Australia is a long way off. After all, it’s a red-eye flight and the movie is a dark noir entitled Death Onboard Flight 666. Dumb choice but better than a rerun of some pabulum.
Then again, the assassin they sent could be the guy with the headphones on, rocking to sounds no one else hears. Damn headphones might be covering one of those newfangled Bluetooth earpieces. Could be receiving instructions right this second. They might want the job done before the plane lifts off. I mean, for all I know . . .
Then again it could be the fellow with the hooked nose stuck in a book, a Max Bolan novel from the look of it. Some mook wanting to be Max Bolan; thinks if he kills me, his reputation is set.
OK, so I don’t know for sure who the hit man is, but I know one thing is certain. A lousy snitch got to Romero, collected a good sum, told Romero that I hadn’t fulfilled the contract. That despite taking Romero’s blood money. You see, I didn’t kill John Russell—the mark.
I am supposed to be on a plane, any plane, halfway to anywhere by now, supposed to be no hassle, no worry, while Russell takes off in another direction entirely, taking his family into hiding—all before anyone could possibly know that I have double-crossed Romero. But one snitch got curious. One snitch got in under the wire. All it takes. One worm. A snitch in time.
As a result, I am sitting here in first class examining my fellow passengers one by one—instead of enjoying the champagne; instead, I am desperately trying to decide which of them is the guy sent to assassinate me. Not the snitch. Snitches seldom to never get killed, and they never do any killing. They’re the parasites who live off both sides at once—the criminal element provides for them on the one hand, the authorities on the other, and normally it’s for mere peanuts—gambling change. Hell, these worms will sell a man out to both sides.
The authorities damn near caught up to me in the airport before I randomly selected a target of my own, brought him to heel, and became him: Sloan Davies Roberts. The name in the wallet told me this guy was from old moneyed families—three in fact: Sloan, Davies, Roberts. Who but a little rich kid handed everything, a car, a business to inherit, Ivey League schools, gets names like that?
Damn sure I don’t look or talk like a Sloan Davies Roberts, and the ill-fitting suit doesn’t help. Thing is extra-extra large but still a tad tight around the middle. Still, if I keep my mouth shut, shuffle papers in Roberts’s briefcase, and make no eye contact, I figure to make it. Even if they find the dead Roberts’ body in the stall where I’ve left him, this stranger to me. To escape unnoticed, I had to take his tickets, and to board as Roberts. Now I figure even if the real Roberts has been found by now, there’s no way for airport cops or San Francisco PD put it together before I am long gone.
Do I feel badly about the real Mr. Roberts? A complete stranger to me? You tell me. If you were facing life without the possibility of parole or execution, and a sure execution by shank on the inside ala Romero, huh? Don’t hesitate. Just do it. It’s called survival; you let nothing stand in the way of survival. Hell, it’s the way we’re wired, guys like me and John Russell, who also for years worked the odd job for Romero.
But someone on this g’damn plane must’ve spotted me in the terminal. Someone on this plane either here or in coach, is on my escape plane. I can feel it, almost smell it. A hired assassin same as me—a hit man, but this time, thanks to a slavering lowlife stoolie, I’m the mark. Never, in all my professional career, have I been the target of a hit. Gotta start now, on a Qantas jet?
Whoever it is, I hope he understands cabin pressure at 50,000 feet.
***
I have to determine who on this plane is him, and to do him before he does me.
No other way to play it if I’m to touch a single toe on Aussie soil, a place I chose at random when I stole Roberts’ wallet and plane ticket. Poor schmuck was just trying to relieve himself. Wrong place, wrong time for him, right place, right time for me.
The only thing I can’t figure is how Lenny Guida—and I know damn well it was that weasel—figured out that John Russell was tipped off instead of killed, that the body inside a burning hulk of a car was not Russell’s.
Guida, that Italian grease ball, somehow squeezed into places like a fly on the wall, like the proverbial witch’s familiar, like a bug or a mouse. He had an animal instinct, a real knack for getting in and getting information which he sold to Romero for big bucks.
Lenny Guida had to have gotten to someone at the hospital, someone in the morgue, someone who knew enough science to know that the dead guy didn’t match up on some minutia. Enough questioned minutia for Guida’s onion head to put it together and run to Romero with the news. To be honest, I gotta hand it to Guida. A guy with multiple contacts for sure, and he knew how to quickly turn news into money.
All the same, I curse and damn that fat little snitch to Hell. Guida had to be Johnny on the spot to have gotten it all back to Romero in time for Romero to get someone on this plane. Here . . . now.
A real snitch in time that Guida. With a bald head that looked for all the world like a melon or a ball of Gouda cheese at a wedding. Wish I had his neck in my hands right now; I’d squeeze life out of the creep.
So who among the deadly human cargo on board Qantas 174 is the guy? Who is it I need to worry about. Hell, I am so nervous, I even suspect the flight attendant. Then here in the darkened plane awaiting takeoff, everyone is suspect. Who might it be, the one who waits till I fall asleep, sneaks up behind my stuffed seat, and silently cuts my throat? Or slips some poison into my drink?
Who? Who on board looks like he knows a silencer from a shot glass?
The white-haired lady traveling with her of-age granddaughter seems harmless enough. They even giggle in an Aussie accent. But what about the granddaughter? A she-hit man? Nahhh. Still, why not an Australian hit woman? But what of the young guy to my left? The nervous Nelly fellow? Looks like a college kid. Be a great cover for a hit man, but then again . . .
Man, all of ‘em seem to have an accent. Everyone on board except me, and yet the man whose identity I stole was an Australian citizen according to his wallet. From the moment I’d lifted the dead man’s briefcase and the key for it from his pocket, I have been somewhat curious about what sort of papers this fellow Roberts carried in his black case, so I’d lain it in the seat beside me. I have as yet to open it. Saving this activity for the flight.
My not having Roberts’ accent could cause problems later, so I was busy in my head with how to sound like Roberts must have sounded. It seems every person on board is going home, and home to Aussie-land, the Down Under. But me? All I know of Australia are a barrage of strange names on a map like Launceston and Tasmania, and what I had picked up from films and dining at Outback restaurants..
So here I am without an accent. Makes me a larger target for the assassin whenever I open my mouth. Like when the flight attendant asked about champagne and to buckle up, and what’d I stupidly answer? “Shore thang, ma’am.”
Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Romero’s guy missed getting on board, whoever he might be. Then again, maybe I’m just being paranoid. But in my line of work, paranoia is the gift that keeps on giving; healthy paranoia can keep a man healthy and breathing. Fear can keep a man alive, right?
The plane’s actually moving, being shoved off, like a tugboat pushed toward a dark sea. Staring out the portal window, all I can see of that sea is darkness. It is not a settled darkness as in the distance summer lightning storms part the clouds. It is a moonless night here in California, and soon I’ll be over the Pacific on my way to freedom. Things are looking better. We’re taxiing off now. On my way. Rather on our way. Still, something clammy and sickening fills my gut when I stare at that framed black patch of darkness to my right.
A panic attack with its tendril-like fingers creeps its way into and through me, an overwhelming sense that the fuselage of the plane is constricting before my eyes to the size of my coffin. Even as a child, claustrophobia had taken root in me; likely thanks to m
y father’s hell and brimstone punishments of me. He’d lock me away in a black hole, be it the closet or the well out back.
To this day, I must sleep with lights on, and while the seat lights were on, the overhead lights in the plane remained dimmed like a funeral parlor, so I am this moment mentally clinging onto the small seat lights overhead. I had immediately turned on my own and the one over the empty seat beside me when boarding. Still, something about the eternal blackness framed in the little window remained to torment me body and soul. It feels as if the black upended rectangle of a window is one huge black iris staring in at me, the eye death itself coming for me.
Still can’t seem to relax, to stop staring at everyone around me. People are starting to stare back like there’s something wrong with me . . . wrong with Mr. Roberts as the young attendant keeps calling me. Perhaps there really isn’t a damn thing to worry about. Maybe I’ve gotten off scot free after all.
Lay your head back, I tell myself. Take advantage of the pillow the young lady handed you. Cute in her uniform. Relax. Dream a little.
I’ve always heard that the beaches in Australia are spectacular. I catch my reflection in the damnably black portal window when the plane comes about. You look jumpy, someone’s gonna notice. In fact, the stewardess is now staring. Calm down. You’re home free. Most unlikely the snitch was in time; unlikely a hit man had gotten on board to take me out. Romero can go to Hell and rot there.
All true unless this guy on board is such a cool character that I won’t see it coming until it comes. I curse myself for letting the jumpiness overtake me. Damn me and this cursed mind.
I put on the headphones the nice attendant had earlier handed me. I love to fly first class, but I don’t want to listen to Kenny G in concert, so I tune into the cockpit palaver between the pilots and those in the tower. At the same time, we stop taxiing, and I assume we’re finally in line for takeoff. Elation washes over me at the prospect of actually lifting off for a country I’ve never seen. A place where I can disappear.
Then I hear disturbing news through the headphone gear. I know it before others in the cabin because I’m listening in on the cockpit frequency. We have a delay, ladies and gentlemen. I imagine an hour if not more on the hot, black asphalt, and I imagine panic taking over if I am asked to sit here in the already stifling atmosphere of the 747.
But it’s worse than a mere delay. I hear the pilot tell his co-pilot, “We gotta return to the terminal, Jake. Something about the authorities looking for an internationally known spy, a real killer.” I have to inwardly laugh even as I cringe that they got me confused with some James Bond type.
I’ve gotten myself into this mess because I couldn’t bring myself to kill John Russell. Did so for good reason. John and me, we grew up on the meanest streets in San Francisco, and you don’t kill a guy who saved your ass several times over a damn gambling debt, even if it is Romero’s decision. No, not in my book. So why’d I take the contract? Who better? Who better to warn John and to help him before the termites, the parasites, and his real killers got at him and his lovely family? Yeah, the contract called for the death of his family before his eyes.
Told JR—I’ve always called him JR—that it was no way to live, the way he and I lived, always on the edge, always looking over our shoulders, always in peril, and always worrying if the next mark would be one of us. How many beers had we hoisted to that kind of talk over the years?
I still feel strongly that I did the right thing; hell, JR’s kids are my god-children. But now as we are heading back to the gate, I’m more anxious than ever. I wonder where they keep the flare gun.
***
The door to the cockpit is opening now, a gaping dark mouth leading to the nose of the plane, the cockpit. The dark-clad co-pilot is stepping out, his features blocked by the red-headed stewardess who is flirting with him. But the co-pilot’s eyes are busy studying everyone in first class. Meanwhile, the pilot is on intercom politely calling us ladies and gentlemen in preparation of the bad news, reporting to everyone over the PA that “We’re having to return to the gate. A brief delay.”
A collective groan with Australian accent intact is the response. As for me, I’m fixated now on the co-pilot. Strange. I see it in his eyes both intensity and alarm when his gaze falls on me.
He’s the killer, uniform or not, I tell myself, but then how many others on the plane before him were the killer? But this one, he’s coming toward me, his features masked by the semi-darkness he moves through. I feel like a man dropped into a pressure cooker. I have no weapon to defend myself with. That’s when I realize something else—that I know this guy. It’s a shocking sort of revelation. Despite the mustache and the colored contacts, I know he’s been put here to do me, and from the way he moves, I know him: it’s JR—John Russell himself.
I’d had to ditch my 9mm in an airport trash container. I knew I’d never get it past inspectors. But slick JR in a pilot’s uniform with a Quantas logo, he could get past J. Edgar Hoover. Still, he’s my friend, and he must know he can’t go through with it now—no matter what lies had turned him against me. When he realizes it’s me they’ve put him on, when he sees that it’s me, the man who had spared him, he’ll spare me.
Questions tornado through my mind faster than I can answer them. How’d he know I’d be on this Quantas flight? That he’d need to don a Quantas uniform and cap? And how could he have been turned against me this way? After all I’d done for him? Had they promised him safety for his family as well as a bundle he couldn’t refuse? Was it Romero’s way of keeping everyone in line? A black dread began dripping into my mind.
JR continues to make his way down the dark aisle. He steps past me to sit in the empty seat just behind and to my right. My back quivering uncontrollably, I expect the shock of a bullet to rip through me.
“So they turned you against me, hey, JR?” I blindly say over my shoulder, unable to see where his hands are.
“I had one last job to do for Romero. Seems some jerk has been selling information to terrorists, a guy named Roberts.”
“I don’t know anything about terrorists or this guy Roberts, except that he’s dead, JR.”
“Lenny Guida told Romero about this guy named Sloan Davies Roberts, and you know how patriotic Romero is. He lost a son in the war.”
“I know, I know, but JR . . .”
“They didn’t freakin’ tell me that Roberts is you—an alias.”
“But I’m not Roberts!” I half-turn to see him out the corner of my eye. He looks grim.
“Checked with the stewardess, and you’re listed as Roberts in this seat, Max.”
“I can explain.”
“We never had any secrets, but you never told me about this nasty little side business, man! You workin’ for the terrorists now? Roberts?”
“What? Terrorists? Never!”
“Romero sent me after Roberts to square things. According to Lenny Guida, you’re carrying government secrets in that briefcase on the seat next to you, Max.”
“But I tell ya, I’m not—” I popped open the briefcase to glance at the papers and for the first time, I realize Guida’s information is again correct.
The blast sounds like a puff of air from an air gun, hardly noticeable above the tinkle of ice and the calm chatter bouncing off the semi-darkened cabin walls as life drains from me. The last human touch I feel is JR’s warm, firm hand holding me by the shoulder so as to keep my body from I slumping over. He does this while closing and taking control of the briefcase. “I’ll just put this in a safe dark place, Mr. Roberts.”
SHADE
—JEREMY C. SHIPP—
When Helen reaches her boiling point, she doesn’t raise her voice or call me names the way she used to. Instead, she funnels her energy into her arms. She points. She chops. She chokes the air with her bare hands.
“Do you get what I’m saying, Brian?” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
As Mount Helen continues to erupt, I focus my vision on
the painting behind her. In the painting, an elderly farmer stands in front of a farmhouse. Covered with flaking green paint, the house looks like a snake about to shed its skin.
“Well?” Helen says. “What do you think?”
“I agree,” I say. Of course, I don’t know what I’m agreeing to, but that doesn’t matter in the least.
Helen keeps talking, and I notice a shadow behind the farmer that has never existed within the painting before. The mass of darkness poses on the front porch, imitating the farmer’s form. The farmer holds an apple in his left hand, and the shadow holds a shadow-apple in the same hand.
Of course, this isn’t any ordinary shadow. This is Shade.
When I look at Shade directly, he doesn’t move. But when I focus on the farmer or the farmhouse or the field, he undulates his body in a vulgar manner. His movements remind me of the motel room I visited last week. I remember the creaky chair and the squeaky bed and the tiny shower.
“You need to try harder,” Helen says.
“I know,” I say.
She concludes her speech by kissing me on the cheek, and I head outside, because I can’t cry in the house anymore. If I open up my heart in the house, Shade will reach inside me and yank out chunks of my essence. With my heart closed, Shade can only grasp at the threads of my being and unravel me like a ball of yarn. With any luck, I’ll be able to find a way to kill him before I’m completely empty.
As I dash across the lawn, bullets of rain rip through me from all sides. I slip on some wet leaves and land hard on my ass. I should go back inside, change my pants, put on a jacket, get an umbrella. Instead, I climb the rope ladder into the tree house and plop down on a musty yellow recliner. I turn on the oil lamp. I put my feet up on the cracked coffee table. How did the previous owner manage to carry all this furniture up here? Maybe some sort of pulley system? Did he build this tree house for his son or was this his own home away from home? Every time I come up here, my mind is haunted by these questions. I could probably track down the previous owner and ask him for the truth, but I won’t. I’m sure his answers would bore me.
For The Night Is Dark Page 24
