22
We spent another restless night in sterile airports and uncomfortable airplane seats as we raced across the country on my dwindling funds, landing hungry and exhausted. I entered the men’s restroom shortly after landing and checked my wound. It was still tender, but the skin at least had healed over. I threw the bandages away in the trashcan.
We rented the cheapest car they had, a tiny blue econobox, and minutes later were headed out into the pre- dawn gloom towards Boulder.
Anne slept in the passenger seat for the entire hour-long drive, not even waking when I stopped for coffee and a map. She looked lovely and peaceful and heartbreakingly vulnerable. I thought a long time about what Henry had said.
The horizon was just beginning to lighten when I finally located the right office park.
The entrance to Coyote Realty was an unremarkable door in a willfully bland stone cube, surrounded by carefully tended generic landscaping. The parking lot was deserted, so I pulled around back to avoid being seen from the road. Perfect silence descended when I turned off the car.
I shook Anne gently on the shoulder. “Hey, wake up.”
“Mmf. Sleeping. You go in, I’ll wait here.”
“I need you to come with me.”
She peeled her eyes open and glared balefully at me. “Why? It’s completely deserted. Just go in and snoop around, you don’t need me for that.”
“Well, what if the drop-off location is on a computer?”
“So?”
“So I don’t know jack about computers. I’ve been living on a farm with one TV and a rotary dial phone for the last twenty years.”
“What, not even one of those senior citizen classes on e-mail?”
“Being sleepy isn’t making you any funnier.”
“Fine.” She groaned and got out of the car, looking like she felt my age. I tried not to notice the way her clothes slid and stretched across her body as she yawned and reached for the sky.
I turned away and grabbed my combat baton from the trunk and then trotted over to the building. I would have liked to have armed Anne as well, but unfortunately all these trips on airplanes was making it difficult to keep both guns and ammo available on short notice.
Coyote Realty’s rear entrance was easy to find, as each of the gray-painted steel doors behind the building was stenciled with the appropriate suite number. As I expected, it was locked.
Anne thumped a fist against the door. “Steel doors. Now what?”
I rapped the door a few times with my knuckles. “Luckily for us, steel doors aren’t solid steel. They’re actually two steel sheets separated by a few ribs, or even a foam core.”
“Yeah, that’s really lucky. I was just thinking, if only this giant steel door was only a couple of sheets thick.”
“There’s still some coffee in the car, if it’ll make you less cranky.” She made an unladylike gesture. “I said lucky because, if it were solid steel, I couldn’t do this.”
I leveled my baton and aimed it at the door, about a foot to the left of the deadbolt. Then I drew it back, sucked in a big breath, and slammed it forward with enough force to flip over a pickup truck.
The end of the baton went through the door like tissue paper. The impact sounded like somebody hitting a dumpster with a sledgehammer, but that didn’t bother me. In the middle of a commercial district at dawn, there probably weren’t many folks around to hear it.
Gripping the baton with both hands, I began to work it back and forth, and then when I had a little room, I started rowing it in a circular motion until I had a hole big enough to stick my arm through. Which I did. I then unlocked the deadbolt from the inside. I opened the door and stepped in, flipping the light switch on as I did so.
We were standing in a small break room. The floor was cheap linoleum, the single table was topped with plastic, and the place smelled like stale coffee. There was a refrigerator in one corner next to a chipped counter with a tiny stainless steel sink in it.
I looked into a couple of cabinets, finding only stained coffee cups and plastic cutlery. “I guess crime doesn’t pay as well as the movies would have you believe.”
“Or we just broke into an actual office.”
“No, this is the right place.”
“Because criminals don’t lie when you’re about to throw them off of a building?”
I fought down a surge of irritation. “I said I was sorry.”
“No, you said that it was necessary. You never once said you regretted murdering two people. I saw the mess outside when we left the hospital. I suppose I should be grateful that I didn’t look into the stairwell.”
I peered down the dim hallway outside the break room. It was an empty stretch of thin gray carpet lined with doors on each side. “Fine. Now I’m saying I’m sorry.”
I stepped out into the hallway and slowly opened the door to my right. The office was tiny, filled nearly wall to wall with a cheap desk and one two-drawer metal filing cabinet. A square beige monitor sat on the corner of the desk with a grimy keyboard the same color in front of it.
A picture in a plastic frame sat alone on the stark white walls, an eagle snatching a fish out of a stream. All the colors were oversaturated and there was some motivational text about teamwork underneath. I’m guessing the fish wasn’t a valued member of Team Eagle.
Anne glanced inside past my shoulder, then turned to face me. “Henry was right, you know.”
“About?”
“Yesterday at the hospital. You were high from the fight, like you were about to burst out laughing at any second. There was blood running out of your stomach and two people were dead, and you were cracking jokes like it was a party.”
“Christ, how many times do you want me to apologize for that?” She narrowed her eyes at my tone and crossed her arms.
I lowered my voice and tried to regain my composure. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to defend it, but at least let me try to explain it.” It took me a few moments to find the words. Talking about this with someone else made me feel vulnerable, but I realized that it was important to me for her to understand.
“People think that they make decisions with some kind of mental arithmetic, where they weigh their options and make the right choice, but they don’t. Most of the time, people decide with their gut. They only use their brains to justify what their gut has already decided.
“You want a particular car, so you start talking about how it’ll save you money on gas if it gets good mileage, or you talk about needing the space if it doesn’t. You like a politician, so you downplay his ugly side and focus on the good stuff, or how bad the other guy is. Most people don’t even realize that they’re doing it.
“Whatever happened to me is at the gut level. I don’t control that, and it makes it hard to tell if I’ve actually decided to do something, or if I’m just justifying it afterwards. I believe that killing those men at the hospital was necessary to save Henry’s and Leon’s lives. I’m just not sure if I became certain after I did it, or if there had been another way that I never looked for.”
Anne pushed her hair back from her face and sighed, obviously frustrated. “It’s not so much the killing. I understand that. For what it’s worth, if I had been armed and any of those men had come into the hospital room, I’d have dropped them right there in the doorway. That’s not the part that has everyone worried.”
And there it was. “I know. You’re worried that I’m looking for chances to kill people that will seem justified after the fact, so that nobody knows I’m doing it on purpose. For all you know, those guys had surrendered, or were bluffing about killing everyone. You don’t even know if they were really armed.”
She didn’t say anything. She just gave me a half-shrug and looked into my eyes.
“There’s this constant pressure inside of me to lash out, and anything to do with this whole Piotr situation makes it worse. It started after I was changed, back in Poland, but it seemed like it had gotten better for a long time. I felt like living on the farm all those years had let me get a handle on it. But now … It’s never been this bad before. And every time I give in, there’s this exultant feeling that comes with it. Like a reward. But even so, I swear
