Mad Dogs (14 page)

“No.”

Zane gave him the mastermind of his son's death: “Or Kyle Russo?”

“No. Did he—”

“TV!” yelled Zane. “I saw TV commercials… Jules, do you have caller I.D.?”

He did, a white plastic box corded to the phone on his desk.

“But it only stores the previous 20 incoming calls,” said Jules as he scrolled backwards through the liquid crystal display of people who'd called. “After Leon died… All the sympathy calls… Call-backs for the
shiva
… No numbers from before yesterday. But I remember that man's number was D.C., a 202 area code.”

He leaned back in his chair. Shook his head.

“One day your government tells you your son is accidentally dead and burned up, then strangers show up to say he was murdered before they taped him to a fence.

“Say I believe you,” Jules told us. “Say I trust you. Still, you're…”

“Crazy,” I said for him.

“At least that.” Jules shook his head. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Not tell anybody about us,” said Zane.

“Help,” said Russell.

Hailey lifted a thick paperback book from a shelf. Held it up for Jules to see.

A thick paperback guide to medicines and pills. Jules said: “Take what you need.”

“We need everything,” I said.

“I'm fresh out of miracles.”

“How about money?” His New Yorker face darkened and I said: “Operational funds. Clothes. Rations. Meds. Logistical gear, whatever you've got. We need—”

“Everything,” said Jules. “I heard you the first time.”

He pulled a wad of bills from his pants. “I maxed out my ATM withdrawal today for the
shiva
. There should be about $200 left there. Tomorrow…”

“Tomorrow is tomorrow.”

“Well… Tonight there's the memorial money. Those white envelopes in the basket on the sideboard. I was going to fund a scholarship in honor of him. The kids at my school organized a cash collection in their homerooms, it's in—”

“STOP!”
yelled Dr. Yarrow Clark's voice from beyond the closed study door.

Into our midst charged Eric, the silver-haired woman's wrist tight in his hand.

“Don't hurt her!” yelled Jules as he raced around his desk.

Zane restrained him with a gentle palm on his chest. “He won't.”

“Eric!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

Frustration contorted his face. He ran from the room, us hurrying in his wake.

To the dining room. He gave the silver-haired woman to Zane, who put an arm around her shoulders to reassure her that she was fine, to show Eric that he had her.

Eric held his head with both hands. He scanned the food-ladened table. Whirled to face the shrouded wall above the mantle. Let his eyes fall on the mantle with the hammer, wire and tacks Jules had used to cover the mirror and the vase of red roses.

“What did you tell him?” Hailey asked me.

Eric thrust the hammer in his belt, pulled down the sheet tacked over the mirror.

“What are you doing, Eric?” I yelled.

Russell told me: “Don't bug him, man. He's on a roll.”

Eric grabbed the cylindrical glass vase off the mantle, swung it so red roses and water flew through the room.

“Wild!” said Russell.

He helped Eric dry the inside of the vase's glass cylinder. Eric checked to see if its bottom was thicker at the sides or in the center, whether its inner curve was convex or concave. Then he put the vase in my hands and ran from the room.

Hailey didn't need the nod of my head to tell her to shadow Eric.

Dr. Yarrow Clark said: “He's like a robot gone mad.”

“'Xactly,” said the man with his arm around her shoulders.

We heard rummaging in Jules's study. Feet running our way.

Eric was back, Hailey two steps behind him.

She told us: “He got rubber bands and scissors.”

Eric leaned over the table with its vegetable trays, water soaked rolls, its brisket of beef and a turkey carcass under a gasping red rose. His face lit up and he dashed through the swinging kitchen door.

Hailey started after him—had to jump back as the kitchen door swung towards us and Eric ran back into the dining room holding a box of aluminum foil.

Wrapping the length of the glass vase with aluminum foil and using rubber bands to bind the foil to it took Eric less than a minute. He handed me the foil-sheathed vase.

We all watched him do it.

Like some samurai sword master in movie slow-motion, in our eyes and reflected in the glass rectangle mounted over the mantle, Eric plucked the hammer from his belt, cocked it behind his head and with a soundless
‘Kia!'
scream, smashed the hammer smack into the center of the naked mirror.

That BOOM! jerked a glass cracking snap through the whole apartment. The mantle wall shuddered. Ceiling plaster rained on us and the food table.

Jagged spider web lines lightninged out from the pulverized center of the mirror. What had been a smooth, coherent reflected image of us now trembled as dozens of fragmented planes with borders and angles. Our image was in pieces.

Yarrow Clark, M.D./PhD./Harvard-Harvard-Harvard whispered: “Holy fuck!”

Zane said: “Neighbors had to hear, feel that.”

“Fuck 'em,” said Russell. “Jules pays his rent.”

Eric frowned at the mosaic of mini-mirrors clinging to the wall above the mantle.

Smashed the mirror's starred epicenter with his hammer
again
!

Chunks of mirror flew off the wall. Plaster rained. Glass shattered on the floor.

“OK,” said Russell, “that might have pushed a few neighbors over the line.”

“Eric,” said Zane, “there's no one behind that mirror watching us.”

Eric's eyes measured the sections of mirror still clinging to the wall. He pried off a torso-sized survivor and ran to the living room, all of us on his heels.

Folding chairs in the living room still stood in a circle like settlers' wagons waiting for the Indians to attack. Eric put the broken section of mirror on one chair, peered out the wall of windows to the night and the street six stories below. He eased sideways along that glass pane—hammer in his hand.

“Ahh…”

“Don't worry, Victor!” said Russell. “This is some kind of beautiful.”

And my dumb mistake. I'd split my focus between directing him and controlling the mourning father. I double-weighted my intent instead of centering to face one force at a time, no matter how instantaneously “short” of a time I devoted to each thing. In a Taipei
T'ai Chi
push hands battle, such double weighting would have gotten me slammed against a stone wall. Here, in this West Side Manhattan sixth story apartment, it got me watching Eric walk along a wall of night windows with a hammer.

Eric stopped. Stared out the window. Raised the hammer—

Laid it on the floor by the windows,
just so
. Eric held his hand palm down. Slid his hand along his body to establish a certain measure of height.

“Don't touch anything!” said Hailey. “Remember, he's an engineer.”

“And not the train driver kind,” said Russell.

Eric closed the heavy curtains over the wall of night windows.

“I don't see what we're doing!” said our host Jules.

Eric snapped on a table lamp. He moved one end of the foil wrapped vase to a point on the closed curtains in line with the hammer. He pressed the bottom of the vase against the curtain at the height he'd judged with his hand, circled a felt pen around the vase on curtain—and scissored that drawn hole from the heavy cloth.

“Hey, I need to live here after you're gone!” snapped Jules.

“Don't worry about that.” Yarrow Clark jerked her hand to cover her mouth.

Eric penetrated the curtain hole with the bottom of the foiled vase. Had me hold it. Peered down the open cannon end and angled the vase tube up. He steeled me into a locked solid position with an urgent grip.

“Just tell us what you need!” said Hailey.

Eric grabbed his head like it was going to explode. Glared at me.

“OK!” I said. “Sorry I somehow made you mute! Just… Go! Do it!”

He closed the living room door. Turned out the ceiling lights. Picked up the chunk of mantle mirror. Edged through the circle of chairs to snap off the table lamp.

Darkness swallowed us, darkness pierced only by a shaft of light flowing through the vase poked through a hole in the curtain.

The shaft of light hit a mirror thrust in its telescoped path and bounced up to the white ceiling. That light refracted in reflected glory as a flat plane of illumination.

The mirror tilted as Eric stepped closer and further back, each motion adjusting the swirl of light's focal length bounced to the ceiling until an illuminated patch of ceiling above us took on form and substance, shape and sense.

“Wow,” whispered Hailey.

Ghost movie. The city street below projected onto the ceiling like a diorama from heaven. The scene played live with intense crime lights from the Korean grocer across the street, open then at 9:35 p.m., open with a glow fed by a full moon, by a streetlight, by green-yellow-red winks from a traffic signal. Sound, no sound in that movie or in our room. Above us danced waves of the outer night where a parked car sat across the street from Jules's apartment building, where a person in the driver's seat of that car rested his arm on his lowered window and watched Jules's front door. Sound, no movie sound as specters of two men appeared next to that driver's window, as one of them shaped his hands in what we recognized as
making a cell phone call
.

“That's about us,” I whispered.

What I'd told Eric:
“Stick with Dr. Clark. Don't say anything. Don't answer any questions… keep an eye on her and an eye out the window and let us know
if
.”

Don't say anything. Don't answer questions. Keep an eye out. Let us know.

Finally, orders accomplished, Eric could use his voice.

“Oh-oh,” he said as in the silent movie on the ceiling, the two men outside the car split up and vanished into the darkness. “Oh-oh.”

27

The rooftops of New York under a full moon are a glorious sight even when you're running for your life.

We'd grabbed Jules's cash, all the money from Yarrow's purse, envelopes from the basket on the sideboard table, said
fuck it
, threw open the apartment door and found the hall empty. We took an elevator, used Jules's building key to get on the roof.

“What then?” he'd said as we rushed through his apartment gearing up to bolt. “You so crazy you think you can fly?”

I said: “We're sane enough to know we can die.”

We gave Jules and Yarrow pillows and made them lay on the living room floor.

Maybe the opposition agents in the car were a surveillance team. Maybe
outside
was where a snatch squad planned to net us. Maybe they'd use a ruse like we did to get
inside
, get Jules to open his door. If they opted for blitz door kicking—stun/flash grenades, charging armor plated SWAT troops with machineguns and shotguns and Extreme Force Authorized—then the best place to be was flat on the floor like a hostage who needed rescue or a conspirator who didn't need another bullet.

“How long do we have to stay like this?” said Jules as he lay pressed to Yarrow.

“Past dawn!” said Zane as he tossed Hailey her coat. “But that's just a guess.”

Jules said: “You don't even know if somebody's out there!”

“Somebody is always out there,” I said.

“Car pulls up across the street,” said Eric. “Front seat woman passenger gets out. Walks both sides of block. Gets back in. Sits and waits. Watches.”

“That could mean anything!” argued Yarrow. “They could be anybody!”

“Parked in front of a fire hydrant,” said Eric.

Russell said: “Cops. Catchers. Killers.”

“Or arrogant fools,” said Jules. “You could be wrong.”

Yarrow said: “You're running from invisible enemies.”

“Welcome to the real world,” I told her.

On the roof, we ran like five mice. If we'd been like the pigeons we spooked who cooed and flapped off to safety in the night, we could have made silhouettes against the full moon like Peter Pan, Wendy and the Lost Boys.

“Vic,” said Hailey as we climbed over the firewall between Jules's building and the next residential behemoth: “How long do you think Jules and Yarrow will lay there?”

“Long enough.”

Hailey smiled in the moonlight. “That's nice.”

Zane said: “I hope you're right about Jules stopping her from calling 911 as soon as the door closed behind us.”

We huddled in the shadows of a rooftop storage shed that smelled of tar.

Russell said: “If the team down below us are full service janitors…”

“Then it won't matter if Jules and the Doc are laying down.”

Somewhere in the night streets below, a yellow taxi honked.

“Unintended consequences,” I said. “Proximity casualties.”

“We had to go there,” said Zane. “It was the necessary, the smart move.”

“Yeah. Look where it got everybody.”

Under that full moon we were part of New York's indigo skyline. We saw the lights of the Chrysler building. The Empire State building. But no King Kong. No World Trade Center towers.

“Don't worry them,” said Russell. “
Wet
won't happen. We're who they want.”

“Whoever ‘they' are,” said Zane.

“Doesn't matter,” I argued: “The CIA, our Castle Keepers, cops working blind on CIA strings or even just responding to a 911 call, outside conspiracy agents or inside renegades who've hijacked the legitimate hunt, a combo of all that.”

“Any way it plays out,” said Hailey. “caught is caught, dead is dead.”

Eric hammered open a roof door. We rode an elevator down, strolled out the front door like we belonged. We were one street over from Jules's building, gambled that our hunters hadn't yet scrambled enough troops for a full block coverage.

The first parking garage used an electronic key car gate and was too close to Jules's. Second garage had easy in/out, but felt busy. Zane spotted the attendant in the booth at the third garage: “He's some kind of out of it. Sleeping, on the nod, drunk.”

Russell and Eric slipped around him without his eyes opening. When they roared past him in a blue Dodge SUV twenty minutes later, the attendant's lids never fluttered.

“Got it all,” Russell said as we piled inside. “CD player, no global positioning unit they can turn on to find us, seating for five, dust on the hood so I figure it's not used every day and won't be missed, and if we're lucky, no secret theft-tracking system.”

We parked near our Chelsea hotel, left Hailey behind the wheel with Eric riding shotgun while us three hard guys risked the in-and-out, grabbed our GODS and matrices, went out through a fire door Russell short-circuited so the alarm wouldn't ring, made it back to the SUV without getting killed or caught. Or maybe even seen.

Hailey climbed out and held the SUV door for me: “You drive. Big as this whale is, three men in the back seat still makes a crowd.”

“Rock us out of town, man,” said Russell in the back seat. “Get us gone.”

“No!” I said. “We can't just go.”

“We sure as shit can't stay!” said Zane.

“Think!” I argued. “They tracked us to that apartment. Doesn't matter if they monitored the police radio traffic sending a cruiser to check out what a mourner called in or if we made some other slip or if they just got smart. They'll get Jules and Yarrow to tell them we're headed to D.C. They'll get that info, doesn't matter
how
.”

“Yeah,” said Hailey, “but it matters
when
.”

“When is now,” I said. “We've got to figure the regular route is blown. They know we're going south to D.C. Toll booths, highway bottlenecks, a rolling box trap—they'll be working on setting that up now, and they're ahead of us.”

“We've gotta get out of here,” said Russell.

“But not like we planned,” I steered the SUV into traffic. “Or like they think.”

We drove away under Hot Zone Rules. Flank Man Russell watched the side streets out one rear seat window, Zane took the other. Hailey slid over the back seat to the cargo bay, rode staring through the red glow from our taillights as Rear Guard. Beside me in the front seat, Eric rode Slack, focused on all the cars streaming towards us in the opposite lane in case they'd organized Waterfall Surveillance with our stalkers circling a loop always coming at us and adjusting to the directions we turned by radio. As Wheel Man, I concentrated on keeping us a moving target.

We came into New York high over a bridge.

We gambled, went out low through a tunnel.

Rumbled through that long bright tube, refracted and reflected like the light caught and shot through Eric's improvised telescope. If any hunters set an ambush for us in that tunnel, we'd all end up on the news, and that kind of high incident exposure meant keeping a cover story intact would be impossible. We paid the toll, knew the cameras snapped us going south, just like our hunters would expect.

But thirty seconds after leaving the tunnel, I whipped our SUV onto a curving off-the-route EXIT ramp.

“The Long Island Expressway,” said Zane. “The ‘L-I-E'.”

“Ain't that the truth.” I hid us in the slipstream of a wooshing semi-truck. All we could see through our windshield was his cargo box's back end. With luck, any cameras or Waterfall Watchers would have time to see would be his headlights.

Ten minutes later, Hailey reported no hungry yellow eyes stroking our trail. I eased off the truck and let that teamster hurtle towards midnight without us.

On the road again. The dark lonely highway. The everywhere night. The hum of tires on blacktop. The smells of some stranger's car seats, a kid's juice box, our sweat.

“What's happening to us?” whispered Russell.

Out of my mouth popped: “Everything.”

“No man,” he said. “Seriously. Zane… He finally melts down so far he cools out. Me… I got it. I did it. All those years in the hospital… I feel…”

“Hollow,” said Zane. “Light.”

“Yeah,” said Russell. “You think our bootleg meds are working?”

“Dr. F said any meds are just tools,” I said. “That we do the real work ourselves.”

“Or get it done to us,” said Hailey.

“There is that.”

Signs our minds couldn't see just then flicked past the windshield.

Russell asked: “You think we're still crazy?”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Some things never change.”

“Thought you believed change was the only certain constant in life,” said Hailey.

“How crazy is that,” I said. “If I'm right, I'm on my way to wrong.”

“But where are we going?” said Russell.

Eric answered: “Washington, D.C.”

“Ultimately,” I said.

“Kyle Russo,” said Hailey. “A voice on the phone. Black letters on a white card.”

Russell asked her: “How do you feel? You and Eric?”

She sighed: “Feeling won't matter soon for me.”

“So you're the same,” said Zane. “And Eric… How you were at Jules's… You're still who you've been. But Victor's starting to be funny.”

“I've always been funny!”

“Nah,” said Russell. “You just think you have. You've been too haunted, too much of a worrier, but now… You're cutting loose.”

“Like this?” I flung both hands off the steering wheel.

As we hurtled 60 mph down the night highway.

“Whoa!” yelled Russell.

Zane lunged forward from the back seat.

But my hands beat him back to their grip on the wheel.

“You think that's funny?” I demanded. “Funny
ha-ha
and not funny peculiar?”

In the rear view mirror, Zane frowned. Said: “Eric?”

Even an inferred command must be obeyed. From the passenger's seat beside me, Eric said: “Vic held the steering wheel with his thighs.”

“Reminds me.” Hailey rummaged in her GODS. Snapped on a flashlight. Pages in the thick book Jules gave her rustled and turned. “Yeah, thought so. Russell, you know those white pills?”

“Yeah, I took one.”

“They're birth control pills.”

“WHAT?”

I said: “Now you don't need to worry when somebody says ‘fuck you.'”

“See!” yelled Zane. “Vic
is
getting funnier!”

“And I'm some kind of fucked!”

“Well…”
I replied to Russell.

“If you're fucked,” said Zane, “think about the teenage girl back at the school near that Starbucks who dumped her contraceptives on us for a few bucks.”

“Amateur crazies.” I sighed.

“What about us?” said Russell. “We've been pros, but now…”

“We still got our standing,” said Zane. “Dr. F claimed that no matter what trauma triggers shot us to crazy, we wouldn't have gone down so deep if we hadn't been pre-disposed to by broken genes or kid stuff.”

“So you need to already be insane to go crazy?” I said. “Seems too absurd.”

Our tires hummed over the road as the night flew past us.

Russell handed one of his CDs to Eric. Our engineer fed it into our stolen car. A pause, then Bruce Springsteen sang to us with his lone voice and acoustic guitar off his
Nebraska
album, pleaded to fate for the unseen state troopers not to stop him, to let him get away.

We're all fugitives
.

The road hummed our stolen car's tires.

Eric rode in the glow of our dashboard lights.

“Hey,” I told him. “Back there in the city. At Jules's. You were terrific.”

His blush radiated all the way to my driver's seat.

“Coming up with that telescope…”

“Leonardo da Vinci,” he said. “
Camera obscura
.”

“What?”

“Been done before. Sort of. Him.”

“Oh, well, that makes all the difference in the world, and pardon me for thinking that coming up with something brilliant like that under the gun was special!” I felt his grin. “Here I am driving a stolen car carrying a crew of crazies, hellhounds on our trail, and sitting right beside me is Leonardo da Vinci.”

Hailey reached up from the back seat and patted Eric's shoulder.