Fallen Angel

by Chuck Logan

  The moment passes, and he quickly checks to make sure she’s all right. Then she follows him to where the final shots played out. Efficiently, using a pencil flashlight, he examines the two bodies; Jaurez curls in a fetal clump wedged under a pipe as if he crawled into the silver woods to die. Hector lays on his back with his hands and feet retracted to his chest, like a singed spider. Jesse takes a close-up look at the multiple chest wounds, at sheer physical death. They look like two piles of dirty laundry, like whoever was wearing their bodies left in a hurry.

  “They’re clean—no ID, no identifying marks—but I know who they are,” Davis says between clenched teeth. “Here.” He hands her two full magazines of 9mm he’s stripped from the bodies.

  “Who are they?” Jesse asks.

  “Los Zetas. Sometimes when the agency plays dirty, they hire them as contract killers. Strictly off the books.”

  “Spooks.” Jesse says it without heat, almost like an afterthought. As she stuffs the mags in her sweatpants pocket, she points at Hector. “That one was going to give me a shot. He made a joke about meeting me before. In Walter Reed.” She raises her eyes and studies Davis’ face in the faint light. His skin is shiny and tight, annealed like hammered metal.

  “He said that, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Then he cocks his head to assess the emergency tempo they can hear over the whir of the machinery above and below them. He tugs her arm. “Over there, where we can see better.” They hurry down the catwalk, and he sinks to the floor beneath one of the faint emergency lights. Trembling now, pouring sweat, he pulls up his shirt, unclips the harness, pushes it aside, and cranes his neck to get a look at the ragged skin bleeding on his right side, below his ribs. Then he leans forward. “Check my back, see if there’s an exit wound.”

  Jesse, getting blood from a gunfight on her hands for the first time, squeegees blood away with her palm and studies the torn flesh along his side. Then, as she checks his lower back, he unpacks a compress, disinfectant, and tape from his harness.

  “No exit wound,” she says, fiddling with the vest. “It hit a buckle on your rig. So you have a huge bruise on your hip and this really ugly, really deep flesh wound on your love handle.” Their eyes meet. “But you don’t have love handles, you skinny bastard.”

  First she cleans and tapes an adhesive strip on his gashed forehead. Next she sprinkles Betadine on the side wound, applies pressure and a compress, and winds the tape under the harness around his waist. The hard edge evaporates from his face, and she can almost see the tension release off him in waves. She looks up and down the cramped walk space that still reeks of cordite and fresh blood. “So now what? Not like we can call the cops.”

  He emits a shaky laugh and his eyes swoon. “Cops come through after the fact, after the lions do the damage. I used to be a cop . . .”

  Jesse points down the walkway toward the bodies. “They work for somebody high up, right? You’re saying the government is trying to kill us?”

  He gives a mirthless grin as he slides the Colt back into his vest and pulls down his shirt. Then he hooks quote marks with his fingers in the air and says, “Not the government; someone in the government.”

  “I’d like to believe that’s cynical bullshit,” she says, hugging herself.

  This time his laugh is stronger. “Take it from a recovering action toy—I’m sure this started as somebody’s really great idea, and now, what we got here . . . Ted Bundy on his best day couldn’t invent something this fucked up. No, this takes patriotic, church-going white guys sitting around a table . . .”

  Revived by his cryptic little speech, Davis gets to his feet. “Something we gotta do. C’mon.” He motions her back down the narrow walkway. Squinting in the gloom, Jesse watches as he hoists Juarez and slings him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. “You drag that one,” he says, pointing at Hector. “We’re going to hide them in the machinery.” Bent over, favoring his side, he disappears in the dim light among the silver-wrapped pipes.

  Jesse discovers it’s hard dragging a body, especially when above and below her she can hear the scurry of feet, like bats in an old barn, flitting to the muted emergency voice on the PA.

  Davis returns and helps her wrestle Hector’s corpse deeper into the machinery. “Okay, good enough,” he says. His face is now pale and dripping sweat from the exertion. He flops down and sits on the catwalk. “I need a minute,” he says.

  “So Mexican hit men. You gonna tell me what’s going on?” she asks.

  Absently, as her voice echoes in the machinery, he pulls a crumpled blue pack of American Spirits from his kangaroo pocket. Then he holds up the metal lighter and smiles. “These guys are all about drugs,” he says softly.

  “What?”

  “Something this old FBI buddy said . . .”

  “FBI? Are they here too?”

  When he pops the lighter and lights the cigarette, she ducks instinctively and darts a nervous look back toward the tangle of machinery. Then she squints at his face that gleams, sweaty yellow, in the faint emergency lights. “How’d you know that stuff about my parents?” she asks.

  He takes a drag. “When you were nine you fell out of an apple tree and broke your left forearm.” He exhales a lungful of smoke. “You went off birth control pills when you were living with Terry because of the water weight.” He winks. “You’re vain. You like your coffee black—no cream, no sugar—and your period comes around the 23rd of the month.”

  “You got a real way with women, don’t you? I say again, what’s going on?”

  He cocks his head and says, “Near as I can figure, you saw something in Iraq you weren’t supposed to.”

  Jesse grits her teeth. “How do you know that?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know that. I suspect that. And I suspect there’s some people, probably in the CIA, who think the rules don’t apply to them anymore. It’s an ongoing dilemma from Runnymede to Watergate to now. Is the king above the law? So it’s all right for them to whack you and your crew to protect their devious bullshit.”

  “And where do you fit in?” Jesse asks.

  Davis grimaces as he experiments with moving his torso. “I was sent by another group, in, ah, other agencies, who think they went too far. It’s kinda like when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. And right now, you and me? We’re the ants in Dumbo’s footprint.”

  “You’re a big help.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He pushes up, tests his balance, grabs her hand, and yanks. “C’mon. We gotta move. One more stop, and then we get you outside.” He takes a second drag on the cigarette then stubs it out and sticks the butt in his pocket.

  Back in the stairwell, Davis locks the door and pockets the keys. Then he leads her down the stairs to the basement. The underground warren of halls is practically deserted. Jesse sees a figure dart in the distance, crossing an intersection, like a panic scene below decks in Titanic. Davis heaves the keys into a trash container.

  “Where are we going?” Jesse asks.

  Davis points to a sign at the end of the corridor: Inpatient Pharmacy. Then he reaches under his shirt, digs in his vest, and pulls out a square of putty-looking material the size of a cigarette pack. He removes a jackknife, flips it open, and carves a small chunk of the putty and then fiddles with a device that Jesse assumes is a timer detonator. “I’m going to blow that door, but I just want to destroy the lock. Could still be people inside. I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  Jesse almost laughs. “You don’t want to hurt anybody?”

  “Uh-huh,” he says, either missing or ignoring the irony. “Wait here.” Then he pulls up the hood to his sweatshirt, jogs down the hall, and slips into the recessed doorway. In seconds he’s back.

  “C’mon.” He leads her back down the corridor, through several turns, and they reach a stairwell as a muffled explosion shudders through the halls.

  “Explain,” Jesse says.

  “Maybe the cops’ll think they came to smash-and-grab the p
harmacy—confuse the reporting, buy us some time,” Davis says as he reaches over and untucks her T-shirt so it covers the butt of the Beretta in her waistband. Then he takes out a pack of moist toilettes from his vest, gives one to her to clean the blood off her hands, and uses another to touch up her face. Finally, he takes out the knife again and cuts off her electronic bracelet along with her patient band and then his own. A minute later they come out of the stairwell on the first floor and blend into the jostle of foot traffic heading through the lobby toward the visitors entrance.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Jesse stares at him amid the bustle. “How’d you get a gun in here?”

  “Same way they did. There’s no metal detector,” Davis says. “I could have brought a .50 cal in here one piece at a time.”

  “What was that place with the machines, where we left the bodies?”

  “Interstitial space.” He jerks a thumb at the levels above them. “You notice how there’s seven feet between the floors. That’s where they put the mechanicals that run the hospital.”

  “And you know that how?”

  “I studied the floor plan. C,mon,” he urges her ahead of him.

  The overhead PA drones: There has been an intruder incident in Zone 3B. Disaster Management Plan is in effect.The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department has been called into the hospital.Remain calm and return to your wards. If you are near a main exit, you may go outside. Remain calm. The hospital is somewhere between lockdown and evacuation.

  “They’ll never evacuate this place; it’s too big,” Jesse thinks out loud.

  “They did once, just hours after 9/11. Some sick asshole called in a bomb threat, totally unrelated, and they moved every single person out on the lawn—except a couple operating theaters that were in mid-procedure. I shit you not,” Davis says.

  “You shit me not, huh?” Jesse hears her voice, which is off, a touch shrill. “So where did the phony name Lemmer come from?”

  “Got me. The guy I work for made it up.”

  “You really a soldier?”

  He manages a pained grin. “Stand by, doggie. I was a Marine.”

  “What then? C,mon, I need to talk right now.”

  He turns to her as they walk, and seeing his sweat-drenched face, Jesse thinks, He’s assessing me for shock. And he’s holding himself together by sheer will at this point. In a steady voice, he says, “I’m the only friend you have in the world, remember?” After a beat he asks, “You all right?”

  “No, I’m not. Keep talking.”

  “In a minute. Right now we have to get you out of this place before they cordon it all off. I think we still have time. C’mon, this way.” He eases her past the diminutive smiling statue of Bob Hope and through a door where they mingle in a tense crowd of patients and staff milling outside. The sweltering summer afternoon is strobed by emergency flashers as cops rush everywhere, trying to direct the press of bodies. Car horns blare in the parking lot. A SWAT team lumbers down from their van and deploy in cumbersome body armor and shields. Davis directs her, and they angle away from the crowd. He stumbles and takes her shoulder as they hurry toward the sprawling patient parking lot where the aisles are clogged with bumper-to-bumper cars trying to flee the bedlam.

  “C’mon.” He leads her to the back of the lot, and they stop at a Ford Escape. He scans the immediate area then sinks to the curb between the parked cars and pulls her down next to him. “Get me out of this harness.”

  She helps him peel off the sweatshirt and unsnap the harness, which looks like a modified survival vest. He tugs open one of the pouches and takes out a syringe and some pills. He tears the packaging with his teeth and gulps the pills. Then he reaches down and pulls off the compress. “Help me,” he says, “This syringe? Put the whole shot right in the wound.”

  Jesse blinks. She’s not sure what happened in the last twenty minutes. Except she’s alive and some other people aren’t—people who were trying to kill her.

  Then this guy . . .

  “C’mon,” he urges as he gingerly touches the wound and gnaws his lip. “Infection’s the problem. Those Zeta creeps like to dip their rounds in the toilet after they take a dump.”

  “What is it?” she asks, taking the syringe.

  “Antibiotics and a DARPA cocktail—keeps the wounded walking. Demerol and anabolic steroids. Do it.”

  Amazed at her calmness, Jesse takes the needle, forces it into the torn, bleeding tissue, and presses the plunger. She’s not surprised anymore when he barely flinches.

  “Now,” he says, “use the needle to dig out any pieces of the buckle, any debris from the vest in the wound. Clean it the best you can. Don’t worry about the bleeding for now.”

  Willing her fingers to be steady, Jesse uses the syringe needle to probe and worry several twisted shards of metal from the welter of torn, oozing tissue. Then she slaps on a fresh dressing and helps him struggle back into the sweatshirt, and his eyes roll back in his head and he leans over and vomits on the pavement. “Better,” he says. Bracing on the cars to either side, he pushes up to his feet and surveys the light show in front of the wide building that flashes like a red and blue hornet convention

  “They haven’t set up a perimeter yet; traffic’s still getting out. I think we can make it.”

  They get in the car, and he stows the vest and the pistol and her nine under the seat and brings a liter bottle of water off the floor and hands it to her. “Drink. Save some for me.”

  After they finish the water he hands her some more moist toilettes to clean her hands and starts the Escape and bulls his way into the clutch of departing cars. As flashing vibrations of the running firefight lurch inside her head, the rest of her body moves at a herky-jerky stop-and-go pace. They loiter in a queue of cars moving a frantic inch at a time to get out the front entrance.

  She shakes her head and says, with awe in her voice, “Up in that hall, with the nurses. All the rounds flying around, and nobody got hit.”

  Davis gives a tired snort. “The only guys who can hit anything in a handgun fight are the heroes in cop thrillers.”

  And Jesse thinks but does not say, You seem to do okay.

  Finally, they edge up to the head of the line where a tense sheriff’s deputy is swearing into his radio and gesticulating at the cars jockeying for position to leave. Davis sees a hole, guns into it, and they are off the campus.

  Davis makes the turn onto East 55 and merges into the anonymous rush-hour traffic. “One more thing I have to do,” he says as he takes out a cell phone and punches a preset. After a moment, he gets a connection.

  “Mouse, it’s me. What? You monitored already? Yeah, I got her out. Uh-huh. Three more of our Mexican brothers. If we’re lucky it’ll look like they came in to hit the pharmacy. And I stashed two of them where the cadaver dogs won’t find them until they get ripe.” Pause. “They didn’t give me a choice; they came on like gangbusters.” Another pause. “I know it’s a mess. Work with me, here. No, I’m not all right . . .”

  He blinks rapidly, listening. “No, you listen. We need some cyber magic. They shot the place up. There’s casualties all over the place. Do the presto-chango. Put her face on the tube, skew the reporting. She went AWOL before. Well, she’s AWOL again; maybe it’ll look like they got her. Try’n buy us some time. Have Bobby Appert stand by. I’ll get her clear and debrief her. Right, in Hayward . . . might turn up something.”

  Exasperated, Davis holds the phone away from his ear then puts it back to his mouth. “Dammit Mouse, Appert told me to find hima bad guy; tell him I’m working on it!”

  The Escape is drifting into traffic in the next lane, so Jesse reaches over to steady the steering wheel. Davis calms down and says in a quieter voice, “Okay, nothing crazy. And dump my VA file.” He ends the call and engages Jesse’s wide-eyed expression.

  “Who’s Mouse?”

  “The guy I work with.”

  “And?”

  “Not now,” he says in a thick voice. “I’m too godda
mned tired.”

  The freeway has moderated into a divided highway metered by stoplights. He turns at the first light and parks on an empty stretch of parkway. “I am flat beat. I need you to drive so I can catch some sleep,” he says. “Can you find your way to Interstate 94?”

  “I can do that.”

  “Follow it into Wisconsin to Highway 53 and turn north. We have almost a full tank of gas. When you get to Spooner, turn right on 70. When you reach Stone Lake, wake me up, and I’ll take it the rest of the way. Got it?”

  “Got it. Rest of the way where?”

  “Someplace safe, where we can regroup.”

  “Is your friend Mouse there?”

  “No,” Davis says patiently, “Mouse lives in the woodwork at the National Security Agency.” He smiles tightly. “Jesse, please, I haven’t slept for three days.”

  “Okay, then; can I ask you something totally unrelated?”

  “As long as it’s not too complicated,” he says, sagging back in the seat, taking out a cigarette, and cupping the lighter in his hand. His face is sunken in the flame, his eyes roll up, his eyelids flutter.

  “You have sisters?”

  “Two of them.”

  “Younger or older sisters?”

  “Older, both of them. Real ballbusters.”

  “Thank you. Just one last thing. Will you tell me who you really are?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He gathers himself, grimacing with the effort. “April 12th, west of Samarra, me and Greg Colbert dug you out of your chopper. I was the code name he was hauling in Tumbleweed Five . . .”

  Jesse blinks, totally energized by the sudden memory. Sam’s Snake Eater.

  Then he says, “You got shot down on my mission, Jesse. You’re not alone anymore.”

  Jesse has never melted before. She does so now, sinking into his shoulder as hot tears streak down her cheeks.

  Davis puts his arm around her shoulder and leans his cheek into her matted hair that smells like fear and sweat and gun smoke. He’d like to stop time and stay right here forever, feeling her heart beat against his chest.