Power Trip Read online

  “Oh, you dated?” I said. “Did your ex have a problem with that?”

  “He’s the one set us up.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “Okay. So if I wanted to transact a little business with Hash, maybe order something not on the menu, what’s his style? Do I need to tiptoe around it or just shoot straight?”

  This must’ve made me look even more appealing than extra hush pups with a side of Thousand Island. A stranger with a murky request. Shelley sat down across from me in the booth.

  “Always shoot straight with Hash. Not out in the open, but just compliment one of his tattoos and tell him Shelley sent you. He’ll walk you back into the office and you can buy your AK-47s or whatever you’re after.”

  I grinned. “Which tattoo is he most fond of?”

  “Oh, prob’ly the one next to his ball sack, but I don’t guess you can compliment that one.” She threw back her head and laughed. “No, the fist on his neck. He just got that one last year.”

  “Fist on the neck? Holy shit, my wife has one like that.”

  Shelley’s eyes grew wide. “Are you shittin’ me?”

  “I’m totally shitting you.”

  She laughed so loud this time that people at the bar turned around to see what was going on with the scrawny new guy. “You are one damned funny man. What’s your name?”

  “Eric.”

  “Well, Mr. Eric, if you’re looking to see the sights around here tonight I can be a damned good guide.”

  “I have no doubt,” I said. “But I better not. I never tempt fate being alone with a pretty woman.”

  She stood up and gave me another bright smile. “Oh, you would never do anything. You love your wife.”

  “That I do, Shelley.”

  “I appreciate the laugh, so that last beer is on me. You have a good night, Mr. Eric.” She strolled off to flirt with another table.

  Back in my hotel room I put the chain lock on the door and then killed the extremely large spider in the bathroom. After checking the bed for other possible critters I called Christina.

  “Still in Portland?” she asked.

  “Babe, I’m a mere 700 miles away in Georgia.”

  “What’s in Georgia?”

  “Hush pups. Want me to bring you some peach jam?”

  “Of course I do. When are you coming home?”

  I sighed. “Hopefully soon. Just wanted to hear your voice. Tell me anything about your week, the longer and more detailed the better.”

  Propped up on three pillows I listened to her describe in-depth the trouble she was having with someone on the restaurant staff. No job is really different from any other, is it? We all work with people we like and people we don’t. It’s as if each industry needs to have a recommended percentage of shitheads, and we all go to work knowing that. In the food industry you just hope it doesn’t affect the peppercorn sauce.

  Christina also mentioned that she might go back to five nights a week at the restaurant. A chef is generally there most nights, but for the last few years she’d negotiated her presence to four nights a week and one day from noon to five. When she wasn’t there her sous chef took the reins. I knew why she was considering going back to five nights.

  “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t been home much. Things have been crazy.”

  “Swan, they’ll always be crazy. I’m not upset; I knew what I signed up for. But I might as well use my time wisely. I don’t foresee you getting a lot of time off anymore.”

  It stung, but it was true. The fact that we’d even entered into our arrangement was perhaps silly, but love shoves us around sometimes. At least we had the separate condo setup, so Christina could live like a single woman on her side without my dirty socks reminding her of my absence. And in case you were wondering, no, she didn’t keep photos of us in her place, either. I mean, how could she ever keep a current picture of me around? Although sometimes I wished she’d created a portfolio of every couples photo we could’ve made. Except she’d look like a total slut.

  We whispered a few overly-sweet things to each other after that. Then she reminded me to bring the peach jam and said good night.

  I slept fitfully during the night. I’m terrified of spiders.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I’ll be damned, it was indeed a fist on his neck. It was on his left side and seemed to spring out toward you. What truly made it cool, though, was the tattoo of a tattoo on the fingers of the fist. Those letters spelled out something but I couldn’t make them out without leaning in to Hash Brown like a lover.

  He was average height and had put on a few pounds since he’d served his country, but it wasn’t much. Stout, you’d say. Still a lot of muscle. A lot of muscle. I could imagine one of those cheap-ass barbell sets out behind his shop where he worked out shirtless with country music playing and a cold beer sitting on a folding chair. His hair was still in regulation mode, although he’d gone lax on the facial hair rules. I believe they used to be called mutton chops. They looked ridiculous. I got the feeling people around Locust Grove gave zero shits about what anyone thought of their style.

  I waited until he was finished with the customer who’d picked out cooking gear for camping. The two of them had caught up on something they found funny, so I passed the time wandering the aisles and realizing that, regardless of how tacky it might be, I kinda liked stores like this. I considered all sorts of purchases that I’d never use in 15 lifetimes.

  We got decent gear from the geniuses at Q2, but that didn’t stop me from lusting for good old-fashioned American accessories. I fingered an honest-to-goodness gas mask and wondered if it could ever come in handy. I stopped short of trying it on for fun, but only because I was within sight of Sgt. Brown.

  “Need help?” he asked when his customer left.

  I stuck out my hand. “Eric. I’m told you might be able to help me round up some special gear.”

  He cautiously shook my hand. “Hash. Have lots of gear. You’re free to look around.”

  I gave a small smile and glanced left, right, then back to his face. “I don’t think you’d have what I’m looking for on the shelves.”

  His eyebrow came up. “Uh-huh. What would that be?”

  “Shelley said you could help me. Is there some place we could talk privately?”

  You could tell Hash didn’t want to trust anyone, and a request for a private meeting probably raised alarms. But after a moment he nodded and led the way down a poorly-lit hallway to one of the tidiest offices I’d ever seen. Military training stays with you. He sat down behind an old wooden desk and took a drink from a can of Diet Coke. He didn’t offer me anything so I sat across from him and started talking.

  “I was admiring the fist,” I said, nodding toward his neck. “You get that around here?”

  “Yes. What can I do for you?”

  So much for Shelley’s advice about kissing up. “I was hoping one former military man could help another.”

  “You served? What group?”

  “4th Infantry,” I said.

  “Old Ivy.”

  “Iron Horse.”

  He chewed on that and then decided to test me. “Who’d you serve under? McKinnon?”

  “McKinnon was a few years later. I fought for Col. Hoff.” Thank you, Poole, you fount of knowledge. I’d done the homework she’d sent.

  “Didn’t take you for that old,” he said, pursing his lips.

  “I still do a lot of pushups.”

  For the first time the ice thawed. He smiled and leaned back. “All right, Eric. What are you in the market for?”

  “Well, Hash, I was hoping you’d be able to rustle up some drones for me.”

  “Drones? Hell, you didn’t have to come back to my office for that, son. You can get those at Walmart.”

  “Not the ones I’m looking for.”

  This was a gamble. By requesting the same basic items LoGo had ordered I was taking a chance the coincidence would scare him off. On the other hand, the popularity of these contraptions grew
every year. He might just see dollar signs instead of a boogie man. I was counting on greed, and in my experience that paid off more often than not.

  For a moment I thought he’d shrug it off and say he couldn’t do any special orders. Instead he asked me to specify.

  “I need a flying machine that can remain stealthy as a teenager sneaking out of the house and hit 60 miles-per-hour but carry a payload of 400-600 pounds.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “That’s a helluva lift. I can’t do anything like that.”

  I could see we were now in square-dance mode, and the do-si-do had begun. Normally in real life this just tired me out, but negotiating with other people’s money is fun. Especially when you’re trying to bag big game.

  “Hash, my information about you couldn’t possibly be wrong.”

  “Depends on where you got the information.”

  I tried to appear as casual as possible while my gaze drifted around the room. It only took me a second to locate the locked lateral file cabinet next to the cart that held a coffee maker. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t have made the trip to Georgia if my intel was faulty. I also wouldn’t have made this trip without a good-faith down payment to share.” I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out the envelope of cash. “I believe your time is valuable. What if I left this little sum with you and checked back tomorrow? Just to compensate you for a few hours investigation.”

  He was good. He didn’t reach for the money right away, instead squinting his eyes to look straight into my skull. I held the gaze long enough to show I was serious, then broke the eye contact and looked around again, taking in the military posters and photographs. A plastic model of an old U2 spy plane, like the one Gary Powers was piloting when shot down over the Soviet Union, hung from fishing line. Right behind that I saw one of only two windows in the room, a small rectangular space near the ceiling that was barred.

  When Sgt. Brown did slowly pick up the package and glance inside at the ten 100 dollar bills, he pursed his lips a second time. “All right. Let me make a call. Stop back by here tomorrow morning?”

  “Hash, that sounds perfect. I’ll need some other specs built in, including radio gear and possibly some jamming equipment. We can talk about that once you confirm you can get the rides.”

  We both stood. “Any recommendations on where a man could fish around here?” I hated fishing, another thing that dinged my man license, but it sounded like it fit the part. He mentioned a lake a few miles away and said they had plenty of boats to rent and even some passable tackle.

  Back in my car I drove off in the direction he’d indicated, then once out of sight turned down another road and cruised with the top down. Eventually I found a shopping area with a theater. Popcorn for lunch sounded good. I bought a ticket to the movie whose poster looked the best and killed a couple hours. By late afternoon I was back at the motel where I grabbed a nap, waiting for late night to arrive. That’s another thing the spy novels ignore: at least half my time is spent sitting around, waiting.

  At ten o’clock I uploaded, reading about the pop singer now dating the Dodgers pitcher. I gave it six months. There was also a totally subjective listing of the top romantic comedies of all time, and I vehemently disagreed with the top three. How do you ignore Julia Roberts? You don’t.

  It was almost one a.m. when I slipped out of the room, clad all in black like a good cat burglar. I drove to within a half-mile of Brown’s Surplus and Supply and hiked the rest of the way just inside the tree line. A small backpack dangled over one shoulder and my gun sat in its holster.

  The satisfying heft of the weapon caused me to think back to some of the times I’d needed an assist from Gaston Glock’s invention. As part of our psychological training we’re told to process the elimination of a knave as quickly as possible, and then to dismiss those thoughts for good. I suppose some agents are able to do that. I file them rather than discard them. It may be part of my obsession with the entire crossing-over experience, or it could just be that I never want to get completely desensitized to the act. I worry about turning into the quintessential vicious killing machine that we hear about.

  To me — and this is something else I’d never utter to Quanta — the way they want us to deal with the act puts me at risk of falling into sociopathic serial-killer territory. I want to at least hope I don’t occupy that level. Not that I’m striving to be the killer-with-a-conscience of popular literature. I may not want to cripple myself emotionally, but I also don’t want to be indifferent to everything. That way lies Monsterville.

  So I keep a file handy in my mind and I sometimes thumb through it during times like this, where I’m just walking and thinking. This time I accessed a knave I’d killed in Ohio, a man behind the murder of more than 40 people in two countries, all in the name of ideology. He was prepped to kill dozens more at a mall when I took him out in his apartment with two shots to the heart and one to the head, just to make sure. This guy had been pure evil. I had no qualms about his death.

  There’d been a few executions that gave me pause. One was only a year ago, a woman in Nashville who definitely had it coming but who just happened to physically remind me of someone I’d once been close to. Looks, voice, mannerisms, all of it. Those are the mind traps that jack you up, because my friend had been the sweetest person you could imagine. It just sucked that her doppelgänger was a murderer.

  See, it’s things like that, little things you’d never consider individually but that build up like plaque and weigh on you through their combined mass. In Nashville a tiny part of my brain had cried out that I was killing someone I loved. I wasn’t, but our minds aren’t always rational.

  Now I’m sounding crazy. It’s just that taking a life isn’t glamorous in any way, even if you’re on the payroll of the government and you understand you’re saving thousands, if not millions, of innocent people. This is not a job for the squeamish.

  I arrived at the edge of the woods behind Brown’s. One car, a very-used Honda Civic, was parked on the side of the building, but inside only the security lights were on. After watching for ten minutes I was convinced everything was empty and quiet. During my earlier visit I’d noted the motion-activated lights at the front door, and now I saw the ones mounted in the back.

  Unzipping a pocket of my backpack, I took out a gadget that looked like a garage door opener. Only once had this thing ever let me down, and this time it worked like a charm. Directed at the security lights, it fried the filaments in three seconds. The security box would show that the lights were activated but there’d only be darkness.

  I pulled down my ski mask and snuck up to the back of the building. Finding the power box was easy and within a few minutes I had everything bypassed, thanks to another piece of hardware the folks on the 2nd floor of Q2 had developed. It looked like a small garage door opener with two wires ending in alligator clips. It would prevent any alarm from being tripped, including motion detectors. I loved all this stuff because it never created a malfunction, which could be an alarm in itself. Things just didn’t work for a while and then they worked again.

  Getting through the lock was the easiest part, and soon I was inside. I turned a corner and found Hash’s office, which was also locked. But not for long.

  Rather than hurrying in I stood at the doorway and looked around. You have no idea how many times that has saved my ass. Night-action should always be walk, wait, walk, wait. For now nothing seemed amiss. A slight breeze from the ventilation system made the U2 swing a bit from its fishing wire, probably the reason it was hung in that spot in the first place. The can of Diet Coke still sat on the desk, joined now by a coffee mug. All was quiet except for a dog just down the street who must’ve smelled a raccoon.

  Although I figured the filing cabinet would yield the most, I started with the desk. The top was uncluttered and uninteresting. Same with the four drawers that were unlocked. The fifth’s lock was easily disabled and it contained a few things that caught my eye. A small box of petty cash, around $3
00. There was an old cell phone with a dead battery, some pictures of Hash with various women — nothing obscene, just friendly hugs. Dude was a total hound dog, but why keep these in a locked drawer? At the back inside a clasped box and wrapped in a small towel there was a handgun, a recently-cleaned Smith & Wesson M&P, the 9mm variety. Not my personal favorite, but serviceable.

  I put everything back in its place and relocked the drawer. The top drawer of the lateral file cabinet was unlocked and was stuffed with folders that meant nothing to me. The bottom drawer was locked, which was a joke. Locks on these drawers could be opened with just a paper clip. I had something a little more professional and was poking around the contents within ten seconds.

  It didn’t figure there would be a folder labeled LoGo, unless the stars truly were aligned. These were obviously the jobs that Sgt. Brown didn’t want to report as traditional income, and he’d gone to the trouble of labeling each in a way that only made sense to him. I went through everything that started with L, just in case, and then D, but there was no LoGo or Drone to be found. I began to randomly sift through folders but that might take ages. I finally remembered that Hash was ex-military and very organized. The folders would likely be ordered by completion date. The LoGo project was either still underway or recently finished. I went to the front of the file. The second one in was gold.

  Sitting on the floor, I removed each page and pulled a small scanner from the backpack. Right then the sound of a vehicle, probably an oversized pickup, roared along the street and decelerated in front of the building. Through the thin windows near the roof I watched the glare of headlights as the truck pulled into the lot and stopped, the engine rumbling in idle. Out of instinct I felt for the Glock. I could faintly hear hair-band music, a relief from the unrelenting country diet I’d endured since getting off the plane. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes, and I wondered if someone was preparing to enter the building. Had I set off some sort of alarm after all?

  Then the music volume intensified as a truck door opened and I heard two people talking and laughing over the Motley Crue or Warrant or whatever it was. The door slammed shut and soon another engine turned over. I realized it was the Honda Civic. Seconds later the truck kicked up gravel as it humped back onto the road and then the Civic did the same. One of Hash’s employees evidently getting a ride back from the bar. I let out a long breath. I could use a drink myself.