I waited a few moments, then gave Steve a call. “How did that tip pan out?” I asked.
“Good so far,” he said. “I’m following now. Got my photographer riding shotgun. That’s definitely our man in the back seat.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“About to pull onto the I-480, south bound. He knows we’re onto him. He’s been trying to shake us for a while now, but he’s hardly the first celeb to try to give me the slip.”
“So, when do I get paid?” I asked.
“As soon as the Inquirer runs my story.”
“Wait,” I said, trying to sound shocked. “You’re with a tabloid? I thought you did respectable news.”
“Fuck you, respectable,” he said. “You want to get paid or not?”
“I’m not comfortable working with the paparazzi,” I said.
“Suit yourself. More money for me and my boy here.”
He hung up. Fine by me. If he was where he said he was, they would be passing by the interchange within ten minutes. No problem. I could be in shooting distance within five.
I raced down side streets to the tallest building in the area with easy roof access. Once atop my impromptu perch, I opened my suitcase full of high quality British engineering and began to assemble Prince Charlie, then watched the southbound traffic from I-480. Their pace had quickened and drawn the attention of a police helicopter who followed the movements of the two cars as they charged headlong toward the stack. Listening in from my pocket scanner, I tracked their movements until I could find Thompson’s car in my sights.
The client wanted an accident, something public, something shocking, something irrefutable? He had it. Who would even think to look for bullet damage on the shredded rubber of a popped tire? At these speeds, a tire blowout wasn’t improbable, but it would certainly be fatal. I took aim on the rear tire, remembering everything Houston taught me about shooting a moving target. Giving some lead way, taking a breath. I had barely landed the shot on the corpse in the field, but that was just practice. I always performed better under pressure. I lined up my sights again, gauged distance and wind, took a breath, held it, and squeezed.
I didn’t breathe again until I saw the tire blow on the car. Then, in an instant, it had out of control, slammed into the overpass wall, began to flip, got crushed by the semi behind it, flew over the side, and exploded. Bill Thompson was undeniably dead in an undeniably public fashion. I hoped it would be ruled accidental; it certainly looked like a bad accident. However, if anyone came to ask what Thompson was doing in the back seat of a car doing ninety miles an hour on an overpass, I had no answer except to say that it had nothing to do with me. Mostly true. I felt pretty pleased with myself until I realized the horrible crushing sounds had continued high above.
I brought Prince Charlie back up and watched the carnage unfold on the upper stack as the semi jack-knifed and began to roll. Other cars careened wildly into it as they tried to avoid the accident. On lower levels, still more cars began to pile up as rubberneckers and those who in a panic at seeing a smashed car fly over the side of the interchange slammed their breaks only to be rear-ended by those behind them, one accident begetting another.
What had I done?
The sound of sirens rocks me back to the present, the stench of burning rubber beginning to fill the air even from this distance.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.”
I feel sick to my stomach. Bill, I can stomach killing. The guy cheated on his dying wife throughout their marriage. That sleazy fuck had it coming. The driver probably did too. Guys like that get paid vast sums to look the other way while their bosses behave like reprehensible scum. They enable sleazebags. Unfortunately, I can’t have the same cavalier attitude about those others in the pileup. Sure, most will survive, but they will suffer because of my carelessness. Some will almost certainly die for it.
There’s a scene in a movie, I can’t remember which or even what it was about, but I remember a bomb had just gone off, and for the next few minutes, everything was muted, like all sound was coming in through mud wrapped in thick blankets deep underwater, and there was shaky, handheld footage of the protagonist stumbling through the wreckage, clearly not thinking, too numb to think, moving on autopilot away from the blast zone. You don’t have to be near an explosion to experience that.
I pack up Prince Charlie in a daze and make my way down stairs without thinking, without feeling. The next few hours are a blur. The next thing I remember is sitting in the hotel shower crying, the hot water long since turned cold, and my phone beeping from seven missed calls from Houston.
After some impossible to quantify slice of time, I shut off the water and change out of my wet clothes. Feeling dry again helps restore my mind to a more even keel. I still feel detached, like my entire body’s been severed, but I can at least move of my own accord and remember that I must have done so because my clothes are dry.
Climbing up onto the hotel bed, I cross my legs and lean back against the headboard, breathing deeply, drinking in the darkness. My phone rings again, but I ignore it. Instead I turn on the TV and watch as the news runs story after story about the accident. My accident. Stories about what a philanthropist Bill Thompson was. His housekeeper, apparently aware that her steady paycheck just got a lot less steady, now sits on the comfy couch of a tell all show and is spilling the lurid details of Bill and Caroline’s open marriage, the wild orgies that the poor cleaner had to clean up after. She tells about his wife’s AIDS. I could kill myself. He wasn’t even a dirty, filthy cheat. Others can say what they like about his lifestyle, but at least he wasn’t abusing his wife’s trust and good name.
No one mentions a gunshot, though they are investigating the driver. I’m in the clear, but I have never wanted to be punished more in my life.
My phone rings again, and because nothing Houston can say will shame me more than I already feel, I answer.
“What would you call that?” he asks.
“A successful kill,” I say, my voice as hollow as the round I just fired. As hollow as my heart. “Public. Between the hours of ten and two. No foul play. It’s over.”
“It was sloppy,” he says, though his words lack the anger and disappointment I expected.
“I know,” I say. “I didn’t think. Too much collateral damage.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, kid,” he says. “It was your first job. One time, I set a bomb on this guy’s car. Mis-wired the trigger. It didn’t detonate when he cranked the car, but when he cut it off. Blew up his house with his wife and kids inside. It happens to everyone.”
“And you don’t feel bad about that at all?”
“Of course I do. I’m not a monster, but it happens sometimes. It sucks, but it happens. You just have to do better next time. Don’t let it get you down. Like you said, you hit all our Mister Johnson’s requirements. Now it’s time to get paid and get the hell out of Omaha.”
I nod, which he can’t hear or see, and hang up the phone. I’m sure he has a point, but I don’t care to hear it and I don’t want to believe it. I have seen the sort of people who don’t let themselves be bothered by accidental casualties and “acceptable losses.”
I refuse to become my parents.
Chapter 12
JAMIE
BURIED BUT NOT GONE
The flames had passed, but the total darkness remained. The air was cold, and I found myself lying on something hard. My head rested on a small pillow, the only consideration for my comfort. The memory of fires still burned fresh on my skin. The longer I’m dead, the longer the sensation lingers. I’m not surprised this one took a while. I lost an arm at least, and missing limbs take no small while to regrow. Particularly bad resurrections always make me feel itchy. I tried to scratch, but my hand slammed against something silky but solid just above my head. I expected as much.
I knocked gently at the lid to my coffin, hoping desperately that Bill’s next of kin hadn’t decided on one of those metal, pressure cooker coffins.
That would take forever to break out of. I could be trapped for years. The sound of knuckles meeting lid was soft and resonant. Wood. Thank goodness. Rolling over as best I could, I put my arms beneath me and pressed up against the lid with my back. Bill was moderately fit for his age, but it would take more than a so-so sixty-year-old to break out of this coffin. I heaved with all my might, but felt no give. The air had grown thick and stale with my exertions, but I had to keep trying, all the way up to the moment my vision blurred from oxygen deprivation and I blacked out. Then came the flames.
Seconds later, I was alive again, gasping in the thick, toxic air. I used my precious few seconds before dying to press at the lid again. Then death and resurrection flames, then pushing through poisoned air, then death and flames, then pushing again.
Suffocation does not take long at all to revive from, since there is little physical damage to the body. In cases like this, I can be back up again in under a minute easy. Probably only seconds. Because my death is so brief, the memory of flames is also just a flicker of an instant. But it just keeps coming. Over and over and over and over and over and over, and if that sounds awful, imagine each time you come back, there’s the full body sensation of having just put your hand on a red-hot stove. A brief, complete searing hell that is gone before your mind can process it. In between these agonizing instants, the frantic sensation of drowning in a dry, confining blackness. Now imagine this happens every thirty seconds or so. It can drive a person insane. I can say for certain it had driven me insane in centuries past.
So, what do you do? You do your best to ignore the pain, to ignore the stagnant, murderous air and dedicate yourself to getting out. You start counting the deaths just to give your mind something else to focus on, something to drive away the panic that claws at the back of your thoughts every claustrophobic second that you’re underground breathing in the same vapors that killed you a hundred times before. You count seconds to see if maybe you can live a little bit longer this time, anything to keep your mind off the pain as you die over and over and over again. It’s a damn tedious agony.
Several hundred deaths came and went before I got the lid to crack just a little. I couldn’t even begin to count how many it took to be able to wiggle my fingers outside the lid so I could begin the long, excruciating process of digging my way out.
For a while, I contemplated charging Bill for each death, as per the original agreement, but considering he almost certainly lost his business and all his assets when he “died,” it seemed cruel. I would just charge him the five-thousand-per-day torture fee because I’m compassionate like that. I would even let him keep this wooden right arm I discovered, no doubt buried with me to replace the one I lost in the wreck.
But first, before I could give him the arm and collect the massive paycheck I had accumulated, I had to break through an oak casket and dig my way up through six feet of earth. It would take time, but time is one thing I’ve always had in abundance.
Chapter 13
OLIVIA
LIVING WITH MY DEAD
Bill Thompson wasn’t a cheating bastard. He didn’t deserve to die. Helen Jenkins was a school teacher. She didn’t deserve to die. Neither did her child Robert she was bringing home from a dentist appointment. Jamarcus Reed was a doctor. He didn’t deserve to die. “Red” Clay Irondha, the truck driver, wasn’t getting much news coverage but he probably didn’t deserve to die. The same went for Hy Cho, the quickstop employee, Stan Laroue, the pizza delivery guy, and Linda White, Avon sales representative. They almost certainly didn’t deserve to die.
At least Daniel Clayton, alias Danny Crow, Danny Charleston, Clay Daniels, deserved to die. Danny was the tall man who kidnapped Bill Thompson and drove so recklessly. The police found a ransom note in his desk drawer, and in their own desk drawers they found his criminal record. Between the two, few tears are shed for poor Danny Clayton. His death is the only solace I find in the whole affair.
The names have been running in my head since the accident. I swore I would use my particular talents to remove scumbags from the world and make a healthy profit for myself for my troubles. Instead I have killed eight innocent people with my carelessness, to say nothing of the many life-changing injuries to be borne by those who’ve survived.
When I was a kid, my parents ran a protection racket for the mob, shaking down decent folk for money, breaking legs when they didn’t pay, and then burning buildings down, often with people inside when they kept not paying. I used to ask Santa for new parents every year.
A little after my eighth birthday, my parents got on the wrong side of someone, and on Christmas Eve while I hid in the downstairs closet waiting for Jolly Old Saint Nick, Houston slipped in the front door and double-tapped my parents both in the chest and finished with a pop in the head each. Right in front of me.
All I could say was, “There is a Santa Claus.”
Houston, noticing me for the first time, scratched his chin with his pistol and stared for a long moment. “Kid,” he said after considerable thought, “your parents had it coming.”
“I know,” I said.
After another long moment in which we both eyed each other, taking the other’s measure, we packed my presents and the cookies in the trunk, and I started my new life and new profession. I don’t imagine there are many people who could watch Leon the Professional and relate on a personal level, minus the creepy sexual overtones of course. Houston was always a perfect gentleman and father.
I wonder, after all this, if he thinks of me the way I think of my parents.
I sit on my bed beside my favorite pistol, Lady Di(e), and a suitcase full of money, supposedly twenty thousand dollars but I haven’t opened it yet to count. I don’t care to. If not for Houston, I wouldn’t even have it. I left Omaha without a second’s thought about getting paid. He went all the way back to collect for me since, according to him, I’m “in no shape to drive, let alone negotiate.”
Our Mister Johnson refused to pay at first, saying he wanted no trace of foul play associated with Thompson’s death, but thanks to Danny Clayton’s sordid past, the police are investigating more than they would a usual interstate accident. Thankfully, Houston was kind enough to explain to him that any foul play the police pick up on is coincidental and in no way related to our hit. Therefore, it would be in our Mister Johnson’s best interest not to slight the fellows who kill people for a living, especially after all the hard work they put in trying to make him happy. I thank Houston for that, but I don’t feel it. Not that I don’t appreciate him defending my interests. I just don’t care to have them defended anymore. I care about nothing anymore.
So, I sit next to my gun and my money, blindly eating Cheetos and running down the list of names, wondering if this is how I start turning into my parents, hurting innocent people. It starts here, with me dismissing them as accidents, then one day when gunning down a Peruvian drug lord and the maid gets caught in the crossfire, I’ll say “Well, what’s one life when weighed against the hundreds I saved?” Then I’m killing people just trying to make a living because they work for bad people in an innocent way and they should know better. And then it’s killing anybody that comes along so long as the price is right. And then maybe I don’t even have to get paid. Maybe someone does something stupid to piss me off, and I decide they have to die. It seems like an absurd progression as a single thought, but spaced out over the course of years it’s entirely possible.
My chest aches with a vast hole, eight people across, that leaves barely enough of my heart to keep my blood moving. I can think of nothing that will ever fill it and make me whole again. Without conscious thought, my hand caresses Lady Di(e), and a gallows laugh breaks my stony silence. How strange that something only a few millimeters across can make so large a hole? And can another round fill that hole for good?
Houston knocks on my door, softly like he used to do when I was a kid.
“Go away,” I say. “I’m a killer. I don’t deserve… whatever it is you have.”
“Hot chocolate and a fresh case of hollow points for my special princess.”
“I don’t deserve hot chocolate and hollow points. I’m a terrible, horrible killer.”
“I’m a killer, and look! I have chocolate.”
“Well, you’re the good kind. I’m the bad kind. I killed a bunch of innocent people.”
“Not your fault. It was an accident. These things happen.”
“It is my fault,” I say. “It’s my fault for pulling the trigger. It’s my fault for not planning better. It’s my fault for not doing my own research instead of taking whatever info our Mister Johnson gives us, because that shit is going to be biased and I should have known it.”
“Okay, yes, technically, when you put it that way, it is your fault,” he says, “but you can’t stay in there forever.”
“Yes, I can.”
“I’m not bringing you any food and the moment you start peeing in bottles, I’m kicking you out of my house. Why not keep it easy and come out now?”
“No,” I say. “I killed innocent people. I don’t deserve easy. I don’t deserve happy. I don’t deserve anything.”
“Thomas Wright,” Houston says.
“Who?”
“Thomas Wright was the first person I accidentally killed. It was a long time ago, long before I met you. There was this lawyer someone wanted dead. Some old lady’s husband gets killed by the mob, lawyer gets the bad guy off. He always gets them off. So, she pays me a hefty slice of the insurance to get him off the mob’s payroll so to speak. I don’t want the mob coming back on me. I know this lawyer, Hormel, he’s a real boozer of a guy, won’t be told what to do, at least not in his personal life. If he has an accident driving home from the bar one day, who’s to be the wiser? I follow him out after the office. Slip him a little something and two drinks feel like four, you know? I casually tell him maybe he should lay off the sauce, so of course to spite me, he has another. I tell him I’ll call him a cab because he’s in no shape to drive, so of course, he shoves me and gets in his car. Crashes into some college kid on his way home from a study session.”
The Professional Corpse (The Departed Book 1) Page 12
