Zero at the Bone (6 page)

walked slowly, casting the beam of his flashlight around, until he saw a tall Joshua tree nearby with a distinctive pitchfork shape to its branches.

“How appropriate,” Jack muttered.

D stopped at the base of the tree and shone his light on the ground, swiping at the desert soil with his foot until he exposed something metallic. He bent over and grabbed it, and Jack saw it was the handle to a trapdoor. D pulled up a cloth, exposing a combination lock. He spun it right and left, then yanked up on the trapdoor. It yawed open like a hungry mouth, revealing a short flight of stairs.

Jack followed D into the hole, a little apprehensive, but it was just an old bunker, possibly an abandoned bomb shelter. D pulled a cord, and a naked bulb illuminated the room. The bunker was dusty and stale; a number of aluminum cases were stacked on its shelves. D began pulling them down and opening them; Jack could see that most of them contained guns. He didn’t know the first thing about firearms, but D seemed to know what he was looking for.

“Here, hold this,” he said, handing Jack a duffel bag. Jack held it open while D

tossed in weapons and boxes of ammunition. He added a smaller, leather case and then opened up an innocuous-looking coffee can and pulled out a very thick roll of bills secured with a rubber band. This, he stuffed into his pocket.

“Holy shit,” Jack said. “Are we taking over a small country?” D snorted. “Gotta be prepared.” He looked up at Jack’s face, frowning. “What?” Jack shrugged. “It’s just….” He sighed. “I’m starting to see words like ‘accessory’

and ‘accomplice’ floating around my head.”

D barely reacted. “How about ‘dead on arrival’? Ya like that better?” Jack nodded, pressing his lips together. “Get more ammo. Ammo is good.” ONCE the deadbolt and chain were secured, D immediately felt better. The motel room’s tackiness was familiar, and as he shut the drapes it was like shutting the world’s eyes to them. No one could see them here.

Francisco was flopped on the bed near the bathroom, staring at the ceiling. D sat down on the other bed and removed his guns. He checked the loads and placed one on the nightstand, the other on the dresser. “I’m starving,” Francisco said. “Can I order a pizza?” 22 | Jane Seville

“Pizza’s good.”

Francisco sat up, frowning. “Oh, you want some?”

“I’m hungry too.” D watched Francisco’s bemused expression. “What?” Francisco shrugged, shaking it off. “I don’t know. It’s just weird that you, you know… eat.”

D cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t everybody?”

“You just seem like you’d be impervious to everything.”
Damn, I wish.
“Well, I ain’t. And I like mushrooms.”

“Me too.” Francisco found a phone book and ordered their pizza. D listened, shaking his head, as Francisco turned on the charm and convinced the pizza joint to bring them a six-pack too. After he hung up, they waited in silence, Francisco on the bed, D

sitting in the chair by the window. “Why’d you do it?” Francisco asked.

“Do what?”

“Agree to kill me. You said you didn’t kill people who didn’t deserve it, but you were going to kill me. Why’d you break your rules?” D sighed and lit up a cigarette.
Motherfucker never stops talking.
“Had no choice.”

“What, were they holding your cat hostage or something?”

“Don’t got no cat.”

“Why didn’t you have a choice?”

“Men that hired me had pictures a me at other jobs I done.”

“So they blackmailed you.”

“Yup.”

“What’s to stop them from turning you in now?”

D turned and looked at Francisco, sitting there on the bed cross-legged like a kid telling ghost stories, so fucking naïve it made D’s teeth hurt. He almost hated to be the one disabusing the man of all his well-meant notions. After the life D had led for the past ten years, it was nice to know that there were still people like Francisco in the world, who thought that life could be good and sweet. “Nothin’. They could turn me in at any time.

They won’t, though. I took the job ’n’ I didn’t do it, and now I’m tryin’ ta stop anyone else from pickin’ up my slack. They ain’t gonna bother getting me thrown in jail. They’re just gonna want me dead.”

“You and me both.”

“Yup.”

“So… we’re in this together?”

D sniffed. “Ya sound like ya hope we are.”

“Frankly, if I’ve got people after me, I’d much rather be on the run with somebody like you than on my own. I can repair a cleft palate in my sleep but I’d be useless against armed killers.”

“Ya sure would.”

Francisco was quiet for a moment. D knew it wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. “So, how long were you in the military?”

D looked at him sharply. “How’d you know I was in the military?” Francisco smiled. “I didn’t. Now I do. Lucky guess. You just seem like the type.

And you didn’t start wearing your hair like that for high fashion.” D slouched down in his chair. It troubled him that Francisco could read something like that so easily. Usually, he prided himself on being unseeable. Black, like a new moon, no features visible. Either he was slipping, or Francisco was real fucking sharp. He sucked on his cigarette to avoid answering. “Yeah, went in when I was eighteen.” Zero at the Bone | 23

“How long were you in?”

“Seven years. ’Til ninety-five.”

That seemed to surprise Francisco. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Thirty-six.”

“Me too! Huh, you don’t look thirty-six.”

“That so?”

“No. I would have thought you were older.”

D snorted. “Guess I oughta be insulted.”

“Why’d you leave the… what, the Army? Navy?”

“Army. What the fuck is this, Twenty Questions?” D bit out, tired of the interrogation but also alarmed at the amount of personal information he was letting slip out. Josey didn’t even know how old he was, and here he’d known Francisco about eight hours and he was spilling his goddamned life story. What was even
more
alarming was that he found himself wanting to say more. That shit had to be nipped in the bud. “We ain’t friends, Francisco,” he snarled, hoping he sounded forbidding. “You don’t gotta know my business, I don’t gotta know yours.”

Francisco shrugged. “Fine, be that way. We’re just going to be spending a lot of time together and we can’t sit here in silence all the time.”

“Why the fuck not?”

That seemed to take the wind out of his sails a bit. His shoulders sagged, and D felt a little tug behind his sternum at the hangdog expression on his face, like a puppy who just wanted his belly rubbed and didn’t get how anybody could resist when he was laying there looking all cute. “Well… can’t you at least call me Jack?” D sighed. “Yeah. Guess I can do that.”
And you know what, Jack? You can call
me… call me….
But that wasn’t happening. That name was no longer his; it belonged to a different man who didn’t exist anymore.

Jack brightened. “Good. Progress.”

Progress,
D thought, lighting another cigarette from his first.
Wants ta make
progress. Next he’ll be wanting ta talk about our childhood traumas and our favorite
colors and our deep innermost thoughts.
He waited for that idea to be repugnant, or horrifying, but it refused to be either. D stared out the window, shoving down the feeling that it might be real nice to sit here and tell Jack Francisco everything about himself, confess things he’d never told nobody, just to feel like somebody cared, and to keep those big blue eyes fixed on him for as long as he could.

24 | Jane Seville

JACK blinked around in disorientation, his sleep-addled brain trying to make sense of the strange surroundings.
What the fuck…. Oh, yeah. Motel. Quartzsite. Almost murdered.

Gotcha.
He turned on his side. D was sitting in the chair by the window, fully dressed in what looked like the same clothes, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t appear to have moved at all since Jack had finally crawled into bed and fallen asleep the night before. Had D

slept? Did he even
require
sleep? Maybe he’d been one of those MK-Ultra top-secret government genetically engineered super-soldiers who didn’t need to sleep and had a photographic memory, but he’d rebelled against his superiors and their immoral experimentation and struck out on his own to right the wrongs done to him….

Jack rubbed his hand over his face.
He’s right. I do read too many Tom Clancy
novels.
“Did you sleep?” he asked.

D grunted. “Enough.”

“Did you… use the bed?” The other bed didn’t appear to have been slept in.

“Laid on top.”

“Why? So you could leap into action if we were ambushed?” D just looked at him, one eyebrow ever so slightly cocked. “We gotta get goin’,” was all he said. “Ya want breakfast?”

“Let’s just pull through a drive-up window or something. I feel like eating something really bad for me. Do they make bacon-covered donuts?"

In the end, the Golden Arches had been the lucky recipients of their patronage, and as they set out on the road to LA, Jack was mopping the grease off his mouth from the Egg McMuffin. “Damn, that was disgusting,” he commented. “I’m not much for fast food, normally.”

“Ate it all though, didn’tcha?” All D had gotten was an extra-large orange juice.

“I was hungry. You weren’t?”

“Don’t like ta eat in the mornin’,” D muttered. “Stomach troubles.”

“Oh, but that highly acidic orange juice will calm you right down. Fruit juice is pure sugar, you know.” That got him The Eyebrow again, so Jack shut up. Briefly. “Where are we going, again?”

“Ta get ID.”

“I know that, but where? No, let me guess. You know a guy.”

“Right, fer once.”

“You sure we can trust him? You said that….”

“We can trust him,” D said flatly, his tone forbidding any argument.

“How long will it take to get new papers?”

Zero at the Bone | 25

“Dunno. We’ll see. Easy ta disappear in LA. Oughta be okay. No one really looks at ya unless yer some kinda movie star, which we ain’t.” They passed the drive in silence. Jack felt jumpy. He’d thought that he’d be more at ease the farther he got from Vegas, but the opposite seemed to be the case. The idea of going back where there were so many people was unnerving. The desert offered a lonely kind of security in its remoteness. It was hard to hide there. In the sprawling city, a city Jack had visited only once and disliked intensely, danger might lurk around every corner and behind every face.

JACK seemed a mite jittery. D wasn’t surprised. LA did that to people, even him, although he wouldn’t show it. He didn’t like LA and only came here when absolutely necessary. In his business it was hard to avoid. Any illegal activity west of the Mississippi had to come through LA eventually. There were certain things you could only get here, like the papers he and Jack needed.

He didn’t say so, but he was a little anxious about showing his face at the club where Dappa kept his shop. He was hardly the only one who used the man’s services, and he might run into some of his competitors. Any one of them could already have heard about the price that was no doubt on his head. He hoped that for once, word had not gotten around too quickly, and they could be in and out without running into anyone he knew.

D drove around San Bernardino until he found a motel that looked generic enough for his purposes. Not nice enough to attract robbers, not grungy enough to be populated with lowlifes paying by the week. It was a fine line. “Are we getting a room first?” Jack asked.

“Gotta. I ain’t drivin’ inta the city with a duffel fulla guns, ammo ’n’ money in the trunk.” Jack nodded, and helped him carry everything into the room, where D locked it all into the aluminum cases he’d brought from the bunker and slid them under the bed.

They both took a few minutes to freshen up a little, and Jack changed his clothes on D’s suggestion. “Ya look like a refugee from a fuckin’ softball game. Put on pants and a jacket.”

Within half an hour they were back in the car and headed into the city. Jack stared out the window, looking like a kid from the suburbs seeing a ghetto for the first time. If he’d ever visited LA, which D guessed he probably had, he sure as hell hadn’t come to this part of town.

Dappa’s shop was beneath a nightclub. D had often wondered why it was that folks who were up to no good had such a damned fondness for setting up shop behind, underneath, above, or otherwise proximal to fucking nightclubs. Couldn’t go anywhere without that goddamned bass line thumping around in your chest when all you were trying to do was buy black-market ordnance or launder some cash. This particular nightclub, a raunchy spot called Del Muerto that catered to the Hispanic crowd, was owned by Dappa’s brother.

He and Jack made their way through the crowds outside, then through the door and past the bouncer with a quick high sign. Jack was sticking ridiculously close to him. D

wondered if he ought to hold his hand like a scared kid at an amusement park. “Jus’ don’t say nothin’,” he muttered as they entered. “Let me handle this.” Jack nodded vigorously. “Sure, sure. No problem.” 26 | Jane Seville

They went down the dirty back staircase to the basement, through an Employees Only door, and into what looked like a supply closet. Cut into the back of the closet was another door. D knocked, and the door was opened by a large man in a beret that always made D think of those beanie-copters that kids in 1950s’ cartoons wore. “Who’s knockin’?” the man asked.