Plum Spooky

TWENTY-ONE

I HAD THE twelve rockets rammed into the Buick’s trunk. Problem was, they didn’t entirely fit.

“Should I tie a red flag on one of them?” I asked Diesel. “I don’t want to get stopped by the police.”

“You need more than a red flag. You’ve got stolen rockets hanging out of the back of a Buick. We need to wrap them.”

Ten minutes later, I had the rockets wrapped in my only quilt.

“I’ve got an open line to Rangeman control room,” Diesel said. “And I’ve got another line open for you. I’ll be on the road, following you from a safe distance.”

Lula’s Firebird swung into my lot and parked next to the Buick.

“Is that the rockets all wrapped up in the quilt?” Lula asked. “That’s real pretty. No one would guess they’re rockets.”

That was true. Most people would guess dead body. Lula and I got into the Buick, and I drove out of my lot to Hamilton.

“I’m supposed to go to the corner of Broad and Third to get directions,” I told Lula.

“I know that block. The corner of Broad and Third is a 7-Eleven.”

I turned onto Broad, and two blocks later, I was at the 7-Eleven on Third. A man in a khaki uniform was waiting in the lot. I pulled up to him and identified myself. He looked in the Buick, then he gave me another envelope.

“I need one of them big pretzels and a drink,” Lula said. “You want anything?”

“No.”

“Just park over there by the post,” Lula said. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“I don’t think I fit in that spot.”

“Sure you do. Back up real slow.”

A ’53 Buick is a whale. There’s no real beginning and no end. It’s like parking a giant sub sandwich. I inched back and crunch.

“Uh-oh,” Lula said, turning in her seat, looking out the rear window. “I think you dented one of Mr. Wulf’s rockets. Maybe you need to pull forward a little. Do you want me to go around and take a look?”

“No! I want you to get your pretzel so we can get on with it.”

I called Diesel and told him the next address. It was a motel on the outskirts of Bordentown.

“He’s taking you south,” Diesel said. “He’s going to bring you to the Barrens.”

“Okay” Lula said, back in the Buick with her drink and her pretzel. “I’m ready to go. You always need food like this on a road trip.”

“This isn’t a road trip,” I told her. “We’re ransoming Gail Scanlon from a scary maniac.”

“Yeah, but I need to keep my strength up in case we need to kick ass.”

Another uniformed man was waiting for me at the motel. He got into the back of the Buick and directed me to a light industrial park just off Interstate 295. I couldn’t call Diesel, but I knew I was a blip on Ranger’s screen, and I suspected Diesel was close. I wound through the industrial park to a ware house. A bay door rolled up, and I was told to drive in.

“I don’t think so,” Lula said to the guy in the backseat. “We don’t do none of this drive into a ware house shit. Someone wants to see us, they gonna have to come out.”

The uniform got on his phone and relayed the message. There was an entire conversation in Spanish. A man peeked out from the ware house, looked us over, and retreated. More Spanish. Finally, a shiny black van pulled out of the ware house and drove up next to us.

Four men got out of the black van, removed the rockets from the Buick, and loaded them into the van.

“This was easy,” Lula said to me. “We didn’t have to worry after all. We didn’t even have to go to all five locations. I might need to get another pretzel on the way home.”

I wasn’t that optimistic. I saw five uniformed guys with guns strapped to their sides. Two of them had assault rifles hanging on their shoulders.

“Now you will get out,” the one uniform said to me.

“No way” Lula said. “You got your rockets. We’re gonna go get more pretzels now.”

Everyone aimed a sidearm at me.

“Okay” Lula said. “We don’t need more pretzels, anyway.”

“You can stay with this car,” the uniform said to Lula. “This other one will go with us.”

Okay, I said to myself, so I go with these guys, they take me to the Pine Barrens, and Wulf gives me over to Martin Munch. How bad could it be? He probably isn’t operating at peak efficiency after that shot I gave him in the nuts. Maybe he’d be happy watching Star Trek reruns. Maybe he’s just lonely.

“It’s okay” I said to Lula. “I’ll be fine. Take the Buick back to my apartment.”

I was guided into the back of the van and sat between two of the armed men. No one spoke for the duration of the ride. There were no side windows. No windows in the rear doors. It was difficult to see the route through the windshield from where I sat. Once we were in the Barrens, it was all trees.

The ugly truth is that I’ve had my share of terrible moments since I’ve become a bounty hunter. I’ve managed to survive them, and while I wish none of them had ever happened, I have to admit there are things I’ve learned. I’ve learned that one of my best traits is that I’m resilient. And I’ve learned that fear is a normal reaction to danger. And I know for certain that panic is the enemy. So I sat in the truck and I tried to keep it together.

I felt the road change from smooth pavement to rutted dirt. Occasionally, I would hear the scrape of brush on the side of the van. I checked my watch. We’d been on the dirt road for ten minutes. The van took a right turn, and after a couple minutes, we entered a cleared area and stopped.

We all got out of the van, and I looked around. The clearing was small. Nothing that would attract attention from aerial surveillance. A crude, one-story, cinder-block building had been erected at the edge of the clearing. Maybe 1,500 square feet. The size of my apartment. It looked like new construction. Nothing fancy. Utilitarian windows and doors. Tin roof. Single metal pipe chimney sticking up out of the roof. The land around the building was raw. No grass, no flowers, no shrubs to soften the landscape. Gravel had been dumped and graded to make a drive court and walkway to the building.

“What is this?” I asked one of the uniforms.

“House,” he said.

Kind of grim for a house, I thought. The Easter Bunny’s trailer was more appealing than this.

A black SUV with dark tinted windows drove into the clearing and parked behind the van. Wulf and Munch got out and made their way over to me. Wulf was wearing Armani black, dressed more for Monaco than the Pine Barrens. Munch was wearing jeans with the cuffs turned up and a Star Trek shirt.

Munch was practically vibrating with excitement. Wulf, as always, showed no emotion. His face was as cool and smooth as alabaster, his eyes were obsidian.

“We will try this one more time,” Wulf said to me. “I’ve brought you here so you can be nice to Martin. If you kick him, bite him, spit on him, or break his nose, you will answer to me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Take her into the house,” Wulf said to the uniform standing next to me. “Restrain her and leave two men to watch the house.” He turned to Munch. “We have everything we need to go forward.”

“We don’t have enough barium.”

“The barium is in transit. The progress of this operation is delayed by your sulking. You have an hour to satisfy yourself, and then I expect you to return to work.”

“I’ve only got an hour with her?”

“We need to put a rocket up to night. And you need to finish your calculations. When the rocket is successfully launched and we’ve retrieved the data, you may return to your toy. Ms. Plum will not be leaving us so long as you wish her to stay.”

Munch looked at me and grinned ear to ear. I was Christmas morning. Lucky me.

The interior of the house wasn’t much better than the exterior. The smell of fresh paint mingled with the smell of new carpet. The furniture was tasteful but bland. Marriott meets college dorm. There was a living room with a couch, two club chairs, a coffee table, and a tele vision. Two small bedrooms with queen-size beds. A bath and a half. An eat-in kitchen that opened to a family room that ordinarily would have had a tele vision and a comfortable couch, but in this house was set up as an office and lab. This was Munch’s house, I thought. Hastily finished when the ranch-style house burned down.

Munch, the En glish-speaking uniform, and three other uniforms with guns drawn led me to the kitchen. A uniform pulled a wooden kitchen chair to the middle of the room, sat me down, and secured my hands behind the chair back with cuffs. He cuffed my right ankle to a chair leg, my left ankle to another chair leg, and he took a step back and set the key on the kitchen counter.

“Is that okay?” he said to Munch.

“Yeah,” Munch said. “That’s great, except she’s got all her clothes on.”

The uniform opened a couple kitchen drawers, found a pair of scissors, and handed them to Munch.

“Have fun,” the uniform said.

The four henchmen left, locking the front door on their way out. There was the sound of two vehicles moving on the gravel surface, and then it was quiet. Just Munch and me left in the cement-block house.

“So,” I said to Munch, “see any good Star Trek reruns lately?”

“Yeah. All the time. I have the whole collection. All the seasons. And all the movies.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. Do you want to watch some?”

“Maybe later. I only have an hour to have fun with you.”

“What does fun involve?”

“You know… fun.”

“It looks like you work here. That’s a serious-looking computer.”

“It’s okay. Mostly, I work at the main facility.”

“Where is that located? Is it far away?”

“It’s through the woods. Everything is through the woods here.”

“Wulf said you were sending a rocket up to night. That’s pretty exciting. I wish I could see it.”

“It’s not that exciting. It’s just a small X-12 King. When we get the barium, we’ll fly the big bird, the BlueBec. It holds twenty-three hundred pounds of propellant, and it’s got a full payload. It’ll be the first real test. If it works, we’ll go global.”

“Global? What does that mean?”

“It means we’ll be able to control weather. Well, not entirely. I can’t do everything with the waves. At least, not yet.”

“What can you do?”

“I can make lightning. Not just a single strike, either. I can create the most terrifying storm you’ve ever imagined. And I can make it rain. Not a sustained rain, but a deluge. I can make the kind of rain that can do damage. Rain the earth can’t absorb fast enough.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I don’t know. Why do people want to paint pictures? Why do people want to design skyscrapers? It’s just what you do. It’s what’s in your head. I tried to get Brytlin to fund my research, but they thought I was a nut. All they wanted was a better magnetometer.”

“What about Eugene Scanlon?”

“Eugene was okay. He saw what I was doing with the new antennae grid design and the miniaturization. He’s the one who started all this in the Barrens. He had some land here, and since the Barrens are filled with nutcases, he figured we wouldn’t be bothered by anyone. The problem was, we didn’t have any money. All I could do was computer-generated stuff. We did a couple tests with the little rockets, but then we were broke.”

“That’s where Wulf comes in, right?”

“Yeah. He’s got money coming out of his ears. I don’t know where he gets it. It’s like he makes it in the basement or something.”

“Why did he kill Eugene Scanlon?”

“Eugene wanted Wulf’s money, but he didn’t want Wulf involved. Eugene wanted to be the boss. And then Eugene got all in a snit and said he wanted Wulf to buy him out. Eugene wanted fifty million dollars or he was going public with my research. So Wulf killed him. Wulf doesn’t mess around. He’s got four BlueBecs on pads for me. You know what they cost? About two million apiece. Not that it’s a big loss. He’ll get all that money back and more. Once I’m up to speed, I’ll be able to destroy every power grid in the country. They’ll pay us what ever we want.”

“You’d blackmail cities?”

“Yeah. How awesome is that?”

“If Wulf has so much money, why did you steal the transmitter?”

“It was going to take too long to order one. We have a generator that we’re using now, but it doesn’t give enough power. The radio station had a monster.”

“Where’s Gail Scanlon?”

“She’s at the main facility. She’s part of a side experiment I started. Turns out the human brain operates on low frequencies of electromagnetic energy. When you’re in active thought, it’s maybe at like fourteen cycles per second. When you’re sleeping, it’s more like four cycles. I can alter that with my machine. Only problem is, I needed to put the helmet on my test subjects so their brain waves would match the resonant frequencies I chose to generate. I can’t really control thoughts yet, but I can make monkeys fall asleep or get depressed or enraged. Human trials are my next phase.”

Seemed to me that monkeys spent a lot of time sleeping anyway. And as for depressed and enraged, I’d feel that way, too, if I was forced to wear a helmet while Munch conducted experiments on me.