Chapter 57
Officer Reese held the scruff of Sam’s neck with one hand as they stood in the doorway. Reese’s other hand held the muzzle of his.357 Magnum against the base of Sam’s neck.
Sam did not look happy – in point of fact, he had a snarly hard-on light in his eyes that said he was about to do something teen-boy stupid.
Don’t be dumb, I willed him. Just chill, son, and wait for the main chance.
Sam’s gaze met mine, and for a second the mortifying embarrassment of being caught with his pants down in front of me threatened to turn this into a major blood bath. Then the moment passed and he subsided into a sullen, watchful stillness.
Officer Reese frog-marched Sam into the room and looked down at Jansen, seemingly hypnotized by his helplessness. I took that opportunity to hide my hammer hand behind my leg.
Reese stank like he hadn’t bathed in a while. Brown snuff stained the front of his uniform shirt; he’d apparently given up on using a dip-spit can at all. He didn’t smell like alcohol tonight, though – he’d come here sober.
“Hello, soul brother,” Jansen mumbled to me as though Reese wasn’t there, something resembling a smile cavorting across his red-stained mouth. “It is so nice to finally welcome you into my home.”
“If the tip of a knife blade is your standard welcome, I’m assuming you don’t get very many voluntary guests.”
“I gave you chance after chance. I could have reached out and taken you anytime, but I didn’t,” Jansen said in a low, gloating asthmatic voice. “I did everything but give you a map to my front door. I gave you this.”
“You keep telling yourself that. I would have gotten you eventually, even if your buddy Hoffman hadn’t turned on you. Yeah, Rick made it easier, making sure everybody knew you’d set up the hit on Kendra. He’s a surprisingly persistent little thing for such a sketch of a personality, ain’t he?”
Jansen’s eyes rolled wildly at that revelation, but he didn’t respond otherwise to the news of his slave’s betrayal.
“How those ribs feeling, Chief?” Reese asked, a crazed expression on his face as he stared at the squirming Driver. “They stinging a bit? Punctured a lung yet?”
“You are a weak fool, Reese, and a coward,” Jansen said. “Your fiancee was a traitor, she-”
With a hiccupping snarl Reese pulled the pistol barrel away from Sam’s temple to aim it at Jansen. But as Reese’s gun hand extended over Sam’s shoulder, Sam yelled “Haw!” and grabbed Reese’s wrist and ducked under his arm, scuttled and spun until he was behind him holding him in a wristlock arm bar.
Sam cranked on Reese’s wrist with one hand and pressed hard on his elbow with the other, forcing Reese heavily to his knees. Sam continued to crank and press until Reese knelt with his upper body squeezed down against his thighs; Reese’s Stetson spilled off his head and he dropped his Python to the floor. I couldn’t be prouder of Sam than a tiger parent watching their cub’s first successful stalk.
Jansen’s smile hadn’t twitched throughout. “So, is it time for a cutting contest?” he asked me. “For you to hold forth with your impassioned list of grievances?”
“That ain’t on the agenda tonight,” I said. “This isn’t about you. You’re not in control.”
I glanced up at the hall-side wall behind Sam and Reese and saw the book cases lining it. The shelves were crowded with Milton and Blake, Rabelais and Erasmus, Thucydides and Marcus Aurelius and Mina Loy.
He read them in here, when he was taking a break from… I felt dizzy as I looked away from those books; it was a travesty seeing the Canon in this room. Jansen laughed, ever sensitive even to momentary weakness.
He’d lost a lot of weight even in the short time since I’d seen him last at the bank – his skin hung off the bones underlying that once much huskier frame. His makeup was pan-caked on thicker tonight too; he hadn’t been wearing it just for the camera at my deposition. The cosmetics were a by-now futile attempt to conceal the ever- increasing blotches covering the exposed skin of his face and arms here near the end of his disease’s progress.
“He killed Kendra,” Reese reminded me from where he knelt. “What are you waiting for?”
Jansen laughed, but his having to turn his head and spit out a mouthful of blood detracted from any levity he was trying to convey. “Not with my own two hands, but it was my will that made it happen, yes,” he said. “He played you into coming here, Reese. It looks as though he played us both.”
“Who is ‘he’?” I asked.
“Why, Tubbs of course,” Jansen said. He looked at Reese. “You see? I am not afraid to say the name.”
“Oh, you do babble on for a dead man,” Reese moaned. “He’s lying. Mr. Tubbs has nothing to do with any of this. Kill him, what are you waiting for?”
“I gots to agree,” Sam said, still holding Reese tight in the arm-bar. “Why are you debating with this piece of shit? Hurry up and get it over with. Let’s roll.”
I stepped over to Moe, whose eyes were lemur-big in his little face as he stared unblinking at the Driver squirming on the floor. I set down my hammer with the other tools, plucked off the tape binding Moe to the gurney and helped him down before turning to answer: “Who says I’m killing him?”
“You promised,” Jansen said. Sam and Reese both looked at me, with varying degrees of contempt.
I picked up the hammer. “I changed my mind – it’s a free country last time I checked.”
Sam said, “Give me the hammer then.”
I studied, him, considering my best approach. Should I tell Sam that when he killed, nothing would ever be the same for him again? That after going through that exit-only door, he’d never be able to go back to what he was before? No: Sam wouldn’t care about any of that.
“You don’t get it,” I said instead. “I never thought we’d take him alive, never thought we’d get this opportunity. But don’t you see? He’s not our target anymore: now, he’s our weapon.”
Sam shook his head, not understanding.
“This one here, he’s just a dog turd, and for all his grandiose pretensions a little one at that,” I explained. “I don’t want him; I want his masters – I want the swine who profited from him.”
“Stagger Bay wants us to sweep all this under the rug,” I said, trying to convince Sam to see past his hate. “They want us to just clean it up and make him go away. They refuse to look at the mess they made nor to think about it. But I’m not their bus boy, or their servant either. I’m not gonna let them hide from this; I’m dragging him out into the light for all to see.”
“You saw what he did to Mai,” Sam said. “He has to pay.”
“Pay?” I asked, incredulous. “Kid, you have no idea.”
“They’ll spit on him on his way to and from the courtroom,” I said, smiling. “Once he’s in prison he’ll dissolve like an oil slick spreading across tainted water; he’ll fade away into the walls of his cell. The head-shrinkers will study him like a lab rat, and every time the Badge talks to him, he’ll see the contempt in their eyes for a punk bitch like him who hid behind the uniform and shamed whatever clean cops may be.”
“And an ex-law-dog in prison? He’ll have a real active sex life, I’m sure. Well,” I said, gesturing towards the AIDS medications, “given his condition the violating will probably be with foreign objects. Of course there’s solitary confinement if he don’t want that kind of interaction with fellow prisoners, I was no stranger to the Hole either. But in the end he’ll die miserably, surrounded by apathetic medical staff in the most ill-equipped health care system in America.”
“No Gotterdammerung for you,” I said to Jansen with a smile. “No transcendence, nothing sublime. Just meaningless, whimpering oblivion, like any of the sheep you despise.”
“We’re nothing like you, you see,” I explained to the Driver.
Jansen laughed quietly, a horrible sound like marbles grinding in a garbage disposal, and more blood spattered his already crimson lower face. “You are ridiculous. I know you better than you know yourself, soul brother. Admit it, my friend: You came here as much to see my face as to end this.
“You are the Other, Markus, just like me. You think I hate you? Hardly, even though I know we could never be friends. We are both self-constructs; we both had to make ourselves – the sheep misunderstand you as thoroughly as they misunderstand me.
“Perhaps if you stay downwind they will not smell the wolf on you. Oh yes, that strategy has worked quite well for you thus far, has it not, Markus? But do you really think they will ever allow you to be part of them?
“As soon as you have taken out the trash, as soon as you have disposed of me? Once the dragon is gone they
