Spiked

by Mark Arsenault

  There was a pause, and then a voice came across the field of flotsam.

  “Is that you, er—Chester?”

  Would a chain-smoking New York City hitman go by Chester? Probably not. This was an old reporter’s trick. Eddie yelled, “No, dickhead, it’s Gerry freakin’ Ford.”

  There was a laugh. The man yelled back, “Right—your hero. Sorry, Ray, you don’t sound so good.”

  “I been running all over this pisshole chasing that skinny fucker.”

  The voice sounded closer. “You get him?”

  “What do you think?”

  Another laugh. “You get anything out of him?”

  “Naw, he pissed me off.”

  There was a loud sigh. “You’re a goddam animal with that temper and it’s going to get you into trouble.” The voice was closer still. “Where’s the girl?”

  “Here. She’s dead. Looks like she bled out.”

  “Yeah, I cut her good. Where are you?”

  “Over here.”

  The gunman suggested, businesslike, “Give her two slugs in the hat to be sure. And let’s get the hell outta here.”

  “You do it. I’m taking a piss.”

  Eddie lowered himself to the floor and slipped beneath the smock.

  The gunman shouted in a festive tone, “Lemme tell ya, that was one tough bitch. It’s no wonder they’re paying what they’re paying, making us rich—not that those guys don’t have the money.”

  He yawned loudly, getting closer. “Chick wore me out. I thought the hot little whore would want one last ride before reincarnation. Didn’t want her dead right away, just to hold still for half-a-fuckin’ minute, you know? Where the hell are you, Ray? Anywhere near the stack of cement bags? Ray? Oh, never mind, I see her.”

  His footsteps drew near. “She could have had ecstasy, but she had a beating instead,” he said. “Some women got too much pride, no matter how bad they want it.” He laughed a silly laugh, more suited to a little girl.

  The gunman had arrived. “Hey baby,” he said in a low silky voice. “Are you still warm?”

  He pulled the smock away.

  Eddie winked at him.

  The gunman gasped. His face twisted into a horror mask. “Over here, Ray!” he screamed. He grabbed furiously for the gun in his waistband, but the bag of cement was already in the air. It thumped off his shoulder and the side of his head. He grunted and stumbled to one knee. Eddie swung the hammer. The man was unconscious before his jaw hit the floor.

  Chanthay dropped from her perch and took the man’s pistol.

  “Where’s your gun?” Eddie asked, but she wasn’t listening.

  “Mick?” she said in disbelief. “You knew his name?”

  Eddie shrugged. “That’s what the other guy said.”

  “Did you two sit around upstairs talking sports?”

  “Politics, actually—he’s Republican.”

  “Yeah? Where is he?”

  Eddie stared at her. He said flatly, “That guy dropped out of the race.” Chanthay looked him up and down, at his ear and the blood down his neck, and nodded.

  “You’re hurt,” Eddie said. He raised a hand toward her face.

  She stepped backwards out of his reach and shook her head.

  Eddie lightly bit his bottom lip. He should have known better. He gestured to the man on the floor. “What about this asshole? Can we get him to the hospital?”

  Chanthay straddled the man and shot him through the back of his head.

  When the bang had died away, she said, “It’s too late for him.”

  Chapter 22

  Chanthay sat at attention on a corner of Eddie’s piano bench. She did not flinch when Eddie reached kitchen shears to her arm. His hands trembled as he snipped away her sleeve and the bloody rag wrapped under her armpit and around her shoulder. The sopping cloth fell onto a newspaper spread over the floor. There was so much blood that Eddie couldn’t see the cut. He pressed a twice-folded hand towel to the wound and held it there.

  The numbness had drained from Eddie’s ear, replaced by a burning sensation. The makeshift bandage of electrical tape seemed to be holding, so he left it there for the moment. The fresh gauze he had taped over the cut on his left hand was still white. That wound had stopped bleeding.

  Eddie peeled the towel back and peeked beneath it.

  Oh, Jesus. It was a straight four-inch slash, deep, diagonal across her shoulder and more than a quarter-inch wide. He put the towel back. “It’s soaking through,” he said. He grabbed another towel from the stack he had brought from the bathroom and pressed it over the first one.

  General VonKatz sniffed the stranger’s boots, and then sat on the coffee table to monitor Eddie’s work in case it suddenly turned into some kind of chasing game.

  Chanthay sipped water from a paper cup. She paid no attention to Eddie’s effort at first aid. She looked like a woman waiting for a bus.

  “Is that an act?” Eddie said. “The stoic soldier?”

  She looked at him. “Would it be easier to treat me if I was hysterical?”

  There was no good comeback to that. Eddie clamped his lips shut. He counted the towels on hand—four more. If he ran out of towels, he could use T-shirts.

  If I run out of towels, she’ll be dead.

  Chanthay noticed the chessboard. “Whom were you playing?” she asked.

  “Myself.”

  She shook her head. “You compete against yourself?”

  Yeah, Eddie thought, he competed against everybody. “I started competing before I was born,” he said.

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Against my brother, not that I knew him.”

  Eddie held the towel. “My parents married young, and had my brother Henry right away,” he explained. “Hank was a genius, I guess, and a top athlete. They thought that kid would run the world someday. He was nineteen when he got tangled in some idiotic robbery scheme—I don’t know much about it except that an armored car driver was shot dead. The cops never found the money, but they found Henry. He’s doing life in a federal pen in New York.

  “My folks were devastated, of course. And even though they were both pushing forty, they decided to start the family over.”

  “And you were born?” she said.

  “Yup. They thought they’d have another Hank, except I wasn’t quite as good in school, not quite as natural an athlete. I had to work harder to keep pace with what he had done in class and on the field.”

  Eddie looked over the captured pieces alongside the chessboard. He was the pawn that had outrun two hitmen, the pawn who had saved the queen. He felt a whoosh of dread. What if I can’t stop the bleeding?

  “Such a family cannot survive,” she said.

  Eddie nodded. “My folks split when I was a kid, my father moved out west. My mom worked a lot. She had two sisters, both young widows, who roomed together. They’d baby-sit me. Sometimes I’d spend the night with them and my mother would pick me up the next day. After a while, I started living with my aunts, and they started raising me. There was never anything official about it—my mom just stopped picking me up.”

  Eddie turned to the chessboard and considered his next move. Two soldiers were in peril. A chess master would keep the knight, whose ability to leap other pieces added a third dimension to the game. Eddie’s game was still linear; to him the rook was more valuable. He moved it to safety and spun the board around.

  “You’ll lose your knight,” Chanthay said.

  “Soldiers die—you ought to know,” Eddie replied. He did not look her in the eye.

  She paused a moment and then asked him, “Did it bother you, in the mill, my shooting that man?”

  Eddie’s mouth went dry. “That guy was no threat to us—not at the time.”

  “He tried to rape me on the stairs.”

  Eddie stared at the towel he held to her arm. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  “He would have kille
d us both and then stopped for a sandwich.”

  “I know.”

  Eddie muttered a curse. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. Chanthay’s brutality in the mill had shocked him. When the gunshot echoed, he had braced himself against a wave of horror and remorse over the execution. The wave crashed over him, and Eddie had discovered that he was the same person, standing in the same spot, with a dead gunman at his feet. It had bothered him, and now he knew why. Shouldn’t I be different somehow?

  “I was taught, you know, in church, to respect human life,” Eddie said, frowning at the bloody towel.

  “By whom?” she said. “A cleric who learned to wear a robe in school? Do you think he ever saw evil like those two men? Be glad that humanity is rid of them.”

  No remorse.

  The towels were growing heavy with her blood. “The bleeding’s not going to stop,” Eddie said. “You need a doctor.”

  “We discussed this,” she reminded him. “Pinch the pressure point—here.” She put his free hand on her shoulder, his thumb in the hollow behind her collarbone. He pinched.

  She nodded and gave him a sleepy little smile.

  He craved to forgive her.

  Chanthay had slain the gunman without hesitation, the way Eddie would swat a mosquito on his arm. He wondered how many people Chanthay had killed in her war, and how many more she had to go. “How will you know when you’re done,” he blurted.

  “Done with what?”

  “With your assassinations, with hitmen chasing you through old mills, with the secret cabal that got Nowlin killed and nearly me, too. How much revenge is enough for you?”

  She was silent for a while. Eddie’s hand cramped from pinching her shoulder. He refused to ease his grip.

  Finally, she said, “My father used to dream of revenge when we were working the fields. These fantasies brought him joy, the idea of his enemy’s heart on a stick. He said that civilized people have mistreated revenge, and locked it from its rightful place in our hearts. Revenge, he would say, is the bastard child of happiness.” She looked at Eddie. “You can never have too much happiness.”

  The General interrupted with an angry gurgle. The moth had flapped in from the kitchen. It bobbed a few times and disappeared into the bathroom. The General dropped to the floor, flattened himself against the carpet, and scurried in pursuit.

  Eddie encouraged him, “Good idea, General. Go sneaky.”

  “You could just swat it with a newspaper,” Chanthay offered.

  “I don’t like to interfere with the General’s business.”

  “No,” she said. “Just mine.” She smiled at him.

  Eddie’s distress over the death in the mill slipped away. Careful, careful. Too late—for once, Eddie could not force himself back behind his reporter’s skepticism.

  The second towel had not soaked through; the bleeding had slowed. “Hold the towel—I think I have some butterfly bandages,” Eddie said. “Maybe I can close the cut.”

  The bandages and an antiseptic were in the first aid kit in his closet. Eddie got a clean T-shirt and ripped it to strips. He balled a strip and soaked it with antiseptic. “This is alcohol-based,” he told her. “Gonna hurt like hell.”

  She nodded.

  Eddie peeled the towel back. It released a thick metallic stench. Blood seeped slowly from the cut. “It’s better,” he said. Chanthay’s arm jerked slightly when the antiseptic touched it. Her eyes squeezed shut. Eddie cleaned the gash and the area around it.

  He fanned the alcohol dry with his hand, and then closed the cut with eight butterfly bandages. Then he wrapped her arm in gauze and sealed it with athletic tape.

  Eddie patted her shoulder. “No bowling for a week,” he said.

  She inspected the bandage. “Not bad. Were you a Boy Scout?”

  “Only until I realized there was no merit badge for chasing cheerleaders.”

  She snickered. “Did you catch any?”

  Eddie rubbed his neck. He asked her, “Who killed Danny?”

  Her smile fell. “I don’t know.”

  “Those goons from the mill?”

  “Those two were nobodies, just cheap labor. There are probably two more on the way as we speak.”

  “Why was Danny shooting heroin?”

  “He wasn’t,” she said. “Drugs were not his weakness.”

  “So who shot him up with dope?”

  She sighed, exasperated. “I don’t know. I’ve been searching for those answers since Danny disappeared.” She turned the conversation around. “What have you been doing? I have been looking for clues in the paper, and have found nothing. Where are the stories about Danny?”

  Eddie looked at the bloody cloth on the floor. “I’m not allowed to write them.”

  “Then what were you doing following me from the wake?”

  “Danny was my friend. Or, he should have been. I owe him answers, and I’m not going to stop until I have them. Same as you, I would say.”

  Chanthay ignored him. She swung her leg over the bench and faced the piano. Her right hand played one chord. She frowned. “A little sharp,” she said. “Is it yours?”

  “Yeah. You want it?”

  She smiled devilishly, and began to play, one-handed. Her right hand roamed up and down in a melody. The sound was modern and experimental, both beautiful and off-putting. As she played, she seemed to stare at a spot past the piano, through the wall, and into the other room. She finished with her hand hard on the keys.

  Eddie clapped. “What was that?” he asked.

  “Claude Debussy. A favorite composer of my father. You know him?”

  “Never heard of him,” Eddie admitted. “He sounds French. Is he dead?”

  “He is both French and dead.”

  Eddie reasoned, “That’s why I never heard of him.”

  She groaned at his lack of culture. “American men are a lost cause.” She yawned, got up unsteadily and sat on Eddie’s recliner.

  “Danny liked easy-listening tunes,” Eddie said. “Must have made you nuts.” His ear throbbed and felt gigantic on his head. “We can help each other, maybe, if we put together what we know.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Eddie rolled his eyes. “Fine. Me first.” He told her about the autopsy report, about the heroin in Danny’s veins, and about the dent in his skull. How Leo and Gabrielle found the body. And he told her of the story Nowlin was writing, which seemed to concern the Khmer Rouge.

  Chanthay nodded at the end, acknowledging that it was her turn. “Danny was working with us,” she said.

  “Who’s us? You and Danny and who else?”

  “Two others—don’t ask for names.” Eddie didn’t ask, and she continued. “I met Danny at the library about three months ago. He was studying Cambodian history, and he knew a few words of Khmer, from his time in my country as an editor. We struck up a conversation.”

  From the bathroom came the crash of shampoo bottles into the tub. The General hissed. “Ignore him,” Eddie said. “He’s obsessed.”

  “Inform your cat that obsession is a full-time job.” She combed her fingers through her hair. “I was also at the library for research. I realized from the material Danny had collected that our areas of interest overlapped. He seemed to have integrity, and I thought he could help us.”

  Chanthay shifted in the chair and grimaced in pain. She leaned back. Her eyes fluttered. “Danny was a good investigator,” she continued. “He knew how to get records we couldn’t get. He confirmed rumors that would have taken us months to track down. And he brought on someone to help us, whom he said we could trust.”

  “Help you how?”

  “To confirm the identity of the one we have come here to kill,” she said. She frowned at him. “There would be jeopardy if you knew any more.”

  “Look at my goddam ear,” Eddie yelled, pointing at the wad of electrical tape on his head. “I’m already in jeopardy.”

  Her e
yes narrowed. “Not jeopardy for you, for our mission.”

  Eddie slumped against a wall and slid to the floor, impatient and irritated. She was like a bomb falling from the sky, wired only for destruction, in her own way just as driven and competitive as Eddie. “That’s all goddam well,” he said. “But what did Danny get from this arrangement?” Eddie looked her over. “Besides you, of course?”

  She shot him a sharp look. “His news story,” she said. “Danny called it his ticket to the major leagues. Does this makes sense to you?”

  Eddie suddenly noticed his headache, like his eyeballs were being squeezed from behind. “Perfect sense,” he admitted.

  “I spoke with Danny on Friday by telephone,” she said. “He was upset. Livid. It was something about his story. He didn’t say what. We planned to meet Saturday night at the house in the Acre. But Danny never showed up. After they found him in the canal, I went to his home and destroyed his notes to cover our tracks.”

  “How did you get the virus on his computer at The Empire?”

  Her eyebrows lowered. “I know nothing about that.”

  Eddie believed her. She might not tell him everything, but he had saved her life, and she would not tell him lies. He weighed his next question for a long while. “Tell me this,” he said, “did you bed Danny to keep him loyal, or was there more to it than that?”

  Chanthay pushed back in the recliner and closed her eyes. She waved her hand over herself and said, “This body is just a container for the mind.”

  “Just a tool to get what you want?”

  “Your words,” she said.

  What the hell did that mean? Eddie was curious, but she was tired. He let it go.

  Her breathing grew louder as she began to drift off. Eddie got a blanket and covered her. She seemed to shrink under it, to become a little girl, a half-starved slave digging a ditch, too weak to lift the pick over her head. He watched her for a long time. Funny, he thought, they had spent the day together in a bloody fight for their lives, and his first glimpse of her humanity had come in something so ordinary as sleep.