The Nowhere Man

71 Vaporized

Candy cracked her window to get a little fresh air and leaned away, not wanting to get sucked into the black hole of Jaggers’s charisma void. He sat motionless in the passenger seat, his hands on the GPS unit as if about to embark on a game of Super Mario.

She monitored the residents and visitors entering the condo building’s front gate.

Old woman with a purse dog. Hipster with sleeve tattoos and a slouch beanie cap. Ladies who lunched in pink pantsuits and glittering pearls.

“Halya Bardakçi,” she murmured.

Though she stared straight ahead, she sensed Orphan M’s head dart over. “What?”

“That was her name. The girl you killed in the alley outside Sevastopol.”

He picked up the laptop and reviewed footage. “How do you know?”

Candy kept her eyes on the luxury complex.

Elderly couple. Teenage girl with bad eye shadow. A diplomat’s wife who resembled a drag queen.

“I read the news story,” Candy said. “She was just a down-on-her-luck kid.”

Bushy-mustached businessman. Swarthy janitor. Strapping college girl.

“Why does that matter?” Jaggers asked.

“Because, you dickless fuck,” Candy said, “she could’ve been us.”

Jaggers jolted in his seat, and for an instant she thought he might strike her. But his eyes remained glued to the laptop. He’d screen-captured the image of the hipster who’d entered the building earlier and zoomed in on the face, barely visible beneath the beanie cap.

“Fuck,” Candy said.

“Make sure that he’s inside René’s condo,” Jaggers said. “And ascertain which room. I’ll ready the coordinates. The last thing we need is him getting away singed.”

Candy grabbed her phone and hopped out of the car.

Jaggers called after her, “And V?”

She leaned back in.

“If you worried more about surveillance and less about a dead Crimean whore, we could’ve sizzled him at the front gate.”

She slammed the door harder than necessary and jogged for the building.

The Need raged and gnashed inside him. Without his infusions of young blood, René could already chart his deterioration. Achy joints, flagging energy, and that chalky residue always in his mouth. The taste of aging.

As soon as they coaxed the Nowhere Man out of hiding, Dex would put an end to him and they could set about rebuilding a new medical lab and acquiring new product.

Rising from his midday nap, René shuffled from the king-size bed toward the makeup counter of the bathroom suite. The windows were Lexan, of course, but to deter surveillance he kept the curtains drawn and the lights off. Just across the tile floor of the interior hall, the connecting door to Dex’s condo was in clear view. It was closed for privacy, though given all the cameras they’d installed throughout the rooms, privacy was hardly an issue. When Dex wasn’t at René’s side, he kept watch on every inch of René’s quarters from a collection of monitors next door, ready to alert their Greek freelancers at the first sign of anything out of the ordinary. It would take the tap of an iPad, no more, and hired knives would close in on Despi and carve her to pieces.

Dex had plans for Evan after that. He’d made multiple contingencies for how to eliminate him once he appeared. Disguised gunports in the common walls. Autolocking double-cylinder dead bolts on the solid-core front door to block egress. Vents wired up for gas just as in the chalet.

René braced himself for a look in the mirror. Despite the low light conditions, he winced at the sight. It was getting harder and harder to produce his confected self. Thinning hair swirled up from his pate. The bags under his eyes had grown bags beneath them, a landslide of bruise-colored flesh. His jowls held the weight of the world.

He began the process of putting himself together.

Cover-up filling in the crow’s-feet. Concealer and color corrector. Fish oil and zinc, calcium and vitamin E. No need for Cialis, not holed up here, but he’d upped his Lexapro in an attempt to filter out some of the gray from the Zagreb pollution. He was just reaching for his Rogaine when his hand brushed across a heap of silken fabric on the dim counter.

A scarf?

He lifted it. Two slender pieces that came apart. Each was a skin-colored tube of fabric covered with elaborate patterns.

Fake sleeve tattoos.

He let them slip to the shag carpeting. His eyes lifted to the mirror.

Barely visible in the dimness at the back of the room was the outline of a face.

A man sitting on the upholstered settee, swallowed by the shadows.

René forced a smile. “Evan,” he said, loud enough for the surveillance equipment to pick up. “I knew you’d find me.”

René let his eyes tick over to that connecting door across the tile, checking to see if any movement interrupted the seam of light across the bottom. He pictured Dex readying the halogenated ether. The Greek henchmen moving on Despi. The door opening and Dex filling the frame. Given that Dex was down to one hand, it would take him so much longer to do to Evan what needed to be done.

The outline of the face stared back at him, a featureless mask. René stayed upright in his chair, staring at the reflection in the mirror.

“The thing is,” René said, listening for the hiss to come through the vents, “this situation is more complicated than you’ve accounted for.”

Something crashed into the mirror, leaving a red streak, and landed with a slap on the counter. Pill bottles skittered across the surface, bouncing on the floor.

René shrieked.

He stared down at the enormous hand resting on top of the jumble of knocked-over beauty products.

Tattooed across it, an eerie, too-wide smile.

His rolling eyes found the connecting door. For a moment he felt an irrational stab of hope — there were Dex’s size-eighteen boots shadowing the gap beneath. Then the darkness spread and spread, seeping beneath the door, creeping across the tile.

He felt his insides wither, his heart drop down the bottomless pit of his stomach.

Still, it seemed, the Nowhere Man had not moved.

René’s throat seized up, too dry to speak. He croaked out the words. “You can have your money back.”

“I don’t want my money back,” the voice said.

“What do you want?”

“Someone once told me, if you control time, you control everything.”

The dark form rose and approached.

Too terrified to turn around, René stayed locked in his chair facing the mirror.

A hand drifted forward into a fall of light. It clutched a syringe filled with a viscous clear fluid.

René’s mouth wobbled open as the needle slid into his neck.

Still the face remained lost to darkness.

René’s last thought before the thumb depressed the plunger was of the double-cylinder dead bolts on the front door, trapping him in.

And then time stopped moving, sealing him inside it like a bug in amber.

Her cell phone held at the ready, Candy leaned against the door to René’s condo, straining to listen for movement inside. A single text to Orphan M and Van Sciver would make it rain.

The neighboring door creaked open. Just as she realized that it might belong to a connected condo, a streak of movement flew at her. She braced herself for a strike, but it didn’t come. Instead she was wrapped up, her arms locked to her sides, and then unfurled, a swing dancer who’d lost her lead.

A face blurred by as he spun her. She recognized his eyes. For an instant she let him lead.

Not that she had a choice.

And then she was free, tumbling across the threshold of the adjacent condo, the door slamming shut behind her.

She slipped on something slick, slammed onto the floor, and came up sticky.

She knew that smell.

She lunged for the door but knew all too well what she’d find. The double-cylinder dead bolts had autolocked. And she didn’t have a key.

Her cell phone was missing, plucked cleanly from her hand. She thought of Orphan M below, waiting for her texted command.

There was little she could do now but brace for the drone missile.

Orphan M held his cell phone in one hand, the GPS unit in the other, staring from screen to screen. He did not allow his knee to bounce with impatience.

At last a text arrived.

HE’S LOOSE. I HAVE HIM PINNED ON GROUND FLOOR. JAM LOCK ON FRONT GATE + I’LL HERD HIM THERE.

Orphan M input the front-gate coordinates for the drone and then tossed the GPS unit on the seat, leapt from the Volkswagen, and Froggered across four lanes to the complex, dodging grilles and blaring horns.

He reached the tall metal gate, readying his pick set. He slid a slender diamond pick into the keyhole and snapped it off.

There’d be no getting through that gate now.

He sprinted back through traffic, nearly getting pancaked by a bus, and flung himself into the Passat before the next barrage of traffic swept by.

The GPS handheld unit rested on the dashboard, not where he’d left it on the seat. Puzzled, he picked it up, turned it over. The battery lid was slightly loose, one of the screws lifted a few millimeters from the plastic.

He stared at it uncomprehendingly even as the reality dawned on him.

The batteries had been taken out and put back in.

Which erased the previous coordinates.

And reset the unit to its own position.

His body went cold, and he realized that it wasn’t cold he was experiencing — it was a full-body panic sweat. His head lifted.

Standing motionless in the sea of movement on the sidewalk across the street was Orphan X. He touched the imaginary brim of his beanie cap, gave a little nod.

M had time only to lift his eyes to the roof of the car before the Volkswagen vaporized.