Unholy Code

Chapter 19

Jimmy McMasters cracked open the door of his hospital room. Guards armed with automatic rifles stood at each end of the long corridor, eyes on anyone seeking access to the patients. They were there to keep the quarantined inside, but looked ready to repel an invasion.

He swore softly to himself. He was dressed and ready to roll, and they were still there. Don’t they ever take a damn break? The hospital was in lockdown, a prison term that sounded painfully appropriate to Jimmy. If he could just get out, he could start rehabilitating his name, if not his health. But he wasn’t feeling too bad. No worse than some epic hangovers he’d known, and he’d managed to race Sexy Streak almost two hundred miles per hour during one of them.

As he eased the door shut and backed away, he glanced again at the mirror in the small bathroom. Not as bad as most of the cases he’d seen on TV, or on his now-dead roommate. But Jimmy had been a good-looking piece of work; he wasn’t so sure of himself now. Dozens of women — he was pretty certain he’d passed the half-century mark — had thought enough of him to show their appreciation. Piccolo — the one who really knew how to play a flute — had said he’d “rocked her world.” Now she’d probably like to stone him to death.

He wanted to feel like a hero again, and he had a plan, a risky one, admittedly, but he’d go for it — if he could just get the hell out of there.

Jimmy was on the third floor. The old bedsheets ploy wouldn’t work. By the time he tied them to a radiator — the hospital had been built in the 1930s — and ran them across the room to the window, he’d be lucky to make it to the top of the second floor. Jumping twenty feet in his condition was not a cool idea.

He thought about tackling a nurse and stealing her baggy blue clothes, but the one who breezed in and out of his room every hour outweighed him by a good eighty pounds and looked pretty frickin’ angry about having to come anywhere near him. She called him “Matt killer,” even though Lauer wasn’t dead yet, a point that Jimmy had made to her more than once.

“But he’s dyin’ and you’re lookin’ like you got nothin’ but a couple of zits,” she’d said on her last visit, shaking her head as she left. It was as if she’d just discovered there really wasn’t any justice in the world if Matt Lauer might die and Jimmy McMasters actually got to live.

He peeked out the window. Starting to get dark, for all the help that might bring him. At least he spied no guards on the hospital grounds.

Christ!

He heard the XXL nurse in the hallway just as he caught sight of a possible way down.

Jimmy rushed to his bed and in seconds had his eyes closed, gown over his pants and shirt, and the sheet over everything but his face.

A moment later she barreled in. “You dead yet?” she asked, sounding far too hopeful for Jimmy’s comfort.

He cracked an eyelid. Yeah, XXL all right. “No, but I feel like I’m dying.”

She promptly stuck a thermometer in his mouth. Pulled it out seconds later. One of those fast-acting ones.

“Don’t be such a wimp. Ninety-nine degrees. You’re no worse for wear. Not like my boy, Matt,” she humphed. “Not that you care.”

“Hey, I liked him, too.”

“Yeah? With friends like you, Matt sure don’t need no enemies. And don’t be talkin’ like he’s already dead. That’s disrespectin’ him even more. Makes me wonder if you’ve been workin’ with those terrorists the whole time.”

“If I was working with them, I wouldn’t have let myself get sick.”

She humphed again. “They got sick and now they’re dyin’, so it seems if you was workin’ with them, you’d be sick, too. And there you are, a waste of space and fresh as some damn peaches and cream… for a supposedly sick man. Tell you what, though, we’re bringin’ in someone in a few minutes who’s sweatin’ blood he’s so gone. See how you’re doin’ with him around.”

“That sucks.”

She looked at her watch. “Ten minutes. Sendin’ up the orderlies. Be seein’ you soon.” She smiled at him for the first time, then slammed the door.

Jimmy swore to himself again, burst from the bed, and raced back to the window. What he’d spotted before XXL showed up was a drainage pipe about five feet from the edge of a six-inch-deep windowsill.

He cranked the handle for the window and watched it open sideways. Might give him just enough room to squeeze by.

Nope.

His pecs wouldn’t compress enough. All those incline presses and drop-sets had left him a little too pumped, even after days of sickness.

He scraped himself, seeing if he could fit through the window, but no one saw him. Tore open a pustule right through his favorite Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt, the Greenville show, Ronnie Van Zant’s last before the band’s fatal crash on the way to Baton Rouge. The tee was a collector’s item — and Jimmy only had five more of them. That was when he remembered the salve XXL had applied to his worst sores. She’d grimaced applying it.

He found the tube in the bathroom and smothered his bare chest with the greasy ointment. Hated to leave the tee behind, but he had no choice. He was giving someone a real fine gift, even if it did have some of the ooze that came out of those sticky sores.

Now he squeezed right through the open window and found himself thirty seconds later perched near the edge of the sill, a good leap from the drainage pipe.

One more step, dude, and you’re free!

But when he pressed his foot down to get ready to launch himself from the last brick, a chunk of the outer sill broke and the brain buster flew loose. Almost took Jimmy with it, landing and bouncing on brown grass that looked hard as concrete.

He steadied his nerves, tested his footing one more time, and reassured himself all he needed was one good jump and he could slide away to freedom, just as he’d done as a kid after climbing light poles.

But you never were Spider-Man, a meek voice inside him said.

He nodded in agreement and studied the pipe, shadowy now under the ever-darkening sky. Oh, no. He’d spotted rust on the length of it. Hadn’t been painted in forever and a day.

His palms felt sweaty as he shifted his weight back to help propel himself over the gap. Not just sweaty, he realized when he rubbed them against the gown: greasy. Really greasy.

“Shit.”

He did his best to wipe off the salve but the reason it proved so soothing was the ointment had been designed to penetrate the deepest layers of skin.

Voices arose in the hallway outside his room. He wasn’t sure if it was XXL, the orderlies, soldiers, or someone else.

Just go!

He hurled himself at the drainage pipe, regret throbbing through him the moment he felt himself falling short.

But no. With a desperate reach he grabbed it and jammed his fingers between the rusty metal and the brick wall, skinning his knuckles. Then he started slipping. Good God! And the rusty metal strips holding the pipe to the brick wall began to break loose.

The whole apparatus fell backward. The only blessing — if you could call it that — was Jimmy could now wrap his arms and legs around the pipe and hold on, no longer hampered by greasy hands.

Down he went, faster and faster in gravity’s sure grip, a nail stuck to the mighty head of a magnetized hammer.

Emma was pregnant. No doubt about it. She’d used up five test sticks. Every one came up pink. She had no idea what she was going to do.

Here she was waltzing down the stairs with Sufyan to have dinner with her folks and Tahir — this was happening way too often — and she hadn’t even told her boyfriend the nightmare news. Even so, for all her casual airs, she feared he sensed her doom already. He’d sure been asking her a lot of questions: “What’s the matter?” “You feel all right?” “You sure?” No surprise why: she’d vomited in his presence four times. Morning sickness. Except not always in the morning; the fourth time had come five minutes ago.

“Stomach flu,” she’d lied.

“You have got to tell your mom. You should see a doctor.”

“No!” she’d snapped. “She’s got too much to worry about. Don’t say anything. Promise?”

Sufyan might not have figured it out but she knew her mom would put two and two together.

He wasn’t promising. He’d stopped on the stairs and was staring at Em as her dad called them down to dinner again.

Em knew Sufyan was going to have to own up because it was the condom that broke, not that that excuse would wash with her mother who’d been telling her the same message since she’d first shown interest in boys: “The pill is to stop pregnancy, and the condom’s not a bad backup but it’s also good to stop STDs.” Always reminding her that even a condom could fail to protect her from herpes.

Em had got something a whole lot worse than an STD: she’d gotten pregnant.

“The last of the halibut,” her dad announced as they walked into the dining room. “Cooked it in a creamy dill sauce. Your favorite,” he said to Em, who felt like hurling all over again. It really was her favorite fish dish, so why did it smell worse than a septic tank?

“Great. Thanks.” He was always trying to fix foods she liked, but she’d been eating less and less because of morning sickness. Maybe he’d noticed; her portion tonight was smaller.

Thank God.

Em urged herself to eat. She felt a hint of her gag reflex when she flaked off a forkful of the white fish, but managed to swallow it.

Tahir’s eyes were on her. He rarely said much but his gaze felt penetrating. She and Sufyan had talked about that. Her boyfriend said there had been times when he would have sworn his uncle could read his mind.

What else could he read? Em wondered. My body?

“So what have you been up to?” Don asked Tahir.

“Not too much,” Tahir replied, his manner of speaking as stiff as ever.

“You work on your computer all the time,” Sufyan said, a prod that didn’t appear appreciated by Tahir, who replied crisply:

“Like you on your phone.”

“Do you work on it a lot?” Lana asked Tahir.

You’re real subtle, Emma thought.

“It is the only way I can stay in touch with our friends and family in Sudan.” Tahir smiled at Lana, which is to say his lips parted just enough to flash his perfect teeth.

“I thought you didn’t have any surviving relatives there,” Lana replied.

“Cousins. Our clan.” That smile again, sneaky as a snake bite.

Em watched her mother eye him the way she always stared at her when Lana expected Emma to say more. The silence trap. That was what Em called it. She’d learned to avoid it — after years of fumbling verbally and trying to fill it, often with self-incriminating information. She saw immediately that Tahir was a much faster study: he simply went back to eating.

“Awkward. Awkward,” Em said to Sufyan when they walked outside to wait for his uncle, who’d stopped to thank her parents for dinner, as formal in parting as he’d been at the table.

The FBI agent, Robin Maray, smiled at Emma and Sufyan. Good-looking, for sure, Em thought, smiling back. Too old for her, though. Old as her mom and dad. And she loved Sufyan.

“We’ve got to slip away from your uncle and my dad soon,” she told him.

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you but you have to promise to keep it secret.”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean it. Say—”

“I promise I’ll keep it secret.”

“I’m pregnant. I need to get away from those two and get to Planned Parenthood as soon as possible.”

“Why?” Sufyan exclaimed. “This is glorious news.”

Glorious?

“No, it’s not gl—”

Tahir was walking toward them. She doubted he could read her mind — or his nephew’s — but she had no doubt that he’d at least heard her last few words. Among them might have been “I’m pregnant.”

“Text me,” Sufyan said, as if they’d been discussing his latest basketball drills. He bounced a ball up and down the court every day.

She nodded and said good night. She still didn’t dare kiss him, even on his cheek, not in the presence of his uncle. And here she was, carrying his child.

He’d be bouncing a baby on his knee if they didn’t do something fast.

After the rusty brackets holding the pipe to the wall broke loose — and feeling himself falling backward at an ever-increasing rate — Jimmy heard a sound even more ominous: the pipe itself snapping apart where it was coupled to the bottom length that ran about fifteen feet to the ground.

Which was a “break” for him because the pipe’s ancient steel peeled apart slowly at the seam, with the gentleness of a new mom laying her baby in a bassinet.

Jimmy even had a chance to lower his feet to the ground and step out of the way. The words “in the flow” came to him, one of Janey the piccolo player’s favorite expressions when they were humping and bumping.

In the deepening shadows of night, Jimmy pressed his back against the building and took a breath, wondering if Janey hated him as much as her brothers did. One brother now: XXL had told him the younger bro died last night, shaking her head like Jimmy was to blame, once again. And there she was, big head sticking out the window. He pressed himself flat against the brick. There would be no missing the pipe, though.

“Where are you, McMasters?”

He heard her tell someone “Pipe’s all bent. That walking sack of smallpox must have fallen with it. Can’t get far.”

Yes I can, Jimmy thought, racing along the hospital wall to the employee parking lot.

He had to check seven cars before he found an unlocked door. He couldn’t believe how untrusting people were these days. But the owner of the old Toyota 4x4 had been kind enough to stash the keys on top of the sun visor.

Jimmy never looked back, driving to a warehouse district not far from the boat garage for Sexy Streak. He hoped like hell BP hadn’t changed the push-button combination for the gate to the compound.

Jimmy punched in the five digits. The lock didn’t open. Tried it again. Still didn’t work. He looked up, wondering if the old coot security guard was still around. Didn’t see him. Then Jimmy looked back at the buttons and made himself take a breath, realizing he might have been off on the last number. True enough.

Third time’s the charm.

BP’s warehouse — one of many, but the only one he’d been in when he worked for the company — rose before him. A city block wide, two stories high, and filled with the tools of the oil trade, including explosives. He needed just enough dynamite to blow the pipe that ran from the seabed to the platform to set off the blowout preventers, BOPs. If the ISIS assholes caught him, they might even think he was doing their work for him. That’s what he planned to tell them, anyway.

When? Right before they chop off your head?

Then he spotted the old security guard shuffling along. He looked harmless. He wasn’t. He carried a pistol and stun gun, using the latter mostly to fry stray cats.

Wilbur. His name made him sound sweet as a teddy bear. Fact is, he smelled sour as an old sock and cussed faster than a Lotto loser. And he loved his nightstick, tapping everything as he walked along. Right now he was cracking it against the concrete walls of the warehouse every few seconds, warming up, no doubt, for surfaces less resilient.

Jimmy huddled by the steps to a loading dock, shoehorning his body into the slim shadows thrown by the security lights.

Knock-knock. Pause. Knock-knock.

Getting closer.

Wilbur, called “Burr” by his friends, all two of them, walked right above Jimmy without looking down. Burr must have patrolled this stretch ten thousand times without ever seeing a soul.

Jimmy stuck to the shadows till the knock-knock softened, then he peered over the edge of the loading dock and watched Burr amble around a corner.

Jimmy hurried across the well-lit concrete to an unlocked door in the center of the building. The interior had night lights outlining the tall shelves and, as Jimmy knew from his brief and spectacularly unsuccessful stint at BP, the outlines of anyone entering the facility after hours.

But if the oil giant was as cheap with security in the warehouse as it had been with the men hired to protect the offshore oil platform now under ISIS control, then there would be no one monitoring those cameras. But Jimmy couldn’t count on that so he crawled in the shadows till he was down the third aisle to his right, hoping the dynamite hadn’t been moved. Not exactly. It was still there, but the sticks were now locked in a steel case as large as an upright freezer.

Getting awful formal around here. Not like the good old days when he had helped himself to a stick or two for some fast nighttime fishing. Let her rip and catch some fish.

Knock-knock. Burr was entering the warehouse. Knock-knock.

Jimmy swore, worrying the guard had spotted him with the security cam. He might be watching a video feed on his phone.

Knock-knock. Getting louder.

But Burr didn’t sound like he was rushing to get to him. Just tapping his nightstick as he’d always done.

Jimmy wedged himself between the steel case and the crisscrossing brackets that supported the shelving rising high above him. He felt no more effective than a kid playing hide-and-go-seek.

The nightstick struck the locked case, then cracked against Jimmy’s knee.

Burr paused with his searchlight pointing down at Jimmy, pulling his Taser out so fast that Jimmy knew the security guard must have practiced on plenty of kitties.

“It’s me, Burr.”

“Who’s ‘me’?” Burr demanded, peering through his thick glasses. “I don’t know no ‘me,’ shithead. All I know is you’re crouching like some goddamn cat next to the ’plosives. ’Course, I love finding cats.”

Jimmy put his hands up. “I’m coming out. I’m coming out.”

“What? You must think this is the Queer Pride Parade. ‘I’m coming out,’” Burr mocked. “Get the fuck out of there ’fore I fry your testicles.”

Jimmy cupped himself instinctively. “I’m Jimmy McMasters.” Hoping his name still meant something to the cussed old creep.

The light flashed right into Jimmy’s eyes.

“Hell if you ain’t,” he said, taking a step backward. “What the fuck are you doing here? Last time I saw you was on the outtakes from the surveillance cam they showed at the Christmas party. You was rootin’ and tootin’ with those high-tailed strippers. Man, they were treating you like the prize calf in a ropin’ contest.”

“You like that, huh?”

“’Least you went out in style, not like these other half-dead fuckers. But let’s get to the issue at hand, Tit Fucker. What the—”

“‘Tit Fucker?’ I was doing other stuff, too,” Jimmy protested.

“Yeah, but that shit was funny. And Jimmy, you should be proud of yourself. Those pictures got themselves a rerun on the Fourth of July picnic up on a big white sheet.”

“Thank you.” What else could he say?

“But what the fuck are you doing here?”

“You see me coming up on that beach with those ISIS terrorists?”

“Yeah, I saw that on the TV. Then I heard you stuck it to that Today Show guy, laid him up faster than a run-down dog.” Which probably explained Burr’s immediate retreat when he recognized Jimmy.

“I didn’t mean to, Burr. I was just feeling so great I thought I’d—”

“Fuck him. I hate his smiley ass anyway. So what do you need the dynamite for? Goin’ fishin’?”

Jimmy told him.

Burr smiled. “Glad to oblige. How much you need? And don’t go gettin’ greedy.”

“Six would be perfect.”

Burr opened the steel case, grabbed the red sticks, and handed them over to Jimmy. “You ever let on I did this, I really will fry your testicles. My brother’s the sheriff. He survives, he’ll help me.”

“I won’t say a word, but since you’re helping me this much, you got a gun you could spare?”

“Now that could be traced to me—”

“I’ll throw it in the Gulf when I’m done. I swear.”

“—if I hadn’t already filed off the numbers.”

Burr reached down and pulled a .38 Saturday night special from an ankle holster. “I always keep a drop gun on me, case I need to shoot some loser and say he drew on me.”

“You are a first-rate thinker, Burr.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Jimmy. Take the sticks and blow them shitheads to bits.”

“You got it, man.” Jimmy tried to shake Burr’s hand, but the old guy backed up farther.

“Do I look like Matt fucking Lauer? Get outta here.”

Jimmy didn’t breathe till he was beyond the reach of that stun gun. Then he rushed across the loading dock and jumped down to the pavement.

Seconds later he was back behind the wheel of the 4x4 and heading to the home of Sexy Streak, asking himself if he really wanted to do this. That platform was more than 140 miles out in the Gulf. He wasn’t sure he could even carry enough fuel to get out there and back. Be right on the margins of the boat’s range.

It’s a goddamn suicide mission, he thought, swampy Gulf air thickening as he drove up to the boat garage.

But facing down that boatload of terrorists could have got him killed, too. And you did that. You got the hero in you, Jimmy.

Janey had told him that over and over, panting those very words into his ear.

She could be right. And “hero” would sure sound better than being remembered as “Tit Fucker.”

He unlocked the garage and opened the big wide door. Sexy Streak still had bullet holes high on her starboard hull. Otherwise, she looked sweet as ever. Hell, Jimmy had a few holes in his own face now. Pull off this caper, though, and they’d look different. Heroes had scars, sometimes lots of them.

If they survive.

He started the engines, their rumble music to his ears as he slipped into the Gulf and left Oysterton behind, maybe for the last time.