Spook

24 Jake Runyon

The one thing he’d never liked about investigative work was surprises. When you knew what was going down, or at least had some advance warning, you could make preparations, plan for contingencies. But when you walked cold into an unexpected situation, it was like being hamstrung — you couldn’t act quickly, you needed time to regroup and by then it might be too late. More than anything else he hated being helpless.

This surprise was a bad one, the worst kind. Tamara Corbin sitting slumped at her desk, one hand cradling her head, smears and streaks of blood all down the left side of her face and neck and across the front of her blouse. Hot-eyed stranger standing spraddle-legged in the middle of the office — big, rangy, early forties; beard-stubbled, brown hair jutting wild from a blotchy scalp, big mole on the left side of his nose; wearing a flak jacket and camouflage fatigues and high-lace boots. Paper files and desktop items strewn all over the floor.

And guns everywhere — on the surface of Bill’s desk, on the floor, spilling out of an open duffel bag next to the desk. At least three handguns, an assembled assault rifle, a couple of big, rapid-fire machine pistols. The piece held steady in the man’s hand was a Micro Uzi SMG, which meant a magazine capacity of twenty rounds minimum of 9 mm parabellum ammo. Bad enough if it was semiautomatic, worse if it was automatic. Deadly as hell in any case. There was ammunition spread around, too, boxes of it for all the weapons.

Runyon took it all in, the details and implications, in the few frozen seconds after his entry. Hostage situation, suicide mission, planned slaughter. It shut him down inside, put him on cold alert. Emotion, any kind, was a liability in this type of situation. The only possible survival mechanisms were intelligence, training, instinct. And they were damned puny against a heavily armed man with death on his mind.

The stranger broke the tableau with a sharp motion of the Uzi and raspy words that seemed to come from deeper within him than his diaphragm. “Which one’re you? What’s your name?”

“Runyon.”

“Yeah. Shut the door, Runyon. Lock it again.”

He did that, turned around. “Who’re you?”

“Three guesses, first two don’t count. Who am I?”

“Tom Valjean.”

“Right the first time, you people are so fucking smart.” Valjean used his free hand to drag the chair away from Bill’s desk, then gave it a kick that sent it rattling across the floor. It banged into a corner of Tamara’s desk, caromed off; the noise made her jerk, raise her head in an unfocused stare. “Go on over there, smart guy, sit down and keep your hands where I can see them.”

Runyon obeyed, moving slow. He asked Tamara, “You okay?”

“Head hurts. Still kind of woozy.” Her eyes were on him now, trying to hold him in focus. He saw pain, fear, disorientation — and anger. The anger was good, as long as she kept it under control. Tough kid. If she hadn’t come unglued by now, she probably wouldn’t. “Cut my face when he smacked me. Won’t stop bleeding.”

“Doesn’t look too bad. Just keep putting pressure on it.”

“Shut up,” Valjean said. “Don’t talk to her, you want to talk you talk to me, understand?”

“Why the arsenal, Tom?”

“Don’t call me Tom, all you bastards think you know me, you don’t know anything about me.”

“What’re you planning to do?”

A sly look reshaped Valjean’s long, slab-cheeked face. “You’re a hotshot detective, you figured out about Colton, all about me and Bob Lightfoot, ought to be easy to figure out about this. Go on, smart guy, figure it out, tell me what I’m gonna do.”

Spook had murdered three people in cold blood, lived for seventeen years with their ghosts in his head, but Thomas Valjean was more unbalanced and far more lethal — the real spook in this business. Runyon said, “Colton deserved to die,” making the lie sound as convincing as he could. “If he’d destroyed my family, I’d’ve killed him too. Same goes for Big Dog.”

“Drunken blackmailing bastard. Bob and me, we shouldn’t’ve paid him the first time, should’ve known he’d be back for more. Should’ve just blown him right out of the picture then.”

“Sure. You were justified with both of them.”

“Damn right I was.”

“But not this time.”

“This time, too. Damn right. Dogging me, siccing the cops on me, you’re no better than Colton or Big Dog or the rest.”

“Cops would’ve figured out about you and Lightfoot, even if we hadn’t.”

“Hell they would. Stupid bastards. You people, you’re the smart ones, Bob told me it was you. You deserve what you’re gonna get, same as the others.”

“All right. But why not just kill me? I tracked you down, I put the law on you, I’m the one you want. Let the woman go.”

“No. She’s part of it, you’re all part of it.”

“Let her go, Tom.”

“Nobody leaves, everybody pays.” Valjean began to pace the width of the office in short, agitated strides, like an ungainly animal. For part of each crossing, the Uzi was pointing away from where Runyon sat; but there was too much distance between them to try to rush him. He and Tamara would both be dead before he got halfway.

“Bastards who hired you,” Valjean said, pacing, “they’re gonna pay too. Who are they, who sent you after me?”

Tamara said, “I wouldn’t tell him.”

“Runyon hadn’t come in when he did, you’d’ve told me all right. I’d’ve knocked it out of you.”

“He tore up the office trying to find out,” she said to Runyon.

“Shut up. You tell me, smart guy. Right now, or I’ll bust the other side of her head, make her bleed some more. You want that?”

“No.”

“Then tell me who hired you!”

“The Department of Human Services.”

“Who? What the hell’s that?”

“City agency that administers to the homeless. They didn’t know who Spook was and the police weren’t getting anywhere, so they brought us in.”

“Bullshit. Why would the city care?”

“So he could have a proper burial.”

“You’re lying to me. Those people, bureaucrats, government bastards, they don’t care about homeless people, they don’t give a shit about anybody. They’re like the IRS, like Marjorie, take your business away, take everything that’s left and leave you with nothing, ruin your life.”

“You asked me who hired us, I told you. The Department of Human Services.”

“Who in the department? Who called up, who’d you talk to, give me some names.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You damn well better. Give me a name, then you call them up, tell them get their asses over here.”

“Bring in more innocent people so you can murder them? I won’t do that, Tom.”

“I won’t either,” Tamara said. “Believe it, man.”

Valjean stopped pacing, leveled the Uzi again. “I’ll kill you, you don’t do what I tell you!”

“You’re planning to kill us anyway. But nobody else is going to die if we can help it.”

“You can’t help it. Cops’ll come when you’re all dead, SWAT team, you think I care? I’ll take some of them out too, as many as I can before they get me.”

“Why?”

“Why? I’ve had it, that’s why, I can’t stand it any more. All the lies, laws, bullshit, everything, everybody, you hear me?”

“Take out as many people as you can just because you’re pissed off at the world. Innocent people doing their jobs.”

“Don’t tell me that! Innocent! Just doing your jobs, just following orders, that’s what you all say, all you bastards, come around and take away everything a man has, ruin his life, then tell him it’s nothing personal, you’re just doing your jobs. Well I’m making it personal. I made it personal with Colton and that blackmailing son of a bitch Big Dog and Marjorie and I’ll make it personal with you and the bastards that hired you, everybody gets in my way, no mercy no prisoners no more bullshit!”

Tamara made a small noise in her throat. Runyon didn’t look at her. Valjean’s eyes were smoky at the edges, the pupils as red-black as burning embers; and they didn’t blink, he hadn’t blinked more than once the entire time. Bad sign. So was the way he kept caressing the Uzi with his free hand, slow, sensuous movements, the intimate caresses of a man making love to a woman. Ready to blow any second, like a shaken bottle of nitro. Anything might set him off — a word, an action, one of his own shorted circuits.

The accelerated rasp of Valjean’s breathing and the steady patter of rain on the skylights were the only sounds in there now. Runyon sat tense and spring-coiled. If Valjean blew, there wouldn’t be time to do much of anything, but at least he’d be up and trying to get in front of Tamara Corbin. He damn well didn’t want to die sitting passive in a chair.

Fifteen seconds like that, and then the crisis point passed. Runyon felt it, saw it in the hot eyes, heard it in the sudden gusty expulsion of breath. Valjean took his left hand off the gun, sleeved sweat from his forehead.

“All right,” he said, “all right, when’s the other one coming?”

“What other one?”

“Don’t play dumb, Runyon, I told you I won’t put up with any more bullshit. Three of you work here, when’s the other one coming?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he won’t be in today.”

“He’s coming, she said he was.”

“Later,” Tamara said. “Not until later.”

“Later, later, when later?”

“Told you, man, I don’t know.”

“Call him, get him on the phone.”

“Don’t know where he is. Told you that too.

“You must know, you work for him.”

“We’re partners.”

“What? You? Partners?”

“Yeah, me. Young black bitch, how about that?”

“Shut up, I didn’t mean it that way. You think I’m prejudiced? I’m not.”

“You just hate everybody, right?”

“That’s right, everybody’s equal in my eyes, I hate everybody regardless of race, creed, or color.” Valjean laughed, a sound like heavy wheels rumbling through gravel. “Justified, by God. Justified!”

Runyon said, “What happens now?”

“What do you think? We wait for your partner.”

“He’s not my partner. I just work here.”

“You think I care? I don’t care about anything any more. It’s almost finished. Soon as he gets here, then everybody gets what’s coming to them, everybody pays, everybody dies.”