Work Done for Hire

  I pushed a tab on the side and a three-by-three-inch screen popped out beside the fat Leupold finderscope. It had a blurry picture with bright crosshairs and a faint bull’s-eye. Hadn’t seen one since the desert.

  “Watch this.” I slipped the cartridge into the receiver and pointed the rifle out the door; the picture on the screen snapped into focus, a bright picture inside a dark circle, like looking through a keyhole. The parking lot.

  “So it shows where the bullet is going?”

  “Exactly.” I set it down and reached inside the carton. Taped into a square of Bubble Wrap, a little box with a joystick. “That’s weird.”

  “How so?”

  I set it down carefully. “I did spend a week training with things like this. But that was like ten years ago, twelve. They expect me to squeeze the trigger and then guide this thing into a target, with no practice? I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to, not with any certainty.”

  She picked it up and studied it. “Maybe they don’t know that? They seem to think you’re one of the people you write about.”

  Odd but true. Maybe there were people with the combination of power and ignorance required for that kind of mistaken identity. The only thing I was sure of, though, was the ignorance on our side. “Let’s think. We should just go to the cops. Homeland Security.”

  “Where they’d have your file open on the desk before you sit down.”

  “Granted. But the Enemy has way upped the ante now. Or again, rather. And I still haven’t broken any law.”

  I eased the cartridge out and held it in my hand. “You can’t buy this shit in a store, not anywhere. I don’t think they let hunters take deer with incendiaries—Smokey the Bear and all. It’s a plain terror weapon.” The weight of it was both repellent and fascinating. In training we had fired off a box of these, one for each of us, aiming at old paint cans, each with a spoonful of gasoline inside. Boom, fireball. Better than winning a Kewpie doll.

  “Pretty expensive?”

  I nodded. “The sergeant made a point of that. The round was worth more to the United States Army than we were. So aim. Or you might have to be the target next week.”

  “They wouldn’t do that.” She was serious.

  “Not really, no. You weren’t disposable till you were overseas.” I hefted the rifle. “This thing is heavy. I guess it’s a match model, for accuracy. Deepens the mystery.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s wasted on me, really. I’m a pretty good shot, but I was far from the best in my platoon, even my squad. The army’s full of people who could shoot one round from a sniper rifle like this and shave a hair off a fly’s ass.”

  “None of whom wrote a novel about a sniper.”

  “More’s the pity.” I aimed it out the door. The scope really was beautiful, a hard bright image with no color fringe. I could spin the power up to 40X, but without support the image danced around like crazy; I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at.

  “Can I try it?”

  “Sure.” I spun the power all the way down and automatically made sure the safety was locked, not just “on.” Product of a thousand spot inspections.

  She put it to her shoulder and pointed into the parking lot, the muzzle waving around in a sloppy orbit. She craned her neck, peering into the scope. “Don’t see anything.”

  “Your eye’s too close. Back off to a natural distance.”

  “Like this?” She leaned back too far.

  “No—” I reached toward her and the room suddenly darkened as a huge form blocked off the light.

  “What you all—” the big black woman said, and then screamed, and backed away so fast she tripped into the parking lot and fell hard onto her back.

  I ran out to help, and Kit was right behind me, still holding the rifle. The woman’s eyes were open, showing mostly whites. I couldn’t feel a pulse in her neck, but her wrist had a slight one. “She’s alive.”

  “Call 9-1-1?”

  “No! Jesus!” I looked wildly around; there didn’t seem to be any eyewitnesses. “Leave the bikes. Get in the car and get the fuck out of here.”

  “But . . .” She looked as helpless as I felt.

  “I know. Let’s carry her in onto the bed and go!” She put the rifle down and took one arm. I took the other and we dragged the woman in through the door.

  No question of lifting her dead weight onto the bed. I scooped up the book with all the hundreds. The loose high-tech round, the joystick. Picked up the rifle off the sidewalk.

  “Maybe we should leave all that stuff behind?”

  “No, maybe we’ll ditch it someplace else. Let’s just get outta here!”

  We threw everything into the car and it started right up. I backed out carefully and turned it around.

  In the distance, sirens.

  “Fuck it!” I floored it and fishtailed out of the gravel lot onto the two-lane road.

  “Don’t!” she said.

  “’Course.” I took my foot off the gas and pulled over, reaching for my wallet. “‘I wasn’t running from the body, officer. Just the FBI and DHS.’”

  Two Highway Patrol squad cars bore down on us, sirens screaming, blue lights flashing. They went right past the motel without slowing down. I clenched the wheel and watched them close in—and then pass us, engines roaring flat out.

  We looked at each other. “So what was that all about?” she said. “We must not be the only criminals in Mississippi.”

  “At least they’re not after this car.” I put it in gear but sat for a moment. “We really ought to . . .”

  “Yeah. She could be really hurt.”

  “We should check.” Still I hesitated. “Hell. ‘Avoid the appearance of wrongdoing.’” I did a slow U-turn and went back to the motel parking lot. The door to the room was still ajar.

  She was still where we had left her, but her eyes were closed now. Still a pulse in her wrist. Her name tag said “Mary Taylor,” and tasked her with Customer Relations. And everything else, I supposed.

  “Mary?” I said. “Miz Taylor?”

  I put my hand behind her head and raised it slightly. There was a little blood in her hair. Her lids fluttered.

  “You fell and hit your head,” I said, which was true.

  “I was . . . you was . . .”

  “You slipped on the gravel,” Kit said.

  She stared at Kit. “You had a gun.”

  “Hunting rifle,” I said. “She was just checking the sights when . . . you came to the door.”

  “What you suppose to be huntin’, this time of year?”

  “Nothing yet. It was a present.”

  She rolled over onto an elbow and touched the back of her head gingerly. “Don’t like guns.”

  “Me neither,” Kit said emphatically.

  The woman fixed me with a baleful stare. “This present. The man give it to you, why he didn’t just knock on your door?”

  “My uncle Johnny,” I improvised, “he’s kind of crazy. I mean, he’s always doing stuff like this, elaborate pranks.”

  “With a gun? Sure.” She sat up with surprising grace, and a groan. “Your Johnny, he give my boy a twenty-dollar bill to tell you look in that room. That’s some uncle.”

  “Yeah. He’s crazy.”

  “You wouldn’t mind if I called the police.” She said po-leese, mocking her own accent.

  I might have paused too long. “Do what you want.”

  “Let me put it some different way. Would it be worth a hundred dollars to you fo’ me not to call the police?”

  “I suppose it would.”

  “Uh-huh. Then I suppose it might be worth a thousand.”

  “No way.”

  She rocked a little bit, thinking. “How ’bout for five hundred bucks I let you tear that page out of the logbook, and I never seen you, nei
ther of you.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said to Kit. “Bargaining with a woman we came back to—”

  “You best believe it,” the woman said. “I do appreciate you coming back, but get real. You got money and I ain’t. You on the wrong side of the law, and I got a cell phone. You want that page for five hundred dollars?”

  “We’re not criminals,” Kit said.

  “I know you ain’t that kind. If I thought you’d do me harm I’d be hiding.”

  “So you’re just trying to make an honest buck,” I said.

  “Dishonest buck,” she conceded. “You got a lot more than five hundred dollars, and I got a lot less.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but you have to throw in the cell phone.”

  She nodded. “Six hundred, then.” She unclipped the cell phone from her belt holder and handed it to me. Just a symbolic gesture, but I took it.

  “Why don’t you put the bikes in the car,” Kit said, turning her back to count out bills from a banded stack. “I’ll take care of the logbook.”

  “Okay.” It wasn’t quite that simple. I wheeled the bikes out to the hatchback, but they were too long to just stuff into the back. I had a panic moment—no tools—but Mary told me there was a tool kit under the counter in the office. I removed the front wheels and the bikes stacked into the back easily.

  While I had a pair of pliers, I took the precaution of sabotaging this new rifle the same way—take the powder out of a bullet and fire just the primer, to lodge it halfway up the barrel. Useless to an assassin, but that was never really in my job description.

  8.

  I called Underwood on the lady’s cell as soon as it was 9:00 in Washington but got a recording. I asked her to call this number back and also send an e-mail. Phone trouble.

  We decided to stay off the expressway, and just crawl down the two-lane. Might as well make it easy for the Mississippi cops, if Mary Taylor decided not to stay quiet for $600. We had bigger problems.

  How had the Enemy caught us? From the billboard encounter we knew that they weren’t following cell phone information; I’d stomped the cell long before that. Maybe, far-fetched as it seems, the mystery did go back to the surgery in the army hospital in Germany—a tracer bug imbedded in muscle mass. What would it use for power? Can a tiny battery or fuel cell work after sitting for ten years? Maybe there was some biological thing, generating electricity from my own body chemistry.

  As soon as we could stop for a few hours in a big enough town, I should arrange to have my hand X-rayed. I could complain about phantom pain from the missing finger, and who would refuse to give me a picture? If only to shut me up. A tracer could be tiny, but big enough to see.

  I didn’t say anything out loud about that. Of course this car had to have been bugged by whoever left it for us. We could assume they knew exactly where we were at any time, and could overhear us talking. Kit hummed a folk song from a couple of years ago: “Sittin’ in my home alone / Waitin’ for the god-damn phone. . . .”

  She took the paper tablet and marker out of her bag and wrote HAVE TO DUMP CAR—GREYHOUND IN GULFPORT? in big block letters.

  I nodded and scrawled CASH TICKETS TO TWO DIFFERENT PLACES? Keeping my eyes on the road.

  It made me nervous, the idea of being separated. But we had agreed that it was a necessary step. There would come a future, I supposed, when every little Podunk bus station and train terminal would have spy-cams with face recognition software. For now, though, you might still travel through the country without Big Brother making sure you stay out of trouble. If you’re careful to stay off the grid.

  They would have our description, a man and a woman biking together, out in the middle of the country but without any touring gear. We’d be less conspicuous as individuals just taking bus rides to wherever.

  (I don’t think I was unduly paranoid about this—and my controlling metaphor wasn’t Big Brother, actually, but Big Mother, the nanny state. If you really want to keep control of your children, you have to keep them on a leash. The image of the cyber-state as a harried young mother with children going every which way, straining at tethers, seemed pretty accurate.)

  We turned on the radio and listened to dreadful Southern nova ska for the benefit of our supposed eavesdroppers. After about ten minutes, though, Kit made a face and slapped the search bar until it delivered some funky bayou jazz on NPR.

  We did take an hour and a half to indulge my paranoia. We saw a sign and pulled into a small “urgent care facility” in the middle of nowhere, and I complained to the doctor about sharp pains in my hand, by the stump. He had a young man take an X-ray, and brought the film to me with a perplexed look, and put it up on the wall.

  “Never seen anything quite like this,” he said, “but then I don’t get a lot of combat amputees.” Where the bone for the little finger was cut off, there was an opaque perfect cube, maybe a third of an inch on a side. “The medics didn’t say anything to you about it?”

  “It was a confusing time.”

  “At a guess, I’d say it was something to promote healing. Never seen the like. Maybe you were a guinea pig, and they didn’t follow up.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Not allowed to do that, but they do. God . . . damned . . . army. You a disabled veteran?”

  “Eighty percent,” I said.

  “You get home, get the VA on their case. Get a patient advocate and stand your ground. They can call me if you want.” He handed me his business card and a prescription. “This is Tylenol with a little codeine. Don’t drive on it.”

  He stood up and shook my hand. “Thank you for your service, son. Wish I could do more.”

  “You’ve done plenty.” Kit and I both said good-bye, staring at the little white cube on the film.

  We settled the bill in the waiting room and then stood for a minute in the small parking lot before getting in the car. “I don’t feel good about leaving you now,” she said.

  “Not that much has changed,” I said. “We figured it was something.” I looked at my hand. “Know any amateur surgeons?”

  By the time we got to Gulfport it was dark. The next bus going north didn’t leave till seven in the morning. That didn’t bother either of us; stop at a nice motel and have a decent dinner and a sleep together before we separated.

  Not a good decision, it turned out.

  The dinner was great, a deep-South crab and shrimp boil with small new potatoes and baby onions cooked in the broth. We tarried over it and had a bottle of wine and a plate of fresh gingersnaps, the house specialty.

  Our lives might have been a lot simpler if we’d just picked up some burgers. Driven on.

  We got back from the restaurant about eleven and there were no parking spaces in front of our motel room at Traveler’s Rest. I let Kit off to run to the bathroom while I went around back to the auxiliary lot.

  We were separated for less than three minutes.

  When I opened the door, there was only a line of light coming from under the bathroom door. “Kit?” I called.

  She made some noise from the bathroom and I stepped into the darkness. A sharp pain exploded in the back of my head, and I was conscious just long enough to think Stroke?

  __________

  It had been a stroke, all right; the stroke from a club or a blackjack. At three in the morning, 3:17 by the bedside clock, I sort of woke up, ears ringing, pain radiating in spasms from the base of my skull. A big tender swelling there. No blood. I swallowed back vomit and staggered to the bathroom and drank some water, and managed to keep it down. Splashed cold water on my face and rubbed it with the harsh towel.

  There was an insistent buzzing in my ears that I eventually realized was coming from a strange cell phone, centered on the neatly made double bed. I got a tissue from the end table and picked up the phone like a master criminal, or an amateur one.

  I pushed the button but d
idn’t think “hello” would express how I felt. “Fuck you.”

  “Now, now,” a familiar female voice said, “what if this was your mother calling?”

  “I suppose I would ask her what the fuck was going on. But I guess I’ll have to ask you. Who the fuck are you?”

  “We are the people who have your girlfriend. That’s all you need to know.”

  “So you’ve upped the stakes to federal crime.”

  “Technically, no; I think it was already a federal crime when somebody killed a DHS agent. But yes, the stakes will be higher . . . for you.”

  “How so?”

  “It goes like this: we’ll give your girlfriend back. If you cooperate, we’ll give her back all at once. If not, we’ll send you a finger first, and then negotiate the next part.”

  I couldn’t speak. It was like my vocal apparatus was glued shut.

  “You can reach me at any time by touching the REPLY button. Do not make a recording of the call. If you don’t reply in one hour, or if you call the authorities, we will definitely give you the finger. Registered mail.” She hung up.

  I stared dumbly at the phone while it sank in.

  They had me pretty well figured out. It might not work with an actual war hero; he would probably make the calculation and, more or less with regret, do what he had to do.

  But to me? Killing some stranger, no matter who he might be, was not unthinkable; that had been my business as usual for more than a year, not that long ago. But allowing the woman I love to die—slowly, tortured by amputation? Through my inaction?

  The ghost of my missing finger talked quietly all the time, in a language no one else could hear. Now it screamed. You can’t let them do this. Do this to her.

  It wasn’t just the pain. The chest pain was worse, when it was bad. But nothing was missing in there.

  The muscle below the stump flexed and flexed. The ring finger clawed in sympathy.

  As it had done when I woke up in the hospital bed in Germany. The tight swath of bandages that covered the chest was nothing compared to the arm suspended just above eye level, twitching, broadcasting loss more than pain. This will never grow back. Never be better.