. The bullets ricochet off the car’s armor, embed in the thick Lexan glass. Amanda hits the museum’s gate at sixty miles an hour, tearing it off its hinges. She fishtails the car across three lanes of the Pacific Coast Highway to head south toward Santa Monica. Out the limousine’s window, Fitz watches the moon reflected off the Pacific Ocean. Even amidst all this madness, at least he can still appreciate that.
“Now what?” Fitz says.
“I had this whole thing planned out to the second,” Amanda says. “We were going to get down to the Santa Monica pier, crash over the side and swim to a boat in the Bay and then hightail it to Catalina Island, where we’d grab a Cessna at the airstrip and fly up north and hide out for a few weeks until shit blows over.”
“What happened to that plan?” Search lights spear down from the helicopters, bathing the car in blue-white brilliance. The limo shakes from the pressure of the rotors as a helicopter dips low toward them. “Didn’t count on the helicopters?”
“Couldn’t find a boat, actually,” she says. “Or a plane. And I’ve never been to Catalina. You?”
“No.”
“I hear they have buffalo out there.”
“Great,” he says. “So that plan’s a wash. What’s next?”
“I haven’t really gotten that far.
” Amanda weaves through traffic, tearing past cars, and heads up the California Incline, a steep hill leading into Santa Monica.
“Did you hit your head on something?” Fitz says. Scary competent Amanda is gone and scattered Amanda is in her place. He remembers the bullet that winged her in the garden. “Shit. Did you get shot in the head?”
“Huh? No. Okay, I got an idea,” she says.
Fitz can see the helicopters backing off, too many buildings for them to get in close, but he doesn’t know how they’re going to get out of this. He can already hear sirens.
Oh, God. “Yeah?” he says, a little afraid to hear it.
“I turn myself in.”
“What?” Fitz says. “Like to the police? Are you insane?”
“I say you’re my hostage, I get taken in, you get let go.”
“And those assholes pick me up while I’m sitting in a police station getting interviewed. What is wrong with you?”
She blinks, and her entire demeanor changes. “Why the hell are we up here?”
“You were talking about taking a boat to Catalina,” Fitz says. “And buffalo. And turning yourself in.”
“That’s insane. Goddammit. Okay, we need to ditch this car fast.”
“That makes more sense,” Fitz says. “Where and how?”
“I have no goddamn idea. Wait. There’s a school prom nearby. Over on Lincoln and California. We’ll park near the other limos and jack something less conspicuous. We’re not going to see another cop for about three minutes.”
“How the hell do you even know that?”
“Because I’m good.”
Fitz is wondering about that. Too many coincidences, too many weird things that just seem to happen. For now he’s along for the ride, but he’s going to get some real goddamn answers soon.
She tears through the streets of Santa Monica, sailing through intersections and ripping the undercarriage over speed bumps in a shower of sparks. She slows down as she approaches the high school a few blocks away. Sure enough, there’s a fleet of limousines dropping kids off at a prom.
Mythbreaker Page 8
