Fun and Games - Duane Swierczynski [28]
His bag. Brought by the airline, as promised.
Not Them, Delivery Dude.
Hardie walked back to the vestibule and squinted through the peephole mounted in the middle of the door for a better look. He was either a delivery guy or a hired killer. Us or Them. As if to answer, the guy called out—
“Delivery!”
—and knocked again, as if it were the last time.
Could he be one of Them? Lane said it would be easy for them to dress up in uniforms and pretend to be cops, or whoever they wanted. No big deal to scrounge up a big ugly truck, a clipboard, and a goofy-looking polo shirt. But then, where did his bag come from? What, was the airline in collusion with these killers?
No.
The very idea was ridiculous, and Lane Madden here—well, clearly she had some issues with reality. She wouldn’t be the first actress to have that kind of problem. Hardie felt lighter; this could all be over in a minute. Not only did Delivery Dude have his bag full of underwear and T-shirts, but he probably had a way of communicating with his dispatcher. LAPD could be up here in a matter of minutes, and then Lane Madden would become their problem. See you in the tabloids, honey.
(Delivery Dude could also have a Glock tucked into the waistband of his cargo shorts and be waiting for you to open the door to give him a clear target! Remember what happened last time someone called out for you, and you looked outside?)
“What are you doing?” Lane asked.
“Saving you from Them.”
“Goddamnit, no!”
Hardie put his hand on the door handle, took a breath, then pressed the latch with his thumb and pulled open the door.
The device mounted on the door frame was called a wasp’s nest.
Nothing fancy, really. You simply mounted it at face level, set the trigger mechanism, and then you were good to go. All the target had to do was open the door, and, boom—load in the face.
The load, though… now, that’s what made the wasp’s nest fancy.
The spray was a weaponized poison that rendered you unconscious within a second, then killed you about a minute later by temporarily shutting down the part of your brain that regulates your heart. After it finished its job, the poison broke down into little untraceable pieces of nothing. A coroner could order all the tox screens he wanted but wouldn’t find jack shit.
And the targets almost never saw it coming.
Something clicked and hissed—
PSSSSSSSSH
—and Hardie felt cold drops spray his face. Even before his brain could form the thought, his body knew something was Real Fucking Wrong. His hand fumbled with the door handle and he felt crazy-weak all of a sudden, overcome with chills and drowsiness, and he didn’t know what was happening, screaming NO NO NO at his mind as if he could talk it out of shutting down and
9
They will stop at nothing…. They are ubiquitous
and all-powerful.
—Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America
ONCE, IN his early twenties, Hardie had an operation to fix a deviated septum. A young nurse with soft skin and pretty eyes held his hand as they wheeled him to the cold, bright operating room. For a moment, Hardie didn’t care that his face was about to be mauled with sharp knives. At that moment he was under a warm blanket and holding a young girl’s hand and then she let go and somebody asked him to count backward from ten but he couldn’t even remember saying nine and then he was blinking and waking up and the pretty girl’s hand was still holding his and she smiled and said, see that wasn’t so bad?
That’s what it felt like now—he had a dim memory of being with a pretty girl.
But now that he was awake, he saw there was no pretty girl.
He was wrapped up in black plastic.
Actually, a body bag.
And with that realization came another: Hardie couldn’t get air into his lungs.