Work Done for Hire

  I could almost remember an ambulance ride, but that kept turning into a familiar helicopter, some bastard medic pounding my chest, Stay with me Stay with me when all I wanted was to leave. Leave behind the mutilated hand, the blood in my eyes, the punched-out chest. And now a dart, too.

  Then it became a nurse whose huge face shrank back to normal size. My hand came up and touched a plastic thing over my mouth.

  “Let’s try breathing without this,” she said, and there were some clicks as she unhooked something behind my head. The plastic went away, and with it the cold breeze that had been whispering into my nose. “They gave you a shot to wake you up. Do you know your name?”

  “Jack Daley not John,” I said automatically. “Specialist First Class, US3482179813. You are not allowed to ask me for more than this.”

  “Doctor Lu?” she said. “He’s responding now.”

  A slender Asian guy, probably Vietnamese, wearing surgical greens and a stethoscope. He checked my pulse and listened to my heart. “You are so in the wrong war,” I said diplomatically. “My grandfather would kill your ass.”

  “I was born in Cleveland,” he said. “I’m just as American as your grandfather, maybe more.” He unbuttoned my hospital shirt and looked at the skin there. He touched it gently with his fingertip. “Does that hurt?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Funny. How do you feel?”

  “Okay. Woozy, I guess.”

  A deep voice behind him said, “He’s talking?”

  “Yes, lieutenant. But I think he should—”

  “I’m a lieutenant colonel, doctor. It’s like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

  Wow, I rated a bird colonel. What kind of shit was I in now? They went out into the hall and conferred, and then walked away talking softly, I think arguing.

  I had the room to myself. Three other beds, empty. What did that mean?

  I napped and woke up what seemed like seconds later, refreshed. “Nurse?” I said quietly.

  She looked up from her charts, smiling. “You’re awake, sir? Let me go get the—”

  “No! No, wait. Before I talk to any officers . . . could you tell me where I am and what I’m doing here?”

  She put a cool hand on my forehead. “You’ve been in this bed several days. Your chart says you’re under observation pursuant to a drug reaction. What drug did you take?”

  “Didn’t take. It was a dart.”

  She touched the gauze in the center of my chest. “It was your heart?”

  “No, not ‘heart.’ A dart. Look. Where am I?”

  “It’s a military hospital, Keesler Air Force Base. You got a dart in your heart?” She smiled. “Like Cupid?”

  “No, not Cupid!” Better not say a beautiful mystery woman shot me with a mysterious dart gun for mysterious reasons. “I guess it was kind of an accident?”

  “That was clumsy,” she said, her pleasant expression unreadable. “You shot yourself in the chest with a riot control gun?”

  “Is that what it was?”

  “Well, they don’t say you did it yourself.” She reached down and rattled the handcuff that attached my ankle to the bed frame. “They seem to think you were resisting arrest.”

  “Holy shit. That’s not it, not at all.” I sat up in bed, shaking off dizziness, and looked at the handcuff, ankle restraint, whatever. It looked pretty serious. “Nobody arrested me.”

  She looked out down the hall. “Yeah, the guys who dumped you here weren’t MPs, despite their uniforms. I work with MPs all the time. What did you really do?”

  “Truth is, I’m not really sure. But I didn’t break any law.”

  “For what it’s worth, I believe you. Those guys are creeps. They don’t work here.”

  “So let me out of here.”

  “Oh, yeah, and get them on my ass.” She shook her head. “Even if I could”—she rattled the handcuffs—“I don’t have the key. Oh yeah, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in federal prison.”

  “They’re not real officers. And I’m not a criminal. I think my life’s in danger.”

  She canted her head and smiled again. “Spy stuff, eh?”

  “Kind of. More like criminal stuff. On their part.”

  She stepped to the door and looked out again. “Them? I think they’re too dumb to be criminals.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Don’t know shit. They didn’t treat me like a nurse, just another dumb black bitch—and those scrubs they’re wearing, they don’t think I know whose monograms they are? Like I’ve worked here so long they oughta name a disease after me.” She turned to rummage through a drawer. “Not even clean. They stole them scrubs from a laundry basket.”

  “You’ve got to help me.”

  “No, I don’t got to. I don’t have to do nothing not in my orders.”

  She looked out the door again, and shook her head, then picked up a big towel. “Don’t you go noplace.” She hustled out and was back in about two minutes.

  “Got my boyfriend’s pickup.” She unwrapped the towel, exposing a big greasy pair of bolt cutters.

  Rather than cut the chain, she snipped through the cuff itself, and then cut it off at my ankle, too. “You take that and get rid of it somewhere. Outside.”

  She pulled open a drawer and lifted out my clothes and shoes, wrapped in tissue paper. “Move fast. I’m not here.” She put the bolt cutters into a low cabinet, stepped into the hall, looked up and down, and walked away unhurriedly.

  There was a heat-sealed plastic sack with my bag in it. No cash in the wallet, though; just a receipt for $4,109. A brown envelope had the stuff from my pockets, about thirty bucks in small bills and change, and keys to the car that was parked back at Mom’s Home Away from Home, and the room key. Not too useful. Credit cards that I might be able to use in off-the-grid places. A dime store cell phone.

  I dressed quickly and stuffed the blue hospital pajamas into a HAZARDOUS BIOWASTE trash can and stepped out briskly, trying to look as if I knew what I was doing.

  No way I was going to get that $4,109 out of the hospital safe. But I wasn’t going anywhere without money.

  The fifty grand inside the book, that was just gone. If the guy with the white moustache showed up, I’d just have to tell him that the other bad guys, Boris and Natasha, had beat him to it. Take it up with your god-damned supervisor.

  I had to assume that they searched through the motel room after they darted me. But if they didn’t know about the money . . . I’d closed the hollowed-out book and left it on the floor by the bed. Maybe some maid got a tip big enough to retire on.

  I sure was worth a lot of money for a guy who barely had cab fare. Even in mundane reality. I had plenty of credit cards in my wallet; that was a couple of grand that I could tap at usurious rates, if I were standing in a bank in Iowa City. But between me and MidWestOne were plenty of search engines where my name would ring a bell. Or start up a siren.

  I sat down in the hospital lobby for a minute, trying to come up with a plan. Went through everything in my wallet.

  At the bottom of the stack of credit cards was a Visa I’d never used. It was from a dumb promotion thing where I’d get $10 of free merchandise at a Hy-Vee in Coralville—but that store was just a hole in the ground now; they’d closed it last year.

  I’d never used the card because it had the wrong middle initial: “John B.” All my other cards were for “C. Jack.” When it came, I hung onto it with a vague idea of doing an experiment; see what happened if I tried it in a cash machine when I was broke.

  Might as well be hung for a sheep as a goat, though I wasn’t really sure what that meant. Might as well be hung for a John as a Jack.

  I used the pen at the sign-in desk and scrawled “John B. Daley” on the card’s signature block. Then I went outside and got in the
next cab. “Bus station, please.” The driver was a girl who looked about twelve.

  “You want the one at the Amtrak station?”

  “Yeah, sure.” The cab had a beat-up card reading machine. I handed her the new one. She slid it through without bells or sirens.

  “You got ID?” I showed her my driver’s license and she scrutinized the picture and then studied my face. “You look better with the beard,” she said, and handed it back. I guess Visa-Jack would pass for Visa-John if there were no computers involved, or sufficiently old ones.

  She dropped me at the bus station annex. I watched her pick up a fare and drive away, then made a snap decision and crossed over to the train station.

  I used the same Visa in a ticket machine, ready to run if it started beeping, but it obediently booked me to Washington. From there I could book to New York, and then up to Maine. The last Maine bit on the bus. How to get from Bangor to Swan’s Island without any money was a problem I’d have to deal with when I got there.

  It wouldn’t be smart to push my luck charging a restaurant meal. With cash, I got a handful of power bars and a hot dog. Still a few hours before the train. I picked up a discarded Times-Picayune and sat on a bench outside, reading with one eye and watching with the other.

  I didn’t suppose a police car would pull up with lights flashing. If a cop car did come up, I could slip off in a cab to nowhere and start over.

  The breeze died and I realized I smelled too strong to sit next to anyone who didn’t have a real bad cold. What performers call “flop sweat,” I supposed. A difficult role, pretending to be an innocent writer from Iowa City who had no connection with murderous assholes or people with good plain haircuts from three-initialed agencies.

  The men’s room had a cologne dispenser that took a dollar coin. So I could at least disguise myself as a weary traveler who knew how bad he smelled.

  The crossword puzzle in the paper was too easy. I did about half of it and quit out of nervous boredom. Then I picked it back up and filled in all the blanks with random words. That was a little more challenging. I got to cross AXOLOTL with LYNX, a biology experiment that would probably never actually happen.

  It was three and a half hours till the train. I got up to look at the map on the wall and with a shock realized I was only twenty miles from the motel where I’d been kidnapped.

  I hurried outside and went to the first cab in line. He looked like a cliché New York cabbie, fat and grizzled and unfriendly, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip. In actual New York, I realized, he’d be from the Indian subcontinent or Northern Africa. Maybe that’s why he moved to Mississippi. I tapped on the window.

  “Yeah?”

  “Could you take me to a motel in Quigman and back in two hours? Mom’s Home Away from Home, off 85?”

  “Twenty-some miles? Sure. Cost ya.”

  “How much, about?”

  He tapped the dash map a couple of times and entered some number into his meter box. “Fifty-mile round trip . . . call it $250 plus waiting time?”

  I handed him the card. “Give you three hundred if you can get me there and back in an hour, and you never saw me?”

  He took the card and the back door sprang open. “Never saw who? I been off duty since ten seconds ago. Gonna drive the long way home.”

  I was sure the meter box would keep a record, but hell. The back of the cab smelled of stale cigarette smoke, which made me think of Kit, trapped somewhere with her face down by that overflowing ashtray.

  My eyes stung and I closed them during the drive, just to rest them, but was sound asleep when he pulled up at Mom’s Home Away from Home. “Here you go, buddy.”

  “Thanks. Back in a minute.” I got out and stretched. Against all odds, the hatchback was still in front of number 15.

  I went into the office and the querulous old man looked up. “Well, finally,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “In the hospital in Biloxi. Not sure how I wound up there.”

  “Oh. You okay now?”

  “Still sore from where someone hit me over the head. Look, I left a suitcase and stuff in that room.”

  He stared at me with a mixture of confusion and suspicion. “Maid cleaned up. Guess you can take a look. You got your key?”

  I took it out of the plastic bag and jiggled it. He decided to follow me to the room, putting a BACK IN FIVE sign on his door. The cabbie joined us, I guess to protect his investment.

  The door to room 15 was locked, which gave me a moment of optimism. But the pink suitcase wasn’t anywhere to be seen, nor the dime store computer. The Dexter Filkins book was on the floor, open, its hollowed-out pages empty.

  “What happened to that book?” the old man asked.

  “I don’t know. Someone got mad at it.”

  I knelt down to pick up the book and yes, the .38 was still down there, not visible behind the bedspread. I swept it out and into my pocket as I stood. The old man hadn’t been looking at me, and the cabbie developed a sudden interest in the ceiling.

  Checked the bathroom and retrieved the shaving kit I’d gotten from the casino.

  Nothing in the car but some road maps and a box of stale cookies. Aluminum foil and masking tape. A coffee cup with dried-up mold in it.

  “You gonna take the car? This ain’t no parkin’ lot.”

  “Somebody’ll be by for it tomorrow.” State police or Homeland Security, but maybe not tomorrow. I wasn’t going to take it and drive to Maine with a beacon: Come shoot me again; maybe a bullet this time.

  On the cab ride back to Biloxi, the cabdriver and I listened to music on a country station. We didn’t talk until we got to the train station and he opened the door. The cab machine took my card with no protest, and I tipped him up to three hundred.

  “It’s none of my business,” he said, “but you better watch your ass. Listen to a fellow vet. Guns are never nothin’ but trouble. Haven’t we had enough trouble?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We shouldn’t go looking for it.” He nodded and drove off shaking his head.

  When trouble comes looking for you, though, best to be ready. A little revolver with five shells is five shots better than a pocket full of nothing. On cue, a train whistled in the distance. The train to Maine, soon enough.

  I’ll come to thee by moonlight, the poet said, though hell should bar the way.

  12.

  I probably could have upgraded my ticket to a sleeper compartment, but didn’t want to push the one credit card too high. I did nurse a couple of glasses of wine, watching TV movies in the bar car.

  The revolver seemed heavy and obvious in my Amtrak bag, and perhaps the idea of a gun clashed with its cheerful logo, but it would be more conspicuous in my pocket. I decided to use my layover in Washington to buy a shoulder holster. And a double-breasted dark jacket, with padded shoulders, to go with it. Mirror shades and a rent-a-girl to hang on my arm. Or maybe I should stick with the Amtrak bag.

  Actually, an inconspicuous light jacket and a shoulder holster would be a good idea. I checked the web on the bar-car computer, and was amazed to find out (admittedly in an ad for shoulder holsters) how risky it was to simply carry a pistol in your pocket—at any second, the trigger could snag the pocket lining and blow your dick off! Buy a shoulder holster for the sake of your theoretical progeny! I’d gone all my life without worrying about that.

  Actually, I’d be more concerned about a policeman saying, “Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just . . . wait! That is a pistol in your pocket! Hands up!”

  The Amtrak bag seemed effective and inconspicuous, and the price was right. But I wondered whether I might be going into a situation where I would want a concealed weapon and both hands free. That might be worth the hundred bucks or so. Though I wouldn’t put it on unless I was walking into an actual “situation.”

  I did get a solid six h
ours of sleep on the train, even getting up a couple of times to take the foil off for random intervals, to confuse things. As we approached Washington, I left it off for the last hour or so. The people who were renting the room in the Marriott would no doubt be listening.

  I’d want it covered up all the time when I headed north, but also, naturally, I’d want it to be “not working” for hours at a time before I left.

  Of course I had no idea where the listeners were located. Maybe they were in Maine, in the same room as Kit, which they implied. I must be ready to surprise them there, at least approaching with the hand quiet, wrapped up.

  But first there was Washington to worry about. In all likelihood, they would expect to meet, or at least contact, me when I arrived in Washington. Perhaps I should do that, reassuring them just before I headed north, with my foil-silenced hand. If I checked into the hotel on schedule and then turned around, wrapped up the hand, and went straight to the train station, I could be halfway to Maine before they missed me.

  By now, I hoped, they should be used to the intermittent signal from the hand.

  When I got off the train in Union Station, I looked around, checking the time, as if I were expecting someone to meet me. Kept looking as I walked from the track through the huge station, but nobody contacted or, apparently, followed me.

  I got to the taxicab rank and then doubled back to the ticket machine. Quickly bought a ticket up to Maine via Penn Station. There were lots of trains from Washington to Boston, but not so many from Boston to Maine. Two leaving in the morning, two in the afternoon, and a red-eye just before midnight.

  I did toy with the idea of chancing a plane north. Of course the pistol was the obstacle. I could just ditch it and improvise when I got to Maine, a state with a lot of hunters. How hard could it be to buy a pistol in Portland?