Dead Man's Hand (7 page)

In my head, I was already out the gate and
heading for my car, the cold kiss-off I’d give Pixel already
forming itself in my thoughts. But before I could get my feet in
sync with my mind, I felt the hard steel of a gun barrel pushed up
against the back of my skull, just to the right of my left ear.

“
See anything you like?”
came the quiet voice, one I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Neat Pete,
but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t have talked my way out of this
even if it had been Pete. A few seconds later, I’d been frisked and
was being pushed forward along the side of the van, toward the
doorway into the drug lab and whatever else lay beyond.

Six

I’d never been anywhere near a roller lab,
but I knew I was in one now. Across the room from me was a large
open tank, the size of a modest aboveground swimming pool in the
suburbs. Pipes ran in and out of it, leading to larger tanks and
smaller ones, passing in and out of this main room and through the
walls, no doubt to other vats and processors, eventually ovens and
weighing and bagging rooms. The smell was only a bit stronger
inside, and I would no longer have said brown rice and bananas—not
quite. Still that odd combination was the closest I’d have been
able to get.

While the drug manufacturing equipment all
around me did draw my interest, it was only to the degree that it
made me wonder just what I’d gotten myself into and if there was
any way I could use what I knew about rolling or about Pete or
Pixel or the Grommets or even Drea and zombies to get myself out of
this, to get the damned gun away from my head. The attempt at
strategizing was fleeting though, giving way to disbelief as I saw
how many bodies were scattered across the floor.

Five wore tan coveralls; three of these were
near the van’s back end, one slumped against the far right wall,
and the last was on the catwalk that ran around the rim of the
largest vat in the room, its head and one arm hanging over the
edge. Two other dead men wore street clothes. One lay with his face
away from me, slumped on the ramp leading up to the catwalk around
the vat. The other was practically at my feet. Blood pooled on the
floor around him, having spilled from the dead man’s throat, half
of which was gone, the flesh around the wound ragged and torn. The
dead man also had a single bullet hole in his forehead—his
compatriots’ way of thwarting the virus transmitted in the bite
that had killed him.

Aside from the hum of machinery, the place
was silent—no moans, no cries of alarm or pain. Other than my
captor, I got no sense that any of Grommet’s boys were in the
place, not even Neat Pete. I knew his couldn’t be the body on the
ramp; its clothes looked too cheap.

After a few seconds, the man with the gun to
my head pushed me toward the ramp where the body lay. Soon, I could
discern that the dead man had snow-white hair and dark age spots on
the one arm that pointed up the ramp—looking like it was somehow
trying to get away from whatever had happened to the body it was
attached to. The dead man’s age and shabby clothes told me this had
been Drea’s driver. By the time we were close enough for me to get
a good look at the body, I could see that a huge flap of flesh hung
down the side of his face and that there was a bullet hole in his
head similar to the first corpse I’d seen.

At first, I’d assumed that the bodies in
coveralls had been lab workers caught in the crossfire, but now I
saw more closely the body on the catwalk ahead of me. It was one of
Drea’s zombies. More specifically, it was Lester Rincon. While the
body’s left arm was hidden from view, hanging with its head over
the edge of the vat, the right arm lay at its side, the hand
cleanly sliced off with the white bone poking through the flesh. It
was impossible to look at that neat stump and not think of the hand
in Pixel’s run-down refrigerator.

There was no way to know exactly what had
happened here, but my guess was that the zombies had somehow gotten
loose. The men in street clothes were Grommet’s boys—which Grommet
I couldn’t say for sure, but I had a hunch. They’d been attacked.
And when the dust had settled, the score was five former zombies,
two dead gangsters, and one dead old man. The living had been
bitten and put down, the undead dispatched with shots to the head.
Doing the math left one zombie unaccounted for, sort of a word
problem from hell, and I had to hope that the man who’d captured me
had already dispatched the missing creature somewhere out of
sight.

And I still saw no sign of Pete. There was a
chance he’d taken part in the melee, but it seemed more likely that
my friend with the gun had done most or all of the work. Pete’s
forte was blades, not bullets, and I guessed that he was hiding
somewhere in a back room or closet, waiting for the all clear.

I felt the gun barrel pushed harder against
my skull, a silent command that I should keep moving. He wanted me
to go up the ramp and toward Rincon’s body. I’d had about enough of
complying and was starting to think of how best to talk my way out
of this. There was a chance the gunslinger would respond well to a
bribe, but I didn’t have much I could promise him, save free legal
council should his boss ever get him into trouble more serious than
what he’d just gone through tonight. If this guy really had been
massacring zombies and then putting down his fellows for not being
quick enough on the draw, he had regained his composure pretty damn
quickly. A cool guy, maybe too cool.

When I got to the top of the ramp, I could
see the rest of Rincon’s body. I don’t know what was in the vat, or
what the process was for cooking coaster, but I could see now that
it was nasty stuff. The body couldn’t have been in the vat long,
but the flesh was already melting away from the bone, stringy bits
of muscle, skin and hairy scalp separating from the skull and
bobbing in the fluid the head was soaking in. As for any plan
involving salvaging the left hand—either to get Pixel a matched set
or to let one of the Grommets enact the same plan Pixel had in
mind—it was in equally bad shape. The hand and wrist floated in the
pool, already reduced mostly to bone.

“
Looks like you guys had
quite a party,” I said.

“
Shut up.”

“
Edward!” The voice came
from behind us, and we both turned away from the vat.

The Grommet brothers came shuffling across
the floor, with another gun-toting thug behind them. I’d seen them
before, but only from a distance. Now I wished it had stayed that
way. The Grommets were repulsive, even aside from the fact that
they were joined together at their heads. They were corpulent and
short, bald and sweaty. Their skin was a sickly ashen color. The
brother who faced me, and I assumed he was the one who had spoken,
had a large mole about the size of a nickel above his right eye and
age spots all over his scalp. It appeared that the brother with his
back to me had his hands bound, and the thug’s gun was trained
steadily on him.

It took me only a couple of seconds to add
up the angles. They didn’t quite make a whole circle, but I had
most of it figured out. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to get
out of this without being shot, but my chances were suddenly
better.

“
Yancy Grommet,” I
said.

He narrowed his eyes at me in a way that
told me I’d guessed correctly. He didn’t deign to reply, though. At
this point, I was nothing more than an unimportant detail in an
already complicated situation.

“
What are you doing,
Edward?” he asked, his voice bubbling up through his jowly
throat.

“
This guy was nosing
around,” Edward said with another nudge of the barrel to the back
of my head. “Figured we didn’t need any live witnesses.”

Grommet nodded, making his brother’s head
nod along. “Were you going to bother finding out who he is
first?”

Edward had a moment’s embarrassed
hesitation, then started feeling for my wallet. Now would have been
a good time to duck and roll and hope he had bad aim, but his boss
put a stop to things before they could get going.

“
Edward!” he barked. “Why
don’t we just ask him, for God’s sake?”

The fumbling at my backside stopped
immediately, and I heard Grommet mutter, “Idiot.”

Edward likely heard it, too, as he gave me a
sharper nudge.

“
Ace Stubble,” I
said.

Grommet narrowed his eyes at me. “Lawyer,”
he said.

“
Guilty,” I
answered.

That almost got a grin.

I figured the best thing I could do was to
play my hand and play it strong, no bluffs, no fakes, not even a
hint that I wanted to get up from the table and walk away. Showing
my cards would either prompt him to let Edward finish me off—which
would surely happen anyway if I just kept my mouth shut—or cause
him to see me as something of an asset, someone he could use. I
didn’t like putting myself in that category, but it was better than
ending up in the vat, blending my molecules with Lester
Rincon’s.

“
How long has Neat Pete
been taking pay from both you and your brother?” I
asked.

A raised eyebrow, nothing
more.
So far, so good
, I thought and threw down another card.

“
I don’t expect you planned
on moving on your brother just yet, though, did you? Pete was
supposed to lay low, gather information. That right?”

Silence still.

Finding Yancy here and in charge amidst the
carnage, his brother a captive and Pete off somewhere cowering, had
told me a lot about Pete. He was the lynch pin, the key part in
this whole mess that made it make sense. Even though I was figuring
it all out even as the words spilled out of my mouth, I laid it all
out for Yancy as though I’d known about it all along, not unlike a
courtroom speech after an unexpected discovery. Never let the judge
or jury know you’ve been in the dark, ever. They’ve got to think
you sleep with one eye open, and that’s how I played it for
Yancy.

“
And then your brother
ordered Pete to kill Rincon. And Pete followed through, thinking he
was also following your orders to lay low until you were ready to
strike at Clancy. Only Rincon was your keystone, wasn’t he? Without
him hacking into Clancy’s operation, you weren’t going to be able
to pull off your little coup. So you figured you’d cut your losses
and move on your brother now, and maybe get a version of Rincon
back while you could.” I paused for a few seconds. “That about sum
it up?”

“
You strike me as a man who
likes a good puzzle,” Grommet finally said. “Not surprisingly,
though, you’ve left one piece out.”

“
And that would
be?”

“
You.”

Of course. He wanted to know how I knew so
much, and I really didn’t want him knowing, didn’t want to have to
walk him back through it all from Drea to Bascom to Pixel to Pete.
That would be laying down too many cards, mostly other people’s. So
I just fired away with a lie, following through with the same
self-assuredness I’d used in telling him the truth.

“
I’ve got a client,” I
said. “Got into some trouble with information systems. I picked up
a rumor that Rincon’s corpse might be had for a price. A little
creative re-animation and I could maybe get what was left of his
brain to hack into a system or two, fix my client’s situation.” I
shrugged, making it seem like this was the kind of thing I ran into
every day. “Then, when the natural process caught up to the corpse,
I’d just let the evidence rot away and be done. Expensive and
risky, but better than dealing with a living hacker who could be
subpoenaed.”

Grommet failed to look skeptical or
convinced, just kept watching me, sweat beading on his forehead. I
decided that even his eyes looked fat. “And you somehow thought
Lester’s body would be here,” he finally said.

“
I played a hunch. A little
late, apparently.” Then I glanced at the one-handed corpse with its
head in the vat. “Looks like finding him hasn’t done me much
good.”

I could see Grommet follow my eyes, and his
own narrowed just a touch as he processed what I said.

“
I see you lost out, too,
though. Now Rincon’s no good to either of us.”

“
Yes,” Grommet said. “A
shame. I want to know about your hunch. I need to see if I’ve got a
hole that needs plugging.” His eyes shifted to Edward, and I
supposed he would have turned to look at the man guarding Clancy if
doing so wouldn’t have involved turning his non-compliant brother’s
body all the way around.

This was bad, mainly because I could think
of no way past this one that didn’t involve giving up someone’s
name. The longer I remained silent, the more impatient and
distrustful of me he’d become. The next words out of his mouth were
likely to be the order to kill me, and I tensed to spring, not
knowing what good it would do me but determined not to just stand
here and take one in the back of the head.

But before Grommet could pull the lever on
me, there came a noise from the shadows behind them—a growling,
snorting sound that I knew couldn’t be good. Yancy Grommet turned
his head and forced his brother to turn with him. I couldn’t help
following his gaze even as I tried running scenarios that would end
with my head spending at least one more night on my pillow.

From out of the dark came one more of
Yancy’s boys, but he wasn’t alone. His expression somewhere between
scared and terrified, he held a four-foot pole with both his hands,
at the end of which was a metal collar fastened around the neck of
the sixth zombie. Like its former fellows, this one wore the tan
jumpsuit. It was tall, making Yancy’s muscle have to crouch a bit
as he walked with the pole going upward to the zombie’s neck. The
undead man had been past middle age before coming into his present
state, but he’d managed to keep a healthy head of graying hair and
might have been handsome. Now, though, his face was contorted with
rage. Slobber dribbled from his lips, and his eyes burned with
need—for flesh, I guessed, or maybe it was just the desire to rip
into the living to exact revenge over the indignity of being
rendered undead.