Briggs sighed and stared off into the distance, as if envisioning a better future for everyone, where people danced in meadows and ate fruit and didn’t worry about the beasties roaring in the night or inside their own heads. “Surrender is the first step to victory.”
Kleingarten was going to have to conduct a little more research on this guy. He doubted if CRO knew what they’d turned loose.
The game had changed a lot in the fifteen years since Kleingarten had taken the field. In the old days, power was power. You got hit, you hit back harder.
In this crazy-assed twenty-first century, though, knowledge was power, and if Kleingarten learned more about what was going on than anyone else involved, he might make this his retirement project. He hadn’t really enjoyed cutting up that whore in Cincinnati. The thrill was gone, and when the focus faded, a fatal mistake was sure to follow.
Yes, it was time to get out. A few more paydays and then maybe a rice plantation in Thailand, or a little cottage on the beach in Puerto Rico, or whatever the hell they did in Madagascar.
He followed Briggs back to the ape-cage office, and Curious George told him he’d wasted half an hour in the lab. Briggs slid open a desk drawer, and Kleingarten saw a recent color photograph of Wendy Leng.
So, you’re hung up on her? Good. It’s about time you showed me something I could use.
Briggs touched the photo tenderly for a moment, then nudged it aside and withdrew some documents and maps.
Smart egghead. If you sent out e-mails or phone calls, anybody could be listening.
CRO wouldn’t get its hands dirty but wouldn’t have any problem keeping an eye and ear on the doc from the safety of a computer somewhere.
That was one of the tricks of the Information Age. You didn’t always have to outsmart people. Sometimes you could out-dumb them.
“Roland Doyle will be the most difficult,” Briggs said. “He’s always been my problem child.”
“Is that why we did that ‘David Underwood’ thing with the fake IDs? To help him remember?”
“Roland has serious identity issues. He loves himself as a drunk, and when you take that away, he doesn’t know how to deal with himself. He’s a man of unreliable character. But one thing you can always count on with Roland-anytime there’s trouble, he comes crawling back to the ex.”
“The Chinese woman, right?” Kleingarten said it just to see the reaction in the doc’s eyes. It was a mixture of anger, lust, and jealousy.
He’d seen idiots fall in love with hookers and heroin addicts and AIDS sluts, and he never failed to be amazed at the shit guys let their dicks do to them.
“She was actually born in Tibet, and we could engage in a political discussion about that, but we both have work to do.”
“Okay. I bring the four people and then I get the bonus? All done?”
Briggs frowned. “Yes, but I’m afraid we’ll lose one.”
“Lose one?”
“Anita Molkesky will finally succeed in the one thing she was put on Earth for, which is to destroy herself. Her final cry for attention. But she’ll need the others to help her with her mission. Bring her first.”
“What do I use? You just want me to kidnap her?”
“She’s already broken, Mr. Drummond. All you have to do is sweep up the pieces and bring them to me.”
“She’s been talking to shrinks. It might be trouble.”
Briggs broke from his dark reverie. “Don’t worry, you’ll be paid for that one, as long as you bring in the others.”
“Do I look worried?”
Briggs smiled, back to his usual self. “No. Not at all. You know the way out.”
The doc turned to his bank of high-tech gear and flipped some switches and triggered the front-door lock. As Kleingarten wended his way through the skeletal machinery, he heard the strains of the old cowboy ballad, “Home on the Range,” once sung by Willie Nelson, who wasn’t a whole lot better than David Underwood at carrying a tune.
The music was concentrated in the area of the holding cells, and Kleingarten shuddered as he pictured David Underwood in that brightly lit room in front of all those eyeballs, with a dope-headed hippie droning on about where the buffalo roam. He told himself he was only hurrying because he was on the clock and headed for retirement, but he knew that was a lie.
The Monkey House was not a place anybody stayed too long if they wanted to keep their marbles.
It wasn’t until he was in his Jeep and headed toward Chapel Hill that he realized he’d been humming.
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.
He punched up the radio and blasted the tune from his mind with ordinary, idiotic pop-rock, where there were plenty of discouraging words.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Damn, Wendy, never there when I need you. Some things never change.
Roland had been lucky enough to find the last working pay phone in the mountains of Virginia, at a run-down gas station where the pumps turned numbers on dials to tally the bill. Roland had made change inside, drawing a long look from the cigarette-huffing woman behind the counter.
He wondered if he looked suspicious as he staggered toward the phone. He was running from something, but that was nothing new. However, this one felt bigger than all those other forgotten failures.
And that damned David Underwood driver’s license stared at him as he stood at the counter. He had to remind himself again that he was Roland Doyle, and in forcing the name into his brain, Cincinnati came back in a rush.
Hell of a week. Fall off the wagon, kill a woman, and turn into somebody else. That sounds exactly like the kind of thing that would happen to me.
“Can I help you, sir?” It was the woman from the counter, who’d taken a break from her cigarette break. She’d rolled the sleeves of her Jeff Gordon racing jacket to her elbows.
Roland realized he’d been leaning with his head against the phone, idly fingering the change slot. He might have been muttering to himself, because the words “Monkey House” spun around his skull like the metal ball of a roulette wheel. “I’m fine.”
“You sure don’t look so hot.”
“A little touch of the flu,” he said.
The woman jumped back as if the virus had wings. “You can keep it.”
“I’m not contagious,” he said. Insanity is only catching in a crowd.
“You ought to take something for that,” she said, retreating to the safety of the store and its carcinogenic atmosphere.
Roland took the vial of pills from his pocket and held them aloft. “Got it right here. Just what the doctor ordered.”
He looked at the vial’s label and then checked his watch. Ten minutes to go. Until what? How many had he taken?
More importantly, how many did he have left?
Three.
The thing that would happen if he didn’t take the pill was already building inside him. It was like a black tsunami, a force that would crush all thoughts and sweep away the foundations of all that made him Roland Doyle.
And as fucked up as Roland Doyle was, it was all he had.
He dropped coins in the slot. As he tried Wendy’s number again, a dark Lexus with tinted windows pulled alongside the pumps. The car had that suspicious sheen of officialdom, though the plates were standard Virginia
