The Driver’s arms wind-milled as he thrashed backward to crash spread-eagle on the floor, hitting hard enough I felt the impact through the soles of my feet. Chief Jansen’s breath came in harsh gargling coughs as he lay there with the blond wig dangling off his head, drops of blood spewing from his mouth with each gasp. His left hand pawed at the caved-in dents on his upper chest; his right arm was draped across his waist, the broken wrist bent out of true.
I hovered over Jansen for a few seconds with the hammer, ready to smack him again if he had any more fight in him. But the Chief was through. He was done.
Next to where he lay was a table filled with enough prescription bottles to medicate a zoo. I recognized the names on some of them from prison: Zidovudine and Combivir, Immunitin and Intelence, Agenerase and Fuzeon; a hard-core end run AIDS medication cocktail. I finally understood the Driver’s reckless desperation, why Jansen had been spiraling downward into final rampage.
I turned and limped to Little Moe, then peeled the tape from across his mouth. “How you doing, little man?” I asked.
“Okay,” he whispered, watching Jansen gurgle on the floor.
I shifted over to block Little Moe’s view of the Driver’s mewling agonies and plucked at the duct tape around his wrists. “I’m here to take you home, Little Moe,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be making too many promises if I were you,” Reese said behind me.
Chapter 57
Officer Reese held the scruff of Sam’s neck with one hand as they stood in the doorway. Reese’s other hand held the muzzle of his.357 Magnum against the base of Sam’s neck.
Sam did not look happy – in point of fact, he had a snarly hard-on light in his eyes that said he was about to do something teen-boy stupid.
Don’t be dumb, I willed him. Just chill, son, and wait for the main chance.
Sam’s gaze met mine, and for a second the mortifying embarrassment of being caught with his pants down in front of me threatened to turn this into a major blood bath. Then the moment passed and he subsided into a sullen, watchful stillness.
Officer Reese frog-marched Sam into the room and looked down at Jansen, seemingly hypnotized by his helplessness. I took that opportunity to hide my hammer hand behind my leg.
Reese stank like he hadn’t bathed in a while. Brown snuff stained the front of his uniform shirt; he’d apparently given up on using a dip-spit can at all. He didn’t smell like alcohol tonight, though – he’d come here sober.
“Hello, soul brother,” Jansen mumbled to me as though Reese wasn’t there, something resembling a smile cavorting across his red-stained mouth. “It is so nice to finally welcome you into my home.”
“If the tip of a knife blade is your standard welcome, I’m assuming you don’t get very many voluntary guests.”
“I gave you chance after chance. I could have reached out and taken you anytime, but I didn’t,” Jansen said in a low, gloating asthmatic voice. “I did everything but give you a map to my front door. I gave you this.”
“You keep telling yourself that. I would have gotten you eventually, even if your buddy Hoffman hadn’t turned on you. Yeah, Rick made it easier, making sure everybody knew you’d set up the hit on Kendra. He’s a surprisingly persistent little thing for such a sketch of a personality, ain’t he?”
Jansen’s eyes rolled wildly at that revelation, but he didn’t respond otherwise to the news of his slave’s betrayal.
“How those ribs feeling, Chief?” Reese asked, a crazed expression on his face as he stared at the squirming Driver. “They stinging a bit? Punctured a lung yet?”
“You are a weak fool, Reese, and a coward,” Jansen said. “Your fiancée was a traitor, she-”
With a hiccupping snarl Reese pulled the pistol barrel away from Sam’s temple to aim it at Jansen. But as Reese’s gun hand extended over Sam’s shoulder, Sam yelled “Haw!” and grabbed Reese’s wrist and ducked under his arm, scuttled and spun until he was behind him holding him in a wristlock arm bar.
Sam cranked on Reese’s wrist with one hand and pressed hard on his elbow with the other, forcing Reese heavily to his knees. Sam continued to crank and press until Reese knelt with his upper body squeezed down against his thighs; Reese’s Stetson spilled off his head and he dropped his Python to the floor. I couldn’t be prouder of Sam than a tiger parent watching their cub’s first successful stalk.
Jansen’s smile hadn’t twitched throughout. “So, is it time for a cutting contest?” he asked me. “For you to hold forth with your impassioned list of grievances?”
“That ain’t on the agenda tonight,” I said. “This isn’t about you. You’re not in control.”
I glanced up at the hall-side wall behind Sam and Reese and saw the book cases lining it. The shelves were crowded with Milton and Blake, Rabelais and Erasmus, Thucydides and Marcus Aurelius and Mina Loy.
He read them in here, when he was taking a break from… I felt dizzy as I looked away from those books; it was a travesty seeing the Canon in this room. Jansen laughed, ever sensitive even to momentary weakness.
He’d lost a lot of weight even in the short time since I’d seen him last at the bank – his skin hung off the bones underlying that once much huskier frame. His makeup was pan-caked on thicker tonight too; he hadn’t been wearing it just for the camera at my deposition. The cosmetics were a by-now futile attempt to conceal the ever-increasing blotches covering the exposed skin of his face and arms here near the end of his disease’s progress.
“He killed Kendra,” Reese reminded me from where he knelt. “What are you waiting for?”
Jansen laughed, but his having to turn his head and spit out a mouthful of blood detracted from any levity he was trying to convey. “Not with my own two hands, but it was my will that made it happen, yes,” he said. “He played you into coming here, Reese. It looks as though he played us both.”
“Who is ‘he’?” I asked.
“Why, Tubbs of course,” Jansen said. He looked at Reese. “You see? I am not afraid to say the name.”
“Oh, you do babble on for a dead man,” Reese moaned. “He’s lying. Mr. Tubbs has nothing to do with any of this. Kill him, what are you waiting for?”
“I gots to agree,” Sam said, still holding Reese tight in the arm-bar. “Why are you debating with this piece of shit? Hurry up and get it over with. Let’s roll.”
I stepped over to Moe, whose eyes were lemur-big in his little face as he stared unblinking at the Driver squirming on the floor. I set down my hammer with the other tools, plucked off the tape binding Moe to the gurney and helped him down before turning to answer: “Who says I’m killing him?”
“You promised,” Jansen said. Sam and Reese both looked at me, with varying degrees of contempt.
I picked up the hammer. “I changed my mind – it’s a free country last time I checked.”
Sam said, “Give me the hammer then.”
I studied, him, considering my best approach. Should I tell Sam that when he killed, nothing would ever be the same for him again? That after going through that exit-only door, he’d never be able to go back to what he was before? No: Sam wouldn’t care about any of that.
“You don’t get it,” I said instead. “I never thought we’d take him alive, never thought we’d get this opportunity. But don’t you see? He’s not our target anymore: now, he’s our weapon.”
Sam shook his head, not understanding.
“This one here, he’s just a dog turd, and for all his grandiose pretensions a little one at that,” I explained. “I don’t want him; I want his masters – I want the swine who profited from him.”
“Stagger Bay wants us to sweep all this under the rug,” I said, trying to convince Sam to see past his hate. “They want us to just clean it up and make him go away. They refuse to look at the mess they made nor to think about it. But I’m not their bus boy, or their servant either. I’m not gonna let them hide from this; I’m dragging him out into the light for all to see.”