I pushed the button. The phone rang once, and the person who picked it up didn’t say anything.
“So what do you want me to do?” I asked the silence.
A man’s voice: “Do you feel fit to drive?”
I didn’t, actually. Maybe I could walk to the door. “How far?”
“Some distance. You should sleep first.”
“Sure.”
“There are sleeping pills and aspirin in your shaving kit.”
“I don’t carry sleeping pills.”
“You do now. Take two and I will call you in the morning.” He hung up, a comedian.
My “shaving kit” was a courtesy zip-bag from Harrah’s. It now had an aspirin bottle with eight aspirin and four purple pills.
No way in hell. Even if I knew they looked like sleeping pills, which I didn’t, I wasn’t going to take them on the word of a probably homicidal mystery man. I walked across the street and got an ice-cold quart of beer from a local place called Swamp Hawg Brewery.
It was not as bad as it might have been. I drank the whole quart in about ten minutes, while nibbling on stale cookies for my stomach’s sake. I started to undress, but only got my shirt off. Decided I had to rest a bit before tackling my shoes.
Woke up slowly with shoes still on, eyelids stuck together, clothes twisted and heavy with sweat. The clock said 9:14. Dappled sunlight coming through the window by the bathroom. Funny feeling in my stomach, butterflies rather than nausea, and probably a bad case of Swamp Hawg breath.
Maybe nerves, too.
I set up the coffee machine and slumped to the shower. It had a head more talented than my own; I set it to a complex vibrating mode and let the thrumming hot water try to wake me up. When it turned cold I stepped out carefully, remembering a stupid accident in junior high. Slipped in a strange bathroom and laid open my chin.
No Time for Stitches, a good title for my autobiography.
I got the cardboard box out of the trunk and dumped the rifle out onto the bed. A lot heavier than the one I used in the desert.
I’d only used the sniper-mod M2010 once as a plain rifle, rather than a sniper weapon, and the results were more instructive than impressive. The bolt action that gives it such accuracy is a handicap when you’re not punching somebody a new orifice long-distance.
There were seven or eight of us deploying in a roomy MaxiStryker, crawling up a steep hill with maybe a dozen other vehicles on our way from nowhere to elsewhere, and we ground to a halt when the vehicle either ran over a mine or was hit by an IED. We were all deafened, but otherwise unhurt. Smoke everywhere. There was some small-arms fire whispering from above us, and we all piled out on the downhill side to shoot back.
It was an unholy racket, even to the deaf; at least two Strykers blasting away with fifties and the littler machine guns and grenade launchers chattering and booming. I could see by tracers what they were aiming at, a dun-colored lump that was probably a pile of sandbags, and I managed to get two rounds in that general direction while the Strykers pelted it with about a thousand. Finally something hit something and it went up in a big orange-and-grey blossom. Some guys pumped fists and cheered, I guess the way Goliath did until his last engagement.
I remembered taking comfort in the rifle’s weight and balance, back then, and now allowed myself a familiar fantasy: those guys pull up in their SUV and start taking pictures of Kit’s bare ass—but instead of the piddling Dick Tracy toy, I pull out my trusty M2010. Right eye or left? Perhaps a new one, in between?
It occurred to me that this might be the same rifle I’d “modified” by plugging the barrel with a low-powered bullet. I slid the bolt back and looked down the barrel; it was unobstructed.
I could take it to the cops. Tell them my story. Some lunatic assholes gave me this rifle and want me to go to Washington and assassinate someone, and they kidnapped my girlfriend to make sure I do it. Here’s a note that proves it.
Sure, son. Why don’t you just put down the gun and sit over there while we check it out… you don’t mind handcuffs, do you?
For some time I sat there and looked at the weapon. Then I carefully filled its box magazine with five fresh rounds, then pulled the bolt back and slipped a sixth one into the chamber.
Four rounds for the car and driver, and then two for the grinning schmuck with the camera. Chest and head. Take a picture of this, motherfucker.
9.
I was just about done with waiting, quarter to eleven, when the little phone buzzed. I pushed the button and didn’t say anything.
“Do you have a pencil?” the woman said.
“No. Second.” I found a ballpoint in my bag, and a folded-over piece of paper. “Okay.”
“You have to be in Washington, DC, in four days. You have a room reserved under the name ‘Grant Harrison’ from the third of July until the fifth, in the JW Marriott Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest.” She paused. “Do you have that?”
“I have it.” I repeated it back to her.
“Your confirmation for the room, and a wallet with Grant Harrison identification, are in the glove compartment of your car. You will have to drive there, of course, so your luggage won’t be searched.”
I didn’t bother to write that down. “I’m not doing anything for you until I know that Kit is safe.”
There was a long pause. “Nothing?”
“Of course not. If you’ve killed her I have no reason to follow your orders.”
“Oh. She is not dead.” There was some line noise and a beep. “I’ve sent you a photograph of her. The picture includes the first page of this morning’s New York Times.
“She still has all her fingers. But take note of the man standing next to her. If you call the authorities… we will give her to him.
“She will be killed. Repeat that to me.”
“She will be killed.”
“Keep that in mind. She will be killed, slowly, badly, and you will be to blame.” The phone went dead, and then buzzed.
I clicked it for “Recents” and found a call with the current time, supposedly from “411.” I opened it and found a photograph.
It was Kit, seated, gagged, wearing only frilly blue underwear. Which I had never seen.
A white rope thicker than clothesline was wound around her. Shoulders, chest, waist, legs. Her wrists were tied together in her lap, with what looked like telephone cord. Low coffee table in front of her, with a metal ashtray in the shape of a bird, filled to overflowing with cigarette butts. A corner of a window behind her showed a pine forest.
A tall thin man wearing a black mask hooded over his head stood next to her. In one hand he held a newspaper and in the other, a long-bladed fileting knife.
That was theater, of course. She was at the mercy of anyone, dramatic weapon or no. If not this theatrical knife-wielder, then the fat guy with the camera, or his black driver. The woman with the honey voice, the person who killed Blackstone, the man who’d just talked on the phone. And maybe some to whom I had not yet been introduced.
The background of the photo didn’t reveal much. There were probably a million rooms just like it in motels and vacation cabins: fake log paneling, furniture that was worn blond Ikea or the like, many years old. I couldn’t read the date on the Times, but the headline was current, “West Virginia Coal Miners’ Strike Near Resolution.”
I couldn’t read Kit’s expression, either. Wide-eyed, I supposed with fright, looking away from the camera, down at the table. The bandana pulled tight between her teeth, that must hurt. Her mouth would be dry. The dead-tobacco smell from the cigarette butts, rank and penetrating.