He stopped in order to keep himself from getting too emotional, hoping that Beth wouldn’t notice that he was trying hard to keep himself under control.
“I wanted…,” he continued, “I wanted to tell them I was sorry. I was sorry for what I did to them. For hurting them. But instead, what did I do? I said nothing. Not a damned thing my whole life. Not one word of apology. Not one word of gratitude or thanks.” He chuckled bitterly at his own words, and tears wanted to form in his eyes. “I stayed quiet and kept others at a safe distance. I kept to myself. I just worked on solving my own problems, and I let others do the same. You… you asked me whether I’ve ever loved. The answer is… no. I haven’t. I’ve never really tried to.” He paused, then quietly asked, as much to himself as to no one, “What’s wrong with me? For Chrissake?”
His hands unconsciously clenched Beth’s coat. He wanted to get up and hide himself from all he had seen, all he had revealed, all he had done.
If I could rewind time and erase what I just revealed about myself, wouldn’t I?
Shouldn’t I?
He fell then into silence, tears seeping gently from the corners of his softly closed eyes.
She allowed his confession to have ample space around it before asking, “Rick… have I hurt you by asking…?” Her cerulean eyes, so innocent, yet deep and endless as the ocean, searched his face for an answer. She looked hurt. There was pain and worry in her own eyes for having caused Rick these moments of suffering. “Rick, did you… did you want me to leave?”
Beth…
Holding himself very still, he whispered, with tears trickling down his face, “I wish you would never leave.”
He quietly wept, years of pain beginning to leave his soul.
In their embrace, thousands of feet above the ground, he could not tell whether he held Beth, or she held him.
Chapter Three
To walk toward the Light, you must first know the Dark.
—Atlantica
The man in the cap lunged at Scarlet.
She dodged, slipped away like an eel.
He went flying into the woman behind her.
He and the woman tumbled onto the floor of the subway car, fighting for dominance.
The passengers in the car screamed in fright and rushed out the doors.
The lady on the floor held something in her hand and was trying to stick him with it.
At her every attempt to pierce him, however, his body found a way to flow around her hand.
They wrestled on the ground some more.
Finally, he came out on top. Both of her wrists were pinned to the floor.
“Shitty assassin!” he scoffed at the woman beneath him. He heaved, catching his breath. The look on the woman’s face was one of unmitigated contempt.
He’s got at least a hundred pounds’ weight advantage on her, yet she nearly had him.
Red emergency-lights began to flash inside the car.
The assassin spat at him and raged.
Ignoring the outpouring of fury, Scarlet looked at what the woman held in her hand: a syringe filled with a clear, grey liquid. The needle on the syringe was so slender that it was hard to see from this distance.
If she had been delicate enough, I might not even have felt it stick my skin in all of the sensory noise that would have occurred at any major stop.
The assassin’s face was covered in an absurd amount of colorful make-up.
Probably to disguise herself as a sex-worker. No one would have thought twice that she was involved in the killing-trade.
Without turning his head away from the assassin, the man addressed Scarlet, “Hey, you know her?”
“Yeah. It’s the make-up. I think I saw her performing in a circus once.”
“Fuck you!” the woman raged.
Scarlet knelt by her and wrested the syringe from her sweaty hand. The assassin howled and cursed some more.
The man pulled a set of handcuffs from his back pocket and slapped them onto the woman’s wrists. He forced her to her feet. She twisted and writhed like one demon-possessed, but he was too strong and too fast. She couldn’t find an opening through which she might bolt.
“You’re coming with us, lady,” he said to the assassin.
“Us?” said Scarlet.
“You, me, and her. We’ve gotta go. It’s not safe here.”
“But I don’t even know—”
“There’s no time. We can talk later. C’mon!”
The man shoved the assassin in front of himself, spun her to face away, and pulled her hair down so far that her face pointed straight upward. With one fist tightly knotted into her hair, he walked her out of the subway car. She twisted and screamed as they went.
“Official police business, people,” the man said to the onlookers. “Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.”
For good measure, Scarlet flashed her NSB badge, and that seemed to put the crowd’s concerns largely to rest, though it did not stop them from looking.
The three emerged from the subway system.
“C’mon. We’ve got to get to the top of that building,” he told her, nodding in the direction of Planck Tower, a concrete high-rise commercial building clad in vast plates of rusting steel.
“Why?” Scarlet asked. “What’s so special about that building?”
“Highest one nearby. And it’s mostly abandoned.” He looked back at her, then down at the syringe. “Careful with that needle, lady.”
They forced their way across a busy street, through a river of honking, angry traffic.
It began to drizzle. Tiny, cold shards of water stung their faces as they strode down the sidewalks, weaving their way through crowds of people.
They ducked inside Planck Tower and found their way to a bank of elevators. Inside were many homeless people. They looked with mild astonishment at the trio, but none dared interfere. The man punched a button, and an empty elevator creaked opened. He wrestled the assassin into the enclosed space, and Scarlet followed.
“But you’re not really police,” Scarlet said. Her heart was pounding.
“Nope.”
“Then just who the hell are you?”
“I’m the guy who saved your bureaucratic ass. Who else? Now hold her while I hot-wire the controls on this thing.”
He forced the assassin to the threadbare, carpeted floor of the elevator, and Scarlet put a knee to her neck to keep her under control.
“Don’t move,” Scarlet said to the assassin. “This isn’t a fight you’re going to win.”
“Fuck you!” the assassin shouted again. “Both of you!” The drizzle had made some of her make-up run down her face, giving her an even closer resemblance to a scorned, wicked clown.
With a sudden burst of effort, she twisted and managed to catch Scarlet’s face with an elbow, busting her lip.
“If I were you,” the man said to Scarlet over his shoulder, “I might just give her some of her own medicine. It might calm her nerves for a bit. Maybe forever.”
At his words, the assassin’s eyes grew round in sudden understanding, and she got very, very still.
Meanwhile, he popped open the control box of the elevator with a pocket knife and reconnected a thin, white wire to a rusty electrical lead. The control box’s electronics sparked and smoked, sending an acrid odor into the air, but the elevator shuddered to life and began its slow, labored crawl up the tower. It seemed only barely able to lift them.
“That oughta keep this elevator from stopping until we reach the top. Welcome to Ulysses Airlines, where we strive for only the best in customer service.” He gave Scarlet a mock salute.
“Ulysses. Is that your name, then?” Scarlet asked.
He nodded. “At your service, ma’am. Or Ms. McRae. Or Agent McRae. Whichever you prefer.”
“How do you know my name?” She wiped blood from her lip with the back of her hand. “I never gave you my name.”
He shrugged. “Lucky guess.”
“You’re a real piece of wor
k, Ulysses.”
“Well, I’m better than that girl you’re sitting on and getting frisky with down there. Speaking of which…” He turned his attention to the assassin, then reached down to grab her and pull her to her feet. He shot a look at Scarlet. “Give me that.” He beckoned with his palm up.
She handed him the syringe.
He held the needle tip to the back of the assassin’s neck.
“Any smooth moves or carnival tricks, Mrs. Evil Strumpet-Clown, and your brain gets to drink in the tasty, wholesome goodness of whatever deathly circus-shit you put in this syringe. You do whatever I tell you to do, whenever I tell you to do it, and exactly as I tell you to do it, or you don’t make it to the ladies’ room. Capeesh?”
The assassin said only, with forced calm and a voice hoarse from yelling, “I… I understand. Just… don’t kill me.” The needle-tip was poised only a fraction of a centimeter from her neck. She did not dare move.
When the elevator had reached the top, its doors opened halfway, then came to a stuttering stop with a metallic, grating sound. Ulysses forced the doors the rest of the way open, and the three scrambled out, into a dark, forgotten stairwell that looked like it hadn’t seen anyone in decades. Its steps were covered in a thin layer of dust. They rushed up the steps to the stairwell’s terminus, and there Ulysses kicked open the door to the roof and led the way through it.
The sudden light assaulted Scarlet’s eyes. “You still haven’t told me who you are—and I don’t mean your name.”
The drizzle was falling heavier now, and she could hear a helicopter thumping faintly somewhere in the distance.
“You’ve done pretty well so far without knowing who I am,” he told her. He looked away, searching the sky for something.
She shook her head. “Look, I appreciate the help. You saved my life. Really, that means a lot. But unless you tell me who you are, Ulysses—if that’s even your real name—our little friendship ends here on this rooftop, and we go our separate ways.”
He held a hand above his eyes and was scanning the sky. “When I saw that the assassin was about to make her move against you, I moved first, but I’m not all that important in all this.” He glanced at her, then continued his search of the drizzling sky. “Believe me when I tell you I’m not someone you should be concerned about, and that you’ve got bigger fish to fry and bigger things to worry about. Trust me at least that far, ma’am.”
“I don’t trust you. I don’t even know you.”
He shook his head but never took his eyes from the sky. “I’m just a man doing a job for a friend. That’s all. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
She finally spotted the helicopter. It was still a distant, black speck in the clouds, but it was drawing nearer. “Not good enough, Ulysses, and you damned well know it.”
“All right, all right.” He sighed. “You’d find out soon enough anyway.” He paused for a long moment, looked down. He then looked at her with a hint of embarrassment and asked, “You’ve heard of Mac Stone, I’m guessing?”
“The billionaire? Of course.”
“Well… I’m his butler.”
Chapter Four
Rodrigo, Beth, Rick, and Xiphos ducked underneath the crime-scene tape that Boston PD had set up around the robotics lab.
The morning light, shrouded by thick layers of endless, grey clouds, shone weakly in between the buildings, onto dirty patches of snow on the ground. The snow made wet crunching sounds whenever the agents walked upon it.
Waiting for them in front of the lab was Lt. O’Hanlon. He stood with arms akimbo, and his eyes scrutinized the approaching agents.
“Well, I can say this,” he said to his Bureau guests in his thick Bostonian accent. “The NSB is full of fuckin’ weirdos. One of you cocks even has a busted face. The feds… Jesus.” He scoffed. “Figures.”
“He had an accident,” Rodrigo said. He eyed the lieutenant. “And you ain’t no picnic yourself, ése.”
Lt. O’Hanlon, his enormous paunch spilling out over his belt in all directions, ignored the remark. “So, what can I do for you freaky fucks, huh? Chief tells me I gotta sit with my thumb up my ass and wait all goddamned morning in the fuckin’ freezin’ cold for some tight-wad feds from the NSB to come and examine my crime scene. Wouldn’t tell me why—so you tell me. C’mon. I’m waitin’.” He crossed his arms, and his face was reddening.
“This is a matter of national security. Even global security at this point,” Rick said. “But we don’t want to raise too many alarm bells, so we’d rather keep this investigation low-profile for as long as we can. This break-in might be related to a certain… girl that we’ve been tracking.”
“A girl?” said O’Hanlon, incredulous. “It sure don’t look like no girl broke into this lab, you dimwits! I can tell ya from the damage inside that this wasn’t no girl. You dumb-fucks are barking up the wrong fuckin’ tree. You need to file a missing persons report with our department if it’s a girl you’re looking for. But looking for her here, at a crime scene? You’re stupid. Get outta here and stop wasting my time!”
“We didn’t have time to fill out all the necessary inter-agency paperwork with your department,” Rick explained. “We had to bypass all the red tape so that we could start our investigation immediately. We’re sorry about that. You should have been given proper notification, not just from your chief, but from us. We messed up. That’s on us. But this was an emergency. We flew in as soon as we could. We weren’t trying to keep you waiting.”
O’Hanlon’s face burned a deeper red. “You weren’t? Well, you did! All fuckin’ mornin’!” Spittle flew from his lips as he vented. “I oughta fuckin’ strangle you bastards! This is my crime-scene! Now get the hell out and let me work before I beat your feddy asses with my bare hands!”
Rodrigo, perceiving the legal door the police lieutenant had opened, smoothly drew his pistol and leveled it at the policeman’s head. “Threatening a federal agent with bodily harm is a third degree felony, amigo. But more than that, we don’t have time for your childish, bullshit temper-tantrums. You let us in to do our job, and nothing happens to you. Continue to obstruct us, and I’ll arrest your fat, shouty, Irish ass and haul it back to a federal jail where it can make intimate buddies with all the wonderful, rutting bulls there who’ll know it belongs to a cop and who would love to fuck it raw for you.” Rodrigo cocked the hammer of his pistol, never breaking eye-contact with the lieutenant. “Your ass. Your call.”
O’Hanlon put his hands up and swallowed. “Hey, hey, what is this? I have my pride. I’m doing my job. This is my scene. I’m a cop, for Chrissake. You can’t just do this to me.” His nervous eyes flickered over the pistol pointed at him. “But, on the other hand, you do have a point. This is, uh… a matter of national security and—and global security, even, right? That’s what you said, wasn’t it? And…”
“And?” Rodrigo prompted.
“Go in. Just go in! You can go in!”
“Gracias, señor,” Rodrigo said. He uncocked and holstered his pistol. “You’re dismissed, Lieutenant. Tell your department we’re grateful for their cooperation.”
The policeman stood in stunned silence, his hands still up in the air.
Rodrigo started to walk away, then stopped and turned back to face the frozen policeman. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I’m really glad you and I dealt with this according to the highest standards of professional conduct.” He shook his head, not just at the police lieutenant, but at his day so far. He turned back toward the lab and walked inside, leaving O’Hanlon behind.
When it rains, it doesn’t pour, Rodrigo thought. It floods.
Chapter Five
The black, angular helicopter’s blades swept powerfully through the air as the craft lifted off from the roof of Planck Tower. Outfitted now in a large, olive-drab helmet with a speaker, Scarlet was seated inside it. The constant, heavy thumping of the rotors vibrated throughout her entire body.
She looked to the back of the cabin. The ass
assin had been tied up there with black rappel-rope, gagged, and secured to a seat in the back via thick, yellow straps looped many times through D-rings. Her head had lolled down over her chest, and her body’s only movement was a gentle, persistent quivering in her flesh caused by the helicopter’s rhythmic vibrations. She appeared to be asleep.
Did we take the fight out of her that much?
“Hell of a butler,” Scarlet said over the radio to Ulysses.
“Not just any butler. Mac’s,” Ulysses stated. He was sitting across from Scarlet. “That means something, you know.”
“How did you come to work for him?”
“Me? We go back a long way. I knew him when we were still in the service.”
“The service. Which one?”
He grinned unabashedly, and Scarlet could see for the first time that he was missing several teeth. “Navy. I was an EOD guy. Explosive Ordinance Disposal. Stepped on an IED buried in the ground one day, though. That’s how I got these babies.” He rolled up first one cuff of his jeans, then the other, to reveal fully prosthetic lower legs. They were shaped every bit like natural shins and calves, but they were made of a shiny, white, translucent material that reminded Scarlet of pearl. “I can even wiggle my toes with these. A damned miracle, man.”
“Those don’t look government-issue, though,” she observed, trying to address his prosthetics with some sensitivity, but not quite sure how. “Did Mac give you those?”
Ulysses looked surprised through the visor of his helmet. “Yeah. That’s right. The VA wouldn’t dream of paying for prosthetics as nice as these. The ones they gave me were shitty. Two shafts of metal with a hard, black polymer foot at the end of ‘em. They hurt my stumps real bad. I couldn’t wear ‘em, so I couldn’t walk, either, unless I wanted to bleed all over my socks and munch on a steady diet of pain-killers.” His eyes hardened. “I was depressed for a long time. Months. Maybe years…”
The Nightfall Billionaire: Serial Installment #3 (Scarlet McRae) Page 2
