Dead Man (6 page)

Not just the physical pain, though that was bad enough.

two bulky men charged in with sawed-off shotguns

Fragments of nightmare.

the shotgun belched yellow flame to smash Marie back and up

Razor blade. A couple of swipes against the wrists, and…

Albie’s legs disappeared as the door frame splintered

But—these were not nightmares. These were memories sent to him by God. The half-formed idea of doing something about their
deaths started small, grew with the nightmares.

To do what you ought to do, you had to survive. So he started getting up before dawn each morning to walk along the road out
into the desert. Half a mile, but and back. A mile. After a while, that led to trotting. Two miles, four. Jogging was the
next logical move, skin brown, legs and arms pumping, sweat rolling, three, five, eight, twelve miles a day.

Six months in, he found himself other disciplines. Health club. Boxing gym. Karate dojo.

Weight, 160.

Carrying a book to strengthen his hands—the heaviest he had was a leather-bound fire-singed copy of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Clutched in his hand as he was dragged from the fire.

I wasn’t ready… Oh Christ
…
I wasn’t ready
…

So, strengthening not just his hands, but also his resolve. Until on the last morning of that first Vegas year, three years
after it had happened, he was physically ready. Maybe emotionally he was still screwed up, maybe he couldn’t remember any
of it without black swirling rage, but physically ready to…

To what? To find the people who had done it, of course. After that was still hazy, but…

Hey—find them how? How do you find two anonymous hitmen hired to kill you three years ago…
hired!

Somebody had hired them! So simple, yet in three years he hadn’t thought of it. Easier to find him than the hitters, because
he
wasn’t
anonymous. Had to have a connection with Grimes…

Also, had to be tied into organized crime. The Mob. Mr. Average Joe, no matter how pissed off, didn’t know anyone could blow
up a boat and make it look like an accident even to the experts. Didn’t know shotgunners for hire who…

Then he realized why he had come to Vegas. The mob still ran it, no matter how many layers of cotton candy you laid over them.
The old men who played golf, the young men who protected them with watchful, venal eyes. Just because he was there recuperating,
for the past year Dain had been studying them. He’d learned the players, the rules, without knowing it. Had watched the watchers
without
being watched himself, because he hadn’t known he was watching.

So maybe he was ready to start looking instead of watching.

Weight, 180.

His assets: he didn’t care if he lived or died; he didn’t care about legalities at this point in the game; he was a genius
with a computer; he was physically ready. Maybe not emotionally, but at least he would be
doing
something about what had been done to him. Final asset, they didn’t know who the hell he was.

Even as Eddie Dain, he’d just been a fly to be swatted, so with a new name, a Vegas name… Travis. Travis… Holt. That was
good. No elaborate disguise needed, but why be careless? Nonprescription glasses, colored contacts, rinse-away hair coloring,
a neat goatee and mustache.

To go with the new name, a rock-solid new life. His laptop massaged Travis Holt into other people’s records. Gave him dead
parents, schooling, a rather no-account brother named Jimmy, put him into the Las Vegas National Guard—this last a precaution
just in case he had to disappear without making waves.

As Travis Holt he was just a guy looking for a casino that needed a bookkeeper for its legit books. Big guy, thirty, maybe
thirty-two, close to 200 pounds, moved quick, didn’t drink, smoke, gamble, chase broads. Or guys. When he wasn’t at work he
was out jogging or at a gym somewhere. Physical fitness freak. And could you believe, a computer nerd. Genuine, complete nerd.
The connected P.I. who checked him out joked that he probably whacked off at night watching his reflection in his computer
screen.

It took Travis Holt only six months to make himself indispensable to the casino that hired him. Creative ideas about bookkeeping.
Always available for overtime. Always willing to fill in for vacations. And a real whiz with the numbers. Pretty soon they
had to give him access to the sensitive files.

Dangerous to give him access? Shit, no, man. Checked
him out back to the cradle. Family gone except for one brother in Vero Beach, Florida, fucking commercial fisherman when he
works, which isn’t often. By the records a drinker, can’t hold a job…

Anyway, Chrissake, Holt is showing us things about figures make the accountants shoot their load. Legit ways to move money
around, lose it, find it, turn it into goods and services—by the time it comes back in from the Bahamas it’s as clean as Tide
Concentrate. And he knows he ever tries to get into files he isn’t authorized for, he leaves tracks right back to his terminal
and we pound him headfirst into the desert and light his feet.

Knows better than to fuck with us.

Of course he knew better, knew all about the buried codes that gave warnings when access was effected. But he didn’t care.
Once he was inside, his obsession deepened. Sometimes, alone at night in his office, trying to find the man who had ordered
his family murdered, he thought he might be cracking up. And still didn’t care. The search gave him focus, eased his nightmares.

As for that access the wise guys thought impossible, at Cal-Tech he had learned all about the back doors always left in computer
systems. Had designed viruses that would take security checks out and put them back when he was done. At Cal-Tech he had built
his own computer, designed his own computer language, created his own software, broken into half the federal security mainframes
in D.C. just for the hell of it.

So latenights, weekends, overtime, his computer made love to the mob’s, stuck its tongue down their system’s throat, lapped
up their data. The books behind the books, the offshore skim accounts, the secret sauna meetings to move millions… The feds
would have killed to know what he knew, but he cared nothing about that. Let the feds make their own cases. All he sought
was to name the nightmares that rode through his sleep.

the door crashed back against the wall, two bulky men charged in with sawed-off shotguns in their hands, heavy boots on bare
planks
…

Long after midnight, almost four years after it had happened,
he found a name, buried deep in the belly of the beast, that meshed with all the givens of that June night.

Mario Pucci. Los Angeles.

Pucci’s specialty was bringing in drugs from Mexico on other people’s private powerboats. Like Ron Grimes’s. In fact, he and
Ron Grimes had been yacht club cronies, had played poker together. What more natural, Grimes bringing in drugs for him? But
maybe a scare from the Coast Guard had made him panic, want out… or maybe he’d gotten greedy…

A phone call from Pucci, a specialist gets on a plane, Grimes’s yacht blows up with Grimes on it. Accident. End of story.
But unknown to Pucci, a private eye named Eddie Dain had been hired by Grimes’s business partner fearful Grimes’s black money
was coming from their company accounts. The private eye confirmed that it wasn’t—and then kept going on his own with his computer,
like a kid with a new toy, thought it was all just a big fucking game, wouldn’t quit poking around…

Dain saw himself reflected in the computer screen, panting, sweating as with fever. He’d read the joke in the P.I.’s report
on Travis Holt, about him watching his reflection in the screen as he jerked off… Was that what he was doing here? Mentally
masturbating into this goddamned machine?

He sure wasn’t acting like a normal human.

Goddammit, he
wasn’t
a normal human being. He was a man who had been blown to pieces and fit back together again like a jigsaw puzzle. A man whose
wife and child had been blown to pieces with him, then burned up without the chance to be fitted back together. Anything he
did was all right, was justified…

He eagerly punched more keys. But when the machine spoke again the fire went out of his eyes, his jaw went slack, he sank
back in his chair shrunken in size and density.

Mario Pucci had died of a heart attack on top of his mistress in a fancy Beverly Hills hotel two years ago. Had left no records
in anyone’s computer of who he might have called to swat that bothersome fly at Point Reyes.

Dain settled slowly back in his chair. It was over. All finished. It all died with Pucci. He had nowhere else to look.
Nothing else to do. No more reason to go on living. By habit, he backtracked out of the maze, reset the bypassed traps, logged
out of the legitimate files, closed down his computer just as if he were coming back. But he knew he was all finished.

Out in the desert the sun was just up. Empty, brilliant, still. Saguaro cacti, Joshua trees, rocks, sand. Cry of a distant
hawk, dry moan of the wind. A good day to die. He left his car, ran at a steady pace out into the desert. He would run until
he died, like the runner bringing news of the victory at Marathon. His was a defeat, but his death would be as good, as clean,
in the desert. A Hemingway death: grace under pressure.

Finally, miles from the road, where tumbled rocks rose to a ridge shaded by a big Joshua, he indeed fell. Collapsed facedown
on the sand. A minute, ten, twenty. But he didn’t die, clean, in the desert. He didn’t die at all. He just felt hot, sticky,
tired, irritable. He rolled onto his back. Lay there, arms wide, chest heaving, staring up into the clear blue sky. High above,
wings motionless, dwarfed by distance, a turkey buzzard rode the thermals, binocular eyes seeking dead meat.

What had he done? Trained too well? Forged a body and a will that knew no despair? But Mario Pucci, like the vulture’s meal,
was dead meat. Along with Pucci, Dain’s planned revenge was also dead meat. Tears ran down the sides of his face to the sand
at the thought of it.

Finally he sat up, forgotten arms still outstretched. Scrambled to his feet. Began dancing to some silent inner music. Faster
and faster, like someone stoned, twisting, rhythmic, sensual. Improvising, sweat flying.

If he couldn’t run himself to death, he would dance himself to death.

He whirled in a circle, fell, leaped up, face transfigured, carried outside himself. Any moment now he would fall down dead
of heatstroke. He ran right up a nearly perpendicular rock face and did a perfect backflip, a graceful parabola to land backward
in the sand and do a back roll to shoot straight up into the air like an arrow, come down crouched—and freeze.

Dry deadly rattle. Lying on an exposed rock in the new sun, a massive rattler five feet long, red-brown with pale diamond
markings. Still just slightly sluggish, but already drawing into its coiled striking position, tail vibrating visibly, vertical
pupil slits in pale yellow lidless eyes almost closed against the direct sunlight. Red diamond rattler. Enough venom in its
fangs, desert old-timers said, to fell a bull.

He stared at it, motionless. Even better. Totally sure. Let the snake kill him.

“All right, goddam you, do it!” he cried.

The rattler hissed but was motionless.

He began to move again, once more slowly, oh so slowly, slowly around the rattler, challenging it. Any moment now…

The snake hissed and rattled warningly, but did not strike.

Dain sprang in and out like a boxer dancing in and out to jab an opponent in the ring. That was it, a game. Once he had been
a great, a tremendous games player. At chess. With his computer. With Marie’s and Albie’s lives. Now the game was to piss
off the snake, so the game would have the ending he sought.

Belatedly, the snake struck. But because the man was already moving away it missed, went out full length off the rock to thump
down on the sand. Dain yelled again, eyes wild.

“Yes! Yes! Goddam you, do it!”

The snake, aroused, was striking repeatedly, as quickly as it could coil and release. But Dain was beyond rationality, into
the game obsessively. Once the snake’s fangs struck the sole of his shoe as he whirled with one leg extended. He was shouting
with… what? Madness, perhaps.

He tried a pirouette, his foot slipped in the soft sand, he fell just as it struck again, fanging the air a foot above his
descending head. It landed across him, he bucked and rolled, throwing off the bewildered rattler even as it tried to coil
and strike again in midair.

Venom was dripping off its fangs, its timing was gone. Its strikes were slower. It was running down like a cobra fighting
a mongoose. Which is what the mongoose waits for.

Here, now, this man was the mongoose, pure energy, the years of training in every discipline he could find coming together
and paying off. He whirled about the rattler, reached in a lightning hand to give its smooth sleek hard body a tweak, leaping
back and away in the same motion, too quick, the snake too exhausted, the inevitable coil and strike didn’t come within four
inches of him,
Dain was winning the game.

The snake, overheated, finally lay stretched out on the hot sand. If it had been a pit bull it would have been lying on its
belly and panting. The man stopped, hands on knees, head down, panting himself in huge gulping breaths. He had won!

Won?
No!
He had lost! He was supposed to die…

Then he realized that his canteen full of water was on his belt. If he had really planned to die in the desert, why had he
strapped on the canteen? He took it off his belt, opened it. Poured sweet cool water over the snake, then over his own head,
down his throat. After long moments, the rattler slid away between a creosote bush and its sunning rock and was gone.

Dain saluted it. He started walking back toward the distant car shimmering in the desert heat. Began to trot. To run. The
dance with the snake had sweated out his madness. No longer Saul struck blind on the road to Damascus. The scales had fallen
from his eyes and along with them, his blindness.