The Bad Place Part 2

CUT AND run! Bobby actually thought she would cut and run when trouble struck-"Get the h.e.l.l out of here"

cut and run? just because he told her to! If she was an obedient little wifey, not a full-fledged partner in the agency, not a d.a.m.ned good investigator in her own right, just a token backup who couldn't take the heat when the nice kicked in. Well, to h.e.l.l with that.

In her mind she could see his lovable face-merry blue eyes pug nose, smattering of freckles, generous mouth-framed thick honey-gold hair that was mussed (as was most often the case) like that of a small boy who had just gotten up from a nap. She wanted to bop his pug nose just hard enough to make his blue eyes water, so he'd have no doubt how the cut-an run suggestion annoyed her.

She had been on surveillance behind Decodyne, at the end of the corporate parking lot, in the deep shadows under a ma.s.sive Indian laurel. The moment Bobby signaled trouble she started the Toyota's engine. By the time she heard gunfire over the earphones, she had shifted gears, popped the emergency brake, switched on the headlights, and jammed the accelerator toward the floor.

At first she kept the headset on, calling Bobby's name, trying to get an answer from him, hearing only the most G.o.d awful ruckus from his end.

Then the set went dead; she couldn't hear anything at all, so she pulled it off and threw it into the back seat.

Cut and run! d.a.m.n him!

When she reached the end of the last row in the parking lot she let up on the accelerator with her right foot, simultaneous tapping the brake pedal with her left foot, finessing the small car into a slide, which carried it onto the access road that led around the big building. She turned the steering wheel into the slide, then gave the heap some gas again even before the back end had stopped skidding and shuddering. The tires barked, and the engine shrieked, and with a rattle-squeak-tw.a.n.g of tortured metal, the car leaped forward.

They were shooting at Bobby, and Bobby probably wasn't even able to shoot back, because he was lax about carrying a gun on every job; he went armed only when it seemed that the current business was likely to involve violence. The Decodyne a.s.signment had looked peaceable enough; sometimes industrial espionage could turn nasty, but the bad guy in this case was Tom Rasmussen, a computer nerd and a greedy son of a b.i.t.c.h, clever as a dog reading Shakespeare on a high wire, with a record of theft via computer but with no blood on his hands. He was the high-tech equivalent of a meek, embezzling bank clerk-or so he had seemed.

But Julie was armed on every job. Bobby was the optimist; she was the pessimist. Bobby expected people to act in their own best interests and be reasonable, but Julie half expected every apparently normal person to be, in secret, a crazed psychotic.

A Smith & Wesson.357 Magnum was held by a clip to the back of the glove box lid, and an Uzi-with two spare, thirty-round magazines-lay on the other front seat. From what she had heard on the earphones before they'd gone dead, she was going to need that Uzi.

The Toyota virtually flew past the side of Decodyne, and she wheeled hard left, onto Michaelson Drive, almost rising onto two wheels, almost losing control, but not quite. Ahead, Bobby's Dodge was parked at the curb in front of the building, and another van-a dark blue Ford-was stopped in the street, doors open wide.

Two men, who had evidently been in the Ford, were standing four or five yards from the Dodge, chopping the h.e.l.l out of it with automatic weapons, blasting away with such ferocity that they seemed not to be after the man inside but to have some bizarre personal grudge against the Dodge itself. They stopped firing, turned toward her as she came out of the driveway onto Michaelson, and hurriedly jammed fresh magazines into their weapons.

Ideally, she would close the hundred-yard gap between herself and the men, pull the Toyota sideways in the street, slip out, and use the car as cover to blow out the tires on their van and pin them down until police arrived. But she didn't have time for all of that. They were already raising the muzzles of their weapons.

She was unnerved at how lonely the night streets looked this hour in the heart of metropolitan Orange County, bare of traffic, washed by the urine-yellow light of the sodium-streetlamps. They were in an area of banks and office buildings no residences, no restaurants or bars within a couple of blocks. It might as well have been a city on the moon, or a vision of the world after it had been swept by an Apocalyptic disaster that had left only a handful of survivors.

She didn't have time to handle the two gunmen by the book and she could not count on help from any quarter, so she would have to do what they least expected: play kamikaze, use her car as a weapon.

The instant she had the Toyota fully under control, pressing the accelerator tight to the floorboards and rocketed straight at the two b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. They opened fire, but she was already slipping down in the seat and leaning sideways a little trying to keep her head below the dashboard and still hold the wheel relatively steady. Bullets snapped and whined off the car. The windshield burst. A second later Julie hit one of the gun men so hard that the impact snapped her head forward, against the wheel, cutting her forehead, snapping her teeth together forcefully enough to make her jaw ache; even as pain needled through her face, she heard the body bounce off the front b.u.mper and slam onto the hood.

With blood trickling down her forehead and dripping from her right eyebrow, Julie jabbed at the brakes and sat up at the same time. She was confronted by a man's wide-eyed corpse jammed in the frame of the empty windshield. His face in front of the steering wheel-teeth chipped, lips torn, chin slashed, cheek battered, left eye missing-and one of his broken legs was inside the car, hooked down over the dashboard. Julie found the brake pedal and pumped it. With the sudden drop in speed, the dead man was dislodged. His limp body rolled across the hood, and when the car slid to a shaky halt he vanished over the front end.

Heart racing, blinking to keep the stinging blood from blue ring the vision in her right eye, Julie s.n.a.t.c.hed the Uzi from the seat beside her, shoved open the door, and rolled out, moving fast and staying low.

The other gunman was already in the blue Ford van. He gave it gas before remembering to shift out of park, so the tires screamed and smoked.

Julie squeezed off two short bursts from the Uzi, blowing out both tires on her side of the van. But the gunman didn't stop. He shifted gears at last and tried to drive past her on two ruined tires.

The guy might have killed Bobby; now he was getting away. He would probably never be found if Julie didn't stop him. Reluctantly she swung the Uzi higher and emptied the magazine into the side window of the van.

The Ford accelerated, then suddenly slowed and swung to the right, at steadily diminishing speed, in a long arc that carried it to the far curb, where it came to a halt with a jolt.

No one got out.

Keeping an eye on the Ford, Julie leaned into her car, plucked a spare magazine from the seat, and reloaded the Uzi. She approached the idling van cautiously and pulled open the door, but caution was not required because the man behind the wheel was dead. Feeling a little sick, she reached in and switched off the engine.

Briefly, as she turned from the Ford and hurried toward the bullet-riddled Dodge, the only sounds she could hear were the sounds of a faint breeze in the lush corporate landscaping that flanked the street, punctuated by the gentle hiss and rattle of palm fronds. Then she also heard the idling engine of the Dodge, simultaneously smelled gasoline, and shouted, "Bobby!"

Before she reached the white van, the back doors creaked open, and Bobby came out, shedding twists of metal, chunks of plastic, bits of gla.s.s, wood chips, and sc.r.a.ps of paper. He was gasping, no doubt because the gasoline fumes had driven most of the breathable air out of the Dodge's rear quarters.

Sirens rose in the distance.

Together they quickly walked away from the van. They had gone only a few steps when orange light flared and flames rose in a wooooosh from the gasoline pooled on the pavement, enveloping the vehicle in bright shrouds. They hurried beyond the corner of intense heat that surrounded the Dodge and stared for a moment, blinking at the wreckage, then at each other.

The sirens were drawing nearer.

He said, "You're bleeding."

"Just skinned my forehead a little."

"You sure?"

"It's nothing. What about you?"

He sucked in a deep breath. "I'm okay."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"You weren't hit?"

"Unmarked. It's a miracle."

"Bobby?"

"What?"

"I couldn't handle it if you'd turned up dead in there.

"I'm not dead. I'm fine."

"Thank G.o.d," she said.

Then she kicked his right shin.

"Ow! What the h.e.l.l?"

She kicked his left shin.

"Julie, dammit!"

"Don't you ever tell me to cut and run."

"What?"

"I'm a full half of this partnership in every way."

"But-"

"I'm as smart as you, as fast as you-"

He glanced at the dead man on the street, the other on the Ford van, half visible through the open door, and he said, "That's for sure, babe."

"-as tough as you-"

"I know, I know. Don't kick me again."

She said, "What about Rasmussen?"

Bobby looked up at the Decodyne building. "You think he's still in there?"

"The only exits from the parking lot are onto Michaelson and he hasn't come out this way, so unless he fled on foot,"

"In there?"

"all right. We've got to nail him before he slides out of the trap with those diskettes."

"Nothing worthwhile on the diskettes anyway," Bobby said.

Decodyne had been on to Rasmussen from the time he applied for the job, because Dakota & Dakota Investigation which was contracted to handle the company's security checks-had penetrated the hacker's highly sophisticated false ID. Decodyne's management wanted to play along with Rasmussen long enough to discover to whom he would pa.s.s the Wizard files when he got them; they intended to prosecute the money man who had hired Rasmussen, for no doubt the hacker's employer was one of Decodyne's primary compet.i.tors.

They had allowed Tom Rasmussen to think he had compromised the security cameras, when in fact he had been under constant observation. They also had allowed him to break down the file codes and access the information he wanted, but unknown to him they had inserted secret instructions in the files, which insured that any diskettes he acquired would be full of trash data of no use to anyone.

Flames roared and crackled, consuming the van. Julie watched chimeras of reflected flames slither and caper up the gla.s.s walls and across the roof and coalesce there in the form of gargoyles.

Raising her voice slightly to compete with the fire and with the shriek of approaching sirens, she said, "Well, we thought he believed he'd circ.u.mvented the videotape records of the security cameras, but apparently he knew we were on to him."

"Sure did."

"So he also might've been smart enough to search for an anticopying directive in the files-and find a way around it."

Bobby frowned. "You're right."

"So he's probably got Wizard, unscrambled, on those diskettes.

"d.a.m.n, I don't want to go in there. I've been shot at enough tonight."

A police cruiser turned the corner two blocks away and sped toward them, siren screaming, emergency lights casting off alternating waves of blue and red light.

"Here come the professionals," Julie said. "Why don't we let them take over now?"

"We were hired to do the job. We have an obligation. honor is a sacred thing, you know. What would Sam Spade think of us?"

She said, "Sam Spade can go spit up a rope."

"What would Philip Marlowe think?"

"Philip Marlowe can go spit up a rope."

"What will our client think?"

"Our client can go spit up a rope."

"Dear, 'spit' isn't the popular expression."

"I know, but I'm a lady."

"You certainly are."

As the black-and-white braked in front of them, another police car turned the corner behind it, siren wailing, and entered Michaelson Drive from the other direction.

Julie put her Uzi on the pavement and raised her hand to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings.

"I'm really glad you're alive, Bobby."

"You going to kick me again?"

"Not for a while."

FRANK Pollard hung on to the tailgate and rode the truck nine or ten blocks, without drawing the attention of the driver.

Along the way he saw a sign welcoming him to the city of Anaheim, so he figured he was in southern California, although he still didn't know if this was where he lived or whether he was from out of town. Judging by the chill in the air, it was winter-not truly cold but as frigid as it got in these climates. He was unnerved to realize that he did not know the date or even the month.

Shivering, he dropped off the truck when it slowed and turned onto a service way that led through a warehouse district. Huge, corrugated-metal buildings-some newly painted and some streaked with rust, some dimly lit by security lamps and some not-loomed against the star spattered sky.

Carrying the flight bag, he walked away from the warehouses. The streets in that area were lined with shabby bungalows. The shrubs and trees were overgrown in many places: untrimmed palms with full skirts of dead fronds; bushy hibiscus with half-closed pale blooms glimmering softly in the gloom; jade hedges and plum-thorn hedges so old they were more woody than leafy; bougainvillea draped over roofs and fences, bristling with thousands of untamed, questing trailers. His soft-soled shoes made no sound on the sidewalk, and his shadow alternately stretched ahead of him and then behind, as he approached and then pa.s.sed one lamppost after another.

Cars, mostly older models, some rusted and battered, were parked at curbs and in driveways; keys might have dangled from the ignitions of some of them, and he could have jump started any he chose. However, he noted that the cinder block walls between the properties-as well as the walls of a decrepit and abandoned house-shimmered with the spray-painted, ghostly, semi-phosph.o.r.escent graffiti of Latino gangs, and didn't want to tinker with a set of wheels that might belong to one of their members. Those guys didn't bother rushing to a phone to call the police if they caught you trying to steal one of their cars; they just blew your head off or put a knife in your neck. Frank had enough trouble already, even with his head intact and his throat unpunctured, so he kept walking.

Twelve blocks later, in a neighborhood of well-kept houses and better cars, he began searching for a set of wheels that would be easy to boost. The tenth vehicle he tried was a one year-old green Chevy, parked near a street lamp, the doors unlocked, the keys tucked under the driver's seat.

Intent on putting a lot of distance between himself and the deserted apartment complex where he had last encountered his unknown pursuer, Frank switched on the Chevy's heater and drove from Anaheim to Santa Ana, then south on Bristol Avenue toward Costa Mesa, surprised by his familiarity with the streets. He seemed to know the area well. He recognized buildings, shopping centers, parks, and neighborhoods past while he drove, though the sight of them did nothing to rekindle his burnt-out memory. He still could not recall who he was, where he lived, what he did for a living, what he was running from or how he had come to wake up in an alleyway in the middle of the night.

Even at that dead hour-the car clock indicated it2:48-he figured his chances of encountering a traffic cop was greater on a freeway, so he stayed on the surface street through Costa Mesa and the eastern and southern fringes of Newport Beach. At Corona Del Mar he picked up the Pacific Coast Highway and followed it all the way to Laguna Beach encountering a thin fog that gradually thickened as he progressed southward.

Laguna, a picturesque resort town and artists' colon shelved down a series of steep hillsides and canyon walls toward the sea, most of it cloaked now in the thick fog. Only an occasional car pa.s.sed him, and the mist rolling in from the Pacific became sufficiently dense to force him to reduce his speed to fifteen miles an hour.

Yawning and gritty-eyed, he turned onto a side street east of the highway and parked at the curb in front of a dark, two story, gabled, Cape Cod house that looked out of place on these Western slopes. He wanted to get a motel room, but before he tried to check in somewhere, he needed to know if he had any money or credit cards. For the first time all night, he had a chance to look for ID, as well. He searched the pockets of his jeans, but to no avail.

He switched on the overhead light, pulled the leather flight bag onto his lap and opened it. The satchel was filled with tightly banded stacks of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.

THE THIN soup of gray mist was gradually stirring itself into a thicker stew. A couple of miles closer to the ocean the night probably was clotted with fog so dense that it would almost have lumps.

Coatless, protected from the night only by a sweater, but warmed by the fact that he had narrowly avoided almost certain death, Bobby leaned against one of the patrol cars in front of Decodyne and watched Julie as she paced back and forth with her hands in the pockets of her brown leather jacket. He never got tired of looking at her. They had been married seven years, and during that time they had lived and worked an played together virtually twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.