Maybe you think things are black and white, that we live in a do-the- crime-do-the-time world. But what about Nolen’s daughter? What about her swimming lessons? What about the rich soil of her life? Should we dry it out, parch it by putting away her father? Should we say “Tough fucking luck, kid,” to her? Or should we say it to Alex Radulov? Let him take one last hit for the human team?
I’m not saying I know the answer. All I knew was that I liked Nolen almost as much as I liked what he could do for me. Yep. I said it. Erring on the side of Nolen was convenient as all hell. If you find that odious, then ask yourself why the world needs judges and independent arbitrators. Mistaking self-interest for truth is just part of the human floor plan. Fact is, I was just doing something consciously that you do unconsciously all the time: believing what I needed to cover my own ass. Remortgage your house to buy a hybrid lately? No? Let me guess. You have a bunch of excuses ...
And maybe that’s not so bad, considering how principles are as liable to get you a Hitler as a Gandhi.
This was what I had to impress upon Molly to get her to play bally. The virtue of hypocrisy.
I really had no idea how she would respond, aside from knowing she would be shocked that I could think such a thing. Unlike men, women possess an almost infinite capacity for moral surprise. No matter how many times the office sociopath burns them, they are hurt and mystified.
I reached out and knocked. The door swung wide as if she had been expecting me.
Except she hadn’t been expecting me. All that was left of her was a small puddle of blood.
Fawk.
It had been quite some time since I had last experienced genuine terror. I had forgotten not so much the tenor as the immediacy. Wow. Bummer.
Her laptop was still up and running on the small table. The lamp next to her bed glowered with dim indifference. I could see DISCIPLE scrawled across a sheet of paper folded on the pillow. I sat on her bed, took comfort in the fact that her mattress was at least as hard as my own. I snapped the sheet up in tingling fingers. Opened it.
Hydradyne Assembly Plant
NO COPS
I dropped the sheet on the floor, gazed at my palms and fingers. Hands are miraculous things. Placed thumb to thumb, they’re perfectly designed for wringing necks ...
I gazed around for several moments, looking from this to that, just to be sure it would all be there if I needed it. In my skull.
Nazi, I decided. The room smelled like Nazi.
I drove through the centre of the town. Dark business fronts. Stretches of deserted sidewalk, freckled with gum. The street lights crawled over the lip of my windshield. Shadow and light dropped like water across me. The gleam of my Volkswagen struck me as alien, made me feel as though I were the squishy insides of a bug.
Ruddick. Fawk. If it had been a city, I could have romanticized things. I could have waxed wise about the scum, squalor. I could have mythologized the ethos of the parasite, or even the out-and-out killer. Lots of people deserved to die in the city. Lots of people brought on what they suffered.
But Ruddick was a small town. There was no anonymity to round off the hard edges, no background clamour to lift the music out of human screams. Everything was stark, real.
With no cracks to fall between, the dead made themselves noticed.
The light of the Kwik-Pik fanned across the small asphalt parking lot. I parked next to the car I recognized from that first meeting, back when Molly and I were still knocking on doors. I sat and waited for the paying customers to leave. Then I cracked my door, breathed deep the oily smell of summer leaking from brick and concrete. For a moment Ruddick almost tasted like a city. My heels made no sound across the tarvey.
I pressed open the glass door.
I walked into the white-baked interior, floated past all the pretty plastic colours. I reached back and tugged my automatic from my belt, held it directly in front of me. Tim stared in abject horror.
“A guy pulls a gun,” I said.
Track Twelve
THE WHATEVER FACTORY
Sometimes I see myself through the scope of a sniper’s rifle. Crosshairs parse me into sliding quadrants, pin me to the centre of the packed parking lot, the variety store foyer, the entrance to the motel office— whatever. I am oblivious. My gaze roams every angle except the one belonging to the lens.
Everything I do is soundless.
Tim was only too happy to help me. He fairly fell over himself in his rush to betray his friends.
I was right about Nill and his techniques, the way he progressively implicated his recruits in various crimes, nurturing a sense of impunity even as he forged a sense of belonging—always invoking the false blood of gang-family ties. Tim was supposed to meet the others at the abandoned Hydradyne plant after his shift—to relieve one of the others if I failed to turn up in a timely fashion. God’s work never ends.
I told him this was precisely what he would do. Only forty minutes to go, as it turned out. The Kwik-Pik closed early on Sundays.
Another car pulled into the lot, so I took his cell and retreated to the magazine section, whiled away the time with Maxim, FHM, and finally the skin mags proper.
I was still staring at pussy when he locked up.
His Honda Civic was three years older than my Volkswagen Golf. Even still, I suffered a pang of shame driving a car in the same status range as that of a punk racist high school dropout.
Gave me second thoughts about poor Radulov.
I worked off my sense of material inadequacy by leaning forward and describing—in excruciating detail—the fates of those who had crossed me in the past. Two Baathists skinned in the desert. An unscrupulous coke dealer found hanged in his apartment. A mob hit man discovered in three different counties.
“You will wave hello,” I grated, “even though you’re shitting your pants in terror. You will smile, even though you’re shitting your pants in terror. You will do everything I tell you to do ...” I reached forward to pinch his trachea. “Because if you fail, Dutchie my boy, you will die convulsing, you will gasp your final breath gnawing dirt. Do you copy?”
He blinked tears, blubbered something I understood as an affirmative.
Tim drove down Highway 3—toward the Framer Compound, suggestively—before turning off on an unpaved service road. The little car rocked to the dip of parched potholes. Weeds and scrub scratched and brushed the fenders and underbody. Tim sat rigid, gazing out at the bobbing fan of illumination before him. Skeins of dried grasses. Tracks in the cool dust. Shadows in the dark.
We drove past an opened chain-link gate then turned down a slope. Sumac and other scrub fenced the lane. A wall of corrugated siding resolved out of the black, windowless and nondescript. Tim slowed, and I saw the gleam of a pickup truck and the hindquarters of another car flash through the headlights. He parked beside the two vehicles. I glimpsed a figure with a flashlight walking toward us. “Stay in the car until he comes,” I barked, pressing the muzzle of my gun against the side of his eye. “Leave it running ...”
Then I slipped out into the night. The surrounding terrain leapt into view: swales of brownlands beginning a long regression to pre- Columbian forest. The factory’s main structure, I realized, was effectively shielded from the neighbouring subdivisions, which was why, no doubt, the Thirds had chosen it out of all the abandoned shells on offer in the industrial park.
Tim had parked to the left of the pickup and car. I couldn’t duck in front of the Civic because of the headlights, and I couldn’t bolt behind because that was the figure’s direction of approach. My only alternative was to huddle in the overgrowth, risk the approaching flashlight. I fell prone behind a hump of grasses, peered between shredded threads ...
“Heeeeey, Dutcheee-boy!” the figure called, kicking the dust tracks. Fucknut, I decided to call him.
He was one of the two guys from the picnic table. Junkie thin. Beard trimmed to the craggy contours of his face. Older, with a grey mullet dropping in strings around his should
ers. He looked like George Carlin at the wrong end of a hunger strike.
His flashlight swayed negligently, missed me altogether.
“Hey? Everything okay?” he said, sauntering around the Civic. “You remember to grab me a pack of Camels?”
He leaned into the driver’s-side window. “You forgot aga—” He heard my rush, but too late to do anything but grunt in abbreviated alarm. I clipped him as he turned, catching him on the notch in his orbital—just above his left eye. He dropped like a rolled carpet.
I retrieved the flashlight to inspect Tim. He sat there, as ashen as a heart attack, his hands clamped on the wheel. His Kwik-Pik name tag gleamed in the white.
“Drive home, Tim,” I said. “You weren’t made for this. You weren’t made to hate ... “
There’s something about tears in flashlight illumination, the way they sparkle like rhinestones. Like something apparently precious.
“Do you understand?”
“Yuh,” he said, swallowing.
“Then go, kid. Get the hell out of here.”
Surprise. We like it the way we like our pets—small and slavishly dependent.
Every heartbeat is an ambush, if you think about it. The key to success in combat is merely to remind your opponent of this fact at opportune times. To make weapons of his routines and his assumptions.
This was why I simply strolled toward the factory in the wake of Tim’s car, dandling the flashlight in an offhand manner. I suppose I could have done a bunch of Navy SEAL shit, diving and rolling through the shadows. But why take the scenic route?
I followed the side of the factory, kicking my feet through the weeds and grasses the same as Fucknut. I found myself glancing up along the looming plane of the wall—a relic of a time when I despised rooftops, I imagine. That’s the thing about war days: they never stop being yesterday.
The stars lent a chill to the air.
I saw Fucknut’s partner, Dipshit, little more than a silhouette leaning against the wall next to an opened door. He was blowing smoke and watching it, which meant he was either bored or scared shitless. The spark of his cigarette floated along an arc anchored to his elbow. I watched it swing up to his lips, burn bright, then swing down to his thigh, and flick ...
I held the flashlight high enough to discourage any peering. Dipshit, I could see, was another chain-on-his-wallet fucker, just as skinny as Fucknut but with more of a Sid Vicious look. Anger as fashion.
“Where the hell did Dutchie go?” Dipshit said, finally turning toward me. “He forget your smokes or something?”
I raised the lamp to his face. He cursed, actually swatted at the glare. Then about a pace away, I tossed the light at him, kicked him square in the nuts. I tagged him with a strike on the temple as he doubled over. In all honesty, I’m not sure he was breathing when he hit the ground. The convulsions suggested a direct hit.
What can I say? They don’t make Nazis the way they used to, I guess.
With both Fucknut and Dipshit tucked in for bed, I figured it was time to draw my gun. I stood in the darkness of the door opening, ears pricked. I heard the drone of a masculine voice reflected off hanging metal surfaces. Reverend Nill, I decided.
This was about when the farting started. What was it about these dead factories?
I stepped across the cracked concrete of the threshold. I paused, my senses tingling at their limits. The air smelled of dust and the trademark Manning-family reek: shit and potato chips. Details of the interior resolved as my eyes adjusted to the absence of the flashlight: a strewn floor, the hint of cavernous walls, and a dim subterranean glow emanating from around a corner. I heard laughter sucked hollow by open space.
I was standing in what looked like a warehousing annex. You would like to think you could step into an abandoned factory and easily guess what it once manufactured, but the fact is, everything has become voodoo in this world. Precious little makes sense to the untrained eye anymore. Hydradyne, I knew, would be as much a riddle to me in broad daylight as in the pitch of night. Some shelving had crashed to my right—that was pretty much the best I could do, identification-wise. It made an obstacle course of my way forward, or so I imagined, because I couldn’t see jack shit.
With one hand out to paw the spaces before me, I moved to the left. I followed a track of rollers—like the kind they use to feed your groceries out to your car—along the wall, toward the truncated glow. My breathing was even, my steps measured, and except for the low, doggish whine of a second fart, I moved without making a sound.
The voice was clearer now.
“Can you talk now? Huh, bitch? Do you think you can talk like a sane, rational, fucking bitch? “
A moment of ain’t-no-such-thing laughter. Definitely Nill, but more winded—almost breathless.
A feminine cry pierced the dark, shrill with rage and terror.
Molls ...
I would like to say that I remained professional at this point, that I behaved with cold, consumer detachment, but the fact is, I began running. Only dumb luck saved me from making a noise kicking or slamming into something, because I could see little more than the gleam of the roller track next to me. I whisked through the black, felt the aura of unseen obstructions fall away harmlessly.
I slowed to a creep as I approached the corner. The illumination was bright enough to airbrush the lines of my automatic. I always feel better when I can see my gun, for some reason. Never had much stomach for abstract instruments of murder.
A second or two passed before my eyes digested the complexity of the scene. It was a receiving bay of some kind. A series of catwalks and grilled floor platforms caged the air above the cluttered floor immediately before me. A single kerosene lantern on one of these platforms was the only source of light, casting fishnet shadows across the bare floor and rubbish below. I could hear its hiss hardening the silence. The greater factory fell into darkness beyond, another derelict arena blasted hollow by unfathomable economic forces.
I saw Molly, bound and gagged with tape, kneeling, burnt white in the glare of the lantern.
And I saw him, stripped to the waist, covered with a sweat-shiny array of comic-book tatts. Reverend Nill, the post-industrial demagogue. I imagine Brenda, my old sociologist girlfriend, would have some kind of interpretative paradigm to explain him. A kind of psycho-social parasite feeding off the resentment of the uneducated service castes. Something like that. You can only reform the economy for the sake of numbers instead of people for so long, I suppose.
That was when I wondered about Johnny ...
My eyes clicked down, around. I noticed the unattended shotgun leaning against three stacked pallets.
Something scuffed something behind me.
The bat chipped the back of my skull, but I was already diving—an old mortar-attack reflex. Even still, it rang my bell hard enough to send my automatic skidding into the black. I crashed face first into debris. There was a bag of something in there, probably concrete mix or something, powdery soft and hard all at once. A jutting nail ripped the meat of my left palm, but I wouldn’t realize this until afterward.
I kick-rolled onto my back just in time to catch the next bat swing in the shin—a fucking stinger. But better than catching it with my face like the batter intended.
Johnny Dinkfingers loomed above me, graphed by lattices of light. A giant man out for giant revenge.
I had caught him pissing or something—away from his weapon, which was why he was still alive. Now, with me down in a crab defending myself with my legs, the best thing he could have done was simply leap for his weapon. He had the drop on me, plain and simple. But the thing was, he already thought he had the drop on me. After all, he had the bat and I was down on my ass. And more importantly, after his humiliation at the pig roast, he had something to prove to himself. The cheapest way to save face is to scar another.
So he came at me, swinging the bat wildly. Teeth clenched, eyes wild and exultant, he looked like something out of a Viking nightmare. I scrambled
back, fending his strikes as best I could, but largely taking it on the shins, retreating into the gloom ... to the point where I hoped I would find my gun.
We have this psychic connection, you see, me and my government- model Colt. One second I was clawing the floor blindly, then, Why hello there, little buddy ...
I was up on my feet, depressing the trigger, plugging him in the face.
Bam-bam-bam. One-two-three ... He teetered, held up by some residual brain stem activity, then crashed forward to the floor. Petals of blood bloomed across the dust.
Score.
He looked like a drunk licking up a spilled Caesar.
“Johnny?” Nill called from immediately above. “Sound off, brother!” With the light next to him, I imagine we must have looked like rats battling in shadows.
“He tripped,” I replied, my automatic still tingling in my hand. “Fell on three bullets.”
If you haven’t noticed, I tend to talk too much.
Rubbing the back of my head, I slowly backed out from under the platform to where Nill could see me pointing my Colt directly at him. He reflexively pulled Molly tight, using her as a shield. I have to admit, she looked hot, her mouth taped, her arms bound behind her, as sweaty as a cold beer on a humid day, wearing only a tank top and boxers—like something out of those boner detective mags I used to “read” when I was a kid.
Nill, on the other hand, looked positively desperado. I understood instantly: he was one of those guys with only two gears in his emotional transmission. Challenge him a little and he seems utterly invincible; challenge him more than a little and he starts putting with his driver.
“Who hired you?” he croaked with what was left of his voice. “Was it Leighton? Or the Mexicans, huh? Who’re you working for?”
“Jonathan and Amanda Bonjour.”
Crazed laughter, dry, as if coughed through ropes rather than vocal cords. “And here I thought I was cold!” he chortled. “Look. I know, man, so you can drop the fucking act!”
Ah, I thought. So this was where it was hiding. The Law of Unintended Consequences always rears its hoary head at some point, and here it was, bright and shiny and as deep up my ass as always.